It has less to do with an "off the record" conversation, and more to do with the fact that all written client communication is covered under heavy regulatory rules. Client communications are mandated to be archived for 7 years, and email ( and IM ) fall under that. IM has been unregulated until now, so that's why this is a big deal ( nobody issued any statements about it from a regulatory standpoint.)
if you HAVE TO archive it and supervise it's use, that's a pain in the butt, and if you don't do an adequate job for that you can be shut down and/or fined heavily. that's what is important.
it's not a matter of coming up with a slick solution to log stuff, or writing fancy scripts; it's a big financial risk and a regulatory problem. you need to display a truly bulletproof system that not only completely controls all access, but logs all of that material regardless of the client used.
Furthermore, you THEN have to have a complete supervisory procedure to go through that material looking for compliance violations. This equates to either an army of compliance officers, or very slick software designed for this purpose that flags content based on complex rules. It's really not all that easy- you also have to do the math on the business cost of violations, since you'll be catching them post-event. All that does is prove someone screwed up, and that's what leads most firms to block IM.
Larger institutional equity firms, however, have taken to IM in a big way- because their customers are fund managers and the like, who have less restrictive rules since they are expected to know what they are doing (unlike joe sixpack investor). I know another IT director who had a major client insist they have direct IM access to their trading desk, otherwise they were pulling all their accounts.
But seriously, if you think it's just some simple script job or whatever, you need to look into the world of hurt we have with email- try having to archive every single email for 7 years. and I don't mean just backing up, I mean truly archiving every little scrap of mail before the client even sees it, and having it reviewed through a compliance department, and archived with comments and/or other bits of metadata. then it has to go to OPTICAL MEDIA (that gets expensive fast!), with multiple copies, which must go offsite ASAP, but still be available within hours, and be fully indexed blah blah blah. I know others in the industry who deal with mail volume approaching a terabyte/week. now hold on to that for 7 years.
Regulatory compliance drives the storage business.
Specific sorts of professionals are exempt, and management is exempt. There's a special stipulation with regards to computer professionals, but it mandates that you must either be in management, or making more than $27.63 an hour (from the last time I looked at the regs).
So, if you're making in excess of $57k/year, and the majority of your work is self directed (or you are in management) then you're somewhat screwed.
State labor laws are also important here- State law cannot weaken the federal law ( if your employer falls under it) but it can make it stronger with more requirements. Check with your State wages and dues/labor/workforce department. They will also come in and investigate if you so desire, and can mandate that employers pay up to 2 years of back wages if they are found to have you wrongfully exempted.
Mind you, when they embed the RFID in your hand or forehead, then the fun really begins:)
Anyone else ever wonder if the Christian Right will wake up from their Bush induced trance when they pull some "book of revelations" inspired nonsense?
In some ways, I'm really curious to see what all those southern Baptists do when something like that happens. Hopefully they'll come to, and start fearing the things they've been promoting on the wagon-train of destruction.
I'm guessing you've never been the target of identity theft. You'd change your mind pretty damn quick about that.
Anonymous payments are a fundamental part of our society, as well as a constitutional expectation of personal privacy. soon both will be gone, and you'll be in a direct-marketing-credit-controlled-transaction-mon itored hell of a world. It's enough to make a sane man move to bangladesh.
Well while there are quite a few of us who are utterly ashamed at the behavior of our government, and the pathetic empire-building track to hell it's on, It's not always easy to get into Canada unless you're wealthy.
I've been trying since early 2002.
I did the math, and figured that I would make quite a bit more money living and working in canada, even with your higher tax rates. it's not about the tax, it's about what I get for my taxes- universal health care, low cost provincial auto insurance, etc.
Fellow Americans- do the math on what you pay for auto insurance, health care, co-pays, deductibles... and you'll see Canada has more to offer. plus better TV/Radio. and no "American Idol".
Some people were raised and taught in a system that enforces correct spelling (and grammar, although the US educational system eliminated that in the late 70's/early 80's). After a long childhood of being penalized for incorrect spelling, punctuation, and the like it's not surprising that some people have fixations bordering on anal retentive levels.
That said, I really don't think it takes too much effort to check your spelling, especially if you are someone who has a problem with it- it helps you to come across more fluidly, as spelling mistakes can be quite jarring to those who can spell correctly.
