From the article: The spokeswoman for a telecom company said, "We're not going to talk about prices, and the fact that we're not going to talk about it is off the record. You can't use the fact that we won't talk about prices in a story."
So he goes and prints it anyways? Can he do that?
Until doing so is declared a violation of the USA Patriot Act, sure. At least at the moment in the US we still have a concept called the First Amendment. There is no legal concept of "off the record" - it is just a professional courtesy between people who make the news and those who report. All it means is, 'if you publish this I will only talk to your competition from now on'.
For the moment anyway. It would not surprise me a bit to see organizations trying to use laws such as USA Patriot (particularly version II) to censor reporting that they don't like. But not yet.
A lot of bills that appear on the surface to be unsupportable and "dead in the water" suddenly appear at the end of a session and get rammed through with no discussion. I would watch this one very closely for those symptoms.
You are using a slippery slope argument. This is a flawed manner of argument and you should reflect on your position and correct it. For instance, I could say that since we allow the government to regulate the operation of motor vehicles, it is only a matter of time before the government regulates all aspects of life. This is not accepted as an argument in any standard logic I have ever followed.
You use an interesting standard of logic then. The sequence of events was (1) state and federal governments asserted "privilage not a right" control over motor vehicles in the 1920s. At this time it was possible to survive as a citizen of the United States without a motor vehicle (2) in the 1960-1970 time frame, the way of life in the United States was changed to essentially require a motor vehicle for survival (yes, I have lived in a a large city without a car. Practially speaking 98% of the population of the US requires a car to be able to eat). (3) Now state and federal regulation of motor vehicles can be and is used to control all aspects of life.
What exactly is illogical about describing that chain of events?
You know I've been wondering about this, because that average person that I talk to is much more sane. Well, not as much as would be nice, but certainly not so bent on bombing and policing everything like Bush and the general media seem to be. The paranoia is being spread by from the top down, it certainly isn't grassroots
That's just a manifestation of a basic (almost said "fundamental"!) problem with all human endeavours. You identify a problem ("threat from terrorism" - reasonable) and decide you need to address that problem. OK so far.
But then you assign the problem to someone (or in the modern world, a group of someones). These people have strong incentives to DO SOMETHING and KEEP ON DOING SOMETHINGs until, well, forever. Whether or not what they are doing actually helps with the original problem.
And of course the mass media make things worse, because the people assigned to the problem know that if they don't "do something", and an incident occurs, they will be crucified in the media for having been "asleep at the switch". So better to curtail the civil liberties of 100,000,000 than look like a fool on CNN.
Then there is the issue of love of power for its own sake...
There was an analysis written regarding the phrase "Life, Liberty and Persuit of Happiness" and it essential boiled down to this. Those words were chosen very specificaly and placed in the order that they were specificaly. That the order is indicative to the order which they must be considered:
I guess I would have to doubt that interpretation a bit, since the people who wrote those words would most certainly have been hanged by the British authorities had they been caught by same. So I would have to assume that they valued the liberty of the citizenry above the life of the individual.
Being a part of the institution that actually produces all of these documents (i.e. the US courts), I fail to see why EVERYONE feels entitled to free access to the systems mentioned.
Um, because we are not dicussing a database of nVidia tech tips, but a database of the law. That institution that claims for itself the exclusive right to send large men with guns and bayonets to enforce its decisions? From which there is no escape as a citizen? While I am not arguing that Lexis should be free, surely you see the basis of the concern here?
This article is a misdirected rant. It is beyond dispute that Lexis, Westlaw, et al. do not own any copyright to public records-- i.e. the actual text of the case decisions.
You are familiar with Veeck vs. Southern Building Council, right? You do know that there are many organizations out there that try very hard to place access controls and tollbooths on the law?
Full agreement here. Anyone who gets to the point of handing over a check to pay for a trip has been fully briefed on the risks. The risks haven't changed - they are the same as they were before the Columbia failure - so why would the paying passengers change their mind?
sPh
We probably won't see the AF images
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I am guessing that the general public won't get to see those Air Force images for 25 or 50 years, as releasing them would reveal the capabilities of the device/location taking them.
