* And anything else you want to add support for yourself-- I note that Hadoop for example has community support for powershell
By support, I dont mean in the sense that you could use bash to launch SSH to manage these things. I mean in the sense that VMWare allows you to run the following native powershell commands:
Connect-VIServer myVMCluster
Get-VM | Where-object {$_.powerState -eq "PoweredOn"} | foreach { stop-VM $_}
And all of your VMs will be shut off. Trying to do something like that in bash is doable, it just requires screwing around with scripted SSH access to the VMhosts which is painful, for anyone who has done it.
That's assuming that you haven't put your ESX hosts in lockdown mode or disabled SSH access, which is obviously a security best practice. If you have done these things then you can't script the actions without PowerShell.
And it's not just VMware, either. How do you manage directory services? How do you manage storage? How do you manage networking? More importantly, how do you do it remotely and at enterprise scale? Most of the major hardware vendors out there now have PowerShell modules for managing their products, because it is quickly becoming the de facto method of managing systems for companies that use Windows server. I get that Slashdot has a fairly strong pro-linux/anti-Microsoft bias, but unless you are one of the few that live in a 100% linux/Unix world then PowerShell is the way forward.
For anyone who has any sort of legitimate interest in learning what PowerShell is intended to be, take a few minutes to look over the Monad Manifesto. It was written by Jeffrey Snover, the "father of PowerShell". He's not some pro-Windows shill that just popped up at Microsoft, his pedigree goes all the way back to DEC and before.
The nice thing about their path is that they're not afraid to cut off backwards compatibility. That's pretty much the biggest flaw with Windows. A lot of the security issues in Vista today are there because drivers used those holes to work. People still use hardware that uses those broken drivers, and the companies who released the products stopped supporting them years ago.
If you had said that about Windows XP I would agree with you, but Windows Vista has a different driver model that is focused around providing security and stability. It clearly broke the "old" driver model to which you are referring.
When you're first starting out, it's very important to have that degree to get your foot in the door. Without having the degree it can be difficult. But the ironic thing is that technology changes fast enough that the degree very quickly becomes irrelevant. This is especially true when it comes to system administration. Even those "schools" (ITT, DeVry, etc) that offer general IT/Sysadmin "degrees" have a very difficult time keeping up with industry trends. After about 5 years of working in IT, nobody will care about your B.S. degree (or Associates). Now if you're working on a Masters, Ph.D., or MBA, that's a different story.
But if you can break into the market without a degree and get those first few years of experience you absolutely can work yourself up to a good IT job. Remember, after 5 years in the workforce your experience will be comparable to everyone else's and their degrees will be outdated. Just don't expect to come in as a sysadmin from day one. You'll probably have to start at the helpdesk/PC tech level, then work your way up to a junior admin, and so on. I don't have a degree but after several years of hard work and continued learning I'm just shy of a six-figure income in a city where the median individual income is about $32k.
I love how people tend to forget we're a nation born of revolt and war, tempered in the fires of combat, using pretty much PRIVATE WEAPONS against a MUCH LARGER ARMY. Pay closer attention to history. If it can happen ONCE and create a new country, it can happen again.
Which was a lot easier to do in the late 1700's when the extent of mainstream military technology was rifles, bayonets, swords, horses, and a few cannons. The "private weapons" were pretty much the same weapons that the military had, and they were also mostly essential tools for survival in colonial America and so most citizens had a couple of them in their possession (canons being the exception). I don't know about you, but NONE of the NRA nuts that I know have an arsenal of laser-guided smart bombs, jet planes, helicopter gunships, or heavily armored tank brigades. If you believe that the events of the Revolutionary War could ever happen again in the United States, you are sadly, sadly delusional.
You are missing a point here. there are ram chips out there that are designed to run with more voltage then 1.65. So you do not even need to overclock for this to happen.
You're missing the point here. If there are RAM chips out there that are designed to run with more voltage than 1.65v then those RAM chips are not designed to the JEDEC standard. Legally, they probably shouldn't even be able to sell them as DDR3 since DDR3 is a JEDEC standard and the parts on non-compliant. Of course, most of the memory manufacturers do this anyway, and since they are part of JEDEC nobody complains too loudly...except when things don't work, of course.
OCZ Platinum 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 is a 1.8v standard. that's NOT overclocking
I just bought a 46" LCD TV the other day, my first HDTV. It will do 1080p resolution, though I've never seen a 1080p signal. All of my HD cable channels are either 720p or 1080i. They look amazing compared to standard definition TV. I don't think that I can tell the difference between 720p and 1080i when viewing from 8 feet away, let alone 1080p.
When I was buying the TV I wanted to get another DVD player so that the old DVD player could move upstairs to my bedroom with the old CRT television. The salespeople steer me to the Blue-Ray players (obviously). I look at the $399 price tag and laugh. He says "Well, we have this less expensive model over here" and points to a $379 player. I laugh even harder. I honestly haven't looked at the different Blu-Ray players to see what's what, but I find it odd that all of them are exactly $399. There's no price differentiation except for the "store brand" model. I ended up quickly picking up an upconverting DVD player for $70 instead.
