Not so much a fanboy of Linux as a detractor of windows. They both have their uses. My point was that the average computer user is ignorant of Linux for many reasons, including being ignorant of the threats that face a Windows machine connected to the internet. That's not fanboying, that's just how it is.
Apart from games, which the clueful use as an excuse to not convert at least one box to Linux, I'd wager Ignorance (capital I) is the leading cause of high Windows market share. There's legions of bot nets for a reason...
If the average computer user is satisfied with windows, it follows that they are blissfully unaware of the pornspam spewing from their infected PC.
You're totally missing the point. It's not about patents and compensation, it's about how Obama's campaign is treating it's own volunteers. This guy was working for the campaign, but was doing so with his own Myspace page. Once the campaign decided it wanted the page, it asked the guy how much he wanted to sell it for. He ball-parked a number, and Obama's gorillas forced MySpace to turn the keys over to them when they didn't like the amount. There was no expectation of compensation, but since they asked, he worked out a figure.
Updating a MySpace page is analogous to updating a regular web page. There's a big difference in the kind of work that a webpage maintainer and a dog walker does, but that doesn't mean it still isn't work. Unless you fell that sysadmins shouldn't get paid...
Say after a few years, an animal shelter no longer needs the services of a volunteer dog walker because a group of professional dog handlers agree to walk the dogs. Wouldn't you think it would be a little unfair if the dog walker asked for compensation as if he worked there? The guy probably does deserve a dinner or some nice gifts for his services, but he agreed to work as a volunteer, not as an employee.
That's not a good analogy. Here's how your dogwalking idea would fit this situation better. Let's say the dogwalkers invented a machine that walked all the dogs. They spent 2.5 years working out the bugs; getting it just right. Then, the animal shelter says, "Hey, we don't need your services any more, but your machine is pretty neat. How much do you want for it?" Then, the shelter proceeds to have the cops confiscate the machine and deliver it to the shelter.
The only difference between this new scenario and the Obama MySpace flap is that there's no "real" property involved. Still a crappy way to treat someone who volunteered for you for 2.5 years.
Re:Wikipedia article on the number is down too.
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Censoring a Number
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Re:Wikipedia article on the number is down too.
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Censoring a Number
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· Score: 1
There is another wiki entry with the key in it here. Apparently, you can't have the key in a title, but you can have it in the body of the article. Or perhaps, wiki just hasn't been told to kill that part of the article yet...
our representative represents *you*, they can only do that job if they know what *you* want. The government is not some faceless monstrosity. It is made of people.
That's all nice and wonderful in theory, but in practice it doesn't get very far. Since the original discussion was about the Vice-President (and I'm going to lump in the whole executive branch here) let's leave the Representatives out for now. The White House is anything but accessible to you and I, least of all the Oval Office. The occasional boy scout or clergyman will get an invite, but Johnny coal miner and Susie accounting clerk won't. In fact, not fifteen years ago, you could drive by the President's house. Now, you'd get hit by a whole lot of small arms fire for trying it. How accessible does the President seem now?
As for Representatives, I've met with my state and national reps. Nice fellows and based on that, I'd elect them again. However, it's not based on that. It's supposed to be about their views and ideals being aligned with mine and ever since they changed the constitution to limit the number of congressional seats, it just keeps getting harder and harder to fit one person's views to their district. Throw in gerrymandering and you've got a recipe for serious constituent disconnect.
I may sound cynical, but I'm really disenfranchised and care enough to not like it. But I don't think its hopeless; there's always the chance that someone will get elected as President that can do something about all this, but when you can't do anything directly about such a big problem, hopelessness is part of the package.
A bunch of party funding now comes from the tax system (which I have no problem with) and is based on the number of votes received.
And you don't have a problem with perpetuating a corrupt political party? That system only works when the elected party is a good one and we all know that it takes good candidates to make good parties and truly good candidates are hard to come by.
We have them. Plenty of them. Just having them isn't enough if people don't vote for them.
The problem isn't that people don't vote for them, it's that they don't think their votes will count if they vote for them, and that's because everyone already voted for their favorite candidate in the primaries.
Primaries are one of (along with gerrymandering, the electoral college, etc.) the single biggest reasons for low voter turnout and the strength of the two party system. If we want real change in political thinking in government and real accountability to the voters, then this is where the changes need to be made. As you pointed out, we already have the seeds for viable third parties sown, now we just need to give them some room to grow without the behemoth weeds of the Republicans and Democrats crowding them out.
