Everyone is up in arms because a PRIVATE company is allowing the government to examine traffic passing over its PRIVATE data network.
Similar to a mall/store owner asking the police to come in during a busy holiday shopping weekend to watch for shoplifters.
Don't like that concept? Don't shop at the mall/store. Don't like what AT&T is doing? Don't buy their products, and convince your providers not to buy their products.
Wrong, private insurance is not bad. Actually, it's a good thing, so long as it's a private, mutual insurance company. In that case, the profits are either re-invested in the company (to form stable or decreased premiums), or distributed back to the owners (e.g., policy holders) as dividends. Either way, the policy holders generally faired fairly well.
However about 7-9 years ago, insurance companies started getting the IPO itch, and went public. That's when the real push for profits began, as investors on the The Street demanded each quarter be better than the last.
Not necessarily. It all depends on demographics and any shifts which may have occurred since the "closing stores" opened. Those particular stores may have had their core demographic targets shift to different locations, while the new stores are opening in those locations.
The exact same thing happened in Minnesota 12 years ago on the primary Internet link at the time. IIRC, in the Minnesota incident, diversified paths were implemented on seperate fibers. Unfortunately, the seperate fibers were in the same bundle.
Actually, there are companies which do enforce non-competes through legal
action. Even if the defendants win, how much money will they have spent on lawyers
to defend themselves? Often, lawsuits aren't for the purpose of winning; rather
for the purposes of setting an example of "you can fight, but it will cost you
every penny you've ever earned, and ever will earn"...
Ex-Iowa workers are sued to shield ethanol secrets
They worked in Jewell and learned confidential methods before switching jobs, the lawsuit says.
By JEFF MARTIN
SIOUX FALLS (S.D.) ARGUS LEADER
March 7, 2007
In a case that underscores how competitive the ethanol industry has become, an ethanol maker is suing two former Iowa employees to protect its trade secrets and keep them from a rival.
Broin and Associates claims it has developed technology that make its ethanol plants some of the most profitable in the industry.
In a federal lawsuit, Broin says two employees of a Broin-affiliated ethanol plant in Jewell, north of Ames, learned confidential information and trade secrets about Broin's ethanol production methods.
Then, the Iowa employees left to work with Colorado's first ethanol plant - a direct competitor of Broin, the lawsuit alleges.
In going to Colorado, the employees broke agreements not to compete with Broin, according to the lawsuit.
Broin has designed, engineered and built more than 25 ethanol plants across the United States, and is building one of the first plants to produce ethanol from corn cobs, in addition to the grain.
Defendants in the lawsuit are Gary T. Hanson, former operations manager at the Horizon Ethanol plant, which began operations about one year ago.
Also named as a defendant is Robert A. Akers, a former maintenance technician at Horizon.
"Broin and Associates licensed to Horizon Ethanol proprietary technology, design information, and operational information," the lawsuit states. "The licensed technology included trade secrets, formulas, research data, processes, know-how, and specifications related to Broin and Associates' design and construction of the ethanol facility."
Hanson resigned from the Iowa plant Dec. 18 and became affiliated with Sterling Ethanol LLC in northeast Colorado, according to the lawsuit. Akers resigned Jan. 22 and also went to Sterling, Broin maintains.
Those job moves violated agreements that they not compete with Broin-affiliated plants, the lawsuit states.
Akers' lawyer, Stu Cochrane of Des Moines, said the lawsuit misrepresents the situation.
For one thing, Cochrane said, Akers was not involved in producing ethanol. Rather, he was a maintenance worker who made $13 an hour, and he went to Colorado to try to make a better life for his family, Cochrane said.
"He wouldn't know a trade secret if he saw one," Cochrane said. "He had nothing to do with anything that was remotely confidential for that plant. He essentially fixed broken equipment."
Akers had no contact with customers, wasn't involved in marketing efforts, and "the suggestion that he's now harming them is ridiculous." Cochrane added that Akers "is no threat in any way, and he never has been."
Hanson could not be reached Tuesday for comment.
Sioux Falls lawyer Tim Shattuck, who is representing Broin and Horizon, said it's their policy not to comment on pending lawsuits.
