Well, as a geek, I want a "real" IP address. to do things like play around with webservers. But here was a real scenario that you just cant do with NAT. me and my roomate in college both wanted ftp servers running on our machines so that we could access some files from over the internet. You cant have two machines running ftp's or any service over NAT. Our options were... have one of our machines run the ftp- kind of annoying, because then you have to worry about whether or not they left their machine on, getting files you want to have access to into the folder, crunching on their machine when they are working on something, etc. PITA. the other was a seperate dedicated machine to do this. The problem with this was that we would have to find space for the extra machine (college apartment = small), have to pay to power the extra machine, have to pay for an extra machine- the 'castoffs' of the time were pentium I's that still fetched a decent amount of money. In the end we just gave up, and burned stuff on CD if we needed it. nowadays USB pendrives work nicely for what we wanted. But even so, it would be nice if me and others in my house could run our own webservers.
Everything is a major PITA with NAT. Alot of applications will not work over NAT at all even if the implementation is done well and it is configured properly.
Im capable of shutting services off that I dont use and running a firewall (the big arugment for NAT is that it provides security). I just want to run two FTP's on my home network, and just not have to worry about NAT screwing things up, or wondering what machine exactly port whatever is being forwarded to. I want to be able to remote desktop to all the machines on my home network! I want to be able to ping all the machines on my home network to see if they are alive. I just want to be a real machine on the internet!
In addition, to me there is always an added bonus of having ubiquity and extra capacity and that bonus is innovation. Sure we dont need an OC-3 going to everyone's doorstep, but someone might create a great new killer app if it was there. We did not need an internet either, but look at what it has created. Sure, we dont see much point in having real IP's available (and imagine if they were static to boot!), but what if we did? Imagine if we really could just use them completely unfettered. Who knows what would happen?
I am not an apologist, and not a fan of MS's policies, but I believe slashdot is way too anti-MS./.'ers will rip MS to shreds over anything, but just kind of look the other way when it happens to linux. You never see articles stating "blahblahblah company considering using windows" articles, but it seems like anytime any entity of more than a few hundred people is even considering changing from windows, its right there on the front page. I believe its the "MS always evil. Linux/OSS do no wrong" attitude that is so ferverently defended that is going to keep linux/OSS in a niche and out of the mainstream. There are some out there who just believe so firmly in the linux/OSS idealogy that their promotion seems to become the goal, when presumably at one point it was benefitting all computer users through linux/OSS that was the goal. And these guys scream bloody murder at every opportunity against MS, no matter how minor the infraction, or how generally accepted a business practice is. And hence they make themselves and by relation linux/OSS look stupid. They call MS programmers idiots, complain about OSS not being widely adopted but then call the users idiots when you tell them most OSS software is too difficult for an average user to use, and have no problem telling an utterly confused newbie to RTFM when they boot up linux for the first time and cant figure out why they cant just run programs (IE why . isnt in their path). Presumably these are the same people who when you have a different opinion than them, dont make a rational, calm, convincing argument as a reply, but rather sit there and call you an F'ing idiot for not seeing there apparently self-evident 100% correct point of view. They just lose touch with reality, and end up alienating alot of people. And so, when I see such opinions being flung about, I try to counteract them with a much more toned down viewpoint, one that suggests maybe, just MAYBE, there might be another side to the story, and that its not completely MS BAD, Linux/OSS GOOD!!, and that mistakes happen, people have bad days arent necessarily idiots because they forgot to shut port whatever off or use the preview pane in outlook. and thats my story on that. if that makes me an apologist, then so be it.
its a dumb password scheme because it was meant to be a dumb password scheme. Its a simple one way hash. It is a document, a self contained, meant to be passed around entity. Even if they used some complex password scheme, it would still not be difficult to brute force it, and thus make it inherently insecure. So I bet they had a design meeting at some point and said, "hey, the customers want a feature to prevent snooping/tampering of docs, lets put a simple lock feature on them" knowing full well that it was not secure. Considering that a document is a passed around, meant to be distributed, entity without centralized tracking or control, it would be very difficult to put real security on them, and nowhere have I seen MS office targeted as the "secure way" to store data. A company using this for invoices and such is just plain crazy. Its like complaining about the insecurity of a soft top convertible. Or that the jack that came with your car wouldnt hold the weight of your friend's truck (I mean its a jack isnt it?, there is nothing on there that says it wont jack up a truck) You cant ever trust the client, ever. Thats a cardinal tenet of security. Thats why we have barcodes, and no longer just put little pricetag stickers on products and ring up whatever is on them. You also wouldnt trust the little tiny lock on a diary to hold the wild stories of your other life as a transexual gay man, at least not without hiding the thing damn well when your family is over to visit. Im getting offtopic here, but the point is, MS Word in no way shape or form tries to be a secure document system, and trusting your business or very secret information to it is just silly. sir, please read the fine post.
The locks on these files are very similar to locks found on standard filing cabinets. They are there to prevent tampering, keeping people out of places they really shouldnt be- sensitive, but not absolutely secret stuff. Secure they are not. I have used these things before, and I can tell you, its pretty clear they are not using any heavy duty security. I do not see how anyone intelligent could really see them as otherwise. You dont have to read a EULA to realize there is no watermarking, no digitial signature, no complex scheme of any sort behind it. I put last year's tax records in a filing cabinet, but I wouldnt keep the deed to my house or my the account number to my secret account in the cayman's in there, I would buy a safe. Same concept here.
Was this ever really meant to be really truly secure? "security" features like that have always been lame at best and equivalent to luggage locks. These passwords have always been susceptible to brute force attacks. Anyone really serious about keeping documents safe puts them into a source control program. There are many ways to pick at MS's security, this is not one of them. But if you are trusting these measures for really secure documents, I highly suggest you get your valuables out of the pink plastic safe you won at the county fair last year.
Well, I am not saying that the student should have been suspended by any stretch of the means, but he did affect 90 machines and presumably disrupted 90 students on those machines (yes, middle school students are very easy to disrupt, and a simple message probably put them all in an uproar of sorts). It was not malicious, but it was also unwise. For those of you who think this is an ok thing to do, try pulling something similar at work. You wont get fired, and prob not sent home w/out pay for a day, but your boss and others will most likely come in your office and be like umm... wtf? If youre on a public/shared resource, you have to be careful w/ what you do on that resource.
This is directed mostly at people who are just going to read this and be like "oh god teachers have no clue." What what he did was by just about any definition wrong and disruptive to others. A more appropriate punishment might have been a warning or an extra assignment of some sort (perhaps on why we dont play with commands when we dont understand the implications of their execution) and not a suspension, but I do feel action of some sort was warranted here.
