The point I was making is that there is nothing hypocritical (in terms of morality) about an adult entertainment company being concerned about piracy. Now if this were a software company that writes its software on a pirated copy VS.NET then I would agree. If this company were stealing other footage and selling it and then bitching about piracy I would agree.
I get REAL itchy when people try to cast a specific morality on the legal system. Specifics of morality differ from person to person:
Person A thinks it is perfectly moral to steal food to feed his starving children Person B thinks it is perfectly moral to kill a non-believer of his faith because his holy book says so. Person C thinks it is perfectly moral to have sex with a child for whatever reason.
I happen to think all three of those things are wrong. I like to work of a few pithy quotes when determining if something is justfied as "enforced morality" or not. This is the main one:
"it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." - Thomas Jefferson
Your morality can say alot of things (based on your personal religious beliefs or self-concocted thought stream whatever) but it can't be forced on someone else. You stole a loaf of bread from me. It was not yours. You attempted to have sex with a 3 year old child (even your own). You can't do that because we have determined (however arbitrary in nature) that there is an age of consent.
It wasn't a personal attack but I honestly didn't see anything contrary about someone being upset that someone stole something they created. That's all.
I never thought I'd really hear people welcoming totalitarianism in the name of "security" and "safety."
I just finished rewatching the entire series (as of a week ago) and it was REALLY creepy to see the parallels. Interestingly enough, my wife and I thought the same thing when we rewatched DS9 in its entirety. Maybe some themes are just eternal.
Hell Ben Franklin thought the same thing with the "those who would give up...." quote.
Don't think for a minute that Dems wouldn't do the same thing if they were in power and the Repubs would be bitching about it. Make no mistake that the parties involved are exactly the same but they are just the minority.
I've all but done this by hosting Insipid on my own server.
The best feature is the "snapshot" feature (at least for me). If I get an inkling that some static content will suddenly disappear, I snapshot it so I can go back to it.
It's not as fancy as delicious and it's not all Web 2.0 but it does the job for me. It supports tagging and access control.
While, I don't normally respond to trolls, I'll bite.
My mom was waitress and my dad was a truck driver. They got divorced when I was 7. That left my mom to support me and my sister who was 2 years younger. We never lived in the same place for more than two years. We moved wherever there was family support.
I couldn't afford to go to college. I've waited tables, I worked in a styrofoam plant and driven a forklift.
I lost a job because of a fuckup with an on-call schedule and was out of work for 6 months. Because I had such a STELLAR example of fiscal responsibility from both of my parents, I immediately lost my card and my apartment (car got repo'd and my roomate kicked me out). I lived in the sunroom of a friend's apartment sleeping on a couch.
I finally found permanent work with Bellsouth DCS (now cingular) as a business analyst (which amounted to glorified tech support). The pay was enough to get me back on my feet and I've learned my lesson. I make decent money and I don't live beyond my means. I now own my own home and am married.
So take your goddamned trust fund comment and shove it up your ass. Life throws you curves. Take some fucking responsibility and deal with it.
I didn't say you were entitled to a job. I said that being employed by a company doesn't give them the right to exploit you, one form of which could be making you work unreasonable hours.
Is being on-call considered unreasonable? I'm a salaried employee but I'm on call and don't get additional compensation for it. Some people would consider it unreasonable to be woken up at 4AM with an emergency.
There are certain rights you can't sign away.
No argument there. Those are the ones that are inalienable. I find it interesting from an internal conflict though that I couldn't seem to MAKE myself an indentured servant even if I wanted to do so.
don't have to. It's a representative government. We've defined a 40-hour week as reasonable. Does that mean you shouldn't be allowed to work more than that if you want to volunteer for it? Not at all. It means that your job shouldn't depend on you working for longer than that. I'm not claiming this is what the laws say, but it's my view of fairness.
Good point but let's be clear that my company depends on me being available for on-call rotation and if I shirk that responsibility (through excuses or simply not responding) they are free to fire me. I'm not doing them any good if I'm doing my job.
It's expected that a company should reward you, through overtime pay (even if you are a salaried employee)
While it may be expected, it's not law yet (for salaried employees that is). I personally DON'T expect it because to me that's like banking on bonuses which is something I don't do. I get paid a fair wage to do a job and I do it.
If the server is crashing on your watch too often, it's reasonable for the company to get someone better for the job and fire you.
