Think about it for a moment, Mr. Soda. What do lawyers, marketing consultants, and SOX compliancy officers produce?
If you can't think of a tangible product that any of these occupations yield, bring forth, generate, or synthesize, then the occupations fit the definition of services jobs. No physical product created? Service is all that can be claimed.
I think you may have narrowed your own definition of "services jobs" to "menial services jobs." For example, every politician is a service provider. So is Slashdot.
When I'm really inebriated and need to come down fast, I just think of how many manufacturing concerns there were in the US 20 years ago. Then I drive home and count the number remaining in my community. Guaranteed buzzkill.
If, for some potent reason, I'm still high, I contemplate how the US once exported finished goods. Now we export raw materials and buy finished goods. Then we sell them--with excellent customer service.
This is the very reason why government should have only the power which it actually requires.
"Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." ~Declaration of Independence July 4, 1776
So the requirements are up to We The People. I get the feeling lately that too many of us are too busy to worry about such a thing, much less do anything about it.
I was contacted by a googlecruiter a couple of years ago. I was really excited about it, I didn't care about the outcome at first, I was flattered that I had somehow managed to attract the company's attention. My excitement rose to new levels after the first two phone interviews, first from a potential team mate, second from someone on a similar team in a different region. Both were courteous and acknowledged my experience, both were great about clarifying questions they'd asked when my answers weren't exactly what they were looking for. In fact, we agreed that the working environment relied heavily on discussion, rather than simple Q & A.
The third interview was a disaster. The call came fifteen minutes late, and after several obtuse questions about esoteric programming problems--to which I got no feedback about my answers, just a sigh and another question--the interview was terminated abruptly. Ten minutes before the appointed hour was up, i.e., after only thirty-five minutes, the interviewer simply announced that he had to go, i.e., I didn't get to ask any questions.
I wasn't surprised at all when the recruiter called to express his regrets that I wasn't a fit, and encouraged me to apply again.
The position was sysadmin + scripting. Perhaps the programming questions from the jerk were straight out of the real-world requirements of the position--that's where it would have been nice to get to ask my own questions. Heck, for all I know that guy would have been my boss, in which case he saved us both a lot of misery and disappointment.
I don't hate Google, but it'll be a long time before I consider working for them again, if ever. I get it, e.g., the third guy may have been having a shitty day (maybe he was having a shitty life) and took it out on me. Maybe I was a dick to him in some former context, and he recognized my name from my CV. And, as has been pointed out in this rambling (and interesting) discussion, I probably would've had a difficult time finding affordable housing in Mountain View anyway.
Months and months have passed, and it still bothers me, though. I like Google, I like what they've produced to date, I'm overjoyed at how my investment in their stock has performed. The dissonance between that opinion and what I was left with that afternoon still hasn't been resolved in my consciousness, though.
How could such a cool company have such an complete asshole interfacing with potential candidates? The first two interviewers confided in me that they didn't consider themselves geniuses, and that they felt welcomed and encouraged there. The third guy completely negated that idea; he came across to me as an elitist ass with whom I had no chance. He may not even work for Google any more. This doesn't seem to matter to my subconscious, though. The association is quite negative when I so much as consider the possibility of working there.
Every so often I see a blurb about some Google requirement that I know I could satisfy. The idea flickers momentarily, quashed by a singularly painful memory.
Guitar Hero II features two ways for your band to make money: live gigs and sponsorships.
I'm still amazed at how the big labels managed to foist the cost of ads for the band--I mean, music videos--onto the band. Sure, TLC had groundbreaking CGI--and they went bankrupt paying for it.
Hands down. Although the quality--and legality--of BT-available "goods" varies widely, the mob, the swarm, the random group of people who are somehow *way* more committed to using their own personal equipment (and time) than people paid to do the same thing on equipment and time they don't own.
USA Today's front page, featured article is about how the DoD is analyzing "small business" (i.e., craigslist) to understand the viral appeal and explosive growth.
Surely they won't declare the War On The Future out loud... will they (or... I've been busy lately, have they already)?
These diagrams might have been created and preserved for us to examine, but the Masons forbade it. It's plausible that this was the (groan) foundation of the Masons' secretive customs.
This argument makes perfect sense, until you consider how many times the US government has put off the mandated elimination of analog broadcasts. Recall that the justification is to free up UHF and VHF analog frequencies for emergency communications. The original decision was made over five years ago, with the original switch-off of analog broadcasts scheduled for October 2004. This deadline was moved back to 2006 because of disagreement over who would pay for analog adapters for households without digital receivers. Several manufacturers originally agreed to provide free adapters for their own models, but the current scheme has the Feds paying for adapters, after abandoning cash awards.
The right to broadcast television signals is based on social responsibility, the repeal of the Fairness Act notwithstanding. Perhaps the cultural shift towards awarding civic responsibility to the wealthiest corporations will continue to change this.
Harry Shearer, among others, points out that digital broadcasting eliminates live coverage by introducing a seven-second delay for encoding between capture and broadcast. Digital radio (aka "HD radio") is becoming more popular, but like digital TV, it requires the purchase of an expensive receiver.
So the tenets of your argument are fairly weak: the US tuner mandate is a moving target, HD game consoles are not market makers, and cheaper LCD sets will still receive analog signals. Advertisers and broadcasters will be dragged along? They've already made it clear that they are most certainly not paying for adapters for consumers who don't buy digital rigs prior to the moving analog cutoff date.
For an especially entertaining explanation, ask a sales associate in any retail outlet which sells digital receivers. Want bonus footage and deleted scenes? Ask whether your HDTV should have a built-in HD tuner.
Heh. Think there's controversy now? Wait until the mandated digital adoption date gets closer than six months away (it hasn't, yet). Then you can watch talking heads argue about it in High Dudgeon.
There never was a business case for HDTV--unless you count the opportunism sensed by electronics manufacturers who thought they had a captive audience.
