You aren't familiar with the concept of a Litigation Hold, or the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Once served with a Litigation Hold letter, you must preserve the email associated with the incident, regardless if your email retention policy would have the the email deleted. "We were just following our email deletion policy" = purposefully gave the finger to the court that said "keep those emails".
Furthermore, FRCP says that if you even think you are going to need the emails, you must keep them - regardless of your email retention policy. For example, an employee (on in my case, an inmate) dies, all email about the incident that lead to death must be retained, even if the policy is to delete all email after 180 days. The fact that a death happened is reason enough to assume that a lawsuit will happen. I'm working on an e-discovery right now that took four years to get to the discovery phase. Following policy of "we delete after 180 days, no matter what the court wants" is willful negligence.
Just a funny/sad story here. So an email in GroupWise is just a record in a database. The space left in the record is greater than 2,000 bytes after the pointers and subject line are filled in. If the body of your message is less than 2,000 bytes, the whole message is just one database record. If the body of your message is greater than 2,000 bytes, the first chunk is stored in the database record, and then an overflow file is created.
BTW - I hate HTML email. Doubles the size of every message, practically guarantees that an overflow file will be created, and for what? Oooh! Comic Sans Serif!!!
So some daffy in one of the departments gets the idea that email to and from the public needs to be stored in.PDF form. So she starts going through all her email from current to past. She prints out a message, slaps the printout into a scanner, and scans the image into a.PDF. Saves the.PDF to the network. Literally, she turns thousands of 2KB - 4KB searchable, indexed, (with metadata and attachment) messages into thousands of 2MB unsearchable, unindexable, (sans metadata and attachment).PDFs. We only found out, because 20 GB later she filled the hard disk for her department. (Their server space was already running on empty, but when they ran out so much faster than we had planned, we had to go looking).
I don't know if she deleted her public facing emails after that. If she did, we're screwed.
You may argue that email is not a document repository - but that only is true if your email system wasn't designed to be a document repository. GroupWise has a built-in DMS (and has had, since the late 1990's), and it is a far more efficient system than Just A Bunch Of Disk Space (what with single-instance-storage and built-in indexing and all that).
The honey trap server *is* a real possibility and chink in the armor. The Infocard people think their plan fixes this, because your local PC would have to be compromised, instead of your session just getting a bad DNS entry taking you to the honey trap. It's harder to compromise 10,000 PCs to get 10,000 identities (versus being a man-in-the-middle to one web site to get 10,000 identities).
I actually want Infocard to take off, but more people seem to like the OpenID plan. Heck, I submitted a/. poll asking "OpenID versus Infocard versus keying username and password x 100,000" (back when the big identity conference was going on a few months ago). Apparently it wasn't nerdy enough, because my poll was rejected, and something completely trivial was the accepted/. poll.
To expand on this, it's important to understand 'deep pockets'. Large organizations have deep pockets, which makes them juicier targets for 'unfair dismissal' lawsuits. Government is the worst for it, because you cannot (essentially) sue them out of business. For example, the Sheriff's Office must continue operating; so, if the lawsuit is lost, tax money is used to cover it. If we run out of tax money, we raise taxes.
Back on point: HR and Legal must assume that the dismissal is going to result in an unfair dismissal lawsuit. So they always push management to make sure the dismissal is 100% airtight. Anything less than that, and the government could lose huge sums of cash (far more than it takes to ride the bad employee for a couple years).
FWIW, in a Citrix environment, you need to use the Add button to install software. Citrix can maintain multiple user profiles on a server, but the program installation has to be done in such a way to facilitate that. Whatever magic is going on, works when the programs are installed via the Add button, and doesn't (from a multi-user mode point-of-view) if the user just launches a setup.exe in their session.
Yeah - I don't know. Wikipedia (that infallible font of all things vetted by three panels of experts) says:
In Geodesic Math and How to Use It Hugh Kenner writes, "Tables of chord factors, containing as they do the essential design information for spherical systems, were for many years guarded like military secrets. As late as 1966, some 3v icosa figures from Popular Science Monthly were all anyone outside the circle of Fuller licensees had to go on." (page 57, 1976 edition)
I did FORTRAN programs in college doing the whole eigen-vector solutions in statics, and that math definitely qualifies as engineering. It wasn't hard, mind you - it was tedious.
