Slashdot's homepage itself appears to try to
install MediaPlex
according to Spybot Search and Destroy ,
in its "resident" mode, so I'd say that the WORST spyware is the spyware that is installed when you are reading about
how bad spyware is on sites like THIS ONE!:)
It is just that simple.
Life is too short, and you are far too young
to be saddled with less-than supportive
management.
I dunno what the actual details are, but it
seems clear that you are being expected to
act several years older than you are. Perhaps
your management had unreasonable expectations
about your maturity, or perhaps you have made
a few moves that would be typical of a 19-yr-old,
moves that can only be described as
"a stupid faux pas".
You are not going to grow up fast enough to
please them, so go somewhere else, where
more reasonable expectations exist.
...and just for your information, there is no
legal basis for a claim of "age discrimination"
unless you are much, much older, or have been
somehow subjected to "reverse discrimination".
...and asking asking Slashdot for career help
is like being in the Special Olympics
even if you happen to do well, you are still retarded.
Yeah, but some of us have automated to the
point where "24x7" can means 24 days a
month, 7 months a year.:)
Regardless, it is a very good idea to at
least charge up one's cellphone, and put
new batteries in one's pager prior to
a holiday. One never knows, do one?
...and only a fool does not do at least
a cursory check, which is why I am online
at all right now.
Now, back to the high-stakes Scrabble game...
Man the NOC? All I need is this pager, Palm Pilot, and a bit of quiet.
Is it so hard to imagine pressing one of these
3 buttons at the same time as the keypad to
select an alpha character, and pressing only
the keypad to select a numeral?
This approach has been used with several
factory-floor handheld terminals since the
late 1970s, starting with Termiflex Corp of
Nashua, NH (usa).
Yes, the 3 buttons are a tad close together,
and yes, holding the phone in your right hand
while pushing the keypad with your left is
clearly a "left-handed" operation.
But nothing is stopping the creation of a
"right handed" version, is there?
On the one hand, we have a ruling by the WIPO
that considers the obvious, which is good.
On the other hand, we have a process where
judgement is made without a "defense" being
presented, which seems to ignore the concept of
"the process". This seems very bad.
Perhaps the point is that some issues are
obvious enough that the complaint is considered 100% without merit, and "dismissed" out of hand.
Typical slashdot... over-reacting with a
worse-case scenario, and assuming that the
resources exist to "target" every hyper-geek
on the planet. Tell it Mulder and Scully,
not someone who has fewer friends alive since 9/11/01.
The wide powers being sought are very specific
in intent, and I expect, application.
While the MAXIMUM penalties for cracking may increase, one can safely assume that script-kiddies
are not the focus of these "enhanced" laws.
There are not enough Feds, not enough hours in
the day, etc. etc.
In fact, one can see how techno-legal resources will soon be re-focused and triaged to point away from the usual "cracking"
foolishness, and toward more subtle activities.
That's another "typical slashdot move" - ignore
the actual POINT, which is that crackers are
likely to become a law-enforcement non-issue for all but the most serious incidents.
Both Bedford, VA and Muscatine Iowa pay my
little company to help them run their networks.
In Muscatine, the city IS the cable company,
so they offer both dial-up and cablemodem service,
and are the full-service ISP.
Bedford VA has fiber, and partners with the
local cable company to offer services, where
the fiber and the cablemodem systems are
integrated into a semi-cohesive whole. This
little project has been going on since 1995,
making this effort one of the first.
I'm sure that there are lots of towns and cities
that have done similar things.
Google wants to ARCHIVE things.
Just like DejaNews did.
To do so, they feel that they need "permission".
There is no harm in Google asking for a NON-EXCLUSIVE
license to simply keep a copy of your posting.
They are simply establishing a legal basis for doing so.
I remember a time long ago (1970ish) when UseNet
was full of stuff WORTH archiving.
(Most of you little brats were not even BORN at that point!)
I'm happy the Google will try to archive it all,
so one can keyword search one's way through the
festering cesspool that UseNET has become to find
the 1% of postings that are worth reading.
Betcha that your cablemodem's DHCP lease
expires every 24 hours, and it takes a
min or two for it to request and get a
new lease.
