Than finding 50+ people asking the same question you are, and not a single answer. (or even only one person asking the question, but because the mailing list or newsgroup was being archived on more than one website, you find the same question over and over again).
It's even more annoying when you had the same question a couple of months before, and had found the answer, but can't remember what the answer was, where your found the answer, or what search terms you had used. (and it's even worse if that site has gone down in its rankings, and something else with people asking the question, but no answer, now ranked higher).
The >10 MeV proton event began on January 16 at 0210 UTC following the X2.6 flare late on the 15th. The peak flux following this flare was 365 pfu at 16/1840 UTC. The >10 MeV protons decayed to 117 pfu by midday on January 17 when a stronger injection of protons occurred following the X3.8 flare and CME. This new infusion began at 17/1240 UTC and peaked with 5040 pfu at 17/1750 UTC. The event decayed to about 19 pfu early on January 20 when yet another proton flare occurred. The X7 flare and CME that occurred on January 20 produced the hardest and most energetic proton event of Cycle 23. The >10 MeV protons peaked at 1860 pfu at 20/0810 UTC. The >100 MeV protons peaked at 652 pfu at 20/0710 UTC, which was the highest >100 MeV proton flux level observed since 1989 October (680 pfu). The >10 MeV proton event finally ended at 22/1755 UTC.
So, the CME (believed to be) associated with it occured about 3 hrs before GOES got hit by it.
Images and movies of the event, as seen by LASCO, are at:
The problem is, that although you can place satellites there, getting data from some of these places is a big problem, because you have to schedule antenna time through the deep space network.
Currently, there's the ESA-NASA project SOHO, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, which sits near L1. You can't actually place it directly in the sun-earth line, because then you can't communicate with the satellite, because of too much noise from the sun.
Currently in testing are the two observatories called STEREO, the Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory, which will launch two satellites flung ahead and behind the earth (but because of the physics involved, they have no way of stopping them, because they won't have enough fuel to stop.
(and there's also the Japanese Solar-B project, which is the successor to Yohkoh, set for launch next year)
But in my opinion, the most significant solar observing satellite in planning is SDO, the Solar Dynamics Observatory. (and I say this purely from an IT standpoint) SDO will be at an inclined geosyncronous orbit -- so it will be able to talk to a single antenna the whole time -- rather than storing up its data, and then sending it down to earth once a day, it will be sending a constant stream of full resolution data.
And we're not talking about the 1megapixel images from SOHO/EIT or SOHO/TRACE instruments -- or even the 4megapixel from STEREO/SECCHI. We're talking about 16 megapixel images, every 10 seconds from one of the instruments, with a planned terrabyte of uncompressed data per day.
Oh -- and I work for NASA contractor, and am assigned to work on STEREO and VSO (the Virtual Solar Observatory, a search engine for solar physics data).
Those people who will be your co-workers have the most insight as anyone else. Don't talk to the managers, unless you're also going to be a manager -- talk to the people in the trenches, as they're the ones who might be pulling the 80+ hr weeks.
Can anyone provide 'wish-I-would-have-known' issues regarding the politics, expectations, and monetary realities of working for a major department within a large University?
Well, I might be a bit jaded, after having been fired for 'use of sarcasm', but I think I summed things up fairly well after having been selected for participation in a survey to see how well the university was doing, and gave the following response:
Why do people feel that they need to constantly upgrade their OS? If it weren't for security problems, most of the people I know wouldn't have a need for anything beyond windows 95 -- which was released almost a decade ago.
I have a bunch of old machines -- I ran a Centris 650 for well over 6 years, and I never went past OS 7.5 on it, because it ran what I needed just fine. (I think I was also running an outdated version of Photoshop, but well, most of the value of the machine was tied up in the video card)
After a while, you repurpose your machines -- they may get turned into file servers, or music servers (nothing like a full SCSI chain of CDROM 2x CD-ROM drives), or something to run MAME and other emulators.
ps. I'm posting from a 2.5 year old laptop, which is running MacOS 10.2.
