It's not LANGUAGE dependence, it's LIBRARY dependence. I was an extremely productive C developer because I knew the obscure (but standard) libraries and tools and could do something in a few days that would take others months (or longer!) to code and test.
I've made the transition to Java over the last few years. I knew Java syntax within a week (and thought some of the "obscure" stuff was irrelevant), took 6 months to learn the J2SE library (aha, I should use this class!) and another year to really understand how to use it properly. Over the same time I went from seeing anonymous inner classes as dangerous to a critical (and robust) solution to some common problems.
The software engineering process wouldn't speed this up at all, not unless you were able to set up a mentoring system with somebody who really knew his stuff.
BTW even the software engineering process can change between languages. Good shops will always do unit testing, Java provides incredibly rich - and standard! - support via junit, jmock et al.
Something overlooked in the trenches is that there's a very good business reason for switching from legacy C++ to solid Java (spring/struts/hibernate).
Finding employees.
Not because of "oh, I'm too good for C++" jerks. Just the simple fact that most recent development has been in Java, not C++. (C is also increasingly hard to find.) That's important when you're looking to expand your staff or replace departures -- it's harder to find people who are current in C++, and harder still to find good people who stayed with C++ instead of migrating to Java.
Same thing with using standard packages like Spring and Hibernate. They may not be the best technology, but they're almost always good enough and you can find good people who know how to use them.
As for outsourcing... huge mistake with a project this small. Besides the nightmare of managing a small team in a distant timezone, development teams this small need a lot of soft skills specific to the deployed environment. You could get around that with a rock solid spec, but I doubt that's the case here.
All of that is extremely fragile technology. Electronic media is, if anything, known to be extremely unreliable due to format changes and deterioration of the underlying media. Even if you have good media, do you have the software to understand it?
E.g., what would you do with a backup of a msql database? Not 'mysql', the once-popular 'msql' that preceded it.
The internet is also fragile. Look at the big picture -- how many copies really exist? The host (hopefully with backups), some search engines, a few intelligence agencies. But anywhere else?...
Paper? Most mass-produced paper contains small amount of acid that slowly deteriorates the paper. Acid-free paper should be stable, but iirc deterioriating paper is already a problem.
The risk from year-to-year is minimal, but shouldn't be entirely ignored. (Can you say New Orleans Public Library?) But over a few generations you definitely need to consider the risk of "fire, flood and insurrection".
More than 500 years out? Greenhouse gases would have washed out of the atmosphere and we would almost certainly be seeing the start of the next ice age. How long until many of those caches would be destroyed?
There are two types of economic gain. The most obvious is getting more money in exchange for your investment in money and effort. The more subtle one is getting into the game at all.
BTW don't assume that "certification" equates to "no experience." I'm not alone in having extensive C experience but having problems finding a Java position since I didn't make a 100% switch years ago. My java certs show that 1) I can work in this environment and 2) it forced me to take a broader perspective than I would have otherwise. If somebody has doubts that the sun exams have gotten decent, I'll start asking them technical questions as well.:-)
Maybe that's true for you, but my pre-lasik vision was so bad that my glasses were so heavy that they interfered with breathing _and_ gave me a serious fishbowl effect when turning my head. That's why I wore contacts unless there was a compelling reason not to -- and the pre-surgical month when I had to wear glasses was a nightmare.
The other reason I hated switching was that my contacts had no astigmatism correction, the glasses had some serious correction. (I can't remember why -- maybe the doc was an idiot who wouldn't write a prescription identical to the contacts.) If you ever want to know a good way to give somebody a headache....
So why do you think I got lasik? Vanity, or safety? Imagine fleeing a fire when anything more than 12-18" away is blurry.
Now, if you're talking about the idiots getting lasik because they have 20/40 or 20/60 vision -- I agree with you completely.
The key word is 'acceptance'. How do I know you accepted the offer? It's a hard question -- if I get a signed letter, how do I know it's your signature? How do I know you're authorized to accept that contract? And so on.
