Apparently the RIAA has a yearly summit to decide the most ungodly drop-stupid way they can think of to piss off the rest of the planet.
Their other idea (have agents walk around handing out random invoices to everyone they catch humming a tune in public) apparently never made it past the focus groups. Probably because everyone would tell them to fuck off or something...
Either way, how come it doesn't ask for permission to transmit (and detail what gets transmitted), like most modern smartphones require? You know, that privacy thing everyone keeps harping on?
That alone would (well, should) make people leery before buying one.
Assuming that you do have the staff and infrastructure in place to fix, test and compile the code, you and your organization are subsequently forked from the official release. A scenario which is can be just as bad than waiting for MS to fix.
Well, with one not-so-small exception... the MS solution is still *broken* (or vulnerable, or otherwise crippled, etc), while the custom code-up job got things running again.
The onus is on your org, then, to repeatedly merge in changes, recompile, retest, and re-release your forked code base.
Or, you could just use the self-patched job, and meanwhile wait to see if the bug is repaired in the next version/patch. If it is, you then replace the self-patched binary(ies?) with the proper (and fixed) vendor-supplied ones to see if that fixed things. If it tests good, fix any other custom code/libs/whatever that hangs off of it, and you're set. It's sort of why they include release notes n' stuff, you know?:)
Again, this is all on the assumption you have the resources/knowledge to actually code a solution. Which many organziations do not.
Now this is the most likely scenario, but then is certainly not an absolute, and doesn't preclude hiring someone to get the job done (even if for a temporary fix).
It all depends on what broke, how badly, and how important it is to get it into a not-broke condition ASAP.
All that said, it doesn't invalidate GP's point - at least with FOSS, you can actually do something about it. Dunno about you, but I find it preferable to shrugging shoulders, blaming Microsoft, and praying that the PHB's don't decide to take it out on the poor slobs stuck in the middle.
I am soooo glad I work for one of those mythical good managers.
I do now... but a previous position had me reporting to an asshat for a manager. I was lucky in that he wasn't bright enough to realize that he left a paper trail a mile wide, but yeah... if it was actually malicious (and not just incompetence), I doubt it would have helped much. He got thrown out after a major project failure, mostly for trying to keep changing priorities and add crap that was never in the original project plan.
No idea if that particular company is still around...
...the fact that you can read and/or modify anyone's email at whim can be used to create an underlying fear in your co-workers?
I dunno... I got into the biz for the beer and the chicks. It's evident that I was lied to, but hey - at least I can still play with the neat tech toys as they arrive...
No, seriously. It won't. If you think Management is going to own up to a fault (especially a massive one) of their making, and risk losing job, career, etc? Heh... good luck with working under that assumption.
The best counter you can have against such a manager (especially one who consistently screws up) is to make sure you get a paper trail and project management chart all set - and get his signature on it! Then, be double-plus careful to note all changes and deviations, again with supporting evidence. It won't prevent an asshat from blaming you and/or your team anyway, but it will make fixing that blame much harder to do.
Dunno, man... the MiG 25 was basically two humongoid engines with a pilot and missile racks strapped on. It had the approximate combat range of a paper airplane, and from all accounts IMHO was about as maneuverable as a brick.
The MiG 25's big trick was that it could move hella fast when it had to (well, for a few minutes anyway, then the gas ran out).
The "F" (and "fighter") designation was the US' way of weaseling out of treaty restrictions on bombers (remember - back in the early 1980's, the US and USSR were still pointing tens of thousands of nukes at each other).
The F-117 was in no way, shape, or form, made for dogfighting, and had zero means of carrying close-in AA weaponry. If you had to fend off a halfway competent MiG pilot, you were basically fucked.
It's pretty obvious, and I suspect the only reason the USSR didn't pitch a bitch over it is because they felt that it wasn't worth the bother. After all, it was a short-range small-capacity tactical bomber, and one that no sane pilot would ever want to drop a nuclear warhead from. (Why? because there's no frickin' way you'd clear the blast zone in time, unless you dropped it from absolute maximum altitude while simultaneously pushing the throttles to the firewall... a condition where the whole stealth thing becomes rather useless.)
