That's an easy one though. The call or text is to the owner of the phone. The owner of the phone is your employer. The addressee is 2125551212@someprovider.blackberry.net, which is therefore owned by the your employer. You just happen to be using their phone in the course of your work.
Much like the golden rule, he who pays the bills makes the rules.
It depends on the company. One provider who I won't name (_extel), I was bitching about the overages, so they faxed me all the texts that came through that month. It was complete. From, to, and message. They kept it all on file.
I'm on a prepaid phone now. They won't provide me with even the call list, much less texts. Probably because it's prepaid, they don't want the extra overhead of storing that data. I wasn't just casually asking about my service. I had received a threatening call, which appeared to be to the wrong number. I wanted to know who it was from, so I could contact the police. "Bob, I'm going to kill you, your family, your friends, and even your dog.". Sorry, I'm not Bob, and I don't own a dog.:) Whoever Bob is, is going to need protection from the nutjob though. The providers answer was (after checking with their supervisor) "We don't maintain any call history for any of our users, so unfortunately we can't tell you or the police who it was." That made me feel a little bit better about making calls on it, so I'm still their customer.:)
Oh, I know all about the intermittent failures. I worked in a computer store for a couple years, and customers would bring in PC's that would crash "sometimes". One guy brought in his machine once a week, with different non-existent problems. I was particularly happy when the boss got involved one of the times. His complaint was that the flight simulator he was playing would bank left for no reason. "I was a pilot, I know how to fly a plane, and this isn't right!". Good, I was a pilot too. I love flight simulators, and the boss told me "keep using it until you can find the problem, and then fix it.". I played it for 8 hours straight. Even when I took bathroom breaks or went to lunch, I'd trim out for straight and level, and when I came back, it was still flying strong. In the end, I had to explain to him how to work the trim on the joystick.:)
We had plenty of "economy" PC's that we sold, that just had weird intermittent problems. Stun guns are great for RMAing those. It changes the problem from "intermittent failure" to "doesn't turn on".:)
I know some intermittent problems are a bastard to work through though. I had a machine once that would get hung up about once every two weeks. The fix for that one was to have a cron to reboot it at 5am Monday morning. It was ugly, but it got us around the hardware problem until I could justify upgrading it. The reboot process took just long enough to trigger our paging system, so I'd get a down page, and then a minute later an up page. That was my Monday morning wakeup call.
We tried to fix everything ourselves, and avoided returning things. For the most part, machines (chassis, motherboard, and CPU) lasted the usable life of the machine. By the time they'd go wonky, they were too old to bother fix.:) CPU fans (as applicable), additional cooling, and hard drives were our biggest problems. We once got a bad set of memory, which shifted us from buying it from a reputable wholesaler, to buying directly from Crucial. I've never had a fault with Crucial memory. We'd RMA drives in lots. Once we had 15 to 20, they'd all get sent back, and then a week or so later it was like Christmas.:)
OS problems were pretty obvious to us. We had a baseline install that was cloned to every machine in that series. Literally I'd install and configure the OS, and tune it up for our needs. I'd then clean it up for size and then tar up the entire thing. We had install CD's which had an install script. The script would format the OS drive, and then untar the previously created tar onto the blank drive. We never had surprises like "did this get installed?"
We didn't necessarily upgrade the OS every time there was an new one, but we kept them patched in sync with each other. We had up to 3 different versions of the same distro floating around at the same time, but it was versioned for our build number also. If it's an OS problem, it's going to show up in an awful lot of machines. Since I tested any new build extensively in house, and then as a one-off in production as part of a cluster, it was well tested before it ever got fully deployed to production.
On the flaky HP, I changed the power supply, hard drives, and memory with known good ones. It still had the problem which left us with the motherboard being bad, or demons in the case.:) By the time we got sufficiently annoyed with it, it was too old and slow to bother with.
That's where I started really liking the Supermicro machines. The motherboards were good and stable. They included all the drive controllers and network interfaces. We could order the same part number, and get the same machine for quite a while. We'd get CPU's, memory, and hard drives, and of course keep spare drives on hand (and a variety of other common failure parts).