Anyway, it sounds like Mr. Fuller did do some non-trivial spherical geometry, and then implemented it in wood and metal. Does that make him an engineer? I'm leaning toward "yes".
You might have a point there. The geodesic dome has the highest ratio of enclosed volume to weight - but is that really engineering? He took an existing idea and expanded on it. It might be more marketing than engineering. I did a little bit of engineering course work in college. Back in the day, computing the loads on beams and pillars (statics) was interesting, but it would have been awful if we didn't have computers. That coursework was definitely engineering. It does look like Mr. Fuller did the math on the chord factors that make up various domes.
I went to a talk given by Buckminster Fuller. He was pretty happy that a short time before, some chemists had indeed figured out *how* to craft a buckyball. (They hadn't yet, but had formulated the process). Anyway, he showed off a model of a structure he invented. He created (and showed) a sphere built of sticks and joints held together by tension (not compression). In other words, even when you pressed on it, it redistributed the load via tension.
You may think him a nut, but he did have some engineering talent beyond the norm.
Ask your boss how many times he actually bought something from a flyer left on the windshield of his automobile.
Then ask him what he thought of the company / person that left the flyer on his car.
Then point out that spam is identical behaviour. The difference being that my anti-spam software will learn about you-all, and hold a grudge for a long time. Which is as it should be.
just because it is fun doesn't make it a spectator sport. Sure - although that poses the question: is any spectator sport really fun?
There are people for whom the whole 'rooting for my team' thing is important, and a big part of their life. That's not me, but I can't fault someone for making that choice. For that type of personality, I'm not sure any particular sport is superior to all others. It probably has to do with what you did as a child. If you played baseball as a child, then you probably like baseball as an adult. If you worked on cars with your dad as a child, you probably like Nascar as an adult.
tell me, what is so interesting about driving for 5 hours? I'll give this question a shot.
In a 500 lap race, you (or the driver you are rooting for) get 1,000 opportunities to pass the guy ahead. Opt in too early, and the guy behind you will pass you before you get to the finish line. Opt in too late, and you lose. The oval track makes the passing opportunities very predictable. So there is a constant duel going on: the second place guy is always looking for an opportunity to hand you your ass, and the first place guy is doing his best to outrun you. Of course, the first place guy is the wind-breaker, which means his car is burning more fuel than the drafters. Also, his engine is working harder, so it's temperature will be higher. At some point, someone decides to pass. Both guys are going to push their machine's limits - but the guy that starts with the cooler engine can push it just a little bit further. Can't push it so far as to break traction, though.;-)
It's as much an endurance race as it is a speed race. Rather like the Iditarod, you won't get to the end if you don't take care of your rig.
So that's an interesting part: how is the balance of speed versus endurance being maintained? Because the guy behind you is probably only one second away from taking your lead. Another interesting part is how the driver deals with traffic congestion. If you can't slip down in front going into the turn, your attempt to pass was a worthless burn of fuel, and now your engine is that much closer to burning out.
Overclocking your CPU would be pretty much the same sport, if the 'race' had some fixed qty of bytes to chew through, and massive failure resulted in smoke and flames.
What was that about embedding CPU's in our skulls again?;-)
In other words, if GonnaBRichYeahYeah!'s dad ordered ISDN from the phone company, they have to provide it.
Anything faster than that, no.
After ISDN is in, his dad would get 128 Kbps. It would be charged per-minute, but if he didn't need.iso downloads, it would be OK. There's essentially zero connect time, too. Just be careful he doesn't install bittorrent....;-)
If the cost of ISDN was too much, he could always cancel it later. Note that for the phone company to put in ISDN, they would have to upgrade equipment between him and the switch. That upgraded equipment likely wouldn't be pulled out, so his 22 Kpbs would probably peg at 56 Kbps afterwards.
If I were in the 50 user range, I would definitely look at MX Logic, Postini, AppRiver, Katharion, Mailwise or some other hosted solution.
What you want is for the hosting company to send you (each user) a digest on a schedule of your choosing. That digest will list all the items waiting in quarantine for you. You look at the items in quarantine, and release the good mail.
The product should learn to pass the items you release. That's something I'd ask. GWAVA does it, and I'm sure other systems do too.