> Also every night between 11:45p m and
> 12:00 am I can't put any traffic across
> my modem for about 2 min. What's up with
> that? Routers rebuilding tables? Anybody know?
"Could you explain what you mean by "uncapping" a cable modem?"
This has been a subject of discussion on a
number of UseNet newsgroups and other
discussion forums. In short, providers offer
"tiers of service", each with a different
maximum transmit and receive speed. Some
folks want to know how they might overcome
this limitation, and remove the "speed cap".
In fact, it is impossible to do this in a
well-managed system.
"...and do you happen to know what frequencies, and how much bandwidth, they use?"
The cable company can use any frequency they
like. They can even move the frequency in
a matter of a few mins if they need to. Some
configurations even allow 'frequency hopping',
which allows a noise event to be detected and avoided. There are several different modulation schemes that can be used with
the same equipment, each supporting a different "channel bandwidth".
"...Does the cable company grab a 6 Mhz slot that they don't have a channel on and use that, or what?"
In essence, yes. The downstream frequency can
be any unused channel. There is also an upstream
frequency, which is most often a frequency that
is below the normal range for cable channels.
The downstream could be (for example) channel 67,
while the upstream is likely somewhere around
20Mhz.
Ignoring the ethical implications of your question...
If you suddenly "lost" channels that you had before, the cable company likely got around to "trapping" your drop, likely to prevent
your home from generating RF noise that might
mess up services to which you do not subscribe.
This means that your "free basic cable" is now limited to whatever a bandpass filter allows, likely an arbitrary group of channels that just happen to be between the downstream (usually the higher freq) and upstream (usually the lower freq) frequencies.
You can't "reprogram" your cablemodem to "get more channels". Cablemodems use only two frequencies (or bands thereof), which can be thought of as "channels". The cablemodem is not a "set-top box", and has nothing to do with TV channels.
You might check out your demarcation point (the box where the cable from your house meets the cable "from the pole"). You may find one or more silver cylinders about the size of a shotgun shell, each with a cable connector on each end.
Removal of one or more of those silver cylinders may restore your channels, but also makes you guilty of an actual criminal offense. At the price of cable, the downside risk is not worth the "reward". In past decades, each cable company made a big show of prosecuting one or two "cable thieves", but more recently, they have adopted a less fascist approach, making a big deal of "amnesty days", where people can "sign up" to keep their bootlegged service without paying for the prior period where the service was "bootlegged".
Those who are both hyper-technical and hyper-legalistic can read their state's laws, most which focus on "illegal CONNECTIONS" to the cable system, and figure out that any coax wire emits a certain amount of stray electromagnetic radiation, which can be picked up via antenna, amplified, and fed to a set-top box or cable-ready TV. This sort of activity may be protected under the "Freedom of the Airwaves" act, which, in general and with certain exceptions, allows anyone to enjoy whatever they can receive with a radio.
Of course, running an antenna "upstream" of the filters but very near your cable drop and working out a very wide-band amplifier may be more trouble and expense than the cable bill.
To be honest, you make me sick. Your cable company is enlightened enough to offer you cablemodem service without "bundling" it with
even basic cable service, allowing you to buy
exactly what you want, nothing more. Your reaction to the situation is to whine when the
free side-effects of your cablemodem service become limited.
...and before you ask, no, I'm not going to tell
you how to "uncap" your cablemodem. None of us are. You are clearly a looser, and civilization
does not need another clueless looser wasting
serious bandwidth.
I smoke, as real programmers program on
nothing more than caffine and nicotine
as they code down to the bare iron, so
I can attest to the impact of long-term
close range smoke. The first thing to go is
the cute little CPU fan.
This makes sense, since you know that airflow
is highest through this fan.
The sad fact is that all these management books (except "The Mythical Man-Month") forget that great software is constantly developed by smaller, less formalized teams working under ad-hoc conditons.
The infamous "garage shops" consistently run circles around the established firms that have the money and the time to implement all the latest management-voodo psycho-babble "best practices" processes.
Books like this are enjoyed by non-technical managers, since they encourage the cookbook application of "practices" upon the technical staff, and promise that management can avoid the basic issue of understanding the technical work at hand well enough to contribute.
