I have CD's that are 17 years old. They still work and I have been able to rip all of them and use them in my MP3 player. The beauty of an open format.
DRM sucks. The files only last for as long as you have the software/hardware to play them. What is my guarantee that I will be able to listen to this music in 20 years after I spend the money to license it? Let's face it, at $10/album or $0.99/song it is not as good of a deal as a $16 CD. The data is in a crippled format that is less valuable to me because I may not be able to use it in a few years. If HP or Apple or whoever later decides to stop supporting the format then I am screwed, I can't legally convert the files to another format unless the vendor is nice enough to provide me with an officially sanctioned tool. Do you think they will do that instead of forcing me to buy another copy in a different format?
How am I supposed to keep track of which file came from which vendor and thus needs player X to play?
I guess it depends on what type of business you are starting. I found it very difficult to get started as a part time business. It is difficult to do your business when all of your potential customers, suppliers, etc are also off from the normal work day.
I also found that knowing that I was screwed if I didn't start making some money helped a great deal. Starvation is the ultimate motivator. As long as I still had a paycheck coming in, I didn't push myself as hard as I was forced to after quiting my job.
It is worth spending time to learn even if it means that you do a lot of it on your own time.
I guess you know that it can be pretty daunting. There are a lot of acronyms and protocols to learn. It is also a lot different than regular IT work because everything is interfaced to physical systems. Dealing with critical business systems can be pretty stressful but it is even more so when your system could kill or mame someone, release a toxic cloud of chemicals, or take the power out in a city. I tend to enjoy the challenges.
I can tell you from my experience that this is a good combination of skills to have. I have kept very busy over the last few years and have recently been passing up work. There is just a huge demand for this skillset.
This is not the case. Ole for Process Control (OPC) which is DCOM based is extremely common and you often see it in SCADA systems but it is not a defining element.
I've been through some of the GE/Harris training and have worked with these systems in the past and I will soon start a project to redesign the security on one of these systems.
The overall EMS system is usually large and consists of a little of everything. The core system is Unix based.
The hardware is usually comprised of IBM AIX systems but I have seen HP-UX boxes as well. There is a lot of redundancy in the system so that a single and in many cases multiple hardware failures will not affect the system.
The software relies on a database to store most of the configuration information. It used to be Sybase but Oracle is also supported and is usually the choice now.
The system software is somewhat archaic consisting of a lot of C code developed by GE/Harris. As you can imagine, this isn't an off the shelf type of thing. There is a lot of redundancy and error checking in the code and it is very resiliant to an overall failure although in my experience it can be pretty finicky on an individual workstation or server level.
The problem arises in that there are a lot of support systems connected to this core system. They are many times NT based. They may and many times to use OPC which is DCOM based. NT based programs may be used for alarming and user interfaces. They are always used to create the screens on the XA/21 itself becuase they are built in AutoCad and then imported into the system.
The use of Windows/NT in SCADA and control systems can be a big problem. You have to take the appropriate security precautions and realize that these aren't like your desktop systems.
The problems that I see is that these systems are usually put in by engineers with limited help from the IT department. The IT departments typically don't know enough about the systems and they are usually not a big priority for IT. The engineers usually know little about IT.
It is easy to be flippant about NT's security problems and they can be serious. Despite this, it is very possible to build a very stable and secure environment even when it contains NT systems. You just have to be mature about it and deal with it. It has become extremely uncommon to find a system that doesn't use NT somewhere.
For any particular type of cancer there are probably hundreds of promising treatments. Which ones do you put your hope in? Whose advice do you take? How do you know that it will help and not hurt? What if you pick the wrong one and waste your time when there was a better choice?
There is a reason for clinical trials and all of the procedures that a treatment has to go through for approval. If nothing else it forces the drug companies to spend the money on the science to prove that a treatment works. Otherwise they might just decide to spend a bunch of money on advertising and incentives to doctors who recommend the treatment.
The article was posted by an employee of the company developing the treatment. The people working on these treatments want to help people and they hope to make money. In most trials however, the hopes don't pan out. It is important to have the trials because it helps to keep things honest. Researchers and companies might be blinded by greed or passion and commitment to finding a cure.
Going for a quick fix you really miss out
on
Hackers On Atkins
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Let's just start by saying that I don't believe in the Atkins diet. While you may lose weight while you are on it, I think that you are doing damage to your body for short term gain (not weight gain). There is plenty of evidence out there to support that claim. Many of the other posts probably cover it better than I could. I would like to live a long and healthy life and I think that you have to be careful how you do things when you are younger because there will eventually be a price paid for abusing your body.
I guess I have struggled with my weight as much as the next geek. I remember seeing my college graduation pictures and being appalled by how bad I looked. My face was pale, I had a little double chin action starting, and I had milk titties with a paunch that hung over my belt. My posture was bad as well. In short, I looked like shit and I felt like shit. Any kind of physical exertion like climbing up a few flights of stairs made me feel ill.
I've found the best approach is to eat a balanced diet consisting of protein, carbs (tending toward goods with a low glycemic index and trying to stay away from processed sugars), unsaturated fat, and fiber combined with exercise. I split my exercise between weights and cardio.
When I first started to work out, I hated it. I was always sore for a couple of days after weights and the cardio always made me want to puke. I felt awkward being in the gym because I didn't know what I was doing but after a couple of months I really started to enjoy it. My body got used to exercising and I was reading some books and magazines to figure out what to do. Once you get into it there are so many rewards.
Weight lifting is more difficult than it looks. How you do it determines the gains that you make and how likely you are to hurt yourself. Technique is the key and it takes a while to learn. I'm to the point now where I set goals for things like squats, dead lifts, and bench press. I work out the plan and then work hard to get there. It's like learning a new scripting language or maybe picking up Linux for the first time. When you first start you don't know what the hell you are doing. After a while you become a pro. Now I'm not a big muscle head, my body is just better proportioned. My shoulders are wider than my love handles, my chest is wider, and I have better posture. I just look better overall. I've also noticed that a lot of nagging aches and pains have gone away. My lower back feels good. I also have an injured shoulder that is going much better now that I have built up a little muscle around it.
