I shortlisted for an interview and got ambushed on my arrival. There were 19 other candidates, and we're all ushered into a small room with 20 desktop spots on a table that went around the entire room. We were handed one single sheet of paper with a coding problem we were to find a solution for. All 20 workstations were Mac Minis. None of us were told there was a programming exercise, none of us were told it was a Mac shop.
I walked out of the "interview" in disgust. Eleven others went with me. By the looks on the interviewers' face, this has happened before.
I don't mind being put to the test, but I don't like being ambushed.
It's obvious that radio silence is the sole MO for large corporate entities, especially the popular / well-known ones. Saying nothing is not the same as denying, and won't be until government bodies start prosecuting it that way.
And sure, Twitter is mostly worthless, but at least they don't make a living and pay high dividends to the 1%'ers by selling way over-priced offshore-made proprietary whatchamacallits.
The first version of Windows that requires a periodic subscription is the day I go 100% Linux user. With increasing steam cross functionality I'm running out of reasons to keep Winblows around.
Yup. If anyone suggested that to me 5 years ago I'd have thought them nuts. Now, not so much. I'm even preparing myself for a steamless Linux desktop sooner rather than later, just because.
You obviously have orders of magnitude more experience. Rise through the ranks. Take over management of the team. Fire everyone and replace them with your own hires over time.
+1 on the TP-WR1043ND. I did flash mine with OpenWRT/Gargoyle, only because the usage monitoring on the stock firmware was crap. As A Canadian I need to monitor my usage relisiously lest I get slapped with an internet bill that would take a 2nd mortgage to pay. Were it not for the usage, the stock formware would have sufficed.
The first mistake is assuming that when an employee leaves, he/she isn't leaving in anger. How does the outfit know whether there is anger or not? Also, anger isn't always the only motive an admin might go rogue then up and quit. Mental illness. Drugs. Personal problems. Who knows. They certainly aren't going to announce "hey I'm angry because [enter reason here] and I'm going rogue then quitting".
The data is an asset, just like anything else in the company, and needn't be treated differently just because it's digital.
In my personal experience, mission critical data has always been backed up and kept off-site, usually with the "big cheese" - the person with whom the buck stops. How often is the answer to a simple question: "How much of this can go missing before trouble starts?"
If the answer is "none", the solution is mirroring - real time backups all of the time. If the answer is "a little but not much", full backups and prescribed intervals with incremental backups filling in the gaps can be considered. If the answer is "pfffft, doesn't really matter, just not too much", then a manual backup at set intervals would suffice.
The danger here is not the finding of an adequate solution.
The real danger is assuming an employee is/will be leaving on good terms and isn't intent on causing damage.
Assume the worst always, and don your teflon. When Murphy's Law strikes (and it will), you're bullet proof.
FWIW, I have a standing policy - when I accept a notice of termination from an employee with adminstrator[-like] privileges, I say thank you for service and escort them out the door. On the spot. No exceptions.
The biggest problem with UBB is the way the incumbents measure traffic. It's patently broken. 100% borked.
On the DSL side, traffic is measured at the BAS. On the cable site, traffic is measured at the node.
It's quite simple to demonstrate how broken their measurement methodology is.
Fire up a cable or DSL internet account, set the modem up, then connect nothing to it. Then, send me your IP address. I can assure you, at the end of the month you're going to get a whopping bill for usage - whatever the max is, that's the bill you're going to get. Just let me know how much usage you want the bill to show. 200G? No problem. 1.5TB? No problem. The usage on the bill will show whatever I want it to show.
The fact is, this has been going on since UBB's inception. Bell, Rogers, Cogeco, Telus... all of them... know the metering is borked. They know it and do nothing because its raking in millions and millions of dollars for each of them, every month.
The concept of UBB is reasonable, IMHO. I have no problem paying for something I use. The more I use, the more I pay. I have no problem with this. But if you're going to charge me XX dollars for XX usage, that XX usage better be MY usage, and it better be at least half-assed accurate.
