The most dangerous offenses on the roads are simply not enforced. Politics pressures officers not to cite people for the worst offenses because they are often the ones that people will fight in court and bitch about. Ask anyone who is on the job how popular they would be if they cited people for the following.
Failure to yield to overtaking traffic (keep right except to pass or speeding up to block a pass) Obstructing the flow of traffic (people doing 10+mph below the posted limits) Failure to maintain lane discipline (going over the yellow lines into oncoming lanes or violating adjoining lanes) Failure to display traffic signals Re-evaluation of license for being too old/feeble or generally incompetent at controlling a vehicle.
All of these are far worse than "speeding" and the politics is not in the favor of an officer who regularly enforces these statutes.
With well over a hundred thousand miles of driving in most of the lower 48, the mid-west highways seem to be the best as far as people driving with common sense. As you approach any city center or the coasts, this all goes to hell fast.
My local area, the damned towns have dropped almost any road that was a 45 limit to 25 now and it is so slow for the road conditions that it just encourages people to text and use the phone and fiddle with the DVD players. It's made things far worse. The limits are so slow that the drivers have even lower awareness for what they are doing...which is supposed to be driving their car.
Instead of the usual commuter rail line, we've had to do some maintenance causing us to provide a single Yugo as transport for the NY morning rush.
After packing 25 angry commuters into the Yugo we left a few hundred thousand stranded on the platform, ping-ponging between the parking lot and home, completely confused how they would get to work.
In addition to that, unfortunately the Yugo couldn't handle the added weight of the passengers and the leaf springs shattered all over the ground. So the 25 passengers we initially planned for were left trapped, to die, inside of the disabled Yugo. They all starved in the days it took us to realize the Yugo never left the station parking lot.
We are sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused and have upgraded to AAA Gold status to prevent any further future disruptions. This will ensure that at least 25 people will actually reach their destinations should this occur again, though they may need to ride on a flat-bed to get there.
What a bonus, Wal-Mart already sells doctored copies of media as 'original' with their own ideals censored into the content.
Now Sony who dictate their own morality though their licensing are winning a major format war.
Why are people happy about this? The manufacturer of what will possibly become the defacto standard for video media, won't permit content they deem to be immoral on their product. People should be outraged over this.
This alone is why I support HD-DVD. Yes it's Microsoft, but at least they don't tell people what they can and can't distribute on the media.
Patent cases are decided by juries of non-technical people who want nothing more than to get out of the court case as soon as they can.
Many many times a decision is handed down in a patent case that has nothing to do with the facts. The decisions are based on what the jury thinks they understand as the facts.
If you brought a patent case about the specific alloy of metal in railroad track with a patent for aluminum rails vs a user of steel rails, the average juror would see it as 'metal' rails and find there was infringement even though the patent was explicitly for the use of aluminum in the rails.
The patents as outlined in these cases are highly technical and most anyone who understands the technology can see there are some really troubling issues involved. This is with the minimal information available from the outside. A juror or a judge will have no idea what they are looking at.
The patent attorneys know this and prey on their victims accordingly....because they can.
What we need is massive patent law reform or only those with the deepest pockets will win.
You basically *have* to keep Windows around somewhere.
Examples
Firmware updater for A/V receiver...only made to run on Windows
Logitech Harmony remote... can only be programmed with a Windows system
Ham Radio software... many rig control and memory managers are only written for Windows.
GPS firmware updates... only possible with Windows
The equipment manufacturers close their protocols and only distribute precompiled utilities that require you to have Windows to use them.
I mostly get stuck with keeping a Windows box around for doing firmware and other software updates for the various toys I have around.
I don't use the install for anything else, but it still has to stick around sucking up disk space as there is no other way to accomplish the above tasks.
Major record label seeks Perl programmer with expert skills in curl scripting.
record exec: *snorts line off the Bentley dash* "Dude, I can't believe they fell for this, we'll scan a number one for anything we release now for the low low cost of $0.99 per sale" "I was so sick and tired of tracking those scan sheets over a fax machine too."
It's a smokescreen. Deep pockets will buy their scans even more than they do now with radio payola.
I think key tokens would be too slow for this application, however for anyone else interested in them.
Look into Aladdin key tokens, they will work with freeradius so anything that can do radius auth will work. The licensing is FAR less than RSA's scheme.
Build a gold image build of your platform/s of choice and use Kickstart/Jumpstart to build systems based on spec files or flar images. This way all your builds are identical and reproduceable. Keep archives of your images as you change them in case you need to recover an older system build.
As for the applications beyond the OS, you need to learn packaging and package your own applications. Again so you can reproduce a given baselined system in 20mins should you need to rebuild it.