The question isn't "Why don't we care" the questions is "What the hell do we do about it?"
I don't like my government, but until the next election, there's nothing *I* can do about it. Aside from suicidal assassination attempts (I don't hate the government that much), writing letters and/or emails that nine times out of ten aren't read by the addressees, or staging protests, the commoners are hamstrung. The rich and the lobbyists can turn policy to their whims, but us middle-classers have nothing but the vote on our side. Until that vote is unified, or until there's something (or someone) worth voting for, we're going to keep getting the same crap in office.
Do you sense a bit of apathy here? If you do, it's because it's real. I've voted in every election since I reached the age of majority, but not once have I voted for the President that won. I don't feel very empowered and I'd wager a lot of Americans feel the same way.
Now I don't claim to be an expert on the internal politics of Canada, but I'd be willing to be that the average Canadian has had these feelings at some point. So you can get off your high horse any time, now...
You mistyped 'unwritten system limitations'. We exceeded the system requirements by far. The hell was in getting the users to pair down their mail store usage, which I obviously didn't get into because it wasn't the focus of the question.
We have 285 mailboxes on Exchange (was 2000, now 2003) and are in the telecom business. We implemented 2003 with a cross-server migration using the mailbox move utility and we went from an unlicensed version of 2000 Enterprise to a licensed version of Standard. Who knew we had an 87 GB mailstore? After I had migrated five users, the mailstore dismounted and the event log told me there was 17 GB out of 16 in use on the mailstore. Apparantly, Standard has a 16 GB limit. I also found out about a neat registry setting (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=57029) that enables a 75 GB limit, but that was still too small for our 87 GB store. Limits was the key, as we didn't have any.
Our largest user was 1.2 GB, but we had fifteen users over 1 GB. My predecessor had tried to implement a five tiered system based on title. Non managers had 100 MB, Managers had 150 MB, Directors had 200 MB, VPs had 250 MB and Corporate Officers were unlimited. My boss (a director) wanted to half these. I pushed for something more manageable, yet reasonable and here is what we implemented:
Non-managers: 250 MB, Managers: 500 MB, VPs and above: Unlimited. We set it so that warnings were issued at 90%, Send is disabled at 100%, and Send/Recieve is disabled at 110%.
After teaching users that the 'Deleted Items' folder is not the place to store important mail, and setting up daily auto-archive set to two months, our mail store is at 50 GB. It takes four hours to backup individual mailboxes to a locally attached Ultrium LTO2 drive. So far, I haven't had to restore anyone's mailbox, but I would expect the same or faster on the restore.
I interviewed for a position in the web team of a regional airline that gets 75% of its revenue from the web, has grown organically, and where their guys feel 'stuck'. You don't happen to work for Jet Blue, do you?
When they didn't call me back for a second interview (I had almost no IIS experience) I was somewhat relieved. The biggest reason was that I knew it would be a rough few years working for them while they worked out their issues. Their problem (which sounds suspiciously like your problem) is not just that you don't have a clearly defined organizational plan, but that you let the business drive the department. With three-fourths of your revenue coming out of the web site, *everyone* watches the daily and even hourly sales numbers. When there's glitches in the system, *everyone* from the sales guys to the CEO knows about it and *your* butt is on the line. Structure a business plan for the IT group. Lay out simple and clear lines of responsibilty, disaster mitigation plans, and (to get to the heart of your question) career paths. Make sure that all layers of managment understand that IT can be subject to forces outside of its control (network/power outages and acts of God anywhere in the world affect everyone else). Have set goals for each employee and set rewards for meeting them. Yearly bonuses, raises, and other perks will go a long way to the retention you seek.
I know it isn't the specific advice you were looking for, but you're not going to find that kind of answer on Slashdot. You know your business better than us. You know your IT needs, and only you can fix it. Start with the basics (career paths, goals/rewards, clear lines of responsibility) and the rest will fall into place. Good luck!
One thing I find amazing is the number of so-called conservatives who attack the UN for being impotent, and then suggest that the way to solve that is to give them more power. Why can't we just concede that the UN should be impotent, and work within that framework?
Okay. I can agree with that. The UN is impotent and let's work within that framework. It's a convenient tool for the powerful and weak when it suits them, and annoyingly meddling when it's not. There is no working within the UN unless you feel it's of some use to you, and any entity that's only usefull when it suits you is not a very useful entity at all.