I started running for cardio. My goal was to finish a half marathon. It was something to focus on and judge my progress against. I still do a half marathon every year but I decided that running is not my thing. I've taken up cycling and love it. Just like weights, I set goals to keep things interesting. I started out by signing up for an 860 mile trek from Miami to Tallahassee, FL. I worked out a plan of the number of miles a week that I wanted to ride and did two 100 mile rides the two weekends before the ride. I'm planning a cross country ride in 2007 (why set small goals). I enjoy the cycling on a lot of levels. I get to see a lot of places that I normally wouldn't see. I've met a lot of really cool people. It also clears my mind. I can't tell you how many times I have been frustrated with a technical problem, taken an hour off to cycle, and then come back and knocked it out. I also really enjoy the physical challenge and pushing myself to do things that I wouldn't have imagined that I could do a few years ago.
I probably sound a little like a zealot here but I can't imagine going back to living the way I used to. I'm happier, healthier, and more energetic.
I think that if you are now where I used to be years back, I would seriously consider a sensible balanced diet and find some physical activities that you enjoy. If you do it right, it can be very physically, intellectually, and spiritual
Heaven forbid that anyone should read the article before posting.
Taken out of context, what Gates said sounds ludicrous. You also have to remember that this was an off the cuff remark. Read the whole article and it makes more sense. His point is that despite the holes in Windows code, patches were provided prior to the hole being exploited and the people who patched their systems and had reasonable security (i.e. many layers) in place had no problems.
My experience would seem to support this. I see a lot of networks in my travels. The folks who are on top of things don't seem to have a lot of problems. The folks who aren't have lots of problems, viruses and otherwise. I would say that the quality and quantity of the people involved is more important than the OS that you run at this point.
The biggest problem that I see is IT departments that have people with insufficient skills. The right person with the right skills can make all the difference in the world. Many companies deploy systems in a haphazard fashion without thinking about maintaining the systems. Before you know it they have a big stinking mess that is going to cost a lot of money to clean up when it could have all been avoided if the right people had been involved from the beginning. Once the mess is there, they can't afford to go back and fix it. They have systems everywhere that aren't patched and were never locked down properly anyway. They have no way to centrally manage the systems and don't monitor their network traffic.
If you have your shit together and pay attention to detail, you can maintain a pretty secure environment with Windows. I would say that this is the same for most major systems out there. Look at the security patches available for Linux, Apache, and most other software out there. If you are lax then you likely have security vulnerabilities no matter what you have installed. There is no perfect code out there. Any complex system is bound to have holes.
I think that it is unwise to underestimate Microsoft. In the past, stability was the main issue. They have come a long way in improving stability. Now the main issue is security. It is going to take a couple of years but I would say that you will see a level of improvement that is comparable to the stability improvements seen in NT. It won't be perfect but it will be good enough to keep people buying.
I work with a lot of embedded controls systems and the use of Windows with these systems (for Human Machine Interface, data gathering, etc) is increasingly common. The security concerns related to viruses and worms are also more common.
Back when more of these systems used Unix, VMS, etc, it was not a big concern. The environment was so heterogeneous that you didn't need to worry. Now that everyone is running Windows, it becomes a huge problem.
I've been helping several of my customers lock things down and better isolate their control systems. There are plenty of ways to do this effectively but it only takes one careless tech to screw the whole thing up. While I'm confident that I can develop the infrastructure and procedures to protect the systems, I'm not confident that the procedures will be adhered to.
This has become such a large concern that many of them are reevaluating their purchasing decisions and considering turning away from Windows. The problem is that nearly all of the vendors are now producing Windows only solutions.
I would like to say that there would likely be similar problems if everyone was running Linux. While you can lock things down when you start to put the systems into the hands of less sophisticated users you will have the same problems. I see this as more of a user problem than a technology problem. The reason that these worms and viruses spread so fast is that users are not taking the procautions that they should.
Anecdotal support for this argument can be found at any large LAN party. There are always a number of bozos running Red Hat infected with all kinds of crap because they have no idea what they are doing.
You can give two guys the best woodworking equipment in the world and the best wood. One will produce an heirloom and the other will be in the emergency room getting his fingers sewn back on. There are more of the latter than the former in this world.
The problem with large scale adoption of Linux on the desktop is the applications that don't run or don't run easily on Linux.
Anyone who went through Y2k upgrades of desktops realizes that 20% of the appications (all of the odd balls) were 80% of the work. Upgrading Office, email, etc was the easy part.
There is a large cost involved in this migration. Even if you can replace 80% of the applications that everyone uses with a Linux alternative, you still aren't even close to being finished.
Running these applications under Wine or an emulator isn't going to work. The cost of supporting that alone would wipe out any saving from going to Linux.
I would like to see it happen as much as anyone else but I think that many people underestimate what it would really take to do it. There is still a very long way to go.
If I had gotten my hands on some of the stinkers that I have been to recently prior to shelling out money to see them, I would have probably passed.
The tactic these days seems to be to hype it as much as possible to get as many people there the first weekend before word gets out about how bad it sucks.
Seems like an aweful lot of exposure for 20% savings.
A terrorist strike in one of these regions and you could see the company stock plunge because 80% of your IT development is done there. Seems if I were a terrorist this might be a good way to strike US economic interests.
Let's say your "partner" overseas decides to take the money and run. Do you then track them down and sue them in Indian/Chinese/whatever legal system? How successful will you be?
If something does happen to your partner, how long will it take you to recover? How much does it cost to have a standby?
How about exposure to other political instability? Don't India and Pakistan stare each other down with nuclear weapons at the ready every year or so? Isn't there a crazy little dude with funky hair in North Korea making missiles that can reach a lot of these regions?
How about all of the pissed off in-house talent who leaves? You've turned your real partners into adversaries. All that accumulated knowledge has left and you're now trying to rebuild it half way around the world? Does this make sense?
20% doesn't sound like all that much. You might be able to save that much by working on better managing your in-house resources.
This isn't to say that there isn't danger and uncertainty here in America, but overall it seems to be about the most stable environment to conduct business.
I would tend to agree. These are very expensive and sophisticated aircraft. They should be designed to be pretty much immune to this type of interference. Besides, at takeoff and landing, the plane is subjected to all kinds of EMI from ground based radios, radar, etc. Most are much more powerful than the interference that could be generated from a cell phone or a laptop. Certainly this is taken into account during the design process.
Anecdotal evidence of problems is a little suspect anyway. There were only about 100 reported incedents last year out of all of the flights that took place. That isn't a very large sample. The people reporting the problems aren't experts in this type of thing either.
The computer didn't have to be exposed to the internet to get the worm.
I do a lot of work in these areas. There are systems all over the place that are maintained by plant maintenance people. The IT department usually doesn't get too involved. All it takes is for a technician with an infected laptop to plug into the network or maybe a computer with one lan card plugged into the corporate network and the other on the controls network.
