It's happened to me a few times, primarily around 2:00am when I'm waiting for a crash dump or tombstone to be analyzed by the support line folks. Since I can't stay awake forever during that time, I make sure that the ringer is on 100%, then I put my head down and snooze until I get a call back.
The only other time was a hell weekend where we were doing a totally screwed up network migration, and I only got about four hours of sleep over a three-day weekend. I was close to killing the stupid network manager who put together a totally useless plan for the migration, but he saved himself by resigning first. Helped me avoid washing the blood off of my hands.
My wife and I have a family plan through Verizon, with an additional line for my mother-in-law (she lives in a different state). I am seriously thinking of getting this for my mother-in-law because of the traveling that she's done.
Case in point: She was traveling here from Florida this past Thursday. She got off of I-10 near Beaumont, TX, and was having a very hard time getting back on (to be fair, she is well into her 70's). If she could have called us, and us being able to see where her GPS indicator was showing her to be, we could have coached her via her cellphone on how best to get back to the Interstate.
So yes, I think it's a grand idea. If a kid gets in a jam and need some help, I don't see any reason why not to get them this type of service. It depends, though, on the type of relationship that a kid has with his parents.
I can't speak for all Christians on this, but I've never pirated any music of any sort whatsoever. Now, I do rip (using Winamp) all of my albums and store it on a hard disk for my listening pleasure, but I certainly don't share them. Am I in violation of the terms and conditions? Possibly, but I feel this is certainly covered under fair use.
However, my wife and I helped a girl from our church purchase a PC. She ripped all of her CD's to her hard disk, and then sold the CD's. Was it wrong? I suggested that it was to her, but she wasn't willing to listen to my advice.
Now, have I ever downloaded anything for free? I have downloaded The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe before it came out on DVD (after seeing it in the movie theater three times), but I deleted it after watching one scene from the latter part of the movie. (I've also downloaded Don't download this song, but nothing else that wasn't for free.
I just went out last week and bought a PS2 for the kids for Christmas. Why did I buy a PS2 now? A couple of reasons:
1. I'm not going to spend $600 for a PS3.
2. I'm not going to spend $400 for a Xbox360
3. While I considered buying a Wii for $250, I don't buy first-generation consoles.
4. The games that my kids want are all available on the PS2, not so on the other three console games.
Can I afford the other game consoles - yes. But because my kids don't need the horsepower of a PS3 or Xbox360, I'd rather spend the money on something that they will get a good deal of enjoyment out of, and wait for the next generation of consoles to get debugged and cheapened before I go spend good money on them. Now, if I had been one of those lucky people who got a Xbox360 for $100 from Amazon last week, I might have bought one of the PS2's, but I still might have.
Basically, the PS2 hit the sweet spot in terms of both money and software, and while it may not be what I want for a final console, it's good enough to do for a few years.
Nope, the name of the company contained the name of the city it was located in, and if the Soviet Union had ever dropped the bomb, it would have been onto the very big Air Force base just south of town. I had a t-shirt (like many others) with the logo of the company (suitably modifed) and the name "Mutants of -----", substituting the name of the city for the dashes.
I can beat that. I was interviewing with an insurance company, and was walking with the manager with whom I was talking over to their conference room. To get there, you had to walk through their cube farms. The cubes were organized with each person getting a 3 foot by 3 foot "cube", but their back was open to the hallway and to the other three people in that "cluster". It was noisy, and certainly not conducive to any in-depth work at their PC. As part of it, the hallway was only two feet wide, so you had a constant flow of people behind you all the time.
The interview went well, but after a very short while (about 1/2 hour into the interview) I had decided not to take the job. Funny story: the group I was supposed to have lunch with got called away to fix a critical problem, and the guy who took me to lunch was rather taken aback when I started asking how close to the Dilbert cartoon strip did his office operate.
A possibly better way of looking at it (for the bulk of us) is to consider that the Law is an analog device, and what it does depends on a number of analog variables (i.e. the actual laws, judges, lawyers, juries, etc.). Most of us here are innately familiar with digital/binary systems, where the answer is either yes or now. Law is not analog at all (and yes, I know that I just made a binary judgment on what the law is).
Its jealously for the most part. Not direct but that is what it still is. They need to feel superior somehow so they mask ignorance with authority. By pulling "rank" they have effectively shown the technical staff whose boss as if it makes right.
Honestly, it also me be something else. Put it this way, managers have to make business decisions based on the technical solutions that we provide. We may have the best project plan, best choice technically selected, etc., but if the manager can't make an informed business decision, he may feel more comfortable checking things out before giving an OK.
