1. Changing paradygms. 2. Drinking the kool aid at a meeting where business developers are present. 3. Falling for the "everyone please send HR a fresh copy of your resume to update your files" ploy 4. Trying to calm down a frantic coworker that is freaking out for a very minuscule thing without at least some caffeine courage. 5. Drinking the last cup in the coffee urn. I can promise you this: it will taste like boiled crap. 6. Eating that last donut from the meeting 3 days ago. The Krisky Kreme box has not moved from the coffee pot table and that one donut looks tempting as hell, but trust me: you don't want it. 7. Come-to-Jesus meetings for a project that is not yours. 8. Any brainstorming meeting involving your newly hired business developer, especially since you don't have a formal "business development" function. 9. Trying to explain to a frantic coworker that mail.app is not crazy and it is not ignoring rules. 10. Trying to explain the same coworker that classifying mail as "ham" helps the filter learn what makes a good email and avoids false positives.
I am sorry, but as a long time victim of the iMac G5 series, I have to question these pictures.
Background:
I have one personal iMac G5 20", and five work iMac G5 20"s all within the serial number range affected by bad capacitors and bad power supplies. A coworker also has a personal iMac G50 20" within the affected range.
Out of these seven machines, three have already killed one motherboard and a power supply. Two of these machines have burned at least two motherboards.
So yeah, I have a damn good idea of what the innards of an iMac G5 20" looks like. Because of this I am having a hard time coming to terms with these pictures. They look shoddy as hell, like they are pictures of a pre-production mule or mockup. Tear open any Apple product from the last 5 years and you will notice the fanatical attention to detail in the way the hardware components are laid out. They are very clean and pretty. The iMac G5 20" is extremely well laid up, everything is tucked in, there are no lose wires, and there is basically no space left unused.
Either these pics are a PS job, or somebody leaked pictures from older test mules. There is no way in hell that Apple is going to sell something that looks so messy.
Both Windows and Mac users are blissfully ignorant of proper computer security. Just because *you* give a crap about installing your updates in either Windows or Mac doesn't mean the other 99% of the users do.
This is a 100% mac office. Every workstation here is a mac. There is one lousy windows box left, a web server being phased out and replaced with a LAMP solution. Everything else on the server side is either OS X, freeBSD or Ubuntu. Does that mean my users here know about virus scanning and installing patches as soon as they are available?
Hell no!
They still do the same dumb shit that Windows users do in every other company. They:
1. Ignore automated patches. 2. Disable Virus scanner DAT file updates (yes, we run a virus scanner on our macs). 3. Disable Word Macro protection, then whine when they bring a macro virus from home and infect the other 5 idiots that also turned off the macro protection. 4. Keep 500 (no exaggeration here) spreadsheets on their desktop, then don't at least turn on the auto-arrange, so all 500 spreadsheets (About two years worth of work give or take) are now stacked on top of another. 5. Email 100 MB MP3 recordings of teleconferences, then bitch when the mail server dies.
Etcetera.
These people are no smarter or dumber than the windows users that I have had to work with over the last decade.
The only real difference is that they don't get as many crashes as windows users, so whenever something goes wrong they completely freak out and have a panic attack.
The problem here is that they are not the first to claim IP on data generated at their expense.
I work for a market research firm, so we are always generating huge mountains of data. This data belongs to our client even if we gathered it. If we sponsor the study, then the data belongs to us and we can do as we please.
MLB is no different, they own everything that relates to MLB games, and they pay to grind these statistics, so the numbers are theirs.
Now, say you sit down and you watch every frickin game, and you run the numbers yourself, then I bet you can make a case that the data is yours. Of course MLB can CYA this easily by adding a disclaimer to their broadcasts and the ticket stubs for each game.
Of legal licenses, at least within government use? 25% sounds like a lot, but if 75% of their desktops are running unlicensed MS software then MS is not really taking a hit with this 25% reduction.
1. Your ops manager drowns on a glass of water. 2. The three staff PhDs together can't team up to figure out how to submit a web form. 3. The CEO knocks you out of a revenue project to work on his pet project. 4. After 6 months of dissing the CEO, his pet project starts making as much money as he predicted. Yes, you were wrong. Yes, the CEO was actually right. 5. For the 14th day in a row SQL Server Agent decides to magically, and for no reason, saboutage your carefully orchestrated maintenance plan for SQL Server. 6. Upon deploying a new server, you remembered to upload the hosts file in the smoothwall firewall. You also remembered to update the rules so only the bare minimum services are exposed. You are happy, so you go home. 12 hours later your junior employee informs you that you forgot to update the external DNS(which means you are missing some 12 entries), and the new server has been sitting pretty much idle all along. 7. The new sales guy uses "paradigm shift" during a meeting that had NOTHING TO DO WITH SHIFTING PARADIGMS. 8. To counteract #7, the marketing manager starts talking about "search engine optimization" in the same meeting. Yeah, the meeting wasn't about that either. 9. You just walked a person thru a very simple sequence of actions ("click here, now click here...") for the 100th time. She has been at that job for about 100 days. Nope, she still doesn't get it. 10. The old nasty coffee urn dies, so the company buys a nice drip maker with a shutoff timer. After 2 hrs the pot shuts down, which forces people to brew fresh coffee instead of keeping it warmed thru the day with the expected nastiness. Of course, your coworkers are too lazy to brew fresh coffee, so they figure out how to turn on the coffee maker so it can keep the same batch warm all day, with the expected nastiness.
