Both are illegal for a reason - Because people should not be allowed to make a decision that puts other's lives at risk without their permission. However, it has become painfully obvious after driving on American roads that a significant minority of people have complete disregard not only for their own safety, but the safety of others as well. These people will continue to engage in dangerous behavior as long as they are physically allowed.
Driving a road vehicle puts pedestrians at significant risk, and many of them don't give permission for passing motorists to be driving at all. Of course motorists don't need their permission. Life is dangerous, and choosing to leave the confines of your house can result in death. My advice on this - live every day knowing that you might not live another.
That said, it is a damned shame that so many people are killed in car accidents. But it's the nature of whipping around at high speeds in heavy steel boxes. Everyone who gets into a car must acknoledge this.
Most accidents are not a result of overly excessive speed or performance driving. They are the result of the opposite, in fact - people on their way to work, visiting a friend, or grabbing a burger - when the last thing on their mind is the precise control of their vehicle.
Performance/aggressive driving puts the driver in a state of mind where every reaction of the vehicle is anticipated. Foresight keeps one alive. You watch the road unfold, and you know what is around you at all times. You watch for other drivers deviating from their natural course of action, and you know the road conditions well.
Contrast that to the usual groggy 9am drive to work. While you worry about the fact that you're late, composing an apology to your boss in your head, you roll through a red light and get smoked by an 18-wheeler.
Every "close call" I've ever had has occurred when I was "driving normally."
There isn't a "standard" SMP unix out there that wouldn't die a horrible death if you pull a cpu out that was running a critical section of the kernel...
Well, it appears that Sun has discontinued it, but for some period of time, they offered the Netra ft-1800. It did just that; it was an 8 CPU machine, with 4 available for use by the OS. Instructions were checkpointed, and a failure of a CPU module did not affect the availability of the software running on it. It was pretty cool... wish they still offered it.:)
It might be a good idea (if this becomes standard across platforms) for daemon writers to include a standard policy file with their source/binaries (you're trusting their code anyway:).
That way, upon installation, you have the best rule set you're likely to ever have, for that application.
Hmm.. well, it might seem to be dodging the point a little, but if you're looking for offerings from vendors from mostly a hardware standpoint, don't forget that Debian has been ported to many different architectures.
I am in the process of rebuilding many of our "legacy" SGI, Apple, and even older Sun systems with Debian. Fewer security holes, homogenous and simple to manage (especially with apt), fast and lightweight - and runs on practically everything we have.
Basically, just choose what you feel is the best server offering (because of price, construction quality, hardware support, and track record), and once the initial install is done, no one knows the difference.:)
So any theories on if these would actually damage a human if it DID pass through them?
Unfortunately, the energy released just from the localized destruction of the tissues would be enough to instantly vaporize any poor soul who were to find themselves in the path of one of these things. Luckily, as noted, the odds of this are infinitesimally small.
Ok, really now. Anyone who believes "IDE hard drives" are slower than "SCSI hard drives" are out to lunch.
SCSI as a protocol is far superior (in terms of performance design, connectability, intelligence, and fault tolerance/scalability) than IDE (which essentially acts as a glorified signal converter). Regardless of what any benchmarks attempt "prove," SCSI does not present an overhead which inherently degrades single-user performance. Given the same drive mechanics and comparitive channel rates (ie. 80mb/sec - 160mb/sec LVD, or FC), SCSI disk performance will meet or exceed IDE disk performance, for any given single user application.
When you begin to involve more complex and real-world use of disk drives, the difference becomes tremendous. Think faster disks (15k rpm Seagates), switched fiber interconnects (running >200mb/sec), spindle synchronization, and intelligent command queueing. The added cost (which is usually insignificant compared to the cost of downtime, delayed I/Os, and maintenance) becomes a non-issue.
99% of the high performance computing industry chooses SCSI over IDE as their block device interface, time and time again, and there is a reason. To do so otherwise demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of storage interface technology.
...or at least the equivalent of it. See the copyright reform process [ic.gc.ca] at Heretige Canada website for more details, although the deadline for comments has already expired. (700 were posted!)
