OK, it didn't actually melt it, but it did fry everything inside.
I'm glad this actually happened to my friend's machine, not mine, too:-)
He'd really gone out of his way to build a reliable machine. Top-quality components throughout, software RAID 1, and even was using a UPS, although the power in Japan is so reliable that I went without one for eight-years and the only time I ever had a power-related outage is because I overloaded the circuit my computers were on and tripped the breaker:-)
Being so careful and using that UPS was his downfall. One day, it shorted out in spectacular fashion, dumping the whole battery load into the computer in an instant. Lots of white smoke escaped, and of course, without the white smoke inside, nothing would work.
The motherboard, memory, CPU, both disk drives, video card, NIC, everything was fried. It was utterly ruined.
This teaches us once again the value of offline backups. You can be super careful and do everything right. Mirroring. UPS. The best components. But a sufficiently large disaster will overcome all those things.
How do you figure that blocking all of, say, Korea, is excluding a minority? Asians constitute the majority of the world's people.
My wife is Asian. A friend of mine is married to a Bulgarian woman he met in college. Does that mean Bulgaria/China/Korea/ shouldn't be blocked from your network if you get no legit traffic from there but tons of spam and fraud attempts?
Nope, it doesn't. Blocking an entire country may seem extreme, and it is, but it's done as a last resort. Blocking an entire ISP for too much spam (the SPEWS approach) is also extreme, also done as a last resort, but it tends to be effective. If a country finds that it is largely isolated from the Internet as a result of not enforcing (or not even having) laws against Internet fraud, it will probably motivate that country's government to do something about the problem.
If it doesn't, well, it sucks to live there but the rest of the world is safe from it, and that's the most important thing. People who live there need to blame their government, not people elsewhere who are just defending their networks from an out of control problem.
If it were adopted for Linux and especially Windows I could finally see if it is any good
Rendezvous is pretty good, it works as advertised. You do hit an important nail on the head with your observation though: put a bunch of Win, Mac, and Linux machines together on a LAN and the only really common way of communication they have is SMB. The Macs can talk to each other with Rendezvous, but the Lin and Win boxes aren't joining in.
At work, I run Debian on an almost completely Windows LAN (I may be the only person running Linux on it) and have no problem authenticating to our PDC and browsing the LAN. If you've never tried smb4k, check it out; it's a very nice SMB share browser which mounts shares in ~/smb4k/ for you; if smb4k could be merged with xfe, people transitioning from Windows Linux would hardly know they'd moved, except for the lack of security troubles and crashes:-)
If there were any Macs on our internal network, I'd have to talk to them over SMB, same as with the Windows boxes.
Now, however, the possibility lies open for this to be adopted by Linux, giving a situation where you could throw a bunch Linux and Mac boxes on a network, turn them on, and just let them configure themselves. Or, just a bunch of Linux boxes.
Imagine you're a Linux consultant. You go to a potential customer's office to do a demo with a handful of live CDs that run rendezvous. You pop one into each of four or five PCs, at least one of which has a printer on it.
The machines boot up, they assign themselves IP addresses, find the printer, configure it, find the gateway and configure themselves to use it, and sit their happily waiting for someone to log in.
Then you say to the customer "By the way, the security model is a lot better than Windows, too."
If Linux adopts this and has it implemented well before Longhorn hits the street, it could really help to hurt MS on the business desktop.
Funny you should mention that, I picked a copy of "Foreign Affairs" a few months ago doing just what the OP suggested: grabbing an interesting magazine off the rack on a topic outside of my usual area (I was there to buy a Linux Journal; I now save a lot of money by subscribing to it).
You do need to dedicate some time to it, but FA is filled with long, very interesting articles on foreign affairs, written by well-known people from all over the political spectrum. Highly recommended.
I haven't seen WPR, but I'll keep an eye out for it.
Very seldom do people recognize a cryptographically signed mail as such; most of them suspect it of being some kind of virus or a corrupted attachment. My boss quit using crypto altogether for that reason; it just wasn't worth her while when no one else seemed to be using it.
Maybe this will help to shed a little light on the importance of encrypted mail. Even if you think you can trust your email provider, don't.
I buy and sell online, and I have first-hand experience in how good UPS is at damaging notebook computers, even in factory packaging (I will not ship *anything* by UPS anymore after my last debacle with them; at least the insurance adjuster was very honest and confirmed when I asked that every UPS horror story I've heard is true), and this kind of arrangement gets you one-stop shopping: You know they're going to smash the computer en-route, so instead of delivering your new Toshiba notebook to your house, they can just route it straight to the repair depot and fix the LCD they broke and anything else that has been crushed or smashed loose, too.
Umm, it's Fujisan, not Fujiyama (at least if you're talking about the famous one in Yamanashi and Shizuoka; there are lesser mountains called Fujiyama in several placs in Japan, but that's an odd mixture of on-yomi and kun-yomi), and I've never heard anyone call it Mt. Fujisan. Even if they did, however, that is generally considered acceptable in bilingual constructs, so that people know what it is. If say those things to a person who doesn't understand Japanese, she might have no idea what I'm talking about.
My oldest friend is the second owner of a '69 GTO Judge, with the original Ram Air IV engine. Now *that's*s a GTO.
He's owned it since we were in high school in the 1970s. The first owner had lost interest in it after pulling the engine for a rebuild. He got as far as tearing the engine down, then left the whole mess in his dad's garage up the street from me.
One day we were driving up the street in my car, and my friend notices the thing through an open garage door and says "Why didn't you tell me there was a Judge up the street?" I'd never seen it before b/c the garage was always shut. He goes and talks to the guy, finds out its for sale, strikes a deal for $600, brings a trailer and hauls it off.
I don't think he'll ever sell it. Someday, his son will be only the third owner of a car that will be about 60 years old by then.
Today, I received a totally unsolicited 15% raise, and I have worked for my employer for less than one year. No, it's not a risk-free transaction from a rich Nigerian, either:-)
This is not the first time I've gone up more than 15% in salary in my first year on the job. In fact, it's the second time in a little over five years that this has happened to me.
To what do I attribute this?
Three things policies that I have:
1) Be up front and honest on your resume and in your interview. Promise nothing that you can't deliver;
2) Deliver all that you've promised and then some;
3)Remember God, from whom you received your talent and the wisdom of doing the first two things on this list. Two practical ways to do this are thankful prayer for the blessings you receive, and give to the charity of your choice that helps the downtrodden of this world. If a windfall comes your way, send some of it the way of those less fortunate than yourself.
Of these three things, the third is the most important. Because of it, I have reaped few negative consequences for the poorer choices in my life, have always gotten by even in the financially tight spots, and have always been able to provide for myself and my family.
That doesn't mean the first two, aren't important, of course; indeed, they flow from the third. But most important among these three things, remember God, from whom your skill, your talent, your education, and your being in the right place at the right time to get that raise, that promotion, that good job at a solvent and growing young company, all come.
Uhhh, because one is a car and one is an email client.
If, on the other hand, Ford had a computer software called Thunderbird, whether or not it was an email client, then they could claim trademark infringement.
Don't forget that Firebird is also a car (although not a current model), and you don't see GM suing over that name as used in software. If Ford tried to build a car called Firebird, GM lawyers would be on the like flies on dogshit, but software is too far removed of a product/industry for them to have a claim.
You're right, they don't need cause to fire you. Not here in California, either.
But as you mentioned, they need cause to have you denied unemployment. That's why they'd rather fire you with cause.
Also, if they have cause, it's a lot easier to defend against any action you might try to bring against them. If someone sues you for wrongful termination, the fact that you are an "at will" employer isn't much of a defense in court. You want to walk in there and cite exactly what that person did to deserve being fired.
It was an obvious lie involving an impossible number of years of experience for the technology in question. Even if he had invented it , he couldn't have had that many years.
You think you can't be caught? Fine, just go on thinking that. I'll never have to compete with you for a job.
Keep thinking that about background checks, too. There are agencies that specialize in getting exactly that kind of information, and it's a lot easier than you think.
Screwing over entry-level workers? Who? When? Where? You obviously have no idea what being screwed over even is.
When, exactly, did all these nameless companies tell people that if they got CS degrees they would get jobs? No one ever told me that. If you said a lot of people assumed that if they got a CS degree they would practically have lifetime employment, you'd be right. But that is very far from companies telling them that. No company every tells anyone anything like that. Sure, the jobs dried up. That isn't the fault of any of the companies who are hiring (or not) CS graduates today. Indeed, the companies that are hiring (or not) today are the ones that survived. If you want to find someone to blame for the jobs that dried up, you have to look first to the people that ran all the companies that *didn't* make it. The ones who burned through huge piles of VC cash on luxurious parties, foosball tables, video games, any sort of corporate extravagance you could name, astonishing salaries even for people with no experience and less skill, the whole dot-bomb nine yards.