Classify your add-on applications into meta-packages so you can install a given role for a system via one package.
You simply must setup a network build system and a package repository before you take on the 200 server client or you will surely drown; if not from overwork, from the frustration of not having a consistent platform that you are guaranteed to know before you log in.
I was a consultant, never directly a.gov employee.
Most of us would show up wearing dress shoes the first days of a contract....only to learn that workboots with a 3/4" thick sole were more apropriate if you wanted to wade into the mensroom.
It was all my fault that I stayed in that sector for so long, it was madness. I've finally escaped.
I could truly write a book about what I saw, but as you can see, people in the government don't see the cesspool for the turds and most normal people don't even believe it's going on.
I'd have to get Fabio for the cover and sell it under novels.
I worked in the public sector for a number of years.
You could bring in food in a Tupperware bowl, leftovers prepared by who knows who and handled in who knows what manner and people would actually eat it! The thought of eating anything left in a fridge by a stranger just makes me shudder.
The habits of civil-servants never ceased to amuse, a herd of animals is the best way I can describe it. Filthy, filthy people. Shameless.
They used to have to pay housekeeping extra so that the restrooms would be cleaned three or four times in an eight hour shift and they were still dirtier than the restrooms in Penn Station.
There has to be some sort of psychology that attracts people to government jobs. It would be an amazing study to do.
What is wrong with people and their insistance on keeping confidential material in the clear on a laptop?
How many headlines do people have to read before they 'get it' and simply encrypt the data?
What are companies thinking allowing this data to be carried at all?
Readers here have even less of an excuse. Try 'man losetup' and look for -e...it's just not that hard.
Set yourself up a nice big crypt file with AES, set it with a nice long and strong passphrase and don't leave the mount mounted when you hibernate the laptop either.
Yes one could brute force the passphrase, but at least you'd be trying to make an effort.
Even better, encrypt it with a key...one that isn't on the laptop at all.
I downloaded the mp3, can't hear a thing thanks to years working as a soundman in clubs. Playing it over and over, turning my head, nothing.
Then I look over and notice all three of my cats huddled at the top of my stairwell all looking rather annoyed. Evidently there is something in that file.
Client->Sun "We need a fiber to SCSI bridge for our tape juke" Sun-> "We don't support that configuration" (What about that is unclear?) Client->Sun "Well, we own it already, it's brand 'foo'" Sun-> "Not only won't we support that configuration, that exact model won't even work at all, we've verified this in our lab."
Client hires another vendor, who not only doesn't sell or configure Sun hardware, they also don't sell anything remotely related to the SCSI bridge in question. This vendor unboxes and plugs in the connections for the bridge and bills the client $2500/day for a week in services.
Guess what? The SCSI bridge hasn't worked from day one. The vendor who installed it of course won't support it, Sun won't support it and the manufacturer told the client already that it won't work in their configuration.
Three years...I spent three years in that place. That broken bridge is still in place today.
I could fill an entire book with the quality decisions that were made there.
There's nothing really funny about this, this is typical IT these days. Millions of wasted dollars in hardware that wasn't needed, won't do what was required and managers that continue to purchase in this manner. Still this is more amusing than those lame and unlikely anecdotes from the basement nerds at the register.
NH was one of the few states that I thought would maintain their sanity.
Our government is gone...out of reach.
I have a great idea, lets just sell NH to Oman or Peru, then they can deal with the lawsuit. Oh wait, no, if we gave it away in a free trade agreement, they would just turn and sue us if they weren't fully satisfied.
A lot of people have touched on this, but it is the misunderstanding of the fundamental concepts that screw up the average user the most.
"Memory" get people to understand what they are referring to.
What is RAM, what is a disk, what does a system in the most basic terms use each of them for?
When you click on a "website", what is happening? Having someone understand they need a network connection first because they are actually making a network request.
Once something is installed...you don't need to keep the installer app.
"Save As", even in an office, it is simply unreal that so many people never knew this option existed. I had a technical team lead (so they titled him) that was mystified any time I took a Word document and turned it around instantly to him in HTML. "You'll have to teach me some HTML one day." Incredible.
Get the basics down and some of the rest might back fill itself.
There isn't enough detail here at all to begin with recommendations.
Small budget...
There's small ($10k) and there's small ($1M). Small? Quantify that.
What is the nature of the data?
There is a massive difference between a PB of static files that are rarely accessed or indexed and a PB that is a highly transactional database.
What size are the files themselves?
What SLA has to be met with regard to the throughput?