C|Net list the price as being US$1070 - 1337, with the basic price near US$1160.
When you consider that you're going to need to get a second video card, if you don't already have on lying about, just buying a 23" LCD (about 1920x1200) seems like a much better solution.
I'm guessing that someone has probably come up with a VESA compliant mount for two screens, or if they haven't, you could probably make your own from an existing base, a bit of sheet steel, a drill, and a few screws... and then you'd be able to just recycle existing monitors.
Of course, the real issue the is stability of the base... how high is the center of gravity, and what is the span of the base, so that we can compute the eccentricity required to tip it?. (it'd be more stable to just place two screens next to each other, and if you want them to stay in place, try a little bit of VHB or duct tape.)
I would think that the advantages to the small footprint would be those that couldn't fit two monitors side by site normally -- which would mean it'd be extending over the edge of the desk, and has that much further to fall when someone bumps it. (unless you VHB it down to the desk, of course)
Their lawyers / safety engineers / etc. wouldn't let them drive that fast, so they drove 45mph.
They also never switched the vehicles, as they may have been tuned differently, so it was a completely unscientific test. (they were the same year and model, but that means next to nothing, due to the tolerances allowed in the engines and such).
Also, Jamie (the one who was driving with air conditioning), was wearing a heavy coat the whole time, because he put the air conditioning on maximum the whole time, rather than trying to get it to a comfortable level. He even complained that it was rather cold in the vehicle.
There's also no consideration given for any other vehicle make and model.
I'm normally a big fan of the show, but I can't believe that they messed up that particular experiment as badly as they did.
Sure, it makes sense -- they put up a bunch of crap to bring down the overall quality of the network, but if someone bans them, they can claim it's a patent violation.
So, we need someone with a vested interest in P2P surviving to patent every conveivable means of taking down a P2P network, so that if someone (RIAA, MPAA, Macrovision, etc.), attempts to do it, they can be sued.
If you remove all of the monotonous tasks, then you run the risk of every person needing a significant level of ability for the whole system (department, company, whatever) to operate smoothly.
Unfortunately, those were the types of roles that you'd typically use for interns and other inexperienced employees. You could see what their learning ability was, and how out how well their work ethic and personality meshed with the organization.
By over optimizing, you can reach the point where all employees must've gotten their initial experience from some other group. You have to trust their references, and your screening processes to find the employees that aren't complete crap.
Yes, the external experience can help the organization, by providing new input, and potentially compare your processes to others that they've seen that were more efficient. But likewise, you run the risk of bringing in highly compensated employees that you're going to have to get rid of, or that can't really pull their weight and drag down the group.
This year, I was given the opportunity to bring in an intern. The organization may want interns, but for me, because of the amount of time that I'd have to spend explaining what needs to be done to the internet, I'd most likely lose out overall in my productivity. It would be better for the company long term to bring in interns, but they left the decision in my hands, and I'm concerned with my short term deadlines.
Like I said most are crap. They can still be used to identify general trends, provided you know what you're looking at. For instance, let's compare the following:
We had more hits today.
Users love our site redesign, look at how many more hits we had!
It's taking the users twice as many clicks to get to any information they want
It's taking twice as many clicks to get to the information they want, but they're more satisfied with the results. (this can't be gotten from just log analysis).
Sales volume is up!
Profits are down.
There is lots of information that can be gotten from log analysis, but you have to beware of anyone who can summarize things in one graph, or 3 bullets in a power point slide, because there's a whole lot of information that they had to throw away to get the nice little summary that they're giving you.
Depending on the person's motives, there's a chance that they could have intentionally 'adjusted' the information so that you'll draw the conclusion they want you to. (I mean, it makes sense to compare this current week to the same week one year ago, so you don't have to deal with seasonal issues, but that also results in them hiding the fact that they're counting images in the 'hits' statistic, and the site redesign 6 months ago results in twice as many images being served per page view, and page views are actually down).