Unfortunately the IT departments never have enough staff to cover plant equipment and the plant maintenance people never have enough training to cover the equipment effectively. Things are setup that IT doesn't know about. I see it all the time. I can't tell you how many times I go into plants and freak out about the way that they have things setup.
Unfortunately the computers connected to control systems are seldom up to date with patches. They usually don't have an internet connection so you end up having to put everything on CD and then install. Very inconvenient and time consuming. Control systems and HMI software are notorious for getting broken by new patches and service packs. You can't just go around indescriminately updating computers without checking with each vendor to insure that they support that patch.
The trend has been toward moving these things to NT/W2K. While I probably don't have the aversion to these systems that most./'ers do, I do worry because of the commonality of these systems. There are so many trojans,viruses, worms, etc. In the old days we had VMS and Unix. Security by obscurity baby. How many VMS worms existed? We had every different flavor of Unix. You didn't have these problems. With everyone running hte same OS, the potential for these problems increases dramatically.
The situation is fortunate for me though. I make a lot of money dealing with IT infrastructure in plant environments. If you have an IT and engineering background, there is an endless amount of work out there doing these types of things.
"This means even to just watch divx movies and not do any actual enncoding, one has to install adware on their machine"
Or you could actually pay them for it.
I know, I know, heresy. I tend to agree.
The only software that should be charged for is the stuff that I write. At least until someone comes up with a free open source mortgage, open source health insurance, open source electric utilities, open source government that isn't tax supported, and last but not least, a free open source woman who doesn't live to spend my money.
I know PhD's who have started their own companies and been fantastically successful. I also know PhD's who will never have a pot to piss in.
There is a stereotype that is well founded in my opinion of the egghead with no interpersonal skills who stays in school because they like the structure. Book smarts will take you a long way in the academic environment and you can be painfully introverted with poor people skills and do just fine. These types of people have a lot of trouble in the real world.
The right mix of skills can take you anywhere. Remember that the PhD is just a part of the essential mix of skill.
You will need to network with people in industry so that you have a market for your new skills when you get out of school. Keeping contact with the outside world will also give your learning some context and help keep you grounded.
I would also make sure that you keep up with your social skills. Don't just hang around other geeks. When you return to the real world you are going to have to work with poeple from other fields. That can be pretty difficult if you only social with people who are just like you.
It seems to me that Netscape was way ahead of MS in the beginning and they were sitting on a boat load of money from a huge IPO. Why do you suppose all of those innovations that he had in his head never made it into his product. He certainly had the resources.
Let's face it, Microsoft doesn't play fair but Netscape didn't innovate fast enough and by IE 3.0-4.0 MS had closed the gap. Netscape didn't have any great features that IE hadn't duplicated already. Microsoft is a master of this game. They just keep chasing you and wearing you down. They just copied what Netscape did and kept refining it. Making it work better in Windows. They win.
Netscape made the same mistake that IBM, Novell, WordPerfect, Lotus, Palm, and many others made. They innovated too slowly, basically sat on their laurels and MS was able to catch up and overtake them.
If Andreessen had these great innovative ideas, he should have patented them to protect them for a while and put them in his product as quickly as possible. MS would not have been able to copy them without infringing on the patent. It would have at least slowed them down a little. Netscape didn't do anything innovative though. Hyperlinking, HTML, forward and back buttons were all wide open and MS could copy at will.
I can't blame Marc Andreessen for taking full advantage of being in the right place at the right time but I think that he blew his load on Mosaic. What we are hearing is bitterness at MS. I can't blame him but he isn't one of the people that I look to for insight into the future. I just don't think that he is much brighter than the rest of us. Not a dummy to be sure but not a visionary either.
Lastly, I'm not sure that the browser needs a whole lot of innovation. Part of the beauty of it is its simplicity. Forward, back, and hyperlink are easy concepts for people to understand and master. I don't know that we can change it that quickly without screwing up less sophisticated users.
The innovation is on the back end. ASP,JSP, PHP to build the pages from dynamic data. XML to represent the data in a portable, cross platform way. Web services for cross platform RPC. These are the real innovations that have happened. The money was never in the browser Marc, it was in getting content to the web.
For 471 large, the DoD could directly hire the most brilliant software minds in the country to create their own operating system and office suite and any other necessary software. What's more, the OS could be released into the public domain and made freely available to the public (perhaps without any classified code). Instead, the DoD is at the mercy of some large corporation, obligated to spend 1/2 billion in a few years to patch all the bugs.
That would be the OS that I was referring to. Purely hypothetical.
The comments come from experience working for govt agencies as an employee and as a private contractor as well as working in private industry. Yes, there is waste in any endeavor but govt institutions stand in a league of their own. Ever try to hire the person you want into a govt position? You can't get there from here. Ever try to buy exactly what you need? You can't get there from here. Everything is a hassle and nobody is directly accountable. Overruns of time and budget are commonplace. In private companies these things tend to force a correction as they start to affect the bottom line. In govt they just borrow more and/or raise taxes.
I think that most people who have worked in both sectors would tend to agree but like most things, there will also be many who disagree.
There are some things that the government must do because they can't be left to private enterprise, like defense of the nation. Those things should be chosen carefully though. I guess the main thing that I objected to was the suggestion that the DOD develop the software and then make it freely available. It sounds good on the surface but I think that the govt taking taxpayer money and then using it to compete with private enterprise is even worse than Microsoft using its stranglehold on the desktop to shoehorn other software into the marketplace.
I disagree that there is no competition. Sun, IBM, Oracle, SAP, the entire open software movement, and many talented others are all gunning for a piece of the pie. Competition is fierce. MS has only had its position of power for about 5 years now. They constantly try to innovate (of course you can argue this point) and use every advantage that they can muster like their dominance on the desktop. If there was no competition, they would be able to sit there with Office 95 and just keep charging for it. As soon as they slack off, they'll suffer just as Lotus, IBM, Novell, and many others have in the past.
I can't point to a study that says that private enterprise is more productive than govt. I'll look around though. I'm sure that one is out there.
There are definitely problems with using COTS technology but the govt tried what you are talking about for a long time. Then someone realized that they were spending a fortune to reinvent the wheel when superior technology was often available for far less.
Do you really think that the govt should be in the business of putting private companies out of business? What happens when they take your tax dollars to produce a product that competes with your company's products and then give it away? I guess you can go work for the govt.
