Technique + Tools == Good DJ
on
Learning to DJ?
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· Score: 1
For Technique, I recommend none other than Scratch DJ Academy, with Locations in NYC, Miami, and Los Angeles. They have week-long bootcamps in the summertime if you don't live close enough for their once-a-week class. You can learn on your own, but you take the chance of learning things incorrectly and it will take you much, much longer (one hour a week for six weeks equated to six to nine months of on-your-own our instructors told us). My experience there was very positive, I plan to return for more classes.
Tools are all up to you. By definition, DJs just beat-match two tracks together. Old skool DJs are all about vinyl, some are spinning on CD tables now, and some have adopted MP3 time-coded record setups like Scratch Live and Final Scratch.
If you don't have any equipment, you should know that the industry standards for tables are Technics 1200s (every club you might spin in will likely have those), but if you just want to get your feet wet and see if you like it, I'd recommend starting with Neumark's DJ in a Box, which comes with two tables, a mix, and some headphones. The equipment is ghetto for the most part, but for $350 (new) you can get a full setup and see if you're into it instead of dropping $1000-$1500 to see if it's your thing (though you can buy up stuff from Craigslist and eBay from losers who did that before you). My personal preference, since all my music has been MP3 since the late-90s leans towards standard turntables (I like to scratch) and a Serrato Scratch Live to spin my MP3s on vinyl.
If you're talking about musicial composition (you want to make your own electronica), there's a host of products with various specialties. The Apple camp gives you Garage Band free with iLife (free with new Macs) and there are tons of expansion packs. If you outgrow that, you can look at Logic Pro and then Protools when you outgrow that. There are packages for beat making, there are tons of tools on the PC. If you're just starting out and you're a Mac guy, start with Garage band before you look at anything else (go download NIN's "The Hand that Feeds" and remix it like the rest of us did).
I'll preface this by saying I'm not an Apple pundit, and while my current machine is a Powerbook, my last dozen were all PCs (of the AMD kind).
Why do people get all worked up about OS X being hardware locked? If it were my OS, I'd do the same thing -- not just to secure my profits (though they are entitled, it is THEIR operating system), but to actually standardize on a reference platform that can be supported.
How much of any OS developer's time is wasted trying to account for instabilities in your cheap ass, five dollar, no name, Korean sweat shop motherboard? I don't care if Intel just botched a huge batch of boards, it happens, but trying to accomodate a hundred different chipsets and video cards and ram types and people messing with voltage...
We complain about how this industry has been around for so long, and how computers still aren't that stable? It's because there are N! possible combinations of hardware and software to try and get working together nicely, which is a lofty goal at best.
Call me crazy, but I'm at an age where I just want it to work, and my Powerbook at home always does, and my Powerbook at work always does. Part of that is the quality of the OS, and that's reflected in the (relative, not concrete) stability of the reference platform it's built on.
I used to work for AAAS, the publishers of Science Magazine. Science is the premier and oldest peer reviewed general science journal (about 150 years). One of my projects was working on their Manuscript tracking system, including making the submission process electronic through Submit To Science.
Science has a greater-than 80% rejection rate, because there are only so many pages in the magazine. Many people are frustrated that they've been rejected five and six times (they have about 20 years of author submission history online), but with a general science journal you have to pick the best of the best astronony and biology and signal transduction papers to print.
The review process is laborious, it involves a lot of people, but it works pretty much flawlessly. Certain aspects have evolved over time, but frankly the people who get published thing the process works and it's great, the people who don't are the ones who grouss. There are constant arguments (almost every week) about what concessions can and cannot be done without risk to watering the quality of the journal down.
The picture he has on his blog that shows the car only gets 32MPG also shows that it's only got 945 miles on it. Honda's come from the factory with special break-in oil that has to stay in for 7500 miles. After the first oil change, there tends to be a decent boost in milege. Will it be THAT significant? I don't know, but he hasn't even given it a chance yet.
