I was born and lived in San Diego until I was 13. I vividly recall what was then the worst commercial airline accident, a mid-air collision between PSA Flight 182 that was coming in for a landing to Lindbergh Field, and a Cessna, in September of 1978.
The Cessna took out the wing of the larger plane, causing it, of course, to burst in flames. 182 crashed in the middle of a residential neighborhood, killing 7 on the ground and creating what is still one of the largest fires in the county.
Not that any crash is good, but ones created by collisions in the middle of residential neighborhoods have to be among the worst. There was video at the time of flaming bodies that fell out of the plane. Local authorities picked up body parts out of backyards and rooftops for several weeks after the crash. It was a gruesome event.
The crash was created by two sets of pilots who failed to maintain good visual contact with each other. The PSA pilots knowingly ignored the other plane and the little plane--piloted by a student pilot if it matters--stopped its visual assessment of the larger commercial plane. The PSA plane was basically directly above the Cessna as it ascended and came into its flight path as the big plane descended. I imagine the student pilot simply didn't lean forward far enough to see the big jet directly above it. He probably thought it was out of his vector but instead made a fatal assumption. Likewise, the PSA pilots didn't look down to keep a good eye on the little plane that was heading their way. There is some evidence to suggest that the PSA pilots, however, didn't have good information from the tower on which plane they should be looking for and where it was.
Lindbergh Field has a reputation for being one of the least desirable airports to land at in the US because of the sharp angle of descent and its close proximity to major urban and residential areas. There's no "easy" approach to land there.
... one time we had a hugely corrupted SQL Server database and I had no good backups.
I had one backup that wasn't that old (a day maybe) but ended up accidentally deleting it when I was trying to setup a system to recover the data... don't ask.
It was a nightmare... an all-nighter but still no DB (this was the entire corporation's PeopleSoft financials DB so all accounting was shutdown on Monday morning), consultants flown in from afar, the works.
Closest backup was 4 days old. The company wrote off the time lost to re-enter all the accounting data. All told it was probably about $25,000 of lost time/labor.
I walked with my head down for about a month. The PeopleSoft programmers brutalized me behind my back. Ah, what fun. Call me crazy but I've been overly paranoid about backups ever since.
I seem to recall an article in Computer Shopper (remember that old tree killing monster of a magazine?) or somesuch about a service where you could plug your computer into your TV and download bits that flowed on a non-visible portion of the TV signal spectrum to get free shareware. This was probably pre-1996 or 1995, but I definitely remember this being offered though I'm not sure if it ever actually worked.
Jeopardy. I'm glad the IRC gaming channels are popular, but the #jeopardy channel is usually so crowded the game becomes a typing race rather than a trivia game. Maybe the newer game channels (#outburst and #boggle) will alleviate some of the crowding.
Oh, the memories.
I literally flunked out of college (twice!) because of this game.
I spent many, many, many hours (days? weeks? months?) in this channel playing. School work and studying be damned. Thanks Kenrick Mock for ruining my brief career at UC Davis!
The "strategy" was, one, you learned all the answers (in those days there might have been 1,000 game answers), two, you could type really fast, and, three, you had a decent non-lagged connection to the IRC Efnet. This was in the days when Efnet was very, very, very crowded (not NEARLY so many IRC nets as today) and it netsplit every 3 minutes or so.
Nowadays I guess it's #riskybus (due to lawsuit threats by the owners of Jeopardy!).
This may not counter your position, but Debian *is* the foundation for Ubuntu, which has come out of nowhere and taken the Linux desktop into a position it's often longed to have.
As a community-driven OS, it definitely has its place.
The release cycle for Debian has indeed been glacial at best. I think I lived a few lifetimes and was incarnated a few times while waiting for sarge. I think also everyone involved with Debian acknowledges how horrific their release cycles were. They seem to be getting better.
I wouldn't call it a "nice try" - Debian has a reputation for being stable and risk-averse over the bleeding edge cycles of other distributions. They are arguably the most "BSD-ish" of the Linux distributions in this respect. This is why a lot of server admins, including myself, pick up on using Debian over say CentOS or RHEL. I've used it for years on production systems and have never regretted it.
That's a nice sentiment but you can't teach your kids to desire scientific jobs. You can teach your kids about science and see if they take to it. No matter your enthusiasm, your kids might lean to the artsy-fartsy, literature, or driving a bus.
... months ago and honestly I can't remember where. One of the major rags like Business Week or Wired.
Anyway, in short it noted that Google, along with MSN and Yahoo (both of whom have also "cooperated" with the Chinese government), have taken the policy of what I'd call accretive decensorship; that is, they are all starting from the position that some things (many things, indeed) must be censored, the Chinese government does not have a master list of what words or phrases must be censored ("Falun Gong" and "Tiananmen Square Massacre" would certainly be a couple), and therefore they all start with a default position of testing the limits of governmental censorship. In other words, you basically do what you want until Beijing throws the hammer down and throws you in jail and/or shuts you down, which happens frequently. Basically they're sitting there watching traffic and will arbitrarily decide which search terms are acceptable and which are not. A Chinese political blogger was put up as an example as someone who ranted for several months but was eventually shut down by the government.
Users in the West have a skewed perception I think of how "evil" Google is being here because the Chinese themselves have grown accustomed to this kind of censorship--not that this is right, per se, but by Chinese standards even a little bit of permissiveness by the government is considered wholly revolutionary. Basically Google, MSN, Yahoo, Baidu, etc. are dancing on a tightrope of what is and is not acceptable content according to the government. This is what I mean by accretive decensorship: Either by the action or inaction of the Chinese government and the action of western business forces like Google there will be a slow and steady decensorship of content. Google is playing a cautious game that all western business must play if they want to make inroads into the world's most explosive economy.
In the area I'm in I see this one company in particular repost the same 4 or 5 jobs every few weeks on DICE, etc. At least 3 of these positions are approximately the kind of IT position one person with the skill set for one job would have suitable skills for the other 2 or 3 positions. Like "System Engineer" and "Data Engineer" or some invented job title.
Now it's not like the company JUST started doing this. It has been going on for years--like at least 3 years.