One of those was mine:
Subject: CPCDI concern
Hello,
I am a Canadian citizen residing in Montreal, QC. I recently learned of
your request for comments regarding the implementation of a Canadian
version of the controversial American DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright
Act), through provisions of the Consultation Paper on Digital Copyright
Issues (CPCDI). I would like to voice my concern.
To anyone who has studied the history of the United States - from the
inception of an independent democracy to the frequent creation and repeal
of unjust law - the DMCA appears to be a gross perversion of both
copyright law (practically, and in spirit) and the American constitution.
It seeks to impose the criminal status on individuals who would otherwise
be practicing constitutionally protected freedoms, while having a
questionable effect, if any, on those who are already criminals - those
who wilfully violate copyright law. It allows for the criminalization of the
act of making fair use (media excerpts, backup copies, transfers of
ownership, research for the purpose of publishing, use under unsupported
or unapproved digital devices, and others) of copyrighted material,
because these fair uses can be controlled through the use of encryption.
Where formerly these would have been civil issues (contract violation),
they now become criminal issues.
This, as we have seen recently in the United States, has already begun to
have a chilling effect on scientific research (see the cases regarding
Dmitry Sklyrov, Dr. Felten, and Jon Johansen - all of whom were enguaged
in previously protected activities for the good of the public). Of
course, the frightening commonality in each of these cases is that the
requests for prosecution were perpetrated by large media centric,
for-profit corporations.
At the end of the day, many criminal acts can be prevented through
proactive prosection, criminalization of related activity, and errosion of
fundamental privacy.
But as a citizen of Canada, I oppose these excessive measures. To me,
living in a free country means being given the opportunity to use tools for
good or bad purposes. It is the trust instilled by the Canadian
government and the Canadian people which makes this country great.
I urge the Canadian government to maintain the fair, delicate balance
between copyright holders and individuals, and to remove the overbroad,
anti-consumer provisions of CPDCI.
I was with ya there, for almost the whole comment... except when you got to the:
The internet in no way affects your quality of life.
Of course it affects quality of life (sometimes even negatively). But of course, this alone is not enough to make it a fundamental right. And yes, food, shelter, privacy, right to earn a living, and many other things come first.:)
One step might be to follow the brilliant suggestion of Bennett Haselton (webmaster) of peacefire:
In the case of decency standards, take the words "screw" and "fuck" -- which mean the same thing, but one of them is considered so harmful that films and CD's containing the word actually carry warning labels. "Fuck" is just a syllable -- the notion of what is considered a dirty word is completely arbitrary. When I was ten, I had an idea for solving the problem of "foul language" in movies: just declare that at midnight on the next January 1st, all swear words are reclassified as "slang" so they're not swear words any more.
The entire "Why we do this" page [rant:)] is quite interesting; well worth a read. Not like any of it would ever happen.:)
How about an ad blocker, that still downloads all images or files marked as ad related (according to the ads database or logic code).. so that the site still gets the money, but instead of displaying the ad and annoying the user, it simply pushes it to/dev/zero.
Sure, it still uses bandwidth, but other than that - no harm done. Anyone who feels this strongly is *not* going to buy the product of aggresive advertisement in either case (so the advertiser loses nothing), the website gets some cash, and you save screen space.
Well, I must say.. I'm impressed. You have demonstrated a complete and consistent disconnection from reality.
You will understand the error that is your argument in the coming months, when you catch wind that the DMCA, in some form or another, has been repealed. It will happen, because corruption is corruptable. And when it does, read this thread from top to bottom.
Your arrogance is overwhelming if you think I actually believe that you would use it for anything other than theft.
I don't care what you believe. My arguments are offered for the sake of others; take from them what you will.
Actually, it applies in North America more than anywhere else in the world. Companies are here to serve their own interests, not yours. They have no obligation whatsoever to please you. If they choose to do that, which seems like good business sense, then bully for them. If not, then don't buy their products.
You would do well reading up on the various consumer and employee protection laws which currently exist. While they are skirted wherever possible by companies run by the unethical, they do exist.
And so that you could have it, a man rots in jail. Are eBooks (which I doubt you even read) worth that much to you?
A man rots in jail because inappropriate laws were passed in predjudice to the constitution of your wonderful country. My utilization of various circumvention "technologies" is unrelated.