If you define goals based on metrics, then you can test to see if the person/group/company did or didn't reach their intended goal. Looking at the stats after the fact, and just trying to come up with something to support your opinion is going to result in a load of crap.
Also, log analysis is a whole lot more than just statistics -- In its best form, it's a type of data mining:
Users with browser X never buy from us, so there's no reason to continue supporting browser X.
Users with browser X never make it to the 'checkout' page
Users with browser X always seem to stop on the (whatever) page.
The (whatever) page causes browser X to crash. (again, this takes more than just log analysis)
There are three types of lies : lies, damned lies, and statistics. (attributed to way too many people)
If you thought web statistics meant anything, you're lying to yourself. Anyone who's done any work with collecting web statistics has had to deal with the AOL Proxies for the last decade. (and with IE deciding it was going to start lying, and say that it was Netscape, etc.)
If Google is ignoring Cache-Control headers, then that's one thing to complain about. There's also a good chance that some of these sites are using improper systems for session control (eg, using HTTP_ADDR without checking X_FORWARDED_FOR, and not setting Cache-Control on their response).
For more info about these known issues with HTTP caching, see the following
multiple revenue streams is not always good.
on
Gates on Google
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· Score: 1
Let's think about this -- we have a massive company who is deciding to branch out into new fields. They can't focus their best talent on the really important projects (like Longhorn, which they keep stripping features from), and so they have to spread themselves thin (MSN, MSNBC, XBox, Office, Windows, WebTV, monopoly problems, Google competition, etc.)
They've lost sight of where their company's real core business is. In some ways, a forced seperation might have helped Microsoft to keep this from happening.
Yes, there's a need to branch out into new fields so that you can bring in new revenue streams and diversify in case something bad happens, but you need smart growth -- sometimes, projects need to be killed. One of the worst things for a company can be a higher up exec's pet project, because they'll keep directing funding to it even when it's overly risky.
If they were just looking for interference in other areas, you'd think they could just act as a VC (directly or indirectly) for lots of other competitors to whatever companies they think might be a 'problem'. [and if those companies did well, buy them outright]
Yes, real work experience (and good references, and good social networking) are what finally land you the job that you want.
Unfortunately, lack of a degree is what gets your resume pitched without having been looked at. (and I say that from experience, in having to sort through stacks of resumes).
Resumes are more than just a piece of paper to say that you know something (which you probably don't, give today's educational systems) -- it's a piece of paper that says that you stuck with something for 4 years that was hard work, and mind numbingly boring at times. (or 7 years, in my brother's case).
If your mind isn't in the right frame of mind for school yet, then take a year off -- but don't put it off too long, or you'll never go back, 'till it's too late, and your mind isn't as receptive to new knowledge (or able to deal with the long hours). Some employers will fund your education -- although, this might not be the best time to go into the military. [well, you can play the odds on what the situation will be in 4 years]
If you're going to work during college, try to find the jobs where they need warm bodies, like computer operator (you sit and babysit the machines overnight, incase something goes wrong). You can get some homework done, while getting paid to be there all night. And on those nights that you don't have homework, you play video games. The pay's not great, but when you can fit in 30hrs at $7/hr, because you're getting your homework done, it's better than 20hrs at $12/hr, and not getting your work done.
University jobs are also good, because they're convenient. (every hour not spent in transit is an hour you could be doing homework, getting paid, or sleeping).
They make their Terms of Service available, and if it's not something that you accept, then don't buy service from them. Odds are, there's something in there that specifically states that they are not required to deliver every e-mail to you.
There are many people that simply do not want spam filtering (yes, this might seem odd to people out there, but if the cost of a false positive results in the loss of a large business contract, your cost of one lost legitimate message may outweigh a thosand spam messages that you didn't have to look through.)