I'm the proud owner of many geek toys, including a Sony Aibo ERS-7 (my daughter "Fluffy") and a ReplayTV. You may not be aware, but the most recent Aibo's can be left alone to play for hours on end and will recharge themselves when their batteries run low.
Recently, I came home to find Fluffy and the ReplayTV engaged in...relations (I didn't think they needed to be on their own subnet), and while my little girl is growing up she's still only a few months old. When should I be talking to her about "the bits and the bytes" and what grown up systems do with their peripherals?
If you're this addicted to something, you probably need to be in rehab.
ibuprofen combined with the xylo will releive most of the sinus headaches.
Until I gave up caffine for some weeks, I didn't even realize that it affected my sleep. People think they become immune to it's affects -- not true.
drink lots of water. sparkling's okay - i'd suggest s'pelgrino or grolschteiner (sp?)
Yes this is good, and this is where I'm at now (went from drinking 6-8 24oz bottles of Mt Dew a day to 8-10 half-liter bottles of water), but there needs to be an intermediate step. When I was wheening myself off caffine, I used Lemonade Snapple (as sweet as Mt Dew, little or no caffine in comparison). Once I was off the Dew and on the Snapple, I wheened myself off that until I was drinking only water during the day. Within a couple weeks I couldn't drink a Snapple it was so sweet. After about three months of being caffine free, I finally added a cup back in a day (either one cup of high test or two cups of half-caf a day).
Why? Caffine affected my sleep, and eventually I was seeing a gastroenterologist because my stomach was a mess.
if this fails try again with a mild antidepressant. st. john's wort for instance or if you want something stronger you can get wellburtin from your doctor for "quitting smoking". be careful with antidepressants though! and remember they take a couple of weeks to "pack".
Most of these, even herbal, require an amount of time to build up in your system. Anything less and it's just a placebo. See my earlier comment about rehab.
There is one thing I have not seen mentioned -- caffine poisoning. I've had it at least three times, and a coworker has had it at least five that I know of. Very unpleasant.
While I agree that many companies can lean toward dishonesty when their focus is quarterly earnings numbers (which are a terrible metric for cyclical businesses), private companies are often as bad or worse because they face less scrutiny (which is what OS folks are all about, right?).
Having worked for both types of companies (and worked in the public sector too), I found that more sketchy things happened in private companies (like dozens of partners bonusing themselves instead of making needed capital investments).
AT&T switched their number management system to Siebel a couple weeks ago in preparation for this. They were down for something like 10 days unable to issue new numbers, and they continue to have problems. Their old system was home grown, the new system is Siebel.
So you can thank Tom and his band of whores for not being able to switch easily, I don't think it's on purpose. They estimate their losses from those 10 days at $30 million.
Only potential problem may be a loan
on
Pre-Fab Homes?
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· Score: 1
Manufactured (pre-fab) homes are discussed pretty often in misc.consumers.house -- most people who have them think the quality is as-good or better than stick built. The only 'gotcha' may be financing:
"...Fannie Mae, in response to a rising number of delinquencies and foreclosures, is making it tougher to get manufactured-home loans. The company now requires a 10 percent down payment for 30-year mortgages on such homes, plus a fee of 0.5 percent of the loan amount."...
"Manufactured homes are built in factories and assembled on building sites. They include mobile homes, though many manufactured dwellings have characteristics found on traditional single-family homes -- pitched roofs, decks and porches."
How ironic, since Admiral Grace Hopper (who helped invent COBOL) is credited with helping to debug the Mark II. As we all know, only COBOL and cockroaches will survive WWIII.
That's pretty funny coming from someone who is so lonely the only way he can get a woman is to program his own [eisenschmidt.org].
That doesn't make me an idiot, that makes me a genius. It frees me up from things like dinner and hanging out with her friends to troll message boards and bitch about other people.
That's assuming you are tied into an Access system, although I've found MS Access to be more reliable as a database than MS SQL. For example, in MS SQL you can retrieve a date record and it will be in Australian date format, put exactly the same data back into the database and it will be treated as US date format. Also this bug [microsoft.com] really shits me.