Among other things, Broin's lawsuit seeks injunctions preventing the two men from working with Sterling, and stopping them from sharing confidential information.
Sterling Ethanol has 30 employees and operates 24 hours a day.
Its owners are building another plant 40 miles south of it. They have plans for three more facilities, the Rocky Mountain News newspaper of Denver reported in January.
This guy is doing what he's supposed to do as Director: evaluating solutions for his current infrastructure before (or even while concurrently) evaluating alternative solutions.
Of course, for all we know, the end-users may be using primarily Unix/Linux workstations as desktops, and any architecture change would require expenses beyond server swapouts. (Citrix or RDC may be an option in that case).
Re:So let the flame wars begin!
on
The Birth of vi
·
· Score: 1
Obviously, this comes from someone who has never worked in an entirely terminal/keyboard-only environment, which then made the switch to a GUI env.
About 12 years ago, I went through this situation at the manufacturing company I worked for, replacing WYSE terminals with pc's. Even with the terminal emulator configured properly on the pc, productivity dropped in many departments (accounting, floor, purchasing, etc). Not because people couldn't learn new things (I had run extensive training for people before rollout, and they were farily confident in their abilities); but rather, because of having to switch to the mouse for many things. Hand away from keyboard is hand not doing work.
In the end, several people had the WYSE terminals returned, and an e-mail program pointed to the IMAP server went on the HP/UX boxen.
Back in '99-00, I was contracting out as a Sun admin for a global corporation, which had set their maintenance window for Sunday mornings from 7 till noon.
My startup times were pretty quick, but I felt for the AIX guys. They were working on an SP cluster, they would have to be done with their work and ready to reboot by 11 am to ensure that the cluster would be up by the end of the window. It generally took around 45-50 minutes.
I laughed, until my next gig which used IBM RS/6000's. 15 minute boot time, each and every time. And THAT was streamlined down from 20 minutes.
Background investigations on the employee are next to worthless, in my book.
First of all, too many companies only do an initial bg check, and never do periodic checks. Second, they don't do true investigations, by interviewing people (references, neighbors, family, friends, etc). Finally, do they investigate the spouse/SO, children, parents, siblings, and/or in-laws?
Stop and think about that last one. Most people can take take the hit on something they've done personally. But what if their family is placed in harm's way? Spouse has a credit/gambling problem; kids have a drug problem; older parents don't have insurance, and need expensinve medical care.
The point is, commercial background checks are irrelevant. They only capture a fraction of the total influences upon a person.
it used to be the background check was called "checking references", and was done by the manager or HR. Previous employers were contacted, and if there were bad vibes, the candidate was passed over. This would tell a company far more than background checks.
Looks like many comments regarding Internet accessability, ownership on someone else's servers, etc may be void. ThinkFree has both stand-alone desktop and internal server products. Pop this puppy on your own servers for intranet or VPN access.
Hosted, or with the option of implementing my own server. Hmmm...A Web 2.0 company doing it right.
Well, if Cringley is right (as reported on/. here)
my guess that this network is the backbone for Google's distributed and portable datacenter. If there's 3.5TB of storage in each, that's a lot of data that would need accessed.
Anything can "fail", whether OSS, SaaS, or proprietary software.
Companies which develop and sell proprietary software can run afoul of IP protections also. They may annoy someone enough that a lawsuit is filed. They may have underestimated their potential market share, and have gone out of business due to insufficient revenues. It may be a private company and the owner dies suddenly with no provisions to what happens to the company after he's gone. (After all, not all software is developed by and for large companies.)
The point is, every business model is vulnerable. Just part of the risks of doing business.
The Globe Gazette of Mason City, Iowa (of all places) is doing a pretty good job in this area, with their site looking more like a blog. Comments are allowed also.
While I agree that the Internet version of the Chicken Little story ("we're running out of address space! we're running out of address space!") has been around for a long time and heard by myself more times than I care to remember; and that Cisco does have a vested interest...but this time, I'm starting to pay closer attention, as the next ten years will see major changes and major growth in address space utilization. The reasons?
