I was already busted down from having domain admin privileges to local admin on just a few boxes (SQL server, webserver, development server, and my own PC). After the new title policy change, I was going to lose everything but the developer login, and I would even lose local privileges on my own PC. That was pretty much the last straw for me, since I figured after 7 years of pre-SOX full access, where if I'd had the will (and total lack of morals) to do so, I could have made it out of there with thousands of credit card numbers. What do they reward my loyalty with? Shackles. "Here, wear these boxing gloves when you code, it'll be harder for you to do it, but our data will be safe from your evil wicked ways!"
This is probably a bit off-topic, but I make damn sure that NONE of my developers have admin rights on the boxes that they use, ESPECIALLY their own workstation. Why? Because when developers develop software with admin privileges they typically ignore the notion that the software has to function for users with regular user privileges. They usually end up putting in code that modifies parts of the filesystem or registry that a regular user wouldn't have access to, and then the code is broken unless you have admin privileges. Of course they rarely have time to go back at the end and test as a regular user, and if they do they usually report back that the application ABSOLUTELY requires admin privileges, or requires us to modify the default permissions on parts of the filesystem or registry that we shouldn't. Then if you want them to fix their sloppy code they tell you it will take weeks. Of course, if they never have anything more than normal user rights to begin with, then they'll have to write code that's LUA compliant to begin with and you can avoid all of that mess. Because when you get down to it, there are very few non-system level applications that include functionality that actually requires admin privileges to work correctly. Most developers are just too lazy (at least on the Windows environment) to code it that way.
There's "Sales Engineers", and "Level One Engineers", and god only know what else. Level one is button pushing, they're TECHNICIANS - people with technical experience, who do what they're told. Then are the real ENGINEERS, who design things (the buttons that the technicians push). Then there are ARCHITECTS, who form all the stuff into a cohesive whole.
I don't know whose "Sales Engineers" you are used to dealing with, but most of the hardware and software vendors I deal with have Sales Engineers who actually sit down with you, go over your requirements, your environment, and you goals to find the best solution (i.e., product or products and deployment methodology) for your situation. I definitely consider them engineers, but they are part of the sales department so that they can a) keep the salesperson honest about what can be delivered and b) make sure that the customer gets what they need. Then if they need post-sales support, they go through regular support channels, which should have documentation of the products sold and implemented that was fed to them previously by the Sales Engineer.
Having a Sales Engineer is an immense help whenever the salesman goes to meet with the customer's IT Director and the IT Director calls in their own engineers to start asking questions about how the product works.
At one time, we all had a reasonable grasp of the role of a 'System Administrator' or 'Helpdesk Technician' but now such roles may actually have significant DBA or developer responsibilities bundled into a lesser job title (such as the recent trend of 'Desktop Support Techs' with SQL DBA responsibilities), often robbing the holder of a fair position (and traditionally better paid) title on the résumé.
Help desk techs doing SQL DBA work? And supposedly this is a "recent trend?" My suspicion is that it isn't a trend, but that instead some Helpdesk Tech somewhere was asked to set up system DSNs in Windows and thinks that it's SQL DBA work. There's a heck of a lot more to being a DBA than just installing SQL, setting up users and creating a DB, but it's not uncommon for people who don't understand that to think that they could do it.
Now, on to the other topic, at my current employer we have several different titles in the IT department: Helpdesk Tech, Network Engineer, Project Manager, Application Specialist, Developer, and Director. Those all seem pretty standard to me, though in a larger company the duties would be a little more granular. For example, the HelpDesk Tech job would be split out into HelpDesk Operator and PC Tech and the Network Engineer would be split into Networking Admin/Engineer and Systems Admin/Engineer, and the Developer would be split into DBA and Developer.
At most places I have worked over the past 10 years it's been basically the same breakdown, with higher or lower levels of granularity. I suspect that if you had a very small company with a very limited IT budget and owners/managers with no IT knowledge, you might get someone looking to hire a HelpDesk Tech and expect them to be able to manage everything. After all, to most users you always call the HelpDesk regardless of whether your needs are as low level as a new mouse or as high level as a boinked application server.
Now, if you're working for someone who expects you to do the work of 2 or 3 widely varying jobs for the salary of a HelpDesk tech, well, any sensible person who had the skills to do the job would either demand more money or go elsewhere. If they didn't have he skills, they could either stay and learn them or go elsewhere.
As a manager, you have to understand that EVERYBODY is screaming at you about their particular area. The marketing people need a bigger budget. The maintenance people are wanting to upgrade this and that. The transportation people need new trucks. That's their job. It's a top manager's job to look at each of these recommendations, and prioritize them in a way that will do the best for the company.
While this much is true, it is also true that IT is the one "area" of a company that touches and supports every single other department of the company. Marketing may interface with sales, and with engineering, but IT interfaces with all three (plus administration, facilities, accounting, compliance, human resources, shipping/receiving, manufacturing, etc). In a modern business, so much of the efficiency and ability to function comes from something that, if it isn't part of IT, is dependent on something that is. And it's only going to go even further in that direction.
A security breach in marketing could mean that your competitor gets a sneak peak at your marketing plans for the next 6 months. A security breach in IT could mean that your entire company shuts down, or that your entire customer database is made public, or that the confidential info on your employees is made public, or that you're now in violation of a number of federal laws like Sarbannes-Oxley, or HIPAA, or what have you.
How many companies have you worked at/heard about that were taken out for a day or more by virus outbreaks? I remember working for companies (both of which had 10,000+ employees) that were offline for a day and a half due to Slammer and Code Red. How much money do you think they ended up spending to fix everything and get the company back up and running? How much money do you think they lost while they were down? How much money could they have saved if they had spent more money on security up front, not to mention headache?
And it's not just viruses, what about the most dreaded security breach of all, the inside job? You can't think of IT security in the same way that you think of facility security and utilities because they are dealing with completely different subjects. With physical security you are protecting something that you can touch, see, and access. If someone steals physical goods from you, you will know that it is gone. But with data how will you know if someone steals your customer lists, price lists, or employee database? It's not possible to physically deny the owner of a physical facility access to it, yet it's trivial to launch a DDoS on a web site, or hack into a server and change passwords to lock out the IT department.
That'd be really nice in a realistic world. Wouldn't it be great if candidates would start putting more than one or two issues on their websites?
The candidates web sites are the only places that you can find out about how people have voted on the issues. As I mentioned earlier, the AARP has a site that's pretty decent. There's others like www.washingtonwatch.com, and if you want to know who is funding the candidates you can even get that info from www.fecinfo.com. Again, it only took me about a minute and a half to find those sites, and there are plenty more if you're willing to expend anything more than the bare minimum amount of effort. But hey, maybe I'm just crazy for thinking that spending an hour or two once every couple years to get to know the candidates and issues so that you can help determine the future of your community and nation is the very least that a responsible citizen could do.
So let me get this straight...you have time to surf the web and post questions to Ask Slashdot, but you don't have time to spend the 30 seconds it would take to find a candidates web site to find out where they stand on the issues? The question isn't whether or not you should vote, the question is why you're so unwilling to find out what's going on in your community that you can't be bothered to vote.