How many different management-imposed failures need to be experienced before they wise up? Sadly, they never do, as there is a never-ending supply of fresh-faced wannabe managers with little or no understanding of the work that they are supposed to manage.
Shall we list the failures? 4GLs, Booch et al, client-server, "widgets" and other re-use of code, and nearly every attempt by groups larger than a dozen people.
On the success side, we have thousands of public domain packages, all done in "spare time", with minimal management of any sort.
No amount of neatly packaged happytalk can dance around the basic fact that software requires either very close cooperation between like-minded developers, or a facist, single-minded design that is strictly enforced. There IS no middle ground!
The concept of "management" is based upon
an incorrect assumption, that people must
be watched over, controlled, and dominated.
This has never been true, if the employees are
motivated and LED by someone they trust.
Leadership is a very different skill from any
other, but one of the components of leadership
is a solid grasp of the "technical details".
For example, I never made claims about my coding ability, but you can be damn sure that I made
sure that I could at least read and understand
the code being written.
An easy way to start being a leader is to
simply make a list of all the "bad things"
about managers, and avoid doing them, for
example:
Don't appear to be arbritrary - explain your rationale when announcing a decision.
Don't be petty - make sure that the "little things" run smoothly, like office supplies and
coke machine refills.
Stick to schedules and definitions. Defend
your people by defending their reality.
Motivate your people, don't patronize them.
Allow your staff to present sucess to upper
management on your behalf - you do not need to
take the credit, and your team's sucess IS your
success.
When you do out of town, have one of your
reports "be you", and rotate the "hot seat"
duty amongst all direct reports. Encourage them
to make decisions when you are gone, and then
make them LIVE WITH those decisions. This will
allow them to see how difficult YOUR task is.
Of course, none of this makes you an actual
leader. A leader must have the ability to
CHOOSE a direction or a goal from several
options, and the power to provide his people with the tools, time, and support required to attain the goal.
Therefore, leadership starts at the top, not
at the bottom or the middle, which explains
why so many managers jump ship so often - they
are looking for leadership themselves.
Long, long before Bill Gates, Altair, or
the Homebrew Computer Club, there was Digital
Equipment Corporation's PDP-8 series of machines. To program these beasties, one
had a choice of the "switch register" (which
gave many people, myself included, a permanent
callus on their index finger), or the noisy
KSR-33 Teletypewriter, with handy paper-tape
reader attached.
DEC sold all sorts of software for the PDP-8 series, but I
never saw a single paper tape with a professional-looking label in years of work/play/messing about. Draw your own conclusions...
Programs were considered a way to show one's mental superiority, so everyone was happy to
make copies of their code for others. We felt complimented when asked for copies.
How did programmers earn a living? Well, not off EACH OTHER, that's for sure!
The concept of "free software" was nothing more than a basis for earning prestige among one's peers. When "paying work" came knocking, one could be sure that multiple people would mention YOUR name as being a good (perhaps the best!) person for that job. In short, we made money off COMPANIES, and gave freely to each other, not only of our time, but also of our code.
Bill Gates saw programmers themselves as "a market", and contributed NOTHING to the community
of programmers, but instead, made himself known with his whining little letter, assuring himself of,FROM DAY ONE , the distain of both his betters and peers, if not actual dinner reservations in Hell.
His letter was widely circulated, greeted with snorts of disbelief, and ignored. The general consensus was that he had nothing to whine about, given that his so-called BASIC was worthless - it would not run "Star-Trek", "WUMPUS", or
"Adventure" (the 3 most popular games of the day) due to massive bugs in the code. (Funny how so little has changed in the decades that have gone by...)
Sheesh... do you twenty-somethings think that you invented "open source"? No way, you kids just wrapped all sorts of (silly) rules and (endless) talk around a situation that worked very well long before most of your parents were high school graduates.
We notice portscans quite often, as we have
boxes on most of our collision domains that
detect such activity.
But we do more a tad more than "notice".
The large majority of these port scans
end abruptly when our machines respond with
a series of well-known attacks, proving that the script kiddies can dish it out, but they can't take it.