One thing we here in the US seem to keep forgetting is that the Internet is global. Over the past several years, several countries have been building out a good chunk of infrastructure, and the question I have is how much of that is IPv6, or will NEED to be IPv6? Don't forget, China has only just started to come on-line. Want to talk IPv4 address exhaustion?
Additionally, mobile devices are a huge seller throughout the world (I believe a billion last year alone), and that will only be increasing as the years go by. With the addition of networking capabilities to billions of mobile devices...well, you get the picture.
I think Chicken Little may be onto something this time.
Hmmm...could it be that people who do state their experience--like me--have learned that if they don't, floods of posts like the two (at least one) before yours stating "it's easy!! just use [apt-get rpm etc]".
As for the rest of your comment, my purpose was to state why I went to Quicken in the first place. I was and am experienced, and had a nasty time installing GnuCash. It was a dependency nightmare.
Now, does my nearly 7 year old experience reflect upon the state of GnuCash today? Of course not. I've no doubt that it's become easier to install with packages, rather than compiling from scratch. But my impressions then started me on using Quicken. GnuCash just wasn't ready.
I've kept an occassional eye on GnuCash. However, instead of installation issues, I find that it's features and functionality that keep me with Quicken, and I don't see reason to change (although the licensing bit almost did).
You know, for those of us who work for a living, this sunsetting isn't much of a shock. A lot of enterprise software is licensed for one or two years, with the license managed by FlexLM or a dongle (these god-foresaken things took a ten-year hiatus, but are showing up again). You don't pay the support fee, you don't use the software--period.
So, what's the difference here? Well, Intuit is still allowing users to USE the software--just not do anything through their systems--compared to software just stopping at date:time in the FlexLM license key.
Intuit has probably done the due dilligence, and decided that as a company, they would rather not spend resources supporting software developed 4.5 years ago, and sold 3.5 years ago. Overall, I don't blame them for doing it, though.
Let's face it, a $50-75 retail product really only brings so much back to Intuit (say $35-45 or so; the rest is markup for the middlemen). Of that, so much is allocated to primarily FREE support and upgrades. (There is a $25/call for supporting those who don't RTFM.) Eventually, the flow of money from that product allocated for support dries up--for both support and upgrades--as sales decline, and the development resources are best placed on money-generating products (read, current or under-development).
For all of you rabid OSS people out there, it's called running a for-profit business, which has a pretty dang good product. (Don't believe it's a good product? Look at who GnuCash is trying to emulate...QIF isn't Microsoft.)
GnuCash was the reason I went to Quicken in the first place (and bought my first Windows box).
Back in the summer of '98, I spent three or four nights trying to get that thing compiled and working on my recently built Linux box. Dependency after dependency forced upgrades all over the place. I finally decided to swear the entire thing off, built a Windows box, bought Quicken, installed it and was up and running within 30 minutes, and haven't really looked back.
And FYI, I've been at this sysadmin and developer thing for longer than most/.'ers have been alive. GnuCash just wasn't worth the pain at the time, and I've been extremely happy with Quicken.
I've glanced at the GnuCash site on occasion, but you know, Quicken still has several features that I find basic to a money management app. Sorry, but Intuit has OSS beat hands down on this one.
Really? Which country is this, where bankers and accountants are "required" to take their vacation? My wife is a senior CPA for a Fortune 200 firm in the US, and is not "required" to take time off.
Slashdot Mirror
Everyone is up in arms because a PRIVATE company is allowing the government to examine traffic passing over its PRIVATE data network.
Similar to a mall/store owner asking the police to come in during a busy holiday shopping weekend to watch for shoplifters.
Don't like that concept? Don't shop at the mall/store. Don't like what AT&T is doing? Don't buy their products, and convince your providers not to buy their products.
Wrong, private insurance is not bad. Actually, it's a good thing, so long as it's a private, mutual insurance company. In that case, the profits are either re-invested in the company (to form stable or decreased premiums), or distributed back to the owners (e.g., policy holders) as dividends. Either way, the policy holders generally faired fairly well.
However about 7-9 years ago, insurance companies started getting the IPO itch, and went public. That's when the real push for profits began, as investors on the The Street demanded each quarter be better than the last.