But, for the record, while I do consider freedom of expression to be an unconditional, unrevokable, and inalienable right, and will fight to the death to protect it for others (and I mean that), I would of course not willingly put someone else on the martyr block.
Don't fool yourself into underestimating the consequences of limiting expression (be it programming code, lecture, speech...).
That's the sort of rubbish that leads to these inane debates. "Hope" is worthless. You have to do something to change the world, not have silly online arguments about the virtues of various criminals.
Circumvention activities are not, and never have been, for use when copyright protection devices fail. You know it, I know it, and everyone here knows it. That's the party line, but let's be honest: The sole purpose of copyright circumvention is the acquisition of free content. Anything else is a perk that can be used to rationalize illegal activity.
I guess we're just different people, doing different things. Your arrogance if overwhelming. I can't believe that you would presume to tell me what I use circumvention technology for.
Sklyarov was not "teaching or aiding in the fight against copyright perversion", he was making cracking software so people didn't have to pay for content.
Some people will use ElcomSoft's utility for cracking illegally copied content. The relevance is lost to me. I'm sorry; it really is. I disagree with your statement. Making cracking software does not preclude teaching or aiding in the fight against copyright perversion, even if it can be used to break the law.
Adobe (and any other company) has an absolute right to do whatever they want with their products.
Not in North America.
If you buy an eBook from them and then "lose" your client software, tough crap for you.
No, I have circumvention technology.
If they choose not to offer your desired level of customer service, don't buy from them.
Canadian copyright provisions allow me the privilage of buying from companies whose ethics or customer service is sub-par. US copyright laws may one day return to this state, if miscarriages of justice like the Skylarov case continue to occur.
Well that's a very cute personal belief. The real world doesn't work like that, though.
You're a troll. Adobe doesn't have your money. The RIAA doesn't have your money. The artists who create the music you download don't have your money. The companies who create the software you download from warez sites don't have your money. The comparison is absurd.
I transfer property (money) to content providers every day. When one of their "copyright protection devices" fails, I will circumvent it. This is a given. I am vehemently against anyone who supports criminalization of circumvention activities.
Also, I might add, that the heartless way in which people suggest that Sklyarov should rot in jail for the "crime" of teaching or aiding in the fight against copyright perversion affects me at an emotional level. Before condemning someone to jail, serve some time yourself!
It is my personal belief that anyone involved in law creation and enforcement should be required to attend a federal prison for 2 weeks every year. Perhaps armed with the understanding of what prosecution and incarceration truly represent, they will be better suited to arrive at just conclusions in the courtroom, in congress, and in uniform.
Reading your comment... I seriously want to punch you in the head.
Whew. Now that I have that aside:
This is absurd. We would not so glorify those who would publish plans for robbing bank vaults, and yet we take men like Sklyarov who delight in playing a sort of twisted Robin Hood and turn them into our heroes. We rationalize the crimes ("Free speech", "Information wants to be free", blah blah blah) and then laugh ourselves giddy because we get what we want without having to pay for it.
If your bank decided to hold all of your deposited money, and not allow you to withdrawl it, how much would you appreciate plans for robbing this bank? People are fucking evil. Groups of evil people are dangerous. If you do not defend yourself from your government, from the police, from corporations (both vendors and employers), you will be bled. Blind faith in humanity leads to revolution.
It really does depend on where you are. You could simply switch the DSL and cable terms in your message and accurately describe my situation last year.
Listen to you new boss and learn. He obviously does "get it".
My message wasn't really intended for you.:/
But, for the record, the new director of MIS (who I considered my manager, not my "boss"), was recently fired. We had a team of coders who were orders of magnitude faster and better programmers then the average. They got pissed when we implemented disk quotas (another stupid idea; disks and tapes are cheap), banned games during the day, and refused to allow non-outlook mail clients. So, they stated flatly, one day, that they were planning to hit the road if the MIS director wasn't fired. That's all it took.
The Guys At Work were griping about their offices and furniture a few weeks back. I suggested they not gripe too hard, because the OBVIOUS solution to their office/furniture problems would be.... cubicles.
You've gotta be careful with that one there. If they don't like cubicles, and the solution handed down is cubicles, they might leave the company. While this might allow some smug "we don't need ya anyway!" remarks from the boys upstairs, the reality is that they may indeed be needed.