Pardon me for being so insensitive, but you sir are an idiot.
Access is more stable that SQL Server? Access is a desktop database, and maybe you've noticed when it fires up it consumes 99% of your CPU time? It has very primitive support for RI and views, and forget about triggers or transactions.
Also, you should never use identities, they force bad habits are aren't good in a replicated environment. Always use GUIDs for your key values. That takes care of your bug.
If you're going to recommend they go with an OS DB, at least suggest postgres since it supports MVCC.
Also, someone suggested using OPLOCK, don't. It makes things faster, but if you get annoyed by escalating table locks, you'll be really pissed at your OS locking the whole database on your first write. I used to write login scripts to push reg keys to disable OPLOCK for that very reason.
An earlier poster had it down: split the data and the code (which is easy with Access 2000 and XP), move the data in SQL Server, continue to use Access as the front end, and be done with it. If you want to add additional security, look at using a custom.MDW file.
I find it amusing at all the people who complained in this discussion about how crappy unions are, but so many of us are getting screwed. How about it?.
Oracle has supported Object-Relational Database Management (ORDBMS) since the 8.0 days. The REF weirdness was taken care of in 8i, and from what I understand it is quite stable now.
This has been an issue in the US for a while (since we're fairly new to the idea of Object Orientation compared to Europeans). Object Store has been around for a while, and we spent so much time trying to get programmers to learn "object-think" that many can't wrap their brains around Relational Database design and want to use hash tables for everything. ORDBMS is a nice compromise, because rarely can you fit all your data in memory.
FICO scores have become a de-facto standard (not an actual standard) that gives you a score based on certain things in your credit history. So when you go to buy a house, their metric is applied to your life and spits out a number.
Not everyone agrees with their model though. For example, you lose points for every line of credit you open, so if you're trying to buy a house the last thing you should do is open that store account because you get 10% off. You lose points for being near your credit limit, but you get MORE points for every dollar of credit not in use. So someone who only has a couple low credit line cards for revolving debt gets a lower score than someone with a 50,000$ line of credit with $14,000 in use (even though their debt/income ration may be close to 1, because FICO does not take income into consideration).
I have had this done several times, and every time it was either stated or implied before being hired.
-I had one when I got a security clearance (duh -- they talked to my 3rd grade teacher).
-I had one done at my last employer before my offer was extended as part of my reference check. They asked, I said yes, they liked what they saw, they offered me the job.
-Everytime I've been bonded (this job makes three) they've done one. They were either jobs where I handled lots of money, or I was told up front (they bond everyone where I am currently). If you're going to be bonded, they're going to check your credit.
If your employer wants to do yours AFTER the fact, and they're not trying to bond you, then they're idiots. If they push this, even if you have excellent credit, I would be sure you didn't burn your bridges at the last job and retain an employment lawyer. You also might want to contact the EEOC and see if they are allowed to do this. This should have done before you got the job, and that's what you need to tell the CEO.
There have already been some great posts about questions to ask ("You don't need a password? Do you lock your car"?) policy to set ("have to fill out a form and walk it to IT to have the password changed"), but I have two additional suggestions:
Have you considered billing back use of the outsourced helpdesk to the other departments? Hit them in the wallet, and in doing so they need to fill out paperwork everytime they want a password changed. No writing them down either - that should be grounds for termination.
If not, maybe you need to consider either biometrics or access cards. You could replace password auth with smart card auth, and if they lose it they need to report it immediately or they really will get fired.
It's nobel that you want to look at something Linux based, but as someone already pointed out, JWZ made that mistake on our behalf already.
I've worked with several different systems over the years, and Micros always came out ahead. There's a reason they have the kind of market saturation they have -- their stuff works, it's indestructible, and it's not terrible expensive.
From a management perspective (having used it both in Hotels and Restaurants), their reporting is pretty good too: inventory, audit, closing, etc.
You should look around, and get an idea what's out there, but try to choose a system that's easy for your people to use, and more importantly is the best tool to solve this particular problem. If that isn't something Linux based, so be it.