The marketplace produces pretty intense competition. Bright and ambitious people work their butts off trying to improve products, reduce design time, and decrease costs because they might strike it big. Products and techiniques progress at an insanely fast pace. I don't ever see that happening in govt.
Since when can the govt only hire the best and brightest. Have you dealt with govt hiring policies lately. It pretty much guarantees that for every bright person, you will get dozens of meatheads. You can never fire these meatheads. They are there to gum up the works forever.
I can see it now. The new IT project is behind schedule and over budget. Originally projected to cost $471k, the costs have soared to $2.4 billion with no end in sight. The project will be finished 3 years late. Now that sounds like a govt project.
It goes back to the old adage that in theory there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is.
I donâ(TM)t think it is simple to fix. Business processes tend to get complicated. Companies must try to meet the needs of many different customers. The end result never looks like something that was designed by one person but rather a conglomeration of the attempts of many people to make everyone happy. You canâ(TM)t just tell your customers to deal with it this way because the programmer doesnâ(TM)t want to spoil the elegance of his system.
You also have to take into account that you rarely if ever get to start from scratch and make everything simple, homogeneous, and elegant. You always end up having to get this file from the old Unisys machine, access this database on the AS/400, ftp this file from another old system, etc. Deal with this Perl script, that COBOL code, that piece of JAVA.
These âoepackagesâ that you implement end up being about 75% code from the vendor and about 25% glue and hacks implemented on-site to meet requirements. So the complexity arises from having to meet all of these needs when a software system is implemented. Each new project adds a few more goofy requirements.
When you start integrating with legacy systems and code from all of the place it is very difficult to adequately test. If you sit down and look at everything it is impossible to develop enough test cases to cover the full range of possibilities. They are practically infinite. Every machine, OS, OS patch level, language, library, communication protocol, file format, database, etc. throws another opportunity for a failure.
You also never have a stable target. Businesses merge, spinoff, develop new products and services, move, layoff, downsize, rightsize⦠At the drop of a hat. When you think about it, we are kicking butt to have anything working.
I guess this happens all the time. Its a shame
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Linux Router Project Dead
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I don't know all of the details here, just what he posted on the LRP site but...
If you are doing this type of thing with the expectation of making a living then you are running a business. If you are running a business then you had better take care of business. This means taking care of a bunch of things that geeks donâ(TM)t like to have to worry about.
It is tough. I'm a geek and I love what I do but I am always juggling my dreams and intellectual interests with the demands of life. My wife and I aren't super materialistic but we have a fairly nice house, like to drive reliable cars, etc. It all takes money. Not a lot but enough that it doesnâ(TM)t just happen by accident.
There are a lot of intellectually challenging things that I would love to do but I can't figure out how to make it work financially. In a lot of ways I respect his ability to forego financial gratification and pursue his dreams but I do think it is foolish to pour time into a project without some sort of plan for taking care of you. If you arenâ(TM)t attending to your business nobody else is going to.
He should have at least had some sort of business plan or plans that would result in him meeting his other life goals in addition to his intellectual pursuits. Thatâ(TM)s just the way life is whether you think it is a good thing or not. Pretty much everyone else on the planet is doing the same thing.
Free software isnâ(TM)t really free. It takes people who have invested a lot of time and money in their education, computers, electricity, a roof over your head. This all adds up.
So, I guess this sort of thing happens all the time. Geek enjoys programming and computers wants to leave his/her mark on the world. Works on project at the neglect of other things, then gets pissed off because the other things werenâ(TM)t taken care of.
Here is an old 1998 research paper that describes some of the preliminary work on such a system. It looks like research into this kind of thing is at least 5-6 years along. Honda doesn't make crap so I'm sure that it is pretty far along by now.
I drove a Mercedes SL500 a few months ago. It has the radar controlled cruise control, etc on it. If you go too hot into a corner, it can brake individual wheels too help control the skid. The kind of stuff that you can't do on your own.
There are a lot of the "I understand physics so I'm a better driver" kind of posts. Accidents happen fast and not always because of things that you do. It isn't only stupid people that get into them. You can be doing everything right and still get killed.
Anything that helps in a split second live and death instance I am all for. In many cases these systems can kick in and do their thing much faster than you can and they can do things that you can't like brake individual wheels, tighten the seatbelt, deploy and airbag, and just about anything else that you can imagine. These little differences can be the difference between surviving and not.
Another thing that this helps is to avoid stupid accidents while you are talking on a cell phone, playing with your mp3 player, eating, and other things that you really shouldn't do but everyone does. Most of us spend so much time in our cars that it would be nice to see things totally automated where we could relax, get work done, etc. Wasn't that all supposed to be working by now? Who's in charge of that project? You're late.
"New Line understands Peter's vision and understands it is bound by technology, so it makes sure technology is not a bottleneck," Houston said. "In the big scheme, a few million dollars for a couple of thousand processors will pay dividends."
In so many of the things that we do the payoff for the use of new technology is not always obvious to everyone. It must be nice to work in an industry where the relationship between the latest technology and the payoff is so easily defined.
First off, realize that no matter how good you think that you are or how much you think the company depends on you, they will just hire someone else to replace you and move on. It is a very rare case that a company just can't go on without a few people. You may inconvenience them for a while but that is about it. Life will go on.
Secondly, don't leave without a plan. If you have plenty of savings and job prospects then go for it. It would be best to line up a new gig prior to leaving the old one though. If you don't have savings and alternatives then its time to buck up and deal with the current situation. If you haven't set aside some cash, kept your fixed expenses low, and networked like hell then you deserve to be stuck. Learn your lesson and make plans to leave your options open in the future. There is nothing worse than being stuck in a shit job because you can't afford to leave.
Third, be professional. If you do leave just tell your boss that you have other opportunities that you want to pursue and give 2 weeks notice. Work hard and be pleasant for those two weeks. You will never regret acting professionally and you leave plenty of options open. You may want to work at this company again some day. You may want to use somebody as a reference. At the very least, you want people to think well of you after you leave. You never know where you will run into these people again. If you make an ass of yourself it could hurt you in the future.
Four, I would leave on my own and not as a group. Why throw fuel on the fire. Nobody can fault you for leaving on your own to pursue something else. Leaving as a group implies that you are intentionally trying to hurt the company. Its up to you but I wouldn't do it.
Last, be constructive and do things because they are what is best for you, not because you want to hurt somebody else.
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I have CD's that are 17 years old. They still work and I have been able to rip all of them and use them in my MP3 player. The beauty of an open format.