I applied for these positions twice in this time period, both times when I was out of work--and I've been back in IT for over 3 years now after being out for 6 months. I won't toot my own horn but I easily qualified for any one of these jobs. Never a call back, never an email, never a response. OK, fine, so I'm not good enough--but reposts of the same jobs for at least 3 years? In that period of time, especially when the dot-com downswing was on full tilt, there had to be dozens and possibly hundreds of likewise highly qualified but unemployed or underemployed IT professionals like me out there. It would be brain-dead easy to fill such positions when the middle-tier talent pool (5-8 years experience) was so glutted.
Now that things have picked up (more or less--in this area, anyway) for IT, if only through attrition, these same jobs show up again and again.
Some have said companies post jobs to give the appearance that they are healthy when in fact that are not hiring at all and all resumes immediately go to the round file. I have a strong suspicion this is what happens with this company, though that wouldn't seem to apply since the company never posts its name along with its ads. Given that, it's just an irritating thing to see these fictional postings out there. The postings should be moderated like Craigslist, but DICE, Monster, Careerbuilder, etc. would probably never allow it because the posting fees are their bread-and-butter. Craigs has so much cash flowing in now from job postings, it can afford to lose an occasional moderated post and refund the money. DICE, etc. should go for quality over quantity so the experience is good for the CONSUMER of the site, not just to leech income off the "companies" that post.
Man is in the habit of placing his view of what God "should" do all the time, simply because he could do it.
God "should" have prevented 9/11. God "should" have stopped the bombings today in Iraq. God "should" have prevented a friend of mine from having her son hit on his bike and killed. God "should" have prevented a small child from dying of leukemia today. And, God "should" prevent children from starving every day.
God "should" do it because he could it. He is clearly a cruel God because He doesn't stop horror, violence, cruelty, starvation. Yes, this makes perfect sense. In fact, it makes perfect sense to me too, ipso-facto or otherwise.
However, I believe this is clearly man's philosophy attempting to compete with God's philosophy.
As a Christian, I believe there is a reason why God does the things He does even when we are unable to fathom it. In fact, He usually does the things He does and we will probably always be mostly unable to fathom it all.
As a rational, thinking, reasonable person this is still very, very hard for me to understand and grasp. Few people wouldn't stop all pain and suffering if they were capable of doing so--so why doesn't God?
Perhaps children--and people in general--starve so that we will be moved with compassion to help them. This does happen, daily.
Perhaps a child--the most innocent of all--dies of leukemia to cause us to value our own lives and the lives of other children that much more. Perhaps it persuades some to drive toward better treatments for leukemia--a far more treatable and effectively curable disease than it was 30 years ago--and other cancers.
Perhaps horror and violence occurs to cause us to question our motives in committing acts of horror and violence in the first place. God gave us free will to decide to commit acts of horror and violence, after all. Though the force behind such acts may be evil, they did not happen out of the blue by some vague and mysterious force. Humanity willfully commits such acts against itself, daily, around the globe, and not just in Iraq or Afghanistan or NYC on 9/11. It's no revelation that violence and horror has been consistent with man's behavior and character for many thousands of years.
It is also possible we should see what is bad and horrible in this world in order to convince ourselves that there is an alternative both to this world and to the behavior that causes horror and violence.
If life were free of horror, violence, pain, suffering, and oppression--in other words, free of consequences--I seriously doubt that we as a species would (dare I say it?) evolve.
I believe it is possible that God's purpose is not to make us wonder so much why He doesn't do what he "should" do and instead wonder why we do not do what we should do.
Re:Just so you appreciate what you are doing,
on
Build Your Own PBX
·
· Score: 1
You should have a very, very, very (read: just about impossible) hard time ever selling this puppy.
For the very reason that VoIP tech. has essentially taken over most corporate phone networks that would ever need a 10K line exchange, there is not a chance anyone would ever deploy it and a fairly slim chance that you could employ a crew that knew how to maintain it properly.
It might pique the interest of some die-hard electronics collectors or an electronics museum, but even then I doubt they'd give you much more than a few hundred bucks for it.
It continually fascinates me how rapidly electronics can devalue. A $3M phone switch drops like a rock to a $1K-$2K device, maybe and even stuff like 3-4 year old Cisco switches and routers dropping to 20-25% of their original value. We're already laughing at how much some of us paid for 15" LCDs 2 years ago (thankfully I wasn't one of them).
1. Condoms are at least 98% effective. Combine that with another form of contraception, and you stand a very good chance of avoiding pregnancy.
Yes, most studies place the rate of condom breakage at 98%. "At least" colors the statistics you're citing, but whatever. Also, condom slippage is a cited problem in 0-5% of cases so this may affect real statistics about condom effectiveness.
Condoms are not necessarily 98% effective against the transmission of HIV. Statistics cite effectiveness for those who always use condoms at 87% so basically you have a 1 in 10 chance of contracting HIV every time you use a condom with a different sexual partner. Men are most at risk here since female-to-male is the most probable path of infection (3% is the most optimistic effectiveness of condoms for those who use condoms always).
As Disraeli said there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. Take it for what such statistics are worth, I suppose.
George Gilder is a techno-pundit who rode the Internet / "new economy" wave to espouse the coming of the so-called "telecosm" inherent in the unlimited bandwidth and explosiveness of DWDM-amped fiber optics. Often a brilliant writer, he got knocked down a few hundred pegs after all of his stock picks either disappeared or lost 99% of their value (along with almost every other telecom stock out there). He became quite wealthy off his newsletter but has since had to mortgage his home off I believe.
To re-iterate the drumbeat the more insightful posters have put up here--Cringely's "disruptive technology" scenario simply doesn't work because it depends on:
1) Ignoring or violating the DMCA and the DSL ISP's (usually the telco, of course) AUP. Non-ILEC DSL ISP's like Speakeasy are the exception, but they are a blip on the radar compared to the ILECs.
2) Intensive de-regulation of VoIP, which very likely will not persist forever. Vonage and other VoIP providers are already being pressured to support 911, just like the wireless telco providers.
The only way I see this scenario becoming truly feasible is the massive decentralization of bandwidth and telco ownership, which is unlikely to happen in my lifetime, if ever. The telcos own the vast majority of the infrastructure Cringely is proposing to use to build this "disruptive" network layered on top of the ILEC DSL networks.
Cringely is jumping on the yee-haw Wild West frontier wagon here, thinking automatically that such a cool geek toy must represent an obvious challenge to ILEC hegemony--and that such a Wild West scenario is even desirable.