While I consider myself conservative, I don't think the UN should have more power. On the contrary, I think that the UN should have less power. It should be a forum for discussion on the low end be a humanitarian aid vehicle (without the bureaucratic-juggernaut) on the high end. One world government is noble, but humanity is too proud and states cling too tightly to soveriegnty for it to work today.
Someone's been sucking on the teat of the UN's propaganda whore. Oil for food was an unqualified disaster because it did *nothing* to motivate Saddam to change his bullying tune. The only thing it did was increase the poverty of the poor and give Saddam bargaining money because guess what? The food never made it to the needy.
Here's an idea... let's look at the other countries we've (as in the US, not the UN) tried sanctioning and then making deals with. Cuba: fifty years later, they're still communist, repressive, and the people still love Uncle Fidel. Lybia: The terrorists left and moved into Afghanistan and the Sudan. Net result? No change. North Korea: Iraq without the oil and with a growing superpower on its border. The US has *tried* the sanction and diplomacy game. It doesn't work for people like Kim, Castro, and Saddam.
To sum up, the UN is impotent and always will be until nations give up sovereignty. The EU is a fantastic example of why that won't happen (they can't even agree on a currency -- *cough*Great Britain*cough*). Therefore, if something needs doing, it's up to the entities with power. Only nation states have power. Multi-national corps, international institutions, and NGO's are all great to have around to boost the ego, but they don't have armies and they don't raise money. Without those two things, people aren't going to pay you a lick of attention.
Bringing this back to the point at hand, it would be Very Bad to give control of the root servers to anyone. You want to see the internet implode? Give the name servers up to a bureaucratic nightmare and watch the infighting begin. I'd give it five years before each of the name servers were sitting in a different third-world country with no electricity and no infrastructure. What a joke.
Well, I don't like to add to an already crowded din of voices, but I can always use this as a journal entry later...
I've walked away from three jobs -- all three were intolerable -- and I have a wife and two kids.
The first one was when I worked for a company in a small southern town. There were more chiefs than indians and IT was a dirty word back then. I was the NetWare guy when 4.x was fresh off the presses. My boss's boss was twiddling with the secretaries and when I caught wind of it, I went to his boss and said exactly what I heard. End of the line? Nope. My boss caught wind of it when top-boss started to snoop around and told his boss (the twiddler). Twiddler called me into his office and tried to rip me a new one. I had a one-year old, and a car payment (we were renting at the time). I told him under no certain circumstances that he was in the wrong and that if he fired me, he'd be in hotter water with his wife than with the law. When big-boss didn't do anything about it, I asked him and he waffled. I packed my boxes and left that day.
Then next job was with a really-big employer a little further north. There were 4000 users and 45 NetWare servers. During my two years there, I bumped that up to 85, designed and built a seperate backup network for the servers, and a whole lot of other things that made my job both easier (simpler) and harder (more to do). During all of this, I also took each of the CNE tests and got certified. When I was first hired, they said, "get certified and we'll give you a 50 cent/hour raise." I said, 'cool', and went to work. Bosses changed and when I said to new boss, "I'm certified, I'd like that raise now', boss said, "I didn't promise that, you aren't getting it." I said, "it's $.50, and you inherited the promise (he knew about it because he had been there when the promise was made)." He said no, I said good bye.
The job after that was with Intel and as a contractor, I couldn't work for more than 18 months. What a sweet job, though. The division was sold off a month after my contract ended and is it's own company now.
The last job I had was with a company that has an office in almost every major city in the country. Every office was a one-man show, except in New York and the Corporate Offices in LA. Over the next three years, I completely re-built the network, re-installed every single PC, built all but two of the seven servers from scratch, and overhauled most of the other systems. Things were going well until my boss was fired. He had been a target of a personal vendetta from his Corporate boss and made a very minor mistake. Despite the fact that he had no prior mistakes, he was fired (against local managment, I might add). The same corporate decision makers then chose a person who had worked at the office before, whom I had worked with, and whom I new I couldn't get along with. I'd been thinking about moving jobs for a while, as there was no room for promotion without moving to LA, I was being under paid, and I wanted to expand my horizons a bit. So, I quit.
That was three months ago and I'm still looking. I turned down two jobs that paid less than what I was making previously. It hasn't been easy, and we've had to make some sacrifices, but the mortgage is paid, the cars drive, and we have food in the fridge. Sometimes, it is better to bend to the wind, and other times, it is better to get out of the storm all together.
If you choose to resist, then you are disturbing the peace and threatening the safety of an officer, therefore they have the right to subdue you - not kill or main you.