It always amazes me how sometimes, people seem to miss the simple economics of the whole thing. I had an argument a few months ago with an older gentlemen who had been hired as the MIS director. He asked me to suggest specs on laptops and desktops for use by developers. I suggested some fairly highend machines with fast CPUs, lots of memory, DVD drives, 3D cards, etc.
He asked me why the 3D cards were necessary for developers to do their work. I answered, of course - they weren't. They're for playing games! The DVD drives? For watching movies. He laughed, and scratched them out. I was a little surprised, and asked him why he did that. He said that he "had no intention of buying 3D cards or DVD drives for his developers."
This upset me for two reasons. One - they aren't his developers. The developers belong to the company, and we exist to support them - to keep them happy. That's our job as MIS folks. Two (and more importantly) the cost of adding these extras was insignificant compared with to the gain. If your people are happy, they'll stay with you. They'll work for smaller salaries, they'll build stronger teams, they'll enjoy there, and they'll take their work home.
The cost of free drinks, a DVD player, a small bonus, team building events, nice furniture, and and office? $10k perhaps? The cost of a developer who doesn't love his/her job? Do the math.
Anyway, my apologies for the rant. Hope this is of use to someone who's about to make a decision that lower's working environment quality.
/ to start mirroring (by in my case booting from rescue cdrom, copying over the/dev/md instances into the ramdisk/dev, insmodding md, raid1 and reiser, mounting the partitions to mirror, chrooting to that mntpoint, editing lilo.conf (btw that's the LATEST lilo with md bootsector support)
Yeah.. it's not very elegant yet.:)
The best way I've figured out how to do it is to install your OS on a your first disk (like usual), bring up a mirror set in degraded mode (/dev/md0 with only second disk online), copy your OS over (in single user mode), lilo, and boot off the mirror. Then, bring your first disk online and let the mirror sync. Lilo one last time, and you're set.
I have a 5.2lb Thinkpad T21 (850/32gb/384mb) that would smoke that thing at just about anything. But that's not the point. I want something that fits in my pocket (say, 3" x 4" x 1" with the screen across the whole thing).
Rather than modding that comment up, could we have a corroborating link?
Unfortunately I don't have a link for proof, but I can verify this from personal knowledge. Until recently, IBM had a dropout rate of almost 70% across it's TFT display line. It's still up fairly high. Remember that there are more almost a million pixels on the average LCD, and close to two million on newer ones, only a few of which can be defective for a screen to pass. In fact, some companies will not ship an LCD if it has even one bad pixel.
Well, it could be time to take a second look at it. The technology side of it has come a long way in the last 4 years.
Would anyone else be willing to pay $1500 for a PDA with these characteristics (my dream PDA)?
- 1gb microdrive (2gb should be out soon)
- 128mb RAM
- 800x600 24-bit color screen
- Onboard sound, ethernet, 802.11, irda, CDMA/GSM (with handsfree phone connection & data capability), modem
- High speed (steppable) CPU and video processor (enough to render 800x600 mpeg1 frames @ 30fps)
- Video keyboard & grafiti input
- CompactflashII slot
- Running some unix variant (would be nice:) with palm emulation & X server
Man, with one of these I'd only need my laptop on trips. I'd easily drop $1500-2000 tomorrow for one.
Slashdot Mirror
Driving a road vehicle puts pedestrians at significant risk, and many of them don't give permission for passing motorists to be driving at all. Of course motorists don't need their permission. Life is dangerous, and choosing to leave the confines of your house can result in death. My advice on this - live every day knowing that you might not live another.
That said, it is a damned shame that so many people are killed in car accidents. But it's the nature of whipping around at high speeds in heavy steel boxes. Everyone who gets into a car must acknoledge this.
Most accidents are not a result of overly excessive speed or performance driving. They are the result of the opposite, in fact - people on their way to work, visiting a friend, or grabbing a burger - when the last thing on their mind is the precise control of their vehicle.
Performance/aggressive driving puts the driver in a state of mind where every reaction of the vehicle is anticipated. Foresight keeps one alive. You watch the road unfold, and you know what is around you at all times. You watch for other drivers deviating from their natural course of action, and you know the road conditions well.