Under the UCC, a 'signature' is any tangible(?) mark indicating consent. It can be your legible signature in cursive. It can be your illegible signature in cursive. It can be an "X". It can be a crude drawing of Daffy Duck. It can be, in theory, an email where you say "I agree to this, Bob Smith" since you had to type it. (Anything written to a computer disk is 'tangible'. This post is tangible and hence covered by copyright.)
The problem is non-repudiation. If you give me a document claiming that I agreed to a contract, how do I disprove it? It's easy with email (easily forged) and crude drawings of Daffy Duck. Sometimes it's obvious with exemplars. Sometimes it requires some serious effort, e.g., determining that the inks used don't match.
(All with generous portion of NaCl since IANAL, but I have studied this since my signature is illegible and I occasionally run into law professors masquerading as clerks in chain stores.)
"Strategized" is nonsense, but "low-hanging fruit" is an extremely important concept in conveying that we can implement 80% of the desired functionality fairly easily... and that the next 10% will take as much effort as everything up to that point... as will the following 5%... and so on.
"Win-win" is bizspeak for "positive sum game." The alternative is the one where you only win by screwing over the client (something that clients DO NOT want to hear), or worse a negative sum game where you're both going to get screwed.
It's robbery, not theft, so by definition there's the use or threat of force involved.
I read an interesting statistic a while back. In the US, most home crime is theft. Crooks try hard to avoid contact with people since they never know who's armed. In the UK, most home crime is robbery.
I don't know if it's true, but it does drive home the fact that criminals adopt to their environment.
You probably don't want to jump into LDAP if this would be your sole use. However a site large enough to make maintainenance of the DNS files a pain is probably large enough that it either does, or at least should consider, using LDAP for user and system information. See the recent series of articles (in Linux Journal?) on setting up a single sign-on system using LDAP and Kerberos for an idea of how powerful it can be.
Yes, maintenance can be a bitch. But it's better than having to maintain separate access and permission files on dozens or hundreds of servers for hundreds or thousands of users. What are you going to use, NIS instead of LDAP+SSL? Besides there are already tools and front-ends and in the worst case you toss together some quick perl or java pages. It's not _that_ hard.
But why bother? Several reasons:
- LDAP is standard and has standard schema. That doesn't matter much when you create your initial system, but what happens when your company acquires another company using their own custom system? Or you're acquired by another company?
- LDAP is extensible. Again that doesn't matter when you create your initial system since you'll include everything you need. But what will it take to add new attributes? E.g., the new TXT entry that's used to indicate which hosts are authorized to send mail for the domain, or a key pair because your corporate overlords tell you to provide DNSSEC.
- DHCP servers can/will soon publish their IP address assignments to LDAP.
- RADIUS servers can/will soon(?) publish their assignments to LDAP.
- LDAP can/will soon be natively supported by bind in the next few releases. It won't be necessary to write tools that map your SQL database to text files, bind will be hitting the database directly.
If I were you, my first question would be whether the company already used LDAP or the CIO had plans that would require it anyway within the next few years. If so, document the points I made above and bite the bullet.
(The "can/will soon" is from the recent LJ articles.)
50%. For the first time in history 50% of the public thinks the country would be better off with Democrats in power. (Republicans are down to 37%).
50%. This is the FIRST TIME in history that the opposition party has hit 50%.
50%. This is such a staggering number that even the Republican leadership will admit that, if the election were held today, that the Democrats would retake control of both houses of Congress. Six years of Republican stonewalling into dozens -- hundreds -- of critical issues will be broken. There will be blood on the walls --- already there are reputable claims that the Abhramcoff(sp?) scandal will take down dozens of Republican (and only Republican members of congress. Not "forced to resigned" either -- the former Representative Cunningham won't be alone in federal prison for corruption.
I don't want to turn this into a political thread -- go to Daily Kos is that -- but the "so what, they're out of power" argument ends on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. The country is pissed off.
(P.S., did I mention that Nixon was more popular before his resignation than Bush is today?)