The real disgrace is in the majority of responses here which indicate how many of us are willing to believe that the MPAA would actually propose something like this. See also the Federal Government.
It's obvious that there is, indeed, a growing clampdown on individual rights in the United States. If it were simple fascism, the Constitutional controls could be applied for a relatively speedy and simple remedy. It's not the government, though. It's private corporations.
Does anyone still believe Friedman's simplistic assertion that the only moral responsibility of a corporation is to provide value to its shareholders?
As pervasive as corporate corruption has been shown to be, this issue is completely independent of shadowy malfeasance: It's all about above-board actions, ignored or rubber-stamped by the Congress, which make sense only to authoritarians. The referenced satire clearly illustrates that American citizens realize that there is no democratic representation in private corporate decisions which impact life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness--and that these private concerns have more power than their century-old counterparts, which had only labor to exploit.
Corporations collect, retain, and use private information without so much as the most minimal regulation. Their claim that they need the data for business purposes seems to trump concerns of freedom and privacy. How egregious must their offenses become? Must we endure an actual example of the satire we discuss today?
My father-in-law and his wife. In every other aspect of life, I admire the man, but his stubborn adherence to anything that comes out of Pat Robertson's mouth is very troubling. I don't care what he believes, as long as he doesn't waste our time trying to convince me of it--and stays away from my children with that nonsense.
He's been talking about this "museum" for at least five years. He gets way too excited about it, like an Amway distributor inviting you to something that features his personal Amway hero.
This weekend should be interesting; first time we'll have spoken at length since the mid-term elections.
PS: Did y'all know that The Rapture Is Not In The Bible? I think I'll research this factoid thoroughly before we drive to Northeast Texas to celebrate Thanksgiving in an RV park.
What's most interesting about this assertion is not so much being the one to say it (authority figure), but being the person to hear it.
What is it that causes us to say/think/act out the response, "Okay." And when is it okay? When is not actually okay, but don't say so?
I'm thinking it's almost always fear/uncertainty/doubt. Sometimes it might be something like, "no use fighting, I don't really care about it, anyway."
I find it to be a particularly galling aspect of human nature to associate "not knowing why" with passiveness. I suppose that I might be waiting to "find out why" before I act on one of the many scenarios that I find myself concerned about. You know, global warming, energy problems, stunningly awful politics...
Finally, consider that the answer to any question beginning with "Why..." is a request for a story. An interpretation. Requiring departure from the facts of the matter.
Re:Red Hat and Oracle RAC
on
Oracle Linux?
·
· Score: 1
Not a good reason, but NAS costs less, and was apparently recommended heavily by NetApp. Notice that they're the ones who published the whitepaper.
Red Hat and Oracle RAC
on
Oracle Linux?
·
· Score: 1
I just got back from the results meeting for an Oracle RAC evaluation, done on Solaris 10, with various filesystem options. The O/S support was no big deal, but the DBAs had a really rough time of it, even with Oracle, Sun, and Veritas consultants along for the entire ride. One DBA checked out halfway through the three-month process, and the replacement couldn't go a single day without mentioning how simple RAC setup and configuration is with Red Hat. The project is on hold, pending better explanations from Oracle as to why it took so long just to test it.
Even though Oracle and Sun seem to go together--at least, in the minds of IT management--there are several documented gaps, e.g., Oracle on Solaris with NAS storage is painfully slow without tuning. Fortunately, there's a whitepaper that covers this particular case pretty well. Not so for every deficiency in the Oracle/Solaris combination.
Surely Oracle/Linux has quirks of its own, but like the ubiquitous Oracle/Solaris environment, these will surface with time + a growing installed base. The firm I'm supporting is very risk-averse, e.g., many meetings must precede even the evaulation of new technology, with many more meetings (and man-hours) before the pilot. I don't see them even testing Oracle on Linux for another year.
By the same token, how many early adopters for a DBMS (even one with ludicrously huge market share) with its own O/S?
Hear, hear. It is my opinion that public servants should have their lives made public.
Barack Obama and Tom Coburn just got a major accountability/transparency bill passed so we can see where "our money" (our debt, actually) is being spent. Like a bus full of lawyers at the bottom of the ocean, it's a good start.
I say that if you want to be a public servant, you lose all privacy. That's the trade off. I don't mean the way it is now, where your past is investigated in order to smear you. You get elected, appointed, whatever, and your life goes on public record from that point until you're not the office holder any more.
Then again, I happen to think that the world would be better served by people fighting over who gets to be a teacher, instead of over who gets to be a doctor, lawyer, or... public servant.
Yeah. Kind of like claiming that your country is all about freedom and democracy, then using countries not bound by that claim as a rendition destination for torture and other violations of your own country's laws.
I think this is the knee-jerk part of this story: Google hires the same firm that the GOP has used for dirty tricks. It's a subconscious association, and it requires conscious examination (like this discussion) to figure out what's actually so--and what there is to do.
BTW, the motto is "Don't Be Evil," which IMHO is far more profound than "Don't Do Evil."
I think I understand what happened. What doesn't make sense to me is how and when the responsibility shifted from the unauthorized accessor to the user with the lame password.
Yes, I understand that there are inherent security responsibilities. Like, if I don't lock my house, car, etc., my insurance company won't pay if they can prove same.
Where and when did we start blaming the victim, though? Maybe I missed the update, but I'm still operating under the impression that a crime is the fault (subset of "responsibility") of the perpetrator.
Yes, yes, this example is complex, since it's possible that the person who accessed the system without authorization may have been given the trial uname/passwd combination. It's still his/her responsibility for having logged in illicitly, whether over wire or wi-fi.
Given the Watergate analogy, it was the GOP who was responsible; they broke in. Sure, the security guards who actually saw the clues and *still* blew it were part of the problem, but there wouldn't have been a problem (or crime) if the burglars had decided to have coffee and doughnuts instead.