Wrong. See the definition of sovereignty . The Federal government has sovereignty over it's citizens, roughly translated, they can kill any number of them at their whim. They earned this sovereignty when our ancestors gave up their individual rights to a sovereign, or the United States government. This social contract is tenuously based on the idea that the state will provide basic protections. By living in society, we tacitly agree to keep our side of the agreement, by continuing to give the state its sovereignty.
This lack of personal responsibility is the cause of most of the problems in America. I personally wish the government would just stand back and let the crowd thin itself.
It's not video games, it's not movies, it's stupid people with bad role models. It's not the governments problem, it's a personal problem.
Welcome to my friends list. You see, humans are the only ones that want to buck the darwinian system and make everyone equal. They want protection without personal sacrifice. They want it all and they want it now. The first thing I teach my kids about right and wrong is that no matter what anyone else does or says, they are personally responsible for their own actions. Nobody else is going to cover for them once they are adults, including me.
Enterprise, JFK, Kitty Hawk, and Constellation are of a different class. Right?
Enterprise and JFK aren't officially 'classed' but they are both very similair except for their power plant. (The 'N' in 'CVN' stands for nuclear.) The Kitty Hawk and Constellation are Kitty Hawk class carriers.
Actually, yes. Along with elected representatives and the President (to a certain extent).
Not exactly. Sometimes I might be held accountable for breaking a law but I'll break it anyway. Speeding, for example. Other times I won't be held accountable, but I still won't break the law.
I don't quite know what you are trying to say here, so I won't comment.
The law has very little to do with morality.
Actually, it does. It has its very foundation in morality. Western law especially has its foundation in Aristotle (who was anything but amoral), via the Magna Carta and English common law.
Everyone breaks the law.
This has never been and will never be good enough justification to break the law. Furthermore, just because you know that you are going to break the law does not mean you should make an effort to do so. Nor should you restrain yourself from making every reasonable effort to keep the law.
You live in some kind of fantasy world.
No, but I do have an ideal for the kind of world I want to live in. I try very hard to live that way myself, teach my kids to live that way and influence the decision makers to make that world come to pass. It is the delusion that there is heppiness in disobedience that is the only fantasy I see.
I'm a human. We all have the right, and IMHO, the duty, to decide what is just and what is unjust.
Depending on you personal philosophy perhaps, but you do not have the right to enforce your views on others. Likewise, you do not have the right to determine what is just and unjust for other people.
But that doesn't mean I'm not allowed to disagree.
Quite right, as long as that is where it stops. Perhaps you could try to convince others that the law(s) are unjust but it is quite a different thing to dictate to others your brand of truth and justice.
But other laws are more easily broken, or have less severe consequences...
I'm just not going to follow these unjust laws if I don't think they're going to be enforced...
I'm perfectly fine with having these laws against stupid things like downloading from Kazaa as long as I don't get my ass thrown in jail for doing it.
So it seems that your personal philosophy includes adhering to the laws only when you are not going to be held accountable for breaking them. Not a very high horse to be on when determining the justice of laws and I might add, morally repugnant.
The United States would still be part of England, of course, since we would continue to pay the ever increasing taxes that they imposed on us.
The difference is that the US formed a new society, wholly cut off from the old one. We stopped paying taxes because we ceased to be associated with Britain. If you want to remove yourself from American society because of bad copyright laws, then be my guest.
Ah, but you are the one who doesn't like the way society works.
Perhaps you are confused with someone else.
I haven't mucked up anything for anyone by downloading something from Kazaa.
You have because you are disobeying the laws of the land (just or not). You are trampling under your feet the fabric that holds society together. In order for us to avoid the state of all against all, people have entered into a social contract. We give up our sovereignty to the society and agree that a government should be established to keep the peace and provide for certain needs common to all men. You can either continue to support and influence society from within the system, or you can leave the system and form your own. What you cannot do is abuse the system and tear apart society because it doesn't justify your desires. While the risk of accountibility may be low (as with speeding) it does not justify your wonton and reckless behavior.
Your moral system differs from mine. I don't believe it is immoral to break an unjust law.
Which is really the whole point isn't it?
Who are you to decide which laws are just and unjust? Is that not what the courts are for? If the system is to truly work, the people who live in a civil society *must* adhere to the laws setup by that society. Otherwise, society breaks down and we revert to a natural state of all against all. That is not a world I want to live in. I support the enforcement of all laws (even the unjust ones) until such time as they are no longer laws. If you don't like the way society works, go find one you do like or make one yourself. Otherwise, get back in line and quit mucking it up for the rest of us.
