on a flight back from Hawaii in March (the wife was attending a conference, so I tagged along for cheap) one chap got booted from first class back into sardine-class with us. The flight was about 30 people overbooked.
After loudly announcing that his wife was up there in first class, repeatedly (and why, we don't know), he settled down into his seat, got out his Mac powerbook, and started watching a porn DVD.
I can hear it now, "Stewardess, can you make that man surf with both hands?"
It's actually just electronic devices that aren't FAA approved. Meaning, anything the airline owns is OK, and anything they don't isn't.
Part of why they don't want you using things is that an airborn cell phone has a stronger signal than one on the ground, and can talk over (and disconnect) other connections. Also, since you're hopping from one cell to the next so quickly, you're leaving a wake of disconnections, and frequently, no billing. (You apparently move through a cell faster than it can recognize you, and bill you.) Some of the in-air phones are apparently linked to a bigger cell-phone antenna that connects to well-placed, special cell phone towers.
I'm not aware of a cell phone, or other electronic device, causing problems on a modern airliner (it'd surprise me with the level of sophistication up there in the cockpit), but I am aware of one chap who wouldn't hang up his cell phone, and was charged with an offense.
Actually folks, I wrote that ending with fake/sarcasm meta tag, as in "this is a joke". Too early in the morning to remember this thing greps out those sorts HTML streams from non-HTML text input.
My preferred browser? IE. Has been for a long time. Never liked how slow and how much memory Netscape grabbed (esp. the java VM). Also never liked how animated GIFs used to consume 100% of the CPU. Been trying Mozilla, but it looks about 8 months away from completion.
Goes to show ya' can't tell on Slashdot what's sarcasm, and what's zealotry. My mistake for not clicking the Preview button.
Compaq does some strange stuff. Their servers seem to be pretty decent. We've had fewer problems with them at work than the HP's, and especially the IBM boxes. (Your own experience will vary.)
However, the product line they sell for home users can only be described as flaming garbage. We bought several at my old job (as sort of minimalist PCs), and they were plagued.
It's strange that a company would willfully choose to sell one product line that's good, and another that destroys their credibility.
It is quite fortunate that they are able to precisely specify how a logo should be used ("1 inch of white space all around"), so nerdy web monkeys who know fuck-all about graphic design won't screw-up the all-important corporate image. By simply following the graphical specifications, they can turn-out perfect work most of the time.
I am the graphic designer.:-)
The identity weenies are zombies in suits. One actually pulled a little wooden ruler out of a drawer, held it up to the screen, and showed me how it wasn't an inch. The second problem was another suit-zombie running at 256 colors. On brand-new, 19" monitor hooked to an ATI Rage Pro video card(4MB). That one could be solved at least.
did that. Now they want a $3k Sony monitor with hood, color calibrator, matching non-reflective black kimono (to wear over your light-colored clothes to eliminate glare) etc. etc.
True. So I left out the part where they've got their Pantone color sample in hand, with The Official Corporate Logo Color on it, and they're hopping angry, wondering why it's not the same color on their monitor. Well, 'cause The Official Corporate Logo Color ain't one of the 212, and it ain't close to one of the default 256, and it's kinda close to one of the 65,000 colors, but it depends upon your monitor settings....
The real problem here is the customers who insist upon complete control. They think "publishing," and somehow think that they have ultimate control over all things, and thus ultimate control over how it is presented to the viewer.
The web is a different medium. You don't take radio rules and apply them to TV, and vice versa. What works well for glossy color magazines won't work well for an indie newspaper.
I'm still fighting battles with folks. The latest here is the use of the corporate logo. The brand-identity weenies complain that there has to be one inch of whitespace around the logo, and the logo can not appear any smaller than certain dimensions, and it has to appear in the correct colors.
One inch of white space? Sure, on what size monitor?
I recently noticed that http://www.insight.com started using PHP, which seemed downright forward-thinking for a vendor to do.
Most folks like to blab about what they've done, so try emailing a few folks, or see what old classmates or fishing buddies the VP's in your company know elsewhere. That'll open doors quickly.
The only thing of real substance I can offer is obvious, but I'll offer it anyway (just to get the ball rolling). Try to modularize everything, and make it generic. Perl, mod-Perl, and PHP all work on NT or *nix, which helps divorce you from a single-vendor situation. The servers can then have any OS or any web server. You could even do a mix in a server farm.