If the product doesn't learn, and instead wants you to manually configure your exceptions list - I'd pass on that product.
You want to keep the crap out of your mail system - so make sure the quarantine is the providers problem, not yours.
It's actually much closer in function to Gnome Conduit, except of course that Conduit has a much higher chance of being ported cross-platform.;-)
Don't think storage replication as much as content replication between service providers (adapting each conduit to work with the peculiarities of each provider (flickr, facebook, multiply, linkedin, etc.) MS is calling it a mess, er, mesh, and I suppose each single link will be called a wire or something. But the readwriteweb link definitely showed something that looks like Conduit.
FWIW, if you have a lawyer in the family who would take the case on for free, I'm pretty sure (in your case) you can get a red-light ticket thrown out because, yes it is wrong, and and can be shown to be racketeering. Then do a class action suit for the locals that got caught, and the town will revert back to longer yellow lights - with a nice standardized length on every switch.
Sure, it's sad that your local bureaucracy views its population as prey.
It's happened elsewhere before, and was thrown out for the same reason. Lights exist to increase safety, and forcing sudden stops via short yellow lights increases danger instead.
I just wish that every city that considers red light cameras did them for the right reason, instead of listening to the vendor's sales pitch that it will boost revenue. There's nothing wrong with having a long yellow light, and fining the heck out of the people who offend anyway. Just don't expect the system to bring in more revenue than the system costs to run. (BTW, I used to work for a red-light camera vendor).
Two obvious answers: 1) sync software that copies the video files to the network ( + configure the software to make short snapshots), 2) another CPU - the desktop kind, not a laptop that would easily walk away.
I've got four CPUs in my cube, because that's how much work I can keep busy. It's not hard to get an older CPU that someone would otherwise surplus. It's the bottom one in the stack that runs the webcam software. And yes, I've caught co-workers messing around my desk this way. It may not be elegant, but it's cheap and it works.
The reality of a new President is that the new administration has the option to scrap the previous administration's stuff. Before Clinton, the U.S. Post Office had NetWare and GroupWise nationwide*. While Clinton was President, fashion dictated that the old system be scrapped, and a new system implemented. Whether the new system was better than the old is immaterial - the old system was Not Invented Here, and thus had to be eliminated. The same must have been true at the White House. Of course, once Clinton was out, so was Notes, with it's replacement being Exchange. Your tax dollars at work.
For taxpayer records, I'm pretty sure the IRS is still using the mainframes they bought in the 1990s. For email, they probably sway in the wind like many of the federal departments. It really depends if the PHBs at the very top are brown-nosers and want to impress the boss.
*Back in 1999, I met the #1 IT tech at the Post Office, and he was very bitter about the transition. He'd spent a chunk of his life implementing a cost-effective system with one file server per post office site, and it all ran very smoothly. All for naught, some PHB appointee scrapped it on political, not technical merit.
He wrote a book in 1965 Unsafe at Any Speed that slammed the Chevrolet Corvair. He appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1969 for his role as a consumer advocate.
If you are part of the liberal main-stream-media in the U.S.A., and you need to fill some column-inches or 30 second sound-bites, Ralph is a pretty good guy to help you slam the big old mean corporations. Not that there aren't corporations that need to be skewered - just that Ralph is a go-to guy when you are low on material.
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The courts are full of verdicts against people who thought that trickery was a good idea.
You aren't familiar with the concept of a Litigation Hold, or the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Once served with a Litigation Hold letter, you must preserve the email associated with the incident, regardless if your email retention policy would have the the email deleted. "We were just following our email deletion policy" = purposefully gave the finger to the court that said "keep those emails".
Furthermore, FRCP says that if you even think you are going to need the emails, you must keep them - regardless of your email retention policy. For example, an employee (on in my case, an inmate) dies, all email about the incident that lead to death must be retained, even if the policy is to delete all email after 180 days. The fact that a death happened is reason enough to assume that a lawsuit will happen. I'm working on an e-discovery right now that took four years to get to the discovery phase. Following policy of "we delete after 180 days, no matter what the court wants" is willful negligence.
Just a funny/sad story here. So an email in GroupWise is just a record in a database. The space left in the record is greater than 2,000 bytes after the pointers and subject line are filled in. If the body of your message is less than 2,000 bytes, the whole message is just one database record. If the body of your message is greater than 2,000 bytes, the first chunk is stored in the database record, and then an overflow file is created.
