Pay for a three year subscription, and you get all the updates during those years, free! Well, great deal... if there are any updates released during those years. Otherwise, you basically paid the same amount you would have for an upgrade version, but never got one. It's completely to Microsoft's advantage to scale back on their release cycle with the new licensing model. It used to behoove them to get version upgrades out as soon as possible, to reap the rewards of the release. Now, they are getting everyone to pay for the new versions before they are released, and there's not much pressure to roll them out.
What I tell people is "as long as it's free, and doesn't obligate us to anything in the license, and it doesn't take IT time to install it, go ahead--but if it breaks anything, you're at the bottom of the list".
That covers software; personal use is another matter, but I figure you should judge based on whether or not the person is getting the tasks they are assigned accomplished quickly and competently, not how much of the rest of their time is spent doing something not 'work related'. It depends on the exact nature of the position, of course, but too often employers assume that ten minutes spent doing anything other than your job means ten minutes faster your job could have been accomplished, and that's usually not the case.
For whatever reason, if you really zoom that map in, it looks a lot more realistic than otherwise. The western US shows up (at least to me) unzoomed as predominantly the lightish yellow color signifying 10-20 inhabitants per square kilometer... but if you zoom down in to about 400%, in actuality most of it is the green or light green signifying 0-1 or 1-10. I find that a lot easier to believe than what it appears to be on the face of it.
But if you plumb more deeply, you'll find that a work made for hire is not defined so simply as you think. In essence, work for hire is not defined at all by who is paying for it, but by the status of the person producing it and any agreements they've reached with the person paying for it. Works for hire are primarily produced by employees; a work produced by a contractor, except under narrow and mutually agreed upon circumstances, is the intellectual property of the contractor, and he or she can resell it as often as they'd like.
IANAL either, but I make sure to check the definitions because I know how sneaky they can be.:)
We've done similar things in WWII Online, as well, with honor guards and gun salutes on the ground. Really, it's no more silly than corresponding 'real life' rituals of a similar nature are.
I consider the people I meet on line and get to know every bit as much friends as my non-virtual friends--and several of them, I've taken the trouble to meet in real life, too. I am happy for them when they marry or have children--I am sad for them when they suffer loss. If the place I interact with them most happens to be a virtual world, then I don't see the problem expressing my condolences in that forum as well.
Some of the most touching gestures I've seen--on line or in real life--ever, was some of the interactions between people on the WWII OL boards on September 11th last year. A lot of people lived in New York--one prominent member of the community works for NYPD and was at the collapse. Several others had friends or family in the towers and were frantic with grief. One guy, in particular, was out of his mind with worry over his fiance, who was working in one of the towers, while he was out on a trip in my neck of the woods (opposite coast). Several of us offered immediately to just go be with him, to get drunk, or whatever... I don't know if he took anyone up on it (thankfully, two days later he found out she was all right) but try getting that sort of response out of any other group of strangers you just happen to be around. As someone else said, a community is a community, whether virtual or real.
I haven't done this, but a couple of buddies and I took a pretty hard look at it a couple of years ago, and ultimately decided we'd missed the window of opportunity, even back then.
Why? Broadband. Gaming centers were all the rage when everyone was on 56K--it was a night and day difference to go in and play on the T1 line at a game shop. But then broadband penetration started going up in our market, and we decided it would pretty much be all downhill from there as far as the gaming cafe business was concerned.
There are still a few around but they don't do very well and several that were in operation then have folded now. It's cheaper and more convenient for most of the hardcore crowd to sit at home and run at nearly the same speeds on their cable or DSL connections, which they would be paying for anyway.
The only real option left is to sell it as an 'experience' or a sort of party destination--like how you might pop open a beer at home, but sometimes you still want to go chill at a bar and play some pool. Gaming isn't really that social, though, at least not in the face to face sense, so that's a hard sell.