You'll likely need to do something tricky for to bypass some performance bottleneck, but try to keep those tricks simple, with the intent of eventually finding some non-tricky method of getting around that bottleneck.
http://www.niehs.nih.gov/oc/factsheets/emf/emf.htm from National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.
http://www.osha-slc.gov/SLTC/elfradiation/index. html OSHA's page on ELF radiation.
NOTE, one of the links is titled, "Possible Association of EMF and Suicide. News Release No. 147, University of North Carolina, (2000, March 15), 1 page. Press release from a large and detailed positive study of the possible link between exposure to low frequency electromagnetic fields (EMFs) and suicide among electric utility workers. "
There's limits on what strengths of magnetic fields you can be exposed to. Call OSHA (occupational and health folks), or even one of the local labour unions. Someone will be able to look it up in a manual, and track down the correct inspector who can gauge field strenghts with an expensive gadget.
With phone records, and in court, you only need to show record that something passed between two parties. You don't need to show what passed between two parties, only that the two parties communicated.
It's also funny that academia, usually seen as the enemy of Big Brother, is now seen by the FBI as saviour.
I tend to add the "banned" sites to my list of Restricted Sites in IE. Not perfect, and I still see the banner ads -- but no cookies, no doubleclick activex controls, etc.
Not slick, I know, but hey, might be of use to someone....
:can't vendors! understand; just how freaking h@rd it is to read aNything and eVerything that's written about their freaking ~products using punctuation as product name?
Makes reading about:cue:cat, Earth First!, and Digital:Convergence painful to read.
Actually, the old-style football was more of a "foot" ball game. Much rounder ball, and much more like rugby. Less passing, more pitching and tossing, and some fun kicks. Like the drop-kick. Overall, it was more like Australian rules football than anything alive today. So, back when things were being named, it was a foot game played with a ball. When the other foot game involving a ball came around, we had to name it something else. My little dictionary states:
"Alteration of assoc., abbreviation of association football." So, I guess you were an "assoc-er", which evolved. 1889 or some such date as an origin.
Having played all three sports (rugby, soccer/football, and American Football [in college]), I think the old-style American football was more fun. Of course, I was a lineman, and we do bloody nothing. It's like being a prop. If there's not a scrum, there's nothing going on.
I'm a consultant, and at my current client site, the lawyers have deemed that no email shall live more than 30 days. If it needs to live longer than that (some does, like contracts and product research), then it quite clearly becomes the user who is responsible (and who gets sued), and not the company, for anything that goes wrong from having that old email lying about. There's still ways of copying email outside the system, but POP and IMAP have been disabled on the servers to prevent local copies of email from accumulating.
Keeping logs doesn't really protect you. All logging does is simplify a post-mortem, and provide a method for digging into someone's past and turning a non-event into something nefarious. If the data isn't collected, you can't turn it over to someone.:-)
And the user can still send inappropriate email using any form of encryption such as, oh, any non-English language. Seriously. Are you going to spot check the emails written in French? Hindi? Farsi? Obfuscated Perl? How about keyword filtering in those languages?
About the best you can do is use the same policy you have in place now for phone use. If it gets out of hand, you, or your co-workers will know (or will rat on the guilty). Make Human Resources play the part of bad guy, and have them deal with these personnel issues. Publicize the policy, and have a two infraction limit. First warning, a week without pay. Second warning, you're fired. Zero exceptions (including VP's and CEO's).
Finally, I'm happy to see that you realize it's not that you're going to get 2,000 hours of perfect work out of an employee per year, but that the value of what they do during a year is greater than what you pay them each year.
I thought it was the USS Scorpion, so thanks for correcting me.
What tidbit of fogged knowledge that was floating around in my head was this:
* US torpedos have/had a safety that disarmed the torpedo if it pulled a 180 degree turn.
* at least one of the models of torpedo out in use would spontaneously arm. disarming it would involve turning the boat around.
* some US sub sank mysteriously, but investigation later concluded that the ship was in the midst of a fast 180 degree turn when something in a front tube detonated, thus the conclusion that the torpedo had armed, and they were trying to get the safety to pop.
So, my shared memory pool assembled all that together, stuck the Scorpion's name on it, and got some/all of it wrong. Oops.
Since a fast torpedo goes fast and turns slowly -- I doubt that it got turned around.