Are they doing this because they understand that open source allows easier auditing for security issues? Or are they doing it because they are using open source just to save money?
What I find creepy is that the purpose of this initiative is to look for stuff on their own and then keep a database of bugs. Will this be so automated that nobody will actually look and check if maybe a new vulnerability should not be announced out in the open until the core developers of the affected item have had a chance to fix it?
Say this automated system finds a buffer overflow issue in Apache, will this just post an automated message that says "Apache 2.0.x has a buffer overflow if you do this:..." or will somebody at least check these out before they go public?
Re:Big Brother and the iTunes Company
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iTunes is Malware?
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· Score: 1
That grocery store tag is used to try to predict the things you like to buy. Didn't you notice that most of the times the coupons that they hand you usually make sense?
The analysis of the sales data used to make these predictions is pretty interesting stuff. For example, you buy a pack of diapers, a bag of cheetos and a 2-liter bottle of coke and it will try to match your purchases against other people that bought those three specific items at the same time.
The 2-week notice is a courtesy you render your employer. Severance in lieu of these two last weeks of work are a courtesy that your employer is rendering to you.
Basically you came out pretty good, you resigned by the book, and your employer bought you out of your last two weeks. Just make sure to not claim victory until you get paid for your excess vacation balance, if you do qualify for it.
I did that too, a few years ago (before "blog" hit the mainstream". It is a great way to appreciate how much work is needed to ship even a rudimentary application. I am in awe of the people that keep xoops, wordpress and others running.
iBlog is only good if you are an occasional blogger. Once you have more than two dozen posts it becomes unmanageable because it is 100% static HTML. This means that if you have 50 articles and you change the template you are forced to upload all 50 articles again, plus supporting files.
What you want is something simple like Wordpress. Wordpress 1.5 already uses the nofollow tag, so you don't have to worry about comments spam. Whoever tries to auto spam you is not going to get any advantage out of it. All you have to do is once a month or so check your list of comments and delete whatever you don't like.
It has been the worst customer service experience I have had in ages. They won't even talk to you on the phone unless your machine is less than 90 days old or if you have purchased the $170 Apple Care extension. They won't allow you to sign-in for the genius queue until the store is already open (you can sign in online at any time, but only if you buy the Pro membership another $100 per machine).
When my work iMac burned its motherboard, they kept the machine for more than two weeks.
When my home iMac burned its motherboard, I had Apple Care. I still had to wait more than a week for them to send me a tech home with a new motherboard. You only get on site support if you pay the $170 extension.
When the second work iMac burned both its motherboard and power supply, it took us almost a week (and yeah, we bought the extension for it too) before they decided to send one of the two parts that need replacing. It will be another week before this is resolved.
The thing that kills me is our office is 100% mac, and none of our other macs have this kind of track record. Of all our original lamp-style iMacs, only one ever failed, its video failed after warranty expired. None of our Power macs had issues before the 3-year mark.
The iMac G5, on the other hand, has been nothing but a constant source of god damn heartburn for us.
We bought six identical iMac G5s, plus two of us bought identical systems for our homes. Out of the batch of 8 machines, we have:
1. Replaced the motherboard in two of these machines. 2. Replaced burned power supplies in one of these. 3. A third machine burned both the motherboard and the power supply. It has taken Apple over a week to ship the parts to be replaced.
Al repairs so far have been under warranty. Half the service transactions have been done thru the genius desk, half thru Apple Care. Both methods are painfully slow.
Also, on the iMac G5 Apple will extend coverage specifically for the capacitor issue, so even if your warranty coverage expires they will fix your machine at their expense (http://www.apple.com/support/imac/repairextension program/).