My suggestion is to find some other provider. If you don't like how something's being handled, vote with your wallet. Odds are, you'll find someone out there whose service offerings better match with what your needs are. (you might have to run your own mail server to get it these days, but everything's avaliable for a price... you just have to decide what the price is that you're willing to pay)
There is, but odds are, anyone who is employed signed away their rights to the expectation of privacy when they signed all of that paperwork that Human Resources gave them. They might've also signed it when requesting an e-mail account.
If you're wondering, the US law in question is not a specific law, but a 1986 set of laws known as the 'Electronic Communications Protection Act'.
There are also provisions in the law, so that system administrators are still allowed to do monitoring. (2511 (2)(a)(i)):
It shall not be unlawful under this chapter for an operator of a switchboard, or an officer, employee, or agent of a provider of wire or electronic communication service, whose facilities are used in the transmission of a wire or electronic communication, to intercept, disclose, or use that communication in the normal course of his employment while engaged in any activity which is a necessary incident to the rendition of his service or to the protection of the rights or property of the provider of that service, except that a provider of wire communication service to the public shall not utilize service observing or random monitoring except for mechanical or service quality control checks.
Use Disk Utility to partition a disk into sections, or "volumes," each of which works like a separate disk. You might want to partition a disk so that you can have different versions of the Mac OS, or organize your information in a logical manner. To learn more about using Disk Utility, open Disk Utility, in the/Applications/Utilities folder, and choose Help > Disk Utility Help.
That looks kinda official to me. (from the MacOS help)
I worked doing tech support during my undergrad. The engineering school went and set aliases like you're suggesting, including aliasing 'rm' to 'rm -i'.
So, of course, as the systems I did support for were stock systems, we had the joy of explaining to people why 'rm *' didn't prompt them, just like they were expecting it to, as it did on the engineering school's computers.
Dumbing things down can have the exact opposite effect that was intended, when people think that's the way that the shell always works.
Someone'll just figure out a way for it to do the exact opposite of what the censor intended. Sort of like Jeff, in Coupling, where he was explaining the difficulty in following the plot in porn videos:
Well, it's kind of hard to tell isn't it 'cos you tend to fast forward if anyone's dressed. Sometimes I forget and do that with proper films. I can get through a lot of movies in an evening
Of course, they as a company can't directly piss off a country, or they run the risk of their employees being detained, should they ever attempt to visit that country.
They can take the profit gained from China, and roll it into something (that's not directly owned by their company) that would otherwise benefit the Chinese people, possibly even to directly fight the types of oppression that's being discussed.
Of course, if they were to do something like that, they'd want to make sure to hide that they were doing such a thing.
Note -- I have no connections to Google. I have no reason to believe that they are doing this, or to believe that they aren't. This is pure speculation on my part, to show that there may be a time when a perceived bad thing can actually be a good thing, but there may be reason to mask that the good thing is happening.
You can either bring no service, or service in compliance with the rules and regulations of the locations that you are providing the service.
Which one is more evil? Refusing to provide your service to a population that could otherwise benefit from it, even in its reduced capacity, or making it available, even if you might not be happy with the terms you're required to comply with?
The correct answer -- neither. Neither one is inherently evil. The first one is petty and immature, and the second one can be construed as greedy without knowing all of the details.
I feel your pain -- I've done my share of idiot tech support questions that should never have been sent to me.
But I have seen once when we had changed the serial, we had lowered the TTL for the week preceeding, and yet there were DNS servers out there that just refused to update. (AOL being one of them).
After we hit two weeks, and the IP still hadn't propagated, I did some digging -- somehow, 4 of the root name servers were forwarding queries to two development DNS servers that someone had set up, which weren't being maintained and getting updates. So yes, it was not the fault of the remote DNS servers that weren't taking the updates... but we have no clue how the outside world found out about the development DNS servers. (or why the hell they weren't firewalled off, but that's another story).
But it's not always just a matter of changing the serial.... other things can go wrong with DNS.
The important thing is that you are not the one to say that it's not worth fixing. You leave that up to (mis)?management to decide.
