Found a link from a link of a small shop in Lille selling chassis for these bricks. Maybe one of these would be a good place to start building a beowulf cluster.
However, on their webpage they state: OpenChassis are sold to computer experts only. So don't mention you saw it on/., or they'll kick you out of the shop:-)
A friend in the U.S. has shown me his well polished dialog for breaking down unwanted spamcallers, mostly those calls around supper time. He gets so many, its down to an art form at this point. When he sees a caller-ID number he doesn't recognize, he just doesn't say hello, he launches directly into his tirade.
He's recorded a few of his best pieces, where the poor women on the other end of the line are in tears thinking they are going to prison or are not going to be paid by the marketeers. His deep alpha male command voice means most people just cave in within a few seconds, but he's surprised by the number who try to stick to the script for a short while.
It goes a little something like this:
Him> "FBI terrorism strike force hot-line. Do not hang up on this call, it has already been traced. If you hang up against my orders, you WILL be prosecuted on felony charges!"
Caller> "Ummm, We've noticed that your account is, ummm, well, ummmm, wait, is this really the FBI?"
Him> "Do you realize how much trouble you could be in for dialing this number? We here at the FBI have exactly ZERO sense of humor for illegal calls into the federal phone system."
Spammer> "Ummmm, well, its a computer that dials the numbers, we're just supposed to read this script on the screen. I didn't mean to dial your number."
Him> "Please state for the record your name, your current location, and the name of the company you are currently working for. If we cannot verify any of this information as being 100% truthfully accurate, you face federal felony charges of lying to a federal agent. The minimum sentence for that charge alone is one year in federal prison"
Usually he gets all kinds of information out of the poor telemarketer idiot from that point on. Most of them are in places like florida or oklahoma where there is high unemployment and lots of ignorant people who will do any job.
Despite this, he thinks his number hasn't been put on anywhere near enough telespammer blacklists. But he's working on it.
There are also some great tapes made by the call-centre training companies to show how abusive some called people can get. Lots of full-on screaming, cursing and threatening psychos get caught on the quality control tapes. Unscrupulous cold call centres in Britain (which is all of them) have a procedure to deal with these psychos. Their is a button on the console to trigger an alternate script for complete psychos, where they then give the name of a competitor. BT's call centre will say "Sorry sir, Vodaphone wishes you a pleasant day" before hanging up.
If they were smart, they would get their site posted to slashdot after first making sure their 56k modem was up to withstanding a slashdot effect.
Oh, wait. Nevermind.
The many war{driving|storming|floating|biking|hiking} groups here in Europe would likely participate next time.
I just got a new laptop and I'll be getting netstumbler up and running RSN. Part two of my driving around Europe vacation is about to begin. That should provide a nice map of a few dozen cities by the end of the month.
It seems that Blue Stone is more correct on this one. The license notice with the DVD prohibits lending or viewing by more than the original owner. Even if the original owner wants to view the DVD in the presence of a large group of friends.
If we were in the US, our actions would be criminalised already. As it is, here in Europe, it will be another year or so before such an action becomes a criminal action (see several stories on NTK, the Register, and/.)
It is a sad state of affairs when loaning materiels becomes a criminal act, and if Belgium adopts the new EUCD directive even public libraries will be forced to shut down or start charging for every book lent or read. Get a clue. The copyright corporations are buying some very bad laws, and there is nothing we can do about it until it gets so bad that everyone is a criminal and forces our politicians to revoke the bad laws.
This isn't news, Dhell has been doing this for a few weeks now. I was talking with some people on wednesday evening about this very topic.
Dell has dropped all their OS-less machines, and now only offer machines with M$-OS pre-installed, at an increased price which can't be negotiated away. Even for their largest customers. Even for corporations with site-license agreements with M$. All because M$ used a carrot-and-stick approach, threatening to remove all discounts unless non-OS options disappeared, and offering a greater discount than H-Paq if they went with a 100% M$ offering.