Not that servers crash on my watch (or anyone else's for that matter) but I would hope they would fire someone for this. Sound suspicious to me.
Interesting question is what if Bob doesn't answer his page while on-call and the server doesn't get up by start of business (exclude the thought that the company should have some f-ing redundancy if it's that mission critical)? Obviously Bob was expected to work overtime in the form of being on call. Could the company fire him? Where does that scenario fall into the general discussion?
However, you seem to approve of someone threatening to fire you and take away your source of income if you don't work more than the agreed upon by society number of reasonable work hours.
An employment contract is different from most other contracts because it's a contract you must enter.
But my opinion still stands that there are other employer's out there. Eventually (with some turbulance in between of course) if enough people leave, the company will go out of business or learn a lesson. Meanwhile Bob is working for a company with a less critical IT infrastructure.
I think the real problem comes in because of the line of work I and many other slashdot readers are in. IT is a different beast than many other fields.
I have this discussion alot with my wife. The concept of something like a server having to be fixed that night or it puts the company at fiscal risk is foreign to her. The problem is that we have over 1000 employees that depend on the systems being fully available for them to do business the next day. That's alot of jobs and alot of OTHER families to be dependant on you doing your job.
I wonder how it works in the medical industry? Are the labor laws applicable for doctor's in the same way as IT (i.e. white collar stuff)? Interestingly enough, that's one area where I WOULD want federal intervention because the risk of a tired doctor fucking up can cost me my life (at least at first blush thinking about the idea.)
I honestly believe that the federal government should stick to its constitutionally defined role. The problem is, and I'll be the first to admit this, everyone has a different interpretation of what is defined as "the common good".
Interestingly enough, I would think many "slashdotters" would agree with the whole idea. I mean we bitch and moan when someone lumps all gamers together or all linux people together or all people together.
Basically you're punishing all businesses for the behaviours of a few. The reasons people define though ( decency, civility, humanity, morality ) are the things I don't want my federal government to have a say in. If I wanted to live in a modern liberal mecca, I'll move to California. If I want to live in a backwater convservative stronghold, I'll move to Alabama but when my FEDERAL government starts telling me what's decent and moral, it's much more difficult if not impossible to expatriate myself and move to Britain or Canada or Australia.
I still hold to my original point though. Noone forced you (not you specifically) at gun point to take a certain job. The threat of termination isn't even coercion in my mind. Unless you've done the surepitous job search, you don't know that you won't be able to find another job. I would be more likely to blame the employee than the employer for taking crap from a job. If your mental and social well being are so important, at some point you have to fish or cut bait. I'm not saying it would be easy and god knows I'd hate to change careers right now but if I *HAD* to (i.e. overtime is costing me my marriage or stress is literally killing me) then I would. I've talked about it with my wife over the past few months.
I want everyone to understand that I'm NOT defending EA's behaviour. I think they put out shit titles and I hated it when they sucked up Origin but my response was to the original post that people are entitled to reasonable work hours based on some sort of inherent right.
I'm all for getting rid of minimum wage. You still didn't address my original points. Who says you're supposed to work non-stop until you die? You aren't being FORCED to do it. You have freedom and choice (for now anyway).
Explain why you are "entitled" to reasonable work hours? You aren't even "entitled" to a job. There is nothing, at least in the U.S. Constitution, that says you are entitled to a job. A job is a contract. You are free to negotiate the terms of that contract. You are also free to find another job if you no longer like the terms of that contract. Furthermore, define reasonable. Is it reasonable to work a 14 hour day because a server has crashed and must be up again by tomorrow or the company loses millions? To the company it is. Maybe not to you.
Now, having said that, does it behoove a company to pay overtime or to not work employees to death with 80 hour work weeks? Sure. The cost of training a new employee because you burned out the previous one is high. There's also the ramp-up time that a project can be delayed. People also get sloppy when the get run-down. How many bugs are missed because people have been working for 14 hours a day?
It's all about enlightened self-interest. If I were running the show, I would expect my employees to, barring issues out of thier control, take one for the team during crunch time. I would expect all of my team members to do that. And when crunch time is over, they all get a nice break and a bonus (based on performance during the crunch time). This is just good for morale.
I'd be curious to see what you think people ARE entitled to in life. At least in my mind, the only unalienable rights are these:
Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness
Notice that it doesn't say Life, Liberty and Happiness. It says the pursuit of Happiness.