Unfortunately, the government has now approved Usage Based Billing (UBB), which will allow Bell to start charging TekSavvy per GB used, which essentially removes all need to go with an independent ISP altogether, even though TekSavvy was paying for its own backbones, separate from Bell.
The UBB decision has not been made yet by the CRTC, and neither has the decision been made on Bell's R&V (asking the CRTC to force UBB on cable subscribers).
I guess the CRTC needs a little more time to ensure the proper pockets get lined and the right pork gets lifted into the barrel.
Realized the iphone didn't have a drive I could mount, Safari didn't have flash, no voice recognition... a battery that can't get through The Dark Knight...
Laid it down on the basement floor and pissed on it.
The Japanese aren't worryied about monetizing every inch of their infrastructure. Here in Canada we're 2 - 3 years behind in technology because the telcos are busy harnessing broadband, wired and otherwise, so they can add to shareholder value, and they have the wonderful auspices of Canada's oldest whorehouse, the CTRC, to protect them while they do.
Government protected, oligopolized hyper-capitalism is the new telecommunications mantra here. The end is nowhere in sight.
Fixing the database is the right move. If it costs 10's of thousands of programmer dollars to fix it I'd say you have far bigger problems than an unoptimized database. I mean, programmers should only have access to selects updates and deletes. If your programmers are designing your databases, no wonder they're borked.
On topic, I can wait for the SSDs. The price of the 250s, mass produced or no, still presents as a problem for a business case to run out and load up on these. Hardly stocking stuffers.
The most disconcerting message in the story is the interview Nowak had with Paul Geist. In it is mention of the fact that Minister of Industry Jim Prentice is AWOL on the issue. I mean, who would dare ask the Minister in charge of investigating anti-competitive offences - and they are serious offences - to look into what has to be one of the worst companies to do business with in Canada. I won't even mention that one of the most recent former Ministers of Industry had just been previously employed as::cough:: head of regulatory affairs at::cough:: Bell Canada.
While you might think that the CRTC is an old antequated fossil that needs to be put out of its misery, the Minsitry of Industry is on life support. What's left of it is being run by gutless bureaucrats more interested in their career path in private business post-federal brothel than protecting Canadians from scheming corporate predators, marketing fraud, advertising scams, artificially high gas prices, the list goes on and on...
"PR had a voice in what content appeared on the blog but they were only one stakeholder among many."
It was the only statement he made that had any substance. And if you think for one minute there never has been, isn't, never will be a muzzle on this dude:
[geek] "What feature did you want to see in Vista that was dropped at the last minute and why?"
[nw]"I came onto the Windows team too late to have an informed opinion, and what I do know should probably remain non-public information. Sorry."
Sue, sue everybody. Sue the now defunct company that lost your domain. Sue the company that bought your domain. Sue the owners of said companies directly. Sue their parents, their wives, and their children. Sue their pets. Sue everybody! How is this modded 5 funny? It's the most insightful bit of advise given. Sue bloody everybody and let a jury sort it out. Just the mere threat of that happening is sufficient to win a blinking contest with the likes of squatters and link farmers. Want to see how fast you can get your domain back? File a Notice of Intent and start attaching a Notice Of Pending Litigation against their real property. You'll probably have free hosting for the domain for a half dozen generations..mike
That's a decade before working prototypes are available.
Then there's the question of when they'll be available to consumers at a price that doesn't require selling one's children in order to afford one. Tack on another decade. Considering the size of flash drives are doubling every couple of months, in 20 years I should be able to carry around a couple of terabytes on my keychain. And I want spinning metal disks made of rare-earth material why?
Gadolinium is worth about $170US a kilo right now. Soon as the free markets find out it can be used for something other than in a nuclear submarine that'll go up. I remember when diesel was 1/4 the price of gas until diesel engines became more popular. How'd that work out for us? Oh. In passing, gadolinium exposure has been associated with a higher-than-normal incidence of kidney failure.