Personally I believe post-Telecom Act of 1996 Redux II (or III or IV) will ultimately be far more disruptive--the telco networks copper hegemony can only be truly displaced by FTTH networks owned by small municipalities and regional corporations who build their own street-to-street networks. These entities should openly encourage use of their networks by ILECs, CLECs, ISPs, and "Joe-around-the-corner CLEC." These FTTH networks will be connected on the backend to ILEC tandems and still reach the outside world and be subject to regulatory constraints and tariffs, but the FCC and states' PUCs have stop being the ILEC's servile whores before any of this can be a reality.
Will outsourcing ultimately lead to American corporations becoming shell operations where most workers, including skilled/professional positions such as engineers, front/backoffice workers, and middle management, do not reside in the US and can in few ways ultimately contribute to the economy and tax base?
I fear essentially what will happen is much of the Fortune 500 will become top-heavy with overpaid executives who are garage-saling the entire operation for the sake of "shareholder value" (translation: more mega-billion $$$ bonuses) while the opportunities for American workers logarathmically shrivels to near-oblivion.
You DO know what the U.S. job market is like for IT personnel in particular and everyone else in general, right?
To say it's bad is too polite.
To say it's horrible is dancing around the reality.
To say you'd be a screaming lunatic to quit your job because they won't let you use your cell phone is more appropriate.
Unless you're a terribly abused employee, to even consider such a thing is ridiculous, moreso for the reason you're giving. Surely they will reconsider their Draconian cell phone banning policy for you since you obviously need it. If they are insistent on banning all PERSONAL cell phones, then have them buy you a company-provided cell phone where you can send your alerts.
In any case, take a step back and put any thought of quitting out of your mind.
The Archos Jukebox FM Recorder...
on
TiVo For Radio?
·
· Score: 1
... kind of does this already. If you're listening to FM radio with it, you can record it direct to MP3. It holds the last 30 seconds of play in buffer so you won't miss the entire song if you don't hit record right away.
I have one of these units and it's a pretty nice feature - though I'll admit I almost never listen to FM with it. Too much MP3 storage.
...I'm at 75% of my salary 9 months ago. Six months ago I was laid off (from a dot-bomb) and I have now been working approximately 2 months at a full-time position.
Thanks to the largesse of a lot of people, we survived this lay-off and did not miss a house or car payment.
Raw statistics - In 6 months I applied for approximately 80 jobs, interviewed at 14, got 2 job offers revoked, and got 3 valid job offers (one of which was from a company I previously had a revoked job offer from). Of those 3, two were full-time position offers and 1, obviously, contract. The contract offer was for very good money; both of the full-time offers were 72-75% of my previous salary, however, they were both in job markets (regions) that normally only offered 80-85% of the salary of the previous market I had worked in (the SF Bay Area). So I would say my net pay decrease was about 10-15% if I had stayed in the same market.
All job offers gelled within a month of each other, but I wouldn't necessarily consider this a sign that things were good or getting better with the economy. I was, in fact, originally told I didn't get this position, but because the original person they offered it to didn't take it I took the position. So, I am second banana amid a competitive field - but I'll take second banana to no banana at all. The other position was at a public institution where starting pay is typically very low (woulda been the same even in a good economy), but benefits are excellent. The third position was great pay, no benefits, but in an IT dept. that had been decimated by layoffs over 2 years. And the commute woulda been HORRIBLE.
Anyway, I suppose my stats could be worse. I could have had far fewer interviews - a friend of mine has been out of work 8+ months and has had NO interviews. And, of course, I could still have no job.
As someone who works (in the present tense - thankfully) for a so-called "e-learning" provider for certification training (Cisco, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle), I can tell you without reservation both the consumer and corporate certification training market is DEAD. When times were good, this company had a profitable revenue run-rate of on JUST individuals that pursued certification training via the Web. Now we're lucky if we sell 1 or 2 $1K-$2K cert. packages a month to any one. Now we have had to change our strategy to stay in business ourselves and strategically align with companies that were once our competitors on the content and training side -- and, while the times are extraordinarily hard, we are making strides with our technology, such as it is, versus pure content, which much bigger companies already provide better and more cheaply than we do.
This dearth of interest in certification training may answer your question in a roundabout way. I see many job postings that specifically ask for MCSE, CCNA, CCNP, CCIE mainly so it SEEMS to be important to some employers, but most individuals and corps themselves are simply not going out for or paying for certifications any more. To give you an illustration I recently took one of the MCSE 2000 courses in a classroom setting. There were just 2 other people in there and both were desktop support people who were in the wrong class but stayed because their employer (a State Agency, as it happens) had already paid for it. In a classroom that could have handled 8 more people, this is a big hit for the ILT (Instructor-Led Training) providers who really need the bodies. Every one in this industry is feeling the hurt.
I do know that Cisco is revamping all their certifications to make them more challenging and appealing to employers and Microsoft is tweaking their cert. program by adding the MCSA, but
You're right - it was Spry.
I worked at a start-up ISP back in those days and Internet-in-a-Box was one of the all-in-one packaged solutions we looked at to give/sell to our customers. This was even before Mosaic Communications/Netscape I think. I remember you used to be able to go into a software store (remember those?) and buy it.
... that day when we met for the first time, dreaming we would start the first commercial ISP in town?
... that really we were just bandwidth junkies that wanted a T1 to play with (and that's the only reason why 90% of the geeks continued to work there)?
... that us admins and support geeks just wanted a static dialup or ISDN on Centrex?
... that we wanted unlimited shell space to use aub at Ethernet speeds?
... the horror of watching the NNRP/NNTP server console and then having to support the same person that had a fetish for farm animals or asian teen chicks the next day?
... the night we lost our one big SCSI hard drive and put it in the freezer, desperately hoping it would spin up?
... how many different ways we attempted to "organize" banks of USR Sportsters?
... how much stock we worked for instead of cash?
... how many telco techs. had to come out to install our first Internet T1 (DSL users - you just don't understand)?
... how many of us fit into our first "real" 350 square foot office - 8 or 9 wasn't it?
... how many times PacBell slammed us and wouldn't give us more phone lines?
... how many of us did tech. support from our apartments in our underwear (wait, was I the only one)?