DRM sucks. The files only last for as long as you have the software/hardware to play them. What is my guarantee that I will be able to listen to this music in 20 years after I spend the money to license it? Let's face it, at $10/album or $0.99/song it is not as good of a deal as a $16 CD. The data is in a crippled format that is less valuable to me because I may not be able to use it in a few years. If HP or Apple or whoever later decides to stop supporting the format then I am screwed, I can't legally convert the files to another format unless the vendor is nice enough to provide me with an officially sanctioned tool. Do you think they will do that instead of forcing me to buy another copy in a different format?
How am I supposed to keep track of which file came from which vendor and thus needs player X to play?
I guess it depends on what type of business you are starting. I found it very difficult to get started as a part time business. It is difficult to do your business when all of your potential customers, suppliers, etc are also off from the normal work day.
I also found that knowing that I was screwed if I didn't start making some money helped a great deal. Starvation is the ultimate motivator. As long as I still had a paycheck coming in, I didn't push myself as hard as I was forced to after quiting my job.
It is worth spending time to learn even if it means that you do a lot of it on your own time.
I guess you know that it can be pretty daunting. There are a lot of acronyms and protocols to learn. It is also a lot different than regular IT work because everything is interfaced to physical systems. Dealing with critical business systems can be pretty stressful but it is even more so when your system could kill or mame someone, release a toxic cloud of chemicals, or take the power out in a city. I tend to enjoy the challenges.
I can tell you from my experience that this is a good combination of skills to have. I have kept very busy over the last few years and have recently been passing up work. There is just a huge demand for this skillset.
This is not the case. Ole for Process Control (OPC) which is DCOM based is extremely common and you often see it in SCADA systems but it is not a defining element.
I've been through some of the GE/Harris training and have worked with these systems in the past and I will soon start a project to redesign the security on one of these systems.
The overall EMS system is usually large and consists of a little of everything. The core system is Unix based.
The hardware is usually comprised of IBM AIX systems but I have seen HP-UX boxes as well. There is a lot of redundancy in the system so that a single and in many cases multiple hardware failures will not affect the system.
The software relies on a database to store most of the configuration information. It used to be Sybase but Oracle is also supported and is usually the choice now.
The system software is somewhat archaic consisting of a lot of C code developed by GE/Harris. As you can imagine, this isn't an off the shelf type of thing. There is a lot of redundancy and error checking in the code and it is very resiliant to an overall failure although in my experience it can be pretty finicky on an individual workstation or server level.
The problem arises in that there are a lot of support systems connected to this core system. They are many times NT based. They may and many times to use OPC which is DCOM based. NT based programs may be used for alarming and user interfaces. They are always used to create the screens on the XA/21 itself becuase they are built in AutoCad and then imported into the system.
The use of Windows/NT in SCADA and control systems can be a big problem. You have to take the appropriate security precautions and realize that these aren't like your desktop systems.
The problems that I see is that these systems are usually put in by engineers with limited help from the IT department. The IT departments typically don't know enough about the systems and they are usually not a big priority for IT. The engineers usually know little about IT.
It is easy to be flippant about NT's security problems and they can be serious. Despite this, it is very possible to build a very stable and secure environment even when it contains NT systems. You just have to be mature about it and deal with it. It has become extremely uncommon to find a system that doesn't use NT somewhere.
Because hope gets lost in the noise.
For any particular type of cancer there are probably hundreds of promising treatments. Which ones do you put your hope in? Whose advice do you take? How do you know that it will help and not hurt? What if you pick the wrong one and waste your time when there was a better choice?
There is a reason for clinical trials and all of the procedures that a treatment has to go through for approval. If nothing else it forces the drug companies to spend the money on the science to prove that a treatment works. Otherwise they might just decide to spend a bunch of money on advertising and incentives to doctors who recommend the treatment.
The article was posted by an employee of the company developing the treatment. The people working on these treatments want to help people and they hope to make money. In most trials however, the hopes don't pan out. It is important to have the trials because it helps to keep things honest. Researchers and companies might be blinded by greed or passion and commitment to finding a cure.
Let's just start by saying that I don't believe in the Atkins diet. While you may lose weight while you are on it, I think that you are doing damage to your body for short term gain (not weight gain). There is plenty of evidence out there to support that claim. Many of the other posts probably cover it better than I could. I would like to live a long and healthy life and I think that you have to be careful how you do things when you are younger because there will eventually be a price paid for abusing your body.
I guess I have struggled with my weight as much as the next geek. I remember seeing my college graduation pictures and being appalled by how bad I looked. My face was pale, I had a little double chin action starting, and I had milk titties with a paunch that hung over my belt. My posture was bad as well. In short, I looked like shit and I felt like shit. Any kind of physical exertion like climbing up a few flights of stairs made me feel ill.
I've found the best approach is to eat a balanced diet consisting of protein, carbs (tending toward goods with a low glycemic index and trying to stay away from processed sugars), unsaturated fat, and fiber combined with exercise. I split my exercise between weights and cardio.
When I first started to work out, I hated it. I was always sore for a couple of days after weights and the cardio always made me want to puke. I felt awkward being in the gym because I didn't know what I was doing but after a couple of months I really started to enjoy it. My body got used to exercising and I was reading some books and magazines to figure out what to do. Once you get into it there are so many rewards.
Weight lifting is more difficult than it looks. How you do it determines the gains that you make and how likely you are to hurt yourself. Technique is the key and it takes a while to learn. I'm to the point now where I set goals for things like squats, dead lifts, and bench press. I work out the plan and then work hard to get there. It's like learning a new scripting language or maybe picking up Linux for the first time. When you first start you don't know what the hell you are doing. After a while you become a pro. Now I'm not a big muscle head, my body is just better proportioned. My shoulders are wider than my love handles, my chest is wider, and I have better posture. I just look better overall. I've also noticed that a lot of nagging aches and pains have gone away. My lower back feels good. I also have an injured shoulder that is going much better now that I have built up a little muscle around it.
I started running for cardio. My goal was to finish a half marathon. It was something to focus on and judge my progress against. I still do a half marathon every year but I decided that running is not my thing. I've taken up cycling and love it. Just like weights, I set goals to keep things interesting. I started out by signing up for an 860 mile trek from Miami to Tallahassee, FL. I worked out a plan of the number of miles a week that I wanted to ride and did two 100 mile rides the two weekends before the ride. I'm planning a cross country ride in 2007 (why set small goals). I enjoy the cycling on a lot of levels. I get to see a lot of places that I normally wouldn't see. I've met a lot of really cool people. It also clears my mind. I can't tell you how many times I have been frustrated with a technical problem, taken an hour off to cycle, and then come back and knocked it out. I also really enjoy the physical challenge and pushing myself to do things that I wouldn't have imagined that I could do a few years ago.