The small number of scans that continue after
an automated response get exactly the sort of personal service and assistance they deserve.
We do no permanent damage, but we do respond
in a manner designed to both halt the packets
and deliver a clear message.
What's WRONG with portscanning? Nothing, as
long as you portscan a network you OWN, where
such activity may have value to as an admin.
...but don't portscan my networks.
Ever.
That's our job, and we don't need any "help".
And what's wrong with our response to portscanning?
Also nothing. We noticed unauthorized use of
our expensive network resources, and halted it
in the most humane manner possible.
First, Solaris 8 has some HA stuff in their distribution.
Second, HA Technical Solutions (http://www.tech-sol.com) has a "poor man's Veritas, that runs only $1500.
Third, one can certainly take a public-domain service-level monitor, such as BigBrother, and look at it as a set of inputs to a state machine that would load different DNS files and restart bind/named whatever, thereby redirecting traffic to servers that are known to be up.
1) AboveNet is a bandwidth provider to ORBS' ISP. As such, they use BGP to advertise at peering points (large) blocks of addresses that are reachable via their facilities.
2) In BGP, the most specific subnet "wins", so regardless of what AboveNet might or might not do, ORBS' ISP can insure that traffic to/from ORBS machines are advertised to its other bandwidth suppliers as more specific routes. The consensus over on inet-access (a respected ISP list) appears to be that ORBS' ISP has been unable or unwilling to do this.
3) Why would ORBS tolerate a situation where AboveNet is upstream of them? It is clear that the two groups have little love for each other. It appears that ORBS is standing on its own shoelaces, when they should have run, not walked, to an ISP that is 100% AboveNet-free. Since they have not done so, they appear to have helped to create this situation, and are thus suffering from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the foot.
4) While it is true that MAPS will soon offer a fee-based enhanced service, the existing MAPS service will remain free of charge.
5) AboveNet certainly has the right to block any and all packets from any sources it wishes. Since ORBS does invasive tests that consume mail server and network resources, AboveNet even has a valid reason to block traffic from ORBS. While only blocking traffic for ORBS to AboveNet's mail servers might be a "more elegant" solution, AboveNet is under no obligation to do this.
6) ORBS might have more respect and more supporters if not for their shocking lack of social skills. This is by no means the first time that ORBS has gone out of its way to be a pain in the neck to someone.
In a world of networks, PEOPLE must cooperate and be non-hostile for the networks to be "cooperative".
Printers are a nice percussion section, but we had actual WOODWINDS !
In the early 1980s, we (one of the "Super-minicomputer" firms - Systems Engineering Labs) had a bank of 4 6250bpi 9-Track tape drives in the R&D lab that had vacuum columns to keep the tape at the proper tension.
These drives made tones when rewinding and seeking. Needless to say, it was not long before (ahem) "Bach-up Tapes" were mounted, and a few Brandenburg Concertos were programmed.
Sadly, in those less "keel" days, everyone worried about being yelled at for abuse of company equipment, so it was kept quiet.
I still have the code (in FORTRAN-77) if anyone happens to have 4 9-Track tape drives with vacuum columns. (Roger Gourd, if you are reading this, yes, I still have readable backups of ALL the fun stuff from our SEL days.
The name of the module? "No Strings Attached", of course.
When a standards body is formed, few except those who have profits at stake take the time and trouble to serve on the commitee.
Is it any wonder that these groups come up with "solutions" that serve their needs rather than yours?
Given that "opt out" seems to be tolerated rather than punished in the US, we can expect no better. Europe seems to have a much better grasp on the subject of privacy as an absolute, rather than a relative thing.
Once one allows even a tiny amount of relativism into the mix, one can expect to have no privacy at all.
One is left to ponder how NetSol can "auction" something that NetSol claims is NOT PROPERTY.
If NetSol's posture in regard to "ownership" is contrasted with their new "auctions", this creates a possible basis for getting a court ruling that even NetSol (by its own actions) clearly agrees that the domain names themselves are "property".
What rationale would they have for charging a higher price for the SAME "service"?