... how many servers you can fit on a Gorilla rack?
... how we worried that AOL or AT&T or PacBell or some other behemoth would end up wiping us out?
... when we didn't offer unlimited?
... when some irate customer kept 4 voice phone lines tied up at once?
... that even a bunch of smart people never could quite make a great business (good maybe, but never quite great)?
... what torture it was every month to run the billing through?
... what a failure the soda purchase honor system was (let's see... how many cans of Dew have I had today)?
... how many small ISPs there used to be in the area -- a hundred or more wasn't it?
... how many of us were local BBS geeks?
... how we used to look at $2.50/sq. ft. high-rise office space in jeans and t-shirts with Real Estate hounds in Armani suits -- just for fun? And what kinds of dreams we used to lay out in those spaces?
... when our first Internet connection was a 56K circuit from BARRNet?
And do we remember when we all left for real jobs eventually and began the distance between ourselves and that low-paying, freewheeling mentality that is the small ISP?
This kind of posting really adds to my enjoyment of/. I mean, I really love it when you point out the spelling errors. Attnetion moderators - this is what "-1: Offtipic" was invented for! I agree. It is rather silly to point out spelling errors when there are two in your own pointed criticism. Perhaps we'll have another "pointing out spelling errors point out spelling errors pointing out spelling errors" ad infinitum post some day soon.
When I started at my present job the network admin above me decided to use Linux instead of NT for a firewall solution. He personally knew very little about Linux but got his brother to setup a Linux-based firewall on a 486-100 with 16 megs of RAM. That was how OSS began its infiltration into our IT dept. where NT was already entrenched. Since then I've upgraded the firewall and it runs firewall, Web, Squid, primary DNS, transparent proxy, and internal routing for our entire network. I've cannibalized retired Pentiums that either served as old user machines or Netware servers and brought them back into service as a RADIUS client/RAS dialup, MySQL server, a "multimedia" machine that permits remote access to the CD burner, scanner, and PCMCIA flash memory cards, and a development machine being used by several programmers for a new development project. We recently purchased a new Linux server to be our VPN server using a commercial VPN server solution and are leasing 3 more large servers which will be running Linux for Web and development. Though NT is entrenched for file and print serving , PeopleSoft, and Exchange is being used for e-mail, Linux has made tremendous in-roads and it certainly isn't "banned." The company is feeling the sting of a huge IT investment over the last 3 years (after many years of putting very little money into IT) and I'm sure they support whatever solution works well and saves money.
Documentation has been and always will be an Achilles heel for OSS.
If Linux has failed to meet whatever set of expectations you had for it, then -- so what? You sound chagrined at its failure to meet its promise -- and what promises has Linux (or any piece of OSS) ever made to you or me or to anyone?
This maudlin mumbling over Linux's nebulous "failure" brings back memories of hanging around in the OS/2 crowd. There we were crying in our beers about how IBM failed so miserably to get OS/2 to meet its promise: mis-fired marketing of a superb desktop OS product; the failure of major ISVs to port their apps to OS/2; the lack of vendor hardware driver support. The list went on. How we wailed the "What ifs..." and "IBM should have done...."
Linux is a rock. You can either leave it on the ground, chuck it across a pond, grind it up into dust, or stick in your pocket and take it home. Freely, openly, and without limitations.
This reasoning is the basic confined thinking of commercial software -- Microsoft or IBM or Adobe promises X feature(s) and I am paying them to deliver those promises. If you've used Linux since '93 ('92 for me), then you should understand better than anyone that Linux, least of all, defies expectations because we have no conceptual framework for warranting expectations in the OSS sphere.
Yes, Linus says journaled file systems will be there in the new kernel stable series... but what if it's not there? So what. Linux still works fine, even if its filesystem is not as robust as say, FreeBSD. Linus owes us nothing except perhaps his vision for whatever he wants Linux to be.
What *is* the promise of Linux, after all? There is none and frankly I prefer it that way. I'd rather set the clock back a year or so when the media hadn't put its claws into Linux nor would there be a debate or any concern whatsoever about how or if Linux would "crush" Microsoft or vice-versa. When I ran Slackware and the pre-1.0 kernels back in '92, no one cared about whether Linux would be great or crush Microsoft.
Linux gives me plenty of value today -- an excellent, stable Web server, PHP3, MySQL and Oracle backend, JServ, XML parsing capability, a networked scanning and CD burning station, IPmasqing and transparent proxying to save on internal IP address space, a RADIUS client-based RAS, a transparent caching proxy, a firewall, and much more. I even use it to house an excellent commercial VPN software package. It does not yet offer me a comprehensive package of documentation to assist me in my endeavor to do all of those things, but that has never particularly been my concern with Linux anyway.
Other users justifiably take a different tack. Corporations have definite requirements in an operating system to consider it as a viable alternative to NT. If I'm trying to provide them with a functional Linux solution, the "Linux is a rock" argument won't hold weight. I have to give them support, stability, and ease of managability, all of which are (to greater and lesser degrees) available on NT. NT's easier to install, administer, and manage out-of-the-box, period. There aren't 5 different versions of NT server available on the shelves at Fry's. Many, many corporate IT houses prefer a single, unified vision for a piece of software that is going to be the bedrock of their department and that they're going to be held accountable for. And they want at least nominal accountability for their OS vendor, which they simply don't have with Linux (well, perhaps they do with commercial support from places like RedHat or Caldera).
I'm not sure if I'll ever be able to present an effective counter-argument to NT for the IT department that is considering using Linux. All I know is Linux and how to use it well and I don't think I want to waste time thinking about how it must beat Microsoft at fundamentally the same game. Linux does what NT does and it does it better, faster, and more cheaply than NT does. The same would not necessarily hold true for other users in other IT departments. I have a considerable amount of Linux expertise. IT departments that put all their stock in Linux with minimal Linux expertise would be shooting time and money down a hole.
So... let's stop concerning ourselves if Linux ever reaches its supposed promise and focus on what it does do. Most sensible NT users haven't held off upgrading to NT4 just so they can wait around for NT to meet whatever its promise is supposed to be. I can afford to ignore Microsoft, albeit at my peril, regardless of what Metcalfe or anyway else who supposedly knows better thinks.