Dell is fucking freaked by the HP-Compaq merger, HPaq is a giant more scary than even M$. Although everyone in the press is laughing about the mis-match of HP and fuckPaq, Dell and IBM aren't laughing. H-Pucker is huge, and will (already started to) create a nasty price war in the corporate PC industry. One of HPricks competitors is going to go out of business, and you can be sure IBM will most likely survive. So M$ hit Dell hard in the negotiations a few months ago, and now we see the results; make every corp client pay twice for M$ products, or lose the war before even being able to fire a shot.
Doh!ll caved in, and probably are spinning this to their share holders as a great oportunity to increase profit margins over HPhuq.
The sad reality is that there are now lots of corporate clients on M$ license 6.0, where they have already paid per-seat/per-user/per-cockroach for copies of M$-OS. Then when they look at the $$$ amount from Dell, and the same spec machines from and IBM or H-dreck, the costs of that "Pay twice for your OS with every machine" are going to look pretty bad. Dell has phucked themselves over bad this time around, you can bet they aren't going to see any long term profits from this move. The boycott from a very tiny percentage of free-OS freaks isn't going to make a blip in their books, but 50K+ corporations jumping ship in the next 3 years will kill them.
As a very astute industry insider predicted wednesday night over a few beers, "that bitch Carlie may have killed the old HP, but if she secretly carved up the PC market with Bill, then Dell has been doomed from the start"
Friends next door have bought the first one, and came over last night to watch it on our huge screen. Impressive. Now we don't need to go out and buy our own copy, if we want to see it again (probably not for another month or so), we'll just borrow it again.
We are waiting until the 4 disk set comes out, and we'll buy that version. Between the two of us, we'll have both versions, and can swap as needed.
All of us are waiting for a couple of years from now, after all the films have been released, WETA finishes all the CGI SFX, and Peter Jackson makes the final extra-long directors cut. That will probably be a 7 or more DVD set. Showings will then be day long affairs with a couple of meals between films, lots of drinks, and regular bathroom breaks.
A quick search on jobserve turns up 19 current job listings requiring Fortran. Not bad for a 30+ year old language. Several satellite, stress engineering and meteorology jobs.
Working code just doesn't stop working because some new language has come out. Imagine having the job of converting 5 million lines of fortran code into visual C++ dotNet code. By the end of the week. With no errors. And no overtime... It just doesn't happen, working code doesn't need to be replaced, and thus it isn't.
I'm still surprised when recruiters ask me about my fortran and cobol skills. I don't list them as skills, because I haven't touched them in more than a decade. But the skillPimps can see I'm an old fart, and the older ones know I started my career with the old languages, because perl and C++ didn't exist in 1972. Hell, Larry Wall was still in diapers when I first touched a computer.
This goes back to the discussion, here and other places, about the difference between coders and computer scientists. Coders insist the only language they know is the only one for the job, because they are too uneducated to understand a language is just a tool. CompSci gurus will just pick up the best tool for the job, whether something ancient like fortran, or something like a procedural language or even assembler.
the AC
Bumps the Mig-19 from my list
on
IBM's Deep View
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· Score: 4, Funny
9.2 megaPixel, up to 56 Hz refresh in a 22 inch LCD screen. Want!
This is now very high on my luxury wish list. When is the next IT bubble scheduled to happen again? I have to start my plan to get rich on other people's stupidity and greed so I can afford a system like this.
I created a couple of throw-away hotmail accounts before my current long vacation, as something to hand out to people I really don't want to know after we say goodbye.
There were of the form (slightly changed to protect the poor accounts) qris9.4food772a@hotmail.com and 3metre3e4w.pa7@hotmail.com
not the kind of addresses a script could guess by incrementing numbers. I carefully un-checked all the "please let M$ partners spam me" boxes as well. For the first 2 weeks after creating these accounts, not a single message came in. Then they both started getting occasional spam, obviously targeted.