Story related to this: I had just taken over a technical group (hired into the company), and had to do a presentation to plant staff on why we had to purchase some 100BT router cards in order to hook up the new servers to the local lan. I presented my answers to their questions (on slides), and in the end got my purchase approved. The plant manager commented that everything was in order and asked me, with both my manager and his manager cringing at the loaded question, "I bet you think these questions are pretty silly, don't you?"
My reply was, "No, they're not silly questions to answer, but business questions that need to be answered so that you have the information you need to make a business decision".
My company has some plants just over the border. I had to go out and meet with the systems administrators there. I was told that all I needed was my driver's license, and that I had to pay $20 for a work permit for the period that I was going to be there.
Well, we get to the office on the Mexican side, and I find out that I need either a birth certificate and driver's license, or a passport. I didn't bring a birth certificate, and I didn't have a passport (I do now!!) The customs official said that I would have to go back over the border to a notary public and get an affidavit saying that I was born in the US, and that would suffice for him, but the cost at the office was going to be about $95.
After a bit (I was chatting with a manager with me) the customs official came back wrote down the number 30 on a piece of paper, and walked away from us. We looked at each other, placed $30 on the counter by the piece of paper, and sort of turned away from the counter. The customs official came back, somehow the money dissappeared, he gave me the work permit and that was that.
Eliot Spitzer is idealistic and ruthless in his pursuit of corruption.
The idea that he would accept bribes is ludicrous, not to mention stupid. In his high profile position, he would surely be found out.
Afterall, if he were to get caught, it would seriously hurt him in his run for the NY state governor's office. He can get his brib^H^H^H^H campaign contributions from those companies through other routes.
No court in this country would have listened to a collector trying to sue GM after his unlicensed EV1's brakes failed.
I doubt that very much. I have been reading far too many stories off of sites such as http://www.overlawyered.com/ to have much faith in the court system to keep frivolous lawsuits out of the legal system. When a car company (Chrysler) is on the hook for $45 million dollars because the driver fell asleep, causing a crash and having the unbuckled passengers hit each other like large billiard balls, I have very little faith in the judicial system.
Now, GM probably would have won nine out of ten cases (or even 99 out of a hundred), but when you factor in the costs of defending itself, along with that one award in ten (or a hundred) that socks GM with tens or hundreds of millions in damages, you have to practice defensive law. That's why GM is taking the steps it's taking.
Full Disclosure: I used to work for GM, and work for a supplier.
Actually, yes they did. The problem that GM has is that, if a car is on the road, they are required to provide spare parts (either by manufacturing them or providing diagrams for third-party manufacturers) for those cars for 10 years past the date of building that particular vehicle. In other words, GM would have to come up with suppliers (or themselves) for parts for these cars until at least 2009, and with the problem of the suppliers not being willing to make those parts, it puts GM into a bad situation.
GM was fortunate in that, with these cars only being leased to customers, they could pull them off the roads and thus limit their liability. I would love to own one of these vehicles myself, but I can understand GM's position.
Disclosure: I used to work for GM, and work for one of their automotive suppliers now, so I do know a little about what goes into these types of decisions.
In other words, it's hard to see how an RFID helps that much at all. It will help in your everyday lost child situation, but it instills a false sense of security at the same time.
Just this past weekend, my oldest boy turned 7. We went to Chuck-E-Cheese (you know, the place of the cardboard pizza and noisy gameroom). Each member of my family got stamped with a UV-visible stamp to make sure that no one could take one of my kids out of that place without a matching stamp on an adult. If the park checks at exit time that the kid's RFID bracelet matches up with the parent's RFID bracelet, then I would say that it would help in providing security. And if it prevented someone from grabbing a kid and trying to hustle them out of there without the parent's knowledge, I'd be all for it.
Personally, I would never allow any of my kids at their ages to be out of sight from me at one of these parks in any event.
Minor correction: Bryan Mack attended the University of Iowa (from the article). Martin Miller, formerly of the University of Houston, was the person who had archived the thousands of emails that traced back to Bryan Mack.
I was at a remote site installing some new Unix workstations when I got an urgent call from the site administrator for some servers I had just installed a few days ago. One of the workstations was down, and wouldn't come up. I asked him what had changed, had he done anything, etc. He said that he hadn't done anything, could I come quick. I finished up what I was doing, and drove over there (45 miles, unfortunately).
(Background info: I had told the managers at the site that the site admin needed three classes of training, hands on work with me while I installed and implemented the systems, and some other experience before he went solo. The managers agreed to this but they never came through: He got zero training, and "was too busy" to work hands-on with me).