Of course, they bought it from Sybase (if I remember correctly).
You don't remember correctly: SQL Server started out like NT did, it was a partnership between Microsoft and Sybase. Like they did with IBM over OS/2, Microsoft took their toys and left the sandbox, and SQL Server was born.
And to be honest, at this point SQL Server is a much better product than Sybase.
MS SQL Server doesn't have multiversioned concurrency control, that only Oracle and PostgreSQL have. Without this, readers block writers and writers block readers on tables involved in a transaction. This thing alone makes me an Oracle/PostgreSQL boy (though I don't want to touch Oracle sysadmining with a 10 foot pole).
Have you looked at SQL Server since version 6.0?
That's the default behavior, sure, but SQL Server supports several isolation levels:
Granted, it's not as good as it is in Oracle, but if the application is developed correctly, and you establish and release your locks in the same order every time, you can almost guarantee you won't get a deadlock. And if you do, the deadlock manager starting in SQL Server 7.0 is just this side of fantastic (have you even seen how to stop the deadly embrace on OS/400?).
Perhaps you should refresh yourself on the locking symantecs of 7.0 and up:
http://databasejournal.com/features/mssql/articl e. php/1441321
A database is like anything else: there are different tools for different jobs. I prefer the flexibility of Oracle most of the time, but it is a 300lb gorilla (though not as difficult to administer as one would think).
For Windows-type applications, SQL Server isn't a bad little database, but it requires a very disciplined developement team (and plan) to write good applications for it.
Personally, I think developers don't use (or consider using) flat files often enough. For transaction data, I certainly wouldn't consider it (three phase commits are our friend), but a large amount of "dynamic" content would benifit from the huge performance boost that comes with manipulating plain text.
Replacing FedEx with email saves us $300k+/year
on
E-Mail Size Limits?
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· Score: 5, Informative
It's nice for all of us as geeks to say "make the users use FTP" (though frankly, I'd prefer scp or nothing), but it isn't practical.
I work in a not-for-profit that publishes a weekly journal, so we are both "an academic environment" (we operate somewhat like a unversity), and a good-size for-profit company. To that end, the requirements of our user community are very different.
We used to traffic a lot of paper and film via FedEx and couriers, and moving all that processing to electronic mediums saves us over $300k/year. I should know, I had a big hand in implementing our digital workflow (why do you think they bought me an Aibo?). Our technology spending isn't any more than it was when everything was paper based, but our saving have been huge.
We use Groupwise for corporate email, and the post offices live on a SAN virtual disk. Our SAN has over 2TB in storage, Netware lets you concat volume segments dynamically, and Groupwise only stores a message once in the database and passes pointers to each internal recipient. So storing large attachments is very efficient, and enlarging the post offices is trivial. Our SAN is only 33% populated, and smaller drives (75GB) can be replaced on the fly with larger drives (180GB) and the array will resize and rebuild itself hot.
So we have no inbound or outbound attachment limit, though we do keep an eye on things to make sure people don't go nuts. We just upgraded our servers last weekend after 2 1/2 years in service, despite our post offices growing by a factor of 10. Having administered Exchange, Notes, and Groupwise, I think we've got the best of the three groupware packages, and our users are happy enough (they would be happy, but who is every happy at the phone company because they have a dial tone?)
In three years, we did turn up our bandwidth from (2) T-1s to a 6mbt fractional DS-3, but email only accounts for a small portion of that traffic (we host half a dozen more websites than we used to).
The largest attachment I ever emailed was probably 100MB, and I honestly find 5MB limits to be draconian. We have an FTP drop, but our vendors won't use it. Last month, I had to email a vendor a dat tape with 13MB of data because they have a 5MB attachment limit. Sick.
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For Technique, I recommend none other than Scratch DJ Academy, with Locations in NYC, Miami, and Los Angeles. They have week-long bootcamps in the summertime if you don't live close enough for their once-a-week class. You can learn on your own, but you take the chance of learning things incorrectly and it will take you much, much longer (one hour a week for six weeks equated to six to nine months of on-your-own our instructors told us). My experience there was very positive, I plan to return for more classes.