I probably sound a little like a zealot here but I can't imagine going back to living the way I used to. I'm happier, healthier, and more energetic.
I think that if you are now where I used to be years back, I would seriously consider a sensible balanced diet and find some physical activities that you enjoy. If you do it right, it can be very physically, intellectually, and spiritual
Heaven forbid that anyone should read the article before posting.
Taken out of context, what Gates said sounds ludicrous. You also have to remember that this was an off the cuff remark. Read the whole article and it makes more sense. His point is that despite the holes in Windows code, patches were provided prior to the hole being exploited and the people who patched their systems and had reasonable security (i.e. many layers) in place had no problems.
My experience would seem to support this. I see a lot of networks in my travels. The folks who are on top of things don't seem to have a lot of problems. The folks who aren't have lots of problems, viruses and otherwise. I would say that the quality and quantity of the people involved is more important than the OS that you run at this point.
The biggest problem that I see is IT departments that have people with insufficient skills. The right person with the right skills can make all the difference in the world. Many companies deploy systems in a haphazard fashion without thinking about maintaining the systems. Before you know it they have a big stinking mess that is going to cost a lot of money to clean up when it could have all been avoided if the right people had been involved from the beginning. Once the mess is there, they can't afford to go back and fix it. They have systems everywhere that aren't patched and were never locked down properly anyway. They have no way to centrally manage the systems and don't monitor their network traffic.
If you have your shit together and pay attention to detail, you can maintain a pretty secure environment with Windows. I would say that this is the same for most major systems out there. Look at the security patches available for Linux, Apache, and most other software out there. If you are lax then you likely have security vulnerabilities no matter what you have installed. There is no perfect code out there. Any complex system is bound to have holes.
I think that it is unwise to underestimate Microsoft. In the past, stability was the main issue. They have come a long way in improving stability. Now the main issue is security. It is going to take a couple of years but I would say that you will see a level of improvement that is comparable to the stability improvements seen in NT. It won't be perfect but it will be good enough to keep people buying.
I work with a lot of embedded controls systems and the use of Windows with these systems (for Human Machine Interface, data gathering, etc) is increasingly common. The security concerns related to viruses and worms are also more common.
Back when more of these systems used Unix, VMS, etc, it was not a big concern. The environment was so heterogeneous that you didn't need to worry. Now that everyone is running Windows, it becomes a huge problem.
I've been helping several of my customers lock things down and better isolate their control systems. There are plenty of ways to do this effectively but it only takes one careless tech to screw the whole thing up. While I'm confident that I can develop the infrastructure and procedures to protect the systems, I'm not confident that the procedures will be adhered to.
This has become such a large concern that many of them are reevaluating their purchasing decisions and considering turning away from Windows. The problem is that nearly all of the vendors are now producing Windows only solutions.
I would like to say that there would likely be similar problems if everyone was running Linux. While you can lock things down when you start to put the systems into the hands of less sophisticated users you will have the same problems. I see this as more of a user problem than a technology problem. The reason that these worms and viruses spread so fast is that users are not taking the procautions that they should.
Anecdotal support for this argument can be found at any large LAN party. There are always a number of bozos running Red Hat infected with all kinds of crap because they have no idea what they are doing.
You can give two guys the best woodworking equipment in the world and the best wood. One will produce an heirloom and the other will be in the emergency room getting his fingers sewn back on. There are more of the latter than the former in this world.
The problem with large scale adoption of Linux on the desktop is the applications that don't run or don't run easily on Linux.
Anyone who went through Y2k upgrades of desktops realizes that 20% of the appications (all of the odd balls) were 80% of the work. Upgrading Office, email, etc was the easy part.
There is a large cost involved in this migration. Even if you can replace 80% of the applications that everyone uses with a Linux alternative, you still aren't even close to being finished.
Running these applications under Wine or an emulator isn't going to work. The cost of supporting that alone would wipe out any saving from going to Linux.
I would like to see it happen as much as anyone else but I think that many people underestimate what it would really take to do it. There is still a very long way to go.
Assuming it is a quality product.
If I had gotten my hands on some of the stinkers that I have been to recently prior to shelling out money to see them, I would have probably passed.
The tactic these days seems to be to hype it as much as possible to get as many people there the first weekend before word gets out about how bad it sucks.
Seems like an aweful lot of exposure for 20% savings.
A terrorist strike in one of these regions and you could see the company stock plunge because 80% of your IT development is done there. Seems if I were a terrorist this might be a good way to strike US economic interests.
Let's say your "partner" overseas decides to take the money and run. Do you then track them down and sue them in Indian/Chinese/whatever legal system? How successful will you be?
If something does happen to your partner, how long will it take you to recover? How much does it cost to have a standby?
How about exposure to other political instability? Don't India and Pakistan stare each other down with nuclear weapons at the ready every year or so? Isn't there a crazy little dude with funky hair in North Korea making missiles that can reach a lot of these regions?
How about all of the pissed off in-house talent who leaves? You've turned your real partners into adversaries. All that accumulated knowledge has left and you're now trying to rebuild it half way around the world? Does this make sense?
20% doesn't sound like all that much. You might be able to save that much by working on better managing your in-house resources.
This isn't to say that there isn't danger and uncertainty here in America, but overall it seems to be about the most stable environment to conduct business.
I would tend to agree. These are very expensive and sophisticated aircraft. They should be designed to be pretty much immune to this type of interference. Besides, at takeoff and landing, the plane is subjected to all kinds of EMI from ground based radios, radar, etc. Most are much more powerful than the interference that could be generated from a cell phone or a laptop. Certainly this is taken into account during the design process.
Anecdotal evidence of problems is a little suspect anyway. There were only about 100 reported incedents last year out of all of the flights that took place. That isn't a very large sample. The people reporting the problems aren't experts in this type of thing either.
I have to reboot my laptop after installing the new update. Gotta go!
computer: "Would you like to reboot?"
me: Of course I like to reboot all the time. Otherwise I would be running Linux.
The computer didn't have to be exposed to the internet to get the worm.