A couple of weeks ago I handed out the first address to a number of people while in Spain, and then checked it regularly from cybercafes around Portugal. Within days it was getting 3-10 portuguese language spams per day. Now it gets about 20 spams per day in various languages, but the second account is still only getting 2-3 per day.
the west coast of Ireland to enjoy the fast bandwidth
Huh? The community centre has a single basic rate ISDN line, so max they'll have a 128kbps connection to the outside world. DSL? Not anytime soon. The LBW isn't about bandwidth, its about the beer, the exercise, and Linux.
But assuming they install some 10/100 hubs in the centre, then locally they'll have a nice little LAN party.
Wouldn't the shortest day of the year be more appropriate?
If you don't get the reference, you aren't getting enough User Friendly. Failure to get enough UF in your diet can lead to blindness, so head over there now for a dose.
the AC
Hire a professional, and prepare for a whole team
on
Computer Room Design?
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· Score: 2
We have five racks for the actual computer room, and need around 25 screens for the command console. Add to this bench space for repairs, and things like: a cupboard, bookshelf, plus more storage space, and the design becomes more complicated. We need enough space for three or four admins. Has anyone seen plans for this type of setup ?
5 racks is not a lot, but leave space for 10 or 15 for future expansion. If the PHB gives you any grief on this, you want to present him with a paper to be signed by the CEO that he is not planning on any growth at all over the next decade. No new customers, no increase in revenue, profits, or employees. That is usually enough to get them to approve a larger space for you and the machines.
You also need to hire someone who has done this before, who knows all about all the little things like glare from the windows and morning/evening temperature shifts in the building and HVAC. A knowledgeable contractor will then sub-contract the various bits to other professionals. Certainly you will need an HVAC team, an electrician, cabling guys, fire suppression specialists, a security guy, and an architect. Yes, all that for just 5 racks and room for 4-10 admins.
You will need aircon to keep the racks cool. Count on 5000 watts of power from 5 fully loaded racks, which equates to 15000 BTU/Hr of cooling needed to keep the servers running. Most office buildings can only do 2-3000 BTU/Hr of cooling in an area, so the machine room will need local, dedicated cooling systems, which possibly means an external chiller and water pipes under the floors.
Each rack requires 3 square metres (or yards) of space, 1 square metre for the rack, and 1 each front and back for the doors. Space above the ceiling and below the floor for cables, electricity, water, fire suppression, drains, etc. Repair area must be separate from the main machine area, physically and electrically.
Electricity will be specced by the electician for the power-on surge, multiplied by the Power Factor. Only a licensed electrician can tell you what all the local laws require/forbid and can sign off the installation with the local authorities. YOU can NOT do this unless you go to night school for a long time and pick up an electrical contractors license. Cheaper to hire a pro:-)
Human work spaces can NOT have any noisy equipment running, the cool looking cabinets should have sound damping. Google for the relevent laws of dB per day exposure in your area. The HVAC guys will have to provide large surface area low noise vents, with multiple zones and controls. Consider putting the fluorescent lights onto 3-phase power. Incandescent floor lamps if you don't/can't.
There are about a thousand things to know about when building a dedicated machine room and "star trek" command centre. My best advice would be to hire the pros, and watch and note everything they do. Then next time an employer asks you about this, you will have a valuable job skill.
Check fatbrain or amazon for books about this topic, I'm sure someone has written this down at least once.
A few years ago I specced out a small machine room, with 16 racks. When the room was originally planned in 1996, the company just didn't count on any growth whatsoever. None! They had two racks then, and figured that would hold them for ever. Totally clueless PHB (but I repeat myself). 3 years later I came on the scene, just before the new building was finished. I pointed out the lack of HVAC, electricity, access control, etc. We asked the HVAC guy if he could cool 30000 Watts of power, and he just laughed. Maximum of 5 desktop PCs in this whole area was his answer, not the 60+ currently planned. Anything more was going to cost $$$, and time. So I got to write up the whole spec for the area over a weekend, and they put it all in, at a huge cost but only delayed the move-in by a week. At first they swore I had over-engineered by a huge amount and threatened lawsuits, but then dropped the whole matter. Last month I saw the room, all 16 racks full of equipment, 90 PCs in the command area, cooling and electricity stressed to the limit. They told me I had saved the company a few years ago, because if they hadn't built the building correctly before moving in, the cost of a retrofit would have been 10X to 20X the original cost, and the lost business due to a year delay would have sunk them even during the internet boom. But I knew enough then to ask all the pros for their advice, rather than do it all myself. A thousand details? Nahh, much, much more.