That would be silly, but I would not hire anyone except maybe a lowlow-level grunt out of Enron's accounting department, and
anyone
that goes down with the ship at SCO I would find questionable also. The SCO thing has been going on for quite some time, and it is quite clear that they are not out to make a legitimate buck. An employee that stays onto a company like that in my eyes therefore deserves the stigma. About the only right answer I could hear out of a current SCO employee's mouth right now is "Well, Ive been looking for a job since it all started going downhill..." I would still have sympathy for most Enron employee's, that bomb took everyone by surprise, and most were out on their arses before they fully understood what happened.
Of course, the upper management at either of these firms I would lynch on the spot, though I doubt theyll be walking into my office, as Im sure they have and will set themselves up very nicely for the rest of their lives.
That is one disease that is on the rise, as opposed to the many, many more diseases that are much deadlier, on the decline. And I can assure you that obesity is a larger problem in the US than in Germany.
A better way to frame your argument might be "in spite of all the chemicals inside of us, we are still living longer. As it stands though, youre just using anectdotal, overly specific evidence- I mean, someone could make a case that there has been an increase in car crashes over the past 100 years too, and we are thus less healthy. Doesnt make much sense though does it?
Yeah. I mean all this is saying is "this product team is 6 times better at reducing errors found by common bugchecker software than proprietary code." Tell this to an end user. You will get a blank stare. And for once, the blank stare is actually justified. Just a few reasons why:
Lets ignore things like how good the product actually is - you know those things like speed, featureset, ease of use, reliability, turnaround time on bug reports, etc- even though featureset and reliability are directly related to code quality, and focus on the code itself.
They still make no analysis based on how well the code is commented. Which is KEY to code quality. In addition, the ease of modification/reuasibility is never touched upon either. Bugless spaghetti code that requires significant rewrites to add new features or requires recompiles to change system function parameters is NOT good code.
Now lets look at methodologies. Did they compare MySql, which is a major premiere product with high visibility and userbase to other major, premiere products with high visibility and large userbases? Did they compare MySql to other database projects of the same size? Did they at least try to match mySql up with other "mission critical" type applications? How about of the same maturity level? Upon perusal of the actual reports, they dont say, and I am guessing they did not. Smaller scale projects will not have the same review processes that larger ones will have- they also fail to mention that mySql, unlike most OSS projects- is funded. I would be much more impressed if they took a random sample of open source projects and compared them with a random sample of commercial products.
In addition, there error counts are far too low. 21 errors in 235,000 lines of code? is that the totality of bugs they feel exists in mySQL? Every decent software engineer knows that these bugs are the cake ones to find. its those really nasty "well in this case my assumptions turned out to be incorrect" type bugs that really cause the problems.
In summary, I could have run the projects through their "automated software checker" and churned out these reports and made these conclusions in a few hours, and grabbed some headlines in the process. But what they actually tell us is next to nothing.
I have tried this, though not necessarily due to deliberately ignoring their problem, but because I am busy and often dont get home from work until after my little brothers are in bed (thus cant fix the computers in their rooms.)
They are way too typical- I have tried my damnedest to get them to understand "data goes on this drive/partition, we install programs on this drive..." to no avail. They just want to be ignorant- with my brothers I can just tell them and then when they ask for a reinstall blast all their data away and teach them a lesson, but w/ the parents... I cant just do that. I have no idea how I share the same genes as them. But anyway, I have been looking for a solution to these problems and I can tell you that multiple users doesnt work out. Alot of software isnt written to use XP's multi user features. What's worse is, that the family has no regard for who is logged in when and will install software at will, and if they sit down and the program isnt in the startup list, well theyll just install it again. Huge nightmares...
The one thing they can do fairly competently is install software. So my solution right now is that I have an image of the C drive in its clean state w/ only essential software (windows, VNC, winzip, acrobat, Antivirus, JVM, GoogleToolbar w/ popupstopper) on my hard disk, and I can in theory in a half hour restore their system. It is the best, and only workable solution I have found.
Printed Electronic Statements often not "proof"
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Paperless Billing?
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· Score: 1
I love electronic statements. Stockpiling paper is a pain to me, cluttering, and just outright annoying. Really what I would like to see though is more of them in a standard, exportable format to make saving them easier.
However, I have had problems with all the electronifying of my statements. I tried to get a mortgage a few months ago. I asked the loan officer if I could email her the html/pdf's of my bank and pay statements. nope. we need paper. So I curse a little at how behind the times they are, but figure no big deal, Ill fax it. They said faxing is fine to get the ball rolling but to get 'approval' we need the actual copies. Me, again cursing their archaicness, then sends them my printed out forms. I get a call about a week and a half later saying this isnt good enough, they need it on the actual company letterhead. I explain to them my statements are now online only, yada yada, thats the best I can do. they say no loan fo' you unless we get real copies. So I had to jump through hoops to get the bank and payroll service to send the lender "real" copies. A major major PITA since they were reluctant to do so (and you have to deal w/ typical call center droids who mentally blue screen once you ask them about something not on the script- and this service was new for both companies, so it wasnt on the script). Also keep in mind, this was in a redhot real estate market. No one believes you when you say "Really everything is fine, theyre just not approving the mortgage because of paperwork", and the seller was getting antsy and wanted to go w/ another buyer. I assume this will change in the future as electronic only statements become more ubiquitous.
Also, since I no longer get that nice piece of paper in the mail saying "PAY ME!", I tend to forget to pay my bills. Most services allow auto payment via debit/credit, but the mortgage company (yeah same mortgage as above, though a different lender- the original bank sold it off) does not, and though I have a pretty comfortable cushion most of the time, I still like to make sure a bill that large and important is done at my discretion anyway.
Ignoring the "we are contemplating from switching from SQL statement" (what is SQL? I am going to assume you mean SQL server, and are just so familiar with it that you just call it SQL now... if not, you shouldnt be doing any DB work at all, do everyone a favor and stick to excel before you create behemoth database schemas that will give people nightmares for years to come). But anyway...
Access is nice from a learning perspective in that its easy to install, seperates you from what can be some nasty DB administration issues, is on your machine, and gives you a nice gui. The gui aspect is nice, because its much nicer to view the tables directly without having to tediously write select * statements all the time- its much more conducive to those "aha!" moments you get when trying to learn concepts. Also, direct data manipulation is nice if you just want to play with something (lets see if I can get this data to not be in the join by changing this value... type experiments). Those are much more tedious in other real DBMS's, though it could be argued that they could further help you learn concepts by practicing update queries and such. In addition, access makes it real easy to make tables.