For example, in many counties you can get a list of ballot issues and candidates from the local board of elections web site. When I searched for mine, the Franklin County (Ohio) board of elections was the first page returned. Then there's this glaringly large link on the front page that says "click here too see if you are registered or to see a sample ballot." I clicked it, put in my name, verified my address, and was able to see everything that I would be allowed to vote on in this election. Total time, about 2 minutes.
Now in my case, I was already familiar with most of the major candidates and the issues, but for those that I was unfamiliar with I was able to simply google them to get the info that I wanted. There are numerous web sites set up to show the voting history of people in congress. AARP typically has a good breakdown of where various candidates stand on the issues. In all seriousness, with less than an hours worth of work you could not only find out what you'll be voting on, but learn enough about the major candidates and issues to make a reasonably informed decision about them. Sure, there's probably 3 pages of judges running for election that you won't have the time to learn about, so just don't vote on those particular races.
Maybe in days gone by it was reasonable to claim ignorance and not want to take the effort to research each of the candidates or issues, but in the modern age of the Internets it has become almost trivial to research something. In that light, not taking the effort to learn and vote on the issues is inexcusable.
Don't confuse having a lack of leadership with having a different philosophy. I wish the Democrats had stronger leadership and a more focused message. The problem I see with Democrats is they have such disparate views that the party has a hard time forming a coherent message. That is one of the strengths of the Republicans. The problem the Republicans have is that there message is focused, but not on what many US citizens are concerned with.
The Democrats have plenty of diverse ideas. The Republicans don't. They call themselves "big tent Republicans", saying that the Republican party has room for all sorts of views. What they actually mean by it is that as long as you call yourself a Republican and vote Republican and toe the party line when it comes to votes and supporting the president, then you can believe whatever you want. As I said earlier, it's not about ideas for them, it's about power.
There's this thing about diversity, and it is that it makes the entire system stronger. Diverse DNA makes for a strong, more resilient population. Diverse ideas make for a stronger, more resilient society. Diverse political parties would be great, but since we're stuck with only two parties we're going to have to settle for one of them being more diverse than the other and hope that it works.
That being said, yes, the Democrats could use another strong leader to unite the party like Bill Clinton did, without trampling idealogical diversity. My best bet would be (with a few more years of experience) Barak Obama. His convention speech in 2004 summed it up perfectly. Not only did he show himself as a strong and charismatic leader, but he demonstrated that different philosphy that I was referring to.
If you vote Democrat you are NOT going to like it unless of course you want us to cut and run in Iraq (and let another Saddam come to power..or worse)
Nobody is talking about "cut and run" except the Republicans. They keep saying that is what the Democrats want. The funny thing is, the Democrats haven't been calling for a "cut and run" or immediate pullout, or anything remotely like it. They're saying that we need to replace Rumsfeld (and many of the current generals are saying the same thing), that Iraq needs to make a better effort at standing up so that we can begin bringing troops home, and that we need to change our strategy in Iraq because the current tactics aren't working. Oddly enough, many of the Republican representatives and senators who are running for re-election tomorrow are saying similar things (with the exception of firing Rumsfeld).
, ignore the NK threat,
The Democrats won't ignore the NK threat. In fact, the Clinton administration (and how it must pain you to hear it) was dealing with NK and making progress. Then Bush shows up and basically cuts them off and ignores them until they start testing nukes.
pay higher taxes (1st thing Dems will do is repeal the Bush tax cuts, especially the child tax credit),
Seeing as I'm not a millionaire or a large corporation, I didn't get any tax cuts. So I won't be too upset to see them repealed, especially if it means that the people making the most money actually have to pay the most taxes. Maybe that will lessen the burden on my family.
see Wall Street go DOWN,
Wall Street was doing just fine until Bush came to office.
increase the chance for another 9/11,
Based on what? How many times did we have a 9/11 style attack while Democrats were in control? Hell, if Bush had actually listened to what the Clinton administration was telling them when they left office (hint: it was "Osama bin Laden is enemy number 1, you need to do everything that you can to get him") then we may have been able to avoid 9/11 altogether. But the Bush administration was too busy trying to figure out how to get at all of that oil in Iraq and build a ballistic missile defense system to be bothered with actual threat.
see all progress on illegal immigration stop (they want illegals..another class to keep down with handouts from the Democrats..the second chance at the Great Society ideal that has not worked for 40 yrs).
Actually, immigration is the one issue that is all over the map, politically speaking. Some Democrats want to keep them out, others want amnesty for them. Bush wants amnesty for them and a guest worker program for them as well, presumably because his cronies in business circles can keep a pool of cheap labor. Immigration is one issue that is very, very clearly not split on party lines. But that doesn't stop the extreme right-wingers from painting it that way so that it makes the Democrats look bad to their xenophobic friends.
No kidding! Now they are accusing democrats of homophobia (for attacking people like Foley), anti-Semitism, racism, and wanting absolute power with no checks and balances.
Ah, that's just typical Limbaugh. My personal favorite was a couple of weeks back when he claimed that the NYT failing to mention that the man running against Republican Senator Mike Dewine in Ohio was a black man was proof of the NYT's liberal bias. The funny part wasn't his logic (OK, it was funny too), but that Mike Dewine's opponent is Sherrod Brown, a 7-term congressman who is...wait for it...WHITE! You would think that's the sort of detail that you just might want to investigate for 15-20 seconds before you go on the air with it, but not Limbaugh. Why let facts (even the most trivially verifiable ones) stand the in the way of a good lie?
Perhaps you haven't been paying attention, but Democrats have a decades-long history of multiple votes per person and fraudulent voter registration. Two generations ago, Democrat Dick Tuck was the king of dirty election campaign tricks.
Well, it's not so much that I haven't been paying attention as much as it is I've only been voting for 20 years. And I have no doubt that there have been Democrats in the past who have pulled dirty tricks, but using those few incidents to justify the widespread deception, shenanigans, and violations of laws that we see today seems specious at best. It reminds me a lot of Mark Foley supporters claiming that there was a Democrat back in 1982 who had consensual sex with a page and that it somehow mitigated Foley's actions or somehow "evened the score." There's nothing that can be done about what "Dick Tuck" may have done way back in the day. All it's really doing is trying to deflect criticism from what is currently going on and what is currently important with what is ancient immutable history.
My real concern is that the GOP's efforts are not the actions of individuals acting alone, but rather appear to be the results of coordinated efforts at the party level, some of which (and I'm specifically referring to activities that took place in northwest Ohio in 2004 and in California this year) may be in violation of the currently standing consent decree against the Republican Party stemming from their illegal actions in 1981 and 1986.
So what you're saying is, the Republican party is evil, and the Democrats are too incompetetent to pick up on these same strategies?
Well, that's not quite how I'd put it. Again, I'd say that the people calling the shots in the GOP are, if not actually evil, extremely nasty, unethical, and willing to stoop to almost any level to get/keep power. I'm not sure that I would call the Democrats incompetent, but I think that there are a lot of progressive types in the Democratic party (go figure) who are willing to put principles over power. Maybe that makes them foolish, but I think that there is a certain reason to it. I think it's similar to saying that if the US tortures it's POWs then we aren't any different than the insurgents who kidnap, torture and kill people to make Jihadi videos. If we are willing to take our own citizens off the streets and lock them away forever without access to the courts, or even without their families knowing what happened to them, then we are no better than the Iraqi regime that we helped to topple. By the same token, I think that the Democrats largely believe that if they stoop to the level of the Ken Mehlmens and Karl Roves of the world, then they would be no better and no more worthy of governing than the Republicans are.
