I figured that I would chime in here, since I've worked on these types of systems, and in this type of environment for nearly 30 years.
It is common to see these types of alerts for all kinds of HMI software, PLC's, and DCS's. They all have security vulnerabilities discovered, just like any software-based systems do. In the electric utility environment in the US, these systems fall under NERC CIP regulations. There will be someone at the utility tasked with keeping track of these alerts and making sure that systems are patched. For really old systems, they will be planning upgrades.
These Industrial Controls Systems (ICS) will be firewalled from the business networks, which will again be firewalled from the Internet. It is common to have a data historian pushing data out of the secured ICS network onto a system on the business networks. This allows managers, engineers, and anyone else who needs the data for analysis and reporting to do so without having to be inside the plant. These days it is common to have a mechanical engineer working on something from across the country through these historian systems.
The firewalled connection pushing the data out of the network may just be a connection between two servers over a particular TCP port that must be initiated from inside the ICS network as an example of the simplest, and probably the most common example. It is more common these days for the data to be pushed to a DMZ server, which then passes it to the business system, making it even more secure. It is also common to use a data diode, where there is only a fiber optic transmitter on the inside and a receiver on the outside, so you can't even physically pass a signal into the ICS network.
I'm not an expert in these particular Schneider systems, but the alert seems to be for HMI software used in the control room to operate the equipment. These systems would be on the firewalled ICS network and not exposed to the business network, so it is unlikely that someone would be able to access them from the company's business network, much less the Internet.
Security of these ICS networks is taken pretty seriously, and the visibility and attention to security have increased greatly in the last ten years. It certainly isn't as far along as it could be, but the ominous picture of cooling towers, which most people equate to nuclear plants, although they are common in large coal units as well, makes this look much worse than it probably is. I can assure you that there are none of these Schneider systems connected to the Internet controlling a nuclear reactor anywhere.
I'm not trying to paint a rosy picture here, merely suggesting that in all probability there will be some engineers patching some firewalled HMI systems in the coming weeks, while they continue to beef up the security at their plants, and not a nuclear meltdown as some script kiddie exploits this hole in a nuclear control system sitting on the Internet with this hole in it.
My father pointed out to me that the nuclear carriers can be a great help after humanitarian disasters as they can desalinate large quantities of water. I found an article about the Carl Vincent that says that it can desalinate 400,000 gallons of water a day. We stationed it off the coast of Haiti after the earthquakes there.
I have to agree. You can't build a system that isn't ever going to be hacked. You can build a system using the best available practices that is very difficult to hack and put the most effective system possible in place to detect hacking attempts as early as possible. To a large extent, it seems that they did a respectable job in both respects. I'm sure that they can make improvements and will learn lessons from this. They are a well capitalized company and it is absolutely vital that they maintain credibility in this respect. The value of their service diminishes greatly if it is not secure. They simply can't be seen as ineffective in this matter.
I am especially impressed that they obviously had an effective plan together to quickly update client applications in the event that something like this happened. They pushed out updates for IOS and Android very quickly. They even updated Penultimate which was only recently integrated into Evernote. It seems like they had their act together as far as that was concerned.
They obviously need to stay on top of this game. I'd like to see two factor authentication and better not encryption options. I have my concerns about using Evernote, but I am still a pretty heavy user with over 6000 notes. So far, the benefits outweigh the risks. From what I have learned about this incident so far, I don't think that my appraisal of the cost and benefit will tip the other way. I hope that it stays that way because we don't learn anything new about this incident that seems careless or irresponsible, and because they continue to develop the product and improve the security.
I don't understand. If the guy who runs the company goes away usually it's fairly easy process (albeit longwinded and boring) to get a new general manager, CEO or whatever. Namesys isn't a public company, so they could name their Thanksgiving turkey the CEO.
It all depends on how the company is setup. For example it could be an S Corp with Reiser as the only shareholder. In that case, he is the company. There is no they to do anything. He may be the only one who can write checks, file taxes, etc. As for the Thanksgiving turkey, I hope that you don't think that it is that easy to run even a small company.
Theoretically, the employees could form another company and carry on that way. Obviously not everyone has the aptitude and intestinal fortitude to pull that sort of thing off.
Is Hans really that important to ReiserFS? Isn't this the whole beauty of GPL code, that there are thousands of people out there who can pick his work up without even involving him, Namesys etc., and continue the 'legacy'?