You may still have a shot at this, if your market area does not have significant broadband penetration. Otherwise, I'd say stay away from it. It's an expensive business to be in--you have a lot of equipment expenses because you need to keep your machines state of the art, you're going to have people spilling crap on them and generally treating them like dung, and the support is pretty intensive--and all that on top of just running the business, which is not much of a picnic in the first place. You'll be hard pressed to compete with broadband when you have to charge as much in one night as a telco charges for a whole month for the same service.
I suspect that we're going to have to agree to disagree. I can agree that these theories cannot be proven by anecdotes, but certainly believe they can be disproven by (documented) anecdotes. Stating that that NT4 has to be re-booted every night to get stability beneath a complex application is just patently untrue; even one exception disproves it.
I think you get more to the heart of the discussion when you address how difficult it may or may not be to make the system work as you expect. How easy it is to get a given product to do what you need it to do is highly relevant--and as I've said several times, I readily agree that NT is not the easiest or best platform for every job out there. In that sense, people who are trying to shoehorn it into these impossible projects that you are citing are perhaps not to be faulted for their skill with NT, but rather for their decision to use it in a place it's not best suited for--or working for numbskulls who insist on it in the face of advice to do otherwise.:)
It's also, as you say, difficult to compare apples and oranges, as we're not getting into the specifics of what these various projects require of the applications. But I will say that with technology, there is always more than one way to accomplish any given task, and if one route happens to be bugged to hell in NT, I don't doubt there's a different way of getting there. Again, that doesn't speak to the efficiency of doing so--just that it IS possible.
And because of that, I'm not trying to imply that I'm the uber-admin or anything--I just have an approach that has worked well for me so far, so that I have not had the experiences you have had--or rather, I have, but have been able to address them to my satisfaction at some point. I've been in this game far too long to have any conceit as to my own technical prowess.:) I do like to run stable systems, though, because I like to have time to sleep and surf Slashdot, and from my observations, it's that inherent laziness that drives me toward stable solutions, rather than cutting edge or shoestring solutions that seem to be popular in the rest of the industry.
At any rate--thank you for the conversation. It's rare to find someone to have a coherent one with around here these days, and I appreciate it.
No, I believe you completely, and certainly would not dispute your personal experience. My point is rather that my experience, and many others with which I'm familiar, disproves the theory. For every story like the Hotmail transition (which did sound pretty ugly, but I'm not all that familiar with it) you can find another like Nucor or Verizon where everything worked fine, using the same products. When I worked as a consultant, many times I too would go into a business and find IT staff stating the same thing you have--they had to re-boot the servers every night to get any stability out of them. Invariably, with a bit of perspective and often some patching, we were able to address the root issue and remove those stability problems.
If that many complex projects can be undertaken successfully using those tools, I think that pretty squarely disproves the instability question--personal experience aside. As I said, I'm having lousy personal experience with Linux at the moment, but I hardly think it reflects on Linux. You seem to be drawing the conclusion that because people you know can't get a stable NT4 installation going without nightly reboots that NT4 is crap and requires such--but the fact that anyone else is able to make it happen without doing that should be enough to tell you there is something wrong with the implementation, not the software.
And again, I'm not trying to start an NT fan club here--it has pluses and minuses, and is not the ideal tool for every project, no question. I'm simply saying that if it's possible for a large number of people and businesses (even if not a majority, although I suspect they are a silent majority) to run complex apps on these products without scripting re-boots every night, then the people who ARE doing that are most likely doing something wrong. I'm sure they don't like hearing that... but it doesn't at all change the logical conclusion.
Eh, well, I guess that proves my point. I have no trouble maintaining stable production environments with Exchange, SQL Server, or IIS (not using ISS, myself--not sure if that's what you meant or just typoed). So the question is, what are other people doing wrong with them? I don't exempt Microsoft's coders from the incompetent category, but if I'm able to run these things out of the box without re-booting nightly, you should be able to as well. They have to be used in complex applications? Not a problem--some testing, a good dev crew, and a basic understanding of the software can see you through just about anything. Whether MS tools are the most efficient for a particular application may be debatable, but I don't consider it seriously in question that they are capable of accomplishing it when used properly. Anyone who does, I don't think really knows their stuff as well as they ought to. As I said, this is not about which is easier to use or better suited for a particular task--just whether or not it's possible.