BTW, answering the point upstream -- the Democrats ensure affordable broadband to at least half of the population by passing a single law that costs no money. "No state, or subdivision within, shall pass any law restricting the ability of any government entity from offering municipal broadband service if it so chooses." Some cities are seriously considering offering citywide WiFi as a municipal utility, same as they offer water, sewer, trash collection, even power and natural gas. Yet the state legislature may pass a law saying that only for-profit entities can offer such service. Huh? Nobody is saying that people _must_ choose municipal WiFi, just that it should be an option on the table, esp. for people in areas where the commercial providers do not or cannot offer service.
Dateline and similar news magazines have covered moving horror stories repeatedly. You should see if you can find information at their websites.
Some of the pointers I remember are:
0) find a reputable mover. If unsure:....
1) pack it yourself. The problem is that they charge for materials used... and you'll find yourself paying for two, no three, rolls of bubble wrap being used to wrap your alarm clock.
2) get a binding weight before you sign off on them leaving. A common abuse is to quote a cost at 10,000 pounds, say, and then telling you that it actually weighed 18,000 pounds and you owe a few thousand dollars more than you expected.
3) several other points regarding storage, labor costs moving your stuff to/from the moving van, etc. Definitely try to find their reports somewhere.
I haven't seen any reports post-PODS, but I think it addresses many of the problems reported with other movers.
Don't forget IRS regulations. Their money to YOU is also THEIR deduction for business expenses, but the IRS has regulations regarding the minimum amount of time you remain employed with them, etc. I think it's 12 months, but could be mistaken.
HR departments are also aware of the statistics on failed relocations. They tend to fail within the first six months, they're more likely to fail with employees with fairly short time with the company (I think it's something like 30% among employees with less than 6 months at the company), etc.
Get a $100 NSLU2 and wipe its brain. Extremely small, extremely quiet, extremely low power and no worries that you'll come home and discover that your power supply has started a fire. You probably don't even need to worry about it being stolen since you can tuck it out of sight. Very out of sight if you use a wireless connection.
BTW I was running my servers at home but had the same problems mentioned elsewhere. Plus the growing problem of my email being rejected since it came from a block of residential IP addresses, and old hardware that I was increasingly uncomfortable leaving up unattended. I eventually said "screw it" and got a cheap virtual hosting system at Tummy. For $25/month I get reliable service and can run the apps of my choice.
The US and Russia efforts went so fast and so far because they were a proxy war. We came within a hair's breath of a nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis[*] and would have probably gone over the edge without a safe alternative.
On the other hand China will be building on 40 years of experience in manned spaceflight. It will still be incredibly challenging, but most of the problems and solutions are already known.
[*] The History Channel is good for nightmares. It wasn't a mere footnote, we came within minutes of nuclear war on at least two occasions.
In one episode of Dragnet, Joe Friday wants to get into an apartment to look around. I don't remember the details, just that he didn't have a warrant.
No problem -- he found the landlord and the landlord gave him permission to enter the tenant's property!
I don't know about California law at the time, but I know that my business law books says that tenancy means the landlord can't enter without express permission. That's why every lease I've signed has had clauses permitting entry on 24 hours written notice or when exceptional conditions require entry to prevent damage to the building (e.g., burst pipes). Yet a lot of people seem to think that Joe Friday was right....
Tell me again why one of these rogue states would bother with a very complex, and very visible, ballastic missile system when they could simply send it to the US in a cargo container? Maybe it can't get past the dock (which is hardly a given), but it would still cause immense immediate and economic damage to blow one in a busy port.
For that matter, blowing it a few miles offshore would still be enough to cause extreme civil disorder and economic chaos.
Finally, don't forget that launching a missile makes it clear who launched the missile... and invites massive US retaliation. A cargo container leaves a lot of doubt.
I'm sure it would be much cheaper to deorbit. You need to change the orbital mechanics so the junk starts to pass through the upper atmosphere, but you can let air resistance deorbit the trash over weeks or months.
In contrast to put everything into a parking orbit you have to change all of the orbital parameters. Changing your orbital inclination can be expensive.
Deleting accounts can be dangereous. You don't want user accounts to be recreated (e.g., does 'bsmith' refer to Bob Smith or Bill Smith, and what do you do when Bob is rehired?), and it's not uncommon for sysadmin accounts to be more integrated into the system than anyone intends. It's not intentional, just inadvertant ownerships or development scripts getting put into place before they're ready.