This is distinct, in my opinion, from the responsibility of firms who acquire private information for their own business purposes. Those concerns do, indeed, have a profound responsibility to protect that data. This case is about a private organization whose own data was raided. Yes, they could have done better. It is provable that they *should* have done better. It is not their fault for not having done better; it is the fault (and therefore the responsibility) of the cracker.
Remember the Microsoft Advantage flap earlier this year? I do. I have a copy of WinXP Pro, paid for, registered, all eyes dotted and tees crossed.
Then I get the "you may be the victim of counterfeiting" or somesuch. What????? Oh, my, was I angry. How dare they? I think I actually posted some ALL-CAPS message to M$, insisting that I was holding the receipt.
Now I've just remembered that the machine also features the free version of AG firewall, and how I was very miserly in allowing services to "access the Internet". M$ services, in particular. Like I don't even get the pictures in the left pane of the Search dialogue.
So I turned off the firewall and clicked the hazy grey little star in the taskbar, you know, the thing you get after you tell it to shut up about your counterfeit version of Windows.
Of course I got right to the "congratulations" page. Then I got a lovely invitation to download some very helpful M$ software.
So I turned the firewall back on. -- "I want more life, father." ~Roy Batty
I'm pretty sure this is 20% "we're real news outlets/bloggers are just bored amateurs" and 80% "holy crap! we're losing market share to *bloggers* !!"
The original blurb I heard was something like "Bloggers are mainly storytellers, not journalists." How ridiculous. What is "the news" if it is not storytelling? Sure, it has shiny features like talking heads, crawling news updates, and billions of dollars invested, but it's still just storytelling. FFS, they introduce features as "stories". There's "Today's Top Story", and the hopefully-adrenaline-releasing phrase, "Late-Breaking Story" (now reduced to simply "Breaking Story").
Ontologically speaking, the whole thing is a story. A story, by definition, is one's interpretation of What Happened. Most of us spend 100% of our time thinking that a story is what happened, but it's not. It's simply the story of what happened, as invented/told/repeated by someone else.
(the corollary--which is also the answer to the Zen koan about the tree falling in the forest--is left as an exercise to the reader)
My story about this story is that the mainstream media is feeling more threatened than usual, lately.
Anecdotal evidence: I once set up a Linux machine behind a firewall, couldn't get to the Internet, but it could be seen from the Internet. Turns out there wasn't any requirement for it to see the Internet, so I checked "done" and moved on. This was a one-off deal.
Got a call a month later: "login isn't working". Of course the machine was for dozens of desktop machines that logged in to run custom Universe scripts, so no one could do his/her work. So I go out there and notice that the network cables have been rearranged to go around the firewall. And there were quite a few email messages spooled up and going nowhere.
Asked about the cable. "Oh. I tried that because I couldn't get to the Internet."
"From this machine?"
"Yeah."
"Why did you want to get to the Internet from the Universe server?"
"I wanted to surf the net while I was waiting for this other install thing that I was doing to finish."
OK, so the machine is naked on the Internet, and login's broken. It takes the password, then another login prompt. Found a rootkit. Reinstalled the O/S, restored Universe from backups, put the machine back behind the firewall.
Oh, the spooled-up email messages? Email to the rootkit installer. Even if the machine was pwned, s/he never found out. After poking around for a while, I discovered that it was a poorly implemented rootkit, e.g., the replacement for/bin/login dumped core when it couldn't send the captured passwords back home.
Further, even if the elaborate cloaking schemes are followed, there must be communication back to the new pwner of the machine.
Wow, you really got hooked by that guy citing a study that a certain class of seminar programs isn't anywhere nearly as effective as psychological therapy. You said yourself that you can't speak to the studies, so we're left to interpret your response as reactive. Nothing wrong with that; in fact, your post was modded as somewhat insightful. I think the insights are to be had by the reader in this case.
What it looks like is that these seminars, whether pseudo-religious, consisting of a finite number of steps (we might as well say "three hour tour"), or both, tend to substitute a vacuum for your time and attention for the addiction. Not everyone who participates in this type of training is addicted, but I think we can assume that 100% of them feel that something in their lives requires transformation. I think the point is that addicts are particularly susceptible to the vaccuum.
I, too, have personal experience with programs like the one you're defending. I really do mean it when I say that there's nothing wrong with them. Some people do the initial seminar or seminars and get it. They don't need to go back. But there's always this ever-growing minority of people who need to keep coming back. They're kind of a drag, actually; most of them don't seem to have their lives together, when one might suppose that, after decades of participation, they'd have improved every area of their lives several times over.
I'm not saying that these are bad people. I'm agreeing with the person who said that this approach doesn't work for addicts.
The best term I know to describe this class of training is Large Group Awareness Training. Never mind the gory details about sleep deprivation and other mind control correlations--that's likely more reactivation and upset, which is only good for clouding the issue. Not to mention limiting the blood supply to your brain. The thing about LGATs (including churches, IMHO) is that the physical setting and production of the seminars tickles our human wiring. It just feels safer in there--whether it is or not. It's *designed* to feel like a safe space; after all, where else might one be expected to transform oneself? The thing is, we don't have access to sober analysis when we're feeling safe. Try it; you can get there, but then you don't feel safe.
Why might you want access to sober analysis in the midst of an LGAT experience? I want it because I want to be able to tell whether the people putting it on are full of shit. Not only are these enterprises prone to fraud, there have been several which have been psychologically harmful to their paying customers.
I'm asserting that while a person can successfully resist the feelings that an LGAT setting produces, it's difficult to maintain while in the physical space, with dozens or hundreds (consider thousands) of other people present, most of whom are committed to that safe feeling. Committed to the level of craving, if not addiction.
I do not believe that these organizations are cults in any manner of the word. I have a close personal friend who was, quite literally, raised in a cult. Cults exact strict and unreasonable disciplines on their members, often controlling each and every aspect of their lives.