I have no doubt that you're quite correct about Linux. One may be better than the other, but as I said, by far the greater factor is who is doing it, not what they are using. I'm totally disinterested in starting an NT/Linux debate--I don't have a side in it, personally. Tools are tools. But I consider the "NT is unreliable, ya' gotta reboot it every night" to be just another example of FUD in a debate that is replete with such.
I've come to the conclusion that anyone who is still re-booting their NT4 servers every night for stability is pretty much incompetent, or relying on coders who are. There are just too many of us out there who are managing to keep the things up without doing anything of the sort, running rock-solid, for months and months on end--it's not a fluke. It's good management versus poor management, which I think you'll find is ALWAYS more of a factor than the OS when it comes to the stability of any box.
Similarly, as a relatively new Linux user, I'm plagued with niggling little problems that come up from time to time which seem to require a reboot to fix. I'm sure they don't; I'm sure I just haven't learned enough about what I'm doing to fix the problem properly. But I'm not going to lay it off on the OS just because I haven't done something properly.
It's not necessarily easy to get an NT box to run stably, and perhaps that's where there is an argument to be made against it (of course, I'm not finding it tremendously easy with Linux at the moment, either). But it's certainly possible. Any time I have had a server that's flaky, there has always been something that I can trace it back to that can be fixed--it might be an app that's running on it, it might be improper or incomplete patch installation, but there's always something. When you find that, and fix it, you can walk away and forget NT boxes as easily as any other.
See, and even your story is funny to me, because in my travels north of the border, I've found Canadians to generally be much more personable and likely to start up a conversation than most people in the States (though even there, depends on where you are... Seattle is a lot friendlier than DC, for example:) ).
Americans are much more likely to be up-front and open about their opinions on more controversial topics, though, I'll give you that. The Canadians I've met personally are pretty much universally just plain NICE. They don't bring up topics that are likely to be controversial. We have a whole branch of the family that lives up around Edmonton, and I always look forward to reunions. I guess they must at the same time be dreading them, eh?;)
I have read "The Harvest", and it was pretty good, but just didn't really capture me the way some of his other stuff has. Too derivative of "Childhood's End", maybe? I'm not sure. "Memory Wire" is optional (kind of a departure from his usual style--cyberpunkish, sorta) but I think "A Bridge of Years" is pretty much a must read for RCW fans.
I agree with you about "Mysterium"... it did kind of slack off a bit toward the end. Another really great alternate worlds novel in somewhat the same vein is Kube-Mcdowell's "Alternities" which has got to be one of his less well known books, but IMHO is one of the best.
Re:Er... This doesn't sound right...
on
The Chronoliths
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· Score: 3, Informative
Read that as 'doesn't currently exist as a leader'. The person, in fact, is assumed to be somewhere, and because of the strange looping effect of knowing the future, is drawn forward into leadership by his own future successes. In fact, multiple potential leaders appear, all assuming that they will be the one that the Chronoliths refer to.
Really, it's a pretty good book, but frankly, not one of my Robert Charles Wilson favorites. I'll take Mysterium or Memory Wire, or A Bridge of Years anyday. His older stuff is better than his newer stuff, IMHO.
Yep, I was going to say this, glad someone beat me to it. A newsgroup or mailing list is one of the best things you can set up if you're rolling out something new, especially if it's not something everybody and their dog is going to have. The best thing I have ever found for getting my head around a new piece of gear is finding someone who is in the process of doing the same thing.
Getting a mass of people together tossing around solutions, issues, and observations is not only useful for them... it tells you where you should be going with the next revision.
Which is a salient point--most older OSes/apps that were around for any length of time have already been patched. There are few new vulnerabilities to find.
On the other hand, depending on the product, the newer versions are the security patches, so ultimately you do end up upgrading by following this logic.