Not necessarily. It all depends on demographics and any shifts which may have occurred since the "closing stores" opened. Those particular stores may have had their core demographic targets shift to different locations, while the new stores are opening in those locations.
The exact same thing happened in Minnesota 12 years ago on the primary Internet link at the time. IIRC, in the Minnesota incident, diversified paths were implemented on seperate fibers. Unfortunately, the seperate fibers were in the same bundle.
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/ar
Good troll.
This guy is doing what he's supposed to do as Director: evaluating solutions for his current infrastructure before (or even while concurrently) evaluating alternative solutions.
Of course, for all we know, the end-users may be using primarily Unix/Linux workstations as desktops, and any architecture change would require expenses beyond server swapouts. (Citrix or RDC may be an option in that case).
Obviously, this comes from someone who has never worked in an entirely terminal/keyboard-only
environment, which then made the switch to a GUI env.
About 12 years ago, I went through this situation at the manufacturing company I worked for, replacing WYSE terminals with pc's. Even with the terminal emulator configured properly on the pc, productivity dropped in many departments (accounting, floor, purchasing, etc). Not because people couldn't learn new things (I had run extensive training for people before rollout, and they were farily confident in their abilities); but rather, because of having to switch to the mouse for many things. Hand away from keyboard is hand not doing work.
In the end, several people had the WYSE terminals returned, and an e-mail program pointed to the IMAP server went on the HP/UX boxen.
Back in '99-00, I was contracting out as a Sun admin for a global corporation, which had set their maintenance window for Sunday mornings from 7 till noon.
My startup times were pretty quick, but I felt for the AIX guys. They were working on an SP cluster, they would have to be done with their work and ready to reboot by 11 am to ensure that the cluster would be up by the end of the window. It generally took around 45-50 minutes.
I laughed, until my next gig which used IBM RS/6000's. 15 minute boot time, each and every time. And THAT was streamlined down from 20 minutes.
Background investigations on the employee are next to worthless, in my book.
First of all, too many companies only do an initial bg check, and never do periodic checks. Second, they don't do true investigations, by interviewing people (references, neighbors, family, friends, etc). Finally, do they investigate the spouse/SO, children, parents, siblings, and/or in-laws?
Stop and think about that last one. Most people can take take the hit on something they've done personally. But what if their family is placed in harm's way? Spouse has a credit/gambling problem; kids have a drug problem; older parents don't have insurance, and need expensinve medical care.
The point is, commercial background checks are irrelevant. They only capture a fraction of the total influences upon a person.
it used to be the background check was called "checking references", and was done by the manager or HR. Previous employers were contacted, and if there were bad vibes, the candidate was passed over. This would tell a company far more than background checks.
Geez...some guys have all the luck.
Although, with the general social reputation of those in the tech community, I'm surprised no
one else picked up on this.
Hosted, or with the option of implementing my own server. Hmmm...A Web 2.0 company doing it right.
Well, if Cringley is right (as reported on /. here)
my guess that this network is the backbone for Google's distributed and portable datacenter. If there's 3.5TB of storage in each, that's a lot of data that would need accessed.
Anything can "fail", whether OSS, SaaS, or proprietary software.
Companies which develop and sell proprietary software can run afoul of IP protections also. They may annoy someone enough that a lawsuit is filed. They may have underestimated their potential market share, and have gone out of business due to insufficient revenues. It may be a private company and the owner dies suddenly with no provisions to what happens to the company after he's gone. (After all, not all software is developed by and for large companies.)
The point is, every business model is vulnerable. Just part of the risks of doing business.
Of course, the words of Asok the Intern (from Dilbert a few years back) pretty much sums the whole thing up:
"If I spent my whole life looking, do you think I'd find anyone who cared about this document marked 'Proprietary'?"
The Globe Gazette of Mason City, Iowa (of all places) is doing a pretty good job in this area, with their site looking more like a blog. Comments are allowed also.
While I agree that the Internet version of the Chicken Little story ("we're running out of address space! we're running out of address space!") has been around for a long time and heard by myself more times than I care to remember; and that Cisco does have a vested interest...but this time, I'm starting to pay closer attention, as the next ten years will see major changes and major growth in address space utilization. The reasons?