On the other hand... Access's SQL engine (JET) sucks. I mean its terrible. It supports only a paltry amount of "real" db functions for data manipulation (substring being one notable example), and it doesnt even come close to supporting standard SQL, not even a plain outer join. Evaluating progress might be easier on a single server, but providing access to a single server can be a pain, and getting students to install DBMS's on their machines can also be a pain. DBMS's are not really that user friendly. But... it will give them better experience as to how real programming is done.
Ive seen classes done with access, and I must say I feel its a better route. Its just easier on the students. It lacks in alot of respects, but for a beginning student learning Concepts, its ok. Students learning things shouldnt be worrying about string manipulations or date conversions from old made up formats when learning DB concepts. All in all, access is a good choice.
This is not a technical book per se, but rather a textbook. The difference is... well... depending on the book, $20-70. And of course, each edition tacks on about $5.
But seriously... textbooks tend to be alot more thorough and dense than X in 21 days or even oreilly type books. You are not going to be able to read this in a casual manner. He is actually alot more readable than most books of this nature, but still, its a textbook nonetheless.
LIRR hardly makes money, and is subsidized by the government. Amtrack needed a bailout not too long ago. I was speaking of commuter rail lines, not freight haulers.
And even if most railroads are doing quite well, then why dont we have faster trains?
I understand the fact that the US as a whole will find it difficult to have a real high speed train system. However, in metropolitan areas, I fail to see what the problem is. I commute to NYC, and they are constantly building HOV (high occupancy vehicle) lanes, and expanding existing roads. The LIRR runs through long island, and its tracks for the most part are straight as an arrow- IE the infrastructure itself is not a limitation. To me it is mind boggling that communities in suffolk county (farther away from the city, most of which is outside most people's commuting tolerances from Manhattan) are not aggressively pushing this. This would drive up everyone's property values, as the commute to the city is a major discount factor for most Long Island Communities, and a map of property values on LI is pretty much a gradient with the highest being in manhattan and then just gradually decreasing the farther you get away.
Secondly, why the government isnt jumping on this also amazes me. Traffic costs alot of money. Additional wear and tear on roads, lost productivity, additional road construction, pollution, etc. My well being is much greater even though I traded in a 20 minute stressful car commute for an hour and 45 minute train trek into manhattan. GM wont be hurt too bad if we all hop on the train, you will still need a car to get to the station.
The fact that the railroad has a monopoly I feel is one of the roots of the problem. They have little incentive to speed up the lines. As it is, they just barely profit. How this is so, when their base infrastructure is quite old- and should already be paid for- also astounds me. I pay $226 a month for an hour ride into the city. They have 10 full cars of people on this single train paying the same thing... how do they not make money?! Even though the ticket takers make 40-50k a year or so just to collect tickets, they should still be able to have a nice take at the end of the year. The railroad misses so many opportunities for increased revenue or at least improving its customer's ride its ridiculous. Power hookups for laptops, and on train internet access stand out in my mind as the most glaringly obvious.
The problem may not be only the railroad's. I recall reading that Amtrack's relatively new 'high speed' trains were capable of going 120mph, but due to federal regulations of some sort, were limited to 80mph.
I too, just dont get it. The technology is there to triple or even double the speed of existing trains, which would redefine many communities. I would personally be willing to name dictator for life someone that could cut my commute in half. Somehow though, I think in 20 or even 30 years, Ill still be chugging along at 60mph, and maybe the cars will be a little newer, but im pretty sure I wont be sitting there telling my grandkids "you know, back in my day we didnt have trains that..."
Just putting computers in a classroom isnt going to accomplish a single thing. What needs to be done is to look at a computer the same way businesses have looked at computers- a tool- a tool to increase efficiency and reduce costs. Unfortunately, most teachers dont know how to use this tool. Similarly, handing me a lathe to do woodworking wouldnt do much good. I would likely end up using the lathe in the wrong (and a very dangerous) way. The lathe in and of itself would do no good. Along with these installations, real training and group brainstorming sessions should be occurring so teachers can be better informed on how to use them effectively, and see ideas on how their colleagues are using technology to teach more effectively. These machines also need to be effectively locked down- Classrooms probably dont really need 'net access at all. And if they do, they would probably be best served by only having an allow list of websites. No net access + locking down the machines so no programs can be installed on them by students will probably solve most of the problems.
Ideas on how computers CAN help education: 1.) Reduce Materials cost.
Textbooks could be made better and cheaper electronically. Color isnt more expensive when youre output is a PDF. Interactive animations/demonstrations, better diagrams, etc are all possible. Its even possible to encode entire lessons and store them for later retrieval.
Many texts read in english classes are public domain, and are already digital. And digital copies never get lost, and dont wear out like hard copies.
"Dittos"- Most schools have copy rooms that rival major corporations. Expensive equipment, lots of wasted paper which costs money. These could easily be digitized and distributed electronically, and have a nice side effect of being a bit greener.
2.)Process- Homework grading is a manual, labor intensive process, and a big time sink on a teacher's time. Often, teachers just 'check' homework by walking around a room and seeing if crap was scribbled down in a notebook. For most subjects it would be easy to make assignments online. Teachers could then every single day get realistic assessments of where the class' understanding is, and where their weakpoints lie (IE everyone seems to be getting the questions about centripetal force wrong, this needs to be reinforced). Tests too, could potentially be done on the computer. Lots of trickiness involved here with security, but if done right could be done alot better and more efficiently than the scantron system. Teachers can do more, better. Students have more, and better resources.
Yeah, effective use involves a big paradigm shift. But there was a point in time when none of our officeworkers made effective use of technology either. The age of the technophobic teacher that laughs over her lack of understanding of technology MUST come to an end, just like it has been for most of the workforce. Computers are also expensive. However, many of these costs are one-time infrastructure costs for wiring our schools, and equipment keeps getting cheaper. Todays hardware is more than enough to be effective.
The problems is that people want to throw hardware at the problem, and have test scores magically go up. Replacing a 486 w/ a P4 doesnt magically increase productivity, either. What is unfortunate is that these installations are most likely going to produce very few results, and administrators around the country are going to see technology in the classroom as a failure, when the real failure was in the implementation, and lack of vision.
Well then why not do some research.... Lets get the profiles on everyone involved... statistically speaking, there are bound to be some cancer patients or someone who had cancer (I can see it now, "RIAA sues cancer survivor!"), someone with HIV, a disability, has no car ("RIAA sues poor man who cannot afford a car!" -pay no mind as to whether he lives in an urban area where cars are not common). Im sure there are others with equally nasty terminal type diseases and stories that will wrench the heart of the public.