I remained gainfully employed through the burst of the dot-com bubble. The only period I was unemployed was from June to September of last years, and that could be termed voluntary, since I relocated and resigned from my old job to do so. Now, of course, I'm working again. Those three positions I wrote about were newly created. The one I still have to fill is an existing one to replace someone who got an offer he couldn't refuse. I hated to see him leave, but it's a great opportunity and I'm glad it went to a deserving person. If he ever wants to come back here, the door is wide open.
Do you know why I remained gainfully employed through the jobs massacre that was the aftermath of the dot-com era despite the fact that I don't even have a CS degree? Contributing reasons are that I'm careful about choosing who I work for, and also probably a bit of plain old luck. Another is that while I did not do my degree in CS, I do have a brain and skill, and I use both. But the capstone of all that is that I never misrepresented myself in any way to any employer, so what they saw was what they got, and I could fully deliver on everything I claimed.
If you talk the talk, but don't walk the walk, you'll be the first to go if there is belt-tightening.
Also, please keep this in mind: pretty much every employer has a clause in their personnel policy which says that if they ever discover that you lied about anything on your resume or application, references, anything at all, you can be fired. Now, read this very carefully and be sure it sinks in: there is no one in my section who is so good that, if I found that they had lied to me on their resume and been hired on that basis, he or she could expect to have me not want them fired. No one.
Now, I'm not looking for skeletons in their closets, because they all have been checked out, they all are honest people, and they are walking the walk. But just imagine a situation where someone takes a dislike to you and *does* want to find a skeleton in your closet. There had better not be one on your resume, because that resume is still on file and they could go through it with a fine-toothed comb looking for problems. If they find out you never worked at company XYZ, or you never really took course ABC, that's all they need to fire you with cause.
You seem very young, possibly even an unemployed CS graduate yourself, with very little experience in the working world, and not much in th
Hmm, let's see. Dancing is very popular in Singapore and people do it all over the place. Big clubs. Small clubs. All kinds of clubs. I've done it myself. You sound like a person who has never been there and just believes what some other (ignorant) person said about it. Singapore is a paradise. If there's a better country on earth, I have not yet been there.
Fines for spitting? Sure, no problem. People shouldn't spit on the sidewalk. Fine for not flushing the toilet? No problem. You shouldn't have to tell anybody to flush the toilet, but if they're so stupid they need to be told, I bet a S$500 fine will help them remember. Yes, gum is illegal in Singapore. Why? Because of irresponsible gum chewers (in large numbers) spitting it on the ground, sticking to things, etc. The same kind of things they do here. I have no problem with gum being illegal. Consider the case of carrying a gun in the United States. I can't carry on the hip without attracting cops like a dog attracts fleas. Neither can I get a concealed carry permit easily (California). Why? Well, you could say "Because of liberal politicians" and you'd be at least partly right. The (larger) part of "Why?" is because of irresponsible gun owners who use them for committing crimes, including some who will get hot-headed and murder someone else. That lead to misguided gun laws which instead of very heavily penalizing those who use guns to commit crimes, prevent carry altogether, while those who don't much care about the law keep right on carrying and do commit crimes. It's a lot like gum in Singapore, except in Singapore they really have gotten gum off the street. If our gun control laws could really get *all* handguns out of circulation, I'd be happy enough to give up my right to one. Sadly, it hasn't worked out that way.
Unlike Singapore's law against gum (which really helps keep things clean), those laws against guns don't seem to do much for safety. Guns are used in crimes all the time, and if every law-abiding gun owner could either carry on the hip or could get a CCW just for asking, plus a small fee and a background check, that would probably do far more to reduce gun crime than the laws which prevent us from doing either of those things.
Also, you don't get caned for things like littering (I notice you neglected to mention that one, perhaps it didn't fit your agenda of trying to make Singapore look bad), or other minor infractions such as smoking in a no-smoking area (they could just ban that altogether along with gum as far as I'm concerned), not flushing, etc. Caning is used as a punishment for more serious infractions, such as vandalism. Vandalism, you may recall, is what American snotty-ass punk teenager Michael Fay was caned for. The sentence also included a fine and jail time. Hardly "spitting on the sidewalk."
You may also remember that when they were trying to get him off the hook, many Americans expressed that not only should he get the full sentenced (his caning was, unfortunately, reduced to four strokes), that they'd be happy to cane him themselves. I was one of them.
The brine, by the way, doesn't make the cane hurt more, but less. Without it, the wood might split. Now *that* would hurt.
You don't want to get caned? Don't commit crimes in Singapore. If you do, and they can your ass, you have nothing to complain about.
Hanging? Lots of countries hang people. It's quite common throughout Asia. Japan hangs people too. So does Thailand. So do many other places. What can you be hanged for in Singapore? Murder. Drug dealing. Drug smuggling. I don't know what else, but you can be sure of this: only things that you *should* be hanged for.
People eat dogs in lots of places, why single out Singapore? Especially considering that it's relatively uncommon there. I've never heard of anyone eating bird puke at all. I wonder what you have to do to even make a bird puke?
You only have a cousin-in-law there? Hmmm, I rather doubt you know more about
I'll tell you what. Rather than my shoot holes in these ideas, why don't you go think about it for a day or two and then come back here and post a list of potential problems.
If I tell you what is wrong with them, you may just dismiss me out of hand. If you figure it out for yourself, you'll learn something and everybody wins.
I will throw out one hint, though: just because a person is wrongly convicted, that doesn't mean anyone lied. Indeed, most false convictions are based on the best evidence at hand, and that person fits it. Granted, sometimes sloppy work contributes to the conviction, but not always; maybe not even usually. In cases of actual false testimony by the police, that does carry a criminal penalty if they are caught.
Oh, I'm all for harsh punishments for real crimes.
There's nothing wrong with caning. Have you ever been to Singapore? It's a great place. Indeed, my favorite place in the world. Caning is a pretty effective deterrent for a lot of things. So are the hefty fines + rigorous enforcement they impose.
Chopping of hands, well, the trouble with that is the same trouble as with the death penalty. If new evidence comes to light that the party was innocent, you can't undo the penalty. It's true that you can't undo jail time either, but you're still alive and have your hands and feet. Fines can be returned if later found to be erroneous. That doesn't mean I oppose the death penalty (there are clearly people who should not be allowed to live), but there should be a hire standard of proof than "beyond a reasonable doubt." For example, take the Scott Peterson case. I think he probably did it, but there is no direct evidence (at least, none has been presented so far in the trial) that he did it, just a lot of circumstantial evidence, including motive and opportunity. If convicted, I don't think he should be executed. I'm convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that he is guilty, but not convinced enough to execute him.
Now, in the case of people like Zarqawi, well, if they asked me to be the executioner, I'd volunteer to shoot him through the head with a pistol. None of this wimpy lethal injection stuff.
Joining the army today is not taking a bullet for Haliburton. Joining the military has *never* been that in this country. Sometimes we have had wrong policies (Viet Nam), but contrary to what some people marching with drums, banners, and odd costumes while chanting "Hey, hey! Ho, ho! " might believe, neither this war nor any other war we have fought has been about stealing anyone's oil.
You'll notice, perhaps, that after the first Persian Gulf war, we didn't take any oil or land. We fought a war to liberate Kuwait, set up no-fly zones to enforce Security Council resolutions, and maintained them. Kuwaiti sovereignty was restored, and after a short while Hussein got back enough sovereignty over southern Iraq to kill thousands of people who opposed his rule and rose up in revolt during the war.
For the record, I was against the first Persian Gulf war and was even one of those kooky marchers; I was wrong. I will not make that mistake again; taking out Saddam Hussein was the right thing to do this time. We should have done it last time and been done with it, even if the Security Council resolutions did not call for it. That was George Bush's great failing. Under George W. Bush, we've gone back to finish the job that should have been finished then.
You'll notice, perhaps, that we still haven't stolen anyone's oil or land, and that in just a few days an interim government will regain sovereignty over Iraq. That will be followed by elections, and the people will have real sovereignty. They will own their oil and profit from it, unlike in the days of Hussein, when *he* was stealing their oil and profiting from it.
The war against terrorism *is* a patriotic war. It *is* about our national, indeed our very cultural, survival. If my children were old enough to join the military today and they wanted to do it, of course I'd be scared for the safety, as every parent is for the safety of his or her children. I would not, however, try to dissuade them from doing it.
I recently filled 3 of 4 open positions in my section and will be interviewing people for the fourth one next week. When I go through a stack of resumes, I triage them like this:
- Yes, contact these people. They get a first interview.
- Maybe. If the best people in the Yes group have already taken jobs or othewise don't work out, this is the stand-by group. So far, we have never had to call anyone in the Maybe group.
- No. People in this group are one or more of: way over-qualified, way under-qualified, totally unqualified, way too expensive, are in some other way unqualified (sometimes we relocate people, other times we want to make a local hire, for example), or they were caught in some lie on their resumes.
