This is just a ploy to make everyone think the air force is a push-over. Actually they will secretly use a version of SELinux and the Chinese, Russian, etc. hackers will be very frustrated trying to hack them.
After all, who could be so stupid as to use MS software for anything other than old games which only run on windows?
The only nation I can think of off the top of my head that is younger than the United States is Israel. Australia, Canada, Germany (approx. 1870), most nations in Africa, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq, etc., Mexico, most nations in South America,... to name a few.
Almost certainly your friend is on COBRA which is a continuation of the benefits he had been receiving through his employer. It is very expensive and not the way to go at all.
If the friend has preexisting conditions, then COBRA may be the best choice available. Although COBRA only lasts for 18 months (if I recall correctly), a person with cancer or other problems might need COBRA. A neighbor has two kids. During each pregnancy, her blood pressure dropped to dangerously low levels and she was hospitalized. The total bill for her two kids was about $500,000 (all paid by her health insurance). If she had to choose between COBRA and no insurance, COBRA would have make the best economic sense.
an infrastructure that's cheap for everyone to use generates a lot more commerce which inevitably enriches everyone.
This is a very insightful comment. It should not be insightful but just common knowledge. Unfortunately, very few people in the world "understand" economics. Some of them may be able to quote economic theory but they do not accept it. It is like smokers who know about health warnings but find excuses so they can claim that thousands of studies on the health effects of tabacco are wrong. Just like evolution, economics will influence our society even if people deny economic theory (or evolution) has any validity.
"The very definition of a country means that some people end up "footing the bill" for others less fortunate than them."
BULLSHIT!
What are you, from frickn north korea or something?!?!
That's a definition of socialist wealth THEFT, dumbass.
I assume you also object to projessive income tax, publically funded K-12 education, etc.
It sounds to me as if you do not want to pay for anything. I would not be surprised if you were the first person to complain about a pothole in the road. You sound like a spoiled brat.
Add to the income tax the following:
12.4% tax for social security and 2.9% Medicare levy (up to some limit - $80,000 ?? of gross income)
state income tax (perhaps 0% - 10% ?? depending on the state)
property tax (rate varies widely)
sales tax (perhaps 0% - 10% ?? depending on the state)
You can do a google search and see the income and sales tax rates in each state.
This
might interest you. (I did not read it carefully but it objects to the shift in taxes during recent years from the rich to the poor.)
Enclosed is your formal invitation to start celebrating Thanksgiving in Europe. Please recall that we in the U.S. have accepted European invitations to celebrate your holidays (e.g. October Fest, Christmas)
and feel obligated to extend our holidays to you. The U.K. might be particularly interested in 4/7 since it reduced the King's areas of responsibility and allowed him to focus his goodwill on the Irish. In order to allow you to enjoy Thanksgiving, the U.S. offers to increase the supply of turkeys. We offer (Condoleezza) Rice, (Donald) Rumsfeld, etc. as our initial offering of turkeys.
I looked up Peopleware", by De Marco and Lister and found (among others) this
site. There were several brief "reviews", including this one:
"This book was one of the most influential books I've ever read. The best way to describe it would be as an Anti-Dilbert Manifesto. Ever wonder why everybody at Microsoft gets their own office, with walls and a door that shuts? It's in there. Why do managers give so much leeway to their teams to get things done? That's in there too. Why are there so many jelled SWAT teams at Microsoft that are remarkably productive? Mainly because Bill Gates has built a company full of managers who read Peopleware. I can't recommend this book highly enough. It is the one thing every software manager needs to read... not just once, but once a year."
-Joel Spolsky,
Founder, Fog Creek Software
Joel on Software
I am not certain what is a "jelled SWAT team" but I assume it is good?
(Since it is Thanksgiving, I have to wonder if it would taste good. Jelly, jello, jelled,... Nah.)
I would guess that the book is good. If Microsoft had ordered its SWAT teams to make security the first, rather than the last, consideration, Windows probably would be a lot more secure.
This is very interesting. You raise several issues; let me consider two of them.
(i) In fact, my experience is that many IT departments are only marginally more technically competent then the departments they service and (in the case of technical companies) are often far LESS technically competent then some of the other departments
(ii) In the end, it's not for IT to dictate what legitimate use another specialist in a different vertical may have for a piece of equipment.
To be fair, I believe central IT departments are (or should be) highly knowledgable regarding external issues related to connecting your organization to the rest of the world and connecting units in your organization to one another. If there were a problem with a T3 line or a router, central IT should know how to fix it or who to call to fix it. Your organization probably provides a DNS service; this should run 24/7 (although our university DNS is down far too often). At universities in the US, central IT should make sure Internet2 works properly. I believe Europe has a similar high speed academic "Internet"; the same comment applies there.