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot's homepage itself appears to try to install MediaPlex according to Spybot Search and Destroy , in its "resident" mode, so I'd say that the WORST spyware is the spyware that is installed when you are reading about how bad spyware is on sites like THIS ONE! :)
NEVER Work For A Jerk
It is just that simple.
Life is too short, and you are far too young
to be saddled with less-than supportive
management.
I dunno what the actual details are, but it
seems clear that you are being expected to
act several years older than you are. Perhaps
your management had unreasonable expectations
about your maturity, or perhaps you have made
a few moves that would be typical of a 19-yr-old,
moves that can only be described as
"a stupid faux pas".
You are not going to grow up fast enough to
please them, so go somewhere else, where
more reasonable expectations exist.
legal basis for a claim of "age discrimination"
unless you are much, much older, or have been
somehow subjected to "reverse discrimination".
is like being in the Special Olympics
even if you happen to do well, you are still retarded.
Yeah, but some of us have automated to the :)
point where "24x7" can means 24 days a
month, 7 months a year.
Regardless, it is a very good idea to at
least charge up one's cellphone, and put
new batteries in one's pager prior to
a holiday. One never knows, do one?
a cursory check, which is why I am online
at all right now.
Now, back to the high-stakes Scrabble game...
Man the NOC? All I need is this pager, Palm
Pilot, and a bit of quiet.
Look at a Motorola StarTac.
It has three buttons on the SIDE of the unit.
They have various functions.
Is it so hard to imagine pressing one of these
3 buttons at the same time as the keypad to
select an alpha character, and pressing only
the keypad to select a numeral?
This approach has been used with several
factory-floor handheld terminals since the
late 1970s, starting with Termiflex Corp of
Nashua, NH (usa).
Yes, the 3 buttons are a tad close together,
and yes, holding the phone in your right hand
while pushing the keypad with your left is
clearly a "left-handed" operation.
But nothing is stopping the creation of a
"right handed" version, is there?
Lets see here...
On the one hand, we have a ruling by the WIPO
that considers the obvious, which is good.
On the other hand, we have a process where
judgement is made without a "defense" being
presented, which seems to ignore the concept of
"the process". This seems very bad.
Perhaps the point is that some issues are
obvious enough that the complaint is
considered 100% without merit,
and "dismissed" out of hand.
Perhaps there is basis for hope, after all.
Typical slashdot... over-reacting with a
worse-case scenario, and assuming that the
resources exist to "target" every hyper-geek
on the planet. Tell it Mulder and Scully,
not someone who has fewer friends alive since
9/11/01.
The wide powers being sought are very specific
in intent, and I expect, application.
While the MAXIMUM penalties for cracking may
increase, one can safely assume that script-kiddies
are not the focus of these "enhanced" laws.
There are not enough Feds, not enough hours in
the day, etc. etc.
In fact, one can see how techno-legal resources
will soon be re-focused and triaged
to point away from the usual "cracking"
foolishness, and toward more subtle activities.
That's another "typical slashdot move" - ignore
the actual POINT, which is that crackers are
likely to become a law-enforcement non-issue
for all but the most serious incidents.
Both Bedford, VA and Muscatine Iowa pay my
little company to help them run their networks.
In Muscatine, the city IS the cable company,
so they offer both dial-up and cablemodem
service, and are the full-service ISP.
Bedford VA has fiber, and partners with the
local cable company to offer services, where
the fiber and the cablemodem systems are
integrated into a semi-cohesive whole. This
little project has been going on since 1995,
making this effort one of the first.
I'm sure that there are lots of towns and cities
that have done similar things.
Just stop it.
Google wants to ARCHIVE things.
Just like DejaNews did.
To do so, they feel that they need "permission".
There is no harm in Google asking for a NON-EXCLUSIVE
license to simply keep a copy of your posting.
They are simply establishing a legal basis for doing so.
I remember a time long ago (1970ish) when UseNet
was full of stuff WORTH archiving.
(Most of you little brats were not even BORN at that point!)
I'm happy the Google will try to archive it all,
so one can keyword search one's way through the
festering cesspool that UseNET has become to find
the 1% of postings that are worth reading.