Among the members of the No group for this round of hiring is a person who was pretty well qualified (possibly over-qualified, but I would have put him in the Yes group) but was caught with BS on his resume. He is in the No group not just because that one part was a lie, but because at that point I instantly lost all confidence in all of his claims of experience. Anyone who has been looking at resumes for a while can recognize the BS pretty easily. If I see BS on your resume, you go into the No group. Do us both a favor and be honest. If you're honest, the worst thing that can happen is you won't get that position, but if your resume seems OK but just wasn't right for that position, I'll hang onto it. You never know what might come up in six months. If I catch you lying, your resume goes into a file of people who will never be contacted for a job with us.
Also, we do background checks before extending job offers. If you succeeded in BS on the resume and again at the interview, but get caught in the background check, not only will you not get the offer, you will never interview with us again. If you get by all that and get an offer and get hired and it becomes obvious the you just lied really well and got hired anyway, you will be fired. So far, no one has gotten past us.
I look at all the resumes I receive. It's true, triage takes out most of them. That's just a hard fact of life that comes from the fact that there are far more applicants than there are positions. I usually wind up with two (and sometimes three) resumes in the Yes pile for each open position. We interviewed six people for the three positions filled so far, and on of the other three was referred to another section where we knew they had an opening and her skillset matched what they needed a lot better than it matched what we needed. We still interviewed her, but we invited that section's manager to the interview and that manager asked most of the questions. The applicant is now a finalist for that position. If she had given us BS on her resume or in the interview, that would never have happened.
Bottom line: honesty on your resume and throughout the interview process is really the best policy, even if it sometimes looks like BS could be a good shortcut. The best people to work with and for, at the best places to work (and I think we are pretty good in both of those respects) will hire you as much for honesty and personality fit with the team as for technical ability. So much of effective management and team-building comes from recognizing people who don't *need* to be managed and who fit in well with each other and easily form a cohesive team, that if you don't meet those criteria then we don't care about your technical skills. I want people on my team who are honest, self-motivated, get along well together, and have no "issues" that I need to deal with. If you don't meet those criteria, I have no use for you. So don't lie on your resume or in the interview.
Be honest. It won't always get you the job, sometimes it might cost you the job, but if you sling BS either on your resume or in person, I guarantee it will cost you the best jobs out there.
So those insurgents we're killing in Iraq aren't terrorists? So Zarqawi suddenly stopped being an important member of Al Qaeda? So the terrorists rushing into Iraq to fight us and to try to prevent an Iraqi return to sovereignty and bring down that new sovereign goverment, aren't being kept busy there, in their own backyard, instead of coming to ours?
Or are you saying they just aren't being killed. Either way, you don't know what you're talking about. And of course, terrorists are being killed in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, too. As far as the actual supply and support of terrorists goes, Syria is in it up to their eyeballs. Should we invade them next? Yeah, probably. Qadafi was in it up to his eyeballs, too, but he decided it would be better to preserve his own skin, so he went straight.
Let me guess, you also think "Fahrenheit 9/11" is not a work of fiction, and John Kerry would make a good president.
You're pretty funny. You say I don't have a point, when you don't even have a (functioning) brain.
OK, mods, that part was a troll, so you can mod me troll instead of offtopic. Or even flamebait, what the heck?:-)
Other countries didn't come to help us liberate ourselves from British rule? The ignorance of that statement greatly weakens the rest of your post. The French took an active role, without which we might well have lost. Granted, they were doing it far more to screw the British than to help us - being an imperial national themselves - but they still helped.
There were more than a few German mercenaries in Washington's army, and a German general himself came over to help train Washinton's force and turn it from an irregular militia into a capable regular army. Without that assistance, again, we might have lost.
As for the war on terror being a waste of time, would you much rather that instead of sending our army out to kill the terrorists in their countries, we instead wait for them to come here and kill more innocent people? I wouldn't. One of the basic principles of war is to fight it on the other side's ground instead of yours if possible. That's how we fought WW II, and that's why, after the fighting was over, we were in a position to rebuild not only countries that were the victims of Axis aggression, but the vanquished Axis nations themselves. We absolutely should be engaging in a war on terror - this is a matter of national survival. We should absolutely be fighting that war in their turf, not ours, to the greatest extent possible. Will there always be some more? Some, sure. But we have far more bullets and bombs than they have ability to produce more terrorists, so at the end of the day we'll be the ones left standing. The only good terrorist as a dead one, so I for one am glad that we are using our military to help terrorists become good. I would enlist myself if they would take me, but I'm well past the age cutoff. The only sufficiently mitigating factor would be if I were an MD, but I'm not.
As for your point regarding the camcorder law, while I think the penalties are excessive (you can commit a real crime, that really hurts someone, and get less jail time than that!), I don't have a problem with it being specifically illegal. I think a better solution WRT penalties would be that if they catch you with a camcorder in the theater, they should have the legal right to confiscate your camcorder, no trial, no appeal. You don't get it back, and if the bouncers ungently throw you through the air out the back door and you get scraped up and bruised when you hit the deck, tough. You should have thought of that before you tried to tape the movie. People who aren't willing to suffer the consequences shouldn't undertake wrong actions in the first place (keep that in mind anytime someone whines about our taking out the Taliban, Saddam Hussein, and whoever the next evildoer to get in our sites might be. Maybe Assad?).
However, the law itself is not unjust. The penalty is just a bit over the top.
NFS mount the user's home directory on a server with hardware RAID, hot-swappable drives, and regular backups and you won't have to worry about moving the profile or anything else.
Seriously, that's the best way to keep all the data safe and backed-up. Indeed, if you can afford a GigE LAN (not all that expensive anymore, but if not, a Fast Ethernet LAN will do well enough), you can run thin clients and run everything off the server, like they do in Largo, Florida. If you're not an all-*nix shop, that must be possible with Windows, too.
While some people might squawk a bit, in truth, most users do not need a full-fledged PC on their desk as work. All the apps they need (or that you want them to have, at least) should be provided by and controlled by the IT department. It's the only way to keep your network safe. Developers might need a full-blown PC, but stick them off on a LAN segment firewalled off from the rest of the PCs, because just being a programmer doesn't mean you won't soon have your machine burdened with 400 pounds of malware and sporting all the latest viruses, too. I think we've all seen programmers who can write code but don't actually know squat about computers or how to keep them secure.
So hand a thin client to everyone you can. They'll get used to it, and you'll save a bunch of money.
You can build one, or if you want to see a nice turn-key system, take a look at a Sun Ray. Sun employees have a card that they stick in the reader on the Sun Ray (and a userid and password I would suppose, or the person with your card 0wnz0rs joo) and their/home is mounted on whatever workstation they happen to be using. It's pretty cool. Pretty close to zero need to carry a notebook around at Sun, I bet.
I think that's a pretty good analysis from someone who had an inside view.
In addition to that, in Microsoft's current approaches, besides the confusion you mention, I also see what is reflected in the quote, attribute to Ghandi, that is often seen in taglines: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
I used to be a Windows user all the way. I was first exposed to *nix in 1997 (FreeBSD) and found later that year. By mid-1998 I had chucked Windows and was using Linux exclusively, including being the only person in my shop developing websites on Linux.
In the days when I converted to Linux, we were still in the "first they ignore you" stage. Microsoft was internally aware of Linux, I'm sure, but they never said anything about it publically. One of the first, if not the first, glimpses into what MS privately was thinking about Linux came when The Halloween Document was leaked.
About that time, Microsoft's public position on Linux was getting into the "then they laugh at you" stage. It lasted for a while, but now we are squarely in the "then they fight you" stage. This will go on a while longer, with MS trying various things to crush, or at least slow, the advance of Linux. Unless they find some astonishing legal maneuver and a job on mass quantities of crack, however, it's not likely to help. And we all know what phase comes after "then they fight you.":-)
It is a sign of a certain desperate fear in the face of an unstoppable new disruptive technology that Microsoft is trying to many different things to try and stop it. They don't know what will work, and so far the answer has been "none of it." They ignored Linux. Linux advanced. They laughed at Linux. Linux advanced. Now they are fighting Linux. Hard. And Linux is perhaps advancing faster than ever before.
I think we will see MS engaging in many more examples of fighting fire with fire in the years to come, and 5 years from now Microsoft will probably have released more software under Shared Source, and some under some kind of actual open source license, than any of us would now believe possible. By sharing source and even outright open-sourcing some software, they hope to further stave off the inevitable. It might help a little, in some areas, but far less than they might think. What draws people to Free and Open Source Software is precisely that it is free and open; if it was just shared, nobody would much care about Linux and *BSD; it wouldn't be that much of an improvement on Windows, for many.
Eventually, if Microsoft wants people to keep using Windows, they'll wind up having to open-source most of it, or at the least pretty much give it away. They will probably try giving it away first, since that helped them to crush Netscape (along with a bunch of self-inflicted wounds on Netscape's part). However, it won't help much in this case. When I meet people who've switched from Windows to Linux, cost has most often had little or no bearing on the decision (nor did it in my case). Even among those who considered cost to be an important factor, it was never number one.