Tools are all up to you. By definition, DJs just beat-match two tracks together. Old skool DJs are all about vinyl, some are spinning on CD tables now, and some have adopted MP3 time-coded record setups like Scratch Live and Final Scratch.
If you don't have any equipment, you should know that the industry standards for tables are Technics 1200s (every club you might spin in will likely have those), but if you just want to get your feet wet and see if you like it, I'd recommend starting with Neumark's DJ in a Box, which comes with two tables, a mix, and some headphones. The equipment is ghetto for the most part, but for $350 (new) you can get a full setup and see if you're into it instead of dropping $1000-$1500 to see if it's your thing (though you can buy up stuff from Craigslist and eBay from losers who did that before you). My personal preference, since all my music has been MP3 since the late-90s leans towards standard turntables (I like to scratch) and a Serrato Scratch Live to spin my MP3s on vinyl.
If you're talking about musicial composition (you want to make your own electronica), there's a host of products with various specialties. The Apple camp gives you Garage Band free with iLife (free with new Macs) and there are tons of expansion packs. If you outgrow that, you can look at Logic Pro and then Protools when you outgrow that. There are packages for beat making, there are tons of tools on the PC. If you're just starting out and you're a Mac guy, start with Garage band before you look at anything else (go download NIN's "The Hand that Feeds" and remix it like the rest of us did).
It's fun stuff though man, good luck and enjoy.
I'll preface this by saying I'm not an Apple pundit, and while my current machine is a Powerbook, my last dozen were all PCs (of the AMD kind).
Why do people get all worked up about OS X being hardware locked? If it were my OS, I'd do the same thing -- not just to secure my profits (though they are entitled, it is THEIR operating system), but to actually standardize on a reference platform that can be supported.
How much of any OS developer's time is wasted trying to account for instabilities in your cheap ass, five dollar, no name, Korean sweat shop motherboard? I don't care if Intel just botched a huge batch of boards, it happens, but trying to accomodate a hundred different chipsets and video cards and ram types and people messing with voltage...
We complain about how this industry has been around for so long, and how computers still aren't that stable? It's because there are N! possible combinations of hardware and software to try and get working together nicely, which is a lofty goal at best.
Call me crazy, but I'm at an age where I just want it to work, and my Powerbook at home always does, and my Powerbook at work always does. Part of that is the quality of the OS, and that's reflected in the (relative, not concrete) stability of the reference platform it's built on.
There is 2% unemployement in the DC area, and in nearby Fairfax county it's only 1.5%. I think their chances are pretty good.
I used to work for AAAS, the publishers of Science Magazine. Science is the premier and oldest peer reviewed general science journal (about 150 years). One of my projects was working on their Manuscript tracking system, including making the submission process electronic through Submit To Science.
Science has a greater-than 80% rejection rate, because there are only so many pages in the magazine. Many people are frustrated that they've been rejected five and six times (they have about 20 years of author submission history online), but with a general science journal you have to pick the best of the best astronony and biology and signal transduction papers to print.
The review process is laborious, it involves a lot of people, but it works pretty much flawlessly. Certain aspects have evolved over time, but frankly the people who get published thing the process works and it's great, the people who don't are the ones who grouss. There are constant arguments (almost every week) about what concessions can and cannot be done without risk to watering the quality of the journal down.
The picture he has on his blog that shows the car only gets 32MPG also shows that it's only got 945 miles on it. Honda's come from the factory with special break-in oil that has to stay in for 7500 miles. After the first oil change, there tends to be a decent boost in milege. Will it be THAT significant? I don't know, but he hasn't even given it a chance yet.
I'm hoping you can help me doctor.
I'm the proud owner of many geek toys, including a Sony Aibo ERS-7 (my daughter "Fluffy") and a ReplayTV. You may not be aware, but the most recent Aibo's can be left alone to play for hours on end and will recharge themselves when their batteries run low.