... shows "no problem" with iTunes.
Nero is toast. Webcam, gone. Scanner, gone. Internal nic on MB, gone.
But iTunes, no problem.
Yeah. Where do I line up for that?
mike
I've always felt that giving notice of termination in my field of work (IT) is extremely dangerous. If I have root on a number of production servers and access to a data center, I've often felt that giving notice leaves you wide open for blame if you share root with others. If you give notice and things start screwing up, it'll be your fault, bank on it. And if Joe IT across the hall doesn't like you, its trivial for him to screw things up deliberately and lay the blame at your feet. It's also feasible that if there are severe ill feelings from management because you're leaving, what better way to screw you over than to arrange for some sabotage (real of pseudo) and blame it on you.
Not a chance.
When I decide it's time for me to leave, I gather my things and leave. Great time to use up all those vacation days or unused lieu days. If not, sue me. I have a lawyer, a really good one, here's her card.
No need to wait for quakes to knock out the spammers and hackers in the far east. A couple of hundred lines in iptables silently rejects incoming packets from APNIC. End of problem. Once implemented I saw an orders-of-magnitude reduction in spam and hack attempts.
LiquidCoooled (634315), on Saturday November 25, 4:48PM, wrote:
> Who are you calling a n00b? > if you were looking for errors instead of optional syntax, I think > you will find my only error is with the line numbering.
Wrong.
> 30 PRINT "Slashdot. News for nerds, stuff thats happening"
Should be...
30 PRINT "Slashdot. News for nerds, stuff that matters"
Slashdot Mirror
Can we maybe get Google to fix Google Home integration with Android TV? /. for that matter.
Broken for weeks and not a peep from Google. Nor
I shortlisted for an interview and got ambushed on my arrival. There were 19 other candidates, and we're all ushered into a small room with 20 desktop spots on a table that went around the entire room. We were handed one single sheet of paper with a coding problem we were to find a solution for. All 20 workstations were Mac Minis. None of us were told there was a programming exercise, none of us were told it was a Mac shop.
I walked out of the "interview" in disgust. Eleven others went with me. By the looks on the interviewers' face, this has happened before.
I don't mind being put to the test, but I don't like being ambushed.
It's obvious that radio silence is the sole MO for large corporate entities, especially the popular / well-known ones. Saying nothing is not the same as denying, and won't be until government bodies start prosecuting it that way.
And sure, Twitter is mostly worthless, but at least they don't make a living and pay high dividends to the 1%'ers by selling way over-priced offshore-made proprietary whatchamacallits.
Firefox lost its way long ago.
Its reputation as the Anti-IE keeps its market share at 10%, otherwise it'd be less than 2%.
It is telling though, that their "experiment" went the way of advertising disguised as gift-giving.
What will they think of next....
The first version of Windows that requires a periodic subscription is the day I go 100% Linux user. With increasing steam cross functionality I'm running out of reasons to keep Winblows around.
Yup.
If anyone suggested that to me 5 years ago I'd have thought them nuts.
Now, not so much.
I'm even preparing myself for a steamless Linux desktop sooner rather than later, just because.
You obviously have orders of magnitude more experience. Rise through the ranks. Take over management of the team. Fire everyone and replace them with your own hires over time.
End of problem.
Mike
-- Karma whore? You betcha
+1 on the TP-WR1043ND. I did flash mine with OpenWRT/Gargoyle, only because the usage monitoring on the stock firmware was crap. As A Canadian I need to monitor my usage relisiously lest I get slapped with an internet bill that would take a 2nd mortgage to pay. Were it not for the usage, the stock formware would have sufficed.