What were the top reasons? Security. Speed. Scalability. Then comes longer hardware life cycles. Finally, somewhere after that, people will say "Oh, and it's free. Saved us a bundle on licensing, too." The other reasons figure into cost in a way, too, but they are more on the TCO side of the equation. Operating systems that are faster, more secure, more scalable, and require hardware up less frequently will have a lower TCO, even if the licensing fees are the same. When you factor in that you can get most distributions of Linux essentially free (the cost of a download, some CD-R media, some bandwidth which most people pay a flat rate for anyway) and install it on as many servers and workstations as you want, well, that's just icing on the cake.
MS will fight these rearguard tactics for some time to come, but Linux will arrive at the "Then you win" stage soon enough.
Mods: you can mod me OT for this, because it is. It's the truth, but it's OT, so go ahead.
Actually, the Bush administration has great respect for both science in general and the scientific method (you might want to take a look at their forestry policy, for instance; for several decades, US forestry policy has been based far more on emotion and cuddly Smokey the Bear images than on science; the Bush administration is changing that). The United States rejected Kyoto because the Bush administration has contempt for junk science, and that's mostly what Kyoto is.
That's one of the (many) good reasons why I'm voting Bush/Cheney in 2004 despite my dislike for Cheney. Others include the fact that unlike his primary opponent, Bush is a moral and princicpled individual (Kerry seems to be neither, in addition to being a tax-and-spend posterboy), that he is far more competent to run the country then Kerry, and he has the proven ability and courage to hunt down our country's mortal enemies and kill them. That last, especially, I have no confidence in Kerry to do.
We're approaching three years on from 9/11 and Al Waeda has not yet achieved another attack in the US. This is because of the Bush administration's aggressive response. Iraq helps, too. Many of the terrorists who might otherwise come here are bogged down in Iraq fighting our army over there. Believe me, it is a far better thing to be fighting and killing the terrorist in their own backyard than in our living room. There is no question that Hussein was a threat to his neighbors and a sponsor of terrorism at least in the Middle East (especially of Palestinian suicide bombers). Taking him out was the right thing to do. Anyone else like him should look upon that and no that this own days are numbered, too. What happened to Hussein was instrumental in making Khadafi play ball. You might have noticed his change of heart. He did it to ensure his own survival, because he could really see himself as being next.
Assad would be wise to take note of Khadafi's good sense.
I'm a team leader, and I report to the director of software development.
When we need to hire someone for my team, we do this:
My boss sends me a copy of all resumes received (and I send her a copy of ones I have independently acquired). We both read them all and triage them into Interview, Maybe, and Forget It piles. When I say "all resumes received" I mean exactly that. HR filters out nothing. In fact, when I was hired I had absolutely no contact with HR until after the hiring decision had been made. That first contact was an offer letter. My very first contact from my employer was a phone call from my (now) boss.
People who we both put into the Interview pile get called. If one of us said Maybe and the other said Interview, we'll discuss it and may or may not call the person. If one of us said Maybe and the other said Forget it, that person doesn't get a call.
Neither of us much cares about certifications. We care about relevant experience and achievements, we care *a lot* about attitude and interest in the work, and we care *a lot* about personality fit. One of the great keys to being a successful manager and building a successful team is to hire people who don't really need to be managed. We both believe this, and that contributed a lot to my being hired. We look for interested, self-motivated people who have a passion about their work. As long as you know what you're doing, we're not all that concerned about how you got there. I don't have a CS degree, and have very little formal training in any aspect of IT (took some classes at Cisco that were paid for by a former employer, that's about it). Everything I know I learned on my own and on the job. That pretty much precludes me from working at big companies, but I don't care. Small ones are a lot more fun.
I know this technique doesn't scale to 900 resumes, and HR departments at large companies probably don't even allow that sort of thing (their loss), but if you are in a position to do it that way, looking at each resume and picking out the people you like based on your criteria (which ought not rely much on certificates) is the best way to assemble a quality staff.
It's very doubtful that much of the population that wasn't killed directly would die off later from radiation. Some people in immediately surrounding areas would, but by no means all. People 1,000 miles or more away from the nearest strike would certainly not be killed or even sickened. You might see elevated cancer rates stemming from fallout for years to come, but that is hardly extermination.
Relevant cases to consider:
1) Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After the nuclear attacks, people went back in there and rebuilt. Not years after, but months after. Hiroshima today is bustling city of over a million people, and ground zero is right in the heart of town, just as it was in 1945. Go there and see it sometime. Fatalities from the nuclear attacks were limited to those killed outright, those who died later from injuries or radiation poisoning, and some who died later from cancer. Deaths from the bombings were pretty well limited to those in the cities at the time, and not even all (not even most) of those. I have a childhood friend whose mother was ten year old girl in Hiroshima at the time of the attack, and she suffered from discrimination against hibakusha far more than from any effects of the bombing.
2) Chernobyl. Chernobyl released far more radiation than a bunch of warheads and over a much longer time. Chernobyl was like a nuclear exchange but without explosions. The town and the area around it is heavily poisoned and will be for many years to come. People cannot live there and will not be able to live there for a very long time. Long enough that we might as well call it never. However, even in the case of Chernobyl, people away from the immediate area were not killed. It is even possible to go into the Chernobyl area, at least for short periods of time, and some people (such as Elena: http://www.kiddofspeed.com/default.htm) do just that.
As others have posted, the primary targets of both US and Soviet ICBMs were not each other's civilian populations. The primary targets were the other side's ICBMs, including submarine bases. The next top targets were the other side's conventional military installations and command and control systems. In the United States, Cheyenne Mountain would have been hit. Washington D.C. Would have been hit very hard. The entire area of the Whitehouse, the Pentagon, etc., would have ceased to exist. Langley, VA (CIA headquarters) was doubtless in the crosshairs too, ditto for the NSA and any other intelligence agencies. I'm from San Diego, and as a town with a lot of military bases, I always knew that if it happened, San Diego would be hit hard and I would probably die because I lived only a few miles from NAS (now MCAS) Miramar, and only a few miles more from NAS North Island, a carrier base. Toward the southern end of San Diego Bay is another major naval base, so people down there would have been hit hard, too. Would everyone in the San Diego metro area have been killed? Probably not, but most would have. You could probably figure on over a million deaths in San Diego County, if the US and the Soviet Union had had a full-scale nuclear exchange.
Life for survivors in the US and the Soviet Union would have been pretty hard after a nuclear exchange, and many of them would probably later die of starvation or disease. Many might have fled to Canada or Mexico if they could.
If the UK got involved, and they probably would have, things would have been similar there. If the Exchange spilled over into NATO generally, Europe would have been a mess, too.
However, for countries that stayed out of it (which would include South America, probably Australia and New Zealand, b/c they have no nukes), most of Asia (all of it, if China stayed out) and all of Africa and the Middle East, no one would have died as a direct result. If global temperatures dropped in a nuclear winter (something that it is not all certain would occur), there would be some starvation, but even then, most people in the world would still survive.
What do you think is so insanely restrictive about Germany's citizenship policy? It's actually the United States that has the weird citizenship policy.
In most countries, citizenzhip is derived from your parents, and has nothing to do with your place of birth. For example, if you are born in Japan but neither of your parents is Japanese, your residence status comes from your parents. If neither of them is a Japanese citizen, neither are you. If neither of them is a legal resident, neither are you. Is Germany's citizenship policy more restrictive than this? If so, what is it?
The United States is one of the rare exceptions to that, conferring citizenship merely by birth in the United States, even if neither of your parents is a US citizen, or even in the country legally. If you are born in the United States, nothing else matters. You are a US citizen.
However, countries that do not follow this policy are not insanely restrictive. They are normal, and frankly, the United States should alter its citizenship policy such that to gain citizenship by birth in the United States, at least one of your parents must be a US citizen. If at least one of your parents is a green card holder, you get one too. If that parent naturalizes while you are under 18, you automatically naturalize. If that parent naturalizes when you are over 18, you have to do it on your own.
That would be fair and in line with international norms. The system we have now is totally screwed up. The child of a person who sneaks across the border 8.5 months pregnant and delivers here is a citizen. Meanwhile, my wife of over two years has never set foot inside the United States because she is still waiting for a visa. Until she gets one, she may not enter the country at all, because she married a US citizen. That is the law. This is also a de facto bar to entry for our US citizen children, since one is a toddler and one is an infant, and they need their mother. She can't come in, so neither can they. As a result, I haven't seen my wife or our children in over six months and won't see them again until this fall when we think my wife will finally get her visa.
Trust me, we're the ones with the insane citizenship and immigration policies. Insanely loose on one hand, and insanely restrictive on the other.
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OK, it didn't actually melt it, but it did fry everything inside.