BTW - I hate HTML email. Doubles the size of every message, practically guarantees that an overflow file will be created, and for what? Oooh! Comic Sans Serif!!!
So some daffy in one of the departments gets the idea that email to and from the public needs to be stored in .PDF form. So she starts going through all her email from current to past. She prints out a message, slaps the printout into a scanner, and scans the image into a .PDF. Saves the .PDF to the network. Literally, she turns thousands of 2KB - 4KB searchable, indexed, (with metadata and attachment) messages into thousands of 2MB unsearchable, unindexable, (sans metadata and attachment) .PDFs. We only found out, because 20 GB later she filled the hard disk for her department. (Their server space was already running on empty, but when they ran out so much faster than we had planned, we had to go looking).
I don't know if she deleted her public facing emails after that. If she did, we're screwed.
You may argue that email is not a document repository - but that only is true if your email system wasn't designed to be a document repository. GroupWise has a built-in DMS (and has had, since the late 1990's), and it is a far more efficient system than Just A Bunch Of Disk Space (what with single-instance-storage and built-in indexing and all that).
The honey trap server *is* a real possibility and chink in the armor. The Infocard people think their plan fixes this, because your local PC would have to be compromised, instead of your session just getting a bad DNS entry taking you to the honey trap. It's harder to compromise 10,000 PCs to get 10,000 identities (versus being a man-in-the-middle to one web site to get 10,000 identities).
I actually want Infocard to take off, but more people seem to like the OpenID plan. Heck, I submitted a /. poll asking "OpenID versus Infocard versus keying username and password x 100,000" (back when the big identity conference was going on a few months ago). Apparently it wasn't nerdy enough, because my poll was rejected, and something completely trivial was the accepted /. poll.
To expand on this, it's important to understand 'deep pockets'. Large organizations have deep pockets, which makes them juicier targets for 'unfair dismissal' lawsuits. Government is the worst for it, because you cannot (essentially) sue them out of business. For example, the Sheriff's Office must continue operating; so, if the lawsuit is lost, tax money is used to cover it. If we run out of tax money, we raise taxes.
Back on point: HR and Legal must assume that the dismissal is going to result in an unfair dismissal lawsuit. So they always push management to make sure the dismissal is 100% airtight. Anything less than that, and the government could lose huge sums of cash (far more than it takes to ride the bad employee for a couple years).
FWIW, in a Citrix environment, you need to use the Add button to install software. Citrix can maintain multiple user profiles on a server, but the program installation has to be done in such a way to facilitate that. Whatever magic is going on, works when the programs are installed via the Add button, and doesn't (from a multi-user mode point-of-view) if the user just launches a setup.exe in their session.
That was great. Thank you!
I did FORTRAN programs in college doing the whole eigen-vector solutions in statics, and that math definitely qualifies as engineering. It wasn't hard, mind you - it was tedious.
Anyway, it sounds like Mr. Fuller did do some non-trivial spherical geometry, and then implemented it in wood and metal. Does that make him an engineer? I'm leaning toward "yes".
You may think him a nut, but he did have some engineering talent beyond the norm.
Then ask him what he thought of the company / person that left the flyer on his car.
Then point out that spam is identical behaviour. The difference being that my anti-spam software will learn about you-all, and hold a grudge for a long time. Which is as it should be.
There are people for whom the whole 'rooting for my team' thing is important, and a big part of their life. That's not me, but I can't fault someone for making that choice. For that type of personality, I'm not sure any particular sport is superior to all others. It probably has to do with what you did as a child. If you played baseball as a child, then you probably like baseball as an adult. If you worked on cars with your dad as a child, you probably like Nascar as an adult.
In a 500 lap race, you (or the driver you are rooting for) get 1,000 opportunities to pass the guy ahead. Opt in too early, and the guy behind you will pass you before you get to the finish line. Opt in too late, and you lose. The oval track makes the passing opportunities very predictable. So there is a constant duel going on: the second place guy is always looking for an opportunity to hand you your ass, and the first place guy is doing his best to outrun you. Of course, the first place guy is the wind-breaker, which means his car is burning more fuel than the drafters. Also, his engine is working harder, so it's temperature will be higher. At some point, someone decides to pass. Both guys are going to push their machine's limits - but the guy that starts with the cooler engine can push it just a little bit further. Can't push it so far as to break traction, though. ;-)
It's as much an endurance race as it is a speed race. Rather like the Iditarod, you won't get to the end if you don't take care of your rig.