On several occasions, I had to deal with Dell. I hate them. One customer had a drive failure. I got to the datacenter at 3pm on a Friday to help him out. They kept me on the phone with "try this..." "try this..." and then finally after 5pm (I believe) they agreed the drive was bad. {sigh} It turns out their 4 hour response doesn't work quite like that. They had to ship us a replacement drive from 100 miles away, and 5pm was the cutoff for shipping. They wanted it shipped to the datacenter, which didn't have anyone to receive it. It took an act of freakin' god to get them to ship it to my house. Saturday afternoon at like 4pm I received the drive, so I took a drive back to the datacenter (only an hour away) to put the new drive in.
For my own network, we had hot spare machines. They were running with an IP. I could make then anything I wanted, but they had already been designated for particular tasks. If it was needed for something else, I could have it up and running in about 15 minutes. If a drive died, we'd grab one from the box of drives that we kept on the floor, and voila, it's rebuilding and will be 100% in about an hour. Meanwhile, it was taken out of production until it got done rebuilding.
I don't trust anyone for anything that I can't put my hands on. You could tell me you have techs standing by a mile away with spare machines coming out of their asses. I know in practice, I won't have a machine up and running in an hour, and probably not within a day.
We did a similar dance with IBM. That company spent a fortune with them on hardware and warranties. There was one server that I diagnosed as having a motherboard problem. With 24/7 support, it took two days to get someone to the site. When they got there, they changed several parts (but not the motherboard), and still couldn't get it working. "Oh, I'll need another tech to come have a look." Another two days later they came back with the diagnosis that the motherboard was bad, and it wasn't covered under the warranty. Thank god we had another machine to move to. That company didn't have very many spare machines, and no spare drives at the datacenter.
The only repair I've ever had with HP went miserably. We had a flaky machine that we returned to them for repair. we got it back, and it was still flaky. By flaky, I mean it would run for between 2 to 30 minutes, and then randomly crash, even though the OS drive was cloned from an identical machine. We returned it again, they repaired it again, and again it didn't work right. We gave up, and it became a decoration in the storage room.
Sad, but it's very true. Lets have a meeting to figure out what we're going to talk about in the next meeting. And of course, another meeting to schedule an appropriate time for that meeting. Following the actual meeting, you'll have a post-meeting meeting to discuss items in the meeting, and finally a meeting to decide what action to take based on the actual meeting.
They weren't always entertained when I'd fall asleep. When I'd get nudged, I'd just ask if it was the real meeting, and remind them not to wake me up until we were talking about something productive.:)
Meetings are great though. You can waste an entire week talking about what work could be done in one day.:)
Nope, drug labs were created in 1990. There were no illegal drugs before that. Well, except:
Opium
Morphine
Heroin
Cocaine
Crack cocaine (popularized in the 1980's)
Marijuana (sorting and processing counts as a lab),
Methamphetamine (invented 1893, popularized in the 1960's)
Crystal methamphetamine (invented 1919)
Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA/Adam/Ecstasy/X) (invented 1912, popularized in the 1970's and 1980's),
and we can't forget the all time favorite Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) (invented 1938, popularized in the 1960's)
Sorry, it's not an all inclusive list, it's just a sampling of.... well.... popular non-pharmaceutical drugs. Some were pharmaceuticals, but most that you'll find on the street aren't commercially produced.
The Chernobyl accident happened April 25th, 1986. Since I'm guessing you weren't alive yet, or old enough to remember, there was a bit of a pesky problem of nuclear fallout that spread quite a bit.
Drugs a bit tainted by radioactive fallout could still be sold for a profit. Who are you going to complain to. It's just like if you buy an 8 ball of coke, but it turns out to be baby powder. It's not like you can just call the cops and say "I paid for coke, but he gave me baby powder!" Drugs destroyed because they may be radioactive are lost money. Drug manufacturers and dealers are just like any big business. They want to make a profit. They aren't going to throw away perfectly good product, if they can sell it.
Oh come on, you know court documents are always more than triplicate.:) Plaintiff's attorney, defendant's attorney, plaintiff, defendant, clerk of courts, judge, frequently a list of specified involved parties, and of course your own file(s).
When I was working for companies (oohh, I need a job), I carried my work phone and private phone. Personal calls and texts were on the personal phone. Work calls and texts were on the work phone.
There was such a huge difference in the texts.
On the work phone, about 1000 texts/day saying things were up, down, or 999 other bogus status messages. And people wondered why "emergency" texts were missed. Of course they were. After the first 10k status messages, you learn to tune out the beep, or mute 'em.
On the personal phone, about 3 texts/month saying my friends network had problems. The remainder of the texts were the occasional "are you available", "yes" and "call me", being sent in both directions.