I already survived my first tour as a PHB, so here are some things I noticed:
1. Hard boundaries. Some of us geeks every now and then think we can get away with murder. Which is true but no need to rub it on non-geeks' faces. 2. Shit umbrella. Your job as a boss is to isolate your employees from the bullshit so they can work. If you protect your employees from the bullshit, they will work their asses off for you. 3. No second guessing. If you hire a guy because he is an expert on ABC, and he gives you his best educated guess on an issue about ABC, give him the benefit of the doubt. Don't go asking a wannabe geek that read ABC for Dummies for his opinion. And please, don't go back to the expert to tell him "so and so says you are wrong." It is stupid. 4. Be flexible. Let your geek pick his workstation OS, most of the cases he'll ask for Linux so it won't cost you a penny and he will feel happier about it. Let each employee expense out no less than one O'Reilly title per quarter, even better if you can get away with doing it once per month. 5. Pick their brains. Geeks don't mind if you ask them what-ifs. If it is obvious that the geek has more in his mind, ask him to write a white paper and give him credit for it on his next review. 6. Feed them. If your geeks are stuck at the office past 6 PM, and you know for sure it is not their fault, call in for some pizzas or chinese. A well-fed geek is a happy geek. If possible, every two months or so send your geeks out for a long "work" lunch and let them argue technical issues without being bothered by people outside of their team. If marketing and sales can meet outside on the company's tab, so can your geeks. 7. Paid time off is sacred. If you give the guy the day off, make sure everyone knows he is not to be disturbed even if the company servers catch on fire. Geeks usually take less PTO than regular employees, so you need to make sure that whatever little time they take will be peaceful for them. 8. Free caffeine. Our 15-employee company has about 9 coffee drinkers. We ran our own coffee club for about a year ($5/month per person) and we never ran out of supplies. After the first year the boss took over paying for our supplies. It is nice to have good coffee in the office and it saves you the hassle of having to run downstairs and wait in line for overpriced coffee. 9. Allow some flex time, especially if your geeks monitor servers from home. When people start bitching about Dilbert working 7AM->3:15PM, tell them that Dilbert goes home, takes a nap and works until close to midnight. Oh, and he is salaried too. 10. Allow some latitude with the work attire. If your geek has zero external customer contact in person, then you should let them wear jeans if they like to. My only rule for jeans was that they had to be clean and without tears or patches. As for t-shirts, some people like them, I don't. I think jeans and golf shirts are confortable enough for a relaxed environment.
The law protects you from your boss giving away your social security number or other personal private things. The law does not protect you if you want to use your work time for personal issues.
When you are at work and you take an emergency call from your son's school, the boss allows it out of courtesy and kindness, it does not mean it is also OK for you to blow an hour per shift figthing with your wife using a company phone. Etc.
I had coworkers spend a whole graveyard shift surfing the net for porn, then bitching when they realized that the IT folks had configured NT4 (this is back in '97) so you could not empty your browser cache unless you were admin for that box. Other idiots spent the whole graveyard shift calling girlfriends long distance on company phones. They whinned when they found out the company was entitled to record any call that went thru our phone system.
Remember, you are entitled to privacy, and your boss is entitled for your full attention (and the proper use of business assets for business purposes) while on the clock.
You are asking about privacy, not about the limited access of specific company-owned information.
You are NOT entitled to privacy in the workplace. You are entitled to limit access to your work materials to those employees that have the need to know.
Two completely different concepts.
You can run IT from a cubicle, there is nothing terrible about that. If you are going to type in a password, look over your shoulder and make sure nobody is watching you. Access to the machine itself is no issue since you are not going to put your servers in your own office, they go to their own room. If you were running all the servers from your office then you are not as smart as you think you are.
Regardless of server OS, you can manage it from anywhere, there is no need to be sitting in front of the damn machine.
As for privacy, when you signed your offer letter and you agreed to follow company guidelines, you pretty much signed away any hope of privacy in the workplace. The boss can listen to your phone calls, can read your mail and read your paperwork. Yes, your boss can read your personal email if you are trying to read it from your workstation at the office. It is the company's computer and you are using the company's resources for personal reasons.
Now, say you are a programmer or a DBA, then you need a bit more shielding from prying eyes. But the plain IT folks? Nah, they can sit outside like everyone else.
It was a bold move, and it did not cost him a penny to do it. If he pulls it off he'll be 5m ahead of where he is right now, since his market share in ROK is pretty much zero. If he pulls it off he also gets to use it as a precedent to go country-by-country offering blanket licenses, which will make Linspire some good money and will royally piss off Microsoft.
Regardless of the merits of Lindows v. all the other Linux distributions out there, this is all about marketing, and it was the right thing to do. Microsoft cannot even afford a counter offer, since this will set the same kind of precedent and every government in the world is going to demand a blanket license like that.
Here is the most critical part: the US is divided into certain regions. Within each of these regions there is a main certification body, mostly some kind of association of schools. What you want is to make sure that whatever school you pick has passed the proper certification process by this main body. Cheesy schools will make these up to try to sound legit.