Why stop there? Lets grab headlines about big government giving parking tickets to grandmothers (again, the fact that they were parked illegally is not of consequence), issuing tickets to children riding bicycles without helmets, etc... Is the government now on par with the RIAA?
If a car T-bones a bus, killing 10 passengers, is the driver more guilty if they are children? Is he less guilty if they are drug dealer convicts on their way to a maximum security prison?
I am being overdramatic for a reason- to point out that it is not the attempted enforcement of a law or its victims that should be an issue- its the law itself. Whether they are shaking down 12 year old virgins, or 40 year old crackheads to me shouldnt be the issue. Your argument just seems to be supporting sensationalism for laws and organizations you do not particularly like.
Why? Because of 'market realities.' Which ones? The 12-year-old girl? The 15-year-old girl? Or the 66-year-old Grandma with a Mac?"
I am as much against the RIAA as anyone, and have been a victim of their tactics (in 1998/99 I was threatened with a suit via my school over an ftp site, ended up being protected by my school, but got slapped w/ loss of network access and academic probation for a year). But come on now guys, these quotes are the same type of crap pulled to get these laws in place 'for the children.' (Ok this doesnt apply really to the DMCA, but it doesnt change the central point). What is worse, is that we are now throwing grandmother's in the picture. It is equally heinous to sue your customers regardless of age, or maternal status. Can we please try to keep the loaded language to the mass media and off of slashdot? If not, might as well do some digging around, im sure one of them has or had cancer, perhaps is HIV positive.
Come on guys, lets keep the standards high, and use solid arguments in place of trying to sling mud at the RIAA.
I agree that just putting computers in a classroom isnt going to accomplish a single thing. In fact, I dont think computers will help at all for students in middle school or below, except for maybe playing those educational games to get them motivated about learning, and also for just teaching the basics of how to use one(this is a mouse, this is where programs are... etc.) What needs to be done is to look at a computer the same way businesses have looked at computers- a tool- a tool to increase efficiency and reduce costs. Unfortunately, most teachers dont know how to use this tool.
How can computers help education? 1.) Reduce Materials cost.
Textbooks could be made better and cheaper electronically. Color isnt more expensive when youre output is a PDF. Interactive animations/demonstrations, better diagrams, etc are all possible. Its even possible to encode entire lessons and store them for later retrieval.
Many texts read in english classes are public domain, and are already digital. And digital copies never get lost, and dont wear out like hard copies.
"Dittos"- Most schools have copy rooms that rival major corporations. Expensive equipment, lots of wasted paper which costs money. These could easily be digitized and distributed electronically, and have a nice side effect of being a bit greener.
2.)Process- Homework grading is a manual, labor intensive process, and a big time sink on a teacher's time. Often, teachers just 'check' homework by walking around a room and seeing if crap was scribbled down in a notebook. For most subjects it would be easy to make assignments online. Teachers could then every single day get realistic assessments of where the class' understanding is, and where their weakpoints lie (IE everyone seems to be getting the questions about centripetal force wrong, this needs to be reinforced). Tests too, could potentially be done on the computer. Lots of trickiness involved here with security, but if done right could be done alot better and more efficiently than the scantron system. Teachers can do more, better. Students have more, and better resources.
Yeah, effective use involves a big paradigm shift. But there was a point in time when none of our officeworkers made effective use of technology either. The age of the technophobic teacher that laughs over her lack of understanding of technology MUST come to an end, just like it has been for most of the workforce. Computers are also expensive. However, many of these costs are one-time infrastructure costs for wiring our schools, and equipment keeps getting cheaper. Todays hardware is more than enough to be effective.
Some software exists to accomplish these goals, most of it needs alot of work, but there is alot of work being done. I believe the 'killer app' for education has not yet been developed, but once it is, it will change the education process. I began work on one briefly (open source- eduonline @sourceforge) developed specs and a DB schema, but my job and another potentially profitable project stole me away within a few weeks of starting. Of course, the problems is that people want to throw hardware at the problem, and have test scores magically go up. Replacing a 486 w/ a P4 doesnt magically increase productivity, either. What is unfortunate is that these pilots are most likely going to produce very few results, and administrators around the country are going to see technology in the classroom as a failure, when the real failure was in the implementation, and lack of vision.
oh if I had mod points, this seems like the biggest troll ever. MySql has been catching up on features against Postgres for many many years now. Big features. Huge features. Subselects, stored procedures, transactions and the like. MySql has a larger userbase, and its not because its better. There are two main reasons for this, maybe three.
The first is that there is a rumor that mysql is faster. And in whatever benchmark that was run that started all this, it probably was. However, DB tuning is a black art, and one that can have a humongous orders of magnitude difference in performance.
The second is that the many many mysql users have no idea what a dbms is when they download it. They expect it to be like access. I have heard "umm... hi im trying to get this sql script loaded into my table, having a problem..." too many times. It is just sheer ignorance of alternatives and the thought process of "database, that uses that sql stuff, oooh mysql must be a database" Ive seen it countless times. Ask a senior CS student what Database systems are out there, and theyll probably answer access, oracle, mysql (in that order), and maybe sql server.
Third is that mysql is easier to set up and runs under windows w/out the added hassle of cygwin, and due to the larger userbase, has more third party pretty apps to make it easier.
Just about every Database professional I have met, if they had a gun put to their head by someone and had to set up a free database, they would choose postgres. Mysql has made some strides, but its just not postgres.
heh. I thought $1500 was kind of skimpy.
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Christmas Bonuses?
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· Score: 1, Informative
Maybe I have just been lucky, but every company I worked for was big on bonuses. Like up to 40-80% of salary type bonuses. Most very successful firms that I have heard about work in this manner. Interestingly enough, these companies were also very successful and had workers that frequently worked 60+ hours a week somewhat willingly. *If* you are willing to be this forthcoming, I would establish bonuses distributed as a percentage of profit(which you would have to reveal to your employees). The system works so much better IMHO if they can directly equate hard work and profitability with money in their pocket in a guaranteed way. Parties, gifts, etc.. yeah those are nice tokens too, but come on now, cash is cash, whether its taxed to death or not. If your employess understand that the success of the company is directly linked to financial gain, your workers will love you, love the company and wont mind putting in longer hours when it counts.