One thing we here in the US seem to keep forgetting is that the Internet is global. Over the past several years, several countries have been building out a good chunk of infrastructure, and the question I have is how much of that is IPv6, or will NEED to be IPv6? Don't forget, China has only just started to come on-line. Want to talk IPv4 address exhaustion?
Additionally, mobile devices are a huge seller throughout the world (I believe a billion last year alone), and that will only be increasing as the years go by. With the addition of networking capabilities to billions of mobile devices...well, you get the picture.
I think Chicken Little may be onto something this time.
Yeah, I guess you shouldn't laugh. After all, you've proven that almost anyone can install from a package.
;)
Maybe someday, you can graduate to being a real Unix/Linux person, and compile from source!
Hmmm...could it be that people who do state their experience--like me--have learned that if they don't, floods of posts like the two (at least one) before yours stating "it's easy!! just use [apt-get rpm etc]".
As for the rest of your comment, my purpose was to state why I went to Quicken in the first place. I was and am experienced, and had a nasty time installing GnuCash. It was a dependency nightmare.
Now, does my nearly 7 year old experience reflect upon the state of GnuCash today? Of course not. I've no doubt that it's become easier to install with packages, rather than compiling from scratch.
But my impressions then started me on using Quicken. GnuCash just wasn't ready.
I've kept an occassional eye on GnuCash. However, instead of installation issues, I find that it's features and functionality that keep me with Quicken, and I don't see reason to change (although the licensing bit almost did).
You know, for those of us who work for a living, this sunsetting isn't much of a shock. A lot of enterprise software is licensed for one or two years, with the license managed by FlexLM or a dongle (these god-foresaken things took a ten-year hiatus, but are showing up again). You don't pay the support fee, you don't use the software--period.
So, what's the difference here? Well, Intuit is still allowing users to USE the software--just not do anything through their systems--compared to software just stopping at date:time in the FlexLM license key.
Intuit has probably done the due dilligence, and decided that as a company, they would rather not spend resources supporting software developed 4.5 years ago, and sold 3.5 years ago. Overall, I don't blame them for doing it, though.
Let's face it, a $50-75 retail product really only brings so much back to Intuit (say $35-45 or so; the rest is markup for the middlemen). Of that, so much is allocated to primarily FREE support and upgrades. (There is a $25/call for supporting those who don't RTFM.) Eventually, the flow of money from that product allocated for support dries up--for both support and upgrades--as sales decline, and the development resources are best placed on money-generating products (read, current or under-development).
For all of you rabid OSS people out there, it's called running a for-profit business, which has a pretty dang good product. (Don't believe it's a good product? Look at who GnuCash is trying to emulate...QIF isn't Microsoft.)
GnuCash was the reason I went to Quicken in the first place (and bought my first Windows box).
/.'ers have been alive. GnuCash just wasn't worth the pain at the time, and I've been extremely happy with Quicken.
Back in the summer of '98, I spent three or four nights trying to get that thing compiled and working on my recently built Linux box. Dependency after dependency forced upgrades all over the place. I finally decided to swear the entire thing off, built a Windows box, bought Quicken, installed it and was up and running within 30 minutes, and haven't really looked back.
And FYI, I've been at this sysadmin and developer thing for longer than most
I've glanced at the GnuCash site on occasion, but you know, Quicken still has several features that I find basic to a money management app. Sorry, but Intuit has OSS beat hands down on this one.
The "Verisign Plans DNS Changes" story now begins to make a bit more sense now. Especially when one considers tying RFID and DNS together.
In other words, these guys were running at between OC-12 and OC-24 speeds.
YAWN!!!!
Considering I'm surrounded by companies putting in their 3rd or 4th OC-48 (you know, 2.448 Gbps/each), color me unimpressed...
Apple released on the same day MPEG-LA announced licensing fees for MPEG-4 Visual, Systems and MPEG-J patents. Details here.
Really? Which country is this, where bankers and accountants are "required" to take their vacation? My wife is a senior CPA for a Fortune 200 firm in the US, and is not "required" to take time off.