I don't really want my employer having access to my texts, nor the list of people I talk to. My friends are none of their business. And for the sake of the business, personal calls on the personal phone don't cost the company anything.:) I burnt up enough minutes on the work phone from remote datacenters, sitting in on hour long conference calls to talk about what we were already doing. "Yup, we're here. We're doing it. We'll be done in a few hours if we don't have to sit in on yet another conference call."
I'd watch out for the folks where all three circles overlap. They're dangerous.
Some people will still say I belong slightly more towards the red circle though. So far I've stayed away from sociopathic tendencies, which is probably why I haven't formed my own world dominating cult yet.:) Not too many of those have gone all that well though, and I'd rather not die in a government induced fire in a place called Wacko.
I found it easier and more cost effective to mirror everything across machines. Redundant power supplies and disks don't help much if say the motherboard goes bad, or a kernel panic brings a machine to a screeching stop.
At the time, we were building commodity servers (Asus motherboard, not quite bleeding edge CPU, IDE drives, in a 1u case) for about $500. Over time, we shifted away from those to 1u Supermicro machines (just add CPU, memory, and SATA drives in hotswap carriers) for about $1500. Instances of arbitrary crashing were still minimal, but the cases were prettier, and it saved us some installation headaches. Those headaches came where CPU's were running a bit warmer and we were having a hard time cooling them. The Supermicro chassis/motherboard combo took care of that for us.
There were still people saying "why don't you buy [high dollar vendor]", and I'd always justify it as for $10,000, you get one server. For $9,000, I get 6 machines that can handle almost as much load per machine. As far as load goes, for my 6 machines, I'd need 3 of your [high dollar vendor] machines. Load for load, versus dollar cost, for $10,000 and no redundancy, I'd only spend $3,000.
When upgrade day comes, and it will always come for a company who stays in business long enough, its easier to say "We're retiring these machines now.", when the cost wasn't very high. In reality, we rarely retired machines unless they had a serious failure. They just worked their way down the priority list until we had better machines to do the lowest priority tasks. It was usually something like high end web server -> low end web server -> special purpose low use server (dns, internal monitoring, internal development, etc). We always had room to have extra low load redundant web servers for the high traffic sites.
We had a Dell, specifically configured for an application. The guy running that project did a hard sell to get us to use it. He got the boss to buy it for $40,000. (big, ugly, heavy, and all bleeding edge). I wasn't given a choice. After a few years and one critical error, I *HAD* to redo the OS on it. I moved all of its responsibilities off to a machine that we spent $1,000 on. I just had it up as a hot spare for another application. Then I got the phone call. "Wow! You're already done fixing my machine? It's flying now!" I had to break the news to him, it's running on one of my $1k spares. Suddenly I had a $40,000 boat anchor on my hands. He didn't want to go back to the old machine.
The Dell was a quad 500Mhz with 8Gb RAM, 7 SCSI drives, 4 RAID controllers, in a 6u case that took two people to move. The machine we had moved him to was a 1u dual 1.4Ghz with 4Gb RAM with 2 IDE drives mirrored. (as I remember it, I could be slightly off). We upgraded him a year or two later to something faster, even though he didn't really need it, and I recycled the previous 1u to a lower priority task.
The Dell sat around the office for a while, and we couldn't figure out what to do with it. I nominated it to be a boat anchor. Last time I saw it, it was sitting on it's edge beside a desk, and papers were stacked on it. A $40,000 end table.
I think your opinion of your self being a "religions nutjob" may be a bit off. Being religious and being a nutjob are not inherently inclusive. Folks all have their opinions and beliefs, and why there may be some I disagree with, you don't seem to be the type to beat me in the head with your bible to save my soul.:)
I don't. Do you think that just might have something to do with the fact that I block all ads and most cookies and scripts? It's your choice to be "targeted".
Well, it's a matter of which machine I'm on, and which browser I happen to be using at the moment. The main computer I use is happily protected from just about everything (adblock, no script, copious hosts file, etc). Machines and browsers I use infrequently I don't keep up with as well. It's a good reminder to me why I like my main computer.:)
I agree. I search for all kinds of weird things as it is, either to have valid information for real world conversations, or to support facts in news stories that we run. I get all kinds of weird ads as it is, I'm not quite sure I want them printed for the family to see.
So, don't set the default gateway, or set it to a bogus value. Now you have a printer that can't talk to the world, but talks very nicely to the LAN. I know, it kinda defeats the purpose of an Internet printer, but who wants their printer up on the Internet anyways?
