My kid and his cousin both give a big thumbs up to Animorphs. They devoured them, and the length was perfect for an eight year old. There are a few cultural references in them that are aimed for adults (I saw a Babylon 5 reference in one), but they are easy to gloss over.
I was thinking you were one of the managers I work with everyday until you said IT can't really take advantage of it. Your datacenter is probably manned only by a few people, and when your application's servers go down, they just call in a contractor who is asked to please turn the lights back off when they're done. Even the IT folks have never touched the hardware for the most part.
I've seen cases where the employer thinks it is work ethic, employees are truly just terrified and afraid. No one wants to be the first one to look like they are slacking off.
Upper management has to take the steps themselves, telling people "I only will respond to a fire or equivalent call after hours", leaving on time and not coming in extra early. That sends a message more thoroughly than anything you could say.
Even if you decide to quietly check your email after hours, never send one after hours.
Make your actions speak for you, it's the only way to truly convince others.
We did it the opposite direction, the starting hour has moved back to 07:00 or earlier for some. Then around 17:00-18:00 you take an hour or two off for dinner, and if anything is remotely important, are often expected to work at least one more hour.
The problem isn't that vacation days are scheduled "on paper", but that people don't actually take those vacations, or don't feel like they are allowed to take them for real.
Companies schedule vacation days now because it's carried as a fiscal impact on their statements. I'm waiting for companies to explicitly require "vacation" to be scheduled evenly throughout the year. Have ten days vacation? Must take 3 days by April 30, 5 days by June 30, etc. Of course this would be combined with being expected to continue to respond to emails during those scheduled days off.
Similar situation here, though maybe not so obvious.
Officially, we are ordered to take all scheduled vacation days, required to schedule them early in the year.
In reality, we are expected to attend meetings, check email, and do work while on vacation, despite official policy prohibiting such. Anyone who doesn't work at least five to ten hours of overtime per week is "not being a team player" and "not understanding the significance of the priority of the project." Supervising managers are expected to frequently work twelve hour days or more, and a vacation day means that they might only work eight hours that day, attending meetings, responding to email, etc.
The Icelandic sagas are a few hundred years older and contain all the elements of a fantasy I would expect to see. Many of them were written after the Christianization of Iceland.
Close by? Don't you mean "within a hundred yards and not sheltered by sound proofing?"
In fairness to the slightly cheaper instruments (e.g. at the $1200 price point instead of the $3000 price point), sometimes, the luthiers get lucky and hit a good combination to make a cheaper instrument sound like a much higher quality one. I've seen this recently on a viola I purchased for my child. The $1200 instrument was clearly outperforming the higher priced instrument.
However, any instrument needs to be carefully adjusted to get the best tonal quality out of it. That $1200 viola? It had the strings replaced with a different set better for that instrument, the sound post was adjusted, and a few other things done to clean up a less than stellar tonal quality on the upper half of the A and D strings. The C and G strings were excellent. (The sudden change in tonal quality is what told me to suggest a sound post adjustment, it was starting surprisingly close to harmonic points and consistent through the rest of the fingerboard, not just a single wolf note). Using a bow that works well with the instrument also makes a big difference.
And speakers so loud that I can't even sit there through the previews without a massive headache? Sometimes the staff will turn it down, half the time they say they will and actually don't. Theaters seem to prefer volumes set for people who need hearing aids and don't want to use them.
I'm told that a very small number of diet sources actually have resources for people who need to gain weight. Real dietitians are used to weight gain diets. The challenge I gave the dietitian was for me to gain weight and not disturb my wife's diet as she was losing weight. (The answer was an attempt to get me to toss in more nuts on my salad and switch me to home made vinegar and oil salad dressing.) I didn't gain, but I stopped losing, which was held to be a partial victory.
It makes an amusing case at my job. One coworker has a medical condition requiring very regular meals. I'm supposed to never forget to eat (which I do regularly already, and instead of grabbing a candy bar or chips like a normal person, I simply wait until the next regularly scheduled meal.) Yet work doesn't actually offer a break from the endless meetings to actually eat lunch. Rarely do I have less than three days a week where I have solid meetings from well before to well after traditional lunch times.
Sunday: Home made chicken and onion barbecue folded calzone Monday: Onion focacia. Tuesday: Pineapple and ham on lightly risen pizza dough with light sauce. Wednesday: Chicago style deep dish onion, green pepper and tomato pizza casserole Thursday: Sausage and onion yogurt bread roll-up Friday: Apple bread topped with cooked apples and cinnamon (a la "dessert pizza") Saturday: Spinach and beef ravioli (because I ran out of pizza variations, and this at least uses many ingredients of pizza)
Store bought pizza has too much fat. Home made pizza doesn't need much at all. The main place I use fat on the above pizza like dishes I've made is either inherent in the meat, or if I'm putting a sauce directly onto uncooked dough to prevent it from soaking in too much.
