You're thinking in the short-term. Ellison has already said that he intends to buy Peoplesoft in order to kill off both the Peoplesoft ERP and the JD Edwards applications. Oracle has no plans to absorb them and sell them in concert with its existing offerings. It's an expensive execution plan is all.
But they won't do it all at once. They'll take out pieces, until it's more difficult to move to SAP than to simply pay Oracle licensing fees. Then Oracle will have the edge, unless current Peoplesoft customers move en masse early on to SAP.
The board at Peoplesoft has been preparing for this for a while, as I understand it, including passing a number of poison-pill packages. Should Oracle succeed, it may end up costing Ellison his job.
Oh.... that's what employers expect you to give voluntarily!
Oddly enough, my employer reclassified virtually my entire department, save three managers at the top, as hourly workers back in June. This has caused endless complaints because of the rules that came along with it.
1. All hourly employees must take a 15-minute break in the morning and afternoon. 2. All hourly employees must take a one-hour lunch. 3. Because of budget restrictions, all employees must obtain prior written approval (e-mail suffices) from their supervisor or manager for overtime. 4. Anyone who works overtime without approval will be paid for it, but will be subject to disciplinary action. 5. All employees are subject to random checks of their times badging in and out for arrival, breaks, and departure. Facility cameras are backups for those cases when an employee follows someone in or out, or forgets their badge.
We used to be flexible on many things. We would get straight time for extra time worked in emergency situations, such as a crashed server that had to be rebuilt or when a critical patch had to be applied after-hours, but for the most part extra hours were worked without complaint based on the expectation that it was a common thing and that we were given some leeway in what we did with our time. We could stay late for personal training, for example. Now the online educational materials sit mostly unused because no one has the time to use them during work hours, and they're inaccessible to most users once we leave the facility. We could also stay late to explore options that were harder to justify during working hours. Now we take the safe approach to things because there's no time to look at anything else. Most common gripe of all is getting stuck in traffic (significant complaint here in SoCal) because almost everyone has to leave at 5pm.
There's a suspicion that the employer had to pay out big-time for OT in some case, because the reclassification came before the new federal rules were put into place, but no one's been able to find anything on it. Personally, I'd love to get my salaried status back. Between the bureaucracy and the extra time in traffic, the OT hassles aren't worth it.
Forget the lost money -- the folks behind the probe at NASA must be feeling terrible seeing years of hard work lying broken and half buried in the sand.
Very true. I caught the replay of it (without sound) on a TV at work and thought something was wrong, that the capsule had broken away from the parafoil on capture. I could feel my stomach sinking -- and hitting -- about as fast as the capsule.
OTOH, the contractors are probably ready to give it another shot.
Since the CIWS uses the M61 gun system, I don't believe there are any rounds available for it that use DU. The API rounds I'm aware of that are available for the gun system (and which I believe are not used in the CIWS) have steel bodies and use powdered aluminum for incendiary effects.
I question your use of the S-3. My understanding is that the S-3 operates solely in the anti-ship/anti-sub role utilizing torpedoes or Harpoons, not as a bomber. I could be wrong on this point, but I don't recall seeing a Viking ever loaded up with anything other than such powered, guided weapons.
As for the impact holes, you won't see much. DU penetration points tend to be small, not much larger than the penetrator, owing to the very nature of what makes them useful. It's what they do once inside that's important (like spontaneously igniting and flying around the inside of the target, igniting ammo and fuel).
I know the controversy you're talking about. I live in north Orange County.
You have the concept of the sabot round correct, but the payload is a little off. Some sabot rounds are tungsten, but those are used mostly by other countries that have abandoned DU for mostly political reasons. They're not as effective, though; the density of DU is about 70% higher than that of lead, and 15% higher than that of tungsten. Furthermore, tungsten has a higher tendency to mushroom, whereas the self-sharpening properties of DU make for a more deeply-penetrating round. The US is by far the largest use of such rounds, and uses an alloy of DU and titanium. Addition of the latter provides some additional strength to the round.
Most sabot rounds are the depleted uranium rounds. They're used to deliver kinetic kills to tanks because depleted uranium is extremely dense and because it's self-sharpening (I can't for the life of me remember the proper term there) so it cuts through armor plate better than other metals which tend to dull as they go through armore.
The A-10 fires 30mm rounds, not 40mm.