Best course? Somewhere in the middle. If you're interested in security, stay off the cutting edge, but don't run something so far back that it's been superceded by newer versions.
Jeez, what a shitstorm... crack a little joke and look at all the hackles that get raised. Some of ya'll need to take yourselves (and the rest of us, by extension) a little less seriously.
For the record, I've got nothing against Reagan or against naming vessels after non-military figures--especially presidents. I just wanted to clear up some misconceptions of Jimmy; this particular naming decision seems more relevant than most, is all.
Stoolpigeon, I'll have to check some other sources--but Grolier's, where I checked my original information, disagrees with the article you've cited: Carter Biography
So does the mini-bio on www.americanpresident.org. And, for that matter, the jimmycarter.org site and some site on Georgia history I turned up on Google. I've probably got an auto-biography around the house some place that I can check... interesting if the usni.org blurb is true, though.
I'll have to re-check that, then--I admit I didn't have the book to hand, but I do recall a very detailed explanation of a fiber tap (and I know it was fiber because of the lengths that they had to go to in order to avoid diffusing the light while putting the tap into place) and I could have sworn it was in there; that's the only book I've read even remotely related to the subject. I recall the RF detector as well, but I'm pretty sure I'm not confusing the two--the process for getting into the fiber stands out pretty vividly in my mind.
But I don't think it's new news. Those agencies have been actively (and presumably successfully) tapping fiber optic cables since the late eighties or so. Blind Man's Bluff details the difficulties in running the taps and the techniques used to overcome them. Interesting read, whether you're for or against.
Well, kind of, unless you happen to know that he was a nuclear submarine officer before he was president. If you know that, then it makes a lot more sense than some naming decisions (USS Ronald Reagan? I guess he probably played a sailor in a movie at some point... oh, and there are all those appropriations bills he signed, yeah).
Thanks for your help with this... I had already found the Network Associates site (pgp.com) and they've discontinued the product line but wrapped the technology into McAfee products... but they are really overkill for what I need. The best site I've found so far is www.pgpI.org, where they maintain the international version and it works fine, but not with GnuPG on Windows. I would happily use the standard PGPi distribution, but due to its evolution, it would require licensing for commercial use, via Network Associates, who no longer offer such a thing as far as I can tell!
At any rate, as comprehensive as pgpi.org is, they do not show any Windows compatible front-ends for GnuPG, so as attractive as it is from a licensing perspective, it's probably not an option. I appreciate your taking the time to follow up on the conversation, though.
I've just given it a try per your suggestion, and as it happens, there is a lot wrong with using it! Unless I switch the entire company over to Linux (on the agenda, but not this month;) ), I can't find a decent front-end to tack it onto!
I tried the only one I could find, WinPT, and it just flat out doesn't work on my set up. I might be able to fiddle with it, but frankly, if it doesn't work out of the box, it's no use--I need something fool proof enough that both employees and contractors can double-click 'Setup' and start using. Don't even talk to me about teaching them the command line. Unless you've got alternative front-end recommendations, this is a dead-end for commercial use.
You may be right. But we're at a place where, while we can say to our vendors, "We're going to sign this stuff digitally; deal with it," we're not yet at a place where we can say "You guys need to sign this stuff digitally; deal with it." They just don't have that level of support in their organizations--in short, as hypocritical as it may seem, we're in a position where we can trust our signature enforcement (as per several posts above) but not necessarily their's. So we need to accept physical signatures.
We still get significant savings from this, though. It reduces a TON of costs in storage, paper, forms management, and physical transportation (previously, signers would have to come back to the main office to sign contracts--now, we can e-mail it out and get it back same day when they are in the field). There's almost no reason that we would ever deal with hardcopy on our end--it's just as easy to review the documents on screen. Everyone and their dog has a TIFF reader.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly what I was thinking.