True enough, the system was down, and I had an appointment that night (Friday night, of course), but I would come in over the weekend to see what I could do. Of course, the guy hadn't backed up this system ever according to the backup procedures I had handed him.
I spend three hours on a Saturday trying to get this station up (it had design part data, and that data couldn't be permanently lost), and finally told the managers at the site that they needed to get the vendor out as it appeared to be a hardware problem based on what I was seeing (bios type messages, but once it hit the hard drive it died hard).
Vendor came out, checked out the hardware, and reported that nothing was wrong with the CPU, memory, SCSI cards, busses, disk drive, etc. The site administrator then remembers that the day before everything hit the fan that he created a/development directory off of the root disk, loaded a database application into it but filled up the hard disk, and then to clean up after himself did a "rm -r/dev*". The/development directory was gone, along with/dev!
Immediately after he told me this little blurb (and I was red hot, Why didn't you tell me when I asked!) he informed me that it was time for him to leave and he did! Luckily for him he did leave, otherwise I was going to strangle him.
Fortunately, I was able to move the disk drive to piggyback off of a similar system, copy the device files from that system to the munged drive, and then recreate the couple of device files that were specific to this system. End result was that the system was back 100% again, and fully backed up (since I had zero confidence in the jerk). I told the managers what had happened, and what the actions of their site admin had cost me both personally and in terms of my work hours. I got blamed by the site admin for "not training him enough", for not being responsive enough, and for accepting his initial story and not digging into it to find out the root causes.
I was aware of this program, and several others that add these features. However, until Billy boy patches in/ships these features, a lot of the less computer litereate users will probably miss out on these features.
And I fully agree with you on that. I've gotten my wife enjoying the Firefox browser so much that she can't imagine going back to IE. However, for my mother-in-law (for whom I'm handing down one of my older PC's for her to use) I'm going to be making Firefox the default browser for her, and I know that she won't have a clue.
Unless someone like us is doing "tech support" for family and friends, the vast majority of people will rely on the spoon-fed stuff coming from Microsoft until they've gotten wind of something better. It is a vexing dilemma.
Slashdot Mirror
It's happened to me a few times, primarily around 2:00am when I'm waiting for a crash dump or tombstone to be analyzed by the support line folks. Since I can't stay awake forever during that time, I make sure that the ringer is on 100%, then I put my head down and snooze until I get a call back.
The only other time was a hell weekend where we were doing a totally screwed up network migration, and I only got about four hours of sleep over a three-day weekend. I was close to killing the stupid network manager who put together a totally useless plan for the migration, but he saved himself by resigning first. Helped me avoid washing the blood off of my hands.
If there is an actual error and you tell me, I'll write you a check for one hexadecimal dollar.
With some breeds, digging for stuff they shouldn't have is also a problem.
Case in point: She was traveling here from Florida this past Thursday. She got off of I-10 near Beaumont, TX, and was having a very hard time getting back on (to be fair, she is well into her 70's). If she could have called us, and us being able to see where her GPS indicator was showing her to be, we could have coached her via her cellphone on how best to get back to the Interstate.
So yes, I think it's a grand idea. If a kid gets in a jam and need some help, I don't see any reason why not to get them this type of service. It depends, though, on the type of relationship that a kid has with his parents.
BritishRIAA wheels out dead artist: Here you go, let him sign.
PollTaker: He can't sign, he's dead!
BritishRIAA rep: Oh come on, he only died this year!
PollTaker: He still can't sign, there are too many dead signers on this petition as is
BritishRIAA rep: He's really not 100% dead
pushes button on wheelchair Corpse: I feel happy!!!
BritshRIAA rep gives money to PollTaker PollTaker: Well, Ok here's the pen.
BritishRIAA rep: Good, see you next Thursday?
PollTaker: See you then.
However, my wife and I helped a girl from our church purchase a PC. She ripped all of her CD's to her hard disk, and then sold the CD's. Was it wrong? I suggested that it was to her, but she wasn't willing to listen to my advice.
Now, have I ever downloaded anything for free? I have downloaded The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe before it came out on DVD (after seeing it in the movie theater three times), but I deleted it after watching one scene from the latter part of the movie. (I've also downloaded Don't download this song, but nothing else that wasn't for free.