I see. And how many billions of dollars per year does your employer make, rounded down to the nearest integer?
If the answer is zero, you're not really the target of VDI...
Eh? My employer falls (barely) under that "zero" category, but as a manufacturing environment, VDI is the best fucking thing since sliced bread. If you've ever had to deal with computers in an environment where there's wild temperature swings and carbide dust that can get literally anywhere, you quickly find out that traditional desktops tend to die early.
Also, you don't have to do the whole VDI package to make it work... just get some little Panologic devices, and install the (primitive, but useful) management software that comes with them, tying the VMs to an existing farm. Doing it that way saves a big bucket of money if that's your main driver, and if your control/management needs aren't very large.
No, seriously, you couldn't be more right. The Dell E6700 I had to limp along with when I first began working at my present position was a right pain in the ass. It was a driving force (along with the endless RAM troubles we saw in our PE 2950 servers) that had us going to HP here where I work, both at the user and server level (we're using HP DL 360's for servers now).
I'm typing this missive on an HP EliteBook 8440p (which runs Ubuntu 10.10 very nicely, I must say:) ).
Easily fixed - get you and your co-workers to start dumping odd chemicals in during bathroom breaks. One week, dump in enough corn syrup to warrant the company hiring a nurse specializing in diabetes. Next week, bring on the gasoline. Week after that, break out those oils that your missus likes to perfume the house with.
I figure in a month, they'll either stop monitoring the thing, or they'll have to call in a hazmat team.
On behalf of myself and the rest of your distant ancestors, I'd like to (sorta) apologize for the huge pile of steamy and unintelligble shit you're going to be stuck with having to untangle, if you ever figure out what an RFID tag/chip was. You thought DRM was bad? Hah! good luck with this one, campers.
You're going to see these little critters everywhere, in everything, and not know WTF they do. No, we're not doing it to screw with you... well, not overtly, anyway.
Either case, with a little luck, maybe you'll figure it out. We're sorry about the migraines it'll create anyway.
(...what, you say nobody will be able to read this by that time? Feh -/. will still be around by then, no sweat. It'll be in the crusty-but still-running server powered by grits. Hot grits, to be precise. And uname -a on it will *still* cough up a version 2.4 kernel.)
Dunno... I recently had to sit in as technical on a metric ton of interviews for open IT positions here where I work. I turned down an IT ops management candidate who had a Masters' Degree in Comp Sci and 10 years of management experience, but never held down a management position at any one company for more than 3 years (the winning candidate had only a 4-yr EE degree, but nearly 20 years' experience managing at an F100 company).
I also talked them into throwing out resumes of college grads with little experience in favor of High School degree holders with more (and demonstrable) experience.
Long story short, a degree only tells me (and most folks I know in the field) one thing: The candidate can be dedicated towards a goal, and is willing to put up with some BS to get there. It's a differentiator, sure... but it's bupkis compared to practical, hands-on experience, and a candidate who rides on his or her sheepskin is less valuable than one who has none but shows initiative, curiosity, and drive.
Before you say it, you're talking to a former EE, and someone who has taught CompSci (and was licensed and affiliated w/ the state board of regents) at a college for six years.
Nitpick: Woodward and Berenstein are famous because they uncovered an actual crime in progress.
The only two things Assange managed were these:
* He published information that the rest of the planet pretty much knew about anyway, just not in detail * He showed himself to be an attention whore of sorts, pretending to live the life of James Bond and the like.
According to Cryptome, he was angling for money as well.
People in a lot of countries are getting a wakeup call on how the US really views them...
If you think for one moment that other countries don't view each other through the same jaundiced, prejudiced, and otherwise unkind views, you are more than just a little naive.
This isn't new news, nor does it reveal anything that sufficiently wise individuals didn't already know.
Err, what? How the frig does someone who only makes $13,000 a year get up the scratch to go on international flights? Even counting such things as living with parents, having his basics taken care of (food, etc), and not owning a car, etc?
This one really stretches the ol' plausibility meter beyond design limits, yanno?