It undoubtedly sucks to get repeatedly beaten by dirty tricks, but the tricksters don't always win. And how much better must it feel if you can win cleanly?
I really don't want to be part of a flame war (I like my karma where it is right now), but it really seems to me that republicans pull this crap off a lot more than democrats. Thinks like the "democrats vote on wednesdays" campaigns, or "[legal] immigrants will be arrested if they come to the polls", or men dressed as leather lingerie-clad homosexuals with signs saying "Vote Democrat so I can adopt" seem to be everywhere. Does anyone have any examples of this happening against republicans? I'll gladly retract my statement if I can see a couple Democrat-sanctioned examples somewhere. I'm aware that I'm a democrat and therefore have selective exposure, but I'm trying to keep an open mind.
You are correct, this typically is something done by the Republicans and not the Democrats. Sure, if you dig deep enough, you can find the story about a couple of Democratic supporters slashing the tires on the Republican parties "get out the vote" mobiles the night before the election, but such incidents are extremely few and far between, and I have yet to see one that was orchestrated on the party rather than individual level.
On the other hand, the Republican party thinks systematically, and when they find something that works they try to milk it in all of their campaigns. Hence the multiple sightings of lether-clad men in lingerie, the robo-calls, the fliers, the push polls, the recent NAMBLA-related smears showing up in close races all across the country (always raised, of course, by the Republicans). In the 2004 election is was church ministers talking about how Kerry (a Catholic) wanted to ban the bible, or mysterious robo-calls claiming to be from the Kerry campaign reminding people that "A vote for John Kerry is a vote for gay marriage," (even though Kerry had never taken a pro-gay marriage stance in his career).
I think, what it comes down to (I'm about to open myself for being flamed senseless), is that the party leadership in the Republican and Democratic parties have very different philosophies of what it means to run an election. Now, I'm speaking in generalities here, as there are some Republicans who I am rather fond of, and some Democrats that I intensely dislike. But in general, it seems that the Democrats have a philosophy more true to what has been enshrined in the constitution, and an overall sense of fairness. They seem to believe that all citizens have the right to vote, and have their vote counted, and have their voice heard no matter what their opinion is. They seem to want (generally) to allow the truth to speak for itself, and to get elected on the issues.
No doubt that there are many Republicans who feel the same way, but the party leadership (the Ken Mehlman and the Karl Rove types) either don't see or don't care about the importance of voting. They don't see it as a sacred right or responsibility. They see it as a means to an end, and that end is the Republicans getting and holding onto power. They (and again I'm referring to the party leadership and those that enable them, not necessarily the rank and file) believe that they are at war with the Democrats, and that any action that they can take that will result in their accruing more power is justified. They don't care how immoral or unethical it is, or even how illegal it is. They simply do whatever they can to win and then (if they get caught) pay the fines/do the time, though the punishment hardly matters if they had already achieved their goal. What's $5 million dollars in fines to the richest political party in the country, if it means that they can keep control of Congress or the White House? They can make that money back in a heartbeat by awarding no-bid contracts to the companies that are their staunchest supporters. The Republican leadership has come to terms with the notion of "acceptable losses" and "collateral damage" during the campaign, and unfortunately those losses include ethics and morals.
Now, I live in Ohio, and I'm sure that you've heard a lot about what sort of t
I R'd the FA, and I don't have the first clue what this perceived threat is. How does signing this deal threaten commercial use of OSS? Don't the existing OSS licensing terms still hold? Why should it matter that MS can now show there's an MS-licensed path?
Well, I think that at one point Microsoft had started inserting language into it's licensing agreements that stated that you couldn't use their products with open source products, or develop them on MS platforms or something like that. Most people would have laughed that out of court I think, because it was incredibly unreasonable. Now that they have this licensing deal with Novell, they can start re-asserting those sorts of policies in their licenses, or more reasonably they can assert that you can only use open source products in conjunction with MS products if those open source products come from Novell. Of course, that's just a guess. It probably still wouldn't hold up in court, but there might be enough FUD behind it to keep big business in line. Then there's the flip side of support...if you're trying to get your Windows-based software to interoperate with a non-Novell Linux flavor, you'll be SOL.
On what basis? They aren't the copyright owner, nor are they the appointed representatives of the copyright owner. Until and unless the French documentary makers complain, what case do they have?
Silly rabbit, you don't have to be the copyright owner or their appointed representative to issue a takedown request under the DMCA. The safe harbor provision basically says that you can't be held liable for your users posting copyrighted content as long as you take it down after receiving a takedown request. Basically, it was intended to protect service providers when a copyright suit is being brought. The assumption was that in practive the copyright holder would issue a takedown request and then initiate an infringement suit. But reality, most of the time the copyright holder will settle for getting the content taken offline in lieu of a huge lawsuit. So in a reasonable person's world, the ISP or host would actually bother to verify that the entity issuing the takedown request held the copyright or were a representative thereof, but most of them just want to avoid getting sued under the DMCA and will take it down regardless because the consequences of delaying are potentially quite high. This is a remarkably effective way to silence criticism and free speech on the Internets.
The only real defense against it is to find out who is issuing the takedown notices for content that they don't own the copyright on, and file a suit against them for fraud, harrassment or something else along those lines. The EFF has several such cases in process now.
Ah yes, the old "the crowd's doing it, it must be wrong" mentality. Nothing like unfounded elitism to point you in the right direction...
I'm not saying that it must be wrong because everyone is doing it, but an awful lot of people watch WWF and Jerry Springer too. If popularity were the only criteria for determining whether to use a product or service, or even just whether the service was decent, then we'd be in a sad state. Anything that aspires to such a high level of popularity must by default appeal to the lowest common denominator. Just look at AOL if you want an example.
Diebold also makes ATMs that work day and night flawlessly (well, 99% flawlessly) with paper trails so that banks know EXACTLY where the money went and if anything has gone wrong. You are correct in saying that these voting machines exhibit 'awful engineering, Crappy programming, bad design, lazy execution.", but when you consider that the company has a track record of the opposite in a (slightly) different field, the needle seems to point more towards maliciousness than carelessness...
As they say, "never attribute to malicious intent that which is more easily explained by incompetence."
I read an interesting article this morning on just that subject. When you consider that Diebold didn't design the machines that they're selling, and that the company that did design them originally did so for use in non-critical voting functions, like in supermarkets and malls, it begins to look at lot more like greed and incompetence. Diebold wanted the get into e-voting because with their reputation they figured they could make a killing. They couldn't bring an entirely new system to market in time to actually cash in on the e-voting boom, so they bought a smaller company that made something that they could sell as an electronic voting machine. They reaped all the profits, and because they were so busy trying to rush to market with anything that even halfway worked, they are now reaping all of the blame too.
The only question is at what point does blind greed and willful incompetence become maliciousness?
I've been ripped off by PayPal twice, with absolutely no recourse whatsoever to get things rectified.
Feel me once...shame on...shame on me. But fool me can't be fooled again.
I think PayPal's business model is at least partly based on having free will to screw over individual customers in this manner.