Other than that, yes. This is not so much a list of "most censored stories" as it is a list of "most overblown stories." For a long time, I was one of those wary of Walmart, but if they can come in and provide, say, 500 jobs with a super-center while displacing 200 other jobs, that's a net growth in jobs. And no, most of those jobs that are displaced aren't paying any higher than Walmart.
That is like saying "I flew on 15 different flights last month, but no one reports it on the news. All I hear about is the one or two plane crashes. News reporting is so unrepresentative."
Most news reports on plane crashes also include the other side at least attempting to mitigate the damage ("Flying is still safer than driving") without then going on to ridicule them.
We should give MS praise for delivering a software firewall, even though it appears to be insecure by default?
If you refer to the ability to turn it off, that's the fault of people running in an administrative context. This is like complaining that someone could install a software package that disables or modifies the iptables setup because they run as root or in root context. Both of those are potentially asking for trouble.
You can't make sure all the variables are the same if you don't know what all the variables are.
I mentioned Henry Bessemer's unintentional use of low-phosphorus steel earlier, and someone else mentioned Fermi's use of a wooden table on which his team's experiment took place. Both points turned out to be critical for the experiments' successes, though neither one was realized until much later after follow-up attempts to reproduce by others proved fruitless.
Oil companies currently have it pretty good - why would they want to actually have to go out and *compete* if they don't have to?
Oil companies do compete, and heavily so. There are a lot of oil companies out there, and all of them want to make a profit. Unocal got out of the post-extraction business in the mid 1990s (though they licensed the trademarks such as the 76 logo to Tosco, who also bought much of the refining and retail operations) because competition in that arena was simply getting to be too difficult. Other companies work solely in refining, or solely in retail, because competition is so fierce in the industry.
Though it appears that he may be right in the end -- cold fusion does exist -- that is how science works. It was extremely difficult for people to reproduce it and since the success rate was on par with anomolous behavior, it was regarded as a fluke.
The same thing happened to Henry Bessemer when he produced high-quality steel by blowing air through it. When others couldn't reproduce it on a regular basis, he had to go back and review what he had done. It nearly broke him, but in the end he found that by pure chance, he had used low-phosphorus steel in his experiments. Once this was shown, uptake was initially slow, but as soon as it was proven to be reproduceable, it caught on and allowed the widespread use of modern steel -- and allowed Bessemer to become very wealthy.
I was amused by the marksman analogy. I'm not much of a marksman, either, but I've been around enough to know that they usually leave one hole in the target. It's the rest of us that leave the target full of them.
I'd love to see the source for that bit. I have a great deal of difficulty believing that even in the smaller civil wars with largely untrained masses doing the fighting, blue-on-blue incidents caused more casualties. Even in the first Gulf War, hostile fire claimed more coalition lives than did friendly fire.
The problem is that you're not the one making decisions on purchasing.
Suppose you have a network that has some external servers. For the most part, you can be secure with a couple of firewalls (one on each side of the DMZ) and proper ACLs on the routers. Throw in a simple AV solution and appropriate lockdowns on the servers, and you're pretty well set for most things that will come in. The security companies will tell you that you need firewalls for your DMZ, plus a separate firewall for each network segment/VLAN, plus a spam firewall, plus spam filtering, plus centralized policy control, plus this brand new stainless steel kitchen sink. It's ridiculous, frankly, but Bruce puts it all into perspective.
To do that, I believe I'd have to disable File Protection, which I do consider to be core functionality. On top of that, doesn't IIS and/or some of its subsidiary parts require some portions of those? I'm referring to a usable system, not just a bootable system.
Why is it that Bruce Schneier is the only person that can speak intelligibly about security?
Bruce has a rare combination of the mental accuity required to be a security researcher and expert, and the ability to write well enough to be understood by large swaths of the population. A lot of security people will try to explain to the non-tech person that blocking ICMP will help to avoid DDoS attacks, but you have to keep SMTP open to allow e-mail, even though that will result in spam getting through but implementation of a Bayesian filter will help to mitigate that. Most managers' eyes will glaze over so much they could open a Krispy Kreme. Bruce can explain it in more simple terms: A properly configured firewall will reduce the chance of successful attacks, but there may be trade-offs, which can be discussed in detail at an appropriate time.
In most cases, you choice is "gifted security expert" or "gifted writer." In Bruce's case, the OR becomes AND.