Your basic risk analysis takes a look at all of the vulnerabilities on the system. For each one, you list the following:
the likelihood of that vulnerability being realized
the impact if that vulnerability were realized
any mitigation that has been done to reduce the chance of it being fully realized and exploited.
Of course, management likes numbers, so you rank each item from 1 to 10 (or 1 to 100, or whatever), using whatever scale you want (so long as you're consistent in your rankings for all of the items). Then, you use the secret fomula :
For the top 10 items (or however many you feel like, you come up with some rough estimates on how much it would cost to fix or reduce the impact, or otherwise mitigate each of the problems.
Note: Some people will say that the 'impact' should be a dollar amount to signify the damages done to the company... but it's impossible. How much is a human life worth? Is it worth more than the company losing millions of dollars in sales? How does it compare to the loss of reputation if your clients found out about whatever it was?
Example: There is a real vulnerability that you may have an electrical fire. The threat of it happening however, tends to be very low, if the building inspectors did their job. The impact, if this happened on a weekend could result in the lost of the entire building. Countermeasures include fire extinguishers, sprinklers, temperature alarms, off site backups, redundant servers, etc. You can never get rid of the vulnerability, because there is always a chance of that fire happening.
Example 2: There is a possibiliy of all of the system administrators quitting, leaving you with no operations staff. This can be mitigated by treating them with respect, not forcing them to wear ties to work, and paying them better.
Use this to your advantage. Don't fight the report, done by someone who knows enough to schmooze the boss, and get paid many thousands of dollars to click a 'run' button. Use it to get rid of those nagging little things that have been bothering you, that you've never been given a chance to sit down and fix.
Slashdot Mirror
Than finding 50+ people asking the same question you are, and not a single answer. (or even only one person asking the question, but because the mailing list or newsgroup was being archived on more than one website, you find the same question over and over again).
It's even more annoying when you had the same question a couple of months before, and had found the answer, but can't remember what the answer was, where your found the answer, or what search terms you had used. (and it's even worse if that site has gone down in its rankings, and something else with people asking the question, but no answer, now ranked higher).
NOAA maintains a list of 'Solar Proton Events'. My boss maintains a copy of the data, which has an extra footnote:So, the CME (believed to be) associated with it occured about 3 hrs before GOES got hit by it.
Images and movies of the event, as seen by LASCO, are at:
The problem is, that although you can place satellites there, getting data from some of these places is a big problem, because you have to schedule antenna time through the deep space network.
Currently, there's the ESA-NASA project SOHO, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, which sits near L1. You can't actually place it directly in the sun-earth line, because then you can't communicate with the satellite, because of too much noise from the sun.
Currently in testing are the two observatories called STEREO, the Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory, which will launch two satellites flung ahead and behind the earth (but because of the physics involved, they have no way of stopping them, because they won't have enough fuel to stop.
(and there's also the Japanese Solar-B project, which is the successor to Yohkoh, set for launch next year)
But in my opinion, the most significant solar observing satellite in planning is SDO, the Solar Dynamics Observatory. (and I say this purely from an IT standpoint) SDO will be at an inclined geosyncronous orbit -- so it will be able to talk to a single antenna the whole time -- rather than storing up its data, and then sending it down to earth once a day, it will be sending a constant stream of full resolution data.
And we're not talking about the 1megapixel images from SOHO/EIT or SOHO/TRACE instruments -- or even the 4megapixel from STEREO/SECCHI. We're talking about 16 megapixel images, every 10 seconds from one of the instruments, with a planned terrabyte of uncompressed data per day.
Oh -- and I work for NASA contractor, and am assigned to work on STEREO and VSO (the Virtual Solar Observatory, a search engine for solar physics data).
Does it matter?
Why do people feel that they need to constantly upgrade their OS? If it weren't for security problems, most of the people I know wouldn't have a need for anything beyond windows 95 -- which was released almost a decade ago.