And you gotta admit, it's a great business model. You get to store peoples' money, shuffle it around and do wire transfers and such, without all those pesky rules and regulations that limit banks. And best of all, at the least hint of anything fishy going on, you can confiscate all of the money in the account and even drain someone's checking account too! It's like having a license to print (or steal, more accurately) money!
With all the payment methods available, and every PayPal-sucks/blows/eatsballs site pushing their own superior alternative, you'd think that no one would use PayPal. And yet . ..
Ah yes, the old "everybody else is doing it so why shouldn't I" mentality. Nothing like the wisdom of the masses to point you in the right direction...
I've been getting about two of these suckers a day on my answering machine. I never actually listen, but just delete. Now that I know it's a potential profit center, they might be worth listening all the way through to see if they qualify for further action. Thanks for the info on how to finally discourage these bastards.
You can do the same thing with junk faxes. I believe that it is the same legislation that forbids those as well. I'm also pretty sure that willful violation can get you triple damages ($1500), so if they've been told to stop sending you junk faxes and still continue to do so, you're in the "big money." Of course, the downside is that you will probably have a hard time collecting on a small claims judgement. If you're suing a junk fax company, they're usually fly by nights and change names/ownership frequently. If you're suing a non-profit for their calls (and right now it's usually election campaigns) then they typically dissolve after the election is over and leave lots of unpaid bills. For example, I had a friend who used to work for Ameritech (before they were SBC or AT&T) who told me that a certain senator's campaign (he's no longer in office) never paid their final phone bill, and it usually got written off as bad debt.
Realistically, if you wanted to spend a lot of time trying to work the system like this, you could probably set up a fax machine and phone line and make a fair living at it. Even if you only averaged 2 wins a week that's still better than a lot of jobs (and certainly fast food jobs). Assuming that you could actually collect. The downside is that the judge might eventually get sick of you or you would run out of people to sue.
That said, who gives a flying shit about some billionaire honky in space? Personally I'd think of cooler things to do with my money. I'd arbitrarily make cool people "funded" so they could pursue research and fun projects. Just all spontaneous like. That's just for starters...
Yeah. Instead of blowing his money on space travel, he ought to be funding "cool" things. Like starting companies that research and teach cool new programming techniques. Or maybe endowing the Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at some prestigious school like Oxford. Oh...wait a minute...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't he the guy who developed the Hungarian notation (not that developing code-standards should lead to fame, fortune and grandeur, but just sayin')
Yes he is. That's why they call it "hungarian notation". He also hasn't worked for Microsoft since 2002. Right now he's running a company called Intentional Software.
AFAIK, this has always been AMDs problem: my earliest recollection is when they bought NexGen's K6 and sold it to Compaq in the sub-$1000 segment in 1995. Since then, anytime the get a good product, they blow it on production, leaving Intel to fill the void they created.
Intel isn't in much better shape right now. Sure, the Core 2 Duo rocks. Everybody wants one. Unfortunately, the Core 2 Duo CPUs are still less than 25% of their desktop production. The rest of it is still the old Pentium D and Pentium 4 CPUs, which no one wants. Which is bad news, because Intel has large stocks of the older gen chips still unsold.
So if you can't get as many Core 2 Duos as you want, your choice is either the Pentium 4/D or the Athlon 64/X2 (which will outperform the Pentium 4/D by a large margin). Apparently most companies are choosing AMD. That's one of the things that the Intel fanbois kept forgetting. It doesn't matter how much faster the Core 2 Duo CPUs are if Intel isn't manufacturing enough of them to meet demand. AMD's capacity problems are at least partly related to Intel's (and the fact that Dell is eating a significant portion of AMD's production).
Oh, but they have. In particular, they anticipated this problem years ago and started to build Fab 36, which is about to come on line right when their capacity issues are becoming a serious limiter to their growth. Fab 36 is going to mean a lot more capacity for AMD, and let them grow their marketshare by a lot. Now they may have production problems with the new fab, but once they get those worked out they won't be having any capacity problems for a while -- and if they do, they will giddily ply investors to help them build a new fab.
The other key to remember is that AMD has also contracted with third-party fabs to make their CPUs. I believe that Chartered Semi is the one. At any rate, once those wafers start producing chips (it takes many weeks to go from raw materials to wafers to CPUs) then supply will increase further.
Is it my imagination, or is this new Extended Validation SSL thing, in the end, just a bunch of paperwork? I may simply be missing the point. If someone can point to a better description of this thing that makes sense, please do so.
No, you've got it about right. The only difference is the amount of verification being done on the back end.
Realistically, the SSL Certificate has very little to do with the encryption. All it is saying is that "some organization presented us with this public encryption key, said that it was for this server/site/organization, and at the time that we tried to verify it this was true." So if you wanted to set up a phishing site, there's nothing really to prevent you from buying a cheap cert from one of the CAs that is trusted by default in IE, setting up a server with it, and going to town. To the average web user, the site will look "safe" to them because it shows a key/padlock to indicate that communications is encrypted, regardless of the fact that the encrypted communications could be going to a criminal's web server.
I have only bought certs from Thawte in the past (they're as good as Verisign I think, and half the price, though there are undoubtedly cheaper CAs), and Thawte has offered several levels of SSL certificates in the past. I was reading on their FAQ page the other day when trying to decide which cert I wanted for a mail server, and they basically explained the difference between some of their levels of certificates as being the amount of verification done on the back end. Some had a turnaround time of a few hours. Some took a couple of days. Presumably this is no different. I remember when my organization bought our first cert, it did take a couple days for them to verify everything. After that, subsequent certs from the same domain name and admin mailbox/technical contact/admin contact went through much faster. Apparently because they know us now.
For my money, it doesn't really make a difference. If you're going to "Bob's Sneaker Store" online, it probably doesn't matter to you if Verisign did a 3 day audit to verify their identity because you don't know who "Bob" is anyway. If you're going to a Microsoft/Cisco/other major company web site, the degree of validation being done on the back end might make you feel safer, since you may already predisposed to trust that company more than some anonymous web merchant.
When you get into NIC bonding, it's not unusual to want 4-8 gigabit NICs in the unit. Especially if you're connecting to an iSCSI/AoE switch fabric and you want to connect to multiple switches for fault-tolerance (along with bonding for bandwidth). Even with dual-port NICs, you start running out of space quickly (it's better with quads, but they're hard to source).
I'm sorry, I thought that it was obvious that we were talking about 4x4, which was AMD's new enthusiast platform for desktops. It sounds to me like you're talking about servers, which are already available in dual-socket configurations with PCI-X slots (and some with PCI-E) that can support those functions.[/sarcasm]
My point wasn't that nobody would ever need all of those slots and connectors. Obviously you could find someone somewhere with some application that required it (or thought that they needed it for bragging rights). But the odds of anyone needing anything approaching that level of capability on a desktop system are extremely slim. My point was that what they were offerring was far in excess of what a standard desktop computing platform would be, and that if you needed the raw computing power of 2 CPU/4 core Athlon processing then you could probably be better served buying an Opteron 200 series workstation instead. If you'll recall, the whole point of 4x4 is 4 CPU cores and 4 video cards for the ultimate in gamer performance, not 4 CPU cores and 4 NICs.