Why? Well, it's $330 cheaper for starters. Secondly, upconverted content looks really good. It may not be the same quality as Blu-Ray, but the difference wasn't that discernible from the in-store displays, and watching upconverted DVD content on my TV looks as good as most of the HD cable content that I watch. Then of course there's the movie prices, they're twice what DVD's cost for only a minor improvement in quality. It's odd, but after 2 years of being out Blu-Ray still feels very "bleeding edge" at the moment. Especially after HD-DVD folded I expected Blu-Ray adoption to increase, and I hoped (perhaps against reason) that the increase the production quantity would bring prices down. I was wrong there.
One other thing that really bothers me is that the $399 price seems "fixed" or artificial. You can buy a PS3 for $399, and it includes a Blu-Ray player. Or you can buy a Blu-Ray player for $399. Doesn't it seem like the stand-alone player should be cheaper than the PS3? It's almost like Sony wants to keep the prices higher so that people opt for the PS3 instead, but I'm not really a gamer. I'm not really much of a fan of Sony either, to be honest. All of their DRM infected CDs and other nonsense that they go through to try to force monopolistic, proprietary standards on people really rubs me the wrong way.
Even with help from Google, Cringely believes many technical managers would fail this test and should get the boot as a result -- you can't manage what you don't understand."
While I agree that you can't manage what you don't understand, I would question whether an IT manager is supposed to be managing technology or managing people. IT staffers might say that they should be helping to manage technology, but the manager (and his upper management, up to the CIO/CTO level) might think that the IT manager is supposed to manage the people that make up the IT team. This is especially more common in larger organizations where there is a lot more established process, procedure, and administrative overhead. It's also pretty common in smaller organizations where one manager covers most or all technology areas. Having a manager with a technical background can be a benefit, but it's silly to expect that they will understand all of the technology that their team manages.
My wife and I used to have this argument all the time. She would often want me to take a day off of work just to hang out with her, or she would want me to not work during a specific weekend. I would sometimes tell her (honestly) that there was x, y, and z that had to be done and I needed to do it because nobody else knew how. She would always get upset and ask why my manager couldn't do it, and would complain that I must have an awful boss because she didn't know how to do the jobs of everyone who reported to her (my wife works in a pharmacy, so she's used to an environment where the boss knows how to do everyone's job). I never could get her to understand that IT doesn't work like that. In our IT team we had one guy who was a straight developer with some DB skills. We had another guy who was a PM with DBA skills. Then there was a Helpdesk/PC tech, a junior admin with PBX management skills, two application specialists (responsible for niche applications in the medical and financial space), and one person who did servers/routing and switching/security (me). As you can see, there's very little overlap. And our manager came out of the DB area, so she knew databases really well but had mostly passing familiarity with everything else we were responsible for. In my opinion she was a good manager, but how can someone honestly expect a manager to understand how to develop software, manage databases and projects, support PC technology, administer a PBX, manage servers, manage routers, manage switches, manage firewalls, implement best practices for security and IDM, as well as support the financial and medical applications? On top of that she would have to do her job too, which is managing people, navigating procedures and policy, and being IT's interface to the rest of the company's management. It's ridiculous to think that anyone would have those skills.
"More than one in every three new PCs is downgraded from Windows Vista to Windows XP
Then the truth:
"The 35% is only an estimate,"
Could we come up with a more meaningless non-statistic? I mean, I get it that there's the perception that Vista is awful and some people prefer XP, but do we really need to make up "statistics" just so we can publish news stories about it? Here's an interesting thought..."nearly two thirds of computer users prefer Vista for their new PCs." Suddenly the story doesn't sound negative at all.
I think that it's also misleading to say that 35% of the PCs are "downgraded" to XP from Vista, which strongly implies that people buy machines with Vista and then install XP on them. The "at the factory" line points out that it's not people downgrading from Vista to XP, it's people choosing to buy PCs with XP pre-installed instead of the same PC with Vista. What I'd really like to know is why they didn't post the number of people who buy PCs with Vista pre-installed and then remove it and replace it with XP after trying Vista. That number is actually less than.01%.
BTW, that ".01%" is "only an estimate". See how that works?
Hey dumbass, it's not the Columbus Post Dispatch. It's the Columbus Dispatch. Even if you're not versed in the names of the local newspapers of every city in our nation, it's right at the top of the web page that you linked to where it says "A Division of The Columbus Dispatch". Way to learn how to read!
I gotta agree. My grandfather kept driving long after it was prudent for him to do so due to his failing vision. After he totalled the second car by turning left in front of oncoming traffic the state finally took his license away. As much as I cared about him, he was a threat to himself and the community. What we really need is more ways to help these people understand that they shouldn't be driving and alternative ways to get around.
The team emphatically claims that this has nothing to do with EA.