I have a bunch of old machines -- I ran a Centris 650 for well over 6 years, and I never went past OS 7.5 on it, because it ran what I needed just fine. (I think I was also running an outdated version of Photoshop, but well, most of the value of the machine was tied up in the video card)
After a while, you repurpose your machines -- they may get turned into file servers, or music servers (nothing like a full SCSI chain of CDROM 2x CD-ROM drives), or something to run MAME and other emulators.
ps. I'm posting from a 2.5 year old laptop, which is running MacOS 10.2.
C|Net list the price as being US$1070 - 1337, with the basic price near US$1160.
... and then you'd be able to just recycle existing monitors.
... how high is the center of gravity, and what is the span of the base, so that we can compute the eccentricity required to tip it?. (it'd be more stable to just place two screens next to each other, and if you want them to stay in place, try a little bit of VHB or duct tape.)
When you consider that you're going to need to get a second video card, if you don't already have on lying about, just buying a 23" LCD (about 1920x1200) seems like a much better solution.
I'm guessing that someone has probably come up with a VESA compliant mount for two screens, or if they haven't, you could probably make your own from an existing base, a bit of sheet steel, a drill, and a few screws
Of course, the real issue the is stability of the base
I would think that the advantages to the small footprint would be those that couldn't fit two monitors side by site normally -- which would mean it'd be extending over the edge of the desk, and has that much further to fall when someone bumps it. (unless you VHB it down to the desk, of course)
55mph?
Their lawyers / safety engineers / etc. wouldn't let them drive that fast, so they drove 45mph.
They also never switched the vehicles, as they may have been tuned differently, so it was a completely unscientific test. (they were the same year and model, but that means next to nothing, due to the tolerances allowed in the engines and such).
Also, Jamie (the one who was driving with air conditioning), was wearing a heavy coat the whole time, because he put the air conditioning on maximum the whole time, rather than trying to get it to a comfortable level. He even complained that it was rather cold in the vehicle.
There's also no consideration given for any other vehicle make and model.
I'm normally a big fan of the show, but I can't believe that they messed up that particular experiment as badly as they did.
Sure, it makes sense -- they put up a bunch of crap to bring down the overall quality of the network, but if someone bans them, they can claim it's a patent violation.
So, we need someone with a vested interest in P2P surviving to patent every conveivable means of taking down a P2P network, so that if someone (RIAA, MPAA, Macrovision, etc.), attempts to do it, they can be sued.
I'd like to build on this, in all seriousness.
If you remove all of the monotonous tasks, then you run the risk of every person needing a significant level of ability for the whole system (department, company, whatever) to operate smoothly.
Unfortunately, those were the types of roles that you'd typically use for interns and other inexperienced employees. You could see what their learning ability was, and how out how well their work ethic and personality meshed with the organization.
By over optimizing, you can reach the point where all employees must've gotten their initial experience from some other group. You have to trust their references, and your screening processes to find the employees that aren't complete crap.
Yes, the external experience can help the organization, by providing new input, and potentially compare your processes to others that they've seen that were more efficient. But likewise, you run the risk of bringing in highly compensated employees that you're going to have to get rid of, or that can't really pull their weight and drag down the group.
This year, I was given the opportunity to bring in an intern. The organization may want interns, but for me, because of the amount of time that I'd have to spend explaining what needs to be done to the internet, I'd most likely lose out overall in my productivity. It would be better for the company long term to bring in interns, but they left the decision in my hands, and I'm concerned with my short term deadlines.
- We had more hits today.
- Users love our site redesign, look at how many more hits we had!
- It's taking the users twice as many clicks to get to any information they want
- It's taking twice as many clicks to get to the information they want, but they're more satisfied with the results. (this can't be gotten from just log analysis).
- Sales volume is up!
- Profits are down.