Contrast that to the usual groggy 9am drive to work. While you worry about the fact that you're late, composing an apology to your boss in your head, you roll through a red light and get smoked by an 18-wheeler.
Every "close call" I've ever had has occurred when I was "driving normally."
My $0.02.
Well, it appears that Sun has discontinued it, but for some period of time, they offered the Netra ft-1800. It did just that; it was an 8 CPU machine, with 4 available for use by the OS. Instructions were checkpointed, and a failure of a CPU module did not affect the availability of the software running on it. It was pretty cool... wish they still offered it. :)
That way, upon installation, you have the best rule set you're likely to ever have, for that application.
I am in the process of rebuilding many of our "legacy" SGI, Apple, and even older Sun systems with Debian. Fewer security holes, homogenous and simple to manage (especially with apt), fast and lightweight - and runs on practically everything we have.
Basically, just choose what you feel is the best server offering (because of price, construction quality, hardware support, and track record), and once the initial install is done, no one knows the difference. :)
Unfortunately, the energy released just from the localized destruction of the tissues would be enough to instantly vaporize any poor soul who were to find themselves in the path of one of these things. Luckily, as noted, the odds of this are infinitesimally small.
Knock wood, I guess. :)
Anyone who believes "IDE hard drives" are faster than "SCSI hard drives" are out to lunch.
I'm fired. ;)
SCSI as a protocol is far superior (in terms of performance design, connectability, intelligence, and fault tolerance/scalability) than IDE (which essentially acts as a glorified signal converter). Regardless of what any benchmarks attempt "prove," SCSI does not present an overhead which inherently degrades single-user performance. Given the same drive mechanics and comparitive channel rates (ie. 80mb/sec - 160mb/sec LVD, or FC), SCSI disk performance will meet or exceed IDE disk performance, for any given single user application.
When you begin to involve more complex and real-world use of disk drives, the difference becomes tremendous. Think faster disks (15k rpm Seagates), switched fiber interconnects (running >200mb/sec), spindle synchronization, and intelligent command queueing. The added cost (which is usually insignificant compared to the cost of downtime, delayed I/Os, and maintenance) becomes a non-issue.
99% of the high performance computing industry chooses SCSI over IDE as their block device interface, time and time again, and there is a reason. To do so otherwise demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of storage interface technology.
One of those was mine:
Subject: CPCDI concern
Hello,
I am a Canadian citizen residing in Montreal, QC. I recently learned of your request for comments regarding the implementation of a Canadian version of the controversial American DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act), through provisions of the Consultation Paper on Digital Copyright Issues (CPCDI). I would like to voice my concern.
To anyone who has studied the history of the United States - from the inception of an independent democracy to the frequent creation and repeal of unjust law - the DMCA appears to be a gross perversion of both copyright law (practically, and in spirit) and the American constitution.
It seeks to impose the criminal status on individuals who would otherwise be practicing constitutionally protected freedoms, while having a questionable effect, if any, on those who are already criminals - those who wilfully violate copyright law. It allows for the criminalization of the act of making fair use (media excerpts, backup copies, transfers of ownership, research for the purpose of publishing, use under unsupported or unapproved digital devices, and others) of copyrighted material, because these fair uses can be controlled through the use of encryption.
Where formerly these would have been civil issues (contract violation), they now become criminal issues.
This, as we have seen recently in the United States, has already begun to have a chilling effect on scientific research (see the cases regarding Dmitry Sklyrov, Dr. Felten, and Jon Johansen - all of whom were enguaged in previously protected activities for the good of the public). Of course, the frightening commonality in each of these cases is that the requests for prosecution were perpetrated by large media centric, for-profit corporations.
At the end of the day, many criminal acts can be prevented through proactive prosection, criminalization of related activity, and errosion of fundamental privacy.
But as a citizen of Canada, I oppose these excessive measures. To me, living in a free country means being given the opportunity to use tools for good or bad purposes. It is the trust instilled by the Canadian government and the Canadian people which makes this country great.
I urge the Canadian government to maintain the fair, delicate balance between copyright holders and individuals, and to remove the overbroad, anti-consumer provisions of CPDCI.
Sincerely,
I'm crossing my fingers. :)
The internet in no way affects your quality of life.