Of course it doesn't. And anyone who says it does either doesn't work for EA or doesn't work for EA "any more". Because we all know that EA has never told one of its studios that it was time to either ship the product or kill it. EA has a terrible, terrible reputation in the games industry for being almost 100% deadline driven. You come out with a new product and release it on time, period. Then you come out with a refresh/upgrade of that product every year and on time, or else. It's their entire business model. It's also one of the biggest reasons that they are not known for quality products. Their goal is to ship it on time, and if it sucks they'll fix it in the next release. Unfortunately with an MMOG you don't have that option. There's no such thing as Warhammer Online 2008, followed by the sequels Warhammer Online 2009 and 2010. When they destroy their reputation with the initial release it will be much harder to recover. Not only that, but WO players will blow through what little content they have in the first month, then move on to the next big thing. If EA is lucky some of the WO players will spend the next 6-9 months waiting for content that should have been in the original release. Hopefully EA will have the good sense to NOT release that content as a for-sale add-on, but they have a pretty bad track record with MMOGs so I wouldn't get my hopes up.
Recently, we managed to get a bunch of money for a High Performance Cluster to run our stuff on. The code is mostly written in Java.
Wait...let me get this straight. You just bought a high performance cluster but your high performance apps are written in Java? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! That's funny. Let me guess, you couldn't find anyone who knew Visual Basic? You know, if you had written them in something a little faster like C or C++ you could probably run it on a single 4-way box instead of needing an entire cluster.
I agree. No way that laptop is worth $350. But if it were, a much better solution would be to sell it for $350, then take the $125 that he spent revamping it, and buy a new "low end laptop" for around $500. For that much money you can get a brand new laptop with a dual core CPU, 2GB of RAM, and a 120GB or 160GB hard disk. Not to mention CD/DVD read and write capability, faster wireless networking, graphics, a better screen, etc. Laptops are very cheap these days, and it wouldn't take much to run circles around that laptop that he's sporting.
...so long as they also outlaw bullying by telephone, postal mail, passing notes in school, and yelling at someone face to face. After all, it's not the medium that causes people to kill themselves, it's the message. Right?
I have never seen a switch fail what are you doing to them? mine are just consumer 5-16port devices
And that's why. If you're using "smart hubs" or "dumb switches" (aka, your $99 Linksys switch), then you're probably not going to have issues. All it does is store MAC tables and forwards data to the appropriate ports. You probably also don't have multiple other network switches/hubs/routers hanging off of those devices somewhere downstream, and if you do then it's very likely that you know what and where they are and can plan for them.
On the other hand, trying to manage an enterprise-class switch with advanced features can be a little more complicated, especially when you start allowing anybody to plug any other kind of network devices into the switch. You can easily end up with spanning tree loops, issues with frame sizing, cross-brand autonegotiation failures, and who knows what else. And that's before you even have to start worrying about bugs in various firmware revisions or some enterprising "hax0r d00dz" who passed Comp Sci 101 trying to do things that he shouldn't be doing, and spoofing addresses to try to cover his tracks.
Upon being told that I would not email this data to her, the consultant asked what my security requirements were for sending the data. What would be on your wishlist for the best way to send sensitive data to someone outside your firewall?"
Your consultant wanted you to email the personal data to them to begin with? Well, first on the wish list would be a new consultant, preferably one who takes security seriously enough to not ask that confidential personal data be sent via email. It's not like they don't know what kind of data they have there, and the lack of consideration for security in acquiring the data from you does not bode well for how it will be handled once they have it. I would probably require that they either come on site and work with the data via your machines on your network, or I would demand a partnership agreement with them that spells out hefty penalties if they fail to follow specified security practices, especially if that failure leads to data compromise.
The idea is interesting to me because I could care less about leveling another character ever again and would rather focus on another way of advancing a character through a game. I think Ultima Online had it right, but no one seems to want to copy them;)
The problem with UO's way of doing it is that it wasn't that profitable for Origin/EA. The way they make money is to keep subscribers. The way they keep subscribers is to keep them busy. So to keep hem busy they put in a treadmill and make them grind through levels, then more levels, then more levels. The first few are easy, so you feel like you're accomplishing something. Then as you advance they get more difficult. They give you just enough of a taste of success early on to get you hooked, then they drag it out enough to make it take longer to hit that next level of satisfaction, but not so long that you get frustrated and quit. Then when too many people reach the higher levels, they bump the level cap so that you stay on the treadmill. Or they put in raids that take forever to complete, drop small quantities of very rare loot, and will require large numbers of people to complete repeatedly before you get that piece of satisfaction. It's all about moving the bar just a little further out to keep you hooked.
UO wasn't as much like that. You didn't level up, you just gained skills. It wasn't very difficult to get most skills up to 100, and once you got there that's when the you could fully explore the game. But once you got there, there was no more levelling or grinding to be done, so the only thing holding it together was the social aspect. That made it harder to keep subscribers, and was probably a big part of their demise. Eventually they realized that and added scrolls that could boost your skill caps to 105, 110. 115, or 120. But it made them very rare drops from monsters that could only be killed by large groups of people in a raid-like fashion. It was probably too little too late though, to be honest.