But the sysadmin's job IS to make users happy. By providing them with the tools they need for the job.
Actually, the sysadmins job is to meet the strategic and tactical needs of the organization as defined by the owners or fiduciary parties. Which may or may not involve making the worker bees "happy".
For example, I am sure everyone in the company would be "happier" if the Transportation Department bought Mercedes sports cars for the car pool, but the organization has determined that Ford Focus' are more in keeping with our organizational goals. Bitch to the Garage Manager about wanting a Mercedes and he will take you out back and introduce you to the wrong end of a very large wrench (no joke, although I guess he hasn't actually had to do that since the one time back in the 70s). See the difference?
he knows in the back of his mind, that to take the time and give enough background information to just one person, so that he could provide a reasonable answer is going to take a month.
1000 people times 1 month ea = 1000 months
That is a very insightful statement and something that is very difficult for even the most perceptive manager to grasp.
Of course infinite quantities of one-on-one training with a deep expert will get most people up to speed. Were your parents able to afford AJ Foyt to give you driving lessons? I bet the answer is no. But worker bees and their managers seem to think that the system equivalent of Charles Babbage should be available for training and support in infinite quantities at no additional charge.
A carpenter can't keep re-learning how to use a hammer over and over. A writer or assistant or office worker can't afford to keep re-learning how to use their tools (like computers).
Actually there have been tremendous changes in the technology of production carpentry over the last 20 years. A carpenter coming back from a 20-year layoff today would find that he needed several weeks, if not months, of training to get back to the apprentice level - and a couple of years to get back to journeyman. Starting with the fact that the hammer has all but disappeared from production carpentry (as opposed to fine carpentry or cabinetmaking).
conceited jerk who can't understand why they don't get it and isn't shy about saying so, is it any wonder that IT departments are being disbanded in droves and the work is being outsourced? Generally speaking, the consultants who get paid more can work as a consultant at least in part because they -- shock, horror -- understand how to relate to people in a positive manner.
In my experience at least what happens is that the "conceited, arrogant jerk" gets replaced by a smooth-talking, personable, conceited, arrogant nitpicker of contract details and "out of scope" forms who (a) doesn't understand the business they way the in-house guy did (b) doesn't have the same motivation that the in-house guy did, because he is on a different team with different incentives. Within two months the bitch-n-moaners are wishing they had the old jerk back, but by that time it is too late as the outsourcers has dismantled the previous staff and scattered them to the winds.
"Defensive" is a non-word with no real meaning. It is a non-word in the way that an atomic bomb is a non-weapon: you use it to destroy a conversation/argument/discussion with no hope of any postive outcome for anyone involved.
Or in other words: when I disagree with your statement/choice/decision, I am being forceful and principled. When you disagree with my decision, you are being "defensive". Once I throw that word out on the table, no further exchange of ideas is possible.
You're a perfect example of what this article is talking about. Arrogant, clueless IT people. Thanks for the example.
I think the parent post was meant to be a bit sarcastic, but there is a lot of truth in your observation.
Still, there is a counterargument that the "we hate 'techies'" pundits tend to gloss right over. It can be encapsulated in the old saying, "if it were easy (or fun) they wouldn't call it 'work'".
When Indycar racing went from smooth shapes to lifting bodies, do you think that race car drivers just jumped in the new cars and set records? No, I imagine they spent a lot of hours at the track practicing, I mean working. When lumbering went from 2-man saws to chainsaws, and from chainsaws to diesel logging machines, do you think old Sven just picked up a chainsaw and got started? No, I imagine he had to do a bit of training and practice so he wouldn't cut his leg off. If Shakespeare showed up today, would he start off with a best-seller, or would he have to do a bit of research about modern society, language, etc? In other words, a bit of... work?
You see where I am headed. When a simple change is made to a computer system, the worker bees who use that system in their daily tasks expect that it will just automagically be understandable to them. None of that nasty "work" here - it's a computer!