Microsoft probably looks at software as less modular and more monolithic. Even when running server applications like Exchange or MS-SQL, they're either run as applications, or integrated strongly into the system in such a way as it's difficult to use the OS for any other dedicated purpose without reinstalling it to wipe away all traces of the server app.
Linux, of course, is very modular. With some notably lame exceptions (I can't recall them exactly now, but they had to do with some graphics library), I'm able to run most anything I want to on my Linux server without installing X, but Windows 2003 will not run properly without Explorer. I could probably get those libraries to work if I did some investigation and re-compiling, but there's pretty much no way I could get Windows 2003 to run right without Explorer. I could change the shell, but I would be missing some critical core functionality.
He allowed messages to come in from just about anyone that wanted to write a message and -- with some editing of comments to weed out the extreme stuff -- painted them on the sidewalk. It's the equivalent of dumping flyers out of a helicopter. It may not directly harm anyone, but it still creates an eyesore that takes time to clean up.
This is part of the problem. France wants Yahoo to block every trace of Nazi merchandise from access in France. They may no longer have a business in France if they withdraw, but they have other business units there that I believe can be targeted if they're in EU countries, and company officers can never again go to Europe because they could be targeted for prosecution for making it available.
I've started moving to energy-efficient bulbs myself, though in a couple of cases they're mildly distracting, as the ones I bought were really designed for longer shades. There was an article I saw recently that suggested that a boost of 5% on power supplies used in computers could contribute to a significant decline in the rate of energy consumption, and I imagine that a potential mass move to LCDs will help, too. My 19" Viewsonic A90 at home uses 135W, while a recent 20" LCD from Viewsonic uses only 60W.
The thermal towers are much more efficient than that. The air under the heating field stays warm enough overnight to continue generating power, albeit at a lower level. However, as the power available decreases, so does the demand. It's much better, in that respect, than traditional solar generators, which rely on the light and hence become virtually useless after sunset. The main problem is that a 1km-tall tower requires a heating field 7km across, so it's not something to be built wherever you want.
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You're thinking in the short-term. Ellison has already said that he intends to buy Peoplesoft in order to kill off both the Peoplesoft ERP and the JD Edwards applications. Oracle has no plans to absorb them and sell them in concert with its existing offerings. It's an expensive execution plan is all.
But they won't do it all at once. They'll take out pieces, until it's more difficult to move to SAP than to simply pay Oracle licensing fees. Then Oracle will have the edge, unless current Peoplesoft customers move en masse early on to SAP.
The board at Peoplesoft has been preparing for this for a while, as I understand it, including passing a number of poison-pill packages. Should Oracle succeed, it may end up costing Ellison his job.
Overtime?
Oh.... that's what employers expect you to give voluntarily!
Oddly enough, my employer reclassified virtually my entire department, save three managers at the top, as hourly workers back in June. This has caused endless complaints because of the rules that came along with it.
1. All hourly employees must take a 15-minute break in the morning and afternoon.
2. All hourly employees must take a one-hour lunch.
3. Because of budget restrictions, all employees must obtain prior written approval (e-mail suffices) from their supervisor or manager for overtime.
4. Anyone who works overtime without approval will be paid for it, but will be subject to disciplinary action.
5. All employees are subject to random checks of their times badging in and out for arrival, breaks, and departure. Facility cameras are backups for those cases when an employee follows someone in or out, or forgets their badge.
We used to be flexible on many things. We would get straight time for extra time worked in emergency situations, such as a crashed server that had to be rebuilt or when a critical patch had to be applied after-hours, but for the most part extra hours were worked without complaint based on the expectation that it was a common thing and that we were given some leeway in what we did with our time. We could stay late for personal training, for example. Now the online educational materials sit mostly unused because no one has the time to use them during work hours, and they're inaccessible to most users once we leave the facility. We could also stay late to explore options that were harder to justify during working hours. Now we take the safe approach to things because there's no time to look at anything else. Most common gripe of all is getting stuck in traffic (significant complaint here in SoCal) because almost everyone has to leave at 5pm.
There's a suspicion that the employer had to pay out big-time for OT in some case, because the reclassification came before the new federal rules were put into place, but no one's been able to find anything on it. Personally, I'd love to get my salaried status back. Between the bureaucracy and the extra time in traffic, the OT hassles aren't worth it.
Forget the lost money -- the folks behind the probe at NASA must be feeling terrible seeing years of hard work lying broken and half buried in the sand.