Now let's say you take the approach that lack of "reasonable" work hours impedes those unalienable rights. How so? Will you lose your life if you don't work those hours? No. Are you being held hostage and forced to work those hours unable to quit? No.
But let's take pursuit of Happiness. Now obviously working 14 hour days makes it difficult to have a hobby. Or get married. Or hang out with friends. My pursuit of happinness is being impeded!
It makes it difficult to do all of those things but it doesn't prevent it. As with the other two, nothing is FORCING you to stay with that company. Sure, you may feel trapped by a poor job market or lifestyle/family choices that will put you in a bind if you leave the current salary or position but as with the other two you aren't being FORCED.
It's all about personal freedom. And about taking responsibility for choices. And taking responsibility for lack of action.
If someone wants to bring attention to EA's working conditions, more power to them. If EA's working conditions cause a shitty product, it's thier own fault. Let the market decide. Let people have the individual freedom to decide how to handle it.
Hell the new pSeries' have USB and it's still shite. No support for USB mass storage which is what I freaking need. I don't think it even supports USB cdrom (not that I need it).
can't be sure what it is on my A21p, because it has a super shitload of pins.
It's probably the svideo connection (if it's yellow). I had a manager the other day trying to plug a fucking PS2 mouse into his t42. He came and asked me if there was a new PS/2 port on the thinkpads now.
It took everything I had not to slap him and tell him to get out of the tech industry. At least he's not my manager.
Odd. In our case we WANT the default user route to be forced through the VPN. That way we control exactly what they do WHILE on the VPN. I loved that about the Cisco VPN Client. Captive VPN. But oddly enough, the Netscreen client doesn't really work the same way even though SafeNet makes both of them.
What gets me is how a game company can fuck up a console game!
It's not as if there's a broad hardware base they have to test against. As someone said more recently in this thread, now that xbox 360 has a patching system, developers can rush games out the door and patch later.
While I'm a Linux/UNIX guy through and through, I understand times when Microsoft makes sense. If your core comptency is Windows, why the hell would you switch without expecting growing pains.
Having said that, and not begrudging the first two companies for switching in the least, let me point out a few problems I see (based ONLY on the article body) that stood out:
Austereo: "For example, remote users struggled to grapple with a virtual private network (VPN) login system that required three different passwords to establish a connection"
- I'm curious what VPN solution they were using. I would think that from a pure cost perspective, going with a hardware VPN solution that provided hooks for existing authentication integration would have been a wiser choice.
""We were assured that there were procedures and processes you could follow to recover down to the individual message, but when it came to reality, it was a lengthy process and an absolute nightmare.""
- This is most definately a problem with most entirely opensource solutions. Zimbra has integrated message level restore into its product but having dealt with most open-source imap solutions, I have a feeling the solution had to be developed in house. I know how to read maildir filenames but YOU tell me what the hell email this is:
1145900957.V804I55c4037.mail.servername.com:2,
""Importing our network environment and applications onto a new platform required some fairly specific skills," he adds, "and those skills were not abundant within the group."
- This is the crux of the problem as mentioned earlier. I don't think they had the skillset on hand to manage the infrastructure.
The other problem I see near the end of that page is that they did a full desktop migration to Linux. This was probably the biggest mistake they made.
Coffey:
"The way they set up their Linux-based infrastructure had promoted the silo mentality; information wasn't stored in any sort of intuitive manner, and it wasn't easy to access information across the various geographical areas. If you weren't in the Brisbane office, for example, you couldn't access that information. There was just nothing from the information point of view that was encouraging collaboration."
- Poor design can happen in Windows just as Linux. This isn't a Linux-only problem. Sounds like a lack of planning or initiative to do things right from the start. I understand that business moves fast but you end up shooting yourself in the foot and having to redo things if you don't think about these things up front.
"After four months, Microsoft Active Directory and Exchange Server 2003 had replaced now-discontinued Linux servers to provide a consistently managed, centralised messaging infrastructure across 20 Coffey offices. "Previously, all the e-mails were effectively stored on the desktops and there was no central location of the data," Parsons explains. "That's a nightmare both because of litigation, and because of duplication across the company and all the problems that duplication brings."
- Sounds like someone needs IMAP and not pop3. There are also plenty of turnkey email solutions for litigation archiving as well. Most of these implement a SMTP gateway to your existing system.
""They initially thought Linux was going to be a cheaper platform," he says, "but as soon as they started to expand they became aware that the hidden costs of Linux were all over the place -- not only in real dollar terms, but because they weren't using the environment intelligently because of the [limited] skill sets.""