Read Dr. Bear's guide to distance learning (ISBN 1-58008-202-5). This man is the expert in figuring out diploma mills v. legitimate schools.
Consider a program like Regents College (now called Excelsior College, https://www.excelsior.edu/). The Regents program was run by the State University of NY out of their Albany campus. Their program was very simple: for a very modest fee they became custodians of your transcripts and they became your educational advisors. You submitted whatever credits you had completed so far, plus your military service records if available. They checked the validity of your transcripts and made sure you completed the courses in accredited institutions. You were free to take your courses anywhere as long as it fit your degree program (BA, BS, etc.) and the transcripts were sent sealed from the school.
Once you finished your course load, they issued you a diploma from the State U. of NY. This program is very popular with military personnel because they can work on their degrees regardless of where they are stationed, since all services make an effort to provide college-level education services. When I was stationed in Germany our education centers were run by the University of Maryland.
Also, there are online universities that have been around since forever. University of Phoenix (http://achieve.phoenix.edu/) started with satellite offices thru the country, then moved online. Keller (http://www.keller.edu/) did the same.
Whatever you do, research a bit to make sure the school is certified properly, then take it from there. Regents/Excelsior has a very active network of graduates that welcome inquiries from people interested in the program.
I spent the first 8 years of my professional life stuck working in NOCs with standard raised flooring, the cooling was just one of the many things it was needed for.
Examples:
Wiring: Not everyone likes to use overhead ladders to carry cables around. In the Army we had less than 50% of our wiring overhead, the rest was routed thru channels underneath the raised flooring.
HVAC Spill protection: Many of our NOCs had huge AC units above the tile level, and these things could leak at any moment. With raised flooring the water will pool at the bottom instead of run over the tiles and cause an accident. We had water sensors installed, so we knew we had a problem as soon as the first drop hit the floor.
If the natural airflow patterns are not enough for a specific piece of equipment, it does not take a lot to build conducts to guarantee cold air delivery underneath a specific rack unit.
The one thing I did not like about the raised floors was when some dumbass moron (who did NOT work within a NOC) decided to replace our nice, white, easy to buff tiles, with carpeted tiles. 10 years later and I can't still figure out why the hell would he approve that switch, since our NOC with its white tiles looked fricking gorgeous just by running a buffer and a clean mop thru it. The tiles with carpeting were gray so they darkened our pristine NOC.
I bet many of the people against raised flooring are land lords that don't want to get stuck with the cost of rebuilding flooring if the new tenant does not need a NOC area. I have been to a NOC in a conventional office suite, they basically crammed all of their racks into what seemed to be a former cubicle island. The air conditioning units were obviously a last-minute addition and it looked like the smallest spill would immediately short the lose power strips on the first row of racks in front of them. Shoddy as hell.
Is this more precise than a Cesium atomic clock? When it comes down to it, all the leap calculations, etc. are programmatic and are not related to super-accurate timekeeping. What you really want is a really stable timing signal, which is pretty much what you get out of a Cesium atomic clock.
I don't know if this is done in the civilian industry, but back in my military satellite communication days, we used to keep no less than two Cesium clocks on site at all time. These produced insanely accurate 10 MHZ and 1 Pulse per second signals which were then distributed to all our other electronics equipment in-house. All our up/down converters, multiplexers, modems, etc. relied on this centralized clock. If one of the clocks got out of sync we were not even allowed to fix it ourselves, instead these were shipped over to the US Naval Observatory, which was in charge of dealing with these.
I would like to add to your third definition. A stored procedure is nothing more than a pre-parsed and pre-planned SQL command. Whenever you send a SQL command your RDBMS has to waste precious time figuring out if the SQL command is valid, then how to execute it properly. When you use a stored procedure, it is already parsed and planned, so when you call it it will go straight to the first step of the execution plan. This is why stored procedures are so much faster than interpreted SQL even when it is just one query. While yes, one of the things you get is the ability to run a bunch of commands at a time, what makes it special is that these commands are already validated and planned.
We had decent luck with Dell but only as servers. Their laptops gave us nothing but grief. And yes, we had excellent luck with Compaq hardware, at least for servers.
Dell has offered this choice to volume and channel sales for many years. The reason they sell it to you with FreeDOS is because their bulk license agreement with Microsoft forbids them from selling OS-less machines. This volume option was intended for two specific markets:
1. People purchasing tons of desktops for organizations with streamlined IT management with pre-defined system images, so they could pull the machine out of the box, put the image and send it to the proper user. Saves them a few minutes per machine in setup.
2. People purchasing tons of cheap reliable boxes intended to run a non-Microsoft OS. Think you just started your dream business as a hosting provider and you wanted to buy 500 $299 Dell servers.
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1. Changing paradygms.