What you do want to do is _disable_ the account and monitor access attempts. This could be disabling the password and monitoring log files to something more sneaky like keeping the password in place but having a minimal program/script that records the connection information and flashes the security administrators before dropping the connection.
BTW disabling access is more than changing the/etc/shadow file. SSH keys are often overlooked, and a sysadmin probably has SSH-key access to multiple accounts. E.g., I can log in directly as root, but it's for a "worst case recovery" situation. You would also want to remove the person from/etc/group, if appropriate.
It's been years since I studied this with the hard numbers, but I think that's a popularization that doesn't take the sun into account. E.g., it mentions the earth getting into tidal lock with the moon, I thought the earth would lose the moon long, long before then. Maybe a few billion years until the earth loses the moon, then another billion years before the sun becomes a red giant? (It doesn't matter anyway - the earth will become inhospitable due to a runaway greenhouse effect in 100MY(?))
Another fun fact - the gravitational attraction between the moon and sun is twice that between the earth and moon. Let's see -- earth is 6e24 kg at 3.84e8m. sun 2e30kg at 1.5e11 m. Removing common factors, fe = 4.1e7, fs=8.9e7. Luna is the only major moon with this property, possibly excluding pluto/charon.
So why are lunar tides so much higher than solar tides? Because tidal forces drop off as 1/r^3. Running those same numbers (and remembering that the mass of the earth is approximately 81 times the mass of the moon) we get tm = 1.3e-3, ts = 6e-4, so the lunar tides are about twice as large as the solar tides.
BTW the tidal bulge is important, but if you look at the 1/r^3 ratio for the moon on each side of the orbit, you'll find that the solar attraction is 1.5% higher at perihelion than apihelion.
Doubling the number of developers doesn't mean you double the size of the industry. Some developers will leave the field, others will be discouraged from taking entry level jobs, etc.
The last point is something worth considering. My friends and I all have solid technical educations. A generation ago we would be leading the charge to get more students to pursue similar academic and career tracks. It's hard work, but it also meant you could have steady employment later.
Now we all discourage people from pursuing technical degrees. The risk is too high. Senior people may still be in demand (although we have to wonder about that as well), but entry-level positions?
For that matter it's not just IT. Higher education is getting much more expensive at the same time that skinflint republicans are cutting student assistance. That forces many students to be more focused on a "trade school" university education than the more well-rounded one of prior generations. K-12 education, it goes without saying, is now teaching to the test to avoid draconian measures under NCLB. (Never mind what a high-performing school district can do. How do you show improvement when you already peg the test? These districts will be punished for being "successful.")
That's a minor pain today, but where will this country be in 20 years? I don't begrudge other countries growing their IT economy, but what happens when everyone would rather stay at home with a higher standard of living than they could get here?
There's a term for what the US is doing -- "eating our seed corn". Businesses may need to look at the next quarterly statement, but the government should be taking a longer view. Maybe the solution is to increase immigration so these skilled workers are more motivated to stay, maybe it's to limit immigration so our students have a motivation to make the necessary investment to be highly skilled workers in 20 years. But AFAIK that question isn't even on the table.
Where did you get this? There are many reasonably stable three-plus body systems. ("reasonably stable" meaning that they'll last the lifetime of the stars, but could still be disrupted by passing stars, etc.)
The classic example is a close binary with a distant third. The distant star essentially sees the binaries as a point. The binaries see the gravitational attraction of the third star as essentially flat (since the tidal forces drop off as 1/r^3). This doesn't mean non-zero, it just means that the attraction of the "near" star won't be higher than the attraction of the "far" star. IIRC that's why the moon is slowly pulling away from the earth -- the sun is slowly pulling the earth and the moon apart.
Another example is a pair of close binaries. Again each binary is overwhelmingly dominated by its pair, with the gravitational attraction of the other pair as essentially flat.
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It's not LANGUAGE dependence, it's LIBRARY dependence. I was an extremely productive C developer because I knew the obscure (but standard) libraries and tools and could do something in a few days that would take others months (or longer!) to code and test.