Are you freaking serious? You're manually inspecting messages tagged as spam looking for legitimate messages? Do you have to wipe people's asses for them too?
Most companies who have effectively dealt with the spam solution have implemented a product that can do filtering based on multiple criteria, and they don't worry about sifting through what was caught by the filters. There are many, many good products out there, but one of my favorites is called XWall. You can get it from www.dataenter.au. The thing that I like best about XWall is that it is inexpensive (less than $500 per SMTP gateway) and that it has a TON of criteria that you can use. Of course you can have it query various blacklisting services, that's pretty much standard. One thing that it supports that I found was highly effective was greylisting. Then there are a number of other criteria including using bayesian filtering, setting up whitelisting, etc. In most cases where I have deployed it I've just set up greylisting along with a couple of common blacklists (Spamhaus and one that lists servers in dynamic IP ranges, which are usally broadband connected zombies), and the reduction in spam is so dramatic that most people are satisfied. After running it for a few years I finally got around to tuning the Bayesian filtering enough to turn it on. You just set the spam detection threshold pretty high initially, then gradually lower it as the system is tuned for the user base. If you have critical clients/business partners, you just whitelist their domain from the beginning.
If you don't want to just drop messages that are flagged as spam, you can have your application prepend the subject line with "SAPM:" and then set up a client-side rule to sort those messages into a spam folder. That way if the user thinks that the filter is overzealous they can check their own spam messages for legitimate content. This also helps when initially tuning the anti-spam system, but it does end up eating up tons of email storage if you support a large number of users.
Every once in awhile we'd have an issue where something important got tagged as spam, or it took longer than expected to get a message delivered due to greylisting, but those things are usually pretty easy to fix. If anyone complained about "time sensitive" emails not getting delivered in time, I'd usually tell them not to use email for something time critical. After all, email isn't a real-time application, mail delivery is handled on a best-effort basis, and while messages usually are delivered within a minute or two there are sorts of things that I have no control over that can cause delays in delivery.
It will be hard to say for sure that a merged MS-Yahoo would have been better, but there are two things that we can pretty much guarantee:
1. Microsoft's share price will go up because they walked away from this deal where they were already offerring too much.
2. Yahoo's share price will take a big hit on Monday, because a lot of people were expecting MS to eventually win this one and overpay for Yahoo shares.
3. Shareholder lawsuits against the Yahoo board will continue, because Yahoo's board turned down an offer that actually gave shareholders significantly more cash than their shares are worth, and Yahoo has little prospect of turning things around themselves and creating more value for shareholders.
I understand that a lot of people don't like Microsoft, but this is business, not a popularity contest. They were being offerred a 70% premium over the value of their stock and it still wasn't enough. And instead of dealing with the reality that Yahoo isn't worth what the Yahoo board wants it to be worth, they threatened to outsource key components of their search and advertising to Google to prevent Microsoft from taking over. That's the equivalent of saying "if you're going to insist on marrying me, I'm going to cut off my arms and legs so you (and nobody else) will ever want me." They basically were offerred a huge premium for their shares, and instead of taking it they said that they would rather destroy the company and it's value rather than be bought out for substantially more than the company is worth. That is absolutely the wrong attitude to take in the business world, and the fact that the Yahoo board (led by Mr. Yang) actually embraced such a strategy sends a strong signal to their shareholders that they're not interested in generating value, they're only interested in doing Yahoo stuff the Yahoo way.
There will be TONS of lawsuits over this, and I wouldn't be surprised to see portions of the Yahoo board replaced. Nor would I be surprised if, two years from now, Microsoft or someone else buys out Yahoo for 30%-50% less than Microsoft offered here.
First, let me say that I hate spam. I understand that in most cases it's annoying. I also understand that in most cases it's sent via illegal access to unwitting people's computers, and that there is no doubt a real cost associated with the amount of bandwidth that it consumes. I understand that in most cases the products that it advertises are scams.
But I have to wonder, how does that statistic that 92.3% of all email sent is spam relate to the rate of junk mail sent via snail mail? I don't know about you, but I'd say that 90% or more of the mail that comes to my home is junk mail, so I'm not sure that the spam statistic is all that surprising. This may just be the expected signal/noise ratio.
One key point is that the CS instruction is heavily theory-based. While it's important to get experience writing code in specific languages, in reality the bulk of that experience will be earned in the workplace as opposed to university. But in my experience, if you understand the theory behind programming models then you can relatively easily learn to program in just about any language.
I take that back, I totally misread the article. Use tax is when the state requires you to pay sales tax on something that you bought out of state that didn't have sales tax already collected on it. This would require the merchant to collect the "use tax", which is totally different.