Betcha that your cablemodem's DHCP lease expires every 24 hours, and it takes a min or two for it to request and get a new lease. > Also every night between 11:45p m and > 12:00 am I can't put any traffic across > my modem for about 2 min. What's up with > that? Routers rebuilding tables? Anybody know?
Unitron asked:
"Could you explain what you mean by "uncapping" a cable modem?"
This has been a subject of discussion on a
number of UseNet newsgroups and other
discussion forums. In short, providers offer
"tiers of service", each with a different
maximum transmit and receive speed. Some
folks want to know how they might overcome
this limitation, and remove the "speed cap".
In fact, it is impossible to do this in a
well-managed system.
"...and do you happen to know what frequencies, and how much bandwidth, they use?"
The cable company can use any frequency they
like. They can even move the frequency in
a matter of a few mins if they need to. Some
configurations even allow 'frequency hopping',
which allows a noise event to be detected and
avoided. There are several different
modulation schemes that can be used with
the same equipment, each supporting a
different "channel bandwidth".
"...Does the cable company grab a 6 Mhz slot that they don't have a channel on and use that, or what?"
In essence, yes. The downstream frequency can
be any unused channel. There is also an upstream
frequency, which is most often a frequency that
is below the normal range for cable channels.
The downstream could be (for example) channel 67,
while the upstream is likely somewhere around
20Mhz.
Ignoring the ethical implications of your question...
...and before you ask, no, I'm not going to tell
you how to "uncap" your cablemodem. None of us are. You are clearly a looser, and civilization
does not need another clueless looser wasting
serious bandwidth.
If you suddenly "lost" channels that you had before, the cable company likely got around to "trapping" your drop, likely to prevent your home from generating RF noise that might mess up services to which you do not subscribe.
This means that your "free basic cable" is now limited to whatever a bandpass filter allows, likely an arbitrary group of channels that just happen to be between the downstream (usually the higher freq) and upstream (usually the lower freq) frequencies.
You can't "reprogram" your cablemodem to "get more channels". Cablemodems use only two frequencies (or bands thereof), which can be thought of as "channels". The cablemodem is not a "set-top box", and has nothing to do with TV channels.
You might check out your demarcation point (the box where the cable from your house meets the cable "from the pole"). You may find one or more silver cylinders about the size of a shotgun shell, each with a cable connector on each end.
Removal of one or more of those silver cylinders may restore your channels, but also makes you guilty of an actual criminal offense. At the price of cable, the downside risk is not worth the "reward". In past decades, each cable company made a big show of prosecuting one or two "cable thieves", but more recently, they have adopted a less fascist approach, making a big deal of "amnesty days", where people can "sign up" to keep their bootlegged service without paying for the prior period where the service was "bootlegged".
Those who are both hyper-technical and hyper-legalistic can read their state's laws, most which focus on "illegal CONNECTIONS" to the cable system, and figure out that any coax wire emits a certain amount of stray electromagnetic radiation, which can be picked up via antenna, amplified, and fed to a set-top box or cable-ready TV. This sort of activity may be protected under the "Freedom of the Airwaves" act, which, in general and with certain exceptions, allows anyone to enjoy whatever they can receive with a radio.
Of course, running an antenna "upstream" of the filters but very near your cable drop and working out a very wide-band amplifier may be more trouble and expense than the cable bill.
To be honest, you make me sick. Your cable company is enlightened enough to offer you cablemodem service without "bundling" it with even basic cable service, allowing you to buy exactly what you want, nothing more. Your reaction to the situation is to whine when the free side-effects of your cablemodem service become limited.
I smoke, as real programmers program on
nothing more than caffine and nicotine
as they code down to the bare iron, so
I can attest to the impact of long-term
close range smoke. The first thing to go is
the cute little CPU fan.
This makes sense, since you know that airflow
is highest through this fan.
The bearing can gum up. Bad news.
The infamous "garage shops" consistently run circles around the established firms that have the money and the time to implement all the latest management-voodo psycho-babble "best practices" processes.
Books like this are enjoyed by non-technical managers, since they encourage the cookbook application of "practices" upon the technical staff, and promise that management can avoid the basic issue of understanding the technical work at hand well enough to contribute.