Most of the arguments already made in favor of redundancy are also true. How could you have a PB of anything that isn't worth protecting? Just the cost of assembling a PB of data or having to restore it from a single disk fault would pretty much demand having a volume management system in place with redundancy.
If none of this has occured to you, hire someone with the background needed to architect this for you.
Sun already supports both Redhat and SuSE in addition to Solaris on their x86 hardware.
They've got some interesting things on the way, though it's quite a big departure from business as usual for them. Will be interesting to see if they keep the vision and follow through.
I think it's a good idea to have an open channel to the top, and I've worked with many principals that really do listen. However from what I've seen, most employees should think long and hard before clicking on 'send'.
From what I've seen in quite small companies with principals open to direct communication, the majority of the employees do themselves more harm than good simply because they have no real perspective as to where they fit in the business.
An example. Recently at a company 'meet and greet' dinner so that the local engineers can meet each other and find out what skillsets are there, a co-worker completely confused his place and what was to be gained with the meeting. The CEO, COO, and CTO were present along with a bunch of co-workers from local client sites.
The co-worker babbled on and on about petty nonsense that was specific to our one particular site. Nothing to do with the other engineers' situations. Nothing having to do with company business at all, just petty political issues and generally self-serving complaints. Basically the co-worker saw what he did as "I showed them, I'm nobody's fool and they will see how powerful and valuable I am". The net result was that the CEO referred to the co-worker as 'a cancer on the company that should be removed at all costs'. The co-worker just doesn't have a clue about what it means to own and run a business and what his place is as an asset to the company.
This isn't uncommon from what I've seen. People have this weird utopian view of how things should be, without any reality in the mix. Though ultimately it is only the fault of the employee, a direct channel to the top is only the express to unemployment for many confused people.
If you can't clearly see the role of your CEO, you'd better think carefully before you click 'send'.
By the time you staff the place, hire housekeeping and then the judicial staff, the rulings apply to what, the remaining 2000 people of Canada? I think they all sell t-shirts at Niagra Falls anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
The most dangerous offenses on the roads are simply not enforced. Politics pressures officers not to cite people for the worst offenses because they are often the ones that people will fight in court and bitch about. Ask anyone who is on the job how popular they would be if they cited people for the following.
Failure to yield to overtaking traffic (keep right except to pass or speeding up to block a pass)
Obstructing the flow of traffic (people doing 10+mph below the posted limits)
Failure to maintain lane discipline (going over the yellow lines into oncoming lanes or violating adjoining lanes)
Failure to display traffic signals
Re-evaluation of license for being too old/feeble or generally incompetent at controlling a vehicle.
All of these are far worse than "speeding" and the politics is not in the favor of an officer who regularly enforces these statutes.
With well over a hundred thousand miles of driving in most of the lower 48, the mid-west highways seem to be the best as far as people driving with common sense. As you approach any city center or the coasts, this all goes to hell fast.
My local area, the damned towns have dropped almost any road that was a 45 limit to 25 now and it is so slow for the road conditions that it just encourages people to text and use the phone and fiddle with the DVD players. It's made things far worse. The limits are so slow that the drivers have even lower awareness for what they are doing...which is supposed to be driving their car.
Pay toilets...but keep your stance narrow my friend.
Don't be unreasonable, don't eat their eyes. Everything else is fair game.
Instead of the usual commuter rail line, we've had to do some maintenance causing us to provide a single Yugo as transport for the NY morning rush.
After packing 25 angry commuters into the Yugo we left a few hundred thousand stranded on the platform, ping-ponging between the parking lot and home, completely confused how they would get to work.
In addition to that, unfortunately the Yugo couldn't handle the added weight of the passengers and the leaf springs shattered all over the ground. So the 25 passengers we initially planned for were left trapped, to die, inside of the disabled Yugo. They all starved in the days it took us to realize the Yugo never left the station parking lot.
We are sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused and have upgraded to AAA Gold status to prevent any further future disruptions. This will ensure that at least 25 people will actually reach their destinations should this occur again, though they may need to ride on a flat-bed to get there.
What a bonus, Wal-Mart already sells doctored copies of media as 'original' with their own ideals censored into the content.
Now Sony who dictate their own morality though their licensing are winning a major format war.
Why are people happy about this? The manufacturer of what will possibly become the defacto standard for video media, won't permit content they deem to be immoral on their product. People should be outraged over this.
This alone is why I support HD-DVD. Yes it's Microsoft, but at least they don't tell people what they can and can't distribute on the media.
Patent cases are decided by juries of non-technical people who want nothing more than to get out of the court case as soon as they can.