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I was already busted down from having domain admin privileges to local admin on just a few boxes (SQL server, webserver, development server, and my own PC). After the new title policy change, I was going to lose everything but the developer login, and I would even lose local privileges on my own PC. That was pretty much the last straw for me, since I figured after 7 years of pre-SOX full access, where if I'd had the will (and total lack of morals) to do so, I could have made it out of there with thousands of credit card numbers. What do they reward my loyalty with? Shackles. "Here, wear these boxing gloves when you code, it'll be harder for you to do it, but our data will be safe from your evil wicked ways!"
This is probably a bit off-topic, but I make damn sure that NONE of my developers have admin rights on the boxes that they use, ESPECIALLY their own workstation. Why? Because when developers develop software with admin privileges they typically ignore the notion that the software has to function for users with regular user privileges. They usually end up putting in code that modifies parts of the filesystem or registry that a regular user wouldn't have access to, and then the code is broken unless you have admin privileges. Of course they rarely have time to go back at the end and test as a regular user, and if they do they usually report back that the application ABSOLUTELY requires admin privileges, or requires us to modify the default permissions on parts of the filesystem or registry that we shouldn't. Then if you want them to fix their sloppy code they tell you it will take weeks. Of course, if they never have anything more than normal user rights to begin with, then they'll have to write code that's LUA compliant to begin with and you can avoid all of that mess. Because when you get down to it, there are very few non-system level applications that include functionality that actually requires admin privileges to work correctly. Most developers are just too lazy (at least on the Windows environment) to code it that way.
There's "Sales Engineers", and "Level One Engineers", and god only know what else. Level one is button pushing, they're TECHNICIANS - people with technical experience, who do what they're told. Then are the real ENGINEERS, who design things (the buttons that the technicians push). Then there are ARCHITECTS, who form all the stuff into a cohesive whole.
I don't know whose "Sales Engineers" you are used to dealing with, but most of the hardware and software vendors I deal with have Sales Engineers who actually sit down with you, go over your requirements, your environment, and you goals to find the best solution (i.e., product or products and deployment methodology) for your situation. I definitely consider them engineers, but they are part of the sales department so that they can a) keep the salesperson honest about what can be delivered and b) make sure that the customer gets what they need. Then if they need post-sales support, they go through regular support channels, which should have documentation of the products sold and implemented that was fed to them previously by the Sales Engineer.
Having a Sales Engineer is an immense help whenever the salesman goes to meet with the customer's IT Director and the IT Director calls in their own engineers to start asking questions about how the product works.
At one time, we all had a reasonable grasp of the role of a 'System Administrator' or 'Helpdesk Technician' but now such roles may actually have significant DBA or developer responsibilities bundled into a lesser job title (such as the recent trend of 'Desktop Support Techs' with SQL DBA responsibilities), often robbing the holder of a fair position (and traditionally better paid) title on the résumé.
Help desk techs doing SQL DBA work? And supposedly this is a "recent trend?" My suspicion is that it isn't a trend, but that instead some Helpdesk Tech somewhere was asked to set up system DSNs in Windows and thinks that it's SQL DBA work. There's a heck of a lot more to being a DBA than just installing SQL, setting up users and creating a DB, but it's not uncommon for people who don't understand that to think that they could do it.
Now, on to the other topic, at my current employer we have several different titles in the IT department: Helpdesk Tech, Network Engineer, Project Manager, Application Specialist, Developer, and Director. Those all seem pretty standard to me, though in a larger company the duties would be a little more granular. For example, the HelpDesk Tech job would be split out into HelpDesk Operator and PC Tech and the Network Engineer would be split into Networking Admin/Engineer and Systems Admin/Engineer, and the Developer would be split into DBA and Developer.
At most places I have worked over the past 10 years it's been basically the same breakdown, with higher or lower levels of granularity. I suspect that if you had a very small company with a very limited IT budget and owners/managers with no IT knowledge, you might get someone looking to hire a HelpDesk Tech and expect them to be able to manage everything. After all, to most users you always call the HelpDesk regardless of whether your needs are as low level as a new mouse or as high level as a boinked application server.
Now, if you're working for someone who expects you to do the work of 2 or 3 widely varying jobs for the salary of a HelpDesk tech, well, any sensible person who had the skills to do the job would either demand more money or go elsewhere. If they didn't have he skills, they could either stay and learn them or go elsewhere.
As a manager, you have to understand that EVERYBODY is screaming at you about their particular area. The marketing people need a bigger budget. The maintenance people are wanting to upgrade this and that. The transportation people need new trucks. That's their job. It's a top manager's job to look at each of these recommendations, and prioritize them in a way that will do the best for the company.
While this much is true, it is also true that IT is the one "area" of a company that touches and supports every single other department of the company. Marketing may interface with sales, and with engineering, but IT interfaces with all three (plus administration, facilities, accounting, compliance, human resources, shipping/receiving, manufacturing, etc). In a modern business, so much of the efficiency and ability to function comes from something that, if it isn't part of IT, is dependent on something that is. And it's only going to go even further in that direction.
A security breach in marketing could mean that your competitor gets a sneak peak at your marketing plans for the next 6 months. A security breach in IT could mean that your entire company shuts down, or that your entire customer database is made public, or that the confidential info on your employees is made public, or that you're now in violation of a number of federal laws like Sarbannes-Oxley, or HIPAA, or what have you.
How many companies have you worked at/heard about that were taken out for a day or more by virus outbreaks? I remember working for companies (both of which had 10,000+ employees) that were offline for a day and a half due to Slammer and Code Red. How much money do you think they ended up spending to fix everything and get the company back up and running? How much money do you think they lost while they were down? How much money could they have saved if they had spent more money on security up front, not to mention headache?
And it's not just viruses, what about the most dreaded security breach of all, the inside job? You can't think of IT security in the same way that you think of facility security and utilities because they are dealing with completely different subjects. With physical security you are protecting something that you can touch, see, and access. If someone steals physical goods from you, you will know that it is gone. But with data how will you know if someone steals your customer lists, price lists, or employee database? It's not possible to physically deny the owner of a physical facility access to it, yet it's trivial to launch a DDoS on a web site, or hack into a server and change passwords to lock out the IT department.
That'd be really nice in a realistic world. Wouldn't it be great if candidates would start putting more than one or two issues on their websites?
The candidates web sites are the only places that you can find out about how people have voted on the issues. As I mentioned earlier, the AARP has a site that's pretty decent. There's others like www.washingtonwatch.com, and if you want to know who is funding the candidates you can even get that info from www.fecinfo.com. Again, it only took me about a minute and a half to find those sites, and there are plenty more if you're willing to expend anything more than the bare minimum amount of effort. But hey, maybe I'm just crazy for thinking that spending an hour or two once every couple years to get to know the candidates and issues so that you can help determine the future of your community and nation is the very least that a responsible citizen could do.
So let me get this straight...you have time to surf the web and post questions to Ask Slashdot, but you don't have time to spend the 30 seconds it would take to find a candidates web site to find out where they stand on the issues? The question isn't whether or not you should vote, the question is why you're so unwilling to find out what's going on in your community that you can't be bothered to vote.