Pay for a three year subscription, and you get all the updates during those years, free! Well, great deal... if there are any updates released during those years. Otherwise, you basically paid the same amount you would have for an upgrade version, but never got one. It's completely to Microsoft's advantage to scale back on their release cycle with the new licensing model. It used to behoove them to get version upgrades out as soon as possible, to reap the rewards of the release. Now, they are getting everyone to pay for the new versions before they are released, and there's not much pressure to roll them out.
What I tell people is "as long as it's free, and doesn't obligate us to anything in the license, and it doesn't take IT time to install it, go ahead--but if it breaks anything, you're at the bottom of the list".
That covers software; personal use is another matter, but I figure you should judge based on whether or not the person is getting the tasks they are assigned accomplished quickly and competently, not how much of the rest of their time is spent doing something not 'work related'. It depends on the exact nature of the position, of course, but too often employers assume that ten minutes spent doing anything other than your job means ten minutes faster your job could have been accomplished, and that's usually not the case.
For whatever reason, if you really zoom that map in, it looks a lot more realistic than otherwise. The western US shows up (at least to me) unzoomed as predominantly the lightish yellow color signifying 10-20 inhabitants per square kilometer... but if you zoom down in to about 400%, in actuality most of it is the green or light green signifying 0-1 or 1-10. I find that a lot easier to believe than what it appears to be on the face of it.
But if you plumb more deeply, you'll find that a work made for hire is not defined so simply as you think. In essence, work for hire is not defined at all by who is paying for it, but by the status of the person producing it and any agreements they've reached with the person paying for it. Works for hire are primarily produced by employees; a work produced by a contractor, except under narrow and mutually agreed upon circumstances, is the intellectual property of the contractor, and he or she can resell it as often as they'd like.
:)
IANAL either, but I make sure to check the definitions because I know how sneaky they can be.
Which, perhaps, is the goal. ;)
We've done similar things in WWII Online, as well, with honor guards and gun salutes on the ground. Really, it's no more silly than corresponding 'real life' rituals of a similar nature are.
I consider the people I meet on line and get to know every bit as much friends as my non-virtual friends--and several of them, I've taken the trouble to meet in real life, too. I am happy for them when they marry or have children--I am sad for them when they suffer loss. If the place I interact with them most happens to be a virtual world, then I don't see the problem expressing my condolences in that forum as well.
Some of the most touching gestures I've seen--on line or in real life--ever, was some of the interactions between people on the WWII OL boards on September 11th last year. A lot of people lived in New York--one prominent member of the community works for NYPD and was at the collapse. Several others had friends or family in the towers and were frantic with grief. One guy, in particular, was out of his mind with worry over his fiance, who was working in one of the towers, while he was out on a trip in my neck of the woods (opposite coast). Several of us offered immediately to just go be with him, to get drunk, or whatever... I don't know if he took anyone up on it (thankfully, two days later he found out she was all right) but try getting that sort of response out of any other group of strangers you just happen to be around. As someone else said, a community is a community, whether virtual or real.
Dude, ignore me... I totally space the paragraph where you talk about no high-speed access being available there or anytime soon. My bad.
Comments on expenses, etc, still hold.
I haven't done this, but a couple of buddies and I took a pretty hard look at it a couple of years ago, and ultimately decided we'd missed the window of opportunity, even back then.
Why? Broadband. Gaming centers were all the rage when everyone was on 56K--it was a night and day difference to go in and play on the T1 line at a game shop. But then broadband penetration started going up in our market, and we decided it would pretty much be all downhill from there as far as the gaming cafe business was concerned.
There are still a few around but they don't do very well and several that were in operation then have folded now. It's cheaper and more convenient for most of the hardcore crowd to sit at home and run at nearly the same speeds on their cable or DSL connections, which they would be paying for anyway.
The only real option left is to sell it as an 'experience' or a sort of party destination--like how you might pop open a beer at home, but sometimes you still want to go chill at a bar and play some pool. Gaming isn't really that social, though, at least not in the face to face sense, so that's a hard sell.