the AC Freelancer looking for a job in.eu land, will even do machine rooms for food (and drink and ). Leave a reply here if you are hiring
Hey, I had an old room mate who formally placed easter eggs into some (maybe all) of his projects.
He was a project manager for a large "internet products" company, designing and building large software projects. Early on in the process, he would get the programmers and QA and other creative types together over beers when there were no other managers around. He would then ask them if they wanted to put an easter egg into the project. The answer was always Yes!, so they would come up with a secret code name for the module, and then QA would be able to test it, project leaders could review it, and the module name would exist from the very first sign-off by managers. Since they basically followed an "extreme programming" style, writing out the test cases and specifics of each function before coding, some slight obfuscation would occur around the eggs exact function. He'd then place a rule that the easter egg module couldn't be coded until 90% of the other code was finished, but the programmers would all have modules coded in advance waiting for the 90% day.
When the easter eggs were all ready, they would all vote for the best (or best two) and put that into the code. Then the QA people could also write test cases around the trigger code, to make sure the easter eggs did exactly what they were supposed to do, and nothing more. Usually they also had a secret credits page, since the company would never allow former employees to tell which projects they worked on (because they now outsource most of their projects to India, VietNam and China and the idiotic^Wpatriotic american customers wouldn't understand).
Because of this, liability of the programmers and the project management team would be negated. The original design specs would contain the easter egg code, just under a name that looked like all the other modules. Just in case the lawyers came after them later, but I've never heard of it happening.
After the revolution, from 1923 to 1931, the russians used a 5 day week, with 6 weeks in each month, and 12 months in each year. The extra 5 days were specially named holidays related to revolutionary dates. Each worker got 1 day in 30 off, staggered throughout the community so no more than 1/30th of the workers were off each day. (Not everybody in russia used the calendar. The navy stuck to the gregorian calendar because all their navigation books were in that format, tribal regions stayed with their historic versions, others just ignored the decree)
It was a complete disaster, the idea was to get an extra boost from worker productivity by not allowing weekends or other time off. It had the opposite effect, workers were exhausted after 29 days of continuous work, and productivity fell dramatically.
In 1931, they switched to a 6 day week, with 5 week months, and one day each week was a rest day for everyone. Productivity jumped 50% or more in the first few months of using the new calendar.
This should be a lesson to managers who try to pull too much work out of their employees. People need time off on a regular basis to recover from the effects of working 8+ hours per day for 5 or 6 days. After spending too much time working, the body and mind can't maintain the output.
the AC The french revolutionary calendar started with year 1, but they made it retroactive a year and called that year 0. Programmers!
WhirldClown may shut down entire sections of UUnyet if they can't find buyers soon. They'll break the system up into affordable chunks and sell off what they can. Some of it they'll shut down for good, to take the tax writeoff. Other sections will be shut down because they can't afford the experienced people any more. Big reseller companies haven't been paying their bills, some for almost a year.
Lately there have been lots of problems in the European networks, with large numbers of BGP4 routes going missing because of people switching away from ebone. The ebone guys have done a great job with too few experts, but slowly entropy and bit rot is causing problems. The dropped or blackholed or null-routed routes mean that major areas can't see each other for hours on end, until the BGP routes stabilize and find new routes. And those new routes tend to quickly saturate with traffic, leading to lots of lost packets and huge lags.