In general, consider that the jargon in most, if not all LGAT programs has you consider your life as a game. At the very least, it's ironic, with the limit tending towards telling as the number of times you hear this meme repeated approaches infinity. I assert that if you keep going back to this sort of thing for long enough, you'll find yourself just as addicted as the OP's friend. Recall that his problem was not the destructive nature of the thing he was addicted to--although he may have been ruining his eyesight, posture, etc. The problem was that he had dropped out of normal social interaction (for him), and the addiction was affecting his career.
My position on Google, Microsoft, Reuters--any information provider, really--setting up shop in China is that a Truly Un-Evil Company would not comply with the censorship rules. They'd pull out, no big fuss or press release. Only an Evil company would justify the assistance of the denial of human rights with "it's just the cost of doing business". That is, the cost is too high.
China's staggering prosperity has a big speed bump in the road ahead, and it's impossible to tell how far away it is--or how fast it will continue to grow. The speed bump is Human Rights, i.e., sooner or later, the problem will come to a head. Critical mass. The legendary Hundredth Monkey. They'll be Mad As Hell, and they're Not Going To Take It Any More.
I find it deplorable--no, unconscionable that corporations are investing in a totalitarian government. Then again, it's implausible to me that our own government is headed in the same direction. Are we bound to fulfill the cyberpunk genre's bleak future just because too many of us have read about it?
The United States took a cue from Israel a few years back in not dealing with terrorists. I guess that only applies to independent terrorists, i.e., if their organization is big enough, we'll not only deal with them, we'll trade with them.
...by following the instructions in the motherboard's manual. It said, "Be sure to connect to our website for any updates to the BIOS," so I very naively did so. At the time, I thought it was soooo nifty that I could download the update and copy it to a diskette that my new machine would boot from and automagically perform on itself. Of course, I also thought it was really nifty that I had managed to plug in all of the parts on the first try to produce a working machine!
Then I got a little nervous at the warnings that the update process couldn't be interrupted to avoid grave consequences. See, I didn't have a UPS, so I worried all through the update procedure.
Then it worked! There wasn't any discernible difference, though, and dang it if it still didn't recognize my drive. So I called Customer Support, and the polite woman asked, right off the bat, whether I'd flashed the BIOS. "Why, of course," I answered proudly, thinking I'd passed some kind of test that would otherwise have required me to admit that I hadn't, after which I'd have to call back, etc.
"Oh, I'm sorry, Sir. You've voided the support warranty. I'm afraid I can't help you."
Of course I started spluttering, and I even tried to deny that I had, but she was well-trained. And she already had the board's serial number.
Turned out I had a bad cable, anyway.
So I'm all for open-source BIOSes. And friendly support that charges a reasonable fee. And nice people everywhere. And the end of evil. And religious people who are also tolerant. And rainbows. And stuff that doesn't suck.
I got email from a Google recruiter, internal guy, very refreshing--he actually listened to me. I was totally stoked; even though this was about 2-3 months before the IPO, I was (still am) very enamoured with the idea of working for Google.
The position was Reliability Engineer, i.e., keeping machines up, proactive monitoring, downtime goals, etc. Not exactly my cup of tea, but the methods seemed attractive: C programs, shell scripts, Perl/Tcl scripts.
First phone interview: wonderful. A guy on the team, fairly new hire, very personable. About ten qualifying questions ("How do you check for free space?" "df." "Good. What's the difference between df and du?" and so on). That went quickly, and well. The rest of the hour was hypothetical problem-solving. Very enjoyable, obviously to see if I was okay with thinking through a problem out loud. Plus I would be working with this guy. Then I got to ask questions, that's how I found out he was new. I asked whether everyone was a genius. He said he wasn't--but that he'd learned more there in two months than in five years as a sysadmin.
So far, so good. I was elated. I started looking at real estate prices, my wife started getting nervous. The Googlecruiter called back, said I had done, very, very well, and that I'd be getting a call the next day from ______ at 3pm my time.
Second phone interview: Not so good. I chalk it up to my perception of the guy. He was 10 minutes late in calling me, he spent ten more minutes telling me about Google, and he seemed aloof & impatient. Some basic questions about my experience and what I liked to work on, then he asked me to explain DNS resolution with an empty cache. I was nervous, and sort of blew it--he hesitated, then I realized my mistake (hostname resolution vs. domain resolution). I felt like I cleaned it up, and I admitted that I was nervous. He didn't seem persuaded. The second question was very interesting: Given a stream of x,y pairs, determine the closest ten to the origin. I felt like I did pretty well, but the interviewer obviously disagreed. My algorithm allowed for continuous ranking (he did say it was a stream), and IMHO was general enough for expansion. He obviously disagreed with my choice of data structures, and was pretty snobby about having given me the origin vs. some arbitrary point on the Cartesian plane. Then, since he had called me late, he refused my request to ask questions.
And that was it. The recruiter called me back, said I wouldn't be getting any more calls. I asked why, and he said that the 2nd interviewer had deemed me "not technical enough." Ouch. He did encourage me to continue to apply.
To be fair, I have worked for a company that had an aggressively filtered interview process: Recruiter screen, two technical interviews, one manager interview. Any "no" along the way, and that was it. The obvious disadvantage is that one of the interviewers could be having a bad day, or might not grasp the nuances of interviewing. The win for the company is that it's pretty well assured of getting quality people, with four checks on the way in. Then again, as the company grew past 1,000 employees, it started breaking down: soft interviewers, managers who wanted to hire someone just from looking at their resume...
I still like Google a lot. I would go to work there, given a reasonable opportunity. I imagine that the salaries are good, so like NASA, it's a best-of-the-best group, but without having to take a pay cut & work for a huge bureaucracy.
Slashdot Mirror
My knee-jerk is to say, "Yuh-huh!! Are too!!!"