:-)
:-)
:-)
I'm glad this actually happened to my friend's machine, not mine, too
He'd really gone out of his way to build a reliable machine. Top-quality components throughout, software RAID 1, and even was using a UPS, although the power in Japan is so reliable that I went without one for eight-years and the only time I ever had a power-related outage is because I overloaded the circuit my computers were on and tripped the breaker
Being so careful and using that UPS was his downfall. One day, it shorted out in spectacular fashion, dumping the whole battery load into the computer in an instant. Lots of white smoke escaped, and of course, without the white smoke inside, nothing would work.
The motherboard, memory, CPU, both disk drives, video card, NIC, everything was fried. It was utterly ruined.
This teaches us once again the value of offline backups. You can be super careful and do everything right. Mirroring. UPS. The best components. But a sufficiently large disaster will overcome all those things.
How often do I back up? Not often enough
How do you figure that blocking all of, say, Korea, is excluding a minority? Asians constitute the majority of the world's people.
My wife is Asian. A friend of mine is married to a Bulgarian woman he met in college. Does that mean Bulgaria/China/Korea/ shouldn't be blocked from your network if you get no legit traffic from there but tons of spam and fraud attempts?
Nope, it doesn't. Blocking an entire country may seem extreme, and it is, but it's done as a last resort. Blocking an entire ISP for too much spam (the SPEWS approach) is also extreme, also done as a last resort, but it tends to be effective. If a country finds that it is largely isolated from the Internet as a result of not enforcing (or not even having) laws against Internet fraud, it will probably motivate that country's government to do something about the problem.
If it doesn't, well, it sucks to live there but the rest of the world is safe from it, and that's the most important thing. People who live there need to blame their government, not people elsewhere who are just defending their networks from an out of control problem.
Rendezvous is pretty good, it works as advertised. You do hit an important nail on the head with your observation though: put a bunch of Win, Mac, and Linux machines together on a LAN and the only really common way of communication they have is SMB. The Macs can talk to each other with Rendezvous, but the Lin and Win boxes aren't joining in.
At work, I run Debian on an almost completely Windows LAN (I may be the only person running Linux on it) and have no problem authenticating to our PDC and browsing the LAN. If you've never tried smb4k, check it out; it's a very nice SMB share browser which mounts shares in ~/smb4k/ for you; if smb4k could be merged with xfe, people transitioning from Windows Linux would hardly know they'd moved, except for the lack of security troubles and crashes
If there were any Macs on our internal network, I'd have to talk to them over SMB, same as with the Windows boxes.
Now, however, the possibility lies open for this to be adopted by Linux, giving a situation where you could throw a bunch Linux and Mac boxes on a network, turn them on, and just let them configure themselves. Or, just a bunch of Linux boxes.
Imagine you're a Linux consultant. You go to a potential customer's office to do a demo with a handful of live CDs that run rendezvous. You pop one into each of four or five PCs, at least one of which has a printer on it.
The machines boot up, they assign themselves IP addresses, find the printer, configure it, find the gateway and configure themselves to use it, and sit their happily waiting for someone to log in.
Then you say to the customer "By the way, the security model is a lot better than Windows, too."
If Linux adopts this and has it implemented well before Longhorn hits the street, it could really help to hurt MS on the business desktop.
Funny you should mention that, I picked a copy of "Foreign Affairs" a few months ago doing just what the OP suggested: grabbing an interesting magazine off the rack on a topic outside of my usual area (I was there to buy a Linux Journal; I now save a lot of money by subscribing to it).
You do need to dedicate some time to it, but FA is filled with long, very interesting articles on foreign affairs, written by well-known people from all over the political spectrum. Highly recommended.
I haven't seen WPR, but I'll keep an eye out for it.
I GPG-sign all of my email.
I encrypt to others who use GPG.
Very seldom do people recognize a cryptographically signed mail as such; most of them suspect it of being some kind of virus or a corrupted attachment. My boss quit using crypto altogether for that reason; it just wasn't worth her while when no one else seemed to be using it.
Maybe this will help to shed a little light on the importance of encrypted mail. Even if you think you can trust your email provider, don't.
Encrypt your mail.
In a way it makes perfect sense.
I buy and sell online, and I have first-hand experience in how good UPS is at damaging notebook computers, even in factory packaging (I will not ship *anything* by UPS anymore after my last debacle with them; at least the insurance adjuster was very honest and confirmed when I asked that every UPS horror story I've heard is true), and this kind of arrangement gets you one-stop shopping: You know they're going to smash the computer en-route, so instead of delivering your new Toshiba notebook to your house, they can just route it straight to the repair depot and fix the LCD they broke and anything else that has been crushed or smashed loose, too.
Then they can Fedex it to you.
Umm, it's Fujisan, not Fujiyama (at least if you're talking about the famous one in Yamanashi and Shizuoka; there are lesser mountains called Fujiyama in several placs in Japan, but that's an odd mixture of on-yomi and kun-yomi), and I've never heard anyone call it Mt. Fujisan. Even if they did, however, that is generally considered acceptable in bilingual constructs, so that people know what it is. If say those things to a person who doesn't understand Japanese, she might have no idea what I'm talking about.
My oldest friend is the second owner of a '69 GTO Judge, with the original Ram Air IV engine. Now *that's*s a GTO.
He's owned it since we were in high school in the 1970s. The first owner had lost interest in it after pulling the engine for a rebuild. He got as far as tearing the engine down, then left the whole mess in his dad's garage up the street from me.
One day we were driving up the street in my car, and my friend notices the thing through an open garage door and says "Why didn't you tell me there was a Judge up the street?" I'd never seen it before b/c the garage was always shut. He goes and talks to the guy, finds out its for sale, strikes a deal for $600, brings a trailer and hauls it off.
I don't think he'll ever sell it. Someday, his son will be only the third owner of a car that will be about 60 years old by then.
I have to add a PS to myself on this topic.
:-)
Today, I received a totally unsolicited 15% raise, and I have worked for my employer for less than one year. No, it's not a risk-free transaction from a rich Nigerian, either
This is not the first time I've gone up more than 15% in salary in my first year on the job. In fact, it's the second time in a little over five years that this has happened to me.
To what do I attribute this?
Three things policies that I have:
1) Be up front and honest on your resume and in your interview. Promise nothing that you can't deliver;
2) Deliver all that you've promised and then some;
3)Remember God, from whom you received your talent and the wisdom of doing the first two things on this list. Two practical ways to do this are thankful prayer for the blessings you receive, and give to the charity of your choice that helps the downtrodden of this world. If a windfall comes your way, send some of it the way of those less fortunate than yourself.
Of these three things, the third is the most important. Because of it, I have reaped few negative consequences for the poorer choices in my life, have always gotten by even in the financially tight spots, and have always been able to provide for myself and my family.
That doesn't mean the first two, aren't important, of course; indeed, they flow from the third. But most important among these three things, remember God, from whom your skill, your talent, your education, and your being in the right place at the right time to get that raise, that promotion, that good job at a solvent and growing young company, all come.
Uhhh, because one is a car and one is an email client.
If, on the other hand, Ford had a computer software called Thunderbird, whether or not it was an email client, then they could claim trademark infringement.
Don't forget that Firebird is also a car (although not a current model), and you don't see GM suing over that name as used in software. If Ford tried to build a car called Firebird, GM lawyers would be on the like flies on dogshit, but software is too far removed of a product/industry for them to have a claim.
You're right, they don't need cause to fire you. Not here in California, either.
But as you mentioned, they need cause to have you denied unemployment. That's why they'd rather fire you with cause.
Also, if they have cause, it's a lot easier to defend against any action you might try to bring against them. If someone sues you for wrongful termination, the fact that you are an "at will" employer isn't much of a defense in court. You want to walk in there and cite exactly what that person did to deserve being fired.
It was an obvious lie involving an impossible number of years of experience for the technology in question. Even if he had invented it , he couldn't have had that many years.
You think you can't be caught? Fine, just go on thinking that. I'll never have to compete with you for a job.
Keep thinking that about background checks, too. There are agencies that specialize in getting exactly that kind of information, and it's a lot easier than you think.
Screwing over entry-level workers? Who? When? Where? You obviously have no idea what being screwed over even is.
When, exactly, did all these nameless companies tell people that if they got CS degrees they would get jobs? No one ever told me that. If you said a lot of people assumed that if they got a CS degree they would practically have lifetime employment, you'd be right. But that is very far from companies telling them that. No company every tells anyone anything like that. Sure, the jobs dried up. That isn't the fault of any of the companies who are hiring (or not) CS graduates today. Indeed, the companies that are hiring (or not) today are the ones that survived. If you want to find someone to blame for the jobs that dried up, you have to look first to the people that ran all the companies that *didn't* make it. The ones who burned through huge piles of VC cash on luxurious parties, foosball tables, video games, any sort of corporate extravagance you could name, astonishing salaries even for people with no experience and less skill, the whole dot-bomb nine yards.