Slashdot Mirror
I was born and lived in San Diego until I was 13. I vividly recall what was then the worst commercial airline accident, a mid-air collision between PSA Flight 182 that was coming in for a landing to Lindbergh Field, and a Cessna, in September of 1978.
The Cessna took out the wing of the larger plane, causing it, of course, to burst in flames. 182 crashed in the middle of a residential neighborhood, killing 7 on the ground and creating what is still one of the largest fires in the county.
Not that any crash is good, but ones created by collisions in the middle of residential neighborhoods have to be among the worst. There was video at the time of flaming bodies that fell out of the plane. Local authorities picked up body parts out of backyards and rooftops for several weeks after the crash. It was a gruesome event.
The crash was created by two sets of pilots who failed to maintain good visual contact with each other. The PSA pilots knowingly ignored the other plane and the little plane--piloted by a student pilot if it matters--stopped its visual assessment of the larger commercial plane. The PSA plane was basically directly above the Cessna as it ascended and came into its flight path as the big plane descended. I imagine the student pilot simply didn't lean forward far enough to see the big jet directly above it. He probably thought it was out of his vector but instead made a fatal assumption. Likewise, the PSA pilots didn't look down to keep a good eye on the little plane that was heading their way. There is some evidence to suggest that the PSA pilots, however, didn't have good information from the tower on which plane they should be looking for and where it was.
Lindbergh Field has a reputation for being one of the least desirable airports to land at in the US because of the sharp angle of descent and its close proximity to major urban and residential areas. There's no "easy" approach to land there.
... one time we had a hugely corrupted SQL Server database and I had no good backups.
I had one backup that wasn't that old (a day maybe) but ended up accidentally deleting it when I was trying to setup a system to recover the data... don't ask.
It was a nightmare... an all-nighter but still no DB (this was the entire corporation's PeopleSoft financials DB so all accounting was shutdown on Monday morning), consultants flown in from afar, the works.
Closest backup was 4 days old. The company wrote off the time lost to re-enter all the accounting data. All told it was probably about $25,000 of lost time/labor.
I walked with my head down for about a month. The PeopleSoft programmers brutalized me behind my back. Ah, what fun. Call me crazy but I've been overly paranoid about backups ever since.
I seem to recall an article in Computer Shopper (remember that old tree killing monster of a magazine?) or somesuch about a service where you could plug your computer into your TV and download bits that flowed on a non-visible portion of the TV signal spectrum to get free shareware. This was probably pre-1996 or 1995, but I definitely remember this being offered though I'm not sure if it ever actually worked.
Jeopardy. I'm glad the IRC gaming channels are popular, but the #jeopardy channel is usually so crowded the game becomes a typing race rather than a trivia game. Maybe the newer game channels (#outburst and #boggle) will alleviate some of the crowding.
Oh, the memories.
I literally flunked out of college (twice!) because of this game.
I spent many, many, many hours (days? weeks? months?) in this channel playing. School work and studying be damned. Thanks Kenrick Mock for ruining my brief career at UC Davis!
The "strategy" was, one, you learned all the answers (in those days there might have been 1,000 game answers), two, you could type really fast, and, three, you had a decent non-lagged connection to the IRC Efnet. This was in the days when Efnet was very, very, very crowded (not NEARLY so many IRC nets as today) and it netsplit every 3 minutes or so.
Nowadays I guess it's #riskybus (due to lawsuit threats by the owners of Jeopardy!).
It'd be even funnier if you didn't misspell misspelled.
... to fill the creativity gap if the Wii tanks.
Oh wait...
This may not counter your position, but Debian *is* the foundation for Ubuntu, which has come out of nowhere and taken the Linux desktop into a position it's often longed to have.
As a community-driven OS, it definitely has its place.
The release cycle for Debian has indeed been glacial at best. I think I lived a few lifetimes and was incarnated a few times while waiting for sarge. I think also everyone involved with Debian acknowledges how horrific their release cycles were. They seem to be getting better.
I wouldn't call it a "nice try" - Debian has a reputation for being stable and risk-averse over the bleeding edge cycles of other distributions. They are arguably the most "BSD-ish" of the Linux distributions in this respect. This is why a lot of server admins, including myself, pick up on using Debian over say CentOS or RHEL. I've used it for years on production systems and have never regretted it.
That's a nice sentiment but you can't teach your kids to desire scientific jobs. You can teach your kids about science and see if they take to it. No matter your enthusiasm, your kids might lean to the artsy-fartsy, literature, or driving a bus.
... months ago and honestly I can't remember where. One of the major rags like Business Week or Wired.
Anyway, in short it noted that Google, along with MSN and Yahoo (both of whom have also "cooperated" with the Chinese government), have taken the policy of what I'd call accretive decensorship; that is, they are all starting from the position that some things (many things, indeed) must be censored, the Chinese government does not have a master list of what words or phrases must be censored ("Falun Gong" and "Tiananmen Square Massacre" would certainly be a couple), and therefore they all start with a default position of testing the limits of governmental censorship. In other words, you basically do what you want until Beijing throws the hammer down and throws you in jail and/or shuts you down, which happens frequently. Basically they're sitting there watching traffic and will arbitrarily decide which search terms are acceptable and which are not. A Chinese political blogger was put up as an example as someone who ranted for several months but was eventually shut down by the government.
Users in the West have a skewed perception I think of how "evil" Google is being here because the Chinese themselves have grown accustomed to this kind of censorship--not that this is right, per se, but by Chinese standards even a little bit of permissiveness by the government is considered wholly revolutionary. Basically Google, MSN, Yahoo, Baidu, etc. are dancing on a tightrope of what is and is not acceptable content according to the government. This is what I mean by accretive decensorship: Either by the action or inaction of the Chinese government and the action of western business forces like Google there will be a slow and steady decensorship of content. Google is playing a cautious game that all western business must play if they want to make inroads into the world's most explosive economy.
In the area I'm in I see this one company in particular repost the same 4 or 5 jobs every few weeks on DICE, etc. At least 3 of these positions are approximately the kind of IT position one person with the skill set for one job would have suitable skills for the other 2 or 3 positions. Like "System Engineer" and "Data Engineer" or some invented job title.
Now it's not like the company JUST started doing this. It has been going on for years--like at least 3 years.