2. Drinking the kool aid at a meeting where business developers are present.
3. Falling for the "everyone please send HR a fresh copy of your resume to update your files" ploy
4. Trying to calm down a frantic coworker that is freaking out for a very minuscule thing without at least some caffeine courage.
5. Drinking the last cup in the coffee urn. I can promise you this: it will taste like boiled crap.
6. Eating that last donut from the meeting 3 days ago. The Krisky Kreme box has not moved from the coffee pot table and that one donut looks tempting as hell, but trust me: you don't want it.
7. Come-to-Jesus meetings for a project that is not yours.
8. Any brainstorming meeting involving your newly hired business developer, especially since you don't have a formal "business development" function.
9. Trying to explain to a frantic coworker that mail.app is not crazy and it is not ignoring rules.
10. Trying to explain the same coworker that classifying mail as "ham" helps the filter learn what makes a good email and avoids false positives.
I am sorry, but as a long time victim of the iMac G5 series, I have to question these pictures.
Background:
I have one personal iMac G5 20", and five work iMac G5 20"s all within the serial number range affected by bad capacitors and bad power supplies. A coworker also has a personal iMac G50 20" within the affected range.
Out of these seven machines, three have already killed one motherboard and a power supply. Two of these machines have burned at least two motherboards.
So yeah, I have a damn good idea of what the innards of an iMac G5 20" looks like. Because of this I am having a hard time coming to terms with these pictures. They look shoddy as hell, like they are pictures of a pre-production mule or mockup. Tear open any Apple product from the last 5 years and you will notice the fanatical attention to detail in the way the hardware components are laid out. They are very clean and pretty. The iMac G5 20" is extremely well laid up, everything is tucked in, there are no lose wires, and there is basically no space left unused.
Either these pics are a PS job, or somebody leaked pictures from older test mules. There is no way in hell that Apple is going to sell something that looks so messy.
Both Windows and Mac users are blissfully ignorant of proper computer security. Just because *you* give a crap about installing your updates in either Windows or Mac doesn't mean the other 99% of the users do.
This is a 100% mac office. Every workstation here is a mac. There is one lousy windows box left, a web server being phased out and replaced with a LAMP solution. Everything else on the server side is either OS X, freeBSD or Ubuntu. Does that mean my users here know about virus scanning and installing patches as soon as they are available?
Hell no!
They still do the same dumb shit that Windows users do in every other company. They:
1. Ignore automated patches.
2. Disable Virus scanner DAT file updates (yes, we run a virus scanner on our macs).
3. Disable Word Macro protection, then whine when they bring a macro virus from home and infect the other 5 idiots that also turned off the macro protection.
4. Keep 500 (no exaggeration here) spreadsheets on their desktop, then don't at least turn on the auto-arrange, so all 500 spreadsheets (About two years worth of work give or take) are now stacked on top of another.
5. Email 100 MB MP3 recordings of teleconferences, then bitch when the mail server dies.
Etcetera.
These people are no smarter or dumber than the windows users that I have had to work with over the last decade.
The only real difference is that they don't get as many crashes as windows users, so whenever something goes wrong they completely freak out and have a panic attack.
The problem here is that they are not the first to claim IP on data generated at their expense.
I work for a market research firm, so we are always generating huge mountains of data. This data belongs to our client even if we gathered it. If we sponsor the study, then the data belongs to us and we can do as we please.
MLB is no different, they own everything that relates to MLB games, and they pay to grind these statistics, so the numbers are theirs.
Now, say you sit down and you watch every frickin game, and you run the numbers yourself, then I bet you can make a case that the data is yours. Of course MLB can CYA this easily by adding a disclaimer to their broadcasts and the ticket stubs for each game.
Of legal licenses, at least within government use? 25% sounds like a lot, but if 75% of their desktops are running unlicensed MS software then MS is not really taking a hit with this 25% reduction.
The last two WMP's for OS X were terrible. The Flip4Mac was a much better solution even when it was $10.
1. Your ops manager drowns on a glass of water. ...") for the 100th time. She has been at that job for about 100 days. Nope, she still doesn't get it.
2. The three staff PhDs together can't team up to figure out how to submit a web form.
3. The CEO knocks you out of a revenue project to work on his pet project.
4. After 6 months of dissing the CEO, his pet project starts making as much money as he predicted. Yes, you were wrong. Yes, the CEO was actually right.
5. For the 14th day in a row SQL Server Agent decides to magically, and for no reason, saboutage your carefully orchestrated maintenance plan for SQL Server.
6. Upon deploying a new server, you remembered to upload the hosts file in the smoothwall firewall. You also remembered to update the rules so only the bare minimum services are exposed. You are happy, so you go home. 12 hours later your junior employee informs you that you forgot to update the external DNS(which means you are missing some 12 entries), and the new server has been sitting pretty much idle all along.