Recently, I came home to find Fluffy and the ReplayTV engaged in...relations (I didn't think they needed to be on their own subnet), and while my little girl is growing up she's still only a few months old. When should I be talking to her about "the bits and the bytes" and what grown up systems do with their peripherals?
Thank you.
take a week off work - and everything else.
If you're this addicted to something, you probably need to be in rehab.
ibuprofen combined with the xylo will releive most of the sinus headaches.
Until I gave up caffine for some weeks, I didn't even realize that it affected my sleep. People think they become immune to it's affects -- not true.
drink lots of water. sparkling's okay - i'd suggest s'pelgrino or grolschteiner (sp?)
Yes this is good, and this is where I'm at now (went from drinking 6-8 24oz bottles of Mt Dew a day to 8-10 half-liter bottles of water), but there needs to be an intermediate step. When I was wheening myself off caffine, I used Lemonade Snapple (as sweet as Mt Dew, little or no caffine in comparison). Once I was off the Dew and on the Snapple, I wheened myself off that until I was drinking only water during the day. Within a couple weeks I couldn't drink a Snapple it was so sweet. After about three months of being caffine free, I finally added a cup back in a day (either one cup of high test or two cups of half-caf a day).
Why? Caffine affected my sleep, and eventually I was seeing a gastroenterologist because my stomach was a mess.
if this fails try again with a mild antidepressant. st. john's wort for instance or if you want something stronger you can get wellburtin from your doctor for "quitting smoking". be careful with antidepressants though! and remember they take a couple of weeks to "pack".
Most of these, even herbal, require an amount of time to build up in your system. Anything less and it's just a placebo. See my earlier comment about rehab.
There is one thing I have not seen mentioned -- caffine poisoning. I've had it at least three times, and a coworker has had it at least five that I know of. Very unpleasant.
While I agree that many companies can lean toward dishonesty when their focus is quarterly earnings numbers (which are a terrible metric for cyclical businesses), private companies are often as bad or worse because they face less scrutiny (which is what OS folks are all about, right?).
Having worked for both types of companies (and worked in the public sector too), I found that more sketchy things happened in private companies (like dozens of partners bonusing themselves instead of making needed capital investments).
AT&T switched their number management system to Siebel a couple weeks ago in preparation for this. They were down for something like 10 days unable to issue new numbers, and they continue to have problems. Their old system was home grown, the new system is Siebel.
So you can thank Tom and his band of whores for not being able to switch easily, I don't think it's on purpose. They estimate their losses from those 10 days at $30 million.
Manufactured (pre-fab) homes are discussed pretty often in misc.consumers.house -- most people who have them think the quality is as-good or better than stick built. The only 'gotcha' may be financing:
3 58 71-2003Sep19.html
...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A
"...Fannie Mae, in response to a rising number of delinquencies and
foreclosures, is making it tougher to get manufactured-home loans. The
company now requires a 10 percent down payment for 30-year mortgages
on such homes, plus a fee of 0.5 percent of the loan amount."
"Manufactured homes are built in factories and assembled on building
sites. They include mobile homes, though many manufactured dwellings
have characteristics found on traditional single-family homes --
pitched roofs, decks and porches."
How ironic, since Admiral Grace Hopper (who helped invent COBOL) is credited with helping to debug the Mark II. As we all know, only COBOL and cockroaches will survive WWIII.
We all know what happened when they released Gnutella, this should be gone in the day.
In the mean time, the playlist editor in Winamp3 shits everytime it meets my MP3 folder...
Karma: 5 (mostly due to unemployment-related /. trolling)
That's pretty funny coming from someone who is so lonely the only way he can get a woman is to program his own [eisenschmidt.org].
That doesn't make me an idiot, that makes me a genius. It frees me up from things like dinner and hanging out with her friends to troll message boards and bitch about other people.
That's assuming you are tied into an Access system, although I've found MS Access to be more reliable as a database than MS SQL. For example, in MS SQL you can retrieve a date record and it will be in Australian date format, put exactly the same data back into the database and it will be treated as US date format. Also this bug [microsoft.com] really shits me.