Of course it affects quality of life (sometimes even negatively). But of course, this alone is not enough to make it a fundamental right. And yes, food, shelter, privacy, right to earn a living, and many other things come first. :)
In the case of decency standards, take the words "screw" and "fuck" -- which mean the same thing, but one of them is considered so harmful that films and CD's containing the word actually carry warning labels. "Fuck" is just a syllable -- the notion of what is considered a dirty word is completely arbitrary. When I was ten, I had an idea for solving the problem of "foul language" in movies: just declare that at midnight on the next January 1st, all swear words are reclassified as "slang" so they're not swear words any more.
The entire "Why we do this" page [rant :)] is quite interesting; well worth a read. Not like any of it would ever happen. :)
Of course, that should be /dev/null. :)
Sure, it still uses bandwidth, but other than that - no harm done. Anyone who feels this strongly is *not* going to buy the product of aggresive advertisement in either case (so the advertiser loses nothing), the website gets some cash, and you save screen space.
Thoughts?
You will understand the error that is your argument in the coming months, when you catch wind that the DMCA, in some form or another, has been repealed. It will happen, because corruption is corruptable. And when it does, read this thread from top to bottom.
I don't care what you believe. My arguments are offered for the sake of others; take from them what you will.
Actually, it applies in North America more than anywhere else in the world. Companies are here to serve their own interests, not yours. They have no obligation whatsoever to please you. If they choose to do that, which seems like good business sense, then bully for them. If not, then don't buy their products.
You would do well reading up on the various consumer and employee protection laws which currently exist. While they are skirted wherever possible by companies run by the unethical, they do exist.
And so that you could have it, a man rots in jail. Are eBooks (which I doubt you even read) worth that much to you?
A man rots in jail because inappropriate laws were passed in predjudice to the constitution of your wonderful country. My utilization of various circumvention "technologies" is unrelated.
But, for the record, while I do consider freedom of expression to be an unconditional, unrevokable, and inalienable right, and will fight to the death to protect it for others (and I mean that), I would of course not willingly put someone else on the martyr block.
Don't fool yourself into underestimating the consequences of limiting expression (be it programming code, lecture, speech...).
That's the sort of rubbish that leads to these inane debates. "Hope" is worthless. You have to do something to change the world, not have silly online arguments about the virtues of various criminals.
Agreed.
I guess we're just different people, doing different things. Your arrogance if overwhelming. I can't believe that you would presume to tell me what I use circumvention technology for.
Sklyarov was not "teaching or aiding in the fight against copyright perversion", he was making cracking software so people didn't have to pay for content.
Some people will use ElcomSoft's utility for cracking illegally copied content. The relevance is lost to me. I'm sorry; it really is. I disagree with your statement. Making cracking software does not preclude teaching or aiding in the fight against copyright perversion, even if it can be used to break the law.
Adobe (and any other company) has an absolute right to do whatever they want with their products.
Not in North America.
If you buy an eBook from them and then "lose" your client software, tough crap for you.
No, I have circumvention technology.
If they choose not to offer your desired level of customer service, don't buy from them.
Canadian copyright provisions allow me the privilage of buying from companies whose ethics or customer service is sub-par. US copyright laws may one day return to this state, if miscarriages of justice like the Skylarov case continue to occur.
Well that's a very cute personal belief. The real world doesn't work like that, though.
One can only hope. :)
I transfer property (money) to content providers every day. When one of their "copyright protection devices" fails, I will circumvent it. This is a given. I am vehemently against anyone who supports criminalization of circumvention activities.
Also, I might add, that the heartless way in which people suggest that Sklyarov should rot in jail for the "crime" of teaching or aiding in the fight against copyright perversion affects me at an emotional level. Before condemning someone to jail, serve some time yourself!
It is my personal belief that anyone involved in law creation and enforcement should be required to attend a federal prison for 2 weeks every year. Perhaps armed with the understanding of what prosecution and incarceration truly represent, they will be better suited to arrive at just conclusions in the courtroom, in congress, and in uniform.
Whew. Now that I have that aside:
This is absurd. We would not so glorify those who would publish plans for robbing bank vaults, and yet we take men like Sklyarov who delight in playing a sort of twisted Robin Hood and turn them into our heroes. We rationalize the crimes ("Free speech", "Information wants to be free", blah blah blah) and then laugh ourselves giddy because we get what we want without having to pay for it.