Slashdot Mirror
Not so much a fanboy of Linux as a detractor of windows. They both have their uses. My point was that the average computer user is ignorant of Linux for many reasons, including being ignorant of the threats that face a Windows machine connected to the internet. That's not fanboying, that's just how it is.
Apart from games, which the clueful use as an excuse to not convert at least one box to Linux, I'd wager Ignorance (capital I) is the leading cause of high Windows market share. There's legions of bot nets for a reason... If the average computer user is satisfied with windows, it follows that they are blissfully unaware of the pornspam spewing from their infected PC.
If they're pricks as campaign staffers, they'll be prick when it actually matters
More accurately, they'll be even bigger pricks when they don't have to worry about that pesky election and the inconvenience of public opinion...
You're totally missing the point. It's not about patents and compensation, it's about how Obama's campaign is treating it's own volunteers. This guy was working for the campaign, but was doing so with his own Myspace page. Once the campaign decided it wanted the page, it asked the guy how much he wanted to sell it for. He ball-parked a number, and Obama's gorillas forced MySpace to turn the keys over to them when they didn't like the amount. There was no expectation of compensation, but since they asked, he worked out a figure.
Updating a MySpace page is analogous to updating a regular web page. There's a big difference in the kind of work that a webpage maintainer and a dog walker does, but that doesn't mean it still isn't work. Unless you fell that sysadmins shouldn't get paid...
Say after a few years, an animal shelter no longer needs the services of a volunteer dog walker because a group of professional dog handlers agree to walk the dogs. Wouldn't you think it would be a little unfair if the dog walker asked for compensation as if he worked there? The guy probably does deserve a dinner or some nice gifts for his services, but he agreed to work as a volunteer, not as an employee.
That's not a good analogy. Here's how your dogwalking idea would fit this situation better. Let's say the dogwalkers invented a machine that walked all the dogs. They spent 2.5 years working out the bugs; getting it just right. Then, the animal shelter says, "Hey, we don't need your services any more, but your machine is pretty neat. How much do you want for it?" Then, the shelter proceeds to have the cops confiscate the machine and deliver it to the shelter.
The only difference between this new scenario and the Obama MySpace flap is that there's no "real" property involved. Still a crappy way to treat someone who volunteered for you for 2.5 years.
Yeah. Preview button is for whimps. linky
There is another wiki entry with the key in it here. Apparently, you can't have the key in a title, but you can have it in the body of the article. Or perhaps, wiki just hasn't been told to kill that part of the article yet...
I never said it did, but since that particular method of public funding doesn't fix the problem, it's not a viable alternative.
That's all nice and wonderful in theory, but in practice it doesn't get very far. Since the original discussion was about the Vice-President (and I'm going to lump in the whole executive branch here) let's leave the Representatives out for now. The White House is anything but accessible to you and I, least of all the Oval Office. The occasional boy scout or clergyman will get an invite, but Johnny coal miner and Susie accounting clerk won't. In fact, not fifteen years ago, you could drive by the President's house. Now, you'd get hit by a whole lot of small arms fire for trying it. How accessible does the President seem now?
As for Representatives, I've met with my state and national reps. Nice fellows and based on that, I'd elect them again. However, it's not based on that. It's supposed to be about their views and ideals being aligned with mine and ever since they changed the constitution to limit the number of congressional seats, it just keeps getting harder and harder to fit one person's views to their district. Throw in gerrymandering and you've got a recipe for serious constituent disconnect.
I may sound cynical, but I'm really disenfranchised and care enough to not like it. But I don't think its hopeless; there's always the chance that someone will get elected as President that can do something about all this, but when you can't do anything directly about such a big problem, hopelessness is part of the package.
And you don't have a problem with perpetuating a corrupt political party? That system only works when the elected party is a good one and we all know that it takes good candidates to make good parties and truly good candidates are hard to come by.
The problem isn't that people don't vote for them, it's that they don't think their votes will count if they vote for them, and that's because everyone already voted for their favorite candidate in the primaries.
Primaries are one of (along with gerrymandering, the electoral college, etc.) the single biggest reasons for low voter turnout and the strength of the two party system. If we want real change in political thinking in government and real accountability to the voters, then this is where the changes need to be made. As you pointed out, we already have the seeds for viable third parties sown, now we just need to give them some room to grow without the behemoth weeds of the Republicans and Democrats crowding them out.