I think that this is part of the falacy of opensource. In theory you are right but something along these lines takes a highly qualified programmer focused on the task a long time to write and test. During that time the programmer needs food, shelter, clothing, utilities, insurance, transportation, computer equipment, etc. Start to work out the logistics for yourself. I'd love to work on it but I can't figure out a way to pay all of my bills while I am doing it. I imagine that I am not alone. I don't have enough spare time to work on it. I imagine that it would take quite a bit of time and effort to even get up to speed. When you start looking at the details, you are really lucky if your theoretical thousands doesn't in fact turn out to be one or two.
I think that when you look at any opesource project, you will find that there are maybe a small handful of people that are able to devote the time and effort to keep it going. Sometimes they get grants or sponsorships and sometimes they just don't mind being flat broke all the time. There certainly aren't thousands makeing really meaningful contributions. There is a small handful without whom the whole thing falls apart.
It seems that we are constraining our thinking based on the way that we have always used computers. The reason that we use hard disks the way that we do is that they were always smaller and more expensive than we wanted them to be. Now that they are cheap and huge we still have systems that use them like they are a precious resource to be conserved. It seems that there are opportunities being missed here. There are uses for all of this spare capacity for the average user. I can think of two right off the top of my head.
You are right that the average user doesn't use anywhere near the capacity of the average hard drive available today. It is also true that many people have more than one machine either on their home network or in a small office. It seems obvious that there is a need for a very easy way for a user to setup their networked machines to automatically replicate their data files between them. I know that there are a lot of ways to do this but they are all a lot of hassle. Something that was easy and transparent would help to make sure that your average user never lost data unless all of their machines were destroyed. Imagine being able to bring home a new laptop and set it up on your network and have all of your files automatically replicate to it. You and I can figure it out many ways to do this but for an average user, it is not available. OS's should have this capability built into them.
Large corporations have networked machines all over the place. They only need a few gigs of disk space to hold the OS and a few programs because most everything else is available on the network but you can't get small drives anymore. How much wasted space is spread across your average corporate network? It would be nice if servers could encrypt and split up their data and load it onto these computers for a backup. I wouldn't want ot rely on it entirely but if each chunk was stored on a few machines, you could pretty much be sure that your data was reasonably safe and a disk based backup system would allow for fast restores. Just a thought of taking the small business system above to the enterprise level.
Another obvious feature that could be built around this extra storage is versioning of files. It would be nice to have the file system automatically keep old revisions of my files as long as there is extra space to keep them up. Again, you can do this yourself now but it isn't transparent to the user.
I'm surprised that more readers on this site don't think like this. Our jobs as geeks is to think about stuff like this. There have been many posts about people losing data, how to backup the data, and what and idiot Joe User is. We know the problems and we know that the average user has a shitload of extra disk space. It shouldn't be that big of a deal to figure out that there are opportunities there.
The reason that Microsoft has been so successful at surviving competitors is that it would be very expensive to move from their products. Once you have their OS on your servers and desktop and all of your other software is tied to that OS it becomes very difficult to change and so they have a great deal of inertia.
How long would it take me to change from Google? Not long. I just have to point my browser to another location and I'm done. I take my eyeballs elsewhere and their revenue stream dries up.
I'm not saying that Balmer is correct, but it would seem that MS can weather the storm and has more time to respond to new innovators due to the fact that it is so difficult to switch. If something significantly better than Google came out, I could change tomorrow.
Sounds like you guys should outsource your unemployment to China. It should be much cheaper. You could probably afford 4 unemployed for what you are now paying for one.
Making the information look pretty is the easy part. The hard part was realizing that this particular briefing amongst all of the other threat information that he receives is the important one.
Spread out 100 documents with this pretty formatting with information about China's increased militarization, Kim Jung Il being a nut case and selling weapons everywhere, the Pakistani's selling nuclear technology, former Soviet nuclear weapons being unaccounted for, Aryan Nation yoyo's wanting to bomb buildings, and every other threat that he hears about everyday and tell me which one is the threat that is going to bite you in the ass next. It isn't that easy.
If you knew before hand, which one was the really important one, you could write it on a napkin with a crayon and it would still work. I guess if I was a graphic designer though I would be trying to save all of the world's problems might making their descriptions look pretty too.
The point of the mini was to win converts by offering a low entry point to the Mac. They can't be making much if any margin on the thing.