I have very mixed feeling about organizational firewalls and filtering policies. In theory, I support their use. In practice, sometimes really poor decisions are made and central IT gets a bad reputation. For example, there might be a MS virus which wants to use port ** and so central IT blocks all requests to port ** (and keeps this block/filter in place for years after the problem has disappeared); however, Linux users who are not at risk from the MS virus may have a reason to desire port ** to remain unblocked and get pissed off at central IT. (As an alternative, what would happen if central IT had a list of (static) IP addresses which run Linux/BSD/OSX and use something like IP tables to filter all port ** requests except for the IP addresses which are on this "non-MS" list? If someone shows an inability to secure her/his computer, take her/him off this "safe" list and filter her/him.)
With regard to your observation (i), I cannot imagine that anyone would disagree. If a CS department cannot have better security than central IT, something is wrong. (Then again, U. Waterloo adopted MS Windows if I recall correctly; I hope I am wrong since I like UW.)
Your second observation may depend on the circumstances. At a university, a faculty member who individually applied for and received a grant may (will) object to someone from central IT telling her/him how to use equipment obtained through the grant. Central IT is in a very weak position here; the faculty member could get pissed off and quit applying for grants (reducing overhead funding for the university) or leave (taking this grant or, at least, future grants with her/him). Our College of Engineering has serious security problems; the engineering professors get grants, use MS, refuse to listen to central IT and are a major source of campus spam/malware. (The dorms are also a problem.)
At a company which provides all of the equipment, central IT might have more power to impose policies on the employees. If central IT is smart and knowledgable, policies which make sense and are supported by the technically trained employees can work. However, stupid policies imposed because the IT office has lots of power can backfire; complaints to the management may reduce the power of central IT or good employees may start leaving (just when the market is good and you really need them). In my opinion, central IT is often its own worst enemy.
Here in Math/Stat, we have a central email server which filters out viruses and other malware, flags SPAM (like my flight information when sent as html mail), etc.; it works fairly well and much much better than the official university provided email service. If you are curious about the security details of the Math/Stat and CS departments, say so and I will ask about them (after the Thanksgiving holiday).
You are correct. I believe Linux is relatively secure and Windows is relatively insecure. I have never met (in person) anyone who had such a poorly configured Linux machine that it had security holes like those of Windows. The statement A poorly configured Linux box can be just as insecure as Windows does not seem to reflect actual experience. Certainly one could always run as root in Linux but I know of no one who does this; it would be really stupid.
On the other hand, requiring absolute security is not an appropriate standard. This standard does not apply anywhere else; your home insurance probably does not cover you for some "acts of nature or God". You cannot say that a meteorite will not fall on you and kill you; you have no absolute security in your daily life. I agree that "Security is a process, not a product." However, experience so far suggests that runing Linux would be much more secure than running Windows.
If I am working on a proof of a new result and I have no interruptions (e.g. teaching, family), I can work for a very long time but at some point I have to stop or my calculations, insights, etc. will be wrong. My normal workday is 7AM - 10PM but I can take a break (or a quick nap in my office) whenever I need; I do not think the ordinary cubical worker has this option.
I have found programming when tired to be easier than writing proofs - until I look at the program output and realize that it is garbage.:-) (Those little details do matter.)
At our university, the Math/Stat and CS departments each has its own IT person. The security in each department is much better than that the central admin IT people provide; we would never trust them with security. CS probably has better security as their policy is that MS machines are not supported and "you fix your MS machine if it breaks"; they still have some problems (e.g. from laptops and they run a MS computer lab - for the (student tuition) money) but real CS students have to use a version of debian.
[1] And personally, I'd rather my software stopped working rather than kept running in an insecure manner.
Then I have a solution for you. Obtain one of the Linux distributions (e.g. go
here
and follow the instructions) and you will no longer have an insecure computer.
As long as you use MS Windows, you will have an insecure machine. (See this comment above: by deaddeng (63515) on Wednesday November 24, @02:24PM (#10912083).)
What are examples of applications which require this "huge parallelism"? I can imagine that FFTs might benefit from this and perhaps applications which involve sparse, structured matrices (e.g. some finite difference approximations of partial differential equations). Are there applications to large data sets (e.g. data mining)? Computer graphics?