- Again it looks like another case of lack of skillset available.
Wotif.com:
Nothing specific jumped out at me. One thing I thought was interesting was the amount of planning(!) that went into the switch. I also notice mention of actual vendor support contracts.
"Wotif's strong adherence to plain-vanilla J2EE development"
I made the same argument to my boss after the Lenovo deal (we're a big IBM shop) and here was his (and our board's) rationale:
There is a difference between buying a laptop from a company where the profits of the entire laptop sale itself go to the company vs. the profits of the entire laptop sale go to the Chinese government.
And you know what, it makes sense to me.
Face it, the profit from the components is nowhere NEAR what it is for the total machine. IBM and all the other vendors took the cheap cost of the components and slapped them together, added a logo and marked them up. Now that markup is going straight into the pocket of Lenovo, a wholly owned Chinese company.
I'm all for free market and the power of global trade but in this case, the market forces seem to be speaking and saying "We can't get away from the parts being bought from communist China but we can choose to not buy a Chinese laptop."
Is it xenophobic? Not really. Hypocritical? Yeppers.
Slashdot Mirror
The point I was making is that there is nothing hypocritical (in terms of morality) about an adult entertainment company being concerned about piracy. Now if this were a software company that writes its software on a pirated copy VS.NET then I would agree. If this company were stealing other footage and selling it and then bitching about piracy I would agree.
I get REAL itchy when people try to cast a specific morality on the legal system. Specifics of morality differ from person to person:
Person A thinks it is perfectly moral to steal food to feed his starving children
Person B thinks it is perfectly moral to kill a non-believer of his faith because his holy book says so.
Person C thinks it is perfectly moral to have sex with a child for whatever reason.
I happen to think all three of those things are wrong. I like to work of a few pithy quotes when determining if something is justfied as "enforced morality" or not. This is the main one:
"it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." - Thomas Jefferson
Your morality can say alot of things (based on your personal religious beliefs or self-concocted thought stream whatever) but it can't be forced on someone else. You stole a loaf of bread from me. It was not yours. You attempted to have sex with a 3 year old child (even your own). You can't do that because we have determined (however arbitrary in nature) that there is an age of consent.
It wasn't a personal attack but I honestly didn't see anything contrary about someone being upset that someone stole something they created. That's all.
There's a difference. Stealing a movie is a crime. Pure and simple. The morality aspect never comes into it.
Making adult movies and posing for photographs in the nude is NOT a crime.
Is there any news of when Torchwood shows? I'm guessing they've already started filiming.
Wasn't Blaidd Drwg enough of a warning?
What, are they going to call it "Raxacoricofallapatorian Telecom"?
I never thought I'd really hear people welcoming totalitarianism in the name of "security" and "safety."
I just finished rewatching the entire series (as of a week ago) and it was REALLY creepy to see the parallels. Interestingly enough, my wife and I thought the same thing when we rewatched DS9 in its entirety. Maybe some themes are just eternal.
Hell Ben Franklin thought the same thing with the "those who would give up...." quote.
Don't think for a minute that Dems wouldn't do the same thing if they were in power and the Repubs would be bitching about it. Make no mistake that the parties involved are exactly the same but they are just the minority.
I'd take Clark over Bush any day. At least he was being controlled by the Shadows. With Bush, I think he really thinks he's doing the right thing.
Gotta love a good B5 reference.
My setup is as follows:
t er-bracket.html
Dual-P3 1Ghz
1GB of RAM
4x250GB SATA - Linux Software RAID5 - New array
2x160 SATA - Linux Software RAID1 - Old Array
The neat part is the external SATA. I planned this for about a year and waited till all the parts came to the right price point:
The 4-250GB drives are in one of these:
http://www.cooldrives.com/icqudrmusaen.html
Connected to my 4-port SATA adapter using one of these:
http://www.cooldrives.com/seatamcasaii1.html
and one of these
http://www.cooldrives.com/sata-multilane-pci-adap
The raid card is a cheap rocketraid 1640. I'm not a fan of the halfass raid that is thrown on the low-end SATA cards but I needed the ports.
My next step is to add another configuration similar to this one in the same server.
I disagree that it was a tactic on face value. I was a part of the RedHat IPO because of some bug contributions but I didn't consider it a ploy.
I've all but done this by hosting Insipid on my own server.