I've made the transition to Java over the last few years. I knew Java syntax within a week (and thought some of the "obscure" stuff was irrelevant), took 6 months to learn the J2SE library (aha, I should use this class!) and another year to really understand how to use it properly. Over the same time I went from seeing anonymous inner classes as dangerous to a critical (and robust) solution to some common problems.
The software engineering process wouldn't speed this up at all, not unless you were able to set up a mentoring system with somebody who really knew his stuff.
BTW even the software engineering process can change between languages. Good shops will always do unit testing, Java provides incredibly rich - and standard! - support via junit, jmock et al.
Something overlooked in the trenches is that there's a very good business reason for switching from legacy C++ to solid Java (spring/struts/hibernate).
Finding employees.
Not because of "oh, I'm too good for C++" jerks. Just the simple fact that most recent development has been in Java, not C++. (C is also increasingly hard to find.) That's important when you're looking to expand your staff or replace departures -- it's harder to find people who are current in C++, and harder still to find good people who stayed with C++ instead of migrating to Java.
Same thing with using standard packages like Spring and Hibernate. They may not be the best technology, but they're almost always good enough and you can find good people who know how to use them.
As for outsourcing... huge mistake with a project this small. Besides the nightmare of managing a small team in a distant timezone, development teams this small need a lot of soft skills specific to the deployed environment. You could get around that with a rock solid spec, but I doubt that's the case here.
He might, but then HR will nail you with OSHA and EPA actions due to the improper disposal of genetic material on kleenex in your trash bin.
All of that is extremely fragile technology. Electronic media is, if anything, known to be extremely unreliable due to format changes and deterioration of the underlying media. Even if you have good media, do you have the software to understand it?
E.g., what would you do with a backup of a msql database? Not 'mysql', the once-popular 'msql' that preceded it.
The internet is also fragile. Look at the big picture -- how many copies really exist? The host (hopefully with backups), some search engines, a few intelligence agencies. But anywhere else?...
Paper? Most mass-produced paper contains small amount of acid that slowly deteriorates the paper. Acid-free paper should be stable, but iirc deterioriating paper is already a problem.
The risk from year-to-year is minimal, but shouldn't be entirely ignored. (Can you say New Orleans Public Library?) But over a few generations you definitely need to consider the risk of "fire, flood and insurrection".
More than 500 years out? Greenhouse gases would have washed out of the atmosphere and we would almost certainly be seeing the start of the next ice age. How long until many of those caches would be destroyed?
There are two types of economic gain. The most obvious is getting more money in exchange for your investment in money and effort. The more subtle one is getting into the game at all.
:-)
BTW don't assume that "certification" equates to "no experience." I'm not alone in having extensive C experience but having problems finding a Java position since I didn't make a 100% switch years ago. My java certs show that 1) I can work in this environment and 2) it forced me to take a broader perspective than I would have otherwise. If somebody has doubts that the sun exams have gotten decent, I'll start asking them technical questions as well.
There are legitimate needs for plausible deniability. E.g., doctor-patient and attorney-client confidentiality.
Maybe that's true for you, but my pre-lasik vision was so bad that my glasses were so heavy that they interfered with breathing _and_ gave me a serious fishbowl effect when turning my head. That's why I wore contacts unless there was a compelling reason not to -- and the pre-surgical month when I had to wear glasses was a nightmare.
The other reason I hated switching was that my contacts had no astigmatism correction, the glasses had some serious correction. (I can't remember why -- maybe the doc was an idiot who wouldn't write a prescription identical to the contacts.) If you ever want to know a good way to give somebody a headache....
So why do you think I got lasik? Vanity, or safety? Imagine fleeing a fire when anything more than 12-18" away is blurry.
Now, if you're talking about the idiots getting lasik because they have 20/40 or 20/60 vision -- I agree with you completely.
The key word is 'acceptance'. How do I know you accepted the offer? It's a hard question -- if I get a signed letter, how do I know it's your signature? How do I know you're authorized to accept that contract? And so on.