They would probably make more money by just selling a version of OS X for standard PC hardware. They could sell it for $149 with a $99 annual maintenance fee. Start adding up extra sales of iLife, etc and you could be talking about real money.
The problem with the mini is that it is still a fairly high price just to try. I also think that the performance is not going to stand up to a standard PC at that price point which would have a much faster and larger hard drive and more RAM.
How about putting OS X for the PC out there with a free 60 day trial? Imagine being able to install OS X on an existing Windows PC that was rotten with spy ware. People would gladly pay the $149 to keep it. I know people who are shelling out $100 out of desperation just for a virus scanner and cheesy anti-spy ware software that they hope will fix the problem only to fall victim again. If Apple developed an easy way to install OS X over Windows while saving documents, pictures, etc. they would have a real winner on their hands.
Apple would make more money this way and they wouldn't have to tie up the capital required to manufacture and distribute the hardware. They could still sell the higher end hardware which they probably make a good margin on. There will always be that small group that want a real Mac.
I think that is the approach that we will take from now on. It has been really ridiculuous trying to get anything from HP.
I also understand that they have "lost" tens of millions of dollars worth of spare parts in the system. They don't know where they are. The PC folks have been actively resisting the SAP implementation on that side after seeing the trouble that the server folks had.
HP moved to a new SAP system last fall. It has been so screwed up that they estimate that they lost $500 million in server business. Nearly all of this went to DELL and IBM.
The system is still screwed up. I ordered 7 servers back in December. I have received 4 and still need 3. They don't let you know when they are coming, they just show up one day. You can't get delivery estimates from them. They just can't tell you so they don't even bother to call back.
I remember talking to an HP engineer who worked for the non-profit side of the company (only the printer division was making any money at the time). He was complaining that the company was not doing well enough to give any of them raises or bonuses but it was doing so well that Carly was getting multi-million dollar bonuses.
When you divide her bonus by the number of employees, it would have been at least a couple thousand apiece. She treated the employees as an expense to be controlled and pretty much ruined the engineering tradition at HP that I think made the company what it was. Now it is just another soulless corporation
I always have to laugh when I'm watching 24 and they pull inter-agency databases up in a few seconds and send it to Jack's PDA in the field. To top it off, half the time the chick that is doing it is pretty hot.
In the real world 1/2 the stuff he asked for would probably be on an old Unisys machine (not supported since 1989) that thinks it is dumping records to a printer that is actually an old OS/2 machine connected to the serial port running a Pascal program that was written by a summer intern back in 1992 to parse the printer data and write it to a csv file so that he could pull it into Lotus 123 and do a report with it.
In the real world the terrorist would win because Jack would be waiting in the field waiting for this vital piece of information. The person that he called to get the data would be a civil servant with a bad attitude who wouldn't answer the phone because he was out smoking a cigarette. Even if he did try to help, he would have to hire a contractor to actually do the work. After the civil servant spent 4 months writing a spec and getting everything through purchasing, the contractor would have to sift through an old yellow printout of the Pascal code because nobody would know where the files were anymore. Eventually the hard drive on the OS/2 machine would die and all would be lost. The contractor would still charge $1000/day for being there and stress that next time they should get him involved BEFORE it gets that bad. It would then take 73 days for the contractor to get paid on his net 30 invoice because if you though the intelligence systems were a CF, you should see how they do it in accounts payable.
I work from home most of the time. Many days I don't really get cleaned up before sitting down to work. The phone is nice because the customer can't see that I am still wearing the pair of baggies that I went surfing in that morning.
Video phones would seriously screw up my life.
What I need is imaging software that will modify the image in real time to make me look respectable. I can imagine a list of preference with check boxes for add shirt, add tie, remove the bags from under my eyes because I was out drinking last night.
I was not paid a tremendous amount of money as an entry level employee. I performed my duties to the best of my ability and always acted professionally. I also made an effort to not only become more technically adept but socially adept as well. I now make more money. I do not think that this is a coincidence.
I am self employed so I have to present myself in such a way that people feel confident hiring me. I not only have a good educational background and excellent professional experience, I also keep myself fit, dress well, and pay attention to all of the other little details that affect how people perceive me. I charge a lot of money for my services. Customers not only need to feel confident that I can do the technical work; they also need to feel confident that I will not embarrass them for making the decision to hire me. Good communication skills, a good attitude, a fit appearance, appropriate dress, and all of the other little details all add up.