The best feature is the "snapshot" feature (at least for me). If I get an inkling that some static content will suddenly disappear, I snapshot it so I can go back to it.
It's not as fancy as delicious and it's not all Web 2.0 but it does the job for me. It supports tagging and access control.
While, I don't normally respond to trolls, I'll bite.
My mom was waitress and my dad was a truck driver. They got divorced when I was 7. That left my mom to support me and my sister who was 2 years younger. We never lived in the same place for more than two years. We moved wherever there was family support.
I couldn't afford to go to college. I've waited tables, I worked in a styrofoam plant and driven a forklift.
I lost a job because of a fuckup with an on-call schedule and was out of work for 6 months. Because I had such a STELLAR example of fiscal responsibility from both of my parents, I immediately lost my card and my apartment (car got repo'd and my roomate kicked me out). I lived in the sunroom of a friend's apartment sleeping on a couch.
I finally found permanent work with Bellsouth DCS (now cingular) as a business analyst (which amounted to glorified tech support). The pay was enough to get me back on my feet and I've learned my lesson. I make decent money and I don't live beyond my means. I now own my own home and am married.
So take your goddamned trust fund comment and shove it up your ass. Life throws you curves. Take some fucking responsibility and deal with it.
I didn't say you were entitled to a job. I said that being employed by a company doesn't give them the right to exploit you, one form of which could be making you work unreasonable hours.
Is being on-call considered unreasonable? I'm a salaried employee but I'm on call and don't get additional compensation for it. Some people would consider it unreasonable to be woken up at 4AM with an emergency.
There are certain rights you can't sign away.
No argument there. Those are the ones that are inalienable. I find it interesting from an internal conflict though that I couldn't seem to MAKE myself an indentured servant even if I wanted to do so.
don't have to. It's a representative government. We've defined a 40-hour week as reasonable. Does that mean you shouldn't be allowed to work more than that if you want to volunteer for it? Not at all. It means that your job shouldn't depend on you working for longer than that. I'm not claiming this is what the laws say, but it's my view of fairness.
Good point but let's be clear that my company depends on me being available for on-call rotation and if I shirk that responsibility (through excuses or simply not responding) they are free to fire me. I'm not doing them any good if I'm doing my job.
It's expected that a company should reward you, through overtime pay (even if you are a salaried employee)
While it may be expected, it's not law yet (for salaried employees that is). I personally DON'T expect it because to me that's like banking on bonuses which is something I don't do. I get paid a fair wage to do a job and I do it.
If the server is crashing on your watch too often, it's reasonable for the company to get someone better for the job and fire you.
Not that servers crash on my watch (or anyone else's for that matter) but I would hope they would fire someone for this. Sound suspicious to me.
Interesting question is what if Bob doesn't answer his page while on-call and the server doesn't get up by start of business (exclude the thought that the company should have some f-ing redundancy if it's that mission critical)? Obviously Bob was expected to work overtime in the form of being on call. Could the company fire him? Where does that scenario fall into the general discussion?
However, you seem to approve of someone threatening to fire you and take away your source of income if you don't work more than the agreed upon by society number of reasonable work hours.
An employment contract is different from most other contracts because it's a contract you must enter.
But my opinion still stands that there are other employer's out there. Eventually (with some turbulance in between of course) if enough people leave, the company will go out of business or learn a lesson. Meanwhile Bob is working for a company with a less critical IT infrastructure.
I think the real problem comes in because of the line of work I and many other slashdot readers are in. IT is a different beast than many other fields.
I have this discussion alot with my wife. The concept of something like a server having to be fixed that night or it puts the company at fiscal risk is foreign to her. The problem is that we have over 1000 employees that depend on the systems being fully available for them to do business the next day. That's alot of jobs and alot of OTHER families to be dependant on you doing your job.
I wonder how it works in the medical industry? Are the labor laws applicable for doctor's in the same way as IT (i.e. white collar stuff)? Interestingly enough, that's one area where I WOULD want federal intervention because the risk of a tired doctor fucking up can cost me my life (at least at first blush thinking about the idea.)
I make no pretenses about my politics =)
I honestly believe that the federal government should stick to its constitutionally defined role. The problem is, and I'll be the first to admit this, everyone has a different interpretation of what is defined as "the common good".
Interestingly enough, I would think many "slashdotters" would agree with the whole idea. I mean we bitch and moan when someone lumps all gamers together or all linux people together or all people together.