Many many times a decision is handed down in a patent case that has nothing to do with the facts. The decisions are based on what the jury thinks they understand as the facts.
If you brought a patent case about the specific alloy of metal in railroad track with a patent for aluminum rails vs a user of steel rails, the average juror would see it as 'metal' rails and find there was infringement even though the patent was explicitly for the use of aluminum in the rails.
The patents as outlined in these cases are highly technical and most anyone who understands the technology can see there are some really troubling issues involved. This is with the minimal information available from the outside. A juror or a judge will have no idea what they are looking at.
The patent attorneys know this and prey on their victims accordingly....because they can.
What we need is massive patent law reform or only those with the deepest pockets will win.
"Boondock Saints" heh , are you 50 or something?
http://www.theboondockstv.com/
It's simple.
... can only be programmed with a Windows system
... many rig control and memory managers are only written for Windows.
... only possible with Windows
You basically *have* to keep Windows around somewhere.
Examples
Firmware updater for A/V receiver...only made to run on Windows
Logitech Harmony remote
Ham Radio software
GPS firmware updates
The equipment manufacturers close their protocols and only distribute precompiled utilities that require you to have Windows to use them.
I mostly get stuck with keeping a Windows box around for doing firmware and other software updates for the various toys I have around.
I don't use the install for anything else, but it still has to stick around sucking up disk space as there is no other way to accomplish the above tasks.
Job Opportunity
Major record label seeks Perl programmer with expert skills in curl scripting.
record exec: *snorts line off the Bentley dash* "Dude, I can't believe they fell for this, we'll scan a number one for anything we release now for the low low cost of $0.99 per sale" "I was so sick and tired of tracking those scan sheets over a fax machine too."
It's a smokescreen. Deep pockets will buy their scans even more than they do now with radio payola.
I think key tokens would be too slow for this application, however for anyone else interested in them.
Look into Aladdin key tokens, they will work with freeradius so anything that can do radius auth will work. The licensing is FAR less than RSA's scheme.
Build a gold image build of your platform/s of choice and use Kickstart/Jumpstart to build systems based on spec files or flar images. This way all your builds are identical and reproduceable. Keep archives of your images as you change them in case you need to recover an older system build.
As for the applications beyond the OS, you need to learn packaging and package your own applications. Again so you can reproduce a given baselined system in 20mins should you need to rebuild it.
Classify your add-on applications into meta-packages so you can install a given role for a system via one package.
You simply must setup a network build system and a package repository before you take on the 200 server client or you will surely drown; if not from overwork, from the frustration of not having a consistent platform that you are guaranteed to know before you log in.
I was a consultant, never directly a .gov employee.
Most of us would show up wearing dress shoes the first days of a contract....only to learn that workboots with a 3/4" thick sole were more apropriate if you wanted to wade into the mensroom.
It was all my fault that I stayed in that sector for so long, it was madness. I've finally escaped.
I could truly write a book about what I saw, but as you can see, people in the government don't see the cesspool for the turds and most normal people don't even believe it's going on.
I'd have to get Fabio for the cover and sell it under novels.
I worked in the public sector for a number of years.
You could bring in food in a Tupperware bowl, leftovers prepared by who knows who and handled in who knows what manner and people would actually eat it! The thought of eating anything left in a fridge by a stranger just makes me shudder.
The habits of civil-servants never ceased to amuse, a herd of animals is the best way I can describe it. Filthy, filthy people. Shameless.
They used to have to pay housekeeping extra so that the restrooms would be cleaned three or four times in an eight hour shift and they were still dirtier than the restrooms in Penn Station.
There has to be some sort of psychology that attracts people to government jobs. It would be an amazing study to do.
What is wrong with people and their insistance on keeping confidential material in the clear on a laptop?
How many headlines do people have to read before they 'get it' and simply encrypt the data?
What are companies thinking allowing this data to be carried at all?
Readers here have even less of an excuse. Try 'man losetup' and look for -e...it's just not that hard.
Set yourself up a nice big crypt file with AES, set it with a nice long and strong passphrase and don't leave the mount mounted when you hibernate the laptop either.
Yes one could brute force the passphrase, but at least you'd be trying to make an effort.
Even better, encrypt it with a key...one that isn't on the laptop at all.
I downloaded the mp3, can't hear a thing thanks to years working as a soundman in clubs. Playing it over and over, turning my head, nothing.
Then I look over and notice all three of my cats huddled at the top of my stairwell all looking rather annoyed. Evidently there is something in that file.
Client->Sun "We need a fiber to SCSI bridge for our tape juke"
Sun-> "We don't support that configuration" (What about that is unclear?)