Literally, the only one I have not made is combining apple bread (which I have made) with an apple/cinnamon topping (which I have made).
Pizza's main problem I've seen is that it has more calories in it than one expects by size and time to eat, so you eat a lot more food than you realize before you are full. This is also the case with many other dishes, including those popular at fast food joints.
Your chicken is very cheap. In this area, the going standard most of the year is $2.50/lb. (I say this as my wife records prices every week and tracks sales).
The real problem I've seen is so few people are taught how to cook real life meals, the kind of cooking that involves five minutes in the kitchen the day before. Putting meat in the fridge to thaw out for the next day. Putting on a crock pot to slow cook something so you come home to an almost completely prepared meal, or a key ingredient (like beans) ready to cook with. How to cook home meals in a microwave so that you are eating in fifteen minutes, not an hour.
Those that I know who I've met who got food stamps (my wife likes to try and volunteer and help such people regularly) didn't know how to cook. The notion that one could put beans and water in a crock pot and let it cook overnight, only to replace the water with a few vegetables the next morning and have a full dinner that night? Unheard of. The very basics of surprisingly cheap spices so that the person doesn't get so tired of the dish that they just go back to that bag of chips and soda because they taste better than the same unflavored meals they've had for months.
Food pantries here often offer seasonal vegetables, but the people getting them often have no idea how to use them. Acorn squash is a good example. I know to look up squash soup, or several other dishes, but the person who got them recently wasn't even sure that they were edible, nevermind how to prepare it.
Often, the poor have a very small place and thus may not have the right tools to prepare as good meals. The crock pot I mentioned above is something they have to decide if they even have space for.
Smaller families and the working single poor person will also have more problems convincing themselves to make the proper sides. It's just more enjoyable to cook for a few people than to only cook for oneself.
I'm not saying that it can't be done, but education would help a great deal. Making available more guides for how to prepare meals around a working schedule and the tools actually available to such a home would help. Too many "quick meals" are based on the dog food diet -- open three different cans, slop them in the bowl together.
Most of the time I've been in a car with someone else, the passenger has very little awareness of what's going on around them from a driving perspective. This has been evidenced by how many times the driver had to take action like braking slightly and suddenly startled the passenger, even though it wasn't hitting the brakes hard, say a car ahead tapped the brakes, and to keep appropriate distance in case the car ahead was going to suddenly decelerate (which happens with depressing frequency) so that an accident can be avoided.
Throw in parents of non-driving children, and you're lucky if they realize you've actually stopped and are getting out.
I've used probably half a dozen word processors in the past fifteen years or so, from MS Works, to IBM Works for OS/2, to DeScribe (proprietary word processor) for OS/2, and so on. I've written and edited multiple documents each over two hundred pages long.
MS Word '97 was the standard that I still compare everything to. Not any later version. OpenOffice is what I ended up using for the past decade, though I recently switched to LibreOffice. My usage model consists of weekly imports of segments of MS Word documents, editing (with track changes), and saving those edits back out to send to someone to read in their various versions of MS Word. Some used odd word processors (e.g. Apple Pages in one case).
I've found that the complaints against OpenOffice were never against areas I ever encountered. I'm doing stylesheet based writing with a custom stylesheet and it just works. The export/import worked remarkably smoothly, only one complaint, and that was in page numbering. (When the page number exceeded approximately 256, it wrapped back to 1 on my copy but no one else's).
The shortcuts were trivial for me and meshed well. Most importantly, I'm able to read my documents from over ten years ago without difficulty. That's the single most important factor for me. Can I still open my files without problems?
No, I'm not putting down images in my documents. I'm writing text. But if I want to change editing items, I want them changed everywhere, hence the stylesheet usage.
I've had to help those who used MS Office before, and have to use it for work. '97 was quite usable. The new version has been getting in my way. Some recent/. discussions may make it usable enough for me, but it still fails that "just lets me work" test. LibreOffice passes that test.
How do I, three months later after people have legitimately added custom log events, validate every location that gets security events? How can I prove that the logging is correct because I can't just check in a single configuration? (Don't get me started on how this file should be checked in on every system. Just... don't.)
My other suggestion to RH was to provide a parser like logger that I can provide an arbitrary log message and it will tell me the destination. I doubt it will be created though.