7. The new sales guy uses "paradigm shift" during a meeting that had NOTHING TO DO WITH SHIFTING PARADIGMS.
8. To counteract #7, the marketing manager starts talking about "search engine optimization" in the same meeting. Yeah, the meeting wasn't about that either.
9. You just walked a person thru a very simple sequence of actions ("click here, now click here
10. The old nasty coffee urn dies, so the company buys a nice drip maker with a shutoff timer. After 2 hrs the pot shuts down, which forces people to brew fresh coffee instead of keeping it warmed thru the day with the expected nastiness. Of course, your coworkers are too lazy to brew fresh coffee, so they figure out how to turn on the coffee maker so it can keep the same batch warm all day, with the expected nastiness.
Are they doing this because they understand that open source allows easier auditing for security issues? Or are they doing it because they are using open source just to save money?
..." or will somebody at least check these out before they go public?
What I find creepy is that the purpose of this initiative is to look for stuff on their own and then keep a database of bugs. Will this be so automated that nobody will actually look and check if maybe a new vulnerability should not be announced out in the open until the core developers of the affected item have had a chance to fix it?
Say this automated system finds a buffer overflow issue in Apache, will this just post an automated message that says "Apache 2.0.x has a buffer overflow if you do this:
That grocery store tag is used to try to predict the things you like to buy. Didn't you notice that most of the times the coupons that they hand you usually make sense?
The analysis of the sales data used to make these predictions is pretty interesting stuff. For example, you buy a pack of diapers, a bag of cheetos and a 2-liter bottle of coke and it will try to match your purchases against other people that bought those three specific items at the same time.
The 2-week notice is a courtesy you render your employer. Severance in lieu of these two last weeks of work are a courtesy that your employer is rendering to you.
Basically you came out pretty good, you resigned by the book, and your employer bought you out of your last two weeks. Just make sure to not claim victory until you get paid for your excess vacation balance, if you do qualify for it.
Crap, forgot to post the URL of my old (and crappy) home brew blog app: http://openvp.sourceforge.net/
I did that too, a few years ago (before "blog" hit the mainstream". It is a great way to appreciate how much work is needed to ship even a rudimentary application. I am in awe of the people that keep xoops, wordpress and others running.
iBlog is only good if you are an occasional blogger. Once you have more than two dozen posts it becomes unmanageable because it is 100% static HTML. This means that if you have 50 articles and you change the template you are forced to upload all 50 articles again, plus supporting files.
What you want is something simple like Wordpress. Wordpress 1.5 already uses the nofollow tag, so you don't have to worry about comments spam. Whoever tries to auto spam you is not going to get any advantage out of it. All you have to do is once a month or so check your list of comments and delete whatever you don't like.
It has been the worst customer service experience I have had in ages. They won't even talk to you on the phone unless your machine is less than 90 days old or if you have purchased the $170 Apple Care extension. They won't allow you to sign-in for the genius queue until the store is already open (you can sign in online at any time, but only if you buy the Pro membership another $100 per machine).
When my work iMac burned its motherboard, they kept the machine for more than two weeks.
When my home iMac burned its motherboard, I had Apple Care. I still had to wait more than a week for them to send me a tech home with a new motherboard. You only get on site support if you pay the $170 extension.
When the second work iMac burned both its motherboard and power supply, it took us almost a week (and yeah, we bought the extension for it too) before they decided to send one of the two parts that need replacing. It will be another week before this is resolved.
The thing that kills me is our office is 100% mac, and none of our other macs have this kind of track record. Of all our original lamp-style iMacs, only one ever failed, its video failed after warranty expired. None of our Power macs had issues before the 3-year mark.
The iMac G5, on the other hand, has been nothing but a constant source of god damn heartburn for us.
We bought six identical iMac G5s, plus two of us bought identical systems for our homes. Out of the batch of 8 machines, we have:
n program/).
1. Replaced the motherboard in two of these machines.
2. Replaced burned power supplies in one of these.
3. A third machine burned both the motherboard and the power supply. It has taken Apple over a week to ship the parts to be replaced.
Al repairs so far have been under warranty. Half the service transactions have been done thru the genius desk, half thru Apple Care. Both methods are painfully slow.
Also, on the iMac G5 Apple will extend coverage specifically for the capacitor issue, so even if your warranty coverage expires they will fix your machine at their expense (http://www.apple.com/support/imac/repairextensio
I already survived my first tour as a PHB, so here are some things I noticed:
1. Hard boundaries. Some of us geeks every now and then think we can get away with murder. Which is true but no need to rub it on non-geeks' faces.
2. Shit umbrella. Your job as a boss is to isolate your employees from the bullshit so they can work. If you protect your employees from the bullshit, they will work their asses off for you.