The first mistake is assuming that when an employee leaves, he/she isn't leaving in anger. How does the outfit know whether there is anger or not? Also, anger isn't always the only motive an admin might go rogue then up and quit. Mental illness. Drugs. Personal problems. Who knows. They certainly aren't going to announce "hey I'm angry because [enter reason here] and I'm going rogue then quitting".
The data is an asset, just like anything else in the company, and needn't be treated differently just because it's digital.
In my personal experience, mission critical data has always been backed up and kept off-site, usually with the "big cheese" - the person with whom the buck stops. How often is the answer to a simple question: "How much of this can go missing before trouble starts?"
If the answer is "none", the solution is mirroring - real time backups all of the time.
If the answer is "a little but not much", full backups and prescribed intervals with incremental backups filling in the gaps can be considered.
If the answer is "pfffft, doesn't really matter, just not too much", then a manual backup at set intervals would suffice.
The danger here is not the finding of an adequate solution.
The real danger is assuming an employee is/will be leaving on good terms and isn't intent on causing damage.
Assume the worst always, and don your teflon. When Murphy's Law strikes (and it will), you're bullet proof.
FWIW, I have a standing policy - when I accept a notice of termination from an employee with adminstrator[-like] privileges, I say thank you for service and escort them out the door. On the spot. No exceptions.
Mike
The biggest problem with UBB is the way the incumbents measure traffic. It's patently broken. 100% borked.
On the DSL side, traffic is measured at the BAS.
On the cable site, traffic is measured at the node.
It's quite simple to demonstrate how broken their measurement methodology is.
Fire up a cable or DSL internet account, set the modem up, then connect nothing to it. Then, send me your IP address. I can assure you, at the end of the month you're going to get a whopping bill for usage - whatever the max is, that's the bill you're going to get. Just let me know how much usage you want the bill to show. 200G? No problem. 1.5TB? No problem. The usage on the bill will show whatever I want it to show.
The fact is, this has been going on since UBB's inception. Bell, Rogers, Cogeco, Telus... all of them... know the metering is borked. They know it and do nothing because its raking in millions and millions of dollars for each of them, every month.
The concept of UBB is reasonable, IMHO. I have no problem paying for something I use. The more I use, the more I pay. I have no problem with this. But if you're going to charge me XX dollars for XX usage, that XX usage better be MY usage, and it better be at least half-assed accurate.
Right now, it's not even that.
Mike
You mean... there's still people out in the world that do business with that outfit?
Excuse my lack of sympathy.
Mike
Unfortunately, the government has now approved Usage Based Billing (UBB), which will allow Bell to start charging TekSavvy per GB used, which essentially removes all need to go with an independent ISP altogether, even though TekSavvy was paying for its own backbones, separate from Bell.
The UBB decision has not been made yet by the CRTC, and neither has the decision been made on Bell's R&V (asking the CRTC to force UBB on cable subscribers).
I guess the CRTC needs a little more time to ensure the proper pockets get lined and the right pork gets lifted into the barrel.
Smoke....
Mirrors....
Invoice....
Repeat.
Realized the iphone didn't have a drive I could mount, Safari didn't have flash, no voice recognition... a battery that can't get through The Dark Knight...
Laid it down on the basement floor and pissed on it.
Still running. Didn't help at all.
Mike
The Japanese aren't worryied about monetizing every inch of their infrastructure. Here in Canada we're 2 - 3 years behind in technology because the telcos are busy harnessing broadband, wired and otherwise, so they can add to shareholder value, and they have the wonderful auspices of Canada's oldest whorehouse, the CTRC, to protect them while they do.
Government protected, oligopolized hyper-capitalism is the new telecommunications mantra here. The end is nowhere in sight.
Fixing the database is the right move. If it costs 10's of thousands of programmer dollars to fix it I'd say you have far bigger problems than an unoptimized database. I mean, programmers should only have access to selects updates and deletes. If your programmers are designing your databases, no wonder they're borked.