More likely they've got the same problems that plagued the US torpedo inventory during the 50's and 60's. Namely, spontaneous arming. One of the US subs was lost in the Atlantic owing to a torpedo that armed itself in the tube.
Hope the engineer that built that one feels at least slightly guilty.
If it's HTML, graphics, and some animations, then 10 meg is still plentiful. But if you keep the quotas down, say, to a meg per person, it gets easier to do backups, it prevents the warez, MP3, and pr0n sites. Or at least limits them.
If folks want more than that, they can pay extra, or go to a third-party hosting system.
Let's face it. The architect there fancies themself to be an artist. They are making artistic demands upon a situation that calls for an engineered solution. The outrageous non-ergonomic rules, the fact that they were "still allowed final say over the use of the office" indicates the architect doesn't care at all about function. They only care about form.
Workers there are just pieces on display. It's not a workplace, it's a gallery for the architect.
Not until there's some anonymous way of doing electronic payment. As anonymous as cash. So anonymous that the black market, drug trade, prostitution, and mafioso rackets use it instead of cash.
What can you get from an Apple server platform that you can't get elsewhere? Yeah, it'd be cool, but aside from that, what concrete things do you gain? Does cool hardware that no one outside the server room can see really mean better performance?
I mean, if all I wanted was file sharing, then anything would work. If there's some sort of remote administration, or client-adminstration you gain from the server, like Tivoli/SMS, that'd be a neat add-on. But I'll bet you can buy 2-3 boxes for the price of one Apple server.
My only hesitation is supporting a monopoly, be it Microsoft or Apple. Apple killed off all of their hardware competition, which was a shame, as I think some of their "competitors" were actually making better "Mac" hardware than Apple was (and at a lower price).
But why do you want your server out in the open? People will play with it, unplug it, bump it, spill drinks on it (like the $300 DEC Alpha keyboard I toasted once), and have to listen to the @#!! RAID drives whining and spinning. Get that thing into another climate-controlled room with fire suppression, hidden wiring, and locked doors. If you want to play on the console, then you need one as a workstation, not a server.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
on a flight back from Hawaii in March (the wife was attending a conference, so I tagged along for cheap) one chap got booted from first class back into sardine-class with us. The flight was about 30 people overbooked.
After loudly announcing that his wife was up there in first class, repeatedly (and why, we don't know), he settled down into his seat, got out his Mac powerbook, and started watching a porn DVD.
I can hear it now, "Stewardess, can you make that man surf with both hands?"
It's actually just electronic devices that aren't FAA approved. Meaning, anything the airline owns is OK, and anything they don't isn't.
Part of why they don't want you using things is that an airborn cell phone has a stronger signal than one on the ground, and can talk over (and disconnect) other connections. Also, since you're hopping from one cell to the next so quickly, you're leaving a wake of disconnections, and frequently, no billing. (You apparently move through a cell faster than it can recognize you, and bill you.) Some of the in-air phones are apparently linked to a bigger cell-phone antenna that connects to well-placed, special cell phone towers.
I'm not aware of a cell phone, or other electronic device, causing problems on a modern airliner (it'd surprise me with the level of sophistication up there in the cockpit), but I am aware of one chap who wouldn't hang up his cell phone, and was charged with an offense.
Actually folks, I wrote that ending with fake /sarcasm meta tag, as in "this is a joke". Too early in the morning to remember this thing greps out those sorts HTML streams from non-HTML text input.
My preferred browser? IE. Has been for a long time. Never liked how slow and how much memory Netscape grabbed (esp. the java VM). Also never liked how animated GIFs used to consume 100% of the CPU. Been trying Mozilla, but it looks about 8 months away from completion.
Goes to show ya' can't tell on Slashdot what's sarcasm, and what's zealotry. My mistake for not clicking the Preview button.
Low bandwidth
Text-only interface
No advertising
No banner ads
Sounds like Lynx on Linux, I know....
Compaq does some strange stuff. Their servers seem to be pretty decent. We've had fewer problems with them at work than the HP's, and especially the IBM boxes. (Your own experience will vary.)
However, the product line they sell for home users can only be described as flaming garbage. We bought several at my old job (as sort of minimalist PCs), and they were plagued.
It's strange that a company would willfully choose to sell one product line that's good, and another that destroys their credibility.