My experience parsing syslog is very different than yours. We had to think a bit about our filters, but one of our best advantages has been the flexibility of syslog.
kernel upgrades in RHEL our one of the banes of the production SA team I work with. (I'm on the security team). Eventually, they are forced to do so, and it breaks a ton of things that RH provides, not to mention our apps.
Look at what log events you are generating. That's a bit on the high side unless your "small installation" is closer to a thousand systems. (We're an order of magnitude higher than you, but we are not a small shop).
A lot of log analysis is looking at those events and determining "this is not a security log, able to cut." or other log analysis to winnow down events that are not required to be retained for a long period of time.
Of course "searchable" has been subject to very interesting interpretations. Most locations and audit rules define it as searchable if you can produce results of the past few months in a day or so and the rest within a few days. (Backup archives count if you can recover reasonably quickly).
Actually, they already have. Red Hat made a real brain dead decision already, and not just in Fedora, on syslog.
We didn't complain about inetadm or svcs. We actually liked those as soon as we saw them. But the lack of syslog on RHEL 6? That's a blocking bug on RHEL 6 certification. No, rsyslog is not syslog. It cannot be monitored to ensure that regardless of the rest of the configuration, it is sending security data appropriately. It tries to send an incompatible format that my other three major platforms (Solaris, HP-UX and AIX) don't use, which of course breaks all my centralized logging infrastructure.
Actually, I work in security logging in a very large environment. The last thing we permit is ripping out syslog on generic systems. We do send a copy of the logs to a central system, but we don't allow the client systems to be touched.
The central copy cannot be tampered with. The local copy is not for security, but stability and immediate usage.
There is no such thing as a secure local log, and pretending otherwise is shameful. As to reliability, you get to pick between two evils. The possibility of logs not being delivered, or the possibility of logs not being delivered. The more complex the protocol, the more likely it is that a message gets devoured by the system. Simple protocols may not have guaranteed delivery, but their simplicity has actually helped ensure things just Don't Go Wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
My kid and his cousin both give a big thumbs up to Animorphs. They devoured them, and the length was perfect for an eight year old. There are a few cultural references in them that are aimed for adults (I saw a Babylon 5 reference in one), but they are easy to gloss over.
Any password policy that permits an end user to have a password as sufficient authentication is broken.
Go to strong authentication, and be done with the whole "one memorized token alone is of value" concept.
I was thinking you were one of the managers I work with everyday until you said IT can't really take advantage of it. Your datacenter is probably manned only by a few people, and when your application's servers go down, they just call in a contractor who is asked to please turn the lights back off when they're done. Even the IT folks have never touched the hardware for the most part.
I've seen cases where the employer thinks it is work ethic, employees are truly just terrified and afraid. No one wants to be the first one to look like they are slacking off.
Upper management has to take the steps themselves, telling people "I only will respond to a fire or equivalent call after hours", leaving on time and not coming in extra early. That sends a message more thoroughly than anything you could say.
Even if you decide to quietly check your email after hours, never send one after hours.
Make your actions speak for you, it's the only way to truly convince others.
That's being taken care of for us by upper management laying off large percentages of technical workers in a manner designed to destroy morale.
Management has already lost several truly key people to their attitudes. They just instructed those who were still around to pick up the slack.
We did it the opposite direction, the starting hour has moved back to 07:00 or earlier for some. Then around 17:00-18:00 you take an hour or two off for dinner, and if anything is remotely important, are often expected to work at least one more hour.
The problem isn't that vacation days are scheduled "on paper", but that people don't actually take those vacations, or don't feel like they are allowed to take them for real.
Companies schedule vacation days now because it's carried as a fiscal impact on their statements. I'm waiting for companies to explicitly require "vacation" to be scheduled evenly throughout the year. Have ten days vacation? Must take 3 days by April 30, 5 days by June 30, etc. Of course this would be combined with being expected to continue to respond to emails during those scheduled days off.
Similar situation here, though maybe not so obvious.
Officially, we are ordered to take all scheduled vacation days, required to schedule them early in the year.
In reality, we are expected to attend meetings, check email, and do work while on vacation, despite official policy prohibiting such. Anyone who doesn't work at least five to ten hours of overtime per week is "not being a team player" and "not understanding the significance of the priority of the project." Supervising managers are expected to frequently work twelve hour days or more, and a vacation day means that they might only work eight hours that day, attending meetings, responding to email, etc.
The Icelandic sagas are a few hundred years older and contain all the elements of a fantasy I would expect to see. Many of them were written after the Christianization of Iceland.
Close by? Don't you mean "within a hundred yards and not sheltered by sound proofing?"