Also, people who became English majors in college need to have something to justify their existence, since we know they are all useless otherwise:)
Until you live in a place where the temperature drops below -30 F or more for weeks on end, shut the hell up. If I can deal with walking to and from the bus stop and work in that weather, your weak southern ass can.
5 minutes? up here 5 minutes outside with no good protection would freeze you to death.
that, and your reference to ice tells me that you live somewhere that consistently fluctuates around the freezing mark in the wintertime- that means some southern state. blah. go away and get some balls.
CCIE's to start make well over 100k/yr, or much much more depending on additional certifications/skillsets (financial securities certs, CISSP, etc). to have your compliance certs (securities firms) and your CISSP, on top of a CCIE, will garner you 200k/yr easily to start.
Please don't confuse the years of work and study that go into a CCIE with a CCNA, or your pathetic time making pong games out of christmas lights at college.
But the so-called lower-end jobs (and yes, I know that there are more advanced sub-divisions of each of these, but I'm talking about entry-level to mid-level) - Networking, System Admin, Hardware, Support - are pretty easy to get into.
I don't know about you, but getting my CCIE wasn't easy, and I'll throw my skills up against any "programmer" any day.
I get very tired reading about people who assume that programmers are somehow the elite. bleh. you're monkeys at the keyboards.
Saudi Arabia is the real seat of problems, not just for the west but for the arab world as well. Wahhabism is NOT a healthy or sane form of Islam, and should be rooted out by muslims everywhere.
You'll note we are doing nothing to stop Saudi Arabia, even though most of the personnel and financing for insanity in the middle east and elsewhere comes from them.
hehe... that reminds of an experience I had with a Tektronix Phaser. I worked for a large health insurance provider, and they had picked the tektronix phasers because they printed the company's logo the most precisely (ONLY reason!) these are the sort with the blocks of melted wax for printing- thermal wax or whatever they are called.
I had to move one of these, and it being my first time seeing one, I didn't know you have to let it cool off for about an hour for the wax to harden first. So I moved it, and unbeknownst to me it pour hot, molten wax all over the internal circuit boards. I toasted a $3500 printer! woohoo.
and, of course, every other time I had to move them, I'd turn them off- go away for an hour and come back, and they'd be turned back on again by someone who needed to print something. I had to resort to not only turning them off, posting a sign, but also taking the power cord and duct taping the floor outlets closed. (nobody but me would crawl on the floor and get dirty, apparently.)
What a blast. your mention of them brings back such fond memories...
Canon's bubblejet/inkjet printers are pretty decent, although they're not much different than most printers of that type (in that their life expectancy is pretty short.)
They make up for it in the ink department though - it's still not cheap, but most of the canon line features individual ink cartridges, so you just need to replace the ones that run empty. this is a good thing, as everyone else just makes one big "color" cartridge, designed to waste your money.
Can you imagine if color laserjets were like that? I'll bet the printer manufacturers would love it!
bullshit. I *LIVE* in a strawbale house, and the straw is packed so tightly there's no chance anything is getting in there.
unless your friend is one of the many lame hippies that infest the strawbale community, who seem to confuse "hay" with "straw".
insect OR rodent infestation is extremely difficult in most well designed strawbale structures, as well as providing superinsulated soundproof walls that withstand heat way beyond anything your stick house would sustain.
cob is OK, it's in the same category as rammed earth and/or adobe. they're great building materials in the right environment, but they can get really ugly if you don't plan correctly for drainage, etc.
we had to put extra-large overhangs on our roof to accomodate rainfall, so we have a much better chance of maintaining lower internal strawbale moisture. it's all about thinking about what you're going to do, rather than listening to some dumbass contractor suggesting 2x6's and rollup insulation. sheesh.
you are EXACTLY right - I loved that card until that little fucking tab broke off, and then it just wouldn't work anymore. I tried to glue it back on, make a new one, etc etc... nothing.