.MDW file.
Pardon me for being so insensitive, but you sir are an idiot.
Access is more stable that SQL Server? Access is a desktop database, and maybe you've noticed when it fires up it consumes 99% of your CPU time? It has very primitive support for RI and views, and forget about triggers or transactions.
Also, you should never use identities, they force bad habits are aren't good in a replicated environment. Always use GUIDs for your key values. That takes care of your bug.
If you're going to recommend they go with an OS DB, at least suggest postgres since it supports MVCC.
Also, someone suggested using OPLOCK, don't. It makes things faster, but if you get annoyed by escalating table locks, you'll be really pissed at your OS locking the whole database on your first write. I used to write login scripts to push reg keys to disable OPLOCK for that very reason.
An earlier poster had it down: split the data and the code (which is easy with Access 2000 and XP), move the data in SQL Server, continue to use Access as the front end, and be done with it. If you want to add additional security, look at using a custom
This would have never happened.
I find it amusing at all the people who complained in this discussion about how crappy unions are, but so many of us are getting screwed.
How about it?.
I'm still looking for a reason to implement something called "necklace" in Perl. Maybe an object that creates a linked list (like Judoscript)?
Oracle has supported Object-Relational Database Management (ORDBMS) since the 8.0 days. The REF weirdness was taken care of in 8i, and from what I understand it is quite stable now.
This has been an issue in the US for a while (since we're fairly new to the idea of Object Orientation compared to Europeans). Object Store has been around for a while, and we spent so much time trying to get programmers to learn "object-think" that many can't wrap their brains around Relational Database design and want to use hash tables for everything. ORDBMS is a nice compromise, because rarely can you fit all your data in memory.
"But pay attention on the sunscreen..."
Yes, the credit check is done by Fair-Issacs.
FICO scores have become a de-facto standard (not an actual standard) that gives you a score based on certain things in your credit history. So when you go to buy a house, their metric is applied to your life and spits out a number.
Not everyone agrees with their model though. For example, you lose points for every line of credit you open, so if you're trying to buy a house the last thing you should do is open that store account because you get 10% off. You lose points for being near your credit limit, but you get MORE points for every dollar of credit not in use. So someone who only has a couple low credit line cards for revolving debt gets a lower score than someone with a 50,000$ line of credit with $14,000 in use (even though their debt/income ration may be close to 1, because FICO does not take income into consideration).
I have had this done several times, and every time it was either stated or implied before being hired.
-I had one when I got a security clearance (duh -- they talked to my 3rd grade teacher).
-I had one done at my last employer before my offer was extended as part of my reference check. They asked, I said yes, they liked what they saw, they offered me the job.
-Everytime I've been bonded (this job makes three) they've done one. They were either jobs where I handled lots of money, or I was told up front (they bond everyone where I am currently). If you're going to be bonded, they're going to check your credit.
If your employer wants to do yours AFTER the fact, and they're not trying to bond you, then they're idiots. If they push this, even if you have excellent credit, I would be sure you didn't burn your bridges at the last job and retain an employment lawyer. You also might want to contact the EEOC and see if they are allowed to do this. This should have done before you got the job, and that's what you need to tell the CEO.
There have already been some great posts about questions to ask ("You don't need a password? Do you lock your car"?) policy to set ("have to fill out a form and walk it to IT to have the password changed"), but I have two additional suggestions:
Have you considered billing back use of the outsourced helpdesk to the other departments? Hit them in the wallet, and in doing so they need to fill out paperwork everytime they want a password changed. No writing them down either - that should be grounds for termination.
If not, maybe you need to consider either biometrics or access cards. You could replace password auth with smart card auth, and if they lose it they need to report it immediately or they really will get fired.
It's nobel that you want to look at something Linux based, but as someone already pointed out, JWZ made that mistake on our behalf already.
I've worked with several different systems over the years, and Micros always came out ahead. There's a reason they have the kind of market saturation they have -- their stuff works, it's indestructible, and it's not terrible expensive.