Hell, why not treat it as a benefit, like free sodas? I recently managed to talk our employer into doing just that... As long as you're not divulging company secrets, moonlighting, or surfing pr0n on our machinery, well? We really don't give a shit as long as you get your work done.
As a bonus, I don't have to futz around on the proxy as much building reports on who may be goofing off, which in turn gives me an extra hour during the week to go do something useful on the network. It also means that folks aren't spending as much time trying to circumvent the system. Now certainly we block production tools from reaching the Internet (they're on their own insulated subnets, so it's drop-easy to wall them off), but office computers are only proxied enough to keep things efficient.
They said to not post about it in Facebook and the like. The reason why is more self-protection for the students who may want or need a security clearance later on.
If you've ever had to get a higher-end security clearance (I've had them both in the military and as a civilian), you would know just how anal and frustratingly detailed the FBI and DSA can get when it comes to investigating your background (interesting tidbit - if you have a debt that's more than 180 days past due - for any reason, even if you didn't know about it, you get denied. I had a former co-worker get his clearance initially rejected because he never saw the $20.odd account closing fee sent by an old cell phone company to his old address).
As crazy as the investigations can get, coupled with the government's ability to dredge through your online presence over the years, it's common-sense to not go around spouting off about things that the government is obviously going to be sensitive about if you ever expect to work for them in a sensitive role at some point in the future.
"You would like to believe that the brightest military minds in the world were duped into invading Iraq?"
Erwin Rommel was arguably one of the most brilliant military strategists (and tacticians) of the entire 20th Century... and he still got duped by the Allies in Africa, and in France.
QED: It's not as if "the brightest military minds in the world" are infallible, especially if they unknowingly have bad datasets to work with.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd love to put facebook et al on the "really fucking horrible slow/strangle" option so I can get my employees time back!
You know you can do that with a proxy server and appropriate port blockage at your company firewall, right?
It'd be easier to blackhole, anyway. Think we can talk 'em into it?
Apparently the RIAA has a yearly summit to decide the most ungodly drop-stupid way they can think of to piss off the rest of the planet.
Their other idea (have agents walk around handing out random invoices to everyone they catch humming a tune in public) apparently never made it past the focus groups. Probably because everyone would tell them to fuck off or something...
According to their lies they should have gone bankrupt by now.
Maybe they're just folding the numbers together and calling it the US national debt? It would explain a lot of things...
Either way, how come it doesn't ask for permission to transmit (and detail what gets transmitted), like most modern smartphones require? You know, that privacy thing everyone keeps harping on?
That alone would (well, should) make people leery before buying one.
Assuming that you do have the staff and infrastructure in place to fix, test and compile the code, you and your organization are subsequently forked from the official release. A scenario which is can be just as bad than waiting for MS to fix.
Well, with one not-so-small exception... the MS solution is still *broken* (or vulnerable, or otherwise crippled, etc), while the custom code-up job got things running again.
The onus is on your org, then, to repeatedly merge in changes, recompile, retest, and re-release your forked code base.
Or, you could just use the self-patched job, and meanwhile wait to see if the bug is repaired in the next version/patch. If it is, you then replace the self-patched binary(ies?) with the proper (and fixed) vendor-supplied ones to see if that fixed things. If it tests good, fix any other custom code/libs/whatever that hangs off of it, and you're set. It's sort of why they include release notes n' stuff, you know? :)
Again, this is all on the assumption you have the resources/knowledge to actually code a solution. Which many organziations do not.
Now this is the most likely scenario, but then is certainly not an absolute, and doesn't preclude hiring someone to get the job done (even if for a temporary fix).
It all depends on what broke, how badly, and how important it is to get it into a not-broke condition ASAP.
All that said, it doesn't invalidate GP's point - at least with FOSS, you can actually do something about it. Dunno about you, but I find it preferable to shrugging shoulders, blaming Microsoft, and praying that the PHB's don't decide to take it out on the poor slobs stuck in the middle.
I am soooo glad I work for one of those mythical good managers.