Slashdot Mirror
* And anything else you want to add support for yourself-- I note that Hadoop for example has community support for powershell
By support, I dont mean in the sense that you could use bash to launch SSH to manage these things. I mean in the sense that VMWare allows you to run the following native powershell commands: Connect-VIServer myVMCluster Get-VM | Where-object {$_.powerState -eq "PoweredOn"} | foreach { stop-VM $_}
And all of your VMs will be shut off. Trying to do something like that in bash is doable, it just requires screwing around with scripted SSH access to the VMhosts which is painful, for anyone who has done it.
That's assuming that you haven't put your ESX hosts in lockdown mode or disabled SSH access, which is obviously a security best practice. If you have done these things then you can't script the actions without PowerShell.
And it's not just VMware, either. How do you manage directory services? How do you manage storage? How do you manage networking? More importantly, how do you do it remotely and at enterprise scale? Most of the major hardware vendors out there now have PowerShell modules for managing their products, because it is quickly becoming the de facto method of managing systems for companies that use Windows server. I get that Slashdot has a fairly strong pro-linux/anti-Microsoft bias, but unless you are one of the few that live in a 100% linux/Unix world then PowerShell is the way forward.
For anyone who has any sort of legitimate interest in learning what PowerShell is intended to be, take a few minutes to look over the Monad Manifesto. It was written by Jeffrey Snover, the "father of PowerShell". He's not some pro-Windows shill that just popped up at Microsoft, his pedigree goes all the way back to DEC and before.
The nice thing about their path is that they're not afraid to cut off backwards compatibility. That's pretty much the biggest flaw with Windows. A lot of the security issues in Vista today are there because drivers used those holes to work. People still use hardware that uses those broken drivers, and the companies who released the products stopped supporting them years ago.
If you had said that about Windows XP I would agree with you, but Windows Vista has a different driver model that is focused around providing security and stability. It clearly broke the "old" driver model to which you are referring.
When you're first starting out, it's very important to have that degree to get your foot in the door. Without having the degree it can be difficult. But the ironic thing is that technology changes fast enough that the degree very quickly becomes irrelevant. This is especially true when it comes to system administration. Even those "schools" (ITT, DeVry, etc) that offer general IT/Sysadmin "degrees" have a very difficult time keeping up with industry trends. After about 5 years of working in IT, nobody will care about your B.S. degree (or Associates). Now if you're working on a Masters, Ph.D., or MBA, that's a different story.
But if you can break into the market without a degree and get those first few years of experience you absolutely can work yourself up to a good IT job. Remember, after 5 years in the workforce your experience will be comparable to everyone else's and their degrees will be outdated. Just don't expect to come in as a sysadmin from day one. You'll probably have to start at the helpdesk/PC tech level, then work your way up to a junior admin, and so on. I don't have a degree but after several years of hard work and continued learning I'm just shy of a six-figure income in a city where the median individual income is about $32k.
I love how people tend to forget we're a nation born of revolt and war, tempered in the fires of combat, using pretty much PRIVATE WEAPONS against a MUCH LARGER ARMY. Pay closer attention to history. If it can happen ONCE and create a new country, it can happen again.
Which was a lot easier to do in the late 1700's when the extent of mainstream military technology was rifles, bayonets, swords, horses, and a few cannons. The "private weapons" were pretty much the same weapons that the military had, and they were also mostly essential tools for survival in colonial America and so most citizens had a couple of them in their possession (canons being the exception). I don't know about you, but NONE of the NRA nuts that I know have an arsenal of laser-guided smart bombs, jet planes, helicopter gunships, or heavily armored tank brigades. If you believe that the events of the Revolutionary War could ever happen again in the United States, you are sadly, sadly delusional.
You are missing a point here. there are ram chips out there that are designed to run with more voltage then 1.65. So you do not even need to overclock for this to happen.
You're missing the point here. If there are RAM chips out there that are designed to run with more voltage than 1.65v then those RAM chips are not designed to the JEDEC standard. Legally, they probably shouldn't even be able to sell them as DDR3 since DDR3 is a JEDEC standard and the parts on non-compliant. Of course, most of the memory manufacturers do this anyway, and since they are part of JEDEC nobody complains too loudly...except when things don't work, of course.
OCZ Platinum 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 is a 1.8v standard. that's NOT overclocking
But it is over-volted.
I just bought a 46" LCD TV the other day, my first HDTV. It will do 1080p resolution, though I've never seen a 1080p signal. All of my HD cable channels are either 720p or 1080i. They look amazing compared to standard definition TV. I don't think that I can tell the difference between 720p and 1080i when viewing from 8 feet away, let alone 1080p.
When I was buying the TV I wanted to get another DVD player so that the old DVD player could move upstairs to my bedroom with the old CRT television. The salespeople steer me to the Blue-Ray players (obviously). I look at the $399 price tag and laugh. He says "Well, we have this less expensive model over here" and points to a $379 player. I laugh even harder. I honestly haven't looked at the different Blu-Ray players to see what's what, but I find it odd that all of them are exactly $399. There's no price differentiation except for the "store brand" model. I ended up quickly picking up an upconverting DVD player for $70 instead.