./'ers do, I do worry because of the commonality of these systems. There are so many trojans,viruses, worms, etc. In the old days we had VMS and Unix. Security by obscurity baby. How many VMS worms existed? We had every different flavor of Unix. You didn't have these problems. With everyone running hte same OS, the potential for these problems increases dramatically.
I do a lot of work in these areas. There are systems all over the place that are maintained by plant maintenance people. The IT department usually doesn't get too involved. All it takes is for a technician with an infected laptop to plug into the network or maybe a computer with one lan card plugged into the corporate network and the other on the controls network.
Unfortunately the IT departments never have enough staff to cover plant equipment and the plant maintenance people never have enough training to cover the equipment effectively. Things are setup that IT doesn't know about. I see it all the time. I can't tell you how many times I go into plants and freak out about the way that they have things setup.
Unfortunately the computers connected to control systems are seldom up to date with patches. They usually don't have an internet connection so you end up having to put everything on CD and then install. Very inconvenient and time consuming. Control systems and HMI software are notorious for getting broken by new patches and service packs. You can't just go around indescriminately updating computers without checking with each vendor to insure that they support that patch.
The trend has been toward moving these things to NT/W2K. While I probably don't have the aversion to these systems that most
The situation is fortunate for me though. I make a lot of money dealing with IT infrastructure in plant environments. If you have an IT and engineering background, there is an endless amount of work out there doing these types of things.
Or you could actually pay them for it.
I know, I know, heresy. I tend to agree.
The only software that should be charged for is the stuff that I write. At least until someone comes up with a free open source mortgage, open source health insurance, open source electric utilities, open source government that isn't tax supported, and last but not least, a free open source woman who doesn't live to spend my money.
I know PhD's who have started their own companies and been fantastically successful. I also know PhD's who will never have a pot to piss in.
There is a stereotype that is well founded in my opinion of the egghead with no interpersonal skills who stays in school because they like the structure. Book smarts will take you a long way in the academic environment and you can be painfully introverted with poor people skills and do just fine. These types of people have a lot of trouble in the real world.
The right mix of skills can take you anywhere. Remember that the PhD is just a part of the essential mix of skill.
You will need to network with people in industry so that you have a market for your new skills when you get out of school. Keeping contact with the outside world will also give your learning some context and help keep you grounded.
I would also make sure that you keep up with your social skills. Don't just hang around other geeks. When you return to the real world you are going to have to work with poeple from other fields. That can be pretty difficult if you only social with people who are just like you.
It seems to me that Netscape was way ahead of MS in the beginning and they were sitting on a boat load of money from a huge IPO. Why do you suppose all of those innovations that he had in his head never made it into his product. He certainly had the resources.
Let's face it, Microsoft doesn't play fair but Netscape didn't innovate fast enough and by IE 3.0-4.0 MS had closed the gap. Netscape didn't have any great features that IE hadn't duplicated already. Microsoft is a master of this game. They just keep chasing you and wearing you down. They just copied what Netscape did and kept refining it. Making it work better in Windows. They win.
Netscape made the same mistake that IBM, Novell, WordPerfect, Lotus, Palm, and many others made. They innovated too slowly, basically sat on their laurels and MS was able to catch up and overtake them.
If Andreessen had these great innovative ideas, he should have patented them to protect them for a while and put them in his product as quickly as possible. MS would not have been able to copy them without infringing on the patent. It would have at least slowed them down a little. Netscape didn't do anything innovative though. Hyperlinking, HTML, forward and back buttons were all wide open and MS could copy at will.
I can't blame Marc Andreessen for taking full advantage of being in the right place at the right time but I think that he blew his load on Mosaic. What we are hearing is bitterness at MS. I can't blame him but he isn't one of the people that I look to for insight into the future. I just don't think that he is much brighter than the rest of us. Not a dummy to be sure but not a visionary either.
Lastly, I'm not sure that the browser needs a whole lot of innovation. Part of the beauty of it is its simplicity. Forward, back, and hyperlink are easy concepts for people to understand and master. I don't know that we can change it that quickly without screwing up less sophisticated users.
The innovation is on the back end. ASP,JSP, PHP to build the pages from dynamic data. XML to represent the data in a portable, cross platform way. Web services for cross platform RPC. These are the real innovations that have happened. The money was never in the browser Marc, it was in getting content to the web.
The posting that I was responding to...
For 471 large, the DoD could directly hire the most brilliant software minds in the country to create their own operating system and office suite and any other necessary software. What's more, the OS could be released into the public domain and made freely available to the public (perhaps without any classified code).
Instead, the DoD is at the mercy of some large corporation, obligated to spend 1/2 billion in a few years to patch all the bugs.
That would be the OS that I was referring to. Purely hypothetical.
The comments come from experience working for govt agencies as an employee and as a private contractor as well as working in private industry. Yes, there is waste in any endeavor but govt institutions stand in a league of their own. Ever try to hire the person you want into a govt position? You can't get there from here. Ever try to buy exactly what you need? You can't get there from here. Everything is a hassle and nobody is directly accountable. Overruns of time and budget are commonplace. In private companies these things tend to force a correction as they start to affect the bottom line. In govt they just borrow more and/or raise taxes.
I think that most people who have worked in both sectors would tend to agree but like most things, there will also be many who disagree.
There are some things that the government must do because they can't be left to private enterprise, like defense of the nation. Those things should be chosen carefully though. I guess the main thing that I objected to was the suggestion that the DOD develop the software and then make it freely available. It sounds good on the surface but I think that the govt taking taxpayer money and then using it to compete with private enterprise is even worse than Microsoft using its stranglehold on the desktop to shoehorn other software into the marketplace.
I disagree that there is no competition. Sun, IBM, Oracle, SAP, the entire open software movement, and many talented others are all gunning for a piece of the pie. Competition is fierce. MS has only had its position of power for about 5 years now. They constantly try to innovate (of course you can argue this point) and use every advantage that they can muster like their dominance on the desktop. If there was no competition, they would be able to sit there with Office 95 and just keep charging for it. As soon as they slack off, they'll suffer just as Lotus, IBM, Novell, and many others have in the past.
I can't point to a study that says that private enterprise is more productive than govt. I'll look around though. I'm sure that one is out there.
Thanks for your comments.
Where to start...
There are definitely problems with using COTS technology but the govt tried what you are talking about for a long time. Then someone realized that they were spending a fortune to reinvent the wheel when superior technology was often available for far less.