I wouldn't worry so much about that. It would likely be added to the print queue. What's worse is that it will probably print regardless of the paper inserted. Cheap printer paper is one thing, but what if I had photo paper, letterhead, or labels in it?
At one job, they printed their own checks for payroll. Folks who used that printer were told "Don't use the printer for the next hour, it's loaded for accounting to print payroll." They'd get real mad when you wasted their check stock with any of your own print jobs. Now instead of someone in the office screwing up, it will be a corporation arbitrarily printing on them.
If they're proving me a free printer, ink, and paper, I'm fine with it. Since we know that won't be true, this is horribly invasive and abusive.
Beyond that, since we know the printer is web based, and they can run their software at will with it, who's to say that they won't have it send copies of everything you print back to them. That would be a huge benefit to them and the hackers at large who learn to exploit it. Most printed stuff is BS, but when the printed materials contain confidential data, that would be worth a fortune.
Sorry, I'd prefer not to have corporation sponsored identity theft.
Well, unless you need to print invoices, packing slips, shipping labels, airline boarding passes, etc. Nah, that'd never happen.
Hell, even my car insurance cards were sent to me electronically so I could print them myself. They don't send them to me, I *have* to print them, since they are required by law.
That's pretty much what I was thinking. Nothing intentionally radioactive, just accidentally done (i.e., Chernobyl). I'd stretch the suspicion from growing areas to things that may have been out and exposed. You know perfectly well, if illegal stuff was exposed, the dealers will still sell it. There's no money in drugs that are thrown away.
hehe. Ya, but as far as I know, that kind of metal isn't poisonousness. Well, unless you talk to some religious nutjobs, but they'll tell you sex and drugs are bad too, and we all know that isn't true.:)
I've actually had people reviewing the books say to me that the IT department doesn't bring in any money, so we were therefore worthless. IT is just a black hole, where money goes in, but nothing productive comes out.
I accept their opinion as truth. Then I volunteer to have the IT staff take a month off with no pay, and not be available by pager and phone regardless of how big the emergency is. Their tone changes quickly.
"But what if something goes down?"
"Nope, we don't do anything"
"What if the network breaks?"
"Sounds like a problem for the people who are worth something."
"You can't do that!"
"We could, and there are people who recognize the value of a good IT department who would hire them before the end of the first week off."
Mind you, that was before the recession hit hard. Those who are still working are happy that they have jobs, even if it's at a fraction of what they used to make. I've gotten a few crying phone calls asking me to fix something, but they rarely offer enough to cover the gas money to get to their site and back. If I happen to be in their area, I'll stop by and fix it. I'm not going to lose what little money I have left, just to fix their problems. My favorite whine is "We're losing $x,xxx every hour!". If it's that important, why can't they pay a reasonable rate for me to fix it. I'm not going to spend $20 in gas and an hour of my time, to get paid $15, regardless if they think it's fair.
Not just absolutely anything, but absolutely everything.:) Set up a PPP over SSH tunnel, and voila, you are no longer judged by anything on their network.
At one place, I was the only person who could pull up quite a few "blocked" sites, and I didn't have to deal with their QOS throttling. I never did get any questions about what that weird traffic on the obscure port was either.:)
Unless you worked in the theoretical physics department, then there would be a whiteboard full of equations to come up with an answer no one understood.
We had a server literally fall out of the back of the truck. Well, the SUV we were transporting a dozen of them in. Coincidentally after about 2 months of service, it started having stability problems too. After that, we were very careful about opening the door when we arrived.:)
Oh, how I loved to use redundant commodity hardware. We could laugh about a $500 server bouncing off the ground. We wouldn't have been laughing so much if it had been a $10,000 machine.
With the bit I know about street drugs, and the amount he has done over the years, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if some was tainted with some sort of radioactive material. I'm afraid to know many radiation tainted drugs came out of Eastern Europe around 1986/1987.
I knew someone who OD'd (and survived). I knew what drugs she thought she had been taking. I also had the opportunity to read her toxicology report. Thank goodness it wasn't a postmortem report, and she gave it to me to read. The report almost read like a complete list on every street drug and several pharmaceuticals. Everything *EXCEPT* for the ones she had taken. For some reason, I pictured a drug manufacturer sweeping the floor, taking everything that was the right color, and pressing it into the pills she had taken.