How many different management-imposed failures need to be experienced before they wise up? Sadly, they never do, as there is a never-ending supply of fresh-faced wannabe managers with little or no understanding of the work that they are supposed to manage.
Shall we list the failures? 4GLs, Booch et al, client-server, "widgets" and other re-use of code, and nearly every attempt by groups larger than a dozen people.
On the success side, we have thousands of public domain packages, all done in "spare time", with minimal management of any sort.
No amount of neatly packaged happytalk can dance around the basic fact that software requires either very close cooperation between like-minded developers, or a facist, single-minded design that is strictly enforced. There IS no middle ground!
This has never been true, if the employees are motivated and LED by someone they trust.
Leadership is a very different skill from any other, but one of the components of leadership is a solid grasp of the "technical details". For example, I never made claims about my coding ability, but you can be damn sure that I made sure that I could at least read and understand the code being written.
An easy way to start being a leader is to simply make a list of all the "bad things" about managers, and avoid doing them, for example:
- Don't appear to be arbritrary - explain your rationale when announcing a decision.
- Don't be petty - make sure that the "little things" run smoothly, like office supplies and
coke machine refills.
- Stick to schedules and definitions. Defend
your people by defending their reality.
- Motivate your people, don't patronize them.
- Allow your staff to present sucess to upper
management on your behalf - you do not need to
take the credit, and your team's sucess IS your
success.
- When you do out of town, have one of your
reports "be you", and rotate the "hot seat"
duty amongst all direct reports. Encourage them
to make decisions when you are gone, and then
make them LIVE WITH those decisions. This will
allow them to see how difficult YOUR task is.
Of course, none of this makes you an actual leader. A leader must have the ability to CHOOSE a direction or a goal from several options, and the power to provide his people with the tools, time, and support required to attain the goal.Therefore, leadership starts at the top, not at the bottom or the middle, which explains why so many managers jump ship so often - they are looking for leadership themselves.
Long, long before Bill Gates, Altair, or the Homebrew Computer Club, there was Digital
,
Equipment Corporation's PDP-8 series of machines. To program these beasties, one
had a choice of the "switch register" (which gave many people, myself included, a permanent
callus on their index finger), or the noisy KSR-33 Teletypewriter, with handy paper-tape
reader attached.
DEC sold all sorts of software for the PDP-8 series, but I never saw a single paper tape with a
professional-looking label in years of work/play/messing about. Draw your own conclusions...
Programs were considered a way to show one's mental superiority, so everyone was happy to
make copies of their code for others. We felt complimented when asked for copies.
How did programmers earn a living? Well, not off EACH OTHER, that's for sure!
The concept of "free software" was nothing more than a basis for earning prestige among one's peers.
When "paying work" came knocking, one could be sure that multiple people would mention YOUR name
as being a good (perhaps the best!) person for that job. In short, we made money off COMPANIES
and gave freely to each other, not only of our time, but also of our code.
Bill Gates saw programmers themselves as "a market", and contributed NOTHING to the community of programmers, but instead, made himself known with his whining little letter, assuring himself of, FROM DAY ONE , the distain of both his betters and peers, if not actual dinner reservations in Hell.
His letter was widely circulated, greeted with snorts of disbelief, and ignored. The general consensus was that he had nothing to whine about, given that his so-called BASIC was worthless - it would not run "Star-Trek", "WUMPUS", or "Adventure" (the 3 most popular games of the day) due to massive bugs in the code. (Funny how so little has changed in the decades that have gone by...)
Sheesh... do you twenty-somethings think that you invented "open source"?
No way, you kids just wrapped all sorts of (silly) rules and (endless) talk around a situation that worked very well long before most of your parents were high school graduates.
We notice portscans quite often, as we have
boxes on most of our collision domains that
detect such activity.
But we do more a tad more than "notice".
The large majority of these port scans
end abruptly when our machines respond with
a series of well-known attacks, proving that
the script kiddies can dish it out, but they
can't take it.
The small number of scans that continue after
an automated response get exactly the sort of
personal service and assistance they deserve.
We do no permanent damage, but we do respond
in a manner designed to both halt the packets
and deliver a clear message.