Why? Well, it's $330 cheaper for starters. Secondly, upconverted content looks really good. It may not be the same quality as Blu-Ray, but the difference wasn't that discernible from the in-store displays, and watching upconverted DVD content on my TV looks as good as most of the HD cable content that I watch. Then of course there's the movie prices, they're twice what DVD's cost for only a minor improvement in quality. It's odd, but after 2 years of being out Blu-Ray still feels very "bleeding edge" at the moment. Especially after HD-DVD folded I expected Blu-Ray adoption to increase, and I hoped (perhaps against reason) that the increase the production quantity would bring prices down. I was wrong there.
One other thing that really bothers me is that the $399 price seems "fixed" or artificial. You can buy a PS3 for $399, and it includes a Blu-Ray player. Or you can buy a Blu-Ray player for $399. Doesn't it seem like the stand-alone player should be cheaper than the PS3? It's almost like Sony wants to keep the prices higher so that people opt for the PS3 instead, but I'm not really a gamer. I'm not really much of a fan of Sony either, to be honest. All of their DRM infected CDs and other nonsense that they go through to try to force monopolistic, proprietary standards on people really rubs me the wrong way.
Even with help from Google, Cringely believes many technical managers would fail this test and should get the boot as a result -- you can't manage what you don't understand."
While I agree that you can't manage what you don't understand, I would question whether an IT manager is supposed to be managing technology or managing people. IT staffers might say that they should be helping to manage technology, but the manager (and his upper management, up to the CIO/CTO level) might think that the IT manager is supposed to manage the people that make up the IT team. This is especially more common in larger organizations where there is a lot more established process, procedure, and administrative overhead. It's also pretty common in smaller organizations where one manager covers most or all technology areas. Having a manager with a technical background can be a benefit, but it's silly to expect that they will understand all of the technology that their team manages.
My wife and I used to have this argument all the time. She would often want me to take a day off of work just to hang out with her, or she would want me to not work during a specific weekend. I would sometimes tell her (honestly) that there was x, y, and z that had to be done and I needed to do it because nobody else knew how. She would always get upset and ask why my manager couldn't do it, and would complain that I must have an awful boss because she didn't know how to do the jobs of everyone who reported to her (my wife works in a pharmacy, so she's used to an environment where the boss knows how to do everyone's job). I never could get her to understand that IT doesn't work like that. In our IT team we had one guy who was a straight developer with some DB skills. We had another guy who was a PM with DBA skills. Then there was a Helpdesk/PC tech, a junior admin with PBX management skills, two application specialists (responsible for niche applications in the medical and financial space), and one person who did servers/routing and switching/security (me). As you can see, there's very little overlap. And our manager came out of the DB area, so she knew databases really well but had mostly passing familiarity with everything else we were responsible for. In my opinion she was a good manager, but how can someone honestly expect a manager to understand how to develop software, manage databases and projects, support PC technology, administer a PBX, manage servers, manage routers, manage switches, manage firewalls, implement best practices for security and IDM, as well as support the financial and medical applications? On top of that she would have to do her job too, which is managing people, navigating procedures and policy, and being IT's interface to the rest of the company's management. It's ridiculous to think that anyone would have those skills.
First, the headline:
.01%.
"More than one in every three new PCs is downgraded from Windows Vista to Windows XP
Then the truth:
"The 35% is only an estimate,"
Could we come up with a more meaningless non-statistic? I mean, I get it that there's the perception that Vista is awful and some people prefer XP, but do we really need to make up "statistics" just so we can publish news stories about it? Here's an interesting thought..."nearly two thirds of computer users prefer Vista for their new PCs." Suddenly the story doesn't sound negative at all.
I think that it's also misleading to say that 35% of the PCs are "downgraded" to XP from Vista, which strongly implies that people buy machines with Vista and then install XP on them. The "at the factory" line points out that it's not people downgrading from Vista to XP, it's people choosing to buy PCs with XP pre-installed instead of the same PC with Vista. What I'd really like to know is why they didn't post the number of people who buy PCs with Vista pre-installed and then remove it and replace it with XP after trying Vista. That number is actually less than
BTW, that ".01%" is "only an estimate". See how that works?
"The Columbus Post Dispatch reports
Hey dumbass, it's not the Columbus Post Dispatch. It's the Columbus Dispatch. Even if you're not versed in the names of the local newspapers of every city in our nation, it's right at the top of the web page that you linked to where it says "A Division of The Columbus Dispatch". Way to learn how to read!
I gotta agree. My grandfather kept driving long after it was prudent for him to do so due to his failing vision. After he totalled the second car by turning left in front of oncoming traffic the state finally took his license away. As much as I cared about him, he was a threat to himself and the community. What we really need is more ways to help these people understand that they shouldn't be driving and alternative ways to get around.
The team emphatically claims that this has nothing to do with EA.