3. No second guessing. If you hire a guy because he is an expert on ABC, and he gives you his best educated guess on an issue about ABC, give him the benefit of the doubt. Don't go asking a wannabe geek that read ABC for Dummies for his opinion. And please, don't go back to the expert to tell him "so and so says you are wrong." It is stupid.
4. Be flexible. Let your geek pick his workstation OS, most of the cases he'll ask for Linux so it won't cost you a penny and he will feel happier about it. Let each employee expense out no less than one O'Reilly title per quarter, even better if you can get away with doing it once per month.
5. Pick their brains. Geeks don't mind if you ask them what-ifs. If it is obvious that the geek has more in his mind, ask him to write a white paper and give him credit for it on his next review.
6. Feed them. If your geeks are stuck at the office past 6 PM, and you know for sure it is not their fault, call in for some pizzas or chinese. A well-fed geek is a happy geek. If possible, every two months or so send your geeks out for a long "work" lunch and let them argue technical issues without being bothered by people outside of their team. If marketing and sales can meet outside on the company's tab, so can your geeks.
7. Paid time off is sacred. If you give the guy the day off, make sure everyone knows he is not to be disturbed even if the company servers catch on fire. Geeks usually take less PTO than regular employees, so you need to make sure that whatever little time they take will be peaceful for them.
8. Free caffeine. Our 15-employee company has about 9 coffee drinkers. We ran our own coffee club for about a year ($5/month per person) and we never ran out of supplies. After the first year the boss took over paying for our supplies. It is nice to have good coffee in the office and it saves you the hassle of having to run downstairs and wait in line for overpriced coffee.
9. Allow some flex time, especially if your geeks monitor servers from home. When people start bitching about Dilbert working 7AM->3:15PM, tell them that Dilbert goes home, takes a nap and works until close to midnight. Oh, and he is salaried too.
10. Allow some latitude with the work attire. If your geek has zero external customer contact in person, then you should let them wear jeans if they like to. My only rule for jeans was that they had to be clean and without tears or patches. As for t-shirts, some people like them, I don't. I think jeans and golf shirts are confortable enough for a relaxed environment.
The law protects you from your boss giving away your social security number or other personal private things. The law does not protect you if you want to use your work time for personal issues.
When you are at work and you take an emergency call from your son's school, the boss allows it out of courtesy and kindness, it does not mean it is also OK for you to blow an hour per shift figthing with your wife using a company phone. Etc.
I had coworkers spend a whole graveyard shift surfing the net for porn, then bitching when they realized that the IT folks had configured NT4 (this is back in '97) so you could not empty your browser cache unless you were admin for that box. Other idiots spent the whole graveyard shift calling girlfriends long distance on company phones. They whinned when they found out the company was entitled to record any call that went thru our phone system.
Remember, you are entitled to privacy, and your boss is entitled for your full attention (and the proper use of business assets for business purposes) while on the clock.
You are asking about privacy, not about the limited access of specific company-owned information.
You are NOT entitled to privacy in the workplace. You are entitled to limit access to your work materials to those employees that have the need to know.
Two completely different concepts.
You can run IT from a cubicle, there is nothing terrible about that. If you are going to type in a password, look over your shoulder and make sure nobody is watching you. Access to the machine itself is no issue since you are not going to put your servers in your own office, they go to their own room. If you were running all the servers from your office then you are not as smart as you think you are.
Regardless of server OS, you can manage it from anywhere, there is no need to be sitting in front of the damn machine.
As for privacy, when you signed your offer letter and you agreed to follow company guidelines, you pretty much signed away any hope of privacy in the workplace. The boss can listen to your phone calls, can read your mail and read your paperwork. Yes, your boss can read your personal email if you are trying to read it from your workstation at the office. It is the company's computer and you are using the company's resources for personal reasons.
Now, say you are a programmer or a DBA, then you need a bit more shielding from prying eyes. But the plain IT folks? Nah, they can sit outside like everyone else.
It was a bold move, and it did not cost him a penny to do it. If he pulls it off he'll be 5m ahead of where he is right now, since his market share in ROK is pretty much zero. If he pulls it off he also gets to use it as a precedent to go country-by-country offering blanket licenses, which will make Linspire some good money and will royally piss off Microsoft.
Regardless of the merits of Lindows v. all the other Linux distributions out there, this is all about marketing, and it was the right thing to do. Microsoft cannot even afford a counter offer, since this will set the same kind of precedent and every government in the world is going to demand a blanket license like that.
Here is the most critical part: the US is divided into certain regions. Within each of these regions there is a main certification body, mostly some kind of association of schools. What you want is to make sure that whatever school you pick has passed the proper certification process by this main body. Cheesy schools will make these up to try to sound legit.