I remained gainfully employed through the burst of the dot-com bubble. The only period I was unemployed was from June to September of last years, and that could be termed voluntary, since I relocated and resigned from my old job to do so. Now, of course, I'm working again. Those three positions I wrote about were newly created. The one I still have to fill is an existing one to replace someone who got an offer he couldn't refuse. I hated to see him leave, but it's a great opportunity and I'm glad it went to a deserving person. If he ever wants to come back here, the door is wide open.
Do you know why I remained gainfully employed through the jobs massacre that was the aftermath of the dot-com era despite the fact that I don't even have a CS degree? Contributing reasons are that I'm careful about choosing who I work for, and also probably a bit of plain old luck.
Another is that while I did not do my degree in CS, I do have a brain and skill, and I use both. But the capstone of all that is that I never misrepresented myself in any way to any employer, so what they saw was what they got, and I could fully deliver on everything I claimed.
If you talk the talk, but don't walk the walk, you'll be the first to go if there is belt-tightening.
Also, please keep this in mind: pretty much every employer has a clause in their personnel policy which says that if they ever discover that you lied about anything on your resume or application, references, anything at all, you can be fired. Now, read this very carefully and be sure it sinks in: there is no one in my section who is so good that, if I found that they had lied to me on their resume and been hired on that basis, he or she could expect to have me not want them fired. No one.
Now, I'm not looking for skeletons in their closets, because they all have been checked out, they all are honest people, and they are walking the walk. But just imagine a situation where someone takes a dislike to you and *does* want to find a skeleton in your closet. There had better not be one on your resume, because that resume is still on file and they could go through it with a fine-toothed comb looking for problems. If they find out you never worked at company XYZ, or you never really took course ABC, that's all they need to fire you with cause.
You seem very young, possibly even an unemployed CS graduate yourself, with very little experience in the working world, and not much in th
Hmm, let's see. Dancing is very popular in Singapore and people do it all over the place. Big clubs. Small clubs. All kinds of clubs. I've done it myself. You sound like a person who has never been there and just believes what some other (ignorant) person said about it. Singapore is a paradise. If there's a better country on earth, I have not yet been there.
Fines for spitting? Sure, no problem. People shouldn't spit on the sidewalk. Fine for not flushing the toilet? No problem. You shouldn't have to tell anybody to flush the toilet, but if they're so stupid they need to be told, I bet a S$500 fine will help them remember. Yes, gum is illegal in Singapore. Why? Because of irresponsible gum chewers (in large numbers) spitting it on the ground, sticking to things, etc. The same kind of things they do here. I have no problem with gum being illegal. Consider the case of carrying a gun in the United States. I can't carry on the hip without attracting cops like a dog attracts fleas. Neither can I get a concealed carry permit easily (California). Why? Well, you could say "Because of liberal politicians" and you'd be at least partly right. The (larger) part of "Why?" is because of irresponsible gun owners who use them for committing crimes, including some who will get hot-headed and murder someone else. That lead to misguided gun laws which instead of very heavily penalizing those who use guns to commit crimes, prevent carry altogether, while those who don't much care about the law keep right on carrying and do commit crimes. It's a lot like gum in Singapore, except in Singapore they really have gotten gum off the street. If our gun control laws could really get *all* handguns out of circulation, I'd be happy enough to give up my right to one. Sadly, it hasn't worked out that way.
Unlike Singapore's law against gum (which really helps keep things clean), those laws against guns don't seem to do much for safety. Guns are used in crimes all the time, and if every law-abiding gun owner could either carry on the hip or could get a CCW just for asking, plus a small fee and a background check, that would probably do far more to reduce gun crime than the laws which prevent us from doing either of those things.
Also, you don't get caned for things like littering (I notice you neglected to mention that one, perhaps it didn't fit your agenda of trying to make Singapore look bad), or other minor infractions such as smoking in a no-smoking area (they could just ban that altogether along with gum as far as I'm concerned), not flushing, etc. Caning is used as a punishment for more serious infractions, such as vandalism. Vandalism, you may recall, is what American snotty-ass punk teenager Michael Fay was caned for. The sentence also included a fine and jail time. Hardly "spitting on the sidewalk."
You may also remember that when they were trying to get him off the hook, many Americans expressed that not only should he get the full sentenced (his caning was, unfortunately, reduced to four strokes), that they'd be happy to cane him themselves. I was one of them.
The brine, by the way, doesn't make the cane hurt more, but less. Without it, the wood might split. Now *that* would hurt.
You don't want to get caned? Don't commit crimes in Singapore. If you do, and they can your ass, you have nothing to complain about.
Hanging? Lots of countries hang people. It's quite common throughout Asia. Japan hangs people too. So does Thailand. So do many other places. What can you be hanged for in Singapore? Murder. Drug dealing. Drug smuggling. I don't know what else, but you can be sure of this: only things that you *should* be hanged for.
People eat dogs in lots of places, why single out Singapore? Especially considering that it's relatively uncommon there. I've never heard of anyone eating bird puke at all. I wonder what you have to do to even make a bird puke?
You only have a cousin-in-law there? Hmmm, I rather doubt you know more about
I'll tell you what. Rather than my shoot holes in these ideas, why don't you go think about it for a day or two and then come back here and post a list of potential problems.
If I tell you what is wrong with them, you may just dismiss me out of hand. If you figure it out for yourself, you'll learn something and everybody wins.
I will throw out one hint, though: just because a person is wrongly convicted, that doesn't mean anyone lied. Indeed, most false convictions are based on the best evidence at hand, and that person fits it. Granted, sometimes sloppy work contributes to the conviction, but not always; maybe not even usually. In cases of actual false testimony by the police, that does carry a criminal penalty if they are caught.
Oh, I'm all for harsh punishments for real crimes.
There's nothing wrong with caning. Have you ever been to Singapore? It's a great place. Indeed, my favorite place in the world. Caning is a pretty effective deterrent for a lot of things. So are the hefty fines + rigorous enforcement they impose.
Chopping of hands, well, the trouble with that is the same trouble as with the death penalty. If new evidence comes to light that the party was innocent, you can't undo the penalty. It's true that you can't undo jail time either, but you're still alive and have your hands and feet. Fines can be returned if later found to be erroneous. That doesn't mean I oppose the death penalty (there are clearly people who should not be allowed to live), but there should be a hire standard of proof than "beyond a reasonable doubt." For example, take the Scott Peterson case. I think he probably did it, but there is no direct evidence (at least, none has been presented so far in the trial) that he did it, just a lot of circumstantial evidence, including motive and opportunity. If convicted, I don't think he should be executed. I'm convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that he is guilty, but not convinced enough to execute him.
Now, in the case of people like Zarqawi, well, if they asked me to be the executioner, I'd volunteer to shoot him through the head with a pistol. None of this wimpy lethal injection stuff.
Joining the army today is not taking a bullet for Haliburton. Joining the military has *never* been that in this country. Sometimes we have had wrong policies (Viet Nam), but contrary to what some people marching with drums, banners, and odd costumes while chanting "Hey, hey! Ho, ho! " might believe, neither this war nor any other war we have fought has been about stealing anyone's oil.
You'll notice, perhaps, that after the first Persian Gulf war, we didn't take any oil or land. We fought a war to liberate Kuwait, set up no-fly zones to enforce Security Council resolutions, and maintained them. Kuwaiti sovereignty was restored, and after a short while Hussein got back enough sovereignty over southern Iraq to kill thousands of people who opposed his rule and rose up in revolt during the war.
For the record, I was against the first Persian Gulf war and was even one of those kooky marchers; I was wrong. I will not make that mistake again; taking out Saddam Hussein was the right thing to do this time. We should have done it last time and been done with it, even if the Security Council resolutions did not call for it. That was George Bush's great failing. Under George W. Bush, we've gone back to finish the job that should have been finished then.
You'll notice, perhaps, that we still haven't stolen anyone's oil or land, and that in just a few days an interim government will regain sovereignty over Iraq. That will be followed by elections, and the people will have real sovereignty. They will own their oil and profit from it, unlike in the days of Hussein, when *he* was stealing their oil and profiting from it.
The war against terrorism *is* a patriotic war. It *is* about our national, indeed our very cultural, survival. If my children were old enough to join the military today and they wanted to do it, of course I'd be scared for the safety, as every parent is for the safety of his or her children. I would not, however, try to dissuade them from doing it.
You'd be surprised how much that doesn't work.
I recently filled 3 of 4 open positions in my section and will be interviewing people for the fourth one next week. When I go through a stack of resumes, I triage them like this:
- Yes, contact these people. They get a first interview.
- Maybe. If the best people in the Yes group have already taken jobs or othewise don't work out, this is the stand-by group. So far, we have never had to call anyone in the Maybe group.
- No. People in this group are one or more of: way over-qualified, way under-qualified, totally unqualified, way too expensive, are in some other way unqualified (sometimes we relocate people, other times we want to make a local hire, for example), or they were caught in some lie on their resumes.