Under the UCC, a 'signature' is any tangible(?) mark indicating consent. It can be your legible signature in cursive. It can be your illegible signature in cursive. It can be an "X". It can be a crude drawing of Daffy Duck. It can be, in theory, an email where you say "I agree to this, Bob Smith" since you had to type it. (Anything written to a computer disk is 'tangible'. This post is tangible and hence covered by copyright.)
The problem is non-repudiation. If you give me a document claiming that I agreed to a contract, how do I disprove it? It's easy with email (easily forged) and crude drawings of Daffy Duck. Sometimes it's obvious with exemplars. Sometimes it requires some serious effort, e.g., determining that the inks used don't match.
(All with generous portion of NaCl since IANAL, but I have studied this since my signature is illegible and I occasionally run into law professors masquerading as clerks in chain stores.)
"Strategized" is nonsense, but "low-hanging fruit" is an extremely important concept in conveying that we can implement 80% of the desired functionality fairly easily... and that the next 10% will take as much effort as everything up to that point... as will the following 5%... and so on.
"Win-win" is bizspeak for "positive sum game." The alternative is the one where you only win by screwing over the client (something that clients DO NOT want to hear), or worse a negative sum game where you're both going to get screwed.
It's robbery, not theft, so by definition there's the use or threat of force involved.
I read an interesting statistic a while back. In the US, most home crime is theft. Crooks try hard to avoid contact with people since they never know who's armed. In the UK, most home crime is robbery.
I don't know if it's true, but it does drive home the fact that criminals adopt to their environment.
Seriously.
You probably don't want to jump into LDAP if this would be your sole use. However a site large enough to make maintainenance of the DNS files a pain is probably large enough that it either does, or at least should consider, using LDAP for user and system information. See the recent series of articles (in Linux Journal?) on setting up a single sign-on system using LDAP and Kerberos for an idea of how powerful it can be.
Yes, maintenance can be a bitch. But it's better than having to maintain separate access and permission files on dozens or hundreds of servers for hundreds or thousands of users. What are you going to use, NIS instead of LDAP+SSL? Besides there are already tools and front-ends and in the worst case you toss together some quick perl or java pages. It's not _that_ hard.
But why bother? Several reasons:
- LDAP is standard and has standard schema. That doesn't matter much when you create your initial system, but what happens when your company acquires another company using their own custom system? Or you're acquired by another company?
- LDAP is extensible. Again that doesn't matter when you create your initial system since you'll include everything you need. But what will it take to add new attributes? E.g., the new TXT entry that's used to indicate which hosts are authorized to send mail for the domain, or a key pair because your corporate overlords tell you to provide DNSSEC.
- DHCP servers can/will soon publish their IP address assignments to LDAP.
- RADIUS servers can/will soon(?) publish their assignments to LDAP.
- LDAP can/will soon be natively supported by bind in the next few releases. It won't be necessary to write tools that map your SQL database to text files, bind will be hitting the database directly.
If I were you, my first question would be whether the company already used LDAP or the CIO had plans that would require it anyway within the next few years. If so, document the points I made above and bite the bullet.
(The "can/will soon" is from the recent LJ articles.)
Apples and peas are about the same size when the context includes the 18-wheeler about to run over them in the middle of the road.
It's the roadkill theory of relativity.
The most familiar example, for many of us, is the nearly identical appearance of prairie dogs and squirrels, post-impact, on country roads.
50%. For the first time in history 50% of the public thinks the country would be better off with Democrats in power. (Republicans are down to 37%).
50%. This is the FIRST TIME in history that the opposition party has hit 50%.
50%. This is such a staggering number that even the Republican leadership will admit that, if the election were held today, that the Democrats would retake control of both houses of Congress. Six years of Republican stonewalling into dozens -- hundreds -- of critical issues will be broken. There will be blood on the walls --- already there are reputable claims that the Abhramcoff(sp?) scandal will take down dozens of Republican (and only Republican members of congress. Not "forced to resigned" either -- the former Representative Cunningham won't be alone in federal prison for corruption.
I don't want to turn this into a political thread -- go to Daily Kos is that -- but the "so what, they're out of power" argument ends on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. The country is pissed off.