There is lots of information that can be gotten from log analysis, but you have to beware of anyone who can summarize things in one graph, or 3 bullets in a power point slide, because there's a whole lot of information that they had to throw away to get the nice little summary that they're giving you.Depending on the person's motives, there's a chance that they could have intentionally 'adjusted' the information so that you'll draw the conclusion they want you to. (I mean, it makes sense to compare this current week to the same week one year ago, so you don't have to deal with seasonal issues, but that also results in them hiding the fact that they're counting images in the 'hits' statistic, and the site redesign 6 months ago results in twice as many images being served per page view, and page views are actually down).
If you define goals based on metrics, then you can test to see if the person/group/company did or didn't reach their intended goal. Looking at the stats after the fact, and just trying to come up with something to support your opinion is going to result in a load of crap.
Also, log analysis is a whole lot more than just statistics -- In its best form, it's a type of data mining:
Most web statistics are complete crap.
For more info about these known issues with HTTP caching, see the following
Let's think about this -- we have a massive company who is deciding to branch out into new fields. They can't focus their best talent on the really important projects (like Longhorn, which they keep stripping features from), and so they have to spread themselves thin (MSN, MSNBC, XBox, Office, Windows, WebTV, monopoly problems, Google competition, etc.)
They've lost sight of where their company's real core business is. In some ways, a forced seperation might have helped Microsoft to keep this from happening.
Yes, there's a need to branch out into new fields so that you can bring in new revenue streams and diversify in case something bad happens, but you need smart growth -- sometimes, projects need to be killed. One of the worst things for a company can be a higher up exec's pet project, because they'll keep directing funding to it even when it's overly risky.
If they were just looking for interference in other areas, you'd think they could just act as a VC (directly or indirectly) for lots of other competitors to whatever companies they think might be a 'problem'. [and if those companies did well, buy them outright]
Yes, real work experience (and good references, and good social networking) are what finally land you the job that you want.
Unfortunately, lack of a degree is what gets your resume pitched without having been looked at. (and I say that from experience, in having to sort through stacks of resumes).
Resumes are more than just a piece of paper to say that you know something (which you probably don't, give today's educational systems) -- it's a piece of paper that says that you stuck with something for 4 years that was hard work, and mind numbingly boring at times. (or 7 years, in my brother's case).
If your mind isn't in the right frame of mind for school yet, then take a year off -- but don't put it off too long, or you'll never go back, 'till it's too late, and your mind isn't as receptive to new knowledge (or able to deal with the long hours). Some employers will fund your education -- although, this might not be the best time to go into the military. [well, you can play the odds on what the situation will be in 4 years]
If you're going to work during college, try to find the jobs where they need warm bodies, like computer operator (you sit and babysit the machines overnight, incase something goes wrong). You can get some homework done, while getting paid to be there all night. And on those nights that you don't have homework, you play video games. The pay's not great, but when you can fit in 30hrs at $7/hr, because you're getting your homework done, it's better than 20hrs at $12/hr, and not getting your work done.
University jobs are also good, because they're convenient. (every hour not spent in transit is an hour you could be doing homework, getting paid, or sleeping).
Then don't buy from AOL.
... you just have to decide what the price is that you're willing to pay)
They make their Terms of Service available, and if it's not something that you accept, then don't buy service from them. Odds are, there's something in there that specifically states that they are not required to deliver every e-mail to you.
There are many people that simply do not want spam filtering (yes, this might seem odd to people out there, but if the cost of a false positive results in the loss of a large business contract, your cost of one lost legitimate message may outweigh a thosand spam messages that you didn't have to look through.)
My suggestion is to find some other provider. If you don't like how something's being handled, vote with your wallet. Odds are, you'll find someone out there whose service offerings better match with what your needs are. (you might have to run your own mail server to get it these days, but everything's avaliable for a price
If you're wondering, the US law in question is not a specific law, but a 1986 set of laws known as the 'Electronic Communications Protection Act'.