Client->Sun "Well, we own it already, it's brand 'foo'"
Sun-> "Not only won't we support that configuration, that exact model won't even work at all, we've verified this in our lab."
Client hires another vendor, who not only doesn't sell or configure Sun hardware, they also don't sell anything remotely related to the SCSI bridge in question. This vendor unboxes and plugs in the connections for the bridge and bills the client $2500/day for a week in services.
Guess what? The SCSI bridge hasn't worked from day one. The vendor who installed it of course won't support it, Sun won't support it and the manufacturer told the client already that it won't work in their configuration.
Three years...I spent three years in that place. That broken bridge is still in place today.
I could fill an entire book with the quality decisions that were made there.
There's nothing really funny about this, this is typical IT these days. Millions of wasted dollars in hardware that wasn't needed, won't do what was required and managers that continue to purchase in this manner. Still this is more amusing than those lame and unlikely anecdotes from the basement nerds at the register.
Is there nowhere left?
NH was one of the few states that I thought would maintain their sanity.
Our government is gone...out of reach.
I have a great idea, lets just sell NH to Oman or Peru, then they can deal with the lawsuit. Oh wait, no, if we gave it away in a free trade agreement, they would just turn and sue us if they weren't fully satisfied.
A lot of people have touched on this, but it is the misunderstanding of the fundamental concepts that screw up the average user the most.
"Memory" get people to understand what they are referring to.
What is RAM, what is a disk, what does a system in the most basic terms use each of them for?
When you click on a "website", what is happening? Having someone understand they need a network connection first because they are actually making a network request.
Once something is installed...you don't need to keep the installer app.
"Save As", even in an office, it is simply unreal that so many people never knew this option existed. I had a technical team lead (so they titled him) that was mystified any time I took a Word document and turned it around instantly to him in HTML. "You'll have to teach me some HTML one day." Incredible.
Get the basics down and some of the rest might back fill itself.
You mean something like a wallet....
The day it is a requirement for me to come to work naked, I'll finally quit.
There isn't enough detail here at all to begin with recommendations.
Small budget...
There's small ($10k) and there's small ($1M). Small? Quantify that.
What is the nature of the data?
There is a massive difference between a PB of static files that are rarely accessed or indexed and a PB that is a highly transactional database.
What size are the files themselves?
What SLA has to be met with regard to the throughput?
Most of the arguments already made in favor of redundancy are also true. How could you have a PB of anything that isn't worth protecting? Just the cost of assembling a PB of data or having to restore it from a single disk fault would pretty much demand having a volume management system in place with redundancy.
If none of this has occured to you, hire someone with the background needed to architect this for you.
Sun already supports both Redhat and SuSE in addition to Solaris on their x86 hardware.
They've got some interesting things on the way, though it's quite a big departure from business as usual for them. Will be interesting to see if they keep the vision and follow through.
We can call it...
Internet Relay Chat
It will be HUGE
No thanks. I'll take the simplicity of gaim to accomplish the given task; relaying a text 'conversation'.
If you go and bloat it up, for the love of God, be sure to leave an options dialog to disable all the crud so I don't have to be beaten with it.
I think it's a good idea to have an open channel to the top, and I've worked with many principals that really do listen. However from what I've seen, most employees should think long and hard before clicking on 'send'.
From what I've seen in quite small companies with principals open to direct communication, the majority of the employees do themselves more harm than good simply because they have no real perspective as to where they fit in the business.
An example. Recently at a company 'meet and greet' dinner so that the local engineers can meet each other and find out what skillsets are there, a co-worker completely confused his place and what was to be gained with the meeting. The CEO, COO, and CTO were present along with a bunch of co-workers from local client sites.
The co-worker babbled on and on about petty nonsense that was specific to our one particular site. Nothing to do with the other engineers' situations. Nothing having to do with company business at all, just petty political issues and generally self-serving complaints. Basically the co-worker saw what he did as "I showed them, I'm nobody's fool and they will see how powerful and valuable I am". The net result was that the CEO referred to the co-worker as 'a cancer on the company that should be removed at all costs'. The co-worker just doesn't have a clue about what it means to own and run a business and what his place is as an asset to the company.
This isn't uncommon from what I've seen. People have this weird utopian view of how things should be, without any reality in the mix. Though ultimately it is only the fault of the employee, a direct channel to the top is only the express to unemployment for many confused people.
If you can't clearly see the role of your CEO, you'd better think carefully before you click 'send'.
By the time you staff the place, hire housekeeping and then the judicial staff, the rulings apply to what, the remaining 2000 people of Canada? I think they all sell t-shirts at Niagra Falls anyway.