(P.S., did I mention that Nixon was more popular before his resignation than Bush is today?)
BTW, answering the point upstream -- the Democrats ensure affordable broadband to at least half of the population by passing a single law that costs no money. "No state, or subdivision within, shall pass any law restricting the ability of any government entity from offering municipal broadband service if it so chooses." Some cities are seriously considering offering citywide WiFi as a municipal utility, same as they offer water, sewer, trash collection, even power and natural gas. Yet the state legislature may pass a law saying that only for-profit entities can offer such service. Huh? Nobody is saying that people _must_ choose municipal WiFi, just that it should be an option on the table, esp. for people in areas where the commercial providers do not or cannot offer service.
Dateline and similar news magazines have covered moving horror stories repeatedly. You should see if you can find information at their websites.
Some of the pointers I remember are:
0) find a reputable mover. If unsure:....
1) pack it yourself. The problem is that they charge for materials used... and you'll find yourself paying for two, no three, rolls of bubble wrap being used to wrap your alarm clock.
2) get a binding weight before you sign off on them leaving. A common abuse is to quote a cost at 10,000 pounds, say, and then telling you that it actually weighed 18,000 pounds and you owe a few thousand dollars more than you expected.
3) several other points regarding storage, labor costs moving your stuff to/from the moving van, etc. Definitely try to find their reports somewhere.
I haven't seen any reports post-PODS, but I think it addresses many of the problems reported with other movers.
Don't forget IRS regulations. Their money to YOU is also THEIR deduction for business expenses, but the IRS has regulations regarding the minimum amount of time you remain employed with them, etc. I think it's 12 months, but could be mistaken.
HR departments are also aware of the statistics on failed relocations. They tend to fail within the first six months, they're more likely to fail with employees with fairly short time with the company (I think it's something like 30% among employees with less than 6 months at the company), etc.
BTW I was running my servers at home but had the same problems mentioned elsewhere. Plus the growing problem of my email being rejected since it came from a block of residential IP addresses, and old hardware that I was increasingly uncomfortable leaving up unattended. I eventually said "screw it" and got a cheap virtual hosting system at Tummy. For $25/month I get reliable service and can run the apps of my choice.
The US and Russia efforts went so fast and so far because they were a proxy war. We came within a hair's breath of a nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis[*] and would have probably gone over the edge without a safe alternative.
On the other hand China will be building on 40 years of experience in manned spaceflight. It will still be incredibly challenging, but most of the problems and solutions are already known.
[*] The History Channel is good for nightmares. It wasn't a mere footnote, we came within minutes of nuclear war on at least two occasions.
In one episode of Dragnet, Joe Friday wants to get into an apartment to look around. I don't remember the details, just that he didn't have a warrant.
No problem -- he found the landlord and the landlord gave him permission to enter the tenant's property!
I don't know about California law at the time, but I know that my business law books says that tenancy means the landlord can't enter without express permission. That's why every lease I've signed has had clauses permitting entry on 24 hours written notice or when exceptional conditions require entry to prevent damage to the building (e.g., burst pipes). Yet a lot of people seem to think that Joe Friday was right....
Are you sure about that? I thought that all of the restrictions were waived when you're physically sharing the same space.
Tell me again why one of these rogue states would bother with a very complex, and very visible, ballastic missile system when they could simply send it to the US in a cargo container? Maybe it can't get past the dock (which is hardly a given), but it would still cause immense immediate and economic damage to blow one in a busy port.
For that matter, blowing it a few miles offshore would still be enough to cause extreme civil disorder and economic chaos.
Finally, don't forget that launching a missile makes it clear who launched the missile... and invites massive US retaliation. A cargo container leaves a lot of doubt.
I'm sure it would be much cheaper to deorbit. You need to change the orbital mechanics so the junk starts to pass through the upper atmosphere, but you can let air resistance deorbit the trash over weeks or months.
In contrast to put everything into a parking orbit you have to change all of the orbital parameters. Changing your orbital inclination can be expensive.