For example, in many counties you can get a list of ballot issues and candidates from the local board of elections web site. When I searched for mine, the Franklin County (Ohio) board of elections was the first page returned. Then there's this glaringly large link on the front page that says "click here too see if you are registered or to see a sample ballot." I clicked it, put in my name, verified my address, and was able to see everything that I would be allowed to vote on in this election. Total time, about 2 minutes.
Now in my case, I was already familiar with most of the major candidates and the issues, but for those that I was unfamiliar with I was able to simply google them to get the info that I wanted. There are numerous web sites set up to show the voting history of people in congress. AARP typically has a good breakdown of where various candidates stand on the issues. In all seriousness, with less than an hours worth of work you could not only find out what you'll be voting on, but learn enough about the major candidates and issues to make a reasonably informed decision about them. Sure, there's probably 3 pages of judges running for election that you won't have the time to learn about, so just don't vote on those particular races.
Maybe in days gone by it was reasonable to claim ignorance and not want to take the effort to research each of the candidates or issues, but in the modern age of the Internets it has become almost trivial to research something. In that light, not taking the effort to learn and vote on the issues is inexcusable.
Don't confuse having a lack of leadership with having a different philosophy. I wish the Democrats had stronger leadership and a more focused message. The problem I see with Democrats is they have such disparate views that the party has a hard time forming a coherent message. That is one of the strengths of the Republicans. The problem the Republicans have is that there message is focused, but not on what many US citizens are concerned with.
The Democrats have plenty of diverse ideas. The Republicans don't. They call themselves "big tent Republicans", saying that the Republican party has room for all sorts of views. What they actually mean by it is that as long as you call yourself a Republican and vote Republican and toe the party line when it comes to votes and supporting the president, then you can believe whatever you want. As I said earlier, it's not about ideas for them, it's about power.
There's this thing about diversity, and it is that it makes the entire system stronger. Diverse DNA makes for a strong, more resilient population. Diverse ideas make for a stronger, more resilient society. Diverse political parties would be great, but since we're stuck with only two parties we're going to have to settle for one of them being more diverse than the other and hope that it works.
That being said, yes, the Democrats could use another strong leader to unite the party like Bill Clinton did, without trampling idealogical diversity. My best bet would be (with a few more years of experience) Barak Obama. His convention speech in 2004 summed it up perfectly. Not only did he show himself as a strong and charismatic leader, but he demonstrated that different philosphy that I was referring to.
More from the Republican lie machine:
If you vote Democrat you are NOT going to like it unless of course you want us to cut and run in Iraq (and let another Saddam come to power..or worse)
Nobody is talking about "cut and run" except the Republicans. They keep saying that is what the Democrats want. The funny thing is, the Democrats haven't been calling for a "cut and run" or immediate pullout, or anything remotely like it. They're saying that we need to replace Rumsfeld (and many of the current generals are saying the same thing), that Iraq needs to make a better effort at standing up so that we can begin bringing troops home, and that we need to change our strategy in Iraq because the current tactics aren't working. Oddly enough, many of the Republican representatives and senators who are running for re-election tomorrow are saying similar things (with the exception of firing Rumsfeld).
, ignore the NK threat,
The Democrats won't ignore the NK threat. In fact, the Clinton administration (and how it must pain you to hear it) was dealing with NK and making progress. Then Bush shows up and basically cuts them off and ignores them until they start testing nukes.
pay higher taxes (1st thing Dems will do is repeal the Bush tax cuts, especially the child tax credit),
Seeing as I'm not a millionaire or a large corporation, I didn't get any tax cuts. So I won't be too upset to see them repealed, especially if it means that the people making the most money actually have to pay the most taxes. Maybe that will lessen the burden on my family.
see Wall Street go DOWN,
Wall Street was doing just fine until Bush came to office.
increase the chance for another 9/11,
Based on what? How many times did we have a 9/11 style attack while Democrats were in control? Hell, if Bush had actually listened to what the Clinton administration was telling them when they left office (hint: it was "Osama bin Laden is enemy number 1, you need to do everything that you can to get him") then we may have been able to avoid 9/11 altogether. But the Bush administration was too busy trying to figure out how to get at all of that oil in Iraq and build a ballistic missile defense system to be bothered with actual threat.
see all progress on illegal immigration stop (they want illegals..another class to keep down with handouts from the Democrats..the second chance at the Great Society ideal that has not worked for 40 yrs).
Actually, immigration is the one issue that is all over the map, politically speaking. Some Democrats want to keep them out, others want amnesty for them. Bush wants amnesty for them and a guest worker program for them as well, presumably because his cronies in business circles can keep a pool of cheap labor. Immigration is one issue that is very, very clearly not split on party lines. But that doesn't stop the extreme right-wingers from painting it that way so that it makes the Democrats look bad to their xenophobic friends.
No kidding! Now they are accusing democrats of homophobia (for attacking people like Foley), anti-Semitism, racism, and wanting absolute power with no checks and balances.
Ah, that's just typical Limbaugh. My personal favorite was a couple of weeks back when he claimed that the NYT failing to mention that the man running against Republican Senator Mike Dewine in Ohio was a black man was proof of the NYT's liberal bias. The funny part wasn't his logic (OK, it was funny too), but that Mike Dewine's opponent is Sherrod Brown, a 7-term congressman who is...wait for it...WHITE! You would think that's the sort of detail that you just might want to investigate for 15-20 seconds before you go on the air with it, but not Limbaugh. Why let facts (even the most trivially verifiable ones) stand the in the way of a good lie?
Perhaps you haven't been paying attention, but Democrats have a decades-long history of multiple votes per person and fraudulent voter registration. Two generations ago, Democrat Dick Tuck was the king of dirty election campaign tricks.
Well, it's not so much that I haven't been paying attention as much as it is I've only been voting for 20 years. And I have no doubt that there have been Democrats in the past who have pulled dirty tricks, but using those few incidents to justify the widespread deception, shenanigans, and violations of laws that we see today seems specious at best. It reminds me a lot of Mark Foley supporters claiming that there was a Democrat back in 1982 who had consensual sex with a page and that it somehow mitigated Foley's actions or somehow "evened the score." There's nothing that can be done about what "Dick Tuck" may have done way back in the day. All it's really doing is trying to deflect criticism from what is currently going on and what is currently important with what is ancient immutable history.
My real concern is that the GOP's efforts are not the actions of individuals acting alone, but rather appear to be the results of coordinated efforts at the party level, some of which (and I'm specifically referring to activities that took place in northwest Ohio in 2004 and in California this year) may be in violation of the currently standing consent decree against the Republican Party stemming from their illegal actions in 1981 and 1986.
So what you're saying is, the Republican party is evil, and the Democrats are too incompetetent to pick up on these same strategies?
Well, that's not quite how I'd put it. Again, I'd say that the people calling the shots in the GOP are, if not actually evil, extremely nasty, unethical, and willing to stoop to almost any level to get/keep power. I'm not sure that I would call the Democrats incompetent, but I think that there are a lot of progressive types in the Democratic party (go figure) who are willing to put principles over power. Maybe that makes them foolish, but I think that there is a certain reason to it. I think it's similar to saying that if the US tortures it's POWs then we aren't any different than the insurgents who kidnap, torture and kill people to make Jihadi videos. If we are willing to take our own citizens off the streets and lock them away forever without access to the courts, or even without their families knowing what happened to them, then we are no better than the Iraqi regime that we helped to topple. By the same token, I think that the Democrats largely believe that if they stoop to the level of the Ken Mehlmens and Karl Roves of the world, then they would be no better and no more worthy of governing than the Republicans are.