The question isn't "Why don't we care" the questions is "What the hell do we do about it?"
I don't like my government, but until the next election, there's nothing *I* can do about it. Aside from suicidal assassination attempts (I don't hate the government that much), writing letters and/or emails that nine times out of ten aren't read by the addressees, or staging protests, the commoners are hamstrung. The rich and the lobbyists can turn policy to their whims, but us middle-classers have nothing but the vote on our side. Until that vote is unified, or until there's something (or someone) worth voting for, we're going to keep getting the same crap in office.
Do you sense a bit of apathy here? If you do, it's because it's real. I've voted in every election since I reached the age of majority, but not once have I voted for the President that won. I don't feel very empowered and I'd wager a lot of Americans feel the same way.
Now I don't claim to be an expert on the internal politics of Canada, but I'd be willing to be that the average Canadian has had these feelings at some point. So you can get off your high horse any time, now...
You mistyped 'unwritten system limitations'. We exceeded the system requirements by far. The hell was in getting the users to pair down their mail store usage, which I obviously didn't get into because it wasn't the focus of the question.
... and it was hell.
We have 285 mailboxes on Exchange (was 2000, now 2003) and are in the telecom business. We implemented 2003 with a cross-server migration using the mailbox move utility and we went from an unlicensed version of 2000 Enterprise to a licensed version of Standard. Who knew we had an 87 GB mailstore? After I had migrated five users, the mailstore dismounted and the event log told me there was 17 GB out of 16 in use on the mailstore. Apparantly, Standard has a 16 GB limit. I also found out about a neat registry setting (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=57029) that enables a 75 GB limit, but that was still too small for our 87 GB store. Limits was the key, as we didn't have any.
Our largest user was 1.2 GB, but we had fifteen users over 1 GB. My predecessor had tried to implement a five tiered system based on title. Non managers had 100 MB, Managers had 150 MB, Directors had 200 MB, VPs had 250 MB and Corporate Officers were unlimited. My boss (a director) wanted to half these. I pushed for something more manageable, yet reasonable and here is what we implemented:
Non-managers: 250 MB, Managers: 500 MB, VPs and above: Unlimited. We set it so that warnings were issued at 90%, Send is disabled at 100%, and Send/Recieve is disabled at 110%.
After teaching users that the 'Deleted Items' folder is not the place to store important mail, and setting up daily auto-archive set to two months, our mail store is at 50 GB. It takes four hours to backup individual mailboxes to a locally attached Ultrium LTO2 drive. So far, I haven't had to restore anyone's mailbox, but I would expect the same or faster on the restore.
I interviewed for a position in the web team of a regional airline that gets 75% of its revenue from the web, has grown organically, and where their guys feel 'stuck'. You don't happen to work for Jet Blue, do you?
When they didn't call me back for a second interview (I had almost no IIS experience) I was somewhat relieved. The biggest reason was that I knew it would be a rough few years working for them while they worked out their issues. Their problem (which sounds suspiciously like your problem) is not just that you don't have a clearly defined organizational plan, but that you let the business drive the department. With three-fourths of your revenue coming out of the web site, *everyone* watches the daily and even hourly sales numbers. When there's glitches in the system, *everyone* from the sales guys to the CEO knows about it and *your* butt is on the line. Structure a business plan for the IT group. Lay out simple and clear lines of responsibilty, disaster mitigation plans, and (to get to the heart of your question) career paths. Make sure that all layers of managment understand that IT can be subject to forces outside of its control (network/power outages and acts of God anywhere in the world affect everyone else). Have set goals for each employee and set rewards for meeting them. Yearly bonuses, raises, and other perks will go a long way to the retention you seek.
I know it isn't the specific advice you were looking for, but you're not going to find that kind of answer on Slashdot. You know your business better than us. You know your IT needs, and only you can fix it. Start with the basics (career paths, goals/rewards, clear lines of responsibility) and the rest will fall into place. Good luck!
You misspelled 'Evar'.
One thing I find amazing is the number of so-called conservatives who attack the UN for being impotent, and then suggest that the way to solve that is to give them more power. Why can't we just concede that the UN should be impotent, and work within that framework?
Okay. I can agree with that. The UN is impotent and let's work within that framework. It's a convenient tool for the powerful and weak when it suits them, and annoyingly meddling when it's not. There is no working within the UN unless you feel it's of some use to you, and any entity that's only usefull when it suits you is not a very useful entity at all.