The report didn't have anything else on it, so I'm guessing they didn't test for heavy metals or anything of that sort. If they had, I wouldn't have been all that surprised to see mercury and lead in the list.
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That's an easy one though. The call or text is to the owner of the phone. The owner of the phone is your employer. The addressee is 2125551212@someprovider.blackberry.net, which is therefore owned by the your employer. You just happen to be using their phone in the course of your work.
Much like the golden rule, he who pays the bills makes the rules.
It depends on the company. One provider who I won't name (_extel), I was bitching about the overages, so they faxed me all the texts that came through that month. It was complete. From, to, and message. They kept it all on file.
I'm on a prepaid phone now. They won't provide me with even the call list, much less texts. Probably because it's prepaid, they don't want the extra overhead of storing that data. I wasn't just casually asking about my service. I had received a threatening call, which appeared to be to the wrong number. I wanted to know who it was from, so I could contact the police. "Bob, I'm going to kill you, your family, your friends, and even your dog.". Sorry, I'm not Bob, and I don't own a dog. :) Whoever Bob is, is going to need protection from the nutjob though. The providers answer was (after checking with their supervisor) "We don't maintain any call history for any of our users, so unfortunately we can't tell you or the police who it was." That made me feel a little bit better about making calls on it, so I'm still their customer. :)
Oh, I know all about the intermittent failures. I worked in a computer store for a couple years, and customers would bring in PC's that would crash "sometimes". One guy brought in his machine once a week, with different non-existent problems. I was particularly happy when the boss got involved one of the times. His complaint was that the flight simulator he was playing would bank left for no reason. "I was a pilot, I know how to fly a plane, and this isn't right!". Good, I was a pilot too. I love flight simulators, and the boss told me "keep using it until you can find the problem, and then fix it.". I played it for 8 hours straight. Even when I took bathroom breaks or went to lunch, I'd trim out for straight and level, and when I came back, it was still flying strong. In the end, I had to explain to him how to work the trim on the joystick. :)
We had plenty of "economy" PC's that we sold, that just had weird intermittent problems. Stun guns are great for RMAing those. It changes the problem from "intermittent failure" to "doesn't turn on". :)
I know some intermittent problems are a bastard to work through though. I had a machine once that would get hung up about once every two weeks. The fix for that one was to have a cron to reboot it at 5am Monday morning. It was ugly, but it got us around the hardware problem until I could justify upgrading it. The reboot process took just long enough to trigger our paging system, so I'd get a down page, and then a minute later an up page. That was my Monday morning wakeup call.
We tried to fix everything ourselves, and avoided returning things. For the most part, machines (chassis, motherboard, and CPU) lasted the usable life of the machine. By the time they'd go wonky, they were too old to bother fix. :) CPU fans (as applicable), additional cooling, and hard drives were our biggest problems. We once got a bad set of memory, which shifted us from buying it from a reputable wholesaler, to buying directly from Crucial. I've never had a fault with Crucial memory. We'd RMA drives in lots. Once we had 15 to 20, they'd all get sent back, and then a week or so later it was like Christmas. :)
OS problems were pretty obvious to us. We had a baseline install that was cloned to every machine in that series. Literally I'd install and configure the OS, and tune it up for our needs. I'd then clean it up for size and then tar up the entire thing. We had install CD's which had an install script. The script would format the OS drive, and then untar the previously created tar onto the blank drive. We never had surprises like "did this get installed?"
We didn't necessarily upgrade the OS every time there was an new one, but we kept them patched in sync with each other. We had up to 3 different versions of the same distro floating around at the same time, but it was versioned for our build number also. If it's an OS problem, it's going to show up in an awful lot of machines. Since I tested any new build extensively in house, and then as a one-off in production as part of a cluster, it was well tested before it ever got fully deployed to production.
On the flaky HP, I changed the power supply, hard drives, and memory with known good ones. It still had the problem which left us with the motherboard being bad, or demons in the case. :) By the time we got sufficiently annoyed with it, it was too old and slow to bother with.
That's where I started really liking the Supermicro machines. The motherboards were good and stable. They included all the drive controllers and network interfaces. We could order the same part number, and get the same machine for quite a while. We'd get CPU's, memory, and hard drives, and of course keep spare drives on hand (and a variety of other common failure parts).