Very true. I caught the replay of it (without sound) on a TV at work and thought something was wrong, that the capsule had broken away from the parafoil on capture. I could feel my stomach sinking -- and hitting -- about as fast as the capsule.
OTOH, the contractors are probably ready to give it another shot.
People aren't bridges.
No, they're not, but imagining them to be so does make it easier to pour gasoline on them and shoot them with a flare gun.
Since the CIWS uses the M61 gun system, I don't believe there are any rounds available for it that use DU. The API rounds I'm aware of that are available for the gun system (and which I believe are not used in the CIWS) have steel bodies and use powdered aluminum for incendiary effects.
I question your use of the S-3. My understanding is that the S-3 operates solely in the anti-ship/anti-sub role utilizing torpedoes or Harpoons, not as a bomber. I could be wrong on this point, but I don't recall seeing a Viking ever loaded up with anything other than such powered, guided weapons.
As for the impact holes, you won't see much. DU penetration points tend to be small, not much larger than the penetrator, owing to the very nature of what makes them useful. It's what they do once inside that's important (like spontaneously igniting and flying around the inside of the target, igniting ammo and fuel).
I know the controversy you're talking about. I live in north Orange County.
You have the concept of the sabot round correct, but the payload is a little off. Some sabot rounds are tungsten, but those are used mostly by other countries that have abandoned DU for mostly political reasons. They're not as effective, though; the density of DU is about 70% higher than that of lead, and 15% higher than that of tungsten. Furthermore, tungsten has a higher tendency to mushroom, whereas the self-sharpening properties of DU make for a more deeply-penetrating round. The US is by far the largest use of such rounds, and uses an alloy of DU and titanium. Addition of the latter provides some additional strength to the round.
Minor actual clarifications:
Most sabot rounds are the depleted uranium rounds. They're used to deliver kinetic kills to tanks because depleted uranium is extremely dense and because it's self-sharpening (I can't for the life of me remember the proper term there) so it cuts through armor plate better than other metals which tend to dull as they go through armore.
The A-10 fires 30mm rounds, not 40mm.
Other than that, yes. This is not so much a list of "most censored stories" as it is a list of "most overblown stories." For a long time, I was one of those wary of Walmart, but if they can come in and provide, say, 500 jobs with a super-center while displacing 200 other jobs, that's a net growth in jobs. And no, most of those jobs that are displaced aren't paying any higher than Walmart.
That is like saying "I flew on 15 different flights last month, but no one reports it on the news. All I hear about is the one or two plane crashes. News reporting is so unrepresentative."
Most news reports on plane crashes also include the other side at least attempting to mitigate the damage ("Flying is still safer than driving") without then going on to ridicule them.
We should give MS praise for delivering a software firewall, even though it appears to be insecure by default?
If you refer to the ability to turn it off, that's the fault of people running in an administrative context. This is like complaining that someone could install a software package that disables or modifies the iptables setup because they run as root or in root context. Both of those are potentially asking for trouble.
You can't make sure all the variables are the same if you don't know what all the variables are.
I mentioned Henry Bessemer's unintentional use of low-phosphorus steel earlier, and someone else mentioned Fermi's use of a wooden table on which his team's experiment took place. Both points turned out to be critical for the experiments' successes, though neither one was realized until much later after follow-up attempts to reproduce by others proved fruitless.
Oil companies currently have it pretty good - why would they want to actually have to go out and *compete* if they don't have to?
Oil companies do compete, and heavily so. There are a lot of oil companies out there, and all of them want to make a profit. Unocal got out of the post-extraction business in the mid 1990s (though they licensed the trademarks such as the 76 logo to Tosco, who also bought much of the refining and retail operations) because competition in that arena was simply getting to be too difficult. Other companies work solely in refining, or solely in retail, because competition is so fierce in the industry.
Though it appears that he may be right in the end -- cold fusion does exist -- that is how science works. It was extremely difficult for people to reproduce it and since the success rate was on par with anomolous behavior, it was regarded as a fluke.
The same thing happened to Henry Bessemer when he produced high-quality steel by blowing air through it. When others couldn't reproduce it on a regular basis, he had to go back and review what he had done. It nearly broke him, but in the end he found that by pure chance, he had used low-phosphorus steel in his experiments. Once this was shown, uptake was initially slow, but as soon as it was proven to be reproduceable, it caught on and allowed the widespread use of modern steel -- and allowed Bessemer to become very wealthy.