Of course it doesn't. And anyone who says it does either doesn't work for EA or doesn't work for EA "any more". Because we all know that EA has never told one of its studios that it was time to either ship the product or kill it. EA has a terrible, terrible reputation in the games industry for being almost 100% deadline driven. You come out with a new product and release it on time, period. Then you come out with a refresh/upgrade of that product every year and on time, or else. It's their entire business model. It's also one of the biggest reasons that they are not known for quality products. Their goal is to ship it on time, and if it sucks they'll fix it in the next release. Unfortunately with an MMOG you don't have that option. There's no such thing as Warhammer Online 2008, followed by the sequels Warhammer Online 2009 and 2010. When they destroy their reputation with the initial release it will be much harder to recover. Not only that, but WO players will blow through what little content they have in the first month, then move on to the next big thing. If EA is lucky some of the WO players will spend the next 6-9 months waiting for content that should have been in the original release. Hopefully EA will have the good sense to NOT release that content as a for-sale add-on, but they have a pretty bad track record with MMOGs so I wouldn't get my hopes up.
Recently, we managed to get a bunch of money for a High Performance Cluster to run our stuff on. The code is mostly written in Java.
Wait...let me get this straight. You just bought a high performance cluster but your high performance apps are written in Java? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! That's funny. Let me guess, you couldn't find anyone who knew Visual Basic? You know, if you had written them in something a little faster like C or C++ you could probably run it on a single 4-way box instead of needing an entire cluster.
I agree. No way that laptop is worth $350. But if it were, a much better solution would be to sell it for $350, then take the $125 that he spent revamping it, and buy a new "low end laptop" for around $500. For that much money you can get a brand new laptop with a dual core CPU, 2GB of RAM, and a 120GB or 160GB hard disk. Not to mention CD/DVD read and write capability, faster wireless networking, graphics, a better screen, etc. Laptops are very cheap these days, and it wouldn't take much to run circles around that laptop that he's sporting.
I will never buy or recommend goods or services from companies that spam. I'm pretty sure that I'm not the only one.
...so long as they also outlaw bullying by telephone, postal mail, passing notes in school, and yelling at someone face to face. After all, it's not the medium that causes people to kill themselves, it's the message. Right?
I have never seen a switch fail what are you doing to them? mine are just consumer 5-16port devices
And that's why. If you're using "smart hubs" or "dumb switches" (aka, your $99 Linksys switch), then you're probably not going to have issues. All it does is store MAC tables and forwards data to the appropriate ports. You probably also don't have multiple other network switches/hubs/routers hanging off of those devices somewhere downstream, and if you do then it's very likely that you know what and where they are and can plan for them.
On the other hand, trying to manage an enterprise-class switch with advanced features can be a little more complicated, especially when you start allowing anybody to plug any other kind of network devices into the switch. You can easily end up with spanning tree loops, issues with frame sizing, cross-brand autonegotiation failures, and who knows what else. And that's before you even have to start worrying about bugs in various firmware revisions or some enterprising "hax0r d00dz" who passed Comp Sci 101 trying to do things that he shouldn't be doing, and spoofing addresses to try to cover his tracks.
...until he was fired.
Streissand effect in 3...2...1...
Upon being told that I would not email this data to her, the consultant asked what my security requirements were for sending the data. What would be on your wishlist for the best way to send sensitive data to someone outside your firewall?"
Your consultant wanted you to email the personal data to them to begin with? Well, first on the wish list would be a new consultant, preferably one who takes security seriously enough to not ask that confidential personal data be sent via email. It's not like they don't know what kind of data they have there, and the lack of consideration for security in acquiring the data from you does not bode well for how it will be handled once they have it. I would probably require that they either come on site and work with the data via your machines on your network, or I would demand a partnership agreement with them that spells out hefty penalties if they fail to follow specified security practices, especially if that failure leads to data compromise.
The idea is interesting to me because I could care less about leveling another character ever again and would rather focus on another way of advancing a character through a game. I think Ultima Online had it right, but no one seems to want to copy them ;)
The problem with UO's way of doing it is that it wasn't that profitable for Origin/EA. The way they make money is to keep subscribers. The way they keep subscribers is to keep them busy. So to keep hem busy they put in a treadmill and make them grind through levels, then more levels, then more levels. The first few are easy, so you feel like you're accomplishing something. Then as you advance they get more difficult. They give you just enough of a taste of success early on to get you hooked, then they drag it out enough to make it take longer to hit that next level of satisfaction, but not so long that you get frustrated and quit. Then when too many people reach the higher levels, they bump the level cap so that you stay on the treadmill. Or they put in raids that take forever to complete, drop small quantities of very rare loot, and will require large numbers of people to complete repeatedly before you get that piece of satisfaction. It's all about moving the bar just a little further out to keep you hooked.
UO wasn't as much like that. You didn't level up, you just gained skills. It wasn't very difficult to get most skills up to 100, and once you got there that's when the you could fully explore the game. But once you got there, there was no more levelling or grinding to be done, so the only thing holding it together was the social aspect. That made it harder to keep subscribers, and was probably a big part of their demise. Eventually they realized that and added scrolls that could boost your skill caps to 105, 110. 115, or 120. But it made them very rare drops from monsters that could only be killed by large groups of people in a raid-like fashion. It was probably too little too late though, to be honest.