Basically you're punishing all businesses for the behaviours of a few. The reasons people define though ( decency, civility, humanity, morality ) are the things I don't want my federal government to have a say in. If I wanted to live in a modern liberal mecca, I'll move to California. If I want to live in a backwater convservative stronghold, I'll move to Alabama but when my FEDERAL government starts telling me what's decent and moral, it's much more difficult if not impossible to expatriate myself and move to Britain or Canada or Australia.
I still hold to my original point though. Noone forced you (not you specifically) at gun point to take a certain job. The threat of termination isn't even coercion in my mind. Unless you've done the surepitous job search, you don't know that you won't be able to find another job. I would be more likely to blame the employee than the employer for taking crap from a job. If your mental and social well being are so important, at some point you have to fish or cut bait. I'm not saying it would be easy and god knows I'd hate to change careers right now but if I *HAD* to (i.e. overtime is costing me my marriage or stress is literally killing me) then I would. I've talked about it with my wife over the past few months.
I want everyone to understand that I'm NOT defending EA's behaviour. I think they put out shit titles and I hated it when they sucked up Origin but my response was to the original post that people are entitled to reasonable work hours based on some sort of inherent right.
I'm all for getting rid of minimum wage. You still didn't address my original points. Who says you're supposed to work non-stop until you die? You aren't being FORCED to do it. You have freedom and choice (for now anyway).
Explain why you are "entitled" to reasonable work hours? You aren't even "entitled" to a job. There is nothing, at least in the U.S. Constitution, that says you are entitled to a job. A job is a contract. You are free to negotiate the terms of that contract. You are also free to find another job if you no longer like the terms of that contract. Furthermore, define reasonable. Is it reasonable to work a 14 hour day because a server has crashed and must be up again by tomorrow or the company loses millions? To the company it is. Maybe not to you.
Now, having said that, does it behoove a company to pay overtime or to not work employees to death with 80 hour work weeks? Sure. The cost of training a new employee because you burned out the previous one is high. There's also the ramp-up time that a project can be delayed. People also get sloppy when the get run-down. How many bugs are missed because people have been working for 14 hours a day?
It's all about enlightened self-interest. If I were running the show, I would expect my employees to, barring issues out of thier control, take one for the team during crunch time. I would expect all of my team members to do that. And when crunch time is over, they all get a nice break and a bonus (based on performance during the crunch time). This is just good for morale.
I'd be curious to see what you think people ARE entitled to in life. At least in my mind, the only unalienable rights are these:
Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness
Notice that it doesn't say Life, Liberty and Happiness. It says the pursuit of Happiness.
Now let's say you take the approach that lack of "reasonable" work hours impedes those unalienable rights. How so? Will you lose your life if you don't work those hours? No. Are you being held hostage and forced to work those hours unable to quit? No.
But let's take pursuit of Happiness. Now obviously working 14 hour days makes it difficult to have a hobby. Or get married. Or hang out with friends. My pursuit of happinness is being impeded!
It makes it difficult to do all of those things but it doesn't prevent it. As with the other two, nothing is FORCING you to stay with that company. Sure, you may feel trapped by a poor job market or lifestyle/family choices that will put you in a bind if you leave the current salary or position but as with the other two you aren't being FORCED.
It's all about personal freedom. And about taking responsibility for choices. And taking responsibility for lack of action.
If someone wants to bring attention to EA's working conditions, more power to them. If EA's working conditions cause a shitty product, it's thier own fault. Let the market decide. Let people have the individual freedom to decide how to handle it.
Just my $1.35.
Hell the new pSeries' have USB and it's still shite. No support for USB mass storage which is what I freaking need. I don't think it even supports USB cdrom (not that I need it).
Found it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_UltraPort
Looks like it was for a variety of peripherals.
Had to download the A21 User's Guide but when I saw reference to an UltraPort for webcams, I googled that and hit the Wikipedia entry.
ThinkWiki has an entry with pics:
http://thinkwiki.org/wiki/UltraPort
It's probably the svideo connection (if it's yellow). I had a manager the other day trying to plug a fucking PS2 mouse into his t42. He came and asked me if there was a new PS/2 port on the thinkpads now.
It took everything I had not to slap him and tell him to get out of the tech industry. At least he's not my manager.
As long as I get to see it demo'd on a real life Major Kusanagi, let them make the camo!