The idea of parallelizing lots of problems has not generally proven to be a great idea. Modern versions of Fortran may attempt to parallelize (portions of certain) code but I have not heard much about success using this idea. Does NASA or the NSA use this? What are examples?
Re:Ungrateful little bastard
on
NYT on EA Games
·
· Score: 1
The 40's through 60's were a cake-walk compared to today's economy, though.
Yeah, my uncle had a cake-walk on
Iwo Jima;
he had such a great time he brought back a souvenir in the form of shrapnel.
Yep, them was good times.
If the U.S. economy was good after WW2, perhaps they earned it. The economies in the rest of the world (e.g. U.K.) were not so good; do they count?
If you were a left-wing actor in the early 1950s, the economy might have been much tougher than now. (Bush may change this, however;
Jesusland don't need no liberals.)
Re:how is that different from other companies
on
NYT on EA Games
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The right managers who do this well are in high demand.
How do you tell which are these right managers?
At one time, executives at Enron appeared to be doing very well. (Now try to live on an "Enron retirement.") The (former)
CEO
and CFO from at least one utility company are on trial for securities violations.
I suspect that no one can distinguish the good managers from the
bad managers. However, they all get very high salaries.
If you are unable to answer the original question
("Remember "most" of those C-types were once employees like you.
Is this accurate or did you just make this up?"),
why did you bother to post? Should I infer that you are saying "Yes! The majority of upper management in the software industry consists of former "real" (i.e. ordinary, low level, productive (e.g. not HR)) employees?
If so, then just come out and provide the proof
(e.g. Google top management).
And they wouldn't have to spend hours trying to figure out how to upgrade their OS like they do with Linux.
Just follow the
directions:
emerge sync
emerge -u world
(or emerge portage, etc. according to the instructions given after you "emerge sync").
Re:how is that different from other companies
on
NYT on EA Games
·
· Score: 1
Remember "most" of those C-types were once employees like you.
Is this accurate or did you just make this up? Will you stand behind this statement?
The popular stereotype is that lawyers, MBAs, etc., rather than "regular" workers (e.g. coders, testers), generally form the majority of upper management. Are you saying that this stereotype is wrong in the software industry? (Is SCO an example?)
Slashdot Mirror
My guess is that the NSA has fabbed their own Alpha EV12 CPUs by now. Who cares if you need liquid helium for cooling? These things rock!
This is just a ploy to make everyone think the air force is a push-over. Actually they will secretly use a version of SELinux and the Chinese, Russian, etc. hackers will be very frustrated trying to hack them.
After all, who could be so stupid as to use MS software for anything other than old games which only run on windows?
The only nation I can think of off the top of my head that is younger than the United States is Israel. ... to name a few.
Australia, Canada, Germany (approx. 1870), most nations in Africa, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq, etc., Mexico, most nations in South America,
Of course, Boeing would never be involved in such illegal activity.
because I even if I TRY to mess up my machine it won't. :-)
What was that IP address again?
Almost certainly your friend is on COBRA which is a continuation of the benefits he had been receiving through his employer. It is very expensive and not the way to go at all.
If the friend has preexisting conditions, then COBRA may be the best choice available. Although COBRA only lasts for 18 months (if I recall correctly), a person with cancer or other problems might need COBRA. A neighbor has two kids. During each pregnancy, her blood pressure dropped to dangerously low levels and she was hospitalized. The total bill for her two kids was about $500,000 (all paid by her health insurance). If she had to choose between COBRA and no insurance, COBRA would have make the best economic sense.
an infrastructure that's cheap for everyone to use generates a lot more commerce which inevitably enriches everyone.
This is a very insightful comment. It should not be insightful but just common knowledge. Unfortunately, very few people in the world "understand" economics. Some of them may be able to quote economic theory but they do not accept it. It is like smokers who know about health warnings but find excuses so they can claim that thousands of studies on the health effects of tabacco are wrong. Just like evolution, economics will influence our society even if people deny economic theory (or evolution) has any validity.
I saw this kind of behavior in Canberra. I was told that it ia very common in Australia.
"The very definition of a country means that some people end up "footing the bill" for others less fortunate than them."
BULLSHIT! What are you, from frickn north korea or something?!?! That's a definition of socialist wealth THEFT, dumbass.
I assume you also object to projessive income tax, publically funded K-12 education, etc. It sounds to me as if you do not want to pay for anything. I would not be surprised if you were the first person to complain about a pothole in the road. You sound like a spoiled brat.