In fairness to the slightly cheaper instruments (e.g. at the $1200 price point instead of the $3000 price point), sometimes, the luthiers get lucky and hit a good combination to make a cheaper instrument sound like a much higher quality one. I've seen this recently on a viola I purchased for my child. The $1200 instrument was clearly outperforming the higher priced instrument.
However, any instrument needs to be carefully adjusted to get the best tonal quality out of it. That $1200 viola? It had the strings replaced with a different set better for that instrument, the sound post was adjusted, and a few other things done to clean up a less than stellar tonal quality on the upper half of the A and D strings. The C and G strings were excellent. (The sudden change in tonal quality is what told me to suggest a sound post adjustment, it was starting surprisingly close to harmonic points and consistent through the rest of the fingerboard, not just a single wolf note). Using a bow that works well with the instrument also makes a big difference.
And speakers so loud that I can't even sit there through the previews without a massive headache? Sometimes the staff will turn it down, half the time they say they will and actually don't. Theaters seem to prefer volumes set for people who need hearing aids and don't want to use them.
I'm told that a very small number of diet sources actually have resources for people who need to gain weight. Real dietitians are used to weight gain diets. The challenge I gave the dietitian was for me to gain weight and not disturb my wife's diet as she was losing weight. (The answer was an attempt to get me to toss in more nuts on my salad and switch me to home made vinegar and oil salad dressing.) I didn't gain, but I stopped losing, which was held to be a partial victory.
It makes an amusing case at my job. One coworker has a medical condition requiring very regular meals. I'm supposed to never forget to eat (which I do regularly already, and instead of grabbing a candy bar or chips like a normal person, I simply wait until the next regularly scheduled meal.) Yet work doesn't actually offer a break from the endless meetings to actually eat lunch. Rarely do I have less than three days a week where I have solid meetings from well before to well after traditional lunch times.
You mean you don't like this menu?
Sunday: Home made chicken and onion barbecue folded calzone
Monday: Onion focacia.
Tuesday: Pineapple and ham on lightly risen pizza dough with light sauce.
Wednesday: Chicago style deep dish onion, green pepper and tomato pizza casserole
Thursday: Sausage and onion yogurt bread roll-up
Friday: Apple bread topped with cooked apples and cinnamon (a la "dessert pizza")
Saturday: Spinach and beef ravioli (because I ran out of pizza variations, and this at least uses many ingredients of pizza)
Store bought pizza has too much fat. Home made pizza doesn't need much at all. The main place I use fat on the above pizza like dishes I've made is either inherent in the meat, or if I'm putting a sauce directly onto uncooked dough to prevent it from soaking in too much.
Literally, the only one I have not made is combining apple bread (which I have made) with an apple/cinnamon topping (which I have made).
Pizza's main problem I've seen is that it has more calories in it than one expects by size and time to eat, so you eat a lot more food than you realize before you are full. This is also the case with many other dishes, including those popular at fast food joints.
Your chicken is very cheap. In this area, the going standard most of the year is $2.50/lb. (I say this as my wife records prices every week and tracks sales).
The real problem I've seen is so few people are taught how to cook real life meals, the kind of cooking that involves five minutes in the kitchen the day before. Putting meat in the fridge to thaw out for the next day. Putting on a crock pot to slow cook something so you come home to an almost completely prepared meal, or a key ingredient (like beans) ready to cook with. How to cook home meals in a microwave so that you are eating in fifteen minutes, not an hour.
Those that I know who I've met who got food stamps (my wife likes to try and volunteer and help such people regularly) didn't know how to cook. The notion that one could put beans and water in a crock pot and let it cook overnight, only to replace the water with a few vegetables the next morning and have a full dinner that night? Unheard of. The very basics of surprisingly cheap spices so that the person doesn't get so tired of the dish that they just go back to that bag of chips and soda because they taste better than the same unflavored meals they've had for months.
Food pantries here often offer seasonal vegetables, but the people getting them often have no idea how to use them. Acorn squash is a good example. I know to look up squash soup, or several other dishes, but the person who got them recently wasn't even sure that they were edible, nevermind how to prepare it.
Often, the poor have a very small place and thus may not have the right tools to prepare as good meals. The crock pot I mentioned above is something they have to decide if they even have space for.
Smaller families and the working single poor person will also have more problems convincing themselves to make the proper sides. It's just more enjoyable to cook for a few people than to only cook for oneself.
I'm not saying that it can't be done, but education would help a great deal. Making available more guides for how to prepare meals around a working schedule and the tools actually available to such a home would help. Too many "quick meals" are based on the dog food diet -- open three different cans, slop them in the bowl together.