From a management perspective (having used it both in Hotels and Restaurants), their reporting is pretty good too: inventory, audit, closing, etc.
You should look around, and get an idea what's out there, but try to choose a system that's easy for your people to use, and more importantly is the best tool to solve this particular problem. If that isn't something Linux based, so be it.
Good luck.
Of course, they bought it from Sybase (if I remember correctly).
l e. php/1441321
You don't remember correctly: SQL Server started out like NT did, it was a partnership between Microsoft and Sybase. Like they did with IBM over OS/2, Microsoft took their toys and left the sandbox, and SQL Server was born.
And to be honest, at this point SQL Server is a much better product than Sybase.
MS SQL Server doesn't have multiversioned concurrency control, that only Oracle and PostgreSQL have. Without this, readers block writers and writers block readers on tables involved in a transaction. This thing alone makes me an Oracle/PostgreSQL boy (though I don't want to touch Oracle sysadmining with a 10 foot pole).
Have you looked at SQL Server since version 6.0?
That's the default behavior, sure, but SQL Server supports several isolation levels:
-READ UNCOMMITTED
-READ COMMITTED
-REPEATABLE READ
-SERIALIZABLE
Granted, it's not as good as it is in Oracle, but if the application is developed correctly, and you establish and release your locks in the same order every time, you can almost guarantee you won't get a deadlock. And if you do, the deadlock manager starting in SQL Server 7.0 is just this side of fantastic (have you even seen how to stop the deadly embrace on OS/400?).
Perhaps you should refresh yourself on the locking symantecs of 7.0 and up:
http://databasejournal.com/features/mssql/artic
A database is like anything else: there are different tools for different jobs. I prefer the flexibility of Oracle most of the time, but it is a 300lb gorilla (though not as difficult to administer as one would think).
For Windows-type applications, SQL Server isn't a bad little database, but it requires a very disciplined developement team (and plan) to write good applications for it.
Personally, I think developers don't use (or consider using) flat files often enough. For transaction data, I certainly wouldn't consider it (three phase commits are our friend), but a large amount of "dynamic" content would benifit from the huge performance boost that comes with manipulating plain text.
It's nice for all of us as geeks to say "make the users use FTP" (though frankly, I'd prefer scp or nothing), but it isn't practical.
I work in a not-for-profit that publishes a weekly journal, so we are both "an academic environment" (we operate somewhat like a unversity), and a good-size for-profit company. To that end, the requirements of our user community are very different.
We used to traffic a lot of paper and film via FedEx and couriers, and moving all that processing to electronic mediums saves us over $300k/year. I should know, I had a big hand in implementing our digital workflow (why do you think they bought me an Aibo?). Our technology spending isn't any more than it was when everything was paper based, but our saving have been huge.
We use Groupwise for corporate email, and the post offices live on a SAN virtual disk. Our SAN has over 2TB in storage, Netware lets you concat volume segments dynamically, and Groupwise only stores a message once in the database and passes pointers to each internal recipient. So storing large attachments is very efficient, and enlarging the post offices is trivial. Our SAN is only 33% populated, and smaller drives (75GB) can be replaced on the fly with larger drives (180GB) and the array will resize and rebuild itself hot.
So we have no inbound or outbound attachment limit, though we do keep an eye on things to make sure people don't go nuts. We just upgraded our servers last weekend after 2 1/2 years in service, despite our post offices growing by a factor of 10. Having administered Exchange, Notes, and Groupwise, I think we've got the best of the three groupware packages, and our users are happy enough (they would be happy, but who is every happy at the phone company because they have a dial tone?)
In three years, we did turn up our bandwidth from (2) T-1s to a 6mbt fractional DS-3, but email only accounts for a small portion of that traffic (we host half a dozen more websites than we used to).
The largest attachment I ever emailed was probably 100MB, and I honestly find 5MB limits to be draconian. We have an FTP drop, but our vendors won't use it. Last month, I had to email a vendor a dat tape with 13MB of data because they have a 5MB attachment limit. Sick.