Add to the income tax the following:
12.4% tax for social security and 2.9% Medicare levy (up to some limit - $80,000 ?? of gross income)
state income tax (perhaps 0% - 10% ?? depending on the state)
property tax (rate varies widely)
sales tax (perhaps 0% - 10% ?? depending on the state)
You can do a google search and see the income and sales tax rates in each state. This might interest you. (I did not read it carefully but it objects to the shift in taxes during recent years from the rich to the poor.)
Enclosed is your formal invitation to start celebrating Thanksgiving in Europe. Please recall that we in the U.S. have accepted European invitations to celebrate your holidays (e.g. October Fest, Christmas) and feel obligated to extend our holidays to you. The U.K. might be particularly interested in 4/7 since it reduced the King's areas of responsibility and allowed him to focus his goodwill on the Irish. In order to allow you to enjoy Thanksgiving, the U.S. offers to increase the supply of turkeys. We offer (Condoleezza) Rice, (Donald) Rumsfeld, etc. as our initial offering of turkeys.
Does each large organization in the U.K. have a "contact person" (e.g. lawyer) to whom these requests for confidential information are directed?
2004 U.S. Federal marginal tax rates.
I looked up Peopleware", by De Marco and Lister and found (among others) this site. There were several brief "reviews", including this one:
... Nah.)
"This book was one of the most influential books I've ever read. The best way to describe it would be as an Anti-Dilbert Manifesto. Ever wonder why everybody at Microsoft gets their own office, with walls and a door that shuts? It's in there. Why do managers give so much leeway to their teams to get things done? That's in there too. Why are there so many jelled SWAT teams at Microsoft that are remarkably productive? Mainly because Bill Gates has built a company full of managers who read Peopleware. I can't recommend this book highly enough. It is the one thing every software manager needs to read... not just once, but once a year."
-Joel Spolsky,
Founder, Fog Creek Software
Joel on Software
I am not certain what is a "jelled SWAT team" but I assume it is good? (Since it is Thanksgiving, I have to wonder if it would taste good. Jelly, jello, jelled,
I would guess that the book is good. If Microsoft had ordered its SWAT teams to make security the first, rather than the last, consideration, Windows probably would be a lot more secure.
This is very interesting. You raise several issues; let me consider two of them.
(i) In fact, my experience is that many IT departments are only marginally more technically competent then the departments they service and (in the case of technical companies) are often far LESS technically competent then some of the other departments
(ii) In the end, it's not for IT to dictate what legitimate use another specialist in a different vertical may have for a piece of equipment.
To be fair, I believe central IT departments are (or should be) highly knowledgable regarding external issues related to connecting your organization to the rest of the world and connecting units in your organization to one another. If there were a problem with a T3 line or a router, central IT should know how to fix it or who to call to fix it. Your organization probably provides a DNS service; this should run 24/7 (although our university DNS is down far too often). At universities in the US, central IT should make sure Internet2 works properly. I believe Europe has a similar high speed academic "Internet"; the same comment applies there.
I have very mixed feeling about organizational firewalls and filtering policies. In theory, I support their use. In practice, sometimes really poor decisions are made and central IT gets a bad reputation. For example, there might be a MS virus which wants to use port ** and so central IT blocks all requests to port ** (and keeps this block/filter in place for years after the problem has disappeared); however, Linux users who are not at risk from the MS virus may have a reason to desire port ** to remain unblocked and get pissed off at central IT. (As an alternative, what would happen if central IT had a list of (static) IP addresses which run Linux/BSD/OSX and use something like IP tables to filter all port ** requests except for the IP addresses which are on this "non-MS" list? If someone shows an inability to secure her/his computer, take her/him off this "safe" list and filter her/him.)
With regard to your observation (i), I cannot imagine that anyone would disagree. If a CS department cannot have better security than central IT, something is wrong. (Then again, U. Waterloo adopted MS Windows if I recall correctly; I hope I am wrong since I like UW.)
Your second observation may depend on the circumstances. At a university, a faculty member who individually applied for and received a grant may (will) object to someone from central IT telling her/him how to use equipment obtained through the grant. Central IT is in a very weak position here; the faculty member could get pissed off and quit applying for grants (reducing overhead funding for the university) or leave (taking this grant or, at least, future grants with her/him). Our College of Engineering has serious security problems; the engineering professors get grants, use MS, refuse to listen to central IT and are a major source of campus spam/malware. (The dorms are also a problem.)
At a company which provides all of the equipment, central IT might have more power to impose policies on the employees. If central IT is smart and knowledgable, policies which make sense and are supported by the technically trained employees can work. However, stupid policies imposed because the IT office has lots of power can backfire; complaints to the management may reduce the power of central IT or good employees may start leaving (just when the market is good and you really need them). In my opinion, central IT is often its own worst enemy.