I think that they original poster shows a total lack of regard for all of these things. The pay does not just come automatically. You have to make it happen. If he is in a low paying job, then he needs to do the things that will make it possible for him to find a higher paying job. Ignoring the social aspects will not help.
This happened with our old cable company here in Florida as well. Migrant laborers with shovels come in and dig the crap out of your front yard. It pisses me off two. You come home from work and find a huge hole with dirt and crap everywhere and then it takes you months to put evertyhing back together when they finish.
The new owner of the cable company actually uses newer equipment to push cables between smaller holes. It doesn't make as big of a mess although the equipment is expensive and looks like it probably takes a lot to maintain.
It sounds like they need to maybe spend a little more on the installation and make it bearable for the homeowners. I know that it used to piss me off really bad to come home and find a huge hole in my front yard. I'd love to have fiber to my house but I know that I wouldn't put up with the mess shown in the pictures. It isn't necessary.
"How often do most people search for files on their hard drive - my guess is not that often."
Are you kidding? I've got ten years worth of project files, code, email, etc. on my laptop. Google Desktop search is incredible. Even if you keep things reasonably organized on your hard drive, the context in which you are searching is not always the context in which you saved it. I may have all of my files organized by customer but what if I want to go back and see what projects I specified a certain piece of hardware for? Google finds it all in no time.
I've gone to a purely digital model. If I didn't get it in electronic format then I scan it. OCR does a reasonable job of reading text allowing text search. People are always amazed when we are in a meeting and I can pull up documents from a couple of years ago instantly.
Desktop searching and information retrival is the killer app these days. At least for anyone who does any real work on a computer.
I think that you have a really good point about the me-too types. When I see the reports that 200,000-400,000 IT jobs have been lost, I usually figure that was the number of unqualified people who took some cert course and got in because they thought it was a gravy train.
For the most part the people who know what they are doing have been able to find and keep jobs. Things have cooled down and they don't have as many choices as they did during the boom but they are able to make a pretty good living.
Slashdot Mirror
I figured that I would chime in here, since I've worked on these types of systems, and in this type of environment for nearly 30 years.
It is common to see these types of alerts for all kinds of HMI software, PLC's, and DCS's. They all have security vulnerabilities discovered, just like any software-based systems do. In the electric utility environment in the US, these systems fall under NERC CIP regulations. There will be someone at the utility tasked with keeping track of these alerts and making sure that systems are patched. For really old systems, they will be planning upgrades.
These Industrial Controls Systems (ICS) will be firewalled from the business networks, which will again be firewalled from the Internet. It is common to have a data historian pushing data out of the secured ICS network onto a system on the business networks. This allows managers, engineers, and anyone else who needs the data for analysis and reporting to do so without having to be inside the plant. These days it is common to have a mechanical engineer working on something from across the country through these historian systems.
The firewalled connection pushing the data out of the network may just be a connection between two servers over a particular TCP port that must be initiated from inside the ICS network as an example of the simplest, and probably the most common example. It is more common these days for the data to be pushed to a DMZ server, which then passes it to the business system, making it even more secure. It is also common to use a data diode, where there is only a fiber optic transmitter on the inside and a receiver on the outside, so you can't even physically pass a signal into the ICS network.
I'm not an expert in these particular Schneider systems, but the alert seems to be for HMI software used in the control room to operate the equipment. These systems would be on the firewalled ICS network and not exposed to the business network, so it is unlikely that someone would be able to access them from the company's business network, much less the Internet.
Security of these ICS networks is taken pretty seriously, and the visibility and attention to security have increased greatly in the last ten years. It certainly isn't as far along as it could be, but the ominous picture of cooling towers, which most people equate to nuclear plants, although they are common in large coal units as well, makes this look much worse than it probably is. I can assure you that there are none of these Schneider systems connected to the Internet controlling a nuclear reactor anywhere.
I'm not trying to paint a rosy picture here, merely suggesting that in all probability there will be some engineers patching some firewalled HMI systems in the coming weeks, while they continue to beef up the security at their plants, and not a nuclear meltdown as some script kiddie exploits this hole in a nuclear control system sitting on the Internet with this hole in it.
Indeed it was. I'll correct the correction. Thanks for the catch.