While I consider myself conservative, I don't think the UN should have more power. On the contrary, I think that the UN should have less power. It should be a forum for discussion on the low end be a humanitarian aid vehicle (without the bureaucratic-juggernaut) on the high end. One world government is noble, but humanity is too proud and states cling too tightly to soveriegnty for it to work today.
Someone's been sucking on the teat of the UN's propaganda whore. Oil for food was an unqualified disaster because it did *nothing* to motivate Saddam to change his bullying tune. The only thing it did was increase the poverty of the poor and give Saddam bargaining money because guess what? The food never made it to the needy.
Here's an idea... let's look at the other countries we've (as in the US, not the UN) tried sanctioning and then making deals with. Cuba: fifty years later, they're still communist, repressive, and the people still love Uncle Fidel. Lybia: The terrorists left and moved into Afghanistan and the Sudan. Net result? No change. North Korea: Iraq without the oil and with a growing superpower on its border. The US has *tried* the sanction and diplomacy game. It doesn't work for people like Kim, Castro, and Saddam.
To sum up, the UN is impotent and always will be until nations give up sovereignty. The EU is a fantastic example of why that won't happen (they can't even agree on a currency -- *cough*Great Britain*cough*). Therefore, if something needs doing, it's up to the entities with power. Only nation states have power. Multi-national corps, international institutions, and NGO's are all great to have around to boost the ego, but they don't have armies and they don't raise money. Without those two things, people aren't going to pay you a lick of attention.
Bringing this back to the point at hand, it would be Very Bad to give control of the root servers to anyone. You want to see the internet implode? Give the name servers up to a bureaucratic nightmare and watch the infighting begin. I'd give it five years before each of the name servers were sitting in a different third-world country with no electricity and no infrastructure. What a joke.
Well, I don't like to add to an already crowded din of voices, but I can always use this as a journal entry later...
I've walked away from three jobs -- all three were intolerable -- and I have a wife and two kids.
The first one was when I worked for a company in a small southern town. There were more chiefs than indians and IT was a dirty word back then. I was the NetWare guy when 4.x was fresh off the presses. My boss's boss was twiddling with the secretaries and when I caught wind of it, I went to his boss and said exactly what I heard. End of the line? Nope. My boss caught wind of it when top-boss started to snoop around and told his boss (the twiddler). Twiddler called me into his office and tried to rip me a new one. I had a one-year old, and a car payment (we were renting at the time). I told him under no certain circumstances that he was in the wrong and that if he fired me, he'd be in hotter water with his wife than with the law. When big-boss didn't do anything about it, I asked him and he waffled. I packed my boxes and left that day.
Then next job was with a really-big employer a little further north. There were 4000 users and 45 NetWare servers. During my two years there, I bumped that up to 85, designed and built a seperate backup network for the servers, and a whole lot of other things that made my job both easier (simpler) and harder (more to do). During all of this, I also took each of the CNE tests and got certified. When I was first hired, they said, "get certified and we'll give you a 50 cent/hour raise." I said, 'cool', and went to work. Bosses changed and when I said to new boss, "I'm certified, I'd like that raise now', boss said, "I didn't promise that, you aren't getting it." I said, "it's $.50, and you inherited the promise (he knew about it because he had been there when the promise was made)." He said no, I said good bye.
The job after that was with Intel and as a contractor, I couldn't work for more than 18 months. What a sweet job, though. The division was sold off a month after my contract ended and is it's own company now.
The last job I had was with a company that has an office in almost every major city in the country. Every office was a one-man show, except in New York and the Corporate Offices in LA. Over the next three years, I completely re-built the network, re-installed every single PC, built all but two of the seven servers from scratch, and overhauled most of the other systems. Things were going well until my boss was fired. He had been a target of a personal vendetta from his Corporate boss and made a very minor mistake. Despite the fact that he had no prior mistakes, he was fired (against local managment, I might add). The same corporate decision makers then chose a person who had worked at the office before, whom I had worked with, and whom I new I couldn't get along with. I'd been thinking about moving jobs for a while, as there was no room for promotion without moving to LA, I was being under paid, and I wanted to expand my horizons a bit. So, I quit.
That was three months ago and I'm still looking. I turned down two jobs that paid less than what I was making previously. It hasn't been easy, and we've had to make some sacrifices, but the mortgage is paid, the cars drive, and we have food in the fridge. Sometimes, it is better to bend to the wind, and other times, it is better to get out of the storm all together.