Think about it for a moment, Mr. Soda. What do lawyers, marketing consultants, and SOX compliancy officers produce?
If you can't think of a tangible product that any of these occupations yield, bring forth, generate, or synthesize, then the occupations fit the definition of services jobs. No physical product created? Service is all that can be claimed.
I think you may have narrowed your own definition of "services jobs" to "menial services jobs." For example, every politician is a service provider. So is Slashdot.
When I'm really inebriated and need to come down fast, I just think of how many manufacturing concerns there were in the US 20 years ago. Then I drive home and count the number remaining in my community. Guaranteed buzzkill.
If, for some potent reason, I'm still high, I contemplate how the US once exported finished goods. Now we export raw materials and buy finished goods. Then we sell them--with excellent customer service.
"Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." ~Declaration of Independence July 4, 1776
So the requirements are up to We The People. I get the feeling lately that too many of us are too busy to worry about such a thing, much less do anything about it.
I was contacted by a googlecruiter a couple of years ago. I was really excited about it, I didn't care about the outcome at first, I was flattered that I had somehow managed to attract the company's attention. My excitement rose to new levels after the first two phone interviews, first from a potential team mate, second from someone on a similar team in a different region. Both were courteous and acknowledged my experience, both were great about clarifying questions they'd asked when my answers weren't exactly what they were looking for. In fact, we agreed that the working environment relied heavily on discussion, rather than simple Q & A.
The third interview was a disaster. The call came fifteen minutes late, and after several obtuse questions about esoteric programming problems--to which I got no feedback about my answers, just a sigh and another question--the interview was terminated abruptly. Ten minutes before the appointed hour was up, i.e., after only thirty-five minutes, the interviewer simply announced that he had to go, i.e., I didn't get to ask any questions.
I wasn't surprised at all when the recruiter called to express his regrets that I wasn't a fit, and encouraged me to apply again.
The position was sysadmin + scripting. Perhaps the programming questions from the jerk were straight out of the real-world requirements of the position--that's where it would have been nice to get to ask my own questions. Heck, for all I know that guy would have been my boss, in which case he saved us both a lot of misery and disappointment.
I don't hate Google, but it'll be a long time before I consider working for them again, if ever. I get it, e.g., the third guy may have been having a shitty day (maybe he was having a shitty life) and took it out on me. Maybe I was a dick to him in some former context, and he recognized my name from my CV. And, as has been pointed out in this rambling (and interesting) discussion, I probably would've had a difficult time finding affordable housing in Mountain View anyway.
Months and months have passed, and it still bothers me, though. I like Google, I like what they've produced to date, I'm overjoyed at how my investment in their stock has performed. The dissonance between that opinion and what I was left with that afternoon still hasn't been resolved in my consciousness, though.
How could such a cool company have such an complete asshole interfacing with potential candidates? The first two interviewers confided in me that they didn't consider themselves geniuses, and that they felt welcomed and encouraged there. The third guy completely negated that idea; he came across to me as an elitist ass with whom I had no chance. He may not even work for Google any more. This doesn't seem to matter to my subconscious, though. The association is quite negative when I so much as consider the possibility of working there.
Every so often I see a blurb about some Google requirement that I know I could satisfy. The idea flickers momentarily, quashed by a singularly painful memory.
Guitar Hero II features two ways for your band to make money: live gigs and sponsorships.
I'm still amazed at how the big labels managed to foist the cost of ads for the band--I mean, music videos--onto the band. Sure, TLC had groundbreaking CGI--and they went bankrupt paying for it.
Hands down. Although the quality--and legality--of BT-available "goods" varies widely, the mob, the swarm, the random group of people who are somehow *way* more committed to using their own personal equipment (and time) than people paid to do the same thing on equipment and time they don't own.
... will they (or ... I've been busy lately, have they already)?
USA Today's front page, featured article is about how the DoD is analyzing "small business" (i.e., craigslist) to understand the viral appeal and explosive growth.
Surely they won't declare the War On The Future out loud
These diagrams might have been created and preserved for us to examine, but the Masons forbade it. It's plausible that this was the (groan) foundation of the Masons' secretive customs.
This argument makes perfect sense, until you consider how many times the US government has put off the mandated elimination of analog broadcasts. Recall that the justification is to free up UHF and VHF analog frequencies for emergency communications. The original decision was made over five years ago, with the original switch-off of analog broadcasts scheduled for October 2004. This deadline was moved back to 2006 because of disagreement over who would pay for analog adapters for households without digital receivers. Several manufacturers originally agreed to provide free adapters for their own models, but the current scheme has the Feds paying for adapters, after abandoning cash awards.
The right to broadcast television signals is based on social responsibility, the repeal of the Fairness Act notwithstanding. Perhaps the cultural shift towards awarding civic responsibility to the wealthiest corporations will continue to change this.
Harry Shearer, among others, points out that digital broadcasting eliminates live coverage by introducing a seven-second delay for encoding between capture and broadcast. Digital radio (aka "HD radio") is becoming more popular, but like digital TV, it requires the purchase of an expensive receiver.
So the tenets of your argument are fairly weak: the US tuner mandate is a moving target, HD game consoles are not market makers, and cheaper LCD sets will still receive analog signals. Advertisers and broadcasters will be dragged along? They've already made it clear that they are most certainly not paying for adapters for consumers who don't buy digital rigs prior to the moving analog cutoff date.
For an especially entertaining explanation, ask a sales associate in any retail outlet which sells digital receivers. Want bonus footage and deleted scenes? Ask whether your HDTV should have a built-in HD tuner.
Heh. Think there's controversy now? Wait until the mandated digital adoption date gets closer than six months away (it hasn't, yet). Then you can watch talking heads argue about it in High Dudgeon.
There never was a business case for HDTV--unless you count the opportunism sensed by electronics manufacturers who thought they had a captive audience.