I went through two of them, and finally I gave up. those were expensive cards, too.
it doesn't quite work like that- the bandwidth you might have over your own AS, or your own controlled network, might cost you "nothing", or be a planned expected amount. you figure for this, and it's not a huge deal.
the traffic you have to pay for- the amount of data you're plowing through peering points, or all those freeloading P2P users grabbing anime from japanese users... that costs, and can cost big. most ISPs like to try to keep down that out-of-net data, and so many use things like caching servers, etc. (I'm not an ISP, never have worked for one, and have no interest in doing so, so feel free to slam me here on nitpicky details.)
different types of bandwidth cost different amounts; if you were my neighbour and were downloading from my fileshare over our quasi-local network, nobody is hurt. if you're in sweden, then my ISP (and your ISP) are paying for that data movement.
thusly, if you have a DS3 that's not flat-rate, as it probably isn't, you aren't going to pay as much if it's not fully used. I guess it depends on your ISPs infrastructure design.
for that matter, a fractional DS3 is usually break-even at some point to several DS1's, and SHARPS service makes up for that extra cost- having redundant SONET loops is a big plus when johnny contractor is playing with the backhoe.
Windows does have an implementation like that- it's Alt-Tab. Control-Tab does the same thing that it does in mac OS, and KDE/Gnome/whatever; Alt-Tab switches between windows in an active app, like an irc prog, word, what have you.
This only works if your app uses that UI paradigm, though. I prefer MDI myself, ala Mozilla or Opera.
I happen to own the Sager notebook that the previous article referenced (the alienware machine is a rebadged sager unit, at a higher cost.) I use it for a ton of RAW file conversions and it lays the smack down on my G4 mac, hands down.
I've completely stopped using the mac for all my conversion needs- maybe this app would be better, but really the speed difference is significant between the two platforms.
Maybe if I was willing to shell out $4k (USD) for a newer mac platform, just to get a few minutes faster at conversion, I could get some speed-up- but for that price I could buy two more of these laptops, with 2.8/3.06 Ghz procs and a gig of RAM. That's the typical Mac owner's conundrum.:)
Mind you, someone could write a SSE2 enabled RAW file converter, and it would perform the same way. hand crafted code that's optimized for speed using specialty CPU features is good for everyone, regardless of platform.
Now if only this guy could make CF cards transfer faster:)
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It has less to do with an "off the record" conversation, and more to do with the fact that all written client communication is covered under heavy regulatory rules. Client communications are mandated to be archived for 7 years, and email ( and IM ) fall under that. IM has been unregulated until now, so that's why this is a big deal ( nobody issued any statements about it from a regulatory standpoint.)
if you HAVE TO archive it and supervise it's use, that's a pain in the butt, and if you don't do an adequate job for that you can be shut down and/or fined heavily. that's what is important.
it's not a matter of coming up with a slick solution to log stuff, or writing fancy scripts; it's a big financial risk and a regulatory problem. you need to display a truly bulletproof system that not only completely controls all access, but logs all of that material regardless of the client used.
Furthermore, you THEN have to have a complete supervisory procedure to go through that material looking for compliance violations. This equates to either an army of compliance officers, or very slick software designed for this purpose that flags content based on complex rules. It's really not all that easy- you also have to do the math on the business cost of violations, since you'll be catching them post-event. All that does is prove someone screwed up, and that's what leads most firms to block IM.
Larger institutional equity firms, however, have taken to IM in a big way- because their customers are fund managers and the like, who have less restrictive rules since they are expected to know what they are doing (unlike joe sixpack investor). I know another IT director who had a major client insist they have direct IM access to their trading desk, otherwise they were pulling all their accounts.
But seriously, if you think it's just some simple script job or whatever, you need to look into the world of hurt we have with email- try having to archive every single email for 7 years. and I don't mean just backing up, I mean truly archiving every little scrap of mail before the client even sees it, and having it reviewed through a compliance department, and archived with comments and/or other bits of metadata. then it has to go to OPTICAL MEDIA (that gets expensive fast!), with multiple copies, which must go offsite ASAP, but still be available within hours, and be fully indexed blah blah blah. I know others in the industry who deal with mail volume approaching a terabyte/week. now hold on to that for 7 years.
Regulatory compliance drives the storage business.
Specific sorts of professionals are exempt, and management is exempt. There's a special stipulation with regards to computer professionals, but it mandates that you must either be in management, or making more than $27.63 an hour (from the last time I looked at the regs).
So, if you're making in excess of $57k/year, and the majority of your work is self directed (or you are in management) then you're somewhat screwed.
State labor laws are also important here- State law cannot weaken the federal law ( if your employer falls under it) but it can make it stronger with more requirements. Check with your State wages and dues/labor/workforce department. They will also come in and investigate if you so desire, and can mandate that employers pay up to 2 years of back wages if they are found to have you wrongfully exempted.
have fun. it's never easy.