My father pointed out to me that the nuclear carriers can be a great help after humanitarian disasters as they can desalinate large quantities of water. I found an article about the Carl Vincent that says that it can desalinate 400,000 gallons of water a day. We stationed it off the coast of Haiti after the earthquakes there.
http://content.time.com/time/s...
Wow, imagine a Beowolf Cluster of these!
I have to agree. You can't build a system that isn't ever going to be hacked. You can build a system using the best available practices that is very difficult to hack and put the most effective system possible in place to detect hacking attempts as early as possible. To a large extent, it seems that they did a respectable job in both respects. I'm sure that they can make improvements and will learn lessons from this. They are a well capitalized company and it is absolutely vital that they maintain credibility in this respect. The value of their service diminishes greatly if it is not secure. They simply can't be seen as ineffective in this matter.
I am especially impressed that they obviously had an effective plan together to quickly update client applications in the event that something like this happened. They pushed out updates for IOS and Android very quickly. They even updated Penultimate which was only recently integrated into Evernote. It seems like they had their act together as far as that was concerned.
They obviously need to stay on top of this game. I'd like to see two factor authentication and better not encryption options. I have my concerns about using Evernote, but I am still a pretty heavy user with over 6000 notes. So far, the benefits outweigh the risks. From what I have learned about this incident so far, I don't think that my appraisal of the cost and benefit will tip the other way. I hope that it stays that way because we don't learn anything new about this incident that seems careless or irresponsible, and because they continue to develop the product and improve the security.
It all depends on how the company is setup. For example it could be an S Corp with Reiser as the only shareholder. In that case, he is the company. There is no they to do anything. He may be the only one who can write checks, file taxes, etc. As for the Thanksgiving turkey, I hope that you don't think that it is that easy to run even a small company.
Theoretically, the employees could form another company and carry on that way. Obviously not everyone has the aptitude and intestinal fortitude to pull that sort of thing off.
I think that this is part of the falacy of opensource. In theory you are right but something along these lines takes a highly qualified programmer focused on the task a long time to write and test. During that time the programmer needs food, shelter, clothing, utilities, insurance, transportation, computer equipment, etc. Start to work out the logistics for yourself. I'd love to work on it but I can't figure out a way to pay all of my bills while I am doing it. I imagine that I am not alone. I don't have enough spare time to work on it. I imagine that it would take quite a bit of time and effort to even get up to speed. When you start looking at the details, you are really lucky if your theoretical thousands doesn't in fact turn out to be one or two.
I think that when you look at any opesource project, you will find that there are maybe a small handful of people that are able to devote the time and effort to keep it going. Sometimes they get grants or sponsorships and sometimes they just don't mind being flat broke all the time. There certainly aren't thousands makeing really meaningful contributions. There is a small handful without whom the whole thing falls apart.
Everyone will be going back to pencil and paper soon when they realize that these computer things are just a lot more trouble than they are worth.
It seems that we are constraining our thinking based on the way that we have always used computers. The reason that we use hard disks the way that we do is that they were always smaller and more expensive than we wanted them to be. Now that they are cheap and huge we still have systems that use them like they are a precious resource to be conserved. It seems that there are opportunities being missed here. There are uses for all of this spare capacity for the average user. I can think of two right off the top of my head.
You are right that the average user doesn't use anywhere near the capacity of the average hard drive available today. It is also true that many people have more than one machine either on their home network or in a small office. It seems obvious that there is a need for a very easy way for a user to setup their networked machines to automatically replicate their data files between them. I know that there are a lot of ways to do this but they are all a lot of hassle. Something that was easy and transparent would help to make sure that your average user never lost data unless all of their machines were destroyed. Imagine being able to bring home a new laptop and set it up on your network and have all of your files automatically replicate to it. You and I can figure it out many ways to do this but for an average user, it is not available. OS's should have this capability built into them.
Large corporations have networked machines all over the place. They only need a few gigs of disk space to hold the OS and a few programs because most everything else is available on the network but you can't get small drives anymore. How much wasted space is spread across your average corporate network? It would be nice if servers could encrypt and split up their data and load it onto these computers for a backup. I wouldn't want ot rely on it entirely but if each chunk was stored on a few machines, you could pretty much be sure that your data was reasonably safe and a disk based backup system would allow for fast restores. Just a thought of taking the small business system above to the enterprise level.