The real disgrace is in the majority of responses here which indicate how many of us are willing to believe that the MPAA would actually propose something like this. See also the Federal Government.
It's obvious that there is, indeed, a growing clampdown on individual rights in the United States. If it were simple fascism, the Constitutional controls could be applied for a relatively speedy and simple remedy. It's not the government, though. It's private corporations.
Does anyone still believe Friedman's simplistic assertion that the only moral responsibility of a corporation is to provide value to its shareholders?
As pervasive as corporate corruption has been shown to be, this issue is completely independent of shadowy malfeasance: It's all about above-board actions, ignored or rubber-stamped by the Congress, which make sense only to authoritarians. The referenced satire clearly illustrates that American citizens realize that there is no democratic representation in private corporate decisions which impact life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness--and that these private concerns have more power than their century-old counterparts, which had only labor to exploit.
Corporations collect, retain, and use private information without so much as the most minimal regulation. Their claim that they need the data for business purposes seems to trump concerns of freedom and privacy. How egregious must their offenses become? Must we endure an actual example of the satire we discuss today?
My father-in-law and his wife. In every other aspect of life, I admire the man, but his stubborn adherence to anything that comes out of Pat Robertson's mouth is very troubling. I don't care what he believes, as long as he doesn't waste our time trying to convince me of it--and stays away from my children with that nonsense.
He's been talking about this "museum" for at least five years. He gets way too excited about it, like an Amway distributor inviting you to something that features his personal Amway hero.
This weekend should be interesting; first time we'll have spoken at length since the mid-term elections.
PS: Did y'all know that The Rapture Is Not In The Bible? I think I'll research this factoid thoroughly before we drive to Northeast Texas to celebrate Thanksgiving in an RV park.
What's most interesting about this assertion is not so much being the one to say it (authority figure), but being the person to hear it.
What is it that causes us to say/think/act out the response, "Okay." And when is it okay? When is not actually okay, but don't say so?
I'm thinking it's almost always fear/uncertainty/doubt. Sometimes it might be something like, "no use fighting, I don't really care about it, anyway."
I find it to be a particularly galling aspect of human nature to associate "not knowing why" with passiveness. I suppose that I might be waiting to "find out why" before I act on one of the many scenarios that I find myself concerned about. You know, global warming, energy problems, stunningly awful politics...
Finally, consider that the answer to any question beginning with "Why..." is a request for a story. An interpretation. Requiring departure from the facts of the matter.
Not a good reason, but NAS costs less, and was apparently recommended heavily by NetApp. Notice that they're the ones who published the whitepaper.
I just got back from the results meeting for an Oracle RAC evaluation, done on Solaris 10, with various filesystem options. The O/S support was no big deal, but the DBAs had a really rough time of it, even with Oracle, Sun, and Veritas consultants along for the entire ride. One DBA checked out halfway through the three-month process, and the replacement couldn't go a single day without mentioning how simple RAC setup and configuration is with Red Hat. The project is on hold, pending better explanations from Oracle as to why it took so long just to test it.
Even though Oracle and Sun seem to go together--at least, in the minds of IT management--there are several documented gaps, e.g., Oracle on Solaris with NAS storage is painfully slow without tuning. Fortunately, there's a whitepaper that covers this particular case pretty well. Not so for every deficiency in the Oracle/Solaris combination.
Surely Oracle/Linux has quirks of its own, but like the ubiquitous Oracle/Solaris environment, these will surface with time + a growing installed base. The firm I'm supporting is very risk-averse, e.g., many meetings must precede even the evaulation of new technology, with many more meetings (and man-hours) before the pilot. I don't see them even testing Oracle on Linux for another year.
By the same token, how many early adopters for a DBMS (even one with ludicrously huge market share) with its own O/S?
See also the Pick Operating System.
Hear, hear. It is my opinion that public servants should have their lives made public.
Barack Obama and Tom Coburn just got a major accountability/transparency bill passed so we can see where "our money" (our debt, actually) is being spent. Like a bus full of lawyers at the bottom of the ocean, it's a good start.
I say that if you want to be a public servant, you lose all privacy. That's the trade off. I don't mean the way it is now, where your past is investigated in order to smear you. You get elected, appointed, whatever, and your life goes on public record from that point until you're not the office holder any more.
Then again, I happen to think that the world would be better served by people fighting over who gets to be a teacher, instead of over who gets to be a doctor, lawyer, or... public servant.
Yeah. Kind of like claiming that your country is all about freedom and democracy, then using countries not bound by that claim as a rendition destination for torture and other violations of your own country's laws.
I think this is the knee-jerk part of this story: Google hires the same firm that the GOP has used for dirty tricks. It's a subconscious association, and it requires conscious examination (like this discussion) to figure out what's actually so--and what there is to do.
BTW, the motto is "Don't Be Evil," which IMHO is far more profound than "Don't Do Evil."
I think I understand what happened. What doesn't make sense to me is how and when the responsibility shifted from the unauthorized accessor to the user with the lame password.
Yes, I understand that there are inherent security responsibilities. Like, if I don't lock my house, car, etc., my insurance company won't pay if they can prove same.
Where and when did we start blaming the victim, though? Maybe I missed the update, but I'm still operating under the impression that a crime is the fault (subset of "responsibility") of the perpetrator.
Yes, yes, this example is complex, since it's possible that the person who accessed the system without authorization may have been given the trial uname/passwd combination. It's still his/her responsibility for having logged in illicitly, whether over wire or wi-fi.
Given the Watergate analogy, it was the GOP who was responsible; they broke in. Sure, the security guards who actually saw the clues and *still* blew it were part of the problem, but there wouldn't have been a problem (or crime) if the burglars had decided to have coffee and doughnuts instead.
This is distinct, in my opinion, from the responsibility of firms who acquire private information for their own business purposes. Those concerns do, indeed, have a profound responsibility to protect that data. This case is about a private organization whose own data was raided. Yes, they could have done better. It is provable that they *should* have done better. It is not their fault for not having done better; it is the fault (and therefore the responsibility) of the cracker.