I am the graphic designer. :-)
The identity weenies are zombies in suits. One actually pulled a little wooden ruler out of a drawer, held it up to the screen, and showed me how it wasn't an inch. The second problem was another suit-zombie running at 256 colors. On brand-new, 19" monitor hooked to an ATI Rage Pro video card(4MB). That one could be solved at least.
did that. Now they want a $3k Sony monitor with hood, color calibrator, matching non-reflective black kimono (to wear over your light-colored clothes to eliminate glare) etc. etc.
:-)
True. So I left out the part where they've got their Pantone color sample in hand, with The Official Corporate Logo Color on it, and they're hopping angry, wondering why it's not the same color on their monitor. Well, 'cause The Official Corporate Logo Color ain't one of the 212, and it ain't close to one of the default 256, and it's kinda close to one of the 65,000 colors, but it depends upon your monitor settings....
The real problem here is the customers who insist upon complete control. They think "publishing," and somehow think that they have ultimate control over all things, and thus ultimate control over how it is presented to the viewer.
The web is a different medium. You don't take radio rules and apply them to TV, and vice versa. What works well for glossy color magazines won't work well for an indie newspaper.
I'm still fighting battles with folks. The latest here is the use of the corporate logo. The brand-identity weenies complain that there has to be one inch of whitespace around the logo, and the logo can not appear any smaller than certain dimensions, and it has to appear in the correct colors.
One inch of white space? Sure, on what size monitor?
Who has to support the code?
If you, then you'd better write it.
If throwing more people at it will get it done faster, then I guess 2,000 people ought to get it done in about an hour.
I recently noticed that http://www.insight.com started using PHP, which seemed downright forward-thinking for a vendor to do.
Most folks like to blab about what they've done, so try emailing a few folks, or see what old classmates or fishing buddies the VP's in your company know elsewhere. That'll open doors quickly.
The only thing of real substance I can offer is obvious, but I'll offer it anyway (just to get the ball rolling). Try to modularize everything, and make it generic. Perl, mod-Perl, and PHP all work on NT or *nix, which helps divorce you from a single-vendor situation. The servers can then have any OS or any web server. You could even do a mix in a server farm.
You'll likely need to do something tricky for to bypass some performance bottleneck, but try to keep those tricks simple, with the intent of eventually finding some non-tricky method of getting around that bottleneck.
http://www.niehs.nih.gov/oc/factsheets/emf/emf.htm
. html OSHA's page on ELF radiation.
from National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.
http://www.osha-slc.gov/SLTC/elfradiation/index
NOTE, one of the links is titled, "Possible Association of EMF and Suicide. News Release No. 147, University of North Carolina, (2000, March 15), 1 page. Press release from a large and detailed positive study of the possible link between exposure to low frequency electromagnetic fields (EMFs) and suicide among electric utility workers. "
There's limits on what strengths of magnetic fields you can be exposed to. Call OSHA (occupational and health folks), or even one of the local labour unions. Someone will be able to look it up in a manual, and track down the correct inspector who can gauge field strenghts with an expensive gadget.
Meantime, be afraid. Or at least cautious.
Cautious beats dead/cancerous any day.
With phone records, and in court, you only need to show record that something passed between two parties. You don't need to show what passed between two parties, only that the two parties communicated.
It's also funny that academia, usually seen as the enemy of Big Brother, is now seen by the FBI as saviour.
I tend to add the "banned" sites to my list of Restricted Sites in IE. Not perfect, and I still see the banner ads -- but no cookies, no doubleclick activex controls, etc.
Not slick, I know, but hey, might be of use to someone....
:can't vendors! understand; just how freaking h@rd it is to read aNything and eVerything that's written about their freaking ~products using punctuation as product name?
:cue:cat, Earth First!, and Digital:Convergence painful to read.
Makes reading about
ouch ouch ouch.
Actually, the old-style football was more of a "foot" ball game. Much rounder ball, and much more like rugby. Less passing, more pitching and tossing, and some fun kicks. Like the drop-kick. Overall, it was more like Australian rules football than anything alive today. So, back when things were being named, it was a foot game played with a ball. When the other foot game involving a ball came around, we had to name it something else. My little dictionary states:
"Alteration of assoc., abbreviation of association football." So, I guess you were an "assoc-er", which evolved. 1889 or some such date as an origin.
Having played all three sports (rugby, soccer/football, and American Football [in college]), I think the old-style American football was more fun. Of course, I was a lineman, and we do bloody nothing. It's like being a prop. If there's not a scrum, there's nothing going on.