Odd. In our case we WANT the default user route to be forced through the VPN. That way we control exactly what they do WHILE on the VPN. I loved that about the Cisco VPN Client. Captive VPN. But oddly enough, the Netscreen client doesn't really work the same way even though SafeNet makes both of them.
What gets me is how a game company can fuck up a console game!
It's not as if there's a broad hardware base they have to test against. As someone said more recently in this thread, now that xbox 360 has a patching system, developers can rush games out the door and patch later.
While I'm a Linux/UNIX guy through and through, I understand times when Microsoft makes sense. If your core comptency is Windows, why the hell would you switch without expecting growing pains.
Having said that, and not begrudging the first two companies for switching in the least, let me point out a few problems I see (based ONLY on the article body) that stood out:
Austereo:
"For example, remote users struggled to grapple with a virtual private network (VPN) login system that required three different passwords to establish a connection"
- I'm curious what VPN solution they were using. I would think that from a pure cost perspective, going with a hardware VPN solution that provided hooks for existing authentication integration would have been a wiser choice.
""We were assured that there were procedures and processes you could follow to recover down to the individual message, but when it came to reality, it was a lengthy process and an absolute nightmare.""
- This is most definately a problem with most entirely opensource solutions. Zimbra has integrated message level restore into its product but having dealt with most open-source imap solutions, I have a feeling the solution had to be developed in house. I know how to read maildir filenames but YOU tell me what the hell email this is:
1145900957.V804I55c4037.mail.servername.com:2,
""Importing our network environment and applications onto a new platform required some fairly specific skills," he adds, "and those skills were not abundant within the group."
- This is the crux of the problem as mentioned earlier. I don't think they had the skillset on hand to manage the infrastructure.
The other problem I see near the end of that page is that they did a full desktop migration to Linux. This was probably the biggest mistake they made.
Coffey:
"The way they set up their Linux-based infrastructure had promoted the silo mentality; information wasn't stored in any sort of intuitive manner, and it wasn't easy to access information across the various geographical areas. If you weren't in the Brisbane office, for example, you couldn't access that information. There was just nothing from the information point of view that was encouraging collaboration."
- Poor design can happen in Windows just as Linux. This isn't a Linux-only problem. Sounds like a lack of planning or initiative to do things right from the start. I understand that business moves fast but you end up shooting yourself in the foot and having to redo things if you don't think about these things up front.
"After four months, Microsoft Active Directory and Exchange Server 2003 had replaced now-discontinued Linux servers to provide a consistently managed, centralised messaging infrastructure across 20 Coffey offices. "Previously, all the e-mails were effectively stored on the desktops and there was no central location of the data," Parsons explains. "That's a nightmare both because of litigation, and because of duplication across the company and all the problems that duplication brings."
- Sounds like someone needs IMAP and not pop3. There are also plenty of turnkey email solutions for litigation archiving as well. Most of these implement a SMTP gateway to your existing system.
""They initially thought Linux was going to be a cheaper platform," he says, "but as soon as they started to expand they became aware that the hidden costs of Linux were all over the place -- not only in real dollar terms, but because they weren't using the environment intelligently because of the [limited] skill sets.""
- Again it looks like another case of lack of skillset available.
Wotif.com:
Nothing specific jumped out at me. One thing I thought was interesting was the amount of planning(!) that went into the switch. I also notice mention of actual vendor support contracts.
"Wotif's strong adherence to plain-vanilla J2EE development"
"Oracle10g Standard Edition"
"We did a very critical pilot for th
I disagree.
I made the same argument to my boss after the Lenovo deal (we're a big IBM shop) and here was his (and our board's) rationale:
There is a difference between buying a laptop from a company where the profits of the entire laptop sale itself go to the company vs. the profits of the entire laptop sale go to the Chinese government.
And you know what, it makes sense to me.
Face it, the profit from the components is nowhere NEAR what it is for the total machine. IBM and all the other vendors took the cheap cost of the components and slapped them together, added a logo and marked them up. Now that markup is going straight into the pocket of Lenovo, a wholly owned Chinese company.
I'm all for free market and the power of global trade but in this case, the market forces seem to be speaking and saying "We can't get away from the parts being bought from communist China but we can choose to not buy a Chinese laptop."
Is it xenophobic? Not really. Hypocritical? Yeppers.
As much as I think it's a bad idea, how is this any different from outsourcing your VPN solution to a third party such as Netifice or someone else?