There is a lot of excess capacity, but none of it is being used for the moment. Putting expensive kit on the ends of the fibres and hiring expensive guys to run it just can't be done in this economy. So the internet isn't going to be as reliable as we've been used to, sites like/. may just disappear for hours each day, and ISPs are going to have to raise rates if they want redundant routes to avoid the worst congestion. The two biggest european carriers are in trouble, and redundancy is about to become very expensive.
Thats the inevetable result of this shakeout, more expensive internet for everyone, and lower reliability for a while. A few years down the road, it will get cheap and reliable again, but that will take some effort.
Alcohol is a vasodialator, so you do get increased bloodflow, especially in surface capillary veins. So you do suffer from hypothermia at a greater rate, but you also prevent frostbite. Depending on the amount of exposed skin, drinking small amounts alcohol is often considered a good thing. If your boots get wet and then freeze, drinking is the only thing you can do to help keep the circulation going and save your toes. Alcohol and water are both vasodialators, but alcohol works best. Caffeine is a vasoconstrictor, which is a bad thing for frostbite. Brandy contains lots of sugars, so would have an overall warming effect, assuming he had reasonable clothing.
Chilling batteries can cause the output voltage to rise, because the internal resistance is a complex function based on temperature. I've seen the graphs of battery output for satellites, very non-linear, with several peaks and dips for different temperatures.
Had a nice long chat this evening with the head of engineering of a KPNQuest competitor. His take: Finally, maybe we can make some money.
There is a glut of dark fibre in Europe (as in the US), and that is keeping prices too low to make any money. The fibre itself isn't very expensive, its the cisco and juniper boxes on the ends of the fibres and the overpriced CCIE's (that's me) that drive up everyone's costs.
This guy was buying lots of rounds of drinks, because over the last week he's had customers coming to him for replacement bandwidth, and he was able to quadruple the price and they were still happy. A 400% increase just put the prices back where they were a few years ago, barely enough to keep running. Even with all the cost cutting, far below where they can maintain any SLA's, they still couldn't make any profit. Now maybe they can stay in business another year.
There was an entire side rant about how the monopoly telcos in each country have used profits from other divisions (mobile phone traffic, leased lines, government subsidies, illegal tax breaks *cough*fraudtelecon*cough*) to keep the prices so low that KPNQuest and others can't stay in the market. Soon, we'll be back to a single monopoly in each country (or, with mergers, just a few for all of Europe), and then we'll look back on the good ol' days when bandwidth was so cheap there was something called the internet that didn't cost $2000/month for a 64k leased line. The commission claims to have an investigation going, but they are so fucking corrupt nothing will come of it except a whitewash and praise for the criminal telcos. In Brussels, ranting and raving about the commission is a required activity on a friday evening in any bar.
On the bad side, there are now a bunch of really good networking engineers on the market, and the market really sucks right now. As one recruiter told me, he's got CCIE's jumping on CCNP salaries, and 500+ CCNP's who can't get a job. Any CV with the mention of CCNA (or MCSE) goes straight into the bin.
the AC Yes, I have been drinking, why do you ask? Pissed has two meanings in this post
Thanx alot chris d. First you tell everyone the lone gunmen died, spoiling it for those on the west coast. Now you tell everyone about an eclipse that hasn't yet happened on the west coast for a few more hours. You could have let them discover the sudden disappearance of the sun with total surprise, rather than spoil it for them.
You should follow the fine example set by Hemos when he waited until closing time to announce the Festival of Inappropriate Technology this past weekend in London. That was how/. used to handle time sensitive stories in the good ol' days (of last weekend):-)
the AC We've had a simulated solar eclipse for the last week. Fscking rain
Oops, I just saw the fiancee bit. Ignore my advice about the spouse-can-never-work visa, and don't get married before you go over. On your own you can do your own visa shopping.
Get some language classes, there's probably a goethe institute in boston, and certainly an alliance francaise. Time to start cramming in the languages before you go over, and continue once you get there. It will help if you seem to be making an effort, no matter how bad you are at the beginning.
it will fulfill my "I will leave the country if Bush is elected" prophecy Great! Political refugees from the US. Just what we need now:-)
As a foreigner who has worked in switzerland a few times, here are a few pointers...