Are you freaking serious? You're manually inspecting messages tagged as spam looking for legitimate messages? Do you have to wipe people's asses for them too?
Most companies who have effectively dealt with the spam solution have implemented a product that can do filtering based on multiple criteria, and they don't worry about sifting through what was caught by the filters. There are many, many good products out there, but one of my favorites is called XWall. You can get it from www.dataenter.au. The thing that I like best about XWall is that it is inexpensive (less than $500 per SMTP gateway) and that it has a TON of criteria that you can use. Of course you can have it query various blacklisting services, that's pretty much standard. One thing that it supports that I found was highly effective was greylisting. Then there are a number of other criteria including using bayesian filtering, setting up whitelisting, etc. In most cases where I have deployed it I've just set up greylisting along with a couple of common blacklists (Spamhaus and one that lists servers in dynamic IP ranges, which are usally broadband connected zombies), and the reduction in spam is so dramatic that most people are satisfied. After running it for a few years I finally got around to tuning the Bayesian filtering enough to turn it on. You just set the spam detection threshold pretty high initially, then gradually lower it as the system is tuned for the user base. If you have critical clients/business partners, you just whitelist their domain from the beginning.
If you don't want to just drop messages that are flagged as spam, you can have your application prepend the subject line with "SAPM:" and then set up a client-side rule to sort those messages into a spam folder. That way if the user thinks that the filter is overzealous they can check their own spam messages for legitimate content. This also helps when initially tuning the anti-spam system, but it does end up eating up tons of email storage if you support a large number of users.
Every once in awhile we'd have an issue where something important got tagged as spam, or it took longer than expected to get a message delivered due to greylisting, but those things are usually pretty easy to fix. If anyone complained about "time sensitive" emails not getting delivered in time, I'd usually tell them not to use email for something time critical. After all, email isn't a real-time application, mail delivery is handled on a best-effort basis, and while messages usually are delivered within a minute or two there are sorts of things that I have no control over that can cause delays in delivery.
It will be hard to say for sure that a merged MS-Yahoo would have been better, but there are two things that we can pretty much guarantee:
1. Microsoft's share price will go up because they walked away from this deal where they were already offerring too much.
2. Yahoo's share price will take a big hit on Monday, because a lot of people were expecting MS to eventually win this one and overpay for Yahoo shares.
3. Shareholder lawsuits against the Yahoo board will continue, because Yahoo's board turned down an offer that actually gave shareholders significantly more cash than their shares are worth, and Yahoo has little prospect of turning things around themselves and creating more value for shareholders.
I understand that a lot of people don't like Microsoft, but this is business, not a popularity contest. They were being offerred a 70% premium over the value of their stock and it still wasn't enough. And instead of dealing with the reality that Yahoo isn't worth what the Yahoo board wants it to be worth, they threatened to outsource key components of their search and advertising to Google to prevent Microsoft from taking over. That's the equivalent of saying "if you're going to insist on marrying me, I'm going to cut off my arms and legs so you (and nobody else) will ever want me." They basically were offerred a huge premium for their shares, and instead of taking it they said that they would rather destroy the company and it's value rather than be bought out for substantially more than the company is worth. That is absolutely the wrong attitude to take in the business world, and the fact that the Yahoo board (led by Mr. Yang) actually embraced such a strategy sends a strong signal to their shareholders that they're not interested in generating value, they're only interested in doing Yahoo stuff the Yahoo way.
There will be TONS of lawsuits over this, and I wouldn't be surprised to see portions of the Yahoo board replaced. Nor would I be surprised if, two years from now, Microsoft or someone else buys out Yahoo for 30%-50% less than Microsoft offered here.
First, let me say that I hate spam. I understand that in most cases it's annoying. I also understand that in most cases it's sent via illegal access to unwitting people's computers, and that there is no doubt a real cost associated with the amount of bandwidth that it consumes. I understand that in most cases the products that it advertises are scams.
But I have to wonder, how does that statistic that 92.3% of all email sent is spam relate to the rate of junk mail sent via snail mail? I don't know about you, but I'd say that 90% or more of the mail that comes to my home is junk mail, so I'm not sure that the spam statistic is all that surprising. This may just be the expected signal/noise ratio.
One key point is that the CS instruction is heavily theory-based. While it's important to get experience writing code in specific languages, in reality the bulk of that experience will be earned in the workplace as opposed to university. But in my experience, if you understand the theory behind programming models then you can relatively easily learn to program in just about any language.
I take that back, I totally misread the article. Use tax is when the state requires you to pay sales tax on something that you bought out of state that didn't have sales tax already collected on it. This would require the merchant to collect the "use tax", which is totally different.
It's called "Use Tax", and most of the 50 states have had it for years.