Other thoughts on distribution: Make it quality based- Good workers get more, bad workers get less. Give more to the rank and file than to the managers, these things always get around somehow, and alot of faith is lost in the company when a worker feels that a manager, on top of already stealing their recognition for work done, is also getting a bigger share of the profits because of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, as a geek, I want a "real" IP address. to do things like play around with webservers. But here was a real scenario that you just cant do with NAT. me and my roomate in college both wanted ftp servers running on our machines so that we could access some files from over the internet. You cant have two machines running ftp's or any service over NAT. Our options were... have one of our machines run the ftp- kind of annoying, because then you have to worry about whether or not they left their machine on, getting files you want to have access to into the folder, crunching on their machine when they are working on something, etc. PITA. the other was a seperate dedicated machine to do this. The problem with this was that we would have to find space for the extra machine (college apartment = small), have to pay to power the extra machine, have to pay for an extra machine- the 'castoffs' of the time were pentium I's that still fetched a decent amount of money. In the end we just gave up, and burned stuff on CD if we needed it. nowadays USB pendrives work nicely for what we wanted. But even so, it would be nice if me and others in my house could run our own webservers.
Everything is a major PITA with NAT. Alot of applications will not work over NAT at all even if the implementation is done well and it is configured properly.
Im capable of shutting services off that I dont use and running a firewall (the big arugment for NAT is that it provides security). I just want to run two FTP's on my home network, and just not have to worry about NAT screwing things up, or wondering what machine exactly port whatever is being forwarded to. I want to be able to remote desktop to all the machines on my home network! I want to be able to ping all the machines on my home network to see if they are alive. I just want to be a real machine on the internet!
In addition, to me there is always an added bonus of having ubiquity and extra capacity and that bonus is innovation. Sure we dont need an OC-3 going to everyone's doorstep, but someone might create a great new killer app if it was there. We did not need an internet either, but look at what it has created. Sure, we dont see much point in having real IP's available (and imagine if they were static to boot!), but what if we did? Imagine if we really could just use them completely unfettered. Who knows what would happen?
Not sure if this is the first one I downloaded, but the first MP3 I burned on to a cd was Nine Inch Nail's "Hurt".
Wow. the ping from Mars must suck.
I am not an apologist, and not a fan of MS's policies, but I believe slashdot is way too anti-MS. /.'ers will rip MS to shreds over anything, but just kind of look the other way when it happens to linux. You never see articles stating "blahblahblah company considering using windows" articles, but it seems like anytime any entity of more than a few hundred people is even considering changing from windows, its right there on the front page. I believe its the "MS always evil. Linux/OSS do no wrong" attitude that is so ferverently defended that is going to keep linux/OSS in a niche and out of the mainstream. There are some out there who just believe so firmly in the linux/OSS idealogy that their promotion seems to become the goal, when presumably at one point it was benefitting all computer users through linux/OSS that was the goal. And these guys scream bloody murder at every opportunity against MS, no matter how minor the infraction, or how generally accepted a business practice is. And hence they make themselves and by relation linux/OSS look stupid. They call MS programmers idiots, complain about OSS not being widely adopted but then call the users idiots when you tell them most OSS software is too difficult for an average user to use, and have no problem telling an utterly confused newbie to RTFM when they boot up linux for the first time and cant figure out why they cant just run programs (IE why . isnt in their path). Presumably these are the same people who when you have a different opinion than them, dont make a rational, calm, convincing argument as a reply, but rather sit there and call you an F'ing idiot for not seeing there apparently self-evident 100% correct point of view. They just lose touch with reality, and end up alienating alot of people. And so, when I see such opinions being flung about, I try to counteract them with a much more toned down viewpoint, one that suggests maybe, just MAYBE, there might be another side to the story, and that its not completely MS BAD, Linux/OSS GOOD!!, and that mistakes happen, people have bad days arent necessarily idiots because they forgot to shut port whatever off or use the preview pane in outlook. and thats my story on that. if that makes me an apologist, then so be it.
its a dumb password scheme because it was meant to be a dumb password scheme. Its a simple one way hash. It is a document, a self contained, meant to be passed around entity. Even if they used some complex password scheme, it would still not be difficult to brute force it, and thus make it inherently insecure. So I bet they had a design meeting at some point and said, "hey, the customers want a feature to prevent snooping/tampering of docs, lets put a simple lock feature on them" knowing full well that it was not secure. Considering that a document is a passed around, meant to be distributed, entity without centralized tracking or control, it would be very difficult to put real security on them, and nowhere have I seen MS office targeted as the "secure way" to store data. A company using this for invoices and such is just plain crazy. Its like complaining about the insecurity of a soft top convertible. Or that the jack that came with your car wouldnt hold the weight of your friend's truck (I mean its a jack isnt it?, there is nothing on there that says it wont jack up a truck) You cant ever trust the client, ever. Thats a cardinal tenet of security. Thats why we have barcodes, and no longer just put little pricetag stickers on products and ring up whatever is on them. You also wouldnt trust the little tiny lock on a diary to hold the wild stories of your other life as a transexual gay man, at least not without hiding the thing damn well when your family is over to visit. Im getting offtopic here, but the point is, MS Word in no way shape or form tries to be a secure document system, and trusting your business or very secret information to it is just silly.
sir, please read the fine post.
The locks on these files are very similar to locks found on standard filing cabinets. They are there to prevent tampering, keeping people out of places they really shouldnt be- sensitive, but not absolutely secret stuff. Secure they are not. I have used these things before, and I can tell you, its pretty clear they are not using any heavy duty security. I do not see how anyone intelligent could really see them as otherwise. You dont have to read a EULA to realize there is no watermarking, no digitial signature, no complex scheme of any sort behind it. I put last year's tax records in a filing cabinet, but I wouldnt keep the deed to my house or my the account number to my secret account in the cayman's in there, I would buy a safe. Same concept here.
Was this ever really meant to be really truly secure? "security" features like that have always been lame at best and equivalent to luggage locks. These passwords have always been susceptible to brute force attacks. Anyone really serious about keeping documents safe puts them into a source control program. There are many ways to pick at MS's security, this is not one of them. But if you are trusting these measures for really secure documents, I highly suggest you get your valuables out of the pink plastic safe you won at the county fair last year.
Well, I am not saying that the student should have been suspended by any stretch of the means, but he did affect 90 machines and presumably disrupted 90 students on those machines (yes, middle school students are very easy to disrupt, and a simple message probably put them all in an uproar of sorts). It was not malicious, but it was also unwise. For those of you who think this is an ok thing to do, try pulling something similar at work. You wont get fired, and prob not sent home w/out pay for a day, but your boss and others will most likely come in your office and be like umm... wtf? If youre on a public/shared resource, you have to be careful w/ what you do on that resource.