Here in Math/Stat, we have a central email server which filters out viruses and other malware, flags SPAM (like my flight information when sent as html mail), etc.; it works fairly well and much much better than the official university provided email service. If you are curious about the security details of the Math/Stat and CS departments, say so and I will ask about them (after the Thanksgiving holiday).
You are correct. I believe Linux is relatively secure and Windows is relatively insecure. I have never met (in person) anyone who had such a poorly configured Linux machine that it had security holes like those of Windows. The statement A poorly configured Linux box can be just as insecure as Windows does not seem to reflect actual experience. Certainly one could always run as root in Linux but I know of no one who does this; it would be really stupid.
On the other hand, requiring absolute security is not an appropriate standard. This standard does not apply anywhere else; your home insurance probably does not cover you for some "acts of nature or God". You cannot say that a meteorite will not fall on you and kill you; you have no absolute security in your daily life. I agree that "Security is a process, not a product." However, experience so far suggests that runing Linux would be much more secure than running Windows.
If I am working on a proof of a new result and I have no interruptions (e.g. teaching, family), I can work for a very long time but at some point I have to stop or my calculations, insights, etc. will be wrong. My normal workday is 7AM - 10PM but I can take a break (or a quick nap in my office) whenever I need; I do not think the ordinary cubical worker has this option. I have found programming when tired to be easier than writing proofs - until I look at the program output and realize that it is garbage. :-) (Those little details do matter.)
At our university, the Math/Stat and CS departments each has its own IT person. The security in each department is much better than that the central admin IT people provide; we would never trust them with security. CS probably has better security as their policy is that MS machines are not supported and "you fix your MS machine if it breaks"; they still have some problems (e.g. from laptops and they run a MS computer lab - for the (student tuition) money) but real CS students have to use a version of debian.
[1] And personally, I'd rather my software stopped working rather than kept running in an insecure manner. .)
Then I have a solution for you. Obtain one of the Linux distributions (e.g. go here and follow the instructions) and you will no longer have an insecure computer. As long as you use MS Windows, you will have an insecure machine. (See this comment above:
by deaddeng (63515) on Wednesday November 24, @02:24PM (#10912083)
What are examples of applications which require this "huge parallelism"? I can imagine that FFTs might benefit from this and perhaps applications which involve sparse, structured matrices (e.g. some finite difference approximations of partial differential equations). Are there applications to large data sets (e.g. data mining)? Computer graphics?
The idea of parallelizing lots of problems has not generally proven to be a great idea. Modern versions of Fortran may attempt to parallelize (portions of certain) code but I have not heard much about success using this idea. Does NASA or the NSA use this? What are examples?
The 40's through 60's were a cake-walk compared to today's economy, though.
Yeah, my uncle had a cake-walk on Iwo Jima ; he had such a great time he brought back a souvenir in the form of shrapnel. Yep, them was good times.
If the U.S. economy was good after WW2, perhaps they earned it. The economies in the rest of the world (e.g. U.K.) were not so good; do they count?
If you were a left-wing actor in the early 1950s, the economy might have been much tougher than now. (Bush may change this, however; Jesusland don't need no liberals.)
The right managers who do this well are in high demand.
How do you tell which are these right managers? At one time, executives at Enron appeared to be doing very well. (Now try to live on an "Enron retirement.") The (former) CEO and CFO from at least one utility company are on trial for securities violations. I suspect that no one can distinguish the good managers from the bad managers. However, they all get very high salaries.
If you are unable to answer the original question
("Remember "most" of those C-types were once employees like you.
Is this accurate or did you just make this up?"),
why did you bother to post? Should I infer that you are saying "Yes! The majority of upper management in the software industry consists of former "real" (i.e. ordinary, low level, productive (e.g. not HR)) employees? If so, then just come out and provide the proof (e.g. Google top management).
And they wouldn't have to spend hours trying to figure out how to upgrade their OS like they do with Linux.
Just follow the directions:
emerge sync
emerge -u world
(or emerge portage, etc. according to the instructions given after you "emerge sync").
Remember "most" of those C-types were once employees like you.
Is this accurate or did you just make this up? Will you stand behind this statement?
The popular stereotype is that lawyers, MBAs, etc., rather than "regular" workers (e.g. coders, testers), generally form the majority of upper management. Are you saying that this stereotype is wrong in the software industry? (Is SCO an example?)