Another obvious feature that could be built around this extra storage is versioning of files. It would be nice to have the file system automatically keep old revisions of my files as long as there is extra space to keep them up. Again, you can do this yourself now but it isn't transparent to the user.
I'm surprised that more readers on this site don't think like this. Our jobs as geeks is to think about stuff like this. There have been many posts about people losing data, how to backup the data, and what and idiot Joe User is. We know the problems and we know that the average user has a shitload of extra disk space. It shouldn't be that big of a deal to figure out that there are opportunities there.
The reason that Microsoft has been so successful at surviving competitors is that it would be very expensive to move from their products. Once you have their OS on your servers and desktop and all of your other software is tied to that OS it becomes very difficult to change and so they have a great deal of inertia.
How long would it take me to change from Google? Not long. I just have to point my browser to another location and I'm done. I take my eyeballs elsewhere and their revenue stream dries up.
I'm not saying that Balmer is correct, but it would seem that MS can weather the storm and has more time to respond to new innovators due to the fact that it is so difficult to switch. If something significantly better than Google came out, I could change tomorrow.
Sounds like you guys should outsource your unemployment to China. It should be much cheaper. You could probably afford 4 unemployed for what you are now paying for one.
Making the information look pretty is the easy part. The hard part was realizing that this particular briefing amongst all of the other threat information that he receives is the important one.
Spread out 100 documents with this pretty formatting with information about China's increased militarization, Kim Jung Il being a nut case and selling weapons everywhere, the Pakistani's selling nuclear technology, former Soviet nuclear weapons being unaccounted for, Aryan Nation yoyo's wanting to bomb buildings, and every other threat that he hears about everyday and tell me which one is the threat that is going to bite you in the ass next. It isn't that easy.
If you knew before hand, which one was the really important one, you could write it on a napkin with a crayon and it would still work. I guess if I was a graphic designer though I would be trying to save all of the world's problems might making their descriptions look pretty too.
I know a lot of geeks with the same problem. Maybe you need a little of this
The point of the mini was to win converts by offering a low entry point to the Mac. They can't be making much if any margin on the thing.
They would probably make more money by just selling a version of OS X for standard PC hardware. They could sell it for $149 with a $99 annual maintenance fee. Start adding up extra sales of iLife, etc and you could be talking about real money.
The problem with the mini is that it is still a fairly high price just to try. I also think that the performance is not going to stand up to a standard PC at that price point which would have a much faster and larger hard drive and more RAM.
How about putting OS X for the PC out there with a free 60 day trial? Imagine being able to install OS X on an existing Windows PC that was rotten with spy ware. People would gladly pay the $149 to keep it. I know people who are shelling out $100 out of desperation just for a virus scanner and cheesy anti-spy ware software that they hope will fix the problem only to fall victim again. If Apple developed an easy way to install OS X over Windows while saving documents, pictures, etc. they would have a real winner on their hands.
Apple would make more money this way and they wouldn't have to tie up the capital required to manufacture and distribute the hardware. They could still sell the higher end hardware which they probably make a good margin on. There will always be that small group that want a real Mac.
I think that is the approach that we will take from now on. It has been really ridiculuous trying to get anything from HP.
I also understand that they have "lost" tens of millions of dollars worth of spare parts in the system. They don't know where they are. The PC folks have been actively resisting the SAP implementation on that side after seeing the trouble that the server folks had.
HP moved to a new SAP system last fall. It has been so screwed up that they estimate that they lost $500 million in server business. Nearly all of this went to DELL and IBM.
The system is still screwed up. I ordered 7 servers back in December. I have received 4 and still need 3. They don't let you know when they are coming, they just show up one day. You can't get delivery estimates from them. They just can't tell you so they don't even bother to call back.
I remember talking to an HP engineer who worked for the non-profit side of the company (only the printer division was making any money at the time). He was complaining that the company was not doing well enough to give any of them raises or bonuses but it was doing so well that Carly was getting multi-million dollar bonuses.
When you divide her bonus by the number of employees, it would have been at least a couple thousand apiece. She treated the employees as an expense to be controlled and pretty much ruined the engineering tradition at HP that I think made the company what it was. Now it is just another soulless corporation
what is the point of the 'Mac Mini skirt?'
You can hide your weed under it.
Makes me wish I was smart enough to work there.