This is directed mostly at people who are just going to read this and be like "oh god teachers have no clue." What what he did was by just about any definition wrong and disruptive to others.
A more appropriate punishment might have been a warning or an extra assignment of some sort (perhaps on why we dont play with commands when we dont understand the implications of their execution) and not a suspension, but I do feel action of some sort was warranted here.
whoops, mixed up underline w/ unnumbered list. doh!
- anyone
that goes down with the ship at SCO I would find questionable also. The SCO thing has been going on for quite some time, and it is quite clear that they are not out to make a legitimate buck. An employee that stays onto a company like that in my eyes therefore deserves the stigma. About the only right answer I could hear out of a current SCO employee's mouth right now is "Well, Ive been looking for a job since it all started going downhill..." I would still have sympathy for most Enron employee's, that bomb took everyone by surprise, and most were out on their arses before they fully understood what happened.Of course, the upper management at either of these firms I would lynch on the spot, though I doubt theyll be walking into my office, as Im sure they have and will set themselves up very nicely for the rest of their lives.
That is one disease that is on the rise, as opposed to the many, many more diseases that are much deadlier, on the decline. And I can assure you that obesity is a larger problem in the US than in Germany.
A better way to frame your argument might be "in spite of all the chemicals inside of us, we are still living longer. As it stands though, youre just using anectdotal, overly specific evidence- I mean, someone could make a case that there has been an increase in car crashes over the past 100 years too, and we are thus less healthy. Doesnt make much sense though does it?
Yeah. I mean all this is saying is "this product team is 6 times better at reducing errors found by common bugchecker software than proprietary code." Tell this to an end user. You will get a blank stare. And for once, the blank stare is actually justified. Just a few reasons why:
Lets ignore things like how good the product actually is - you know those things like speed, featureset, ease of use, reliability, turnaround time on bug reports, etc- even though featureset and reliability are directly related to code quality, and focus on the code itself.
They still make no analysis based on how well the code is commented. Which is KEY to code quality.
In addition, the ease of modification/reuasibility is never touched upon either. Bugless spaghetti code that requires significant rewrites to add new features or requires recompiles to change system function parameters is NOT good code.
Now lets look at methodologies. Did they compare MySql, which is a major premiere product with high visibility and userbase to other major, premiere products with high visibility and large userbases? Did they compare MySql to other database projects of the same size? Did they at least try to match mySql up with other "mission critical" type applications? How about of the same maturity level? Upon perusal of the actual reports, they dont say, and I am guessing they did not. Smaller scale projects will not have the same review processes that larger ones will have- they also fail to mention that mySql, unlike most OSS projects- is funded. I would be much more impressed if they took a random sample of open source projects and compared them with a random sample of commercial products.
In addition, there error counts are far too low. 21 errors in 235,000 lines of code? is that the totality of bugs they feel exists in mySQL? Every decent software engineer knows that these bugs are the cake ones to find. its those really nasty "well in this case my assumptions turned out to be incorrect" type bugs that really cause the problems.
In summary, I could have run the projects through their "automated software checker" and churned out these reports and made these conclusions in a few hours, and grabbed some headlines in the process. But what they actually tell us is next to nothing.
I have tried this, though not necessarily due to deliberately ignoring their problem, but because I am busy and often dont get home from work until after my little brothers are in bed (thus cant fix the computers in their rooms.)
They are way too typical- I have tried my damnedest to get them to understand "data goes on this drive/partition, we install programs on this drive..." to no avail. They just want to be ignorant- with my brothers I can just tell them and then when they ask for a reinstall blast all their data away and teach them a lesson, but w/ the parents... I cant just do that. I have no idea how I share the same genes as them. But anyway, I have been looking for a solution to these problems and I can tell you that multiple users doesnt work out. Alot of software isnt written to use XP's multi user features. What's worse is, that the family has no regard for who is logged in when and will install software at will, and if they sit down and the program isnt in the startup list, well theyll just install it again. Huge nightmares...
The one thing they can do fairly competently is install software. So my solution right now is that I have an image of the C drive in its clean state w/ only essential software (windows, VNC, winzip, acrobat, Antivirus, JVM, GoogleToolbar w/ popupstopper) on my hard disk, and I can in theory in a half hour restore their system. It is the best, and only workable solution I have found.
I love electronic statements. Stockpiling paper is a pain to me, cluttering, and just outright annoying. Really what I would like to see though is more of them in a standard, exportable format to make saving them easier.
However, I have had problems with all the electronifying of my statements. I tried to get a mortgage a few months ago. I asked the loan officer if I could email her the html/pdf's of my bank and pay statements. nope. we need paper. So I curse a little at how behind the times they are, but figure no big deal, Ill fax it. They said faxing is fine to get the ball rolling but to get 'approval' we need the actual copies. Me, again cursing their archaicness, then sends them my printed out forms. I get a call about a week and a half later saying this isnt good enough, they need it on the actual company letterhead. I explain to them my statements are now online only, yada yada, thats the best I can do. they say no loan fo' you unless we get real copies. So I had to jump through hoops to get the bank and payroll service to send the lender "real" copies. A major major PITA since they were reluctant to do so (and you have to deal w/ typical call center droids who mentally blue screen once you ask them about something not on the script- and this service was new for both companies, so it wasnt on the script). Also keep in mind, this was in a redhot real estate market. No one believes you when you say "Really everything is fine, theyre just not approving the mortgage because of paperwork", and the seller was getting antsy and wanted to go w/ another buyer. I assume this will change in the future as electronic only statements become more ubiquitous.
Also, since I no longer get that nice piece of paper in the mail saying "PAY ME!", I tend to forget to pay my bills. Most services allow auto payment via debit/credit, but the mortgage company (yeah same mortgage as above, though a different lender- the original bank sold it off) does not, and though I have a pretty comfortable cushion most of the time, I still like to make sure a bill that large and important is done at my discretion anyway.
Ignoring the "we are contemplating from switching from SQL statement" (what is SQL? I am going to assume you mean SQL server, and are just so familiar with it that you just call it SQL now... if not, you shouldnt be doing any DB work at all, do everyone a favor and stick to excel before you create behemoth database schemas that will give people nightmares for years to come). But anyway...
Access is nice from a learning perspective in that its easy to install, seperates you from what can be some nasty DB administration issues, is on your machine, and gives you a nice gui. The gui aspect is nice, because its much nicer to view the tables directly without having to tediously write select * statements all the time- its much more conducive to those "aha!" moments you get when trying to learn concepts. Also, direct data manipulation is nice if you just want to play with something (lets see if I can get this data to not be in the join by changing this value... type experiments). Those are much more tedious in other real DBMS's, though it could be argued that they could further help you learn concepts by practicing update queries and such. In addition, access makes it real easy to make tables.