If your bank decided to hold all of your deposited money, and not allow you to withdrawl it, how much would you appreciate plans for robbing this bank? People are fucking evil. Groups of evil people are dangerous. If you do not defend yourself from your government, from the police, from corporations (both vendors and employers), you will be bled. Blind faith in humanity leads to revolution.
--
All men are great
before declaring war
My message wasn't really intended for you. :/
But, for the record, the new director of MIS (who I considered my manager, not my "boss"), was recently fired. We had a team of coders who were orders of magnitude faster and better programmers then the average. They got pissed when we implemented disk quotas (another stupid idea; disks and tapes are cheap), banned games during the day, and refused to allow non-outlook mail clients. So, they stated flatly, one day, that they were planning to hit the road if the MIS director wasn't fired. That's all it took.
--
All men are great
before declaring war
You've gotta be careful with that one there. If they don't like cubicles, and the solution handed down is cubicles, they might leave the company. While this might allow some smug "we don't need ya anyway!" remarks from the boys upstairs, the reality is that they may indeed be needed.
It always amazes me how sometimes, people seem to miss the simple economics of the whole thing. I had an argument a few months ago with an older gentlemen who had been hired as the MIS director. He asked me to suggest specs on laptops and desktops for use by developers. I suggested some fairly highend machines with fast CPUs, lots of memory, DVD drives, 3D cards, etc.
He asked me why the 3D cards were necessary for developers to do their work. I answered, of course - they weren't. They're for playing games! The DVD drives? For watching movies. He laughed, and scratched them out. I was a little surprised, and asked him why he did that. He said that he "had no intention of buying 3D cards or DVD drives for his developers."
This upset me for two reasons. One - they aren't his developers. The developers belong to the company, and we exist to support them - to keep them happy. That's our job as MIS folks. Two (and more importantly) the cost of adding these extras was insignificant compared with to the gain. If your people are happy, they'll stay with you. They'll work for smaller salaries, they'll build stronger teams, they'll enjoy there, and they'll take their work home.
The cost of free drinks, a DVD player, a small bonus, team building events, nice furniture, and and office? $10k perhaps? The cost of a developer who doesn't love his/her job? Do the math.
Anyway, my apologies for the rant. Hope this is of use to someone who's about to make a decision that lower's working environment quality.
--
All men are great
before declaring war
Yeah .. it's not very elegant yet. :)
The best way I've figured out how to do it is to install your OS on a your first disk (like usual), bring up a mirror set in degraded mode (/dev/md0 with only second disk online), copy your OS over (in single user mode), lilo, and boot off the mirror. Then, bring your first disk online and let the mirror sync. Lilo one last time, and you're set.
--
All men are great
before declaring war
I have a 5.2lb Thinkpad T21 (850/32gb/384mb) that would smoke that thing at just about anything. But that's not the point. I want something that fits in my pocket (say, 3" x 4" x 1" with the screen across the whole thing).
--
All men are great
before declaring war
Unfortunately I don't have a link for proof, but I can verify this from personal knowledge. Until recently, IBM had a dropout rate of almost 70% across it's TFT display line. It's still up fairly high. Remember that there are more almost a million pixels on the average LCD, and close to two million on newer ones, only a few of which can be defective for a screen to pass. In fact, some companies will not ship an LCD if it has even one bad pixel.
They're getting there, though.
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All men are great
before declaring war
Would anyone else be willing to pay $1500 for a PDA with these characteristics (my dream PDA)?
- 1gb microdrive (2gb should be out soon) :) with palm emulation & X server
- 128mb RAM
- 800x600 24-bit color screen
- Onboard sound, ethernet, 802.11, irda, CDMA/GSM (with handsfree phone connection & data capability), modem
- High speed (steppable) CPU and video processor (enough to render 800x600 mpeg1 frames @ 30fps)
- Video keyboard & grafiti input
- CompactflashII slot
- Running some unix variant (would be nice
Man, with one of these I'd only need my laptop on trips. I'd easily drop $1500-2000 tomorrow for one.
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All men are great
before declaring war
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All men are great
before declaring war