Deleting accounts can be dangereous. You don't want user accounts to be recreated (e.g., does 'bsmith' refer to Bob Smith or Bill Smith, and what do you do when Bob is rehired?), and it's not uncommon for sysadmin accounts to be more integrated into the system than anyone intends. It's not intentional, just inadvertant ownerships or development scripts getting put into place before they're ready.
/etc/shadow file. SSH keys are often overlooked, and a sysadmin probably has SSH-key access to multiple accounts. E.g., I can log in directly as root, but it's for a "worst case recovery" situation. You would also want to remove the person from /etc/group, if appropriate.
What you do want to do is _disable_ the account and monitor access attempts. This could be disabling the password and monitoring log files to something more sneaky like keeping the password in place but having a minimal program/script that records the connection information and flashes the security administrators before dropping the connection.
BTW disabling access is more than changing the
It's been years since I studied this with the hard numbers, but I think that's a popularization that doesn't take the sun into account. E.g., it mentions the earth getting into tidal lock with the moon, I thought the earth would lose the moon long, long before then. Maybe a few billion years until the earth loses the moon, then another billion years before the sun becomes a red giant? (It doesn't matter anyway - the earth will become inhospitable due to a runaway greenhouse effect in 100MY(?))
Another fun fact - the gravitational attraction between the moon and sun is twice that between the earth and moon. Let's see -- earth is 6e24 kg at 3.84e8m. sun 2e30kg at 1.5e11 m. Removing common factors, fe = 4.1e7, fs=8.9e7. Luna is the only major moon with this property, possibly excluding pluto/charon.
So why are lunar tides so much higher than solar tides? Because tidal forces drop off as 1/r^3. Running those same numbers (and remembering that the mass of the earth is approximately 81 times the mass of the moon) we get tm = 1.3e-3, ts = 6e-4, so the lunar tides are about twice as large as the solar tides.
BTW the tidal bulge is important, but if you look at the 1/r^3 ratio for the moon on each side of the orbit, you'll find that the solar attraction is 1.5% higher at perihelion than apihelion.
Doubling the number of developers doesn't mean you double the size of the industry. Some developers will leave the field, others will be discouraged from taking entry level jobs, etc.
The last point is something worth considering. My friends and I all have solid technical educations. A generation ago we would be leading the charge to get more students to pursue similar academic and career tracks. It's hard work, but it also meant you could have steady employment later.
Now we all discourage people from pursuing technical degrees. The risk is too high. Senior people may still be in demand (although we have to wonder about that as well), but entry-level positions?
For that matter it's not just IT. Higher education is getting much more expensive at the same time that skinflint republicans are cutting student assistance. That forces many students to be more focused on a "trade school" university education than the more well-rounded one of prior generations. K-12 education, it goes without saying, is now teaching to the test to avoid draconian measures under NCLB. (Never mind what a high-performing school district can do. How do you show improvement when you already peg the test? These districts will be punished for being "successful.")
That's a minor pain today, but where will this country be in 20 years? I don't begrudge other countries growing their IT economy, but what happens when everyone would rather stay at home with a higher standard of living than they could get here?
There's a term for what the US is doing -- "eating our seed corn". Businesses may need to look at the next quarterly statement, but the government should be taking a longer view. Maybe the solution is to increase immigration so these skilled workers are more motivated to stay, maybe it's to limit immigration so our students have a motivation to make the necessary investment to be highly skilled workers in 20 years. But AFAIK that question isn't even on the table.
Where did you get this? There are many reasonably stable three-plus body systems. ("reasonably stable" meaning that they'll last the lifetime of the stars, but could still be disrupted by passing stars, etc.)
The classic example is a close binary with a distant third. The distant star essentially sees the binaries as a point. The binaries see the gravitational attraction of the third star as essentially flat (since the tidal forces drop off as 1/r^3). This doesn't mean non-zero, it just means that the attraction of the "near" star won't be higher than the attraction of the "far" star. IIRC that's why the moon is slowly pulling away from the earth -- the sun is slowly pulling the earth and the moon apart.
Another example is a pair of close binaries. Again each binary is overwhelmingly dominated by its pair, with the gravitational attraction of the other pair as essentially flat.