On several occasions, I had to deal with Dell. I hate them. One customer had a drive failure. I got to the datacenter at 3pm on a Friday to help him out. They kept me on the phone with "try this..." "try this..." and then finally after 5pm (I believe) they agreed the drive was bad. {sigh} It turns out their 4 hour response doesn't work quite like that. They had to ship us a replacement drive from 100 miles away, and 5pm was the cutoff for shipping. They wanted it shipped to the datacenter, which didn't have anyone to receive it. It took an act of freakin' god to get them to ship it to my house. Saturday afternoon at like 4pm I received the drive, so I took a drive back to the datacenter (only an hour away) to put the new drive in.
For my own network, we had hot spare machines. They were running with an IP. I could make then anything I wanted, but they had already been designated for particular tasks. If it was needed for something else, I could have it up and running in about 15 minutes. If a drive died, we'd grab one from the box of drives that we kept on the floor, and voila, it's rebuilding and will be 100% in about an hour. Meanwhile, it was taken out of production until it got done rebuilding.
I don't trust anyone for anything that I can't put my hands on. You could tell me you have techs standing by a mile away with spare machines coming out of their asses. I know in practice, I won't have a machine up and running in an hour, and probably not within a day.
We did a similar dance with IBM. That company spent a fortune with them on hardware and warranties. There was one server that I diagnosed as having a motherboard problem. With 24/7 support, it took two days to get someone to the site. When they got there, they changed several parts (but not the motherboard), and still couldn't get it working. "Oh, I'll need another tech to come have a look." Another two days later they came back with the diagnosis that the motherboard was bad, and it wasn't covered under the warranty. Thank god we had another machine to move to. That company didn't have very many spare machines, and no spare drives at the datacenter.
The only repair I've ever had with HP went miserably. We had a flaky machine that we returned to them for repair. we got it back, and it was still flaky. By flaky, I mean it would run for between 2 to 30 minutes, and then randomly crash, even though the OS drive was cloned from an identical machine. We returned it again, they repaired it again, and again it didn't work right. We gave up, and it became a decoration in the storage room.
Sad, but it's very true. Lets have a meeting to figure out what we're going to talk about in the next meeting. And of course, another meeting to schedule an appropriate time for that meeting. Following the actual meeting, you'll have a post-meeting meeting to discuss items in the meeting, and finally a meeting to decide what action to take based on the actual meeting.
They weren't always entertained when I'd fall asleep. When I'd get nudged, I'd just ask if it was the real meeting, and remind them not to wake me up until we were talking about something productive. :)
Meetings are great though. You can waste an entire week talking about what work could be done in one day. :)
HAHAHAHAHAHAA
Nope, drug labs were created in 1990. There were no illegal drugs before that. Well, except:
Sorry, it's not an all inclusive list, it's just a sampling of .... well .... popular non-pharmaceutical drugs. Some were pharmaceuticals, but most that you'll find on the street aren't commercially produced.
You can find more information at Erowid and Lycaeum
The Chernobyl accident happened April 25th, 1986. Since I'm guessing you weren't alive yet, or old enough to remember, there was a bit of a pesky problem of nuclear fallout that spread quite a bit.
Drugs a bit tainted by radioactive fallout could still be sold for a profit. Who are you going to complain to. It's just like if you buy an 8 ball of coke, but it turns out to be baby powder. It's not like you can just call the cops and say "I paid for coke, but he gave me baby powder!" Drugs destroyed because they may be radioactive are lost money. Drug manufacturers and dealers are just like any big business. They want to make a profit. They aren't going to throw away perfectly good product, if they can sell it.
Oh come on, you know court documents are always more than triplicate. :) Plaintiff's attorney, defendant's attorney, plaintiff, defendant, clerk of courts, judge, frequently a list of specified involved parties, and of course your own file(s).
That'd seem to make sense.
When I was working for companies (oohh, I need a job), I carried my work phone and private phone. Personal calls and texts were on the personal phone. Work calls and texts were on the work phone.
There was such a huge difference in the texts.
On the work phone, about 1000 texts/day saying things were up, down, or 999 other bogus status messages. And people wondered why "emergency" texts were missed. Of course they were. After the first 10k status messages, you learn to tune out the beep, or mute 'em.
On the personal phone, about 3 texts/month saying my friends network had problems. The remainder of the texts were the occasional "are you available", "yes" and "call me", being sent in both directions.