I applied for these positions twice in this time period, both times when I was out of work--and I've been back in IT for over 3 years now after being out for 6 months. I won't toot my own horn but I easily qualified for any one of these jobs. Never a call back, never an email, never a response. OK, fine, so I'm not good enough--but reposts of the same jobs for at least 3 years? In that period of time, especially when the dot-com downswing was on full tilt, there had to be dozens and possibly hundreds of likewise highly qualified but unemployed or underemployed IT professionals like me out there. It would be brain-dead easy to fill such positions when the middle-tier talent pool (5-8 years experience) was so glutted.
Now that things have picked up (more or less--in this area, anyway) for IT, if only through attrition, these same jobs show up again and again.
Some have said companies post jobs to give the appearance that they are healthy when in fact that are not hiring at all and all resumes immediately go to the round file. I have a strong suspicion this is what happens with this company, though that wouldn't seem to apply since the company never posts its name along with its ads. Given that, it's just an irritating thing to see these fictional postings out there. The postings should be moderated like Craigslist, but DICE, Monster, Careerbuilder, etc. would probably never allow it because the posting fees are their bread-and-butter. Craigs has so much cash flowing in now from job postings, it can afford to lose an occasional moderated post and refund the money. DICE, etc. should go for quality over quantity so the experience is good for the CONSUMER of the site, not just to leech income off the "companies" that post.
Mmm... I wouldn't say ipso-facto.
Man is in the habit of placing his view of what God "should" do all the time, simply because he could do it.
God "should" have prevented 9/11.
God "should" have stopped the bombings today in Iraq.
God "should" have prevented a friend of mine from having her son hit on his bike and killed.
God "should" have prevented a small child from dying of leukemia today.
And, God "should" prevent children from starving every day.
God "should" do it because he could it. He is clearly a cruel God because He doesn't stop horror, violence, cruelty, starvation. Yes, this makes perfect sense. In fact, it makes perfect sense to me too, ipso-facto or otherwise.
However, I believe this is clearly man's philosophy attempting to compete with God's philosophy.
As a Christian, I believe there is a reason why God does the things He does even when we are unable to fathom it. In fact, He usually does the things He does and we will probably always be mostly unable to fathom it all.
As a rational, thinking, reasonable person this is still very, very hard for me to understand and grasp. Few people wouldn't stop all pain and suffering if they were capable of doing so--so why doesn't God?
Perhaps children--and people in general--starve so that we will be moved with compassion to help them. This does happen, daily.
Perhaps a child--the most innocent of all--dies of leukemia to cause us to value our own lives and the lives of other children that much more. Perhaps it persuades some to drive toward better treatments for leukemia--a far more treatable and effectively curable disease than it was 30 years ago--and other cancers.
Perhaps horror and violence occurs to cause us to question our motives in committing acts of horror and violence in the first place. God gave us free will to decide to commit acts of horror and violence, after all. Though the force behind such acts may be evil, they did not happen out of the blue by some vague and mysterious force. Humanity willfully commits such acts against itself, daily, around the globe, and not just in Iraq or Afghanistan or NYC on 9/11. It's no revelation that violence and horror has been consistent with man's behavior and character for many thousands of years.
It is also possible we should see what is bad and horrible in this world in order to convince ourselves that there is an alternative both to this world and to the behavior that causes horror and violence.
If life were free of horror, violence, pain, suffering, and oppression--in other words, free of consequences--I seriously doubt that we as a species would (dare I say it?) evolve.
I believe it is possible that God's purpose is not to make us wonder so much why He doesn't do what he "should" do and instead wonder why we do not do what we should do.
You should have a very, very, very (read: just about impossible) hard time ever selling this puppy.
For the very reason that VoIP tech. has essentially taken over most corporate phone networks that would ever need a 10K line exchange, there is not a chance anyone would ever deploy it and a fairly slim chance that you could employ a crew that knew how to maintain it properly.
It might pique the interest of some die-hard electronics collectors or an electronics museum, but even then I doubt they'd give you much more than a few hundred bucks for it.
It continually fascinates me how rapidly electronics can devalue. A $3M phone switch drops like a rock to a $1K-$2K device, maybe and even stuff like 3-4 year old Cisco switches and routers dropping to 20-25% of their original value. We're already laughing at how much some of us paid for 15" LCDs 2 years ago (thankfully I wasn't one of them).
1. Condoms are at least 98% effective. Combine that with another form of contraception, and you stand a very good chance of avoiding pregnancy.
Yes, most studies place the rate of condom breakage at 98%. "At least" colors the statistics you're citing, but whatever. Also, condom slippage is a cited problem in 0-5% of cases so this may affect real statistics about condom effectiveness.
Condoms are not necessarily 98% effective against the transmission of HIV. Statistics cite effectiveness for those who always use condoms at 87% so basically you have a 1 in 10 chance of contracting HIV every time you use a condom with a different sexual partner. Men are most at risk here since female-to-male is the most probable path of infection (3% is the most optimistic effectiveness of condoms for those who use condoms always).
As Disraeli said there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. Take it for what such statistics are worth, I suppose.
George Gilder is a techno-pundit who rode the Internet / "new economy" wave to espouse the coming of the so-called "telecosm" inherent in the unlimited bandwidth and explosiveness of DWDM-amped fiber optics. Often a brilliant writer, he got knocked down a few hundred pegs after all of his stock picks either disappeared or lost 99% of their value (along with almost every other telecom stock out there). He became quite wealthy off his newsletter but has since had to mortgage his home off I believe.
To re-iterate the drumbeat the more insightful posters have put up here--Cringely's "disruptive technology" scenario simply doesn't work because it depends on:
1) Ignoring or violating the DMCA and the DSL ISP's (usually the telco, of course) AUP. Non-ILEC DSL ISP's like Speakeasy are the exception, but they are a blip on the radar compared to the ILECs.
2) Intensive de-regulation of VoIP, which very likely will not persist forever. Vonage and other VoIP providers are already being pressured to support 911, just like the wireless telco providers.
The only way I see this scenario becoming truly feasible is the massive decentralization of bandwidth and telco ownership, which is unlikely to happen in my lifetime, if ever. The telcos own the vast majority of the infrastructure Cringely is proposing to use to build this "disruptive" network layered on top of the ILEC DSL networks.