On the other hand... Access's SQL engine (JET) sucks. I mean its terrible. It supports only a paltry amount of "real" db functions for data manipulation (substring being one notable example), and it doesnt even come close to supporting standard SQL, not even a plain outer join. Evaluating progress might be easier on a single server, but providing access to a single server can be a pain, and getting students to install DBMS's on their machines can also be a pain. DBMS's are not really that user friendly. But... it will give them better experience as to how real programming is done.
Ive seen classes done with access, and I must say I feel its a better route. Its just easier on the students. It lacks in alot of respects, but for a beginning student learning Concepts, its ok. Students learning things shouldnt be worrying about string manipulations or date conversions from old made up formats when learning DB concepts. All in all, access is a good choice.
This is not a technical book per se, but rather a textbook. The difference is... well... depending on the book, $20-70. And of course, each edition tacks on about $5.
But seriously... textbooks tend to be alot more thorough and dense than X in 21 days or even oreilly type books. You are not going to be able to read this in a casual manner. He is actually alot more readable than most books of this nature, but still, its a textbook nonetheless.
LIRR hardly makes money, and is subsidized by the government. Amtrack needed a bailout not too long ago. I was speaking of commuter rail lines, not freight haulers.
And even if most railroads are doing quite well, then why dont we have faster trains?
I understand the fact that the US as a whole will find it difficult to have a real high speed train system. However, in metropolitan areas, I fail to see what the problem is. I commute to NYC, and they are constantly building HOV (high occupancy vehicle) lanes, and expanding existing roads. The LIRR runs through long island, and its tracks for the most part are straight as an arrow- IE the infrastructure itself is not a limitation. To me it is mind boggling that communities in suffolk county (farther away from the city, most of which is outside most people's commuting tolerances from Manhattan) are not aggressively pushing this. This would drive up everyone's property values, as the commute to the city is a major discount factor for most Long Island Communities, and a map of property values on LI is pretty much a gradient with the highest being in manhattan and then just gradually decreasing the farther you get away.
Secondly, why the government isnt jumping on this also amazes me. Traffic costs alot of money. Additional wear and tear on roads, lost productivity, additional road construction, pollution, etc. My well being is much greater even though I traded in a 20 minute stressful car commute for an hour and 45 minute train trek into manhattan. GM wont be hurt too bad if we all hop on the train, you will still need a car to get to the station.
The fact that the railroad has a monopoly I feel is one of the roots of the problem. They have little incentive to speed up the lines. As it is, they just barely profit. How this is so, when their base infrastructure is quite old- and should already be paid for- also astounds me. I pay $226 a month for an hour ride into the city. They have 10 full cars of people on this single train paying the same thing... how do they not make money?! Even though the ticket takers make 40-50k a year or so just to collect tickets, they should still be able to have a nice take at the end of the year. The railroad misses so many opportunities for increased revenue or at least improving its customer's ride its ridiculous. Power hookups for laptops, and on train internet access stand out in my mind as the most glaringly obvious.
The problem may not be only the railroad's. I recall reading that Amtrack's relatively new 'high speed' trains were capable of going 120mph, but due to federal regulations of some sort, were limited to 80mph.
I too, just dont get it. The technology is there to triple or even double the speed of existing trains, which would redefine many communities. I would personally be willing to name dictator for life someone that could cut my commute in half. Somehow though, I think in 20 or even 30 years, Ill still be chugging along at 60mph, and maybe the cars will be a little newer, but im pretty sure I wont be sitting there telling my grandkids "you know, back in my day we didnt have trains that..."
Just putting computers in a classroom isnt going to accomplish a single thing. What needs to be done is to look at a computer the same way businesses have looked at computers- a tool- a tool to increase efficiency and reduce costs. Unfortunately, most teachers dont know how to use this tool. Similarly, handing me a lathe to do woodworking wouldnt do much good. I would likely end up using the lathe in the wrong (and a very dangerous) way. The lathe in and of itself would do no good. Along with these installations, real training and group brainstorming sessions should be occurring so teachers can be better informed on how to use them effectively, and see ideas on how their colleagues are using technology to teach more effectively. These machines also need to be effectively locked down- Classrooms probably dont really need 'net access at all. And if they do, they would probably be best served by only having an allow list of websites. No net access + locking down the machines so no programs can be installed on them by students will probably solve most of the problems.
Ideas on how computers CAN help education:
1.) Reduce Materials cost.
Textbooks could be made better and cheaper electronically. Color isnt more expensive when youre output is a PDF. Interactive animations/demonstrations, better diagrams, etc are all possible. Its even possible to encode entire lessons and store them for later retrieval.
Many texts read in english classes are public domain, and are already digital. And digital copies never get lost, and dont wear out like hard copies.
"Dittos"- Most schools have copy rooms that rival major corporations. Expensive equipment, lots of wasted paper which costs money. These could easily be digitized and distributed electronically, and have a nice side effect of being a bit greener.
2.)Process- Homework grading is a manual, labor intensive process, and a big time sink on a teacher's time. Often, teachers just 'check' homework by walking around a room and seeing if crap was scribbled down in a notebook. For most subjects it would be easy to make assignments online. Teachers could then every single day get realistic assessments of where the class' understanding is, and where their weakpoints lie (IE everyone seems to be getting the questions about centripetal force wrong, this needs to be reinforced). Tests too, could potentially be done on the computer. Lots of trickiness involved here with security, but if done right could be done alot better and more efficiently than the scantron system. Teachers can do more, better. Students have more, and better resources.
Yeah, effective use involves a big paradigm shift. But there was a point in time when none of our officeworkers made effective use of technology either. The age of the technophobic teacher that laughs over her lack of understanding of technology MUST come to an end, just like it has been for most of the workforce. Computers are also expensive. However, many of these costs are one-time infrastructure costs for wiring our schools, and equipment keeps getting cheaper. Todays hardware is more than enough to be effective.
The problems is that people want to throw hardware at the problem, and have test scores magically go up. Replacing a 486 w/ a P4 doesnt magically increase productivity, either. What is unfortunate is that these installations are most likely going to produce very few results, and administrators around the country are going to see technology in the classroom as a failure, when the real failure was in the implementation, and lack of vision.
Well then why not do some research.... Lets get the profiles on everyone involved... statistically speaking, there are bound to be some cancer patients or someone who had cancer (I can see it now, "RIAA sues cancer survivor!"), someone with HIV, a disability, has no car ("RIAA sues poor man who cannot afford a car!" -pay no mind as to whether he lives in an urban area where cars are not common). Im sure there are others with equally nasty terminal type diseases and stories that will wrench the heart of the public.