I'm a consultant, and at my current client site, the lawyers have deemed that no email shall live more than 30 days. If it needs to live longer than that (some does, like contracts and product research), then it quite clearly becomes the user who is responsible (and who gets sued), and not the company, for anything that goes wrong from having that old email lying about. There's still ways of copying email outside the system, but POP and IMAP have been disabled on the servers to prevent local copies of email from accumulating.
:-)
Keeping logs doesn't really protect you. All logging does is simplify a post-mortem, and provide a method for digging into someone's past and turning a non-event into something nefarious. If the data isn't collected, you can't turn it over to someone.
And the user can still send inappropriate email using any form of encryption such as, oh, any non-English language. Seriously. Are you going to spot check the emails written in French? Hindi? Farsi? Obfuscated Perl? How about keyword filtering in those languages?
About the best you can do is use the same policy you have in place now for phone use. If it gets out of hand, you, or your co-workers will know (or will rat on the guilty). Make Human Resources play the part of bad guy, and have them deal with these personnel issues. Publicize the policy, and have a two infraction limit. First warning, a week without pay. Second warning, you're fired. Zero exceptions (including VP's and CEO's).
Finally, I'm happy to see that you realize it's not that you're going to get 2,000 hours of perfect work out of an employee per year, but that the value of what they do during a year is greater than what you pay them each year.
I thought it was the USS Scorpion, so thanks for correcting me.
What tidbit of fogged knowledge that was floating around in my head was this:
* US torpedos have/had a safety that disarmed the torpedo if it pulled a 180 degree turn.
* at least one of the models of torpedo out in use would spontaneously arm. disarming it would involve turning the boat around.
* some US sub sank mysteriously, but investigation later concluded that the ship was in the midst of a fast 180 degree turn when something in a front tube detonated, thus the conclusion that the torpedo had armed, and they were trying to get the safety to pop.
So, my shared memory pool assembled all that together, stuck the Scorpion's name on it, and got some/all of it wrong. Oops.
Ok, I agree. I was overly harsh on that one. I extend an apology for crossing the line.
I've just seen too many coders, engineers, and MBA's lacking a conscience. Me getting cynical.
Since a fast torpedo goes fast and turns slowly -- I doubt that it got turned around.
More likely they've got the same problems that plagued the US torpedo inventory during the 50's and 60's. Namely, spontaneous arming. One of the US subs was lost in the Atlantic owing to a torpedo that armed itself in the tube.
Hope the engineer that built that one feels at least slightly guilty.
If it's HTML, graphics, and some animations, then 10 meg is still plentiful. But if you keep the quotas down, say, to a meg per person, it gets easier to do backups, it prevents the warez, MP3, and pr0n sites. Or at least limits them.
If folks want more than that, they can pay extra, or go to a third-party hosting system.
Let's face it. The architect there fancies themself to be an artist. They are making artistic demands upon a situation that calls for an engineered solution. The outrageous non-ergonomic rules, the fact that they were "still allowed final say over the use of the office" indicates the architect doesn't care at all about function. They only care about form.
Workers there are just pieces on display. It's not a workplace, it's a gallery for the architect.
Anonymity? Never.
Not until there's some anonymous way of doing electronic payment. As anonymous as cash. So anonymous that the black market, drug trade, prostitution, and mafioso rackets use it instead of cash.
What can you get from an Apple server platform that you can't get elsewhere? Yeah, it'd be cool, but aside from that, what concrete things do you gain? Does cool hardware that no one outside the server room can see really mean better performance?
:-)
I mean, if all I wanted was file sharing, then anything would work. If there's some sort of remote administration, or client-adminstration you gain from the server, like Tivoli/SMS, that'd be a neat add-on. But I'll bet you can buy 2-3 boxes for the price of one Apple server.
My only hesitation is supporting a monopoly, be it Microsoft or Apple. Apple killed off all of their hardware competition, which was a shame, as I think some of their "competitors" were actually making better "Mac" hardware than Apple was (and at a lower price).
But why do you want your server out in the open? People will play with it, unplug it, bump it, spill drinks on it (like the $300 DEC Alpha keyboard I toasted once), and have to listen to the @#!! RAID drives whining and spinning. Get that thing into another climate-controlled room with fire suppression, hidden wiring, and locked doors. If you want to play on the console, then you need one as a workstation, not a server.