So my butcher is lying when they label my roast as 4.34 pounds and no other unit for weight given?
Most of the time I've been in a car with someone else, the passenger has very little awareness of what's going on around them from a driving perspective. This has been evidenced by how many times the driver had to take action like braking slightly and suddenly startled the passenger, even though it wasn't hitting the brakes hard, say a car ahead tapped the brakes, and to keep appropriate distance in case the car ahead was going to suddenly decelerate (which happens with depressing frequency) so that an accident can be avoided.
Throw in parents of non-driving children, and you're lucky if they realize you've actually stopped and are getting out.
You assume passengers are over the age of 25.
I've used probably half a dozen word processors in the past fifteen years or so, from MS Works, to IBM Works for OS/2, to DeScribe (proprietary word processor) for OS/2, and so on. I've written and edited multiple documents each over two hundred pages long.
MS Word '97 was the standard that I still compare everything to. Not any later version. OpenOffice is what I ended up using for the past decade, though I recently switched to LibreOffice. My usage model consists of weekly imports of segments of MS Word documents, editing (with track changes), and saving those edits back out to send to someone to read in their various versions of MS Word. Some used odd word processors (e.g. Apple Pages in one case).
I've found that the complaints against OpenOffice were never against areas I ever encountered. I'm doing stylesheet based writing with a custom stylesheet and it just works. The export/import worked remarkably smoothly, only one complaint, and that was in page numbering. (When the page number exceeded approximately 256, it wrapped back to 1 on my copy but no one else's).
The shortcuts were trivial for me and meshed well. Most importantly, I'm able to read my documents from over ten years ago without difficulty. That's the single most important factor for me. Can I still open my files without problems?
No, I'm not putting down images in my documents. I'm writing text. But if I want to change editing items, I want them changed everywhere, hence the stylesheet usage.
I've had to help those who used MS Office before, and have to use it for work. '97 was quite usable. The new version has been getting in my way. Some recent /. discussions may make it usable enough for me, but it still fails that "just lets me work" test. LibreOffice passes that test.
Build wasn't the killer.
How do I, three months later after people have legitimately added custom log events, validate every location that gets security events? How can I prove that the logging is correct because I can't just check in a single configuration? (Don't get me started on how this file should be checked in on every system. Just ... don't.)
My other suggestion to RH was to provide a parser like logger that I can provide an arbitrary log message and it will tell me the destination. I doubt it will be created though.
My experience parsing syslog is very different than yours. We had to think a bit about our filters, but one of our best advantages has been the flexibility of syslog.
kernel upgrades in RHEL our one of the banes of the production SA team I work with. (I'm on the security team). Eventually, they are forced to do so, and it breaks a ton of things that RH provides, not to mention our apps.
Look at what log events you are generating. That's a bit on the high side unless your "small installation" is closer to a thousand systems. (We're an order of magnitude higher than you, but we are not a small shop).
A lot of log analysis is looking at those events and determining "this is not a security log, able to cut." or other log analysis to winnow down events that are not required to be retained for a long period of time.
Of course "searchable" has been subject to very interesting interpretations. Most locations and audit rules define it as searchable if you can produce results of the past few months in a day or so and the rest within a few days. (Backup archives count if you can recover reasonably quickly).
Actually, they already have. Red Hat made a real brain dead decision already, and not just in Fedora, on syslog.
We didn't complain about inetadm or svcs. We actually liked those as soon as we saw them. But the lack of syslog on RHEL 6? That's a blocking bug on RHEL 6 certification. No, rsyslog is not syslog. It cannot be monitored to ensure that regardless of the rest of the configuration, it is sending security data appropriately. It tries to send an incompatible format that my other three major platforms (Solaris, HP-UX and AIX) don't use, which of course breaks all my centralized logging infrastructure.
And in our shop, we shut down error report for all security logs (the ones we really care about in my team) and force it to be syslog only.
Actually, I work in security logging in a very large environment. The last thing we permit is ripping out syslog on generic systems. We do send a copy of the logs to a central system, but we don't allow the client systems to be touched.
The central copy cannot be tampered with. The local copy is not for security, but stability and immediate usage.
There is no such thing as a secure local log, and pretending otherwise is shameful. As to reliability, you get to pick between two evils. The possibility of logs not being delivered, or the possibility of logs not being delivered. The more complex the protocol, the more likely it is that a message gets devoured by the system. Simple protocols may not have guaranteed delivery, but their simplicity has actually helped ensure things just Don't Go Wrong.