I just went out last week and bought a PS2 for the kids for Christmas. Why did I buy a PS2 now? A couple of reasons: 1. I'm not going to spend $600 for a PS3. 2. I'm not going to spend $400 for a Xbox360 3. While I considered buying a Wii for $250, I don't buy first-generation consoles. 4. The games that my kids want are all available on the PS2, not so on the other three console games. Can I afford the other game consoles - yes. But because my kids don't need the horsepower of a PS3 or Xbox360, I'd rather spend the money on something that they will get a good deal of enjoyment out of, and wait for the next generation of consoles to get debugged and cheapened before I go spend good money on them. Now, if I had been one of those lucky people who got a Xbox360 for $100 from Amazon last week, I might have bought one of the PS2's, but I still might have. Basically, the PS2 hit the sweet spot in terms of both money and software, and while it may not be what I want for a final console, it's good enough to do for a few years.
Nope, the name of the company contained the name of the city it was located in, and if the Soviet Union had ever dropped the bomb, it would have been onto the very big Air Force base just south of town. I had a t-shirt (like many others) with the logo of the company (suitably modifed) and the name "Mutants of -----", substituting the name of the city for the dashes.
I can beat that. I was interviewing with an insurance company, and was walking with the manager with whom I was talking over to their conference room. To get there, you had to walk through their cube farms. The cubes were organized with each person getting a 3 foot by 3 foot "cube", but their back was open to the hallway and to the other three people in that "cluster". It was noisy, and certainly not conducive to any in-depth work at their PC. As part of it, the hallway was only two feet wide, so you had a constant flow of people behind you all the time. The interview went well, but after a very short while (about 1/2 hour into the interview) I had decided not to take the job. Funny story: the group I was supposed to have lunch with got called away to fix a critical problem, and the guy who took me to lunch was rather taken aback when I started asking how close to the Dilbert cartoon strip did his office operate.
Why would I want to have my cell phone be able to find my contact lenses? That's going a little too far!!!
A possibly better way of looking at it (for the bulk of us) is to consider that the Law is an analog device, and what it does depends on a number of analog variables (i.e. the actual laws, judges, lawyers, juries, etc.). Most of us here are innately familiar with digital/binary systems, where the answer is either yes or now. Law is not analog at all (and yes, I know that I just made a binary judgment on what the law is).
Honestly, it also me be something else. Put it this way, managers have to make business decisions based on the technical solutions that we provide. We may have the best project plan, best choice technically selected, etc., but if the manager can't make an informed business decision, he may feel more comfortable checking things out before giving an OK.
Story related to this: I had just taken over a technical group (hired into the company), and had to do a presentation to plant staff on why we had to purchase some 100BT router cards in order to hook up the new servers to the local lan. I presented my answers to their questions (on slides), and in the end got my purchase approved. The plant manager commented that everything was in order and asked me, with both my manager and his manager cringing at the loaded question, "I bet you think these questions are pretty silly, don't you?"
My reply was, "No, they're not silly questions to answer, but business questions that need to be answered so that you have the information you need to make a business decision".
I don't know, I hear a lot of whining from France nowadays.
It's not just the police, by the way.
My company has some plants just over the border. I had to go out and meet with
the systems administrators there. I was told that all I needed was my driver's
license, and that I had to pay $20 for a work permit for the period that I was
going to be there.
Well, we get to the office on the Mexican side, and I find out that I need either
a birth certificate and driver's license, or a passport. I didn't bring a birth
certificate, and I didn't have a passport (I do now!!) The customs official said
that I would have to go back over the border to a notary public and get an affidavit
saying that I was born in the US, and that would suffice for him, but the cost at
the office was going to be about $95.
After a bit (I was chatting with a manager with me) the customs official came back
wrote down the number 30 on a piece of paper, and walked away from us. We looked at
each other, placed $30 on the counter by the piece of paper, and sort of turned away
from the counter. The customs official came back, somehow the money dissappeared, he
gave me the work permit and that was that.
First time I have ever given a bribe of any sort.
Dennis:
I told you. We're an anarcho-syndicalist commune.
Oh, shut up and go and change your armor.
Afterall, if he were to get caught, it would seriously hurt him in his run for the NY state governor's office. He can get his brib^H^H^H^H campaign contributions from those companies through other routes.
Primary character, other than Pooh and his friends, is a heffalump named Lumpy. And yes, I've seen it multiple times with my three kids.
Actually, it was a rather enjoyable movie, and when it comes out in DVD in two weeks, I'll purchase it
for my family.
I doubt that very much. I have been reading far too many stories off of sites such as http://www.overlawyered.com/ to have much faith in the court system to keep frivolous lawsuits out of the legal system. When a car company (Chrysler) is on the hook for $45 million dollars because the driver fell asleep, causing a crash and having the unbuckled passengers hit each other like large billiard balls, I have very little faith in the judicial system.