I don't really want my employer having access to my texts, nor the list of people I talk to. My friends are none of their business. And for the sake of the business, personal calls on the personal phone don't cost the company anything. :) I burnt up enough minutes on the work phone from remote datacenters, sitting in on hour long conference calls to talk about what we were already doing. "Yup, we're here. We're doing it. We'll be done in a few hours if we don't have to sit in on yet another conference call."
You know, I really like venn diagrams. :)
This one should explain it for everyone else.
I'd watch out for the folks where all three circles overlap. They're dangerous.
Some people will still say I belong slightly more towards the red circle though. So far I've stayed away from sociopathic tendencies, which is probably why I haven't formed my own world dominating cult yet. :) Not too many of those have gone all that well though, and I'd rather not die in a government induced fire in a place called Wacko.
I found it easier and more cost effective to mirror everything across machines. Redundant power supplies and disks don't help much if say the motherboard goes bad, or a kernel panic brings a machine to a screeching stop.
At the time, we were building commodity servers (Asus motherboard, not quite bleeding edge CPU, IDE drives, in a 1u case) for about $500. Over time, we shifted away from those to 1u Supermicro machines (just add CPU, memory, and SATA drives in hotswap carriers) for about $1500. Instances of arbitrary crashing were still minimal, but the cases were prettier, and it saved us some installation headaches. Those headaches came where CPU's were running a bit warmer and we were having a hard time cooling them. The Supermicro chassis/motherboard combo took care of that for us.
There were still people saying "why don't you buy [high dollar vendor]", and I'd always justify it as for $10,000, you get one server. For $9,000, I get 6 machines that can handle almost as much load per machine. As far as load goes, for my 6 machines, I'd need 3 of your [high dollar vendor] machines. Load for load, versus dollar cost, for $10,000 and no redundancy, I'd only spend $3,000.
When upgrade day comes, and it will always come for a company who stays in business long enough, its easier to say "We're retiring these machines now.", when the cost wasn't very high. In reality, we rarely retired machines unless they had a serious failure. They just worked their way down the priority list until we had better machines to do the lowest priority tasks. It was usually something like high end web server -> low end web server -> special purpose low use server (dns, internal monitoring, internal development, etc). We always had room to have extra low load redundant web servers for the high traffic sites.
We had a Dell, specifically configured for an application. The guy running that project did a hard sell to get us to use it. He got the boss to buy it for $40,000. (big, ugly, heavy, and all bleeding edge). I wasn't given a choice. After a few years and one critical error, I *HAD* to redo the OS on it. I moved all of its responsibilities off to a machine that we spent $1,000 on. I just had it up as a hot spare for another application. Then I got the phone call. "Wow! You're already done fixing my machine? It's flying now!" I had to break the news to him, it's running on one of my $1k spares. Suddenly I had a $40,000 boat anchor on my hands. He didn't want to go back to the old machine.
The Dell was a quad 500Mhz with 8Gb RAM, 7 SCSI drives, 4 RAID controllers, in a 6u case that took two people to move. The machine we had moved him to was a 1u dual 1.4Ghz with 4Gb RAM with 2 IDE drives mirrored. (as I remember it, I could be slightly off). We upgraded him a year or two later to something faster, even though he didn't really need it, and I recycled the previous 1u to a lower priority task.
The Dell sat around the office for a while, and we couldn't figure out what to do with it. I nominated it to be a boat anchor. Last time I saw it, it was sitting on it's edge beside a desk, and papers were stacked on it. A $40,000 end table.
I think your opinion of your self being a "religions nutjob" may be a bit off. Being religious and being a nutjob are not inherently inclusive. Folks all have their opinions and beliefs, and why there may be some I disagree with, you don't seem to be the type to beat me in the head with your bible to save my soul. :)
Well, it's a matter of which machine I'm on, and which browser I happen to be using at the moment. The main computer I use is happily protected from just about everything (adblock, no script, copious hosts file, etc). Machines and browsers I use infrequently I don't keep up with as well. It's a good reminder to me why I like my main computer. :)
I agree. I search for all kinds of weird things as it is, either to have valid information for real world conversations, or to support facts in news stories that we run. I get all kinds of weird ads as it is, I'm not quite sure I want them printed for the family to see.
So, don't set the default gateway, or set it to a bogus value. Now you have a printer that can't talk to the world, but talks very nicely to the LAN. I know, it kinda defeats the purpose of an Internet printer, but who wants their printer up on the Internet anyways?
I wouldn't worry so much about that. It would likely be added to the print queue. What's worse is that it will probably print regardless of the paper inserted. Cheap printer paper is one thing, but what if I had photo paper, letterhead, or labels in it?