I do now... but a previous position had me reporting to an asshat for a manager. I was lucky in that he wasn't bright enough to realize that he left a paper trail a mile wide, but yeah... if it was actually malicious (and not just incompetence), I doubt it would have helped much. He got thrown out after a major project failure, mostly for trying to keep changing priorities and add crap that was never in the original project plan.
No idea if that particular company is still around...
I'm typing this on a near-new HP Elitebook. Someone had to pilot the new executive laptops, after all...
I think next year I'll try and talk them into using MacBook Pros >:)
...the fact that you can read and/or modify anyone's email at whim can be used to create an underlying fear in your co-workers?
I dunno... I got into the biz for the beer and the chicks. It's evident that I was lied to, but hey - at least I can still play with the neat tech toys as they arrive...
No, seriously. It won't. If you think Management is going to own up to a fault (especially a massive one) of their making, and risk losing job, career, etc? Heh... good luck with working under that assumption.
The best counter you can have against such a manager (especially one who consistently screws up) is to make sure you get a paper trail and project management chart all set - and get his signature on it! Then, be double-plus careful to note all changes and deviations, again with supporting evidence. It won't prevent an asshat from blaming you and/or your team anyway, but it will make fixing that blame much harder to do.
Dunno, man... the MiG 25 was basically two humongoid engines with a pilot and missile racks strapped on. It had the approximate combat range of a paper airplane, and from all accounts IMHO was about as maneuverable as a brick.
The MiG 25's big trick was that it could move hella fast when it had to (well, for a few minutes anyway, then the gas ran out).
The "F" (and "fighter") designation was the US' way of weaseling out of treaty restrictions on bombers (remember - back in the early 1980's, the US and USSR were still pointing tens of thousands of nukes at each other).
The F-117 was in no way, shape, or form, made for dogfighting, and had zero means of carrying close-in AA weaponry. If you had to fend off a halfway competent MiG pilot, you were basically fucked.
It's pretty obvious, and I suspect the only reason the USSR didn't pitch a bitch over it is because they felt that it wasn't worth the bother. After all, it was a short-range small-capacity tactical bomber, and one that no sane pilot would ever want to drop a nuclear warhead from. (Why? because there's no frickin' way you'd clear the blast zone in time, unless you dropped it from absolute maximum altitude while simultaneously pushing the throttles to the firewall... a condition where the whole stealth thing becomes rather useless.)
I see. And how many billions of dollars per year does your employer make, rounded down to the nearest integer?
If the answer is zero, you're not really the target of VDI...
Eh? My employer falls (barely) under that "zero" category, but as a manufacturing environment, VDI is the best fucking thing since sliced bread. If you've ever had to deal with computers in an environment where there's wild temperature swings and carbide dust that can get literally anywhere, you quickly find out that traditional desktops tend to die early.
Also, you don't have to do the whole VDI package to make it work... just get some little Panologic devices, and install the (primitive, but useful) management software that comes with them, tying the VMs to an existing farm. Doing it that way saves a big bucket of money if that's your main driver, and if your control/management needs aren't very large.
No, seriously, you couldn't be more right. The Dell E6700 I had to limp along with when I first began working at my present position was a right pain in the ass. It was a driving force (along with the endless RAM troubles we saw in our PE 2950 servers) that had us going to HP here where I work, both at the user and server level (we're using HP DL 360's for servers now).
I'm typing this missive on an HP EliteBook 8440p (which runs Ubuntu 10.10 very nicely, I must say :) ).
STD checking, duh.
Easily fixed - get you and your co-workers to start dumping odd chemicals in during bathroom breaks. One week, dump in enough corn syrup to warrant the company hiring a nurse specializing in diabetes. Next week, bring on the gasoline. Week after that, break out those oils that your missus likes to perfume the house with.
I figure in a month, they'll either stop monitoring the thing, or they'll have to call in a hazmat team.
On behalf of myself and the rest of your distant ancestors, I'd like to (sorta) apologize for the huge pile of steamy and unintelligble shit you're going to be stuck with having to untangle, if you ever figure out what an RFID tag/chip was. You thought DRM was bad? Hah! good luck with this one, campers.