On topic, I can wait for the SSDs. The price of the 250s, mass produced or no, still presents as a problem for a business case to run out and load up on these. Hardly stocking stuffers.
The most disconcerting message in the story is the interview Nowak had with Paul Geist. In it is mention of the fact that Minister of Industry Jim Prentice is AWOL on the issue. I mean, who would dare ask the Minister in charge of investigating anti-competitive offences - and they are serious offences - to look into what has to be one of the worst companies to do business with in Canada. I won't even mention that one of the most recent former Ministers of Industry had just been previously employed as ::cough:: head of regulatory affairs at ::cough:: Bell Canada.
While you might think that the CRTC is an old antequated fossil that needs to be put out of its misery, the Minsitry of Industry is on life support. What's left of it is being run by gutless bureaucrats more interested in their career path in private business post-federal brothel than protecting Canadians from scheming corporate predators, marketing fraud, advertising scams, artificially high gas prices, the list goes on and on...
Bell Canada is the least of our worries.
He had me at:
"PR had a voice in what content appeared on the blog but they were only one stakeholder among many."
It was the only statement he made that had any substance. And if you think for one minute there never has been, isn't, never will be a muzzle on this dude:
[geek] "What feature did you want to see in Vista that was dropped at the last minute and why?"
[nw]"I came onto the Windows team too late to have an informed opinion, and what I do know should probably remain non-public information. Sorry."
Pffffft.
Because it's native replication is rock solid and can be set up in less that 60 seconds by a teenager without spending a nickle?
That's a decade before working prototypes are available.
Then there's the question of when they'll be available to consumers at a price that doesn't require selling one's children in order to afford one. Tack on another decade. Considering the size of flash drives are doubling every couple of months, in 20 years I should be able to carry around a couple of terabytes on my keychain. And I want spinning metal disks made of rare-earth material why?
Gadolinium is worth about $170US a kilo right now. Soon as the free markets find out it can be used for something other than in a nuclear submarine that'll go up. I remember when diesel was 1/4 the price of gas until diesel engines became more popular. How'd that work out for us? Oh. In passing, gadolinium exposure has been associated with a higher-than-normal incidence of kidney failure.
Um... I'll pass.
... shows "no problem" with iTunes. Nero is toast. Webcam, gone. Scanner, gone. Internal nic on MB, gone. But iTunes, no problem. Yeah. Where do I line up for that? mike
I've always felt that giving notice of termination in my field of work (IT) is
extremely dangerous. If I have root on a number of production servers and access
to a data center, I've often felt that giving notice leaves you wide open for
blame if you share root with others. If you give notice and things start screwing
up, it'll be your fault, bank on it. And if Joe IT across the hall doesn't like
you, its trivial for him to screw things up deliberately and lay the blame at your
feet. It's also feasible that if there are severe ill feelings from management
because you're leaving, what better way to screw you over than to arrange for some
sabotage (real of pseudo) and blame it on you.
Not a chance.
When I decide it's time for me to leave, I gather my things and leave. Great time
to use up all those vacation days or unused lieu days. If not, sue me. I have a
lawyer, a really good one, here's her card.
mike
No need to wait for quakes to knock out the spammers and hackers
in the far east. A couple of hundred lines in iptables silently
rejects incoming packets from APNIC. End of problem. Once implemented
I saw an orders-of-magnitude reduction in spam and hack attempts.
Pffft. Gone.
Loss-of-life not required.
mike
LiquidCoooled (634315), on Saturday November 25, 4:48PM, wrote:
> Who are you calling a n00b?
> if you were looking for errors instead of optional syntax, I think
> you will find my only error is with the line numbering.
Wrong.
> 30 PRINT "Slashdot. News for nerds, stuff thats happening"
Should be...
30 PRINT "Slashdot. News for nerds, stuff that matters"
mike
No. Democracy is 2 wolves and 1 sheep voting on what to eat for dinner, and .45 calibre handgun.
the sheep is carrying a legally registered