Now since "techies" spend 40% of a typical day teaching themselves new systems (since Marketing bought it but forgot to budget for any training or support, IT has to figure out how to make it work. You don't understand the procedures for analyzing sales of women's underwear? Better learn that quick too so you can get the new system set up right!). We do the work. The worker bees just kvetch.
This is news? One gets vastly different results when one connects to either support.microsoft.com or slate.msn.com with Mozilla vs. connecting with Internet Explorer. Guess which one looks better and is easier to use?
I just finished testing installs of SuSE 8.1 and RedHat 8.0 vs. Windows 2000. The only odd thing about the Linux installs was the questions about the disk partitioning, but (a) anyone who ever worked with MS-DOS would not be fazed by that (b) hitting [continue] and accepting the defaults would have worked just fine. That's on a generic, three-year old Dell corporate workstation.
Granted, I have installed a lot of software and OS' in my day. But I cannot agree with your statement that current Linux distros are difficult to install.
Then those people should get the fuck out of the IT field; the last thing any company needs is non-technical technical staff. Wow, installing the SQL service pack was so hard... click on the.exe! installing the SQL hotfixes were also hard... click on the.exe! Unless you are an idiot and install them out of order, I dont see how you can go wrong.
It has long been said that the winner of a game of chess is the person who makes the second-to-last mistake. Even Kasparov makes mistakes (in fact he lost a game just yesterday due to a mistake an A-level player "shouldn't" have made).
Eventually you too will make a mistake. The question then becomes: how fragile or resilient are the systems you are using? If you read Russ Cooper's analysis of Slammer on the NTBugTraq mailing list, you will find that even an admin behaving with ordinary capability and diligence could have been caught by Slammer, since there were undocumented dependencies in the patches.
Wow - installing the SQL Server patch was hard...
Perhaps you may want to talk to the Lotus Notes admins who discovered that NT 4.0 SP6 totally hosed Lotus Notes. You can find them working as checkers at Wal-Mart. Note that SP6 contained numerous critical security fixes.
Rad Hat has some nice certification programs that seem to be versatile and respectable
The problem is that none of the Red Hat-conducted introductory install and admin classes are currently scheduled. And while I am not a huge fan of formal training in the IT world, when taking on something entirely new one needs a place to get started.
What puzzles me about the whole 9700 thing is this: as far as I can see from monitoring the general-interest hardware press, the 9700 has been #1 in performance for about one full product release cycle for the "best of the best of the best" in video cards (6 months or thereabouts). Presumably by this point ATI have a 9900 waiting in the wings to counter nVidia's next move. That means that in order to retake the medal, nVidia would have to make an order-of-magnitude jump over the 9700. Is that possible?
What about cars? You buy a brand new Vette only to find out that the factory limited your speed by programming one of the computer chips to lock out at 167 MPH. So you buy a different chip to "unlock" your cars full potential. Is that stealing?
Interesting comparison. I have talked to a few people in the Corvette engineering group, and they have told me that there a quite a few "Easter eggs" in both the mechanicals and software of the Corvette. These are typically capabilities that Marketing or Legal nixed and that Engineering removed from the product by disabling rather than removing ("can't change that PROM code - too risky at this stage - we will jump over the affected area"). Now, do they want you to not find these? Or to find them? And what are ATI's intentions?
If you, as an end user, can overclock the 9500 to the 9700 pro for little money, then what the hell are they charging so much more money for the 9700?
Well, product line differentiation and price discimination is one of the basic tools for a consumer products company to make money. The best example is book publishing: if you look at the production cost of a hardcover you will see it really isn't much more than for a paperback (something like $1 vs 0.50) but those who want hardcovers are willing to pay 4x what the paperback buyer will pay. Typically the premium version pays the development costs and the stockholders, while the budget version pays the rest of the bills.
Also, it can be a good way to make use of parts which are out-of-spec for the higher performance version.
I doubt AMI will sue anyone over this, since it seems like an excellent way to triple sales of 9xxx boards (the original 9500, which on reading the article has about an 80% chance of becoming toast; the 9700 you then have to purchase to give the performance originally desired; and possibly a second 9500 since you probably took that one from your secondary computer which is now headless).