1) TV. Forget about U.S. shows, the crap over here is just as bad as the U.S. If you want to get the premium UK satellite channels (meaning in english), you must have a mailing address in the UK to get the decoder cards. But there is a ton of old US shows dubbed into various languages, great fun to watch reruns of Seinfeld in kinderdeutch. Best idea, don't buy a TV, go out more often. You wont regret it after the withdrawl symptoms stop.
If you get broadband, you can always P2P/IRC the latest episodes of the major shows like friends and sex and the city(Rachel dies, the lone gunmen die, Carrie dies). I know americans who regularly have sitcom nights in their places, watching low quality divx bootlegs of US shows. Tomorrow night we are watching the new spiderman movie a few days before it opens in cinemas.
2) Language may not be a major problem in Geneva, but is a complete barrier in all other parts of the country. Plan on spending your first few months in language classes. Life will be much, much easier if you can carry on conversations with government officials (i.e. visa officers) in their native language. You will not get a spouse visa if you don't speak the language, period! No matter what the law says, the petty beaurocrats come up with an infinite number of impossible tasks until you can argue with them about the details. And Swiss German != German German (hoch deutch), Swiss German is much, much easier and flexible.
All the Swiss IT workers speak fluent english, so you don't have an advantage being a native speaker.
3) Visa. If your wife accepts the visa offered by the company, it will have a clause forbidding spouses from ever seeking employment or even attempting to gain a work visa. I've seen couples ejected from the country because the husband had taken the standard spouse-never-works visa, and then the wife tried to change her resident-only visa after they had been there for a while. You must make sure your wife insists on a spouse-can-work visa, even if they say it is impossible or will take too long. Otherwise you will sit around as a house husband while she works (not a bad idea).
Also, to get a work visa, you must be a universite graduate, and bring all the supporting documentation. Thats bac+4 (high school diploma + bachelors or 4 year uni equivalent). Bring the originals with you in your carry on luggage, they are worth more than their weight in gold. Get a signed and stamped letter from your universite in addition to all the other docs, with a contact number so they can validate the diploma.
After you get to.ch, talk with the other ex-pats (find an irish pub) and find out all the things they had to do to get a visa and then a job. Plan on at least one trip back home to gather documents and to apply from outside the country.
4) broadband. It exists in the centre of every major town in the country. Does not exist in outlying areas or small villages. Cheaper than in the US, and some providers let you have servers, static IPs, etc.
5) Laws, who cares. Have fun, stay off the drugs.
6) Don't ship anything from the states unless this will be a permanent move. Sell all the big items in the US (car, white goods) and buy the same over here. Expect to pay 25% higher over here, due to purchasing power parity (the big mac index). Everything you can get in the states can be found here. Everything. Except decent mexican food.
I've known americans who shipped their cars over from an east coast port. Cost is about US$800 shipping, US$500-1000 making it compliant. Then you are forbidden to sell it for at least one year after it gets legal on the road, but the re-sell value is often about the same as you paid for it new in the US. Just the way the market works.
New Topic - 7) Housing. If you are renting, the landlords will never refund your security deposit (2 to 12 months of rent) if you don't play the game like a swiss from the very beginning. They will always claim in some sub-clause the apartment was in a perfect, new condition before you moved in, and when you leave they will find a few flaws and keep the money. Before you sign a lease, get a bailiff (huissier in french, I forget the german word) to inspect the place and note all the damage and problems. That legal document will help you when you move out. Swiss landowners are some of the worst in Europe for cheating renters. Cheating foreigners is a national sport, and supported by the local cantons.
Getting back to the original question: job market.
Someone already mentioned jobserve.co.uk. Start there, see what is available. In my opinion, not much right now, but things seem to be picking up slowly.