Anything to eliminate those mile-wide mounds of self-igniting, non-extinguishable mounds of manure produced by feed lots.
Remember the Microsoft Advantage flap earlier this year? I do. I have a copy of WinXP Pro, paid for, registered, all eyes dotted and tees crossed.
Then I get the "you may be the victim of counterfeiting" or somesuch. What????? Oh, my, was I angry. How dare they? I think I actually posted some ALL-CAPS message to M$, insisting that I was holding the receipt.
Now I've just remembered that the machine also features the free version of AG firewall, and how I was very miserly in allowing services to "access the Internet". M$ services, in particular. Like I don't even get the pictures in the left pane of the Search dialogue.
So I turned off the firewall and clicked the hazy grey little star in the taskbar, you know, the thing you get after you tell it to shut up about your counterfeit version of Windows.
Of course I got right to the "congratulations" page. Then I got a lovely invitation to download some very helpful M$ software.
So I turned the firewall back on.
--
"I want more life, father." ~Roy Batty
I'm pretty sure this is 20% "we're real news outlets/bloggers are just bored amateurs" and 80% "holy crap! we're losing market share to *bloggers* !!"
The original blurb I heard was something like "Bloggers are mainly storytellers, not journalists." How ridiculous. What is "the news" if it is not storytelling? Sure, it has shiny features like talking heads, crawling news updates, and billions of dollars invested, but it's still just storytelling. FFS, they introduce features as "stories". There's "Today's Top Story", and the hopefully-adrenaline-releasing phrase, "Late-Breaking Story" (now reduced to simply "Breaking Story").
Ontologically speaking, the whole thing is a story. A story, by definition, is one's interpretation of What Happened. Most of us spend 100% of our time thinking that a story is what happened, but it's not. It's simply the story of what happened, as invented/told/repeated by someone else.
(the corollary--which is also the answer to the Zen koan about the tree falling in the forest--is left as an exercise to the reader)
My story about this story is that the mainstream media is feeling more threatened than usual, lately.
Short answer: yes.
/bin/login dumped core when it couldn't send the captured passwords back home.
Anecdotal evidence: I once set up a Linux machine behind a firewall, couldn't get to the Internet, but it could be seen from the Internet. Turns out there wasn't any requirement for it to see the Internet, so I checked "done" and moved on. This was a one-off deal.
Got a call a month later: "login isn't working". Of course the machine was for dozens of desktop machines that logged in to run custom Universe scripts, so no one could do his/her work. So I go out there and notice that the network cables have been rearranged to go around the firewall. And there were quite a few email messages spooled up and going nowhere.
Asked about the cable. "Oh. I tried that because I couldn't get to the Internet."
"From this machine?"
"Yeah."
"Why did you want to get to the Internet from the Universe server?"
"I wanted to surf the net while I was waiting for this other install thing that I was doing to finish."
OK, so the machine is naked on the Internet, and login's broken. It takes the password, then another login prompt. Found a rootkit. Reinstalled the O/S, restored Universe from backups, put the machine back behind the firewall.
Oh, the spooled-up email messages? Email to the rootkit installer. Even if the machine was pwned, s/he never found out. After poking around for a while, I discovered that it was a poorly implemented rootkit, e.g., the replacement for
Further, even if the elaborate cloaking schemes are followed, there must be communication back to the new pwner of the machine.
Wow. You're absolutely right. How could I ever have doubted you?
Have a nice day.
Wow, you really got hooked by that guy citing a study that a certain class of seminar programs isn't anywhere nearly as effective as psychological therapy. You said yourself that you can't speak to the studies, so we're left to interpret your response as reactive. Nothing wrong with that; in fact, your post was modded as somewhat insightful. I think the insights are to be had by the reader in this case.
What it looks like is that these seminars, whether pseudo-religious, consisting of a finite number of steps (we might as well say "three hour tour"), or both, tend to substitute a vacuum for your time and attention for the addiction. Not everyone who participates in this type of training is addicted, but I think we can assume that 100% of them feel that something in their lives requires transformation. I think the point is that addicts are particularly susceptible to the vaccuum.
I, too, have personal experience with programs like the one you're defending. I really do mean it when I say that there's nothing wrong with them. Some people do the initial seminar or seminars and get it. They don't need to go back. But there's always this ever-growing minority of people who need to keep coming back. They're kind of a drag, actually; most of them don't seem to have their lives together, when one might suppose that, after decades of participation, they'd have improved every area of their lives several times over.
I'm not saying that these are bad people. I'm agreeing with the person who said that this approach doesn't work for addicts.
The best term I know to describe this class of training is Large Group Awareness Training. Never mind the gory details about sleep deprivation and other mind control correlations--that's likely more reactivation and upset, which is only good for clouding the issue. Not to mention limiting the blood supply to your brain. The thing about LGATs (including churches, IMHO) is that the physical setting and production of the seminars tickles our human wiring. It just feels safer in there--whether it is or not. It's *designed* to feel like a safe space; after all, where else might one be expected to transform oneself? The thing is, we don't have access to sober analysis when we're feeling safe. Try it; you can get there, but then you don't feel safe.
Why might you want access to sober analysis in the midst of an LGAT experience? I want it because I want to be able to tell whether the people putting it on are full of shit. Not only are these enterprises prone to fraud, there have been several which have been psychologically harmful to their paying customers.
I'm asserting that while a person can successfully resist the feelings that an LGAT setting produces, it's difficult to maintain while in the physical space, with dozens or hundreds (consider thousands) of other people present, most of whom are committed to that safe feeling. Committed to the level of craving, if not addiction.
I do not believe that these organizations are cults in any manner of the word. I have a close personal friend who was, quite literally, raised in a cult. Cults exact strict and unreasonable disciplines on their members, often controlling each and every aspect of their lives.