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Until doing so is declared a violation of the USA Patriot Act, sure. At least at the moment in the US we still have a concept called the First Amendment. There is no legal concept of "off the record" - it is just a professional courtesy between people who make the news and those who report. All it means is, 'if you publish this I will only talk to your competition from now on'.
For the moment anyway. It would not surprise me a bit to see organizations trying to use laws such as USA Patriot (particularly version II) to censor reporting that they don't like. But not yet.
sPh
sPh
What exactly is illogical about describing that chain of events?
sPh
But then you assign the problem to someone (or in the modern world, a group of someones). These people have strong incentives to DO SOMETHING and KEEP ON DOING SOMETHINGs until, well, forever. Whether or not what they are doing actually helps with the original problem.
And of course the mass media make things worse, because the people assigned to the problem know that if they don't "do something", and an incident occurs, they will be crucified in the media for having been "asleep at the switch". So better to curtail the civil liberties of 100,000,000 than look like a fool on CNN.
Then there is the issue of love of power for its own sake...
sPh
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sPh
For example, I am sure everyone in the company would be "happier" if the Transportation Department bought Mercedes sports cars for the car pool, but the organization has determined that Ford Focus' are more in keeping with our organizational goals. Bitch to the Garage Manager about wanting a Mercedes and he will take you out back and introduce you to the wrong end of a very large wrench (no joke, although I guess he hasn't actually had to do that since the one time back in the 70s). See the difference?
sPh
Of course infinite quantities of one-on-one training with a deep expert will get most people up to speed. Were your parents able to afford AJ Foyt to give you driving lessons? I bet the answer is no. But worker bees and their managers seem to think that the system equivalent of Charles Babbage should be available for training and support in infinite quantities at no additional charge.
sPh
sPh
sPh
Or in other words: when I disagree with your statement/choice/decision, I am being forceful and principled. When you disagree with my decision, you are being "defensive". Once I throw that word out on the table, no further exchange of ideas is possible.
sPh
Still, there is a counterargument that the "we hate 'techies'" pundits tend to gloss right over. It can be encapsulated in the old saying, "if it were easy (or fun) they wouldn't call it 'work'".
When Indycar racing went from smooth shapes to lifting bodies, do you think that race car drivers just jumped in the new cars and set records? No, I imagine they spent a lot of hours at the track practicing, I mean working. When lumbering went from 2-man saws to chainsaws, and from chainsaws to diesel logging machines, do you think old Sven just picked up a chainsaw and got started? No, I imagine he had to do a bit of training and practice so he wouldn't cut his leg off. If Shakespeare showed up today, would he start off with a best-seller, or would he have to do a bit of research about modern society, language, etc? In other words, a bit of... work?
You see where I am headed. When a simple change is made to a computer system, the worker bees who use that system in their daily tasks expect that it will just automagically be understandable to them. None of that nasty "work" here - it's a computer!
Now since "techies" spend 40% of a typical day teaching themselves new systems (since Marketing bought it but forgot to budget for any training or support, IT has to figure out how to make it work. You don't understand the procedures for analyzing sales of women's underwear? Better learn that quick too so you can get the new system set up right!). We do the work. The worker bees just kvetch.
That's another line of thought, anyway.
sPh
sPh
Granted, I have installed a lot of software and OS' in my day. But I cannot agree with your statement that current Linux distros are difficult to install.
sPh
Eventually you too will make a mistake. The question then becomes: how fragile or resilient are the systems you are using? If you read Russ Cooper's analysis of Slammer on the NTBugTraq mailing list, you will find that even an admin behaving with ordinary capability and diligence could have been caught by Slammer, since there were undocumented dependencies in the patches.
Perhaps you may want to talk to the Lotus Notes admins who discovered that NT 4.0 SP6 totally hosed Lotus Notes. You can find them working as checkers at Wal-Mart. Note that SP6 contained numerous critical security fixes.sPh
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Also, it can be a good way to make use of parts which are out-of-spec for the higher performance version.
sPh
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We have found 26 of these recalled units at our facilites so far. Many thanks to the person who submitted this article and the editor who posted it!
sPh