Among the members of the No group for this round of hiring is a person who was pretty well qualified (possibly over-qualified, but I would have put him in the Yes group) but was caught with BS on his resume. He is in the No group not just because that one part was a lie, but because at that point I instantly lost all confidence in all of his claims of experience. Anyone who has been looking at resumes for a while can recognize the BS pretty easily. If I see BS on your resume, you go into the No group. Do us both a favor and be honest. If you're honest, the worst thing that can happen is you won't get that position, but if your resume seems OK but just wasn't right for that position, I'll hang onto it. You never know what might come up in six months. If I catch you lying, your resume goes into a file of people who will never be contacted for a job with us.
Also, we do background checks before extending job offers. If you succeeded in BS on the resume and again at the interview, but get caught in the background check, not only will you not get the offer, you will never interview with us again. If you get by all that and get an offer and get hired and it becomes obvious the you just lied really well and got hired anyway, you will be fired. So far, no one has gotten past us.
I look at all the resumes I receive. It's true, triage takes out most of them. That's just a hard fact of life that comes from the fact that there are far more applicants than there are positions. I usually wind up with two (and sometimes three) resumes in the Yes pile for each open position. We interviewed six people for the three positions filled so far, and on of the other three was referred to another section where we knew they had an opening and her skillset matched what they needed a lot better than it matched what we needed. We still interviewed her, but we invited that section's manager to the interview and that manager asked most of the questions. The applicant is now a finalist for that position. If she had given us BS on her resume or in the interview, that would never have happened.
Bottom line: honesty on your resume and throughout the interview process is really the best policy, even if it sometimes looks like BS could be a good shortcut. The best people to work with and for, at the best places to work (and I think we are pretty good in both of those respects) will hire you as much for honesty and personality fit with the team as for technical ability. So much of effective management and team-building comes from recognizing people who don't *need* to be managed and who fit in well with each other and easily form a cohesive team, that if you don't meet those criteria then we don't care about your technical skills. I want people on my team who are honest, self-motivated, get along well together, and have no "issues" that I need to deal with. If you don't meet those criteria, I have no use for you. So don't lie on your resume or in the interview.
Be honest. It won't always get you the job, sometimes it might cost you the job, but if you sling BS either on your resume or in person, I guarantee it will cost you the best jobs out there.
OT, go ahead and mod me down.
:-)
So those insurgents we're killing in Iraq aren't terrorists? So Zarqawi suddenly stopped being an important member of Al Qaeda? So the terrorists rushing into Iraq to fight us and to try to prevent an Iraqi return to sovereignty and bring down that new sovereign goverment, aren't being kept busy there, in their own backyard, instead of coming to ours?
Or are you saying they just aren't being killed. Either way, you don't know what you're talking about. And of course, terrorists are being killed in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, too. As far as the actual supply and support of terrorists goes, Syria is in it up to their eyeballs. Should we invade them next? Yeah, probably. Qadafi was in it up to his eyeballs, too, but he decided it would be better to preserve his own skin, so he went straight.
Let me guess, you also think "Fahrenheit 9/11" is not a work of fiction, and John Kerry would make a good president.
You're pretty funny. You say I don't have a point, when you don't even have a (functioning) brain.
OK, mods, that part was a troll, so you can mod me troll instead of offtopic. Or even flamebait, what the heck?
Other countries didn't come to help us liberate ourselves from British rule? The ignorance of that statement greatly weakens the rest of your post. The French took an active role, without which we might well have lost. Granted, they were doing it far more to screw the British than to help us - being an imperial national themselves - but they still helped.
There were more than a few German mercenaries in Washington's army, and a German general himself came over to help train Washinton's force and turn it from an irregular militia into a capable regular army. Without that assistance, again, we might have lost.
As for the war on terror being a waste of time, would you much rather that instead of sending our army out to kill the terrorists in their countries, we instead wait for them to come here and kill more innocent people? I wouldn't. One of the basic principles of war is to fight it on the other side's ground instead of yours if possible. That's how we fought WW II, and that's why, after the fighting was over, we were in a position to rebuild not only countries that were the victims of Axis aggression, but the vanquished Axis nations themselves. We absolutely should be engaging in a war on terror - this is a matter of national survival. We should absolutely be fighting that war in their turf, not ours, to the greatest extent possible. Will there always be some more? Some, sure. But we have far more bullets and bombs than they have ability to produce more terrorists, so at the end of the day we'll be the ones left standing. The only good terrorist as a dead one, so I for one am glad that we are using our military to help terrorists become good. I would enlist myself if they would take me, but I'm well past the age cutoff. The only sufficiently mitigating factor would be if I were an MD, but I'm not.
As for your point regarding the camcorder law, while I think the penalties are excessive (you can commit a real crime, that really hurts someone, and get less jail time than that!), I don't have a problem with it being specifically illegal. I think a better solution WRT penalties would be that if they catch you with a camcorder in the theater, they should have the legal right to confiscate your camcorder, no trial, no appeal. You don't get it back, and if the bouncers ungently throw you through the air out the back door and you get scraped up and bruised when you hit the deck, tough. You should have thought of that before you tried to tape the movie. People who aren't willing to suffer the consequences shouldn't undertake wrong actions in the first place (keep that in mind anytime someone whines about our taking out the Taliban, Saddam Hussein, and whoever the next evildoer to get in our sites might be. Maybe Assad?).
However, the law itself is not unjust. The penalty is just a bit over the top.
NFS mount the user's home directory on a server with hardware RAID, hot-swappable drives, and regular backups and you won't have to worry about moving the profile or anything else.
/home is mounted on whatever workstation they happen to be using. It's pretty cool. Pretty close to zero need to carry a notebook around at Sun, I bet.
Seriously, that's the best way to keep all the data safe and backed-up. Indeed, if you can afford a GigE LAN (not all that expensive anymore, but if not, a Fast Ethernet LAN will do well enough), you can run thin clients and run everything off the server, like they do in Largo, Florida. If you're not an all-*nix shop, that must be possible with Windows, too.
While some people might squawk a bit, in truth, most users do not need a full-fledged PC on their desk as work. All the apps they need (or that you want them to have, at least) should be provided by and controlled by the IT department. It's the only way to keep your network safe. Developers might need a full-blown PC, but stick them off on a LAN segment firewalled off from the rest of the PCs, because just being a programmer doesn't mean you won't soon have your machine burdened with 400 pounds of malware and sporting all the latest viruses, too. I think we've all seen programmers who can write code but don't actually know squat about computers or how to keep them secure.
So hand a thin client to everyone you can. They'll get used to it, and you'll save a bunch of money.
You can build one, or if you want to see a nice turn-key system, take a look at a Sun Ray. Sun employees have a card that they stick in the reader on the Sun Ray (and a userid and password I would suppose, or the person with your card 0wnz0rs joo) and their
I think that's a pretty good analysis from someone who had an inside view.
:-)
In addition to that, in Microsoft's current approaches, besides the confusion you mention, I also see what is reflected in the quote, attribute to Ghandi, that is often seen in taglines: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
I used to be a Windows user all the way. I was first exposed to *nix in 1997 (FreeBSD) and found later that year. By mid-1998 I had chucked Windows and was using Linux exclusively, including being the only person in my shop developing websites on Linux.
In the days when I converted to Linux, we were still in the "first they ignore you" stage. Microsoft was internally aware of Linux, I'm sure, but they never said anything about it publically. One of the first, if not the first, glimpses into what MS privately was thinking about Linux came when The Halloween Document was leaked.
About that time, Microsoft's public position on Linux was getting into the "then they laugh at you" stage. It lasted for a while, but now we are squarely in the "then they fight you" stage. This will go on a while longer, with MS trying various things to crush, or at least slow, the advance of Linux. Unless they find some astonishing legal maneuver and a job on mass quantities of crack, however, it's not likely to help. And we all know what phase comes after "then they fight you."
It is a sign of a certain desperate fear in the face of an unstoppable new disruptive technology that Microsoft is trying to many different things to try and stop it. They don't know what will work, and so far the answer has been "none of it." They ignored Linux. Linux advanced. They laughed at Linux. Linux advanced. Now they are fighting Linux. Hard. And Linux is perhaps advancing faster than ever before.
I think we will see MS engaging in many more examples of fighting fire with fire in the years to come, and 5 years from now Microsoft will probably have released more software under Shared Source, and some under some kind of actual open source license, than any of us would now believe possible. By sharing source and even outright open-sourcing some software, they hope to further stave off the inevitable. It might help a little, in some areas, but far less than they might think. What draws people to Free and Open Source Software is precisely that it is free and open; if it was just shared, nobody would much care about Linux and *BSD; it wouldn't be that much of an improvement on Windows, for many.
Eventually, if Microsoft wants people to keep using Windows, they'll wind up having to open-source most of it, or at the least pretty much give it away. They will probably try giving it away first, since that helped them to crush Netscape (along with a bunch of self-inflicted wounds on Netscape's part). However, it won't help much in this case. When I meet people who've switched from Windows to Linux, cost has most often had little or no bearing on the decision (nor did it in my case). Even among those who considered cost to be an important factor, it was never number one.