Now, GM probably would have won nine out of ten cases (or even 99 out of a hundred), but when you factor in the costs of defending itself, along with that one award in ten (or a hundred) that socks GM with tens or hundreds of millions in damages, you have to practice defensive law. That's why GM is taking the steps it's taking.
Full Disclosure: I used to work for GM, and work for a supplier.
Actually, yes they did. The problem that GM has is that, if a car is on the road, they are required to provide spare parts (either by manufacturing them or providing diagrams for third-party manufacturers) for those cars for 10 years past the date of building that particular vehicle. In other words, GM would have to come up with suppliers (or themselves) for parts for these cars until at least 2009, and with the problem of the suppliers not being willing to make those parts, it puts GM into a bad situation.
GM was fortunate in that, with these cars only being leased to customers, they could pull them off the roads and thus limit their liability. I would love to own one of these vehicles myself, but I can understand GM's position.
Disclosure: I used to work for GM, and work for one of their automotive suppliers now, so I do know a little about what goes into these types of decisions.
Which will come first, 2004 MN4 asteroid, or
Duke Nukem Forever?
Just this past weekend, my oldest boy turned 7. We went to Chuck-E-Cheese (you know, the place of the cardboard pizza and noisy gameroom). Each member of my family got stamped with a UV-visible stamp to make sure that no one could take one of my kids out of that place without a matching stamp on an adult. If the park checks at exit time that the kid's RFID bracelet matches up with the parent's RFID bracelet, then I would say that it would help in providing security. And if it prevented someone from grabbing a kid and trying to hustle them out of there without the parent's knowledge, I'd be all for it.
Personally, I would never allow any of my kids at their ages to be out of sight from me at one of these parks in any event.
Minor correction: Bryan Mack attended the University of Iowa (from the article). Martin Miller, formerly of the University of Houston, was the person who had archived the thousands of emails that traced back to Bryan Mack.
I was at a remote site installing some new Unix workstations when I got an urgent call from the site administrator for some servers I had just installed a few days ago. One of the workstations was down, and wouldn't come up. I asked him what had changed, had he done anything, etc. He said that he hadn't done anything, could I come quick. I finished up what I was doing, and drove over there (45 miles, unfortunately).
/development directory off of the root disk, loaded a database application into it but filled up the hard disk, and then to clean up after himself did a "rm -r /dev*". The /development directory was gone, along with /dev!
(Background info: I had told the managers at the site that the site admin needed three classes of training, hands on work with me while I installed and implemented the systems, and some other experience before he went solo. The managers agreed to this but they never came through: He got zero training, and "was too busy" to work hands-on with me).
True enough, the system was down, and I had an appointment that night (Friday night, of course), but I would come in over the weekend to see what I could do. Of course, the guy hadn't backed up this system ever according to the backup procedures I had handed him.
I spend three hours on a Saturday trying to get this station up (it had design part data, and that data couldn't be permanently lost), and finally told the managers at the site that they needed to get the vendor out as it appeared to be a hardware problem based on what I was seeing (bios type messages, but once it hit the hard drive it died hard).
Vendor came out, checked out the hardware, and reported that nothing was wrong with the CPU, memory, SCSI cards, busses, disk drive, etc. The site administrator then remembers that the day before everything hit the fan that he created a
Immediately after he told me this little blurb (and I was red hot, Why didn't you tell me when I asked!) he informed me that it was time for him to leave and he did! Luckily for him he did leave, otherwise I was going to strangle him.
Fortunately, I was able to move the disk drive to piggyback off of a similar system, copy the device files from that system to the munged drive, and then recreate the couple of device files that were specific to this system. End result was that the system was back 100% again, and fully backed up (since I had zero confidence in the jerk). I told the managers what had happened, and what the actions of their site admin had cost me both personally and in terms of my work hours. I got blamed by the site admin for "not training him enough", for not being responsive enough, and for accepting his initial story and not digging into it to find out the root causes.
And I fully agree with you on that. I've gotten my wife enjoying the Firefox browser so much that she can't imagine going back to IE. However, for my mother-in-law (for whom I'm handing down one of my older PC's for her to use) I'm going to be making Firefox the default browser for her, and I know that she won't have a clue.
Unless someone like us is doing "tech support" for family and friends, the vast majority of people will rely on the spoon-fed stuff coming from Microsoft until they've gotten wind of something better. It is a vexing dilemma.