Cringely is jumping on the yee-haw Wild West frontier wagon here, thinking automatically that such a cool geek toy must represent an obvious challenge to ILEC hegemony--and that such a Wild West scenario is even desirable.
Personally I believe post-Telecom Act of 1996 Redux II (or III or IV) will ultimately be far more disruptive--the telco networks copper hegemony can only be truly displaced by FTTH networks owned by small municipalities and regional corporations who build their own street-to-street networks. These entities should openly encourage use of their networks by ILECs, CLECs, ISPs, and "Joe-around-the-corner CLEC." These FTTH networks will be connected on the backend to ILEC tandems and still reach the outside world and be subject to regulatory constraints and tariffs, but the FCC and states' PUCs have stop being the ILEC's servile whores before any of this can be a reality.
Will outsourcing ultimately lead to American corporations becoming shell operations where most workers, including skilled/professional positions such as engineers, front/backoffice workers, and middle management, do not reside in the US and can in few ways ultimately contribute to the economy and tax base?
I fear essentially what will happen is much of the Fortune 500 will become top-heavy with overpaid executives who are garage-saling the entire operation for the sake of "shareholder value" (translation: more mega-billion $$$ bonuses) while the opportunities for American workers logarathmically shrivels to near-oblivion.
You DO know what the U.S. job market is like for IT personnel in particular and everyone else in general, right?
To say it's bad is too polite.
To say it's horrible is dancing around the reality.
To say you'd be a screaming lunatic to quit your job because they won't let you use your cell phone is more appropriate.
Unless you're a terribly abused employee, to even consider such a thing is ridiculous, moreso for the reason you're giving. Surely they will reconsider their Draconian cell phone banning policy for you since you obviously need it. If they are insistent on banning all PERSONAL cell phones, then have them buy you a company-provided cell phone where you can send your alerts.
In any case, take a step back and put any thought of quitting out of your mind.
... kind of does this already. If you're listening to FM radio with it, you can record it direct to MP3. It holds the last 30 seconds of play in buffer so you won't miss the entire song if you don't hit record right away.
I have one of these units and it's a pretty nice feature - though I'll admit I almost never listen to FM with it. Too much MP3 storage.
...I'm at 75% of my salary 9 months ago. Six months ago I was laid off (from a dot-bomb) and I have now been working approximately 2 months at a full-time position.
Thanks to the largesse of a lot of people, we survived this lay-off and did not miss a house or car payment.
Raw statistics - In 6 months I applied for approximately 80 jobs, interviewed at 14, got 2 job offers revoked, and got 3 valid job offers (one of which was from a company I previously had a revoked job offer from). Of those 3, two were full-time position offers and 1, obviously, contract. The contract offer was for very good money; both of the full-time offers were 72-75% of my previous salary, however, they were both in job markets (regions) that normally only offered 80-85% of the salary of the previous market I had worked in (the SF Bay Area). So I would say my net pay decrease was about 10-15% if I had stayed in the same market.
All job offers gelled within a month of each other, but I wouldn't necessarily consider this a sign that things were good or getting better with the economy. I was, in fact, originally told I didn't get this position, but because the original person they offered it to didn't take it I took the position. So, I am second banana amid a competitive field - but I'll take second banana to no banana at all. The other position was at a public institution where starting pay is typically very low (woulda been the same even in a good economy), but benefits are excellent. The third position was great pay, no benefits, but in an IT dept. that had been decimated by layoffs over 2 years. And the commute woulda been HORRIBLE.
Anyway, I suppose my stats could be worse. I could have had far fewer interviews - a friend of mine has been out of work 8+ months and has had NO interviews. And, of course, I could still have no job.
Even at 75% I'm happy it's not 0%.
As someone who works (in the present tense - thankfully) for a so-called "e-learning" provider for certification training (Cisco, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle), I can tell you without reservation both the consumer and corporate certification training market is DEAD. When times were good, this company had a profitable revenue run-rate of on JUST individuals that pursued certification training via the Web. Now we're lucky if we sell 1 or 2 $1K-$2K cert. packages a month to any one. Now we have had to change our strategy to stay in business ourselves and strategically align with companies that were once our competitors on the content and training side -- and, while the times are extraordinarily hard, we are making strides with our technology, such as it is, versus pure content, which much bigger companies already provide better and more cheaply than we do.
This dearth of interest in certification training may answer your question in a roundabout way. I see many job postings that specifically ask for MCSE, CCNA, CCNP, CCIE mainly so it SEEMS to be important to some employers, but most individuals and corps themselves are simply not going out for or paying for certifications any more. To give you an illustration I recently took one of the MCSE 2000 courses in a classroom setting. There were just 2 other people in there and both were desktop support people who were in the wrong class but stayed because their employer (a State Agency, as it happens) had already paid for it. In a classroom that could have handled 8 more people, this is a big hit for the ILT (Instructor-Led Training) providers who really need the bodies. Every one in this industry is feeling the hurt.
I do know that Cisco is revamping all their certifications to make them more challenging and appealing to employers and Microsoft is tweaking their cert. program by adding the MCSA, but
You're right - it was Spry. I worked at a start-up ISP back in those days and Internet-in-a-Box was one of the all-in-one packaged solutions we looked at to give/sell to our customers. This was even before Mosaic Communications/Netscape I think. I remember you used to be able to go into a software store (remember those?) and buy it.
Do we remember...
... that day when we met for the first time, dreaming we would start the first commercial ISP in town?
... that really we were just bandwidth junkies that wanted a T1 to play with (and that's the only reason why 90% of the geeks continued to work there)?
... that us admins and support geeks just wanted a static dialup or ISDN on Centrex?
... that we wanted unlimited shell space to use aub at Ethernet speeds?
... the horror of watching the NNRP/NNTP server console and then having to support the same person that had a fetish for farm animals or asian teen chicks the next day?
... the night we lost our one big SCSI hard drive and put it in the freezer, desperately hoping it would spin up?
... how many different ways we attempted to "organize" banks of USR Sportsters?
... how much stock we worked for instead of cash?
... how many telco techs. had to come out to install our first Internet T1 (DSL users - you just don't understand)?
... how many of us fit into our first "real" 350 square foot office - 8 or 9 wasn't it?
... how many times PacBell slammed us and wouldn't give us more phone lines?
... how many of us did tech. support from our apartments in our underwear (wait, was I the only one)?