I was amused by the marksman analogy. I'm not much of a marksman, either, but I've been around enough to know that they usually leave one hole in the target. It's the rest of us that leave the target full of them.
I'd love to see the source for that bit. I have a great deal of difficulty believing that even in the smaller civil wars with largely untrained masses doing the fighting, blue-on-blue incidents caused more casualties. Even in the first Gulf War, hostile fire claimed more coalition lives than did friendly fire.
The problem is that you're not the one making decisions on purchasing.
Suppose you have a network that has some external servers. For the most part, you can be secure with a couple of firewalls (one on each side of the DMZ) and proper ACLs on the routers. Throw in a simple AV solution and appropriate lockdowns on the servers, and you're pretty well set for most things that will come in. The security companies will tell you that you need firewalls for your DMZ, plus a separate firewall for each network segment/VLAN, plus a spam firewall, plus spam filtering, plus centralized policy control, plus this brand new stainless steel kitchen sink. It's ridiculous, frankly, but Bruce puts it all into perspective.
To do that, I believe I'd have to disable File Protection, which I do consider to be core functionality. On top of that, doesn't IIS and/or some of its subsidiary parts require some portions of those? I'm referring to a usable system, not just a bootable system.
Why is it that Bruce Schneier is the only person that can speak intelligibly about security?
Bruce has a rare combination of the mental accuity required to be a security researcher and expert, and the ability to write well enough to be understood by large swaths of the population. A lot of security people will try to explain to the non-tech person that blocking ICMP will help to avoid DDoS attacks, but you have to keep SMTP open to allow e-mail, even though that will result in spam getting through but implementation of a Bayesian filter will help to mitigate that. Most managers' eyes will glaze over so much they could open a Krispy Kreme. Bruce can explain it in more simple terms: A properly configured firewall will reduce the chance of successful attacks, but there may be trade-offs, which can be discussed in detail at an appropriate time.
In most cases, you choice is "gifted security expert" or "gifted writer." In Bruce's case, the OR becomes AND.
Microsoft probably looks at software as less modular and more monolithic. Even when running server applications like Exchange or MS-SQL, they're either run as applications, or integrated strongly into the system in such a way as it's difficult to use the OS for any other dedicated purpose without reinstalling it to wipe away all traces of the server app.
Linux, of course, is very modular. With some notably lame exceptions (I can't recall them exactly now, but they had to do with some graphics library), I'm able to run most anything I want to on my Linux server without installing X, but Windows 2003 will not run properly without Explorer. I could probably get those libraries to work if I did some investigation and re-compiling, but there's pretty much no way I could get Windows 2003 to run right without Explorer. I could change the shell, but I would be missing some critical core functionality.
My childhood says, "No gnus is good gnus with Gary Gnu."
Chalk the kids use washes away in a couple of days. His paint washes away in a couple of weeks. Big difference.
He allowed messages to come in from just about anyone that wanted to write a message and -- with some editing of comments to weed out the extreme stuff -- painted them on the sidewalk. It's the equivalent of dumping flyers out of a helicopter. It may not directly harm anyone, but it still creates an eyesore that takes time to clean up.
Their glide ratio isn't very good, though...
This is part of the problem. France wants Yahoo to block every trace of Nazi merchandise from access in France. They may no longer have a business in France if they withdraw, but they have other business units there that I believe can be targeted if they're in EU countries, and company officers can never again go to Europe because they could be targeted for prosecution for making it available.
The thing is that in the case of a significant accident, the flood of lawsuits would mean going out of business, so they go the extra mile in safety.
I've started moving to energy-efficient bulbs myself, though in a couple of cases they're mildly distracting, as the ones I bought were really designed for longer shades. There was an article I saw recently that suggested that a boost of 5% on power supplies used in computers could contribute to a significant decline in the rate of energy consumption, and I imagine that a potential mass move to LCDs will help, too. My 19" Viewsonic A90 at home uses 135W, while a recent 20" LCD from Viewsonic uses only 60W.
The thermal towers are much more efficient than that. The air under the heating field stays warm enough overnight to continue generating power, albeit at a lower level. However, as the power available decreases, so does the demand. It's much better, in that respect, than traditional solar generators, which rely on the light and hence become virtually useless after sunset. The main problem is that a 1km-tall tower requires a heating field 7km across, so it's not something to be built wherever you want.