You're going to see these little critters everywhere, in everything, and not know WTF they do. No, we're not doing it to screw with you... well, not overtly, anyway.
Either case, with a little luck, maybe you'll figure it out. We're sorry about the migraines it'll create anyway.
(...what, you say nobody will be able to read this by that time? Feh - /. will still be around by then, no sweat. It'll be in the crusty-but still-running server powered by grits. Hot grits, to be precise. And uname -a on it will *still* cough up a version 2.4 kernel.)
(warning: anecdotal evidence ahead)
Dunno... I recently had to sit in as technical on a metric ton of interviews for open IT positions here where I work. I turned down an IT ops management candidate who had a Masters' Degree in Comp Sci and 10 years of management experience, but never held down a management position at any one company for more than 3 years (the winning candidate had only a 4-yr EE degree, but nearly 20 years' experience managing at an F100 company).
I also talked them into throwing out resumes of college grads with little experience in favor of High School degree holders with more (and demonstrable) experience.
Long story short, a degree only tells me (and most folks I know in the field) one thing: The candidate can be dedicated towards a goal, and is willing to put up with some BS to get there. It's a differentiator, sure... but it's bupkis compared to practical, hands-on experience, and a candidate who rides on his or her sheepskin is less valuable than one who has none but shows initiative, curiosity, and drive.
Before you say it, you're talking to a former EE, and someone who has taught CompSci (and was licensed and affiliated w/ the state board of regents) at a college for six years.
Nitpick: Woodward and Berenstein are famous because they uncovered an actual crime in progress.
The only two things Assange managed were these:
* He published information that the rest of the planet pretty much knew about anyway, just not in detail
* He showed himself to be an attention whore of sorts, pretending to live the life of James Bond and the like.
According to Cryptome, he was angling for money as well.
People in a lot of countries are getting a wakeup call on how the US really views them ...
If you think for one moment that other countries don't view each other through the same jaundiced, prejudiced, and otherwise unkind views, you are more than just a little naive.
This isn't new news, nor does it reveal anything that sufficiently wise individuals didn't already know.
Err, what? How the frig does someone who only makes $13,000 a year get up the scratch to go on international flights? Even counting such things as living with parents, having his basics taken care of (food, etc), and not owning a car, etc?
This one really stretches the ol' plausibility meter beyond design limits, yanno?
Parent is right.
Hell, why not treat it as a benefit, like free sodas? I recently managed to talk our employer into doing just that... As long as you're not divulging company secrets, moonlighting, or surfing pr0n on our machinery, well? We really don't give a shit as long as you get your work done.
As a bonus, I don't have to futz around on the proxy as much building reports on who may be goofing off, which in turn gives me an extra hour during the week to go do something useful on the network. It also means that folks aren't spending as much time trying to circumvent the system. Now certainly we block production tools from reaching the Internet (they're on their own insulated subnets, so it's drop-easy to wall them off), but office computers are only proxied enough to keep things efficient.
Question: Would that be before or after the neighborhood cats discover it?
They said to not post about it in Facebook and the like. The reason why is more self-protection for the students who may want or need a security clearance later on.
If you've ever had to get a higher-end security clearance (I've had them both in the military and as a civilian), you would know just how anal and frustratingly detailed the FBI and DSA can get when it comes to investigating your background (interesting tidbit - if you have a debt that's more than 180 days past due - for any reason, even if you didn't know about it, you get denied. I had a former co-worker get his clearance initially rejected because he never saw the $20.odd account closing fee sent by an old cell phone company to his old address).
As crazy as the investigations can get, coupled with the government's ability to dredge through your online presence over the years, it's common-sense to not go around spouting off about things that the government is obviously going to be sensitive about if you ever expect to work for them in a sensitive role at some point in the future.
"You would like to believe that the brightest military minds in the world were duped into invading Iraq?"
Erwin Rommel was arguably one of the most brilliant military strategists (and tacticians) of the entire 20th Century... and he still got duped by the Allies in Africa, and in France.
QED: It's not as if "the brightest military minds in the world" are infallible, especially if they unknowingly have bad datasets to work with.