There are also provisions in the law, so that system administrators are still allowed to do monitoring. (2511 (2)(a)(i)):
That looks kinda official to me. (from the MacOS help)
I worked doing tech support during my undergrad. The engineering school went and set aliases like you're suggesting, including aliasing 'rm' to 'rm -i'.
So, of course, as the systems I did support for were stock systems, we had the joy of explaining to people why 'rm *' didn't prompt them, just like they were expecting it to, as it did on the engineering school's computers.
Dumbing things down can have the exact opposite effect that was intended, when people think that's the way that the shell always works.
Of course, they as a company can't directly piss off a country, or they run the risk of their employees being detained, should they ever attempt to visit that country.
They can take the profit gained from China, and roll it into something (that's not directly owned by their company) that would otherwise benefit the Chinese people, possibly even to directly fight the types of oppression that's being discussed.
Of course, if they were to do something like that, they'd want to make sure to hide that they were doing such a thing.
Note -- I have no connections to Google. I have no reason to believe that they are doing this, or to believe that they aren't. This is pure speculation on my part, to show that there may be a time when a perceived bad thing can actually be a good thing, but there may be reason to mask that the good thing is happening.
It must be a slow news day for Apple.
You can either bring no service, or service in compliance with the rules and regulations of the locations that you are providing the service.
Which one is more evil? Refusing to provide your service to a population that could otherwise benefit from it, even in its reduced capacity, or making it available, even if you might not be happy with the terms you're required to comply with?
The correct answer -- neither. Neither one is inherently evil. The first one is petty and immature, and the second one can be construed as greedy without knowing all of the details.
I feel your pain -- I've done my share of idiot tech support questions that should never have been sent to me.
... but we have no clue how the outside world found out about the development DNS servers. (or why the hell they weren't firewalled off, but that's another story).
But I have seen once when we had changed the serial, we had lowered the TTL for the week preceeding, and yet there were DNS servers out there that just refused to update. (AOL being one of them).
After we hit two weeks, and the IP still hadn't propagated, I did some digging -- somehow, 4 of the root name servers were forwarding queries to two development DNS servers that someone had set up, which weren't being maintained and getting updates. So yes, it was not the fault of the remote DNS servers that weren't taking the updates
But it's not always just a matter of changing the serial.... other things can go wrong with DNS.
There was mention of the Mitsubishi mini projector/a just a few months back. July was the expected release date, and I haven't heard any changes to that plan.
Your basic risk analysis takes a look at all of the vulnerabilities on the system. For each one, you list the following:
- the likelihood of that vulnerability being realized
- the impact if that vulnerability were realized
- any mitigation that has been done to reduce the chance of it being fully realized and exploited.
Of course, management likes numbers, so you rank each item from 1 to 10 (or 1 to 100, or whatever), using whatever scale you want (so long as you're consistent in your rankings for all of the items). Then, you use the secret fomula : For the top 10 items (or however many you feel like, you come up with some rough estimates on how much it would cost to fix or reduce the impact, or otherwise mitigate each of the problems.Note: Some people will say that the 'impact' should be a dollar amount to signify the damages done to the company... but it's impossible. How much is a human life worth? Is it worth more than the company losing millions of dollars in sales? How does it compare to the loss of reputation if your clients found out about whatever it was?
Example: There is a real vulnerability that you may have an electrical fire. The threat of it happening however, tends to be very low, if the building inspectors did their job. The impact, if this happened on a weekend could result in the lost of the entire building. Countermeasures include fire extinguishers, sprinklers, temperature alarms, off site backups, redundant servers, etc. You can never get rid of the vulnerability, because there is always a chance of that fire happening.
Example 2: There is a possibiliy of all of the system administrators quitting, leaving you with no operations staff. This can be mitigated by treating them with respect, not forcing them to wear ties to work, and paying them better.
Use this to your advantage. Don't fight the report, done by someone who knows enough to schmooze the boss, and get paid many thousands of dollars to click a 'run' button. Use it to get rid of those nagging little things that have been bothering you, that you've never been given a chance to sit down and fix.