... how many servers you can fit on a Gorilla rack?
... how we worried that AOL or AT&T or PacBell or some other behemoth would end up wiping us out?
... when we didn't offer unlimited?
... when some irate customer kept 4 voice phone lines tied up at once?
... that even a bunch of smart people never could quite make a great business (good maybe, but never quite great)?
... what torture it was every month to run the billing through?
... what a failure the soda purchase honor system was (let's see... how many cans of Dew have I had today)?
... how many small ISPs there used to be in the area -- a hundred or more wasn't it?
... how many of us were local BBS geeks?
... how we used to look at $2.50/sq. ft. high-rise office space in jeans and t-shirts with Real Estate hounds in Armani suits -- just for fun? And what kinds of dreams we used to lay out in those spaces?
... when our first Internet connection was a 56K circuit from BARRNet?
And do we remember when we all left for real jobs eventually and began the distance between ourselves and that low-paying, freewheeling mentality that is the small ISP?
This kind of posting really adds to my enjoyment of /. I mean, I really love it when you point out the spelling errors. Attnetion moderators - this is what "-1: Offtipic" was invented for!
I agree. It is rather silly to point out spelling errors when there are two in your own pointed criticism.
Perhaps we'll have another "pointing out spelling errors point out spelling errors pointing out spelling errors" ad infinitum post some day soon.
When I started at my present job the network admin above me decided to use Linux instead of NT for a firewall solution. He personally knew very little about Linux but got his brother to setup a Linux-based firewall on a 486-100 with 16 megs of RAM. That was how OSS began its infiltration into our IT dept. where NT was already entrenched. Since then I've upgraded the firewall and it runs firewall, Web, Squid, primary DNS, transparent proxy, and internal routing for our entire network. I've cannibalized retired Pentiums that either served as old user machines or Netware servers and brought them back into service as a RADIUS client/RAS dialup, MySQL server, a "multimedia" machine that permits remote access to the CD burner, scanner, and PCMCIA flash memory cards, and a development machine being used by several programmers for a new development project. We recently purchased a new Linux server to be our VPN server using a commercial VPN server solution and are leasing 3 more large servers which will be running Linux for Web and development. Though NT is entrenched for file and print serving , PeopleSoft, and Exchange is being used for e-mail, Linux has made tremendous in-roads and it certainly isn't "banned." The company is feeling the sting of a huge IT investment over the last 3 years (after many years of putting very little money into IT) and I'm sure they support whatever solution works well and saves money.
Documentation has been and always will be an Achilles heel for OSS.
If Linux has failed to meet whatever set of expectations you had for it, then -- so what? You sound chagrined at its failure to meet its promise -- and what promises has Linux (or any piece of OSS) ever made to you or me or to anyone?
This maudlin mumbling over Linux's nebulous "failure" brings back memories of hanging around in the OS/2 crowd. There we were crying in our beers about how IBM failed so miserably to get OS/2 to meet its promise: mis-fired marketing of a superb desktop OS product; the failure of major ISVs to port their apps to OS/2; the lack of vendor hardware driver support. The list went on. How we wailed the "What ifs..." and "IBM should have done...."
Linux is a rock. You can either leave it on the ground, chuck it across a pond, grind it up into dust, or stick in your pocket and take it home. Freely, openly, and without limitations.
This reasoning is the basic confined thinking of commercial software -- Microsoft or IBM or Adobe promises X feature(s) and I am paying them to deliver those promises. If you've used Linux since '93 ('92 for me), then you should understand better than anyone that Linux, least of all, defies expectations because we have no conceptual framework for warranting expectations in the OSS sphere.
Yes, Linus says journaled file systems will be there in the new kernel stable series... but what if it's not there? So what. Linux still works fine, even if its filesystem is not as robust as say, FreeBSD. Linus owes us nothing except perhaps his vision for whatever he wants Linux to be.
What *is* the promise of Linux, after all? There is none and frankly I prefer it that way. I'd rather set the clock back a year or so when the media hadn't put its claws into Linux nor would there be a debate or any concern whatsoever about how or if Linux would "crush" Microsoft or vice-versa. When I ran Slackware and the pre-1.0 kernels back in '92, no one cared about whether Linux would be great or crush Microsoft.
Linux gives me plenty of value today -- an excellent, stable Web server, PHP3, MySQL and Oracle backend, JServ, XML parsing capability, a networked scanning and CD burning station, IPmasqing and transparent proxying to save on internal IP address space, a RADIUS client-based RAS, a transparent caching proxy, a firewall, and much more. I even use it to house an excellent commercial VPN software package. It does not yet offer me a comprehensive package of documentation to assist me in my endeavor to do all of those things, but that has never particularly been my concern with Linux anyway.
Other users justifiably take a different tack. Corporations have definite requirements in an operating system to consider it as a viable alternative to NT. If I'm trying to provide them with a functional Linux solution, the "Linux is a rock" argument won't hold weight. I have to give them support, stability, and ease of managability, all of which are (to greater and lesser degrees) available on NT. NT's easier to install, administer, and manage out-of-the-box, period. There aren't 5 different versions of NT server available on the shelves at Fry's. Many, many corporate IT houses prefer a single, unified vision for a piece of software that is going to be the bedrock of their department and that they're going to be held accountable for. And they want at least nominal accountability for their OS vendor, which they simply don't have with Linux (well, perhaps they do with commercial support from places like RedHat or Caldera).
I'm not sure if I'll ever be able to present an effective counter-argument to NT for the IT department that is considering using Linux. All I know is Linux and how to use it well and I don't think I want to waste time thinking about how it must beat Microsoft at fundamentally the same game. Linux does what NT does and it does it better, faster, and more cheaply than NT does. The same would not necessarily hold true for other users in other IT departments. I have a considerable amount of Linux expertise. IT departments that put all their stock in Linux with minimal Linux expertise would be shooting time and money down a hole.
So... let's stop concerning ourselves if Linux ever reaches its supposed promise and focus on what it does do. Most sensible NT users haven't held off upgrading to NT4 just so they can wait around for NT to meet whatever its promise is supposed to be. I can afford to ignore Microsoft, albeit at my peril, regardless of what Metcalfe or anyway else who supposedly knows better thinks.
Episode IV was actually the first Star Wars.
I, II, and III are the prequels obviously.