Mind you, when they embed the RFID in your hand or forehead, then the fun really begins :)
Anyone else ever wonder if the Christian Right will wake up from their Bush induced trance when they pull some "book of revelations" inspired nonsense?
In some ways, I'm really curious to see what all those southern Baptists do when something like that happens. Hopefully they'll come to, and start fearing the things they've been promoting on the wagon-train of destruction.
I'm guessing you've never been the target of identity theft. You'd change your mind pretty damn quick about that.
n itored hell of a world. It's enough to make a sane man move to bangladesh.
Anonymous payments are a fundamental part of our society, as well as a constitutional expectation of personal privacy. soon both will be gone, and you'll be in a direct-marketing-credit-controlled-transaction-mo
ugh.
I've been trying since early 2002.
I did the math, and figured that I would make quite a bit more money living and working in canada, even with your higher tax rates. it's not about the tax, it's about what I get for my taxes- universal health care, low cost provincial auto insurance, etc.
Fellow Americans- do the math on what you pay for auto insurance, health care, co-pays, deductibles... and you'll see Canada has more to offer. plus better TV/Radio. and no "American Idol".
I routinely let friends borrow my dog for a few days to take care of their rabbit problems.
That's the upside of rescuing starving dogs from farms- they are used to providing their own food.
2 weeks ago he cleared out 14 rabbits in 3 days for a guy down the road. great little mutt.
Some people were raised and taught in a system that enforces correct spelling (and grammar, although the US educational system eliminated that in the late 70's/early 80's). After a long childhood of being penalized for incorrect spelling, punctuation, and the like it's not surprising that some people have fixations bordering on anal retentive levels.
:)
That said, I really don't think it takes too much effort to check your spelling, especially if you are someone who has a problem with it- it helps you to come across more fluidly, as spelling mistakes can be quite jarring to those who can spell correctly.
Also, people who became English majors in college need to have something to justify their existence, since we know they are all useless otherwise
missouri? please.
:)
you're funny
Until you live in a place where the temperature drops below -30 F or more for weeks on end, shut the hell up. If I can deal with walking to and from the bus stop and work in that weather, your weak southern ass can.
5 minutes? up here 5 minutes outside with no good protection would freeze you to death.
that, and your reference to ice tells me that you live somewhere that consistently fluctuates around the freezing mark in the wintertime- that means some southern state. blah. go away and get some balls.
You seriously think that IRAN or Syria is as much of a threat to world stability and safety as Wahhabi Arabia?
the Kingdom NEEDS TO FALL
CCIE's to start make well over 100k/yr, or much much more depending on additional certifications/skillsets (financial securities certs, CISSP, etc). to have your compliance certs (securities firms) and your CISSP, on top of a CCIE, will garner you 200k/yr easily to start.
Please don't confuse the years of work and study that go into a CCIE with a CCNA, or your pathetic time making pong games out of christmas lights at college.
I don't know about you, but getting my CCIE wasn't easy, and I'll throw my skills up against any "programmer" any day.
I get very tired reading about people who assume that programmers are somehow the elite. bleh. you're monkeys at the keyboards.
Saudi Arabia is the real seat of problems, not just for the west but for the arab world as well. Wahhabism is NOT a healthy or sane form of Islam, and should be rooted out by muslims everywhere.
You'll note we are doing nothing to stop Saudi Arabia, even though most of the personnel and financing for insanity in the middle east and elsewhere comes from them.
Down with the Kingdom!
somebody mod the parent post up! it's amazingly relevant to you stupid idiots who are unaware of what our ancestors died for to give you.
hehe... that reminds of an experience I had with a Tektronix Phaser. I worked for a large health insurance provider, and they had picked the tektronix phasers because they printed the company's logo the most precisely (ONLY reason!) these are the sort with the blocks of melted wax for printing- thermal wax or whatever they are called.
I had to move one of these, and it being my first time seeing one, I didn't know you have to let it cool off for about an hour for the wax to harden first. So I moved it, and unbeknownst to me it pour hot, molten wax all over the internal circuit boards. I toasted a $3500 printer! woohoo.
and, of course, every other time I had to move them, I'd turn them off- go away for an hour and come back, and they'd be turned back on again by someone who needed to print something. I had to resort to not only turning them off, posting a sign, but also taking the power cord and duct taping the floor outlets closed. (nobody but me would crawl on the floor and get dirty, apparently.)