Why stop there? Lets grab headlines about big government giving parking tickets to grandmothers (again, the fact that they were parked illegally is not of consequence), issuing tickets to children riding bicycles without helmets, etc... Is the government now on par with the RIAA?
If a car T-bones a bus, killing 10 passengers, is the driver more guilty if they are children? Is he less guilty if they are drug dealer convicts on their way to a maximum security prison?
I am being overdramatic for a reason- to point out that it is not the attempted enforcement of a law or its victims that should be an issue- its the law itself. Whether they are shaking down 12 year old virgins, or 40 year old crackheads to me shouldnt be the issue. Your argument just seems to be supporting sensationalism for laws and organizations you do not particularly like.
Why? Because of 'market realities.' Which ones? The 12-year-old girl? The 15-year-old girl? Or the 66-year-old Grandma with a Mac?"
I am as much against the RIAA as anyone, and have been a victim of their tactics (in 1998/99 I was threatened with a suit via my school over an ftp site, ended up being protected by my school, but got slapped w/ loss of network access and academic probation for a year). But come on now guys, these quotes are the same type of crap pulled to get these laws in place 'for the children.' (Ok this doesnt apply really to the DMCA, but it doesnt change the central point). What is worse, is that we are now throwing grandmother's in the picture. It is equally heinous to sue your customers regardless of age, or maternal status. Can we please try to keep the loaded language to the mass media and off of slashdot? If not, might as well do some digging around, im sure one of them has or had cancer, perhaps is HIV positive.
Come on guys, lets keep the standards high, and use solid arguments in place of trying to sling mud at the RIAA.
I agree that just putting computers in a classroom isnt going to accomplish a single thing. In fact, I dont think computers will help at all for students in middle school or below, except for maybe playing those educational games to get them motivated about learning, and also for just teaching the basics of how to use one(this is a mouse, this is where programs are... etc.) What needs to be done is to look at a computer the same way businesses have looked at computers- a tool- a tool to increase efficiency and reduce costs. Unfortunately, most teachers dont know how to use this tool.
How can computers help education?
1.) Reduce Materials cost.
Textbooks could be made better and cheaper electronically. Color isnt more expensive when youre output is a PDF. Interactive animations/demonstrations, better diagrams, etc are all possible. Its even possible to encode entire lessons and store them for later retrieval.
Many texts read in english classes are public domain, and are already digital. And digital copies never get lost, and dont wear out like hard copies.
"Dittos"- Most schools have copy rooms that rival major corporations. Expensive equipment, lots of wasted paper which costs money. These could easily be digitized and distributed electronically, and have a nice side effect of being a bit greener.
2.)Process- Homework grading is a manual, labor intensive process, and a big time sink on a teacher's time. Often, teachers just 'check' homework by walking around a room and seeing if crap was scribbled down in a notebook. For most subjects it would be easy to make assignments online. Teachers could then every single day get realistic assessments of where the class' understanding is, and where their weakpoints lie (IE everyone seems to be getting the questions about centripetal force wrong, this needs to be reinforced). Tests too, could potentially be done on the computer. Lots of trickiness involved here with security, but if done right could be done alot better and more efficiently than the scantron system. Teachers can do more, better. Students have more, and better resources.
Yeah, effective use involves a big paradigm shift. But there was a point in time when none of our officeworkers made effective use of technology either. The age of the technophobic teacher that laughs over her lack of understanding of technology MUST come to an end, just like it has been for most of the workforce. Computers are also expensive. However, many of these costs are one-time infrastructure costs for wiring our schools, and equipment keeps getting cheaper. Todays hardware is more than enough to be effective.
Some software exists to accomplish these goals, most of it needs alot of work, but there is alot of work being done. I believe the 'killer app' for education has not yet been developed, but once it is, it will change the education process. I began work on one briefly (open source- eduonline @sourceforge) developed specs and a DB schema, but my job and another potentially profitable project stole me away within a few weeks of starting. Of course, the problems is that people want to throw hardware at the problem, and have test scores magically go up. Replacing a 486 w/ a P4 doesnt magically increase productivity, either. What is unfortunate is that these pilots are most likely going to produce very few results, and administrators around the country are going to see technology in the classroom as a failure, when the real failure was in the implementation, and lack of vision.
oh if I had mod points, this seems like the biggest troll ever. MySql has been catching up on features against Postgres for many many years now. Big features. Huge features. Subselects, stored procedures, transactions and the like. MySql has a larger userbase, and its not because its better. There are two main reasons for this, maybe three.
The first is that there is a rumor that mysql is faster. And in whatever benchmark that was run that started all this, it probably was. However, DB tuning is a black art, and one that can have a humongous orders of magnitude difference in performance.
The second is that the many many mysql users have no idea what a dbms is when they download it. They expect it to be like access. I have heard "umm... hi im trying to get this sql script loaded into my table, having a problem..." too many times. It is just sheer ignorance of alternatives and the thought process of "database, that uses that sql stuff, oooh mysql must be a database" Ive seen it countless times. Ask a senior CS student what Database systems are out there, and theyll probably answer access, oracle, mysql (in that order), and maybe sql server.
Third is that mysql is easier to set up and runs under windows w/out the added hassle of cygwin, and due to the larger userbase, has more third party pretty apps to make it easier.
Just about every Database professional I have met, if they had a gun put to their head by someone and had to set up a free database, they would choose postgres. Mysql has made some strides, but its just not postgres.
rikku.
Maybe I have just been lucky, but every company I worked for was big on bonuses. Like up to 40-80% of salary type bonuses. Most very successful firms that I have heard about work in this manner. Interestingly enough, these companies were also very successful and had workers that frequently worked 60+ hours a week somewhat willingly. *If* you are willing to be this forthcoming, I would establish bonuses distributed as a percentage of profit(which you would have to reveal to your employees). The system works so much better IMHO if they can directly equate hard work and profitability with money in their pocket in a guaranteed way. Parties, gifts, etc.. yeah those are nice tokens too, but come on now, cash is cash, whether its taxed to death or not. If your employess understand that the success of the company is directly linked to financial gain, your workers will love you, love the company and wont mind putting in longer hours when it counts.
Other thoughts on distribution:
Make it quality based- Good workers get more, bad workers get less.
Give more to the rank and file than to the managers, these things always get around somehow, and alot of faith is lost in the company when a worker feels that a manager, on top of already stealing their recognition for work done, is also getting a bigger share of the profits because of it.