Read Dr. Bear's guide to distance learning (ISBN 1-58008-202-5). This man is the expert in figuring out diploma mills v. legitimate schools.
Consider a program like Regents College (now called Excelsior College, https://www.excelsior.edu/). The Regents program was run by the State University of NY out of their Albany campus. Their program was very simple: for a very modest fee they became custodians of your transcripts and they became your educational advisors. You submitted whatever credits you had completed so far, plus your military service records if available. They checked the validity of your transcripts and made sure you completed the courses in accredited institutions. You were free to take your courses anywhere as long as it fit your degree program (BA, BS, etc.) and the transcripts were sent sealed from the school.
Once you finished your course load, they issued you a diploma from the State U. of NY. This program is very popular with military personnel because they can work on their degrees regardless of where they are stationed, since all services make an effort to provide college-level education services. When I was stationed in Germany our education centers were run by the University of Maryland.
Also, there are online universities that have been around since forever. University of Phoenix (http://achieve.phoenix.edu/) started with satellite offices thru the country, then moved online. Keller (http://www.keller.edu/) did the same.
Whatever you do, research a bit to make sure the school is certified properly, then take it from there. Regents/Excelsior has a very active network of graduates that welcome inquiries from people interested in the program.
I spent the first 8 years of my professional life stuck working in NOCs with standard raised flooring, the cooling was just one of the many things it was needed for.
Examples:
Wiring: Not everyone likes to use overhead ladders to carry cables around. In the Army we had less than 50% of our wiring overhead, the rest was routed thru channels underneath the raised flooring.
HVAC Spill protection: Many of our NOCs had huge AC units above the tile level, and these things could leak at any moment. With raised flooring the water will pool at the bottom instead of run over the tiles and cause an accident. We had water sensors installed, so we knew we had a problem as soon as the first drop hit the floor.
If the natural airflow patterns are not enough for a specific piece of equipment, it does not take a lot to build conducts to guarantee cold air delivery underneath a specific rack unit.
The one thing I did not like about the raised floors was when some dumbass moron (who did NOT work within a NOC) decided to replace our nice, white, easy to buff tiles, with carpeted tiles. 10 years later and I can't still figure out why the hell would he approve that switch, since our NOC with its white tiles looked fricking gorgeous just by running a buffer and a clean mop thru it. The tiles with carpeting were gray so they darkened our pristine NOC.
I bet many of the people against raised flooring are land lords that don't want to get stuck with the cost of rebuilding flooring if the new tenant does not need a NOC area. I have been to a NOC in a conventional office suite, they basically crammed all of their racks into what seemed to be a former cubicle island. The air conditioning units were obviously a last-minute addition and it looked like the smallest spill would immediately short the lose power strips on the first row of racks in front of them. Shoddy as hell.
Is this more precise than a Cesium atomic clock? When it comes down to it, all the leap calculations, etc. are programmatic and are not related to super-accurate timekeeping. What you really want is a really stable timing signal, which is pretty much what you get out of a Cesium atomic clock.
I don't know if this is done in the civilian industry, but back in my military satellite communication days, we used to keep no less than two Cesium clocks on site at all time. These produced insanely accurate 10 MHZ and 1 Pulse per second signals which were then distributed to all our other electronics equipment in-house. All our up/down converters, multiplexers, modems, etc. relied on this centralized clock. If one of the clocks got out of sync we were not even allowed to fix it ourselves, instead these were shipped over to the US Naval Observatory, which was in charge of dealing with these.
I would like to add to your third definition. A stored procedure is nothing more than a pre-parsed and pre-planned SQL command. Whenever you send a SQL command your RDBMS has to waste precious time figuring out if the SQL command is valid, then how to execute it properly. When you use a stored procedure, it is already parsed and planned, so when you call it it will go straight to the first step of the execution plan. This is why stored procedures are so much faster than interpreted SQL even when it is just one query. While yes, one of the things you get is the ability to run a bunch of commands at a time, what makes it special is that these commands are already validated and planned.
We had decent luck with Dell but only as servers. Their laptops gave us nothing but grief. And yes, we had excellent luck with Compaq hardware, at least for servers.
Dell has offered this choice to volume and channel sales for many years. The reason they sell it to you with FreeDOS is because their bulk license agreement with Microsoft forbids them from selling OS-less machines. This volume option was intended for two specific markets:
1. People purchasing tons of desktops for organizations with streamlined IT management with pre-defined system images, so they could pull the machine out of the box, put the image and send it to the proper user. Saves them a few minutes per machine in setup.
2. People purchasing tons of cheap reliable boxes intended to run a non-Microsoft OS. Think you just started your dream business as a hosting provider and you wanted to buy 500 $299 Dell servers.