What's WRONG with portscanning? Nothing, as
long as you portscan a network you OWN, where
such activity may have value to as an admin.
Ever.
That's our job, and we don't need any "help".
And what's wrong with our response to portscanning?
Also nothing. We noticed unauthorized use of
our expensive network resources, and halted it
in the most humane manner possible.
First, Solaris 8 has some HA stuff in their
distribution.
Second, HA Technical Solutions
(http://www.tech-sol.com) has a "poor man's
Veritas, that runs only $1500.
Third, one can certainly take a public-domain
service-level monitor, such as BigBrother,
and look at it as a set of inputs to a state
machine that would load different DNS files
and restart bind/named whatever, thereby
redirecting traffic to servers that
are known to be up.
...before the signal/noise ratio goes to zero
1) AboveNet is a bandwidth provider to
ORBS' ISP. As such, they use BGP to
advertise at peering points (large)
blocks of addresses that are reachable
via their facilities.
2) In BGP, the most specific subnet "wins",
so regardless of what AboveNet might or
might not do, ORBS' ISP can insure that
traffic to/from ORBS machines are
advertised to its other bandwidth suppliers
as more specific routes. The consensus
over on inet-access (a respected ISP list)
appears to be that ORBS' ISP has been
unable or unwilling to do this.
3) Why would ORBS tolerate a situation where
AboveNet is upstream of them? It is clear
that the two groups have little love for
each other. It appears that ORBS is
standing on its own shoelaces, when they
should have run, not walked, to an ISP
that is 100% AboveNet-free. Since they
have not done so, they appear to have
helped to create this situation, and are
thus suffering from a self-inflicted
gunshot wound to the foot.
4) While it is true that MAPS will soon offer
a fee-based enhanced service, the existing
MAPS service will remain free of charge.
5) AboveNet certainly has the right to block
any and all packets from any sources it
wishes. Since ORBS does invasive tests
that consume mail server and network resources,
AboveNet even has a valid reason to block
traffic from ORBS. While only blocking
traffic for ORBS to AboveNet's mail servers
might be a "more elegant" solution, AboveNet
is under no obligation to do this.
6) ORBS might have more respect and more
supporters if not for their shocking lack
of social skills. This is by no means the
first time that ORBS has gone out of its
way to be a pain in the neck to someone.
In a world of networks, PEOPLE must cooperate
and be non-hostile for the networks to be
"cooperative".
'nuff said!
Printers are a nice percussion section, but we
had actual WOODWINDS !
In the early 1980s, we (one of the
"Super-minicomputer" firms - Systems Engineering Labs)
had a bank of 4 6250bpi 9-Track tape drives in the R&D
lab that had vacuum columns to keep the tape
at the proper tension.
These drives made tones when rewinding and seeking.
Needless to say, it was not long before
(ahem) "Bach-up Tapes" were mounted, and a few
Brandenburg Concertos were programmed.
Sadly, in those less "keel" days, everyone
worried about being yelled at for abuse of
company equipment, so it was kept quiet.
I still have the code (in FORTRAN-77) if anyone
happens to have 4 9-Track tape drives with
vacuum columns. (Roger Gourd, if you are reading
this, yes, I still have readable backups of ALL the fun
stuff from our SEL days.
The name of the module? "No Strings Attached", of course.
When a standards body is formed, few except
those who have profits at stake take the time
and trouble to serve on the commitee.
Is it any wonder that these groups come up
with "solutions" that serve their needs rather
than yours?
Given that "opt out" seems to be tolerated
rather than punished in the US, we can expect
no better. Europe seems to have a much better
grasp on the subject of privacy as an absolute,
rather than a relative thing.
Once one allows even a tiny amount of relativism
into the mix, one can expect to have no privacy
at all.
One is left to ponder how NetSol can "auction"
something that NetSol claims
is NOT PROPERTY.
If NetSol's posture in regard to "ownership"
is contrasted with their new "auctions", this
creates a possible basis for getting a court
ruling that even NetSol (by its own actions)
clearly agrees that the domain names themselves
are "property".
What rationale would they have for charging
a higher price for the SAME "service"?