You may still have a shot at this, if your market area does not have significant broadband penetration. Otherwise, I'd say stay away from it. It's an expensive business to be in--you have a lot of equipment expenses because you need to keep your machines state of the art, you're going to have people spilling crap on them and generally treating them like dung, and the support is pretty intensive--and all that on top of just running the business, which is not much of a picnic in the first place. You'll be hard pressed to compete with broadband when you have to charge as much in one night as a telco charges for a whole month for the same service.
Good luck, whatever your decision.
I suspect that we're going to have to agree to disagree. I can agree that these theories cannot be proven by anecdotes, but certainly believe they can be disproven by (documented) anecdotes. Stating that that NT4 has to be re-booted every night to get stability beneath a complex application is just patently untrue; even one exception disproves it.
:)
:) I do like to run stable systems, though, because I like to have time to sleep and surf Slashdot, and from my observations, it's that inherent laziness that drives me toward stable solutions, rather than cutting edge or shoestring solutions that seem to be popular in the rest of the industry.
I think you get more to the heart of the discussion when you address how difficult it may or may not be to make the system work as you expect. How easy it is to get a given product to do what you need it to do is highly relevant--and as I've said several times, I readily agree that NT is not the easiest or best platform for every job out there. In that sense, people who are trying to shoehorn it into these impossible projects that you are citing are perhaps not to be faulted for their skill with NT, but rather for their decision to use it in a place it's not best suited for--or working for numbskulls who insist on it in the face of advice to do otherwise.
It's also, as you say, difficult to compare apples and oranges, as we're not getting into the specifics of what these various projects require of the applications. But I will say that with technology, there is always more than one way to accomplish any given task, and if one route happens to be bugged to hell in NT, I don't doubt there's a different way of getting there. Again, that doesn't speak to the efficiency of doing so--just that it IS possible.
And because of that, I'm not trying to imply that I'm the uber-admin or anything--I just have an approach that has worked well for me so far, so that I have not had the experiences you have had--or rather, I have, but have been able to address them to my satisfaction at some point. I've been in this game far too long to have any conceit as to my own technical prowess.
At any rate--thank you for the conversation. It's rare to find someone to have a coherent one with around here these days, and I appreciate it.
No, I believe you completely, and certainly would not dispute your personal experience. My point is rather that my experience, and many others with which I'm familiar, disproves the theory. For every story like the Hotmail transition (which did sound pretty ugly, but I'm not all that familiar with it) you can find another like Nucor or Verizon where everything worked fine, using the same products. When I worked as a consultant, many times I too would go into a business and find IT staff stating the same thing you have--they had to re-boot the servers every night to get any stability out of them. Invariably, with a bit of perspective and often some patching, we were able to address the root issue and remove those stability problems.
If that many complex projects can be undertaken successfully using those tools, I think that pretty squarely disproves the instability question--personal experience aside. As I said, I'm having lousy personal experience with Linux at the moment, but I hardly think it reflects on Linux. You seem to be drawing the conclusion that because people you know can't get a stable NT4 installation going without nightly reboots that NT4 is crap and requires such--but the fact that anyone else is able to make it happen without doing that should be enough to tell you there is something wrong with the implementation, not the software.
And again, I'm not trying to start an NT fan club here--it has pluses and minuses, and is not the ideal tool for every project, no question. I'm simply saying that if it's possible for a large number of people and businesses (even if not a majority, although I suspect they are a silent majority) to run complex apps on these products without scripting re-boots every night, then the people who ARE doing that are most likely doing something wrong. I'm sure they don't like hearing that... but it doesn't at all change the logical conclusion.
Eh, well, I guess that proves my point. I have no trouble maintaining stable production environments with Exchange, SQL Server, or IIS (not using ISS, myself--not sure if that's what you meant or just typoed). So the question is, what are other people doing wrong with them? I don't exempt Microsoft's coders from the incompetent category, but if I'm able to run these things out of the box without re-booting nightly, you should be able to as well. They have to be used in complex applications? Not a problem--some testing, a good dev crew, and a basic understanding of the software can see you through just about anything. Whether MS tools are the most efficient for a particular application may be debatable, but I don't consider it seriously in question that they are capable of accomplishing it when used properly. Anyone who does, I don't think really knows their stuff as well as they ought to. As I said, this is not about which is easier to use or better suited for a particular task--just whether or not it's possible.