I always have to laugh when I'm watching 24 and they pull inter-agency databases up in a few seconds and send it to Jack's PDA in the field. To top it off, half the time the chick that is doing it is pretty hot.
In the real world 1/2 the stuff he asked for would probably be on an old Unisys machine (not supported since 1989) that thinks it is dumping records to a printer that is actually an old OS/2 machine connected to the serial port running a Pascal program that was written by a summer intern back in 1992 to parse the printer data and write it to a csv file so that he could pull it into Lotus 123 and do a report with it.
In the real world the terrorist would win because Jack would be waiting in the field waiting for this vital piece of information. The person that he called to get the data would be a civil servant with a bad attitude who wouldn't answer the phone because he was out smoking a cigarette. Even if he did try to help, he would have to hire a contractor to actually do the work. After the civil servant spent 4 months writing a spec and getting everything through purchasing, the contractor would have to sift through an old yellow printout of the Pascal code because nobody would know where the files were anymore. Eventually the hard drive on the OS/2 machine would die and all would be lost. The contractor would still charge $1000/day for being there and stress that next time they should get him involved BEFORE it gets that bad. It would then take 73 days for the contractor to get paid on his net 30 invoice because if you though the intelligence systems were a CF, you should see how they do it in accounts payable.
I work from home most of the time. Many days I don't really get cleaned up before sitting down to work. The phone is nice because the customer can't see that I am still wearing the pair of baggies that I went surfing in that morning.
Video phones would seriously screw up my life.
What I need is imaging software that will modify the image in real time to make me look respectable. I can imagine a list of preference with check boxes for add shirt, add tie, remove the bags from under my eyes because I was out drinking last night.
I was not paid a tremendous amount of money as an entry level employee. I performed my duties to the best of my ability and always acted professionally. I also made an effort to not only become more technically adept but socially adept as well. I now make more money. I do not think that this is a coincidence.
I am self employed so I have to present myself in such a way that people feel confident hiring me. I not only have a good educational background and excellent professional experience, I also keep myself fit, dress well, and pay attention to all of the other little details that affect how people perceive me. I charge a lot of money for my services. Customers not only need to feel confident that I can do the technical work; they also need to feel confident that I will not embarrass them for making the decision to hire me. Good communication skills, a good attitude, a fit appearance, appropriate dress, and all of the other little details all add up.
I think that they original poster shows a total lack of regard for all of these things. The pay does not just come automatically. You have to make it happen. If he is in a low paying job, then he needs to do the things that will make it possible for him to find a higher paying job. Ignoring the social aspects will not help.
This happened with our old cable company here in Florida as well. Migrant laborers with shovels come in and dig the crap out of your front yard. It pisses me off two. You come home from work and find a huge hole with dirt and crap everywhere and then it takes you months to put evertyhing back together when they finish.
The new owner of the cable company actually uses newer equipment to push cables between smaller holes. It doesn't make as big of a mess although the equipment is expensive and looks like it probably takes a lot to maintain.
It sounds like they need to maybe spend a little more on the installation and make it bearable for the homeowners. I know that it used to piss me off really bad to come home and find a huge hole in my front yard. I'd love to have fiber to my house but I know that I wouldn't put up with the mess shown in the pictures. It isn't necessary.
"How often do most people search for files on their hard drive - my guess is not that often."
Are you kidding? I've got ten years worth of project files, code, email, etc. on my laptop. Google Desktop search is incredible. Even if you keep things reasonably organized on your hard drive, the context in which you are searching is not always the context in which you saved it. I may have all of my files organized by customer but what if I want to go back and see what projects I specified a certain piece of hardware for? Google finds it all in no time.
I've gone to a purely digital model. If I didn't get it in electronic format then I scan it. OCR does a reasonable job of reading text allowing text search. People are always amazed when we are in a meeting and I can pull up documents from a couple of years ago instantly.
Desktop searching and information retrival is the killer app these days. At least for anyone who does any real work on a computer.
Conspiracy theory 27
Actually I think that they are too lazy to count Columbia pieces and hope he can do it in one shot.
I think that you have a really good point about the me-too types. When I see the reports that 200,000-400,000 IT jobs have been lost, I usually figure that was the number of unqualified people who took some cert course and got in because they thought it was a gravy train.
For the most part the people who know what they are doing have been able to find and keep jobs. Things have cooled down and they don't have as many choices as they did during the boom but they are able to make a pretty good living.