At one job, they printed their own checks for payroll. Folks who used that printer were told "Don't use the printer for the next hour, it's loaded for accounting to print payroll." They'd get real mad when you wasted their check stock with any of your own print jobs. Now instead of someone in the office screwing up, it will be a corporation arbitrarily printing on them.
If they're proving me a free printer, ink, and paper, I'm fine with it. Since we know that won't be true, this is horribly invasive and abusive.
Beyond that, since we know the printer is web based, and they can run their software at will with it, who's to say that they won't have it send copies of everything you print back to them. That would be a huge benefit to them and the hackers at large who learn to exploit it. Most printed stuff is BS, but when the printed materials contain confidential data, that would be worth a fortune.
Sorry, I'd prefer not to have corporation sponsored identity theft.
Well, unless you need to print invoices, packing slips, shipping labels, airline boarding passes, etc. Nah, that'd never happen.
Hell, even my car insurance cards were sent to me electronically so I could print them myself. They don't send them to me, I *have* to print them, since they are required by law.
That's pretty much what I was thinking. Nothing intentionally radioactive, just accidentally done (i.e., Chernobyl). I'd stretch the suspicion from growing areas to things that may have been out and exposed. You know perfectly well, if illegal stuff was exposed, the dealers will still sell it. There's no money in drugs that are thrown away.
hehe. Ya, but as far as I know, that kind of metal isn't poisonousness. Well, unless you talk to some religious nutjobs, but they'll tell you sex and drugs are bad too, and we all know that isn't true. :)
I've actually had people reviewing the books say to me that the IT department doesn't bring in any money, so we were therefore worthless. IT is just a black hole, where money goes in, but nothing productive comes out.
I accept their opinion as truth. Then I volunteer to have the IT staff take a month off with no pay, and not be available by pager and phone regardless of how big the emergency is. Their tone changes quickly.
"But what if something goes down?"
"Nope, we don't do anything"
"What if the network breaks?"
"Sounds like a problem for the people who are worth something."
"You can't do that!"
"We could, and there are people who recognize the value of a good IT department who would hire them before the end of the first week off."
Mind you, that was before the recession hit hard. Those who are still working are happy that they have jobs, even if it's at a fraction of what they used to make. I've gotten a few crying phone calls asking me to fix something, but they rarely offer enough to cover the gas money to get to their site and back. If I happen to be in their area, I'll stop by and fix it. I'm not going to lose what little money I have left, just to fix their problems. My favorite whine is "We're losing $x,xxx every hour!". If it's that important, why can't they pay a reasonable rate for me to fix it. I'm not going to spend $20 in gas and an hour of my time, to get paid $15, regardless if they think it's fair.
Not just absolutely anything, but absolutely everything. :) Set up a PPP over SSH tunnel, and voila, you are no longer judged by anything on their network.
At one place, I was the only person who could pull up quite a few "blocked" sites, and I didn't have to deal with their QOS throttling. I never did get any questions about what that weird traffic on the obscure port was either. :)
Unless you worked in the theoretical physics department, then there would be a whiteboard full of equations to come up with an answer no one understood.
We had a server literally fall out of the back of the truck. Well, the SUV we were transporting a dozen of them in. Coincidentally after about 2 months of service, it started having stability problems too. After that, we were very careful about opening the door when we arrived. :)
Oh, how I loved to use redundant commodity hardware. We could laugh about a $500 server bouncing off the ground. We wouldn't have been laughing so much if it had been a $10,000 machine.
That's ok, he took a lot of drugs to compensate.
With the bit I know about street drugs, and the amount he has done over the years, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if some was tainted with some sort of radioactive material. I'm afraid to know many radiation tainted drugs came out of Eastern Europe around 1986/1987.
I knew someone who OD'd (and survived). I knew what drugs she thought she had been taking. I also had the opportunity to read her toxicology report. Thank goodness it wasn't a postmortem report, and she gave it to me to read. The report almost read like a complete list on every street drug and several pharmaceuticals. Everything *EXCEPT* for the ones she had taken. For some reason, I pictured a drug manufacturer sweeping the floor, taking everything that was the right color, and pressing it into the pills she had taken.
The report didn't have anything else on it, so I'm guessing they didn't test for heavy metals or anything of that sort. If they had, I wouldn't have been all that surprised to see mercury and lead in the list.