In general, consider that the jargon in most, if not all LGAT programs has you consider your life as a game. At the very least, it's ironic, with the limit tending towards telling as the number of times you hear this meme repeated approaches infinity. I assert that if you keep going back to this sort of thing for long enough, you'll find yourself just as addicted as the OP's friend. Recall that his problem was not the destructive nature of the thing he was addicted to--although he may have been ruining his eyesight, posture, etc. The problem was that he had dropped out of normal social interaction (for him), and the addiction was affecting his career.
My position on Google, Microsoft, Reuters--any information provider, really--setting up shop in China is that a Truly Un-Evil Company would not comply with the censorship rules. They'd pull out, no big fuss or press release. Only an Evil company would justify the assistance of the denial of human rights with "it's just the cost of doing business". That is, the cost is too high.
China's staggering prosperity has a big speed bump in the road ahead, and it's impossible to tell how far away it is--or how fast it will continue to grow. The speed bump is Human Rights, i.e., sooner or later, the problem will come to a head. Critical mass. The legendary Hundredth Monkey. They'll be Mad As Hell, and they're Not Going To Take It Any More.
I find it deplorable--no, unconscionable that corporations are investing in a totalitarian government. Then again, it's implausible to me that our own government is headed in the same direction. Are we bound to fulfill the cyberpunk genre's bleak future just because too many of us have read about it?
The United States took a cue from Israel a few years back in not dealing with terrorists. I guess that only applies to independent terrorists, i.e., if their organization is big enough, we'll not only deal with them, we'll trade with them.
...by following the instructions in the motherboard's manual. It said, "Be sure to connect to our website for any updates to the BIOS," so I very naively did so. At the time, I thought it was soooo nifty that I could download the update and copy it to a diskette that my new machine would boot from and automagically perform on itself. Of course, I also thought it was really nifty that I had managed to plug in all of the parts on the first try to produce a working machine!
Then I got a little nervous at the warnings that the update process couldn't be interrupted to avoid grave consequences. See, I didn't have a UPS, so I worried all through the update procedure.
Then it worked! There wasn't any discernible difference, though, and dang it if it still didn't recognize my drive. So I called Customer Support, and the polite woman asked, right off the bat, whether I'd flashed the BIOS. "Why, of course," I answered proudly, thinking I'd passed some kind of test that would otherwise have required me to admit that I hadn't, after which I'd have to call back, etc.
"Oh, I'm sorry, Sir. You've voided the support warranty. I'm afraid I can't help you."
Of course I started spluttering, and I even tried to deny that I had, but she was well-trained. And she already had the board's serial number.
Turned out I had a bad cable, anyway.
So I'm all for open-source BIOSes. And friendly support that charges a reasonable fee. And nice people everywhere. And the end of evil. And religious people who are also tolerant. And rainbows. And stuff that doesn't suck.
I got email from a Google recruiter, internal guy, very refreshing--he actually listened to me. I was totally stoked; even though this was about 2-3 months before the IPO, I was (still am) very enamoured with the idea of working for Google.
The position was Reliability Engineer, i.e., keeping machines up, proactive monitoring, downtime goals, etc. Not exactly my cup of tea, but the methods seemed attractive: C programs, shell scripts, Perl/Tcl scripts.
First phone interview: wonderful. A guy on the team, fairly new hire, very personable. About ten qualifying questions ("How do you check for free space?" "df." "Good. What's the difference between df and du?" and so on). That went quickly, and well. The rest of the hour was hypothetical problem-solving. Very enjoyable, obviously to see if I was okay with thinking through a problem out loud. Plus I would be working with this guy. Then I got to ask questions, that's how I found out he was new. I asked whether everyone was a genius. He said he wasn't--but that he'd learned more there in two months than in five years as a sysadmin.
So far, so good. I was elated. I started looking at real estate prices, my wife started getting nervous. The Googlecruiter called back, said I had done, very, very well, and that I'd be getting a call the next day from ______ at 3pm my time.
Second phone interview: Not so good. I chalk it up to my perception of the guy. He was 10 minutes late in calling me, he spent ten more minutes telling me about Google, and he seemed aloof & impatient. Some basic questions about my experience and what I liked to work on, then he asked me to explain DNS resolution with an empty cache. I was nervous, and sort of blew it--he hesitated, then I realized my mistake (hostname resolution vs. domain resolution). I felt like I cleaned it up, and I admitted that I was nervous. He didn't seem persuaded. The second question was very interesting: Given a stream of x,y pairs, determine the closest ten to the origin. I felt like I did pretty well, but the interviewer obviously disagreed. My algorithm allowed for continuous ranking (he did say it was a stream), and IMHO was general enough for expansion. He obviously disagreed with my choice of data structures, and was pretty snobby about having given me the origin vs. some arbitrary point on the Cartesian plane. Then, since he had called me late, he refused my request to ask questions.
And that was it. The recruiter called me back, said I wouldn't be getting any more calls. I asked why, and he said that the 2nd interviewer had deemed me "not technical enough." Ouch. He did encourage me to continue to apply.
To be fair, I have worked for a company that had an aggressively filtered interview process: Recruiter screen, two technical interviews, one manager interview. Any "no" along the way, and that was it. The obvious disadvantage is that one of the interviewers could be having a bad day, or might not grasp the nuances of interviewing. The win for the company is that it's pretty well assured of getting quality people, with four checks on the way in. Then again, as the company grew past 1,000 employees, it started breaking down: soft interviewers, managers who wanted to hire someone just from looking at their resume...
I still like Google a lot. I would go to work there, given a reasonable opportunity. I imagine that the salaries are good, so like NASA, it's a best-of-the-best group, but without having to take a pay cut & work for a huge bureaucracy.
That's the point. Plan and execute the backups/hardcopies now, so that in the event of a catastrophe, it's handled.