What a blast. your mention of them brings back such fond memories...
Canon's bubblejet/inkjet printers are pretty decent, although they're not much different than most printers of that type (in that their life expectancy is pretty short.)
They make up for it in the ink department though - it's still not cheap, but most of the canon line features individual ink cartridges, so you just need to replace the ones that run empty. this is a good thing, as everyone else just makes one big "color" cartridge, designed to waste your money.
Can you imagine if color laserjets were like that? I'll bet the printer manufacturers would love it!
bullshit. I *LIVE* in a strawbale house, and the straw is packed so tightly there's no chance anything is getting in there.
unless your friend is one of the many lame hippies that infest the strawbale community, who seem to confuse "hay" with "straw".
insect OR rodent infestation is extremely difficult in most well designed strawbale structures, as well as providing superinsulated soundproof walls that withstand heat way beyond anything your stick house would sustain.
cob is OK, it's in the same category as rammed earth and/or adobe. they're great building materials in the right environment, but they can get really ugly if you don't plan correctly for drainage, etc.
we had to put extra-large overhangs on our roof to accomodate rainfall, so we have a much better chance of maintaining lower internal strawbale moisture. it's all about thinking about what you're going to do, rather than listening to some dumbass contractor suggesting 2x6's and rollup insulation. sheesh.
standard construction = WinME
you funny, silly people down south.
:)
frost line is one thing, but 60 degrees below zero is another
good luck, bugs.
Mind you, moral arguments about operating systems sound rather humorous in the context of which application lets you steal content faster :)
you are EXACTLY right - I loved that card until that little fucking tab broke off, and then it just wouldn't work anymore. I tried to glue it back on, make a new one, etc etc... nothing.
I went through two of them, and finally I gave up. those were expensive cards, too.
you put it very well, much better than I could. kudos.
it doesn't quite work like that- the bandwidth you might have over your own AS, or your own controlled network, might cost you "nothing", or be a planned expected amount. you figure for this, and it's not a huge deal.
the traffic you have to pay for- the amount of data you're plowing through peering points, or all those freeloading P2P users grabbing anime from japanese users... that costs, and can cost big. most ISPs like to try to keep down that out-of-net data, and so many use things like caching servers, etc. (I'm not an ISP, never have worked for one, and have no interest in doing so, so feel free to slam me here on nitpicky details.)
different types of bandwidth cost different amounts; if you were my neighbour and were downloading from my fileshare over our quasi-local network, nobody is hurt. if you're in sweden, then my ISP (and your ISP) are paying for that data movement.
thusly, if you have a DS3 that's not flat-rate, as it probably isn't, you aren't going to pay as much if it's not fully used. I guess it depends on your ISPs infrastructure design.
for that matter, a fractional DS3 is usually break-even at some point to several DS1's, and SHARPS service makes up for that extra cost- having redundant SONET loops is a big plus when johnny contractor is playing with the backhoe.
Windows does have an implementation like that- it's Alt-Tab. Control-Tab does the same thing that it does in mac OS, and KDE/Gnome/whatever; Alt-Tab switches between windows in an active app, like an irc prog, word, what have you.
This only works if your app uses that UI paradigm, though. I prefer MDI myself, ala Mozilla or Opera.
I happen to own the Sager notebook that the previous article referenced (the alienware machine is a rebadged sager unit, at a higher cost.) I use it for a ton of RAW file conversions and it lays the smack down on my G4 mac, hands down.
:)
:)
I've completely stopped using the mac for all my conversion needs- maybe this app would be better, but really the speed difference is significant between the two platforms.
Maybe if I was willing to shell out $4k (USD) for a newer mac platform, just to get a few minutes faster at conversion, I could get some speed-up- but for that price I could buy two more of these laptops, with 2.8/3.06 Ghz procs and a gig of RAM. That's the typical Mac owner's conundrum.
Mind you, someone could write a SSE2 enabled RAW file converter, and it would perform the same way. hand crafted code that's optimized for speed using specialty CPU features is good for everyone, regardless of platform.
Now if only this guy could make CF cards transfer faster