So that's an interesting part: how is the balance of speed versus endurance being maintained? Because the guy behind you is probably only one second away from taking your lead. Another interesting part is how the driver deals with traffic congestion. If you can't slip down in front going into the turn, your attempt to pass was a worthless burn of fuel, and now your engine is that much closer to burning out.
Overclocking your CPU would be pretty much the same sport, if the 'race' had some fixed qty of bytes to chew through, and massive failure resulted in smoke and flames.
What was that about embedding CPU's in our skulls again? ;-)
Anything faster than that, no.
After ISDN is in, his dad would get 128 Kbps. It would be charged per-minute, but if he didn't need .iso downloads, it would be OK. There's essentially zero connect time, too. Just be careful he doesn't install bittorrent.... ;-)
If the cost of ISDN was too much, he could always cancel it later. Note that for the phone company to put in ISDN, they would have to upgrade equipment between him and the switch. That upgraded equipment likely wouldn't be pulled out, so his 22 Kpbs would probably peg at 56 Kbps afterwards.
What you want is for the hosting company to send you (each user) a digest on a schedule of your choosing. That digest will list all the items waiting in quarantine for you. You look at the items in quarantine, and release the good mail.
The product should learn to pass the items you release. That's something I'd ask. GWAVA does it, and I'm sure other systems do too.
If the product doesn't learn, and instead wants you to manually configure your exceptions list - I'd pass on that product.
You want to keep the crap out of your mail system - so make sure the quarantine is the providers problem, not yours.
THAT made me giggle. Thanks! It's been a while, but man did that episode ever make me laugh way back when.
That made me chuckle. Thanks. :-)
Don't think storage replication as much as content replication between service providers (adapting each conduit to work with the peculiarities of each provider (flickr, facebook, multiply, linkedin, etc.) MS is calling it a mess, er, mesh, and I suppose each single link will be called a wire or something. But the readwriteweb link definitely showed something that looks like Conduit.
After I posted my snarky comment, I RTFA. Turns out Live Mesh is more a clone of Gnome Conduit
Does not being cross-platform qualify as "innovation" now?
Great. So now in Sync equipped cars, I can expect a Personal Dashboard Assistant named Zippy to offer to wrest the steering wheel away from me.
Sure, it's sad that your local bureaucracy views its population as prey.
It's happened elsewhere before, and was thrown out for the same reason. Lights exist to increase safety, and forcing sudden stops via short yellow lights increases danger instead.
I just wish that every city that considers red light cameras did them for the right reason, instead of listening to the vendor's sales pitch that it will boost revenue. There's nothing wrong with having a long yellow light, and fining the heck out of the people who offend anyway. Just don't expect the system to bring in more revenue than the system costs to run. (BTW, I used to work for a red-light camera vendor).
I've got four CPUs in my cube, because that's how much work I can keep busy. It's not hard to get an older CPU that someone would otherwise surplus. It's the bottom one in the stack that runs the webcam software. And yes, I've caught co-workers messing around my desk this way. It may not be elegant, but it's cheap and it works.
For taxpayer records, I'm pretty sure the IRS is still using the mainframes they bought in the 1990s. For email, they probably sway in the wind like many of the federal departments. It really depends if the PHBs at the very top are brown-nosers and want to impress the boss.
*Back in 1999, I met the #1 IT tech at the Post Office, and he was very bitter about the transition. He'd spent a chunk of his life implementing a cost-effective system with one file server per post office site, and it all ran very smoothly. All for naught, some PHB appointee scrapped it on political, not technical merit.
He wrote a book in 1965 Unsafe at Any Speed that slammed the Chevrolet Corvair. He appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1969 for his role as a consumer advocate.
If you are part of the liberal main-stream-media in the U.S.A., and you need to fill some column-inches or 30 second sound-bites, Ralph is a pretty good guy to help you slam the big old mean corporations. Not that there aren't corporations that need to be skewered - just that Ralph is a go-to guy when you are low on material.