It undoubtedly sucks to get repeatedly beaten by dirty tricks, but the tricksters don't always win. And how much better must it feel if you can win cleanly?
I really don't want to be part of a flame war (I like my karma where it is right now), but it really seems to me that republicans pull this crap off a lot more than democrats. Thinks like the "democrats vote on wednesdays" campaigns, or "[legal] immigrants will be arrested if they come to the polls", or men dressed as leather lingerie-clad homosexuals with signs saying "Vote Democrat so I can adopt" seem to be everywhere. Does anyone have any examples of this happening against republicans? I'll gladly retract my statement if I can see a couple Democrat-sanctioned examples somewhere. I'm aware that I'm a democrat and therefore have selective exposure, but I'm trying to keep an open mind.
You are correct, this typically is something done by the Republicans and not the Democrats. Sure, if you dig deep enough, you can find the story about a couple of Democratic supporters slashing the tires on the Republican parties "get out the vote" mobiles the night before the election, but such incidents are extremely few and far between, and I have yet to see one that was orchestrated on the party rather than individual level.
On the other hand, the Republican party thinks systematically, and when they find something that works they try to milk it in all of their campaigns. Hence the multiple sightings of lether-clad men in lingerie, the robo-calls, the fliers, the push polls, the recent NAMBLA-related smears showing up in close races all across the country (always raised, of course, by the Republicans). In the 2004 election is was church ministers talking about how Kerry (a Catholic) wanted to ban the bible, or mysterious robo-calls claiming to be from the Kerry campaign reminding people that "A vote for John Kerry is a vote for gay marriage," (even though Kerry had never taken a pro-gay marriage stance in his career).
I think, what it comes down to (I'm about to open myself for being flamed senseless), is that the party leadership in the Republican and Democratic parties have very different philosophies of what it means to run an election. Now, I'm speaking in generalities here, as there are some Republicans who I am rather fond of, and some Democrats that I intensely dislike. But in general, it seems that the Democrats have a philosophy more true to what has been enshrined in the constitution, and an overall sense of fairness. They seem to believe that all citizens have the right to vote, and have their vote counted, and have their voice heard no matter what their opinion is. They seem to want (generally) to allow the truth to speak for itself, and to get elected on the issues.
No doubt that there are many Republicans who feel the same way, but the party leadership (the Ken Mehlman and the Karl Rove types) either don't see or don't care about the importance of voting. They don't see it as a sacred right or responsibility. They see it as a means to an end, and that end is the Republicans getting and holding onto power. They (and again I'm referring to the party leadership and those that enable them, not necessarily the rank and file) believe that they are at war with the Democrats, and that any action that they can take that will result in their accruing more power is justified. They don't care how immoral or unethical it is, or even how illegal it is. They simply do whatever they can to win and then (if they get caught) pay the fines/do the time, though the punishment hardly matters if they had already achieved their goal. What's $5 million dollars in fines to the richest political party in the country, if it means that they can keep control of Congress or the White House? They can make that money back in a heartbeat by awarding no-bid contracts to the companies that are their staunchest supporters. The Republican leadership has come to terms with the notion of "acceptable losses" and "collateral damage" during the campaign, and unfortunately those losses include ethics and morals.
Now, I live in Ohio, and I'm sure that you've heard a lot about what sort of t
I R'd the FA, and I don't have the first clue what this perceived threat is. How does signing this deal threaten commercial use of OSS? Don't the existing OSS licensing terms still hold? Why should it matter that MS can now show there's an MS-licensed path?
Well, I think that at one point Microsoft had started inserting language into it's licensing agreements that stated that you couldn't use their products with open source products, or develop them on MS platforms or something like that. Most people would have laughed that out of court I think, because it was incredibly unreasonable. Now that they have this licensing deal with Novell, they can start re-asserting those sorts of policies in their licenses, or more reasonably they can assert that you can only use open source products in conjunction with MS products if those open source products come from Novell. Of course, that's just a guess. It probably still wouldn't hold up in court, but there might be enough FUD behind it to keep big business in line. Then there's the flip side of support...if you're trying to get your Windows-based software to interoperate with a non-Novell Linux flavor, you'll be SOL.
On what basis? They aren't the copyright owner, nor are they the appointed representatives of the copyright owner. Until and unless the French documentary makers complain, what case do they have?
Silly rabbit, you don't have to be the copyright owner or their appointed representative to issue a takedown request under the DMCA. The safe harbor provision basically says that you can't be held liable for your users posting copyrighted content as long as you take it down after receiving a takedown request. Basically, it was intended to protect service providers when a copyright suit is being brought. The assumption was that in practive the copyright holder would issue a takedown request and then initiate an infringement suit. But reality, most of the time the copyright holder will settle for getting the content taken offline in lieu of a huge lawsuit. So in a reasonable person's world, the ISP or host would actually bother to verify that the entity issuing the takedown request held the copyright or were a representative thereof, but most of them just want to avoid getting sued under the DMCA and will take it down regardless because the consequences of delaying are potentially quite high. This is a remarkably effective way to silence criticism and free speech on the Internets.
The only real defense against it is to find out who is issuing the takedown notices for content that they don't own the copyright on, and file a suit against them for fraud, harrassment or something else along those lines. The EFF has several such cases in process now.
Ah yes, the old "the crowd's doing it, it must be wrong" mentality. Nothing like unfounded elitism to point you in the right direction...
I'm not saying that it must be wrong because everyone is doing it, but an awful lot of people watch WWF and Jerry Springer too. If popularity were the only criteria for determining whether to use a product or service, or even just whether the service was decent, then we'd be in a sad state. Anything that aspires to such a high level of popularity must by default appeal to the lowest common denominator. Just look at AOL if you want an example.
Diebold also makes ATMs that work day and night flawlessly (well, 99% flawlessly) with paper trails so that banks know EXACTLY where the money went and if anything has gone wrong. You are correct in saying that these voting machines exhibit 'awful engineering, Crappy programming, bad design, lazy execution.", but when you consider that the company has a track record of the opposite in a (slightly) different field, the needle seems to point more towards maliciousness than carelessness...
As they say, "never attribute to malicious intent that which is more easily explained by incompetence."
I read an interesting article this morning on just that subject. When you consider that Diebold didn't design the machines that they're selling, and that the company that did design them originally did so for use in non-critical voting functions, like in supermarkets and malls, it begins to look at lot more like greed and incompetence. Diebold wanted the get into e-voting because with their reputation they figured they could make a killing. They couldn't bring an entirely new system to market in time to actually cash in on the e-voting boom, so they bought a smaller company that made something that they could sell as an electronic voting machine. They reaped all the profits, and because they were so busy trying to rush to market with anything that even halfway worked, they are now reaping all of the blame too.
The only question is at what point does blind greed and willful incompetence become maliciousness?
I've been ripped off by PayPal twice, with absolutely no recourse whatsoever to get things rectified.
Feel me once...shame on...shame on me. But fool me can't be fooled again.
I think PayPal's business model is at least partly based on having free will to screw over individual customers in this manner.