Do you really think that the govt should be in the business of putting private companies out of business? What happens when they take your tax dollars to produce a product that competes with your company's products and then give it away? I guess you can go work for the govt.
The marketplace produces pretty intense competition. Bright and ambitious people work their butts off trying to improve products, reduce design time, and decrease costs because they might strike it big. Products and techiniques progress at an insanely fast pace. I don't ever see that happening in govt.
Since when can the govt only hire the best and brightest. Have you dealt with govt hiring policies lately. It pretty much guarantees that for every bright person, you will get dozens of meatheads. You can never fire these meatheads. They are there to gum up the works forever.
I can see it now. The new IT project is behind schedule and over budget. Originally projected to cost $471k, the costs have soared to $2.4 billion with no end in sight. The project will be finished 3 years late. Now that sounds like a govt project.
It goes back to the old adage that in theory there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is.
I donâ(TM)t think it is simple to fix. Business processes tend to get complicated. Companies must try to meet the needs of many different customers. The end result never looks like something that was designed by one person but rather a conglomeration of the attempts of many people to make everyone happy. You canâ(TM)t just tell your customers to deal with it this way because the programmer doesnâ(TM)t want to spoil the elegance of his system.
You also have to take into account that you rarely if ever get to start from scratch and make everything simple, homogeneous, and elegant. You always end up having to get this file from the old Unisys machine, access this database on the AS/400, ftp this file from another old system, etc. Deal with this Perl script, that COBOL code, that piece of JAVA.
These âoepackagesâ that you implement end up being about 75% code from the vendor and about 25% glue and hacks implemented on-site to meet requirements. So the complexity arises from having to meet all of these needs when a software system is implemented. Each new project adds a few more goofy requirements.
When you start integrating with legacy systems and code from all of the place it is very difficult to adequately test. If you sit down and look at everything it is impossible to develop enough test cases to cover the full range of possibilities. They are practically infinite. Every machine, OS, OS patch level, language, library, communication protocol, file format, database, etc. throws another opportunity for a failure.
You also never have a stable target. Businesses merge, spinoff, develop new products and services, move, layoff, downsize, rightsize⦠At the drop of a hat. When you think about it, we are kicking butt to have anything working.
I don't know all of the details here, just what he posted on the LRP site but...
If you are doing this type of thing with the expectation of making a living then you are running a business. If you are running a business then you had better take care of business. This means taking care of a bunch of things that geeks donâ(TM)t like to have to worry about.
It is tough. I'm a geek and I love what I do but I am always juggling my dreams and intellectual interests with the demands of life. My wife and I aren't super materialistic but we have a fairly nice house, like to drive reliable cars, etc. It all takes money. Not a lot but enough that it doesnâ(TM)t just happen by accident.
There are a lot of intellectually challenging things that I would love to do but I can't figure out how to make it work financially. In a lot of ways I respect his ability to forego financial gratification and pursue his dreams but I do think it is foolish to pour time into a project without some sort of plan for taking care of you. If you arenâ(TM)t attending to your business nobody else is going to.
He should have at least had some sort of business plan or plans that would result in him meeting his other life goals in addition to his intellectual pursuits. Thatâ(TM)s just the way life is whether you think it is a good thing or not. Pretty much everyone else on the planet is doing the same thing.
Free software isnâ(TM)t really free. It takes people who have invested a lot of time and money in their education, computers, electricity, a roof over your head. This all adds up.
So, I guess this sort of thing happens all the time. Geek enjoys programming and computers wants to leave his/her mark on the world. Works on project at the neglect of other things, then gets pissed off because the other things werenâ(TM)t taken care of.
It would probably help to include a check for their campaign with the letter.
Here is an old 1998 research paper that describes some of the preliminary work on such a system. It looks like research into this kind of thing is at least 5-6 years along. Honda doesn't make crap so I'm sure that it is pretty far along by now.
I drove a Mercedes SL500 a few months ago. It has the radar controlled cruise control, etc on it. If you go too hot into a corner, it can brake individual wheels too help control the skid. The kind of stuff that you can't do on your own.
There are a lot of the "I understand physics so I'm a better driver" kind of posts. Accidents happen fast and not always because of things that you do. It isn't only stupid people that get into them. You can be doing everything right and still get killed.
Anything that helps in a split second live and death instance I am all for. In many cases these systems can kick in and do their thing much faster than you can and they can do things that you can't like brake individual wheels, tighten the seatbelt, deploy and airbag, and just about anything else that you can imagine. These little differences can be the difference between surviving and not.
Another thing that this helps is to avoid stupid accidents while you are talking on a cell phone, playing with your mp3 player, eating, and other things that you really shouldn't do but everyone does. Most of us spend so much time in our cars that it would be nice to see things totally automated where we could relax, get work done, etc. Wasn't that all supposed to be working by now? Who's in charge of that project? You're late.
"New Line understands Peter's vision and understands it is bound by technology, so it makes sure technology is not a bottleneck," Houston said. "In the big scheme, a few million dollars for a couple of thousand processors will pay dividends."
In so many of the things that we do the payoff for the use of new technology is not always obvious to everyone. It must be nice to work in an industry where the relationship between the latest technology and the payoff is so easily defined.
First off, realize that no matter how good you think that you are or how much you think the company depends on you, they will just hire someone else to replace you and move on. It is a very rare case that a company just can't go on without a few people. You may inconvenience them for a while but that is about it. Life will go on.
Secondly, don't leave without a plan. If you have plenty of savings and job prospects then go for it. It would be best to line up a new gig prior to leaving the old one though. If you don't have savings and alternatives then its time to buck up and deal with the current situation. If you haven't set aside some cash, kept your fixed expenses low, and networked like hell then you deserve to be stuck. Learn your lesson and make plans to leave your options open in the future. There is nothing worse than being stuck in a shit job because you can't afford to leave.
Third, be professional. If you do leave just tell your boss that you have other opportunities that you want to pursue and give 2 weeks notice. Work hard and be pleasant for those two weeks. You will never regret acting professionally and you leave plenty of options open. You may want to work at this company again some day. You may want to use somebody as a reference. At the very least, you want people to think well of you after you leave. You never know where you will run into these people again. If you make an ass of yourself it could hurt you in the future.
Four, I would leave on my own and not as a group. Why throw fuel on the fire. Nobody can fault you for leaving on your own to pursue something else. Leaving as a group implies that you are intentionally trying to hurt the company. Its up to you but I wouldn't do it.
Last, be constructive and do things because they are what is best for you, not because you want to hurt somebody else.