If you choose to resist, then you are disturbing the peace and threatening the safety of an officer, therefore they have the right to subdue you - not kill or main you.
Wrong. See the definition of sovereignty . The Federal government has sovereignty over it's citizens, roughly translated, they can kill any number of them at their whim. They earned this sovereignty when our ancestors gave up their individual rights to a sovereign, or the United States government. This social contract is tenuously based on the idea that the state will provide basic protections. By living in society, we tacitly agree to keep our side of the agreement, by continuing to give the state its sovereignty.
This lack of personal responsibility is the cause of most of the problems in America. I personally wish the government would just stand back and let the crowd thin itself.
It's not video games, it's not movies, it's stupid people with bad role models. It's not the governments problem, it's a personal problem.
Welcome to my friends list. You see, humans are the only ones that want to buck the darwinian system and make everyone equal. They want protection without personal sacrifice. They want it all and they want it now. The first thing I teach my kids about right and wrong is that no matter what anyone else does or says, they are personally responsible for their own actions. Nobody else is going to cover for them once they are adults, including me.
Enterprise and JFK aren't officially 'classed' but they are both very similair except for their power plant. (The 'N' in 'CVN' stands for nuclear.) The Kitty Hawk and Constellation are Kitty Hawk class carriers.
Actually, yes. Along with elected representatives and the President (to a certain extent).
Not exactly. Sometimes I might be held accountable for breaking a law but I'll break it anyway. Speeding, for example. Other times I won't be held accountable, but I still won't break the law.I don't quite know what you are trying to say here, so I won't comment.
The law has very little to do with morality.Actually, it does. It has its very foundation in morality. Western law especially has its foundation in Aristotle (who was anything but amoral), via the Magna Carta and English common law.
Everyone breaks the law.This has never been and will never be good enough justification to break the law. Furthermore, just because you know that you are going to break the law does not mean you should make an effort to do so. Nor should you restrain yourself from making every reasonable effort to keep the law.
You live in some kind of fantasy world.No, but I do have an ideal for the kind of world I want to live in. I try very hard to live that way myself, teach my kids to live that way and influence the decision makers to make that world come to pass. It is the delusion that there is heppiness in disobedience that is the only fantasy I see.
Depending on you personal philosophy perhaps, but you do not have the right to enforce your views on others. Likewise, you do not have the right to determine what is just and unjust for other people.
But that doesn't mean I'm not allowed to disagree.Quite right, as long as that is where it stops. Perhaps you could try to convince others that the law(s) are unjust but it is quite a different thing to dictate to others your brand of truth and justice.
But other laws are more easily broken, or have less severe consequences...I'm just not going to follow these unjust laws if I don't think they're going to be enforced...
I'm perfectly fine with having these laws against stupid things like downloading from Kazaa as long as I don't get my ass thrown in jail for doing it.
So it seems that your personal philosophy includes adhering to the laws only when you are not going to be held accountable for breaking them. Not a very high horse to be on when determining the justice of laws and I might add, morally repugnant.
The United States would still be part of England, of course, since we would continue to pay the ever increasing taxes that they imposed on us.The difference is that the US formed a new society, wholly cut off from the old one. We stopped paying taxes because we ceased to be associated with Britain. If you want to remove yourself from American society because of bad copyright laws, then be my guest.
Ah, but you are the one who doesn't like the way society works.Perhaps you are confused with someone else.
I haven't mucked up anything for anyone by downloading something from Kazaa.You have because you are disobeying the laws of the land (just or not). You are trampling under your feet the fabric that holds society together. In order for us to avoid the state of all against all, people have entered into a social contract. We give up our sovereignty to the society and agree that a government should be established to keep the peace and provide for certain needs common to all men. You can either continue to support and influence society from within the system, or you can leave the system and form your own. What you cannot do is abuse the system and tear apart society because it doesn't justify your desires. While the risk of accountibility may be low (as with speeding) it does not justify your wonton and reckless behavior.
Which is really the whole point isn't it?
Who are you to decide which laws are just and unjust? Is that not what the courts are for? If the system is to truly work, the people who live in a civil society *must* adhere to the laws setup by that society. Otherwise, society breaks down and we revert to a natural state of all against all. That is not a world I want to live in. I support the enforcement of all laws (even the unjust ones) until such time as they are no longer laws. If you don't like the way society works, go find one you do like or make one yourself. Otherwise, get back in line and quit mucking it up for the rest of us.