I have no doubt that you're quite correct about Linux. One may be better than the other, but as I said, by far the greater factor is who is doing it, not what they are using. I'm totally disinterested in starting an NT/Linux debate--I don't have a side in it, personally. Tools are tools. But I consider the "NT is unreliable, ya' gotta reboot it every night" to be just another example of FUD in a debate that is replete with such.
I've come to the conclusion that anyone who is still re-booting their NT4 servers every night for stability is pretty much incompetent, or relying on coders who are. There are just too many of us out there who are managing to keep the things up without doing anything of the sort, running rock-solid, for months and months on end--it's not a fluke. It's good management versus poor management, which I think you'll find is ALWAYS more of a factor than the OS when it comes to the stability of any box.
Similarly, as a relatively new Linux user, I'm plagued with niggling little problems that come up from time to time which seem to require a reboot to fix. I'm sure they don't; I'm sure I just haven't learned enough about what I'm doing to fix the problem properly. But I'm not going to lay it off on the OS just because I haven't done something properly.
It's not necessarily easy to get an NT box to run stably, and perhaps that's where there is an argument to be made against it (of course, I'm not finding it tremendously easy with Linux at the moment, either). But it's certainly possible. Any time I have had a server that's flaky, there has always been something that I can trace it back to that can be fixed--it might be an app that's running on it, it might be improper or incomplete patch installation, but there's always something. When you find that, and fix it, you can walk away and forget NT boxes as easily as any other.
See, and even your story is funny to me, because in my travels north of the border, I've found Canadians to generally be much more personable and likely to start up a conversation than most people in the States (though even there, depends on where you are... Seattle is a lot friendlier than DC, for example :) ).
;)
Americans are much more likely to be up-front and open about their opinions on more controversial topics, though, I'll give you that. The Canadians I've met personally are pretty much universally just plain NICE. They don't bring up topics that are likely to be controversial. We have a whole branch of the family that lives up around Edmonton, and I always look forward to reunions. I guess they must at the same time be dreading them, eh?
I have read "The Harvest", and it was pretty good, but just didn't really capture me the way some of his other stuff has. Too derivative of "Childhood's End", maybe? I'm not sure. "Memory Wire" is optional (kind of a departure from his usual style--cyberpunkish, sorta) but I think "A Bridge of Years" is pretty much a must read for RCW fans.
I agree with you about "Mysterium"... it did kind of slack off a bit toward the end. Another really great alternate worlds novel in somewhat the same vein is Kube-Mcdowell's "Alternities" which has got to be one of his less well known books, but IMHO is one of the best.
Read that as 'doesn't currently exist as a leader'. The person, in fact, is assumed to be somewhere, and because of the strange looping effect of knowing the future, is drawn forward into leadership by his own future successes. In fact, multiple potential leaders appear, all assuming that they will be the one that the Chronoliths refer to.
Really, it's a pretty good book, but frankly, not one of my Robert Charles Wilson favorites. I'll take Mysterium or Memory Wire, or A Bridge of Years anyday. His older stuff is better than his newer stuff, IMHO.
Yes and no... A-10s do mount a 30mm cannon (the Gatling style GAU-8 "Avenger") but so do Apache's... it's a 30mm chain gun, though, the M230.
Yep, I was going to say this, glad someone beat me to it. A newsgroup or mailing list is one of the best things you can set up if you're rolling out something new, especially if it's not something everybody and their dog is going to have. The best thing I have ever found for getting my head around a new piece of gear is finding someone who is in the process of doing the same thing.
Getting a mass of people together tossing around solutions, issues, and observations is not only useful for them... it tells you where you should be going with the next revision.