What were the top reasons? Security. Speed. Scalability. Then comes longer hardware life cycles. Finally, somewhere after that, people will say "Oh, and it's free. Saved us a bundle on licensing, too." The other reasons figure into cost in a way, too, but they are more on the TCO side of the equation. Operating systems that are faster, more secure, more scalable, and require hardware up less frequently will have a lower TCO, even if the licensing fees are the same. When you factor in that you can get most distributions of Linux essentially free (the cost of a download, some CD-R media, some bandwidth which most people pay a flat rate for anyway) and install it on as many servers and workstations as you want, well, that's just icing on the cake.
MS will fight these rearguard tactics for some time to come, but Linux will arrive at the "Then you win" stage soon enough.
Mods: you can mod me OT for this, because it is. It's the truth, but it's OT, so go ahead.
Actually, the Bush administration has great respect for both science in general and the scientific method (you might want to take a look at their forestry policy, for instance; for several decades, US forestry policy has been based far more on emotion and cuddly Smokey the Bear images than on science; the Bush administration is changing that). The United States rejected Kyoto because the Bush administration has contempt for junk science, and that's mostly what Kyoto is.
That's one of the (many) good reasons why I'm voting Bush/Cheney in 2004 despite my dislike for Cheney. Others include the fact that unlike his primary opponent, Bush is a moral and princicpled individual (Kerry seems to be neither, in addition to being a tax-and-spend posterboy), that he is far more competent to run the country then Kerry, and he has the proven ability and courage to hunt down our country's mortal enemies and kill them. That last, especially, I have no confidence in Kerry to do.
We're approaching three years on from 9/11 and Al Waeda has not yet achieved another attack in the US. This is because of the Bush administration's aggressive response. Iraq helps, too. Many of the terrorists who might otherwise come here are bogged down in Iraq fighting our army over there. Believe me, it is a far better thing to be fighting and killing the terrorist in their own backyard than in our living room. There is no question that Hussein was a threat to his neighbors and a sponsor of terrorism at least in the Middle East (especially of Palestinian suicide bombers). Taking him out was the right thing to do. Anyone else like him should look upon that and no that this own days are numbered, too. What happened to Hussein was instrumental in making Khadafi play ball. You might have noticed his change of heart. He did it to ensure his own survival, because he could really see himself as being next.
Assad would be wise to take note of Khadafi's good sense.
I'm a team leader, and I report to the director of software development.
When we need to hire someone for my team, we do this:
My boss sends me a copy of all resumes received (and I send her a copy of ones I have independently acquired).
We both read them all and triage them into Interview, Maybe, and Forget It piles. When I say "all resumes received" I mean exactly that. HR filters out nothing. In fact, when I was hired I had absolutely no contact with HR until after the hiring decision had been made. That first contact was an offer letter. My very first contact from my employer was a phone call from my (now) boss.
People who we both put into the Interview pile get called. If one of us said Maybe and the other said Interview, we'll discuss it and may or may not call the person. If one of us said Maybe and the other said Forget it, that person doesn't get a call.
Neither of us much cares about certifications. We care about relevant experience and achievements, we care *a lot* about attitude and interest in the work, and we care *a lot* about personality fit. One of the great keys to being a successful manager and building a successful team is to hire people who don't really need to be managed. We both believe this, and that contributed a lot to my being hired. We look for interested, self-motivated people who have a passion about their work. As long as you know what you're doing, we're not all that concerned about how you got there. I don't have a CS degree, and have very little formal training in any aspect of IT (took some classes at Cisco that were paid for by a former employer, that's about it). Everything I know I learned on my own and on the job. That pretty much precludes me from working at big companies, but I don't care. Small ones are a lot more fun.
I know this technique doesn't scale to 900 resumes, and HR departments at large companies probably don't even allow that sort of thing (their loss), but if you are in a position to do it that way, looking at each resume and picking out the people you like based on your criteria (which ought not rely much on certificates) is the best way to assemble a quality staff.
It's very doubtful that much of the population that wasn't killed directly would die off later from radiation. Some people in immediately surrounding areas would, but by no means all. People 1,000 miles or more away from the nearest strike would certainly not be killed or even sickened. You might see elevated cancer rates stemming from fallout for years to come, but that is hardly extermination.
Relevant cases to consider:
1) Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After the nuclear attacks, people went back in there and rebuilt. Not years after, but months after. Hiroshima today is bustling city of over a million people, and ground zero is right in the heart of town, just as it was in 1945. Go there and see it sometime. Fatalities from the nuclear attacks were limited to those killed outright, those who died later from injuries or radiation poisoning, and some who died later from cancer. Deaths from the bombings were pretty well limited to those in the cities at the time, and not even all (not even most) of those. I have a childhood friend whose mother was ten year old girl in Hiroshima at the time of the attack, and she suffered from discrimination against hibakusha far more than from any effects of the bombing.
2) Chernobyl. Chernobyl released far more radiation than a bunch of warheads and over a much longer time. Chernobyl was like a nuclear exchange but without explosions. The town and the area around it is heavily poisoned and will be for many years to come. People cannot live there and will not be able to live there for a very long time. Long enough that we might as well call it never. However, even in the case of Chernobyl, people away from the immediate area were not killed. It is even possible to go into the Chernobyl area, at least for short periods of time, and some people (such as Elena: http://www.kiddofspeed.com/default.htm) do just that.
As others have posted, the primary targets of both US and Soviet ICBMs were not each other's civilian populations. The primary targets were the other side's ICBMs, including submarine bases. The next top targets were the other side's conventional military installations and command and control systems. In the United States, Cheyenne Mountain would have been hit. Washington D.C. Would have been hit very hard. The entire area of the Whitehouse, the Pentagon, etc., would have ceased to exist. Langley, VA (CIA headquarters) was doubtless in the crosshairs too, ditto for the NSA and any other intelligence agencies. I'm from San Diego, and as a town with a lot of military bases, I always knew that if it happened, San Diego would be hit hard and I would probably die because I lived only a few miles from NAS (now MCAS) Miramar, and only a few miles more from NAS North Island, a carrier base. Toward the southern end of San Diego Bay is another major naval base, so people down there would have been hit hard, too. Would everyone in the San Diego metro area have been killed? Probably not, but most would have. You could probably figure on over a million deaths in San Diego County, if the US and the Soviet Union had had a full-scale nuclear exchange.
Life for survivors in the US and the Soviet Union would have been pretty hard after a nuclear exchange, and many of them would probably later die of starvation or disease. Many might have fled to Canada or Mexico if they could.
If the UK got involved, and they probably would have, things would have been similar there. If the Exchange spilled over into NATO generally, Europe would have been a mess, too.
However, for countries that stayed out of it (which would include South America, probably Australia and New Zealand, b/c they have no nukes), most of Asia (all of it, if China stayed out) and all of Africa and the Middle East, no one would have died as a direct result. If global temperatures dropped in a nuclear winter (something that it is not all certain would occur), there would be some starvation, but even then, most people in the world would still survive.
The most notable change may be the one-liner that should fix the embarrassing FP exception problem.
Personally, I had no idea that it was possible to get a First Post in the Linux kernel, let alone that it could cause an exception.
What do you think is so insanely restrictive about Germany's citizenship policy? It's actually the United States that has the weird citizenship policy.
In most countries, citizenzhip is derived from your parents, and has nothing to do with your place of birth. For example, if you are born in Japan but neither of your parents is Japanese, your residence status comes from your parents. If neither of them is a Japanese citizen, neither are you. If neither of them is a legal resident, neither are you. Is Germany's citizenship policy more restrictive than this? If so, what is it?
The United States is one of the rare exceptions to that, conferring citizenship merely by birth in the United States, even if neither of your parents is a US citizen, or even in the country legally. If you are born in the United States, nothing else matters. You are a US citizen.
However, countries that do not follow this policy are not insanely restrictive. They are normal, and frankly, the United States should alter its citizenship policy such that to gain citizenship by birth in the United States, at least one of your parents must be a US citizen. If at least one of your parents is a green card holder, you get one too. If that parent naturalizes while you are under 18, you automatically naturalize. If that parent naturalizes when you are over 18, you have to do it on your own.
That would be fair and in line with international norms. The system we have now is totally screwed up. The child of a person who sneaks across the border 8.5 months pregnant and delivers here is a citizen. Meanwhile, my wife of over two years has never set foot inside the United States because she is still waiting for a visa. Until she gets one, she may not enter the country at all, because she married a US citizen. That is the law. This is also a de facto bar to entry for our US citizen children, since one is a toddler and one is an infant, and they need their mother. She can't come in, so neither can they. As a result, I haven't seen my wife or our children in over six months and won't see them again until this fall when we think my wife will finally get her visa.
Trust me, we're the ones with the insane citizenship and immigration policies. Insanely loose on one hand, and insanely restrictive on the other.