And you gotta admit, it's a great business model. You get to store peoples' money, shuffle it around and do wire transfers and such, without all those pesky rules and regulations that limit banks. And best of all, at the least hint of anything fishy going on, you can confiscate all of the money in the account and even drain someone's checking account too! It's like having a license to print (or steal, more accurately) money!
With all the payment methods available, and every PayPal-sucks/blows/eatsballs site pushing their own superior alternative, you'd think that no one would use PayPal. And yet . . .
Ah yes, the old "everybody else is doing it so why shouldn't I" mentality. Nothing like the wisdom of the masses to point you in the right direction...
I've been getting about two of these suckers a day on my answering machine. I never actually listen, but just delete. Now that I know it's a potential profit center, they might be worth listening all the way through to see if they qualify for further action. Thanks for the info on how to finally discourage these bastards.
You can do the same thing with junk faxes. I believe that it is the same legislation that forbids those as well. I'm also pretty sure that willful violation can get you triple damages ($1500), so if they've been told to stop sending you junk faxes and still continue to do so, you're in the "big money." Of course, the downside is that you will probably have a hard time collecting on a small claims judgement. If you're suing a junk fax company, they're usually fly by nights and change names/ownership frequently. If you're suing a non-profit for their calls (and right now it's usually election campaigns) then they typically dissolve after the election is over and leave lots of unpaid bills. For example, I had a friend who used to work for Ameritech (before they were SBC or AT&T) who told me that a certain senator's campaign (he's no longer in office) never paid their final phone bill, and it usually got written off as bad debt.
Realistically, if you wanted to spend a lot of time trying to work the system like this, you could probably set up a fax machine and phone line and make a fair living at it. Even if you only averaged 2 wins a week that's still better than a lot of jobs (and certainly fast food jobs). Assuming that you could actually collect. The downside is that the judge might eventually get sick of you or you would run out of people to sue.
That said, who gives a flying shit about some billionaire honky in space? Personally I'd think of cooler things to do with my money. I'd arbitrarily make cool people "funded" so they could pursue research and fun projects. Just all spontaneous like. That's just for starters...
Yeah. Instead of blowing his money on space travel, he ought to be funding "cool" things. Like starting companies that research and teach cool new programming techniques. Or maybe endowing the Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at some prestigious school like Oxford. Oh...wait a minute...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't he the guy who developed the Hungarian notation (not that developing code-standards should lead to fame, fortune and grandeur, but just sayin')
Yes he is. That's why they call it "hungarian notation". He also hasn't worked for Microsoft since 2002. Right now he's running a company called Intentional Software.
AFAIK, this has always been AMDs problem: my earliest recollection is when they bought NexGen's K6 and sold it to Compaq in the sub-$1000 segment in 1995. Since then, anytime the get a good product, they blow it on production, leaving Intel to fill the void they created.
Intel isn't in much better shape right now. Sure, the Core 2 Duo rocks. Everybody wants one. Unfortunately, the Core 2 Duo CPUs are still less than 25% of their desktop production. The rest of it is still the old Pentium D and Pentium 4 CPUs, which no one wants. Which is bad news, because Intel has large stocks of the older gen chips still unsold.
So if you can't get as many Core 2 Duos as you want, your choice is either the Pentium 4/D or the Athlon 64/X2 (which will outperform the Pentium 4/D by a large margin). Apparently most companies are choosing AMD. That's one of the things that the Intel fanbois kept forgetting. It doesn't matter how much faster the Core 2 Duo CPUs are if Intel isn't manufacturing enough of them to meet demand. AMD's capacity problems are at least partly related to Intel's (and the fact that Dell is eating a significant portion of AMD's production).
Oh, but they have. In particular, they anticipated this problem years ago and started to build Fab 36, which is about to come on line right when their capacity issues are becoming a serious limiter to their growth. Fab 36 is going to mean a lot more capacity for AMD, and let them grow their marketshare by a lot. Now they may have production problems with the new fab, but once they get those worked out they won't be having any capacity problems for a while -- and if they do, they will giddily ply investors to help them build a new fab.
The other key to remember is that AMD has also contracted with third-party fabs to make their CPUs. I believe that Chartered Semi is the one. At any rate, once those wafers start producing chips (it takes many weeks to go from raw materials to wafers to CPUs) then supply will increase further.
Is it my imagination, or is this new Extended Validation SSL thing, in the end, just a bunch of paperwork? I may simply be missing the point. If someone can point to a better description of this thing that makes sense, please do so.
No, you've got it about right. The only difference is the amount of verification being done on the back end.
Realistically, the SSL Certificate has very little to do with the encryption. All it is saying is that "some organization presented us with this public encryption key, said that it was for this server/site/organization, and at the time that we tried to verify it this was true." So if you wanted to set up a phishing site, there's nothing really to prevent you from buying a cheap cert from one of the CAs that is trusted by default in IE, setting up a server with it, and going to town. To the average web user, the site will look "safe" to them because it shows a key/padlock to indicate that communications is encrypted, regardless of the fact that the encrypted communications could be going to a criminal's web server.
I have only bought certs from Thawte in the past (they're as good as Verisign I think, and half the price, though there are undoubtedly cheaper CAs), and Thawte has offered several levels of SSL certificates in the past. I was reading on their FAQ page the other day when trying to decide which cert I wanted for a mail server, and they basically explained the difference between some of their levels of certificates as being the amount of verification done on the back end. Some had a turnaround time of a few hours. Some took a couple of days. Presumably this is no different. I remember when my organization bought our first cert, it did take a couple days for them to verify everything. After that, subsequent certs from the same domain name and admin mailbox/technical contact/admin contact went through much faster. Apparently because they know us now.
For my money, it doesn't really make a difference. If you're going to "Bob's Sneaker Store" online, it probably doesn't matter to you if Verisign did a 3 day audit to verify their identity because you don't know who "Bob" is anyway. If you're going to a Microsoft/Cisco/other major company web site, the degree of validation being done on the back end might make you feel safer, since you may already predisposed to trust that company more than some anonymous web merchant.
When you get into NIC bonding, it's not unusual to want 4-8 gigabit NICs in the unit. Especially if you're connecting to an iSCSI/AoE switch fabric and you want to connect to multiple switches for fault-tolerance (along with bonding for bandwidth). Even with dual-port NICs, you start running out of space quickly (it's better with quads, but they're hard to source).
I'm sorry, I thought that it was obvious that we were talking about 4x4, which was AMD's new enthusiast platform for desktops. It sounds to me like you're talking about servers, which are already available in dual-socket configurations with PCI-X slots (and some with PCI-E) that can support those functions.[/sarcasm]
My point wasn't that nobody would ever need all of those slots and connectors. Obviously you could find someone somewhere with some application that required it (or thought that they needed it for bragging rights). But the odds of anyone needing anything approaching that level of capability on a desktop system are extremely slim. My point was that what they were offerring was far in excess of what a standard desktop computing platform would be, and that if you needed the raw computing power of 2 CPU/4 core Athlon processing then you could probably be better served buying an Opteron 200 series workstation instead. If you'll recall, the whole point of 4x4 is 4 CPU cores and 4 video cards for the ultimate in gamer performance, not 4 CPU cores and 4 NICs.