Which is a salient point--most older OSes/apps that were around for any length of time have already been patched. There are few new vulnerabilities to find.
On the other hand, depending on the product, the newer versions are the security patches, so ultimately you do end up upgrading by following this logic.
Best course? Somewhere in the middle. If you're interested in security, stay off the cutting edge, but don't run something so far back that it's been superceded by newer versions.
Jeez, what a shitstorm... crack a little joke and look at all the hackles that get raised. Some of ya'll need to take yourselves (and the rest of us, by extension) a little less seriously.
For the record, I've got nothing against Reagan or against naming vessels after non-military figures--especially presidents. I just wanted to clear up some misconceptions of Jimmy; this particular naming decision seems more relevant than most, is all.
Stoolpigeon, I'll have to check some other sources--but Grolier's, where I checked my original information, disagrees with the article you've cited: Carter Biography
So does the mini-bio on www.americanpresident.org. And, for that matter, the jimmycarter.org site and some site on Georgia history I turned up on Google. I've probably got an auto-biography around the house some place that I can check... interesting if the usni.org blurb is true, though.
I'll have to re-check that, then--I admit I didn't have the book to hand, but I do recall a very detailed explanation of a fiber tap (and I know it was fiber because of the lengths that they had to go to in order to avoid diffusing the light while putting the tap into place) and I could have sworn it was in there; that's the only book I've read even remotely related to the subject. I recall the RF detector as well, but I'm pretty sure I'm not confusing the two--the process for getting into the fiber stands out pretty vividly in my mind.
But I don't think it's new news. Those agencies have been actively (and presumably successfully) tapping fiber optic cables since the late eighties or so. Blind Man's Bluff details the difficulties in running the taps and the techniques used to overcome them. Interesting read, whether you're for or against.
Well, kind of, unless you happen to know that he was a nuclear submarine officer before he was president. If you know that, then it makes a lot more sense than some naming decisions (USS Ronald Reagan? I guess he probably played a sailor in a movie at some point... oh, and there are all those appropriations bills he signed, yeah).
Thanks for your help with this... I had already found the Network Associates site (pgp.com) and they've discontinued the product line but wrapped the technology into McAfee products... but they are really overkill for what I need. The best site I've found so far is www.pgpI.org, where they maintain the international version and it works fine, but not with GnuPG on Windows. I would happily use the standard PGPi distribution, but due to its evolution, it would require licensing for commercial use, via Network Associates, who no longer offer such a thing as far as I can tell!
At any rate, as comprehensive as pgpi.org is, they do not show any Windows compatible front-ends for GnuPG, so as attractive as it is from a licensing perspective, it's probably not an option. I appreciate your taking the time to follow up on the conversation, though.
I've just given it a try per your suggestion, and as it happens, there is a lot wrong with using it! Unless I switch the entire company over to Linux (on the agenda, but not this month ;) ), I can't find a decent front-end to tack it onto!
I tried the only one I could find, WinPT, and it just flat out doesn't work on my set up. I might be able to fiddle with it, but frankly, if it doesn't work out of the box, it's no use--I need something fool proof enough that both employees and contractors can double-click 'Setup' and start using. Don't even talk to me about teaching them the command line. Unless you've got alternative front-end recommendations, this is a dead-end for commercial use.
You may be right. But we're at a place where, while we can say to our vendors, "We're going to sign this stuff digitally; deal with it," we're not yet at a place where we can say "You guys need to sign this stuff digitally; deal with it." They just don't have that level of support in their organizations--in short, as hypocritical as it may seem, we're in a position where we can trust our signature enforcement (as per several posts above) but not necessarily their's. So we need to accept physical signatures.
We still get significant savings from this, though. It reduces a TON of costs in storage, paper, forms management, and physical transportation (previously, signers would have to come back to the main office to sign contracts--now, we can e-mail it out and get it back same day when they are in the field). There's almost no reason that we would ever deal with hardcopy on our end--it's just as easy to review the documents on screen. Everyone and their dog has a TIFF reader.