I know a bunch of oracle/J2EE programmers in Zurich and Geneva and Basel. They are all looking for something new outside of.ch right now, not one of them has anything lined up after their current contracts end. They all work for banks, the biggest IT employment sector in.ch, and the banks are now all cutting back on projects leaving the market saturated with programmers. The slowdown in the US is arriving in Europe, just delayed about a year, since we had Y2K and then the euro conversion to spread IT spending over several years. Now the euro exists and nobody has any more large IT conversion projects on their budgets.
If you are lucky enough to move to Geneva, working for an international org is your best bet. But beware, these places are nothing like an american company, they are festering cesspools of political manoeuvering and infighting (bitter, moi?). Google around for some horror stories from people who have escaped these kafka-esque places. Pure coders are not needed, but people who can admin systems, networks, servers, as well as whip up simple new interfaces to purchased software packages. Lots of SNA, X.25, MVS, GCOS8, SAS. If these don't strike terror in your heart, you don't have the skillset needed to work in the antiquated environments of the internation orgs, but many of them are moving to almost 100% mickey$oft nightmares.
If they are registered as a telephone company in the US, they have to route E911 calls to a local PSAP (public safety access point). Its one of the first tested requirement before turning up any commercial voice telecoms equipment. Every one of the 50 states PUC's require it before the first customer makes a call.
Something is very fishy about this. Perhaps they are counting on the DSL line still having a working phone which can call 911. I can't find them listed as a registered telco in the US either.
Look at their customer FAQ. There is a long list of area codes they can't call, especially all toll numbers like 1-900, and all competing telco access numbers like 1010-att. I have a sneaky suspicion they are not hooked into the national SS7 network, but instead have some kind of simple interface into voice trunks in a few places. Their international rates are the worst I've seen in years, US$0.35/minute to belgium. Ouch.
There may be a problem with their non-geographic use of area codes. Since they have purchased blocks of phone numbers from a bunch of area codes, maybe it would fuck up older PSAPs if they get delivered a non-local number. I can just see a police dispatcher in Oregon freaking out because she has a call coming in from a New Jersey phone number (hold on sir, we'll have someone there in three days:-)
I was at the American embassy a while ago and saw a sign posted warning americans not to attempt to set up MLM scams in Europe. I asked the visa officer about it, and he said the embassy was aware of a number of americans currently in prison for setting up amway or herbalife MLM scams.
When the fraud police see the posters going up, they track back the number and arrest the scammer. Locals are allowed to avoid prison time by cooperating fully in testifying against their recruiter. If the recruiter is a local, lather, rinse, repeat. At the top, they always catch an american or a russian, and throw them in prison.
Americans tend to be ex-military trailer trash types who did a tour on a NATO base, and think they can come back and scam the locals, since they discover the american market is completely saturated a million times over. The russians are mafia wannabes who add physical intimidation, threats, blackmail and other nasty things to increase ROI. Its the russians the police are after, since there are other crimes than just conspiracy and finacial fraud. But they prosecute the americans just as vigorously, because they tend to make full confessions and claim that since fraud is legal in the US, it must be legal here.
Ex-pat groups always get americans or brits trying to set up a new MLM network. But the ex-pat types tend to be intelligent enough to know it can't work, so the scammers move on.
But I still see posters around town. Stopping these scams even with good laws on the books is like playing whak-a-mole.
He is using a FlashLinker from Lik-Sang in Taiwan. Covered before on/.
Fortunately, the UK doesn't (yet) outlaw a simple data cable as a DMCA circumvention device, unlike other countries with far fewer freedoms for CompSci students.
So when the UK gets its laws in order, then Nintendo can crack down on eeeviiiilll hackers like Adrian, who obviously are going to use this webserver as a warez site:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Found a link from a link of a small shop in Lille selling chassis for these bricks. Maybe one of these would be a good place to start building a beowulf cluster.
/., or they'll kick you out of the shop :-)
However, on their webpage they state:
OpenChassis are sold to computer experts only.
So don't mention you saw it on
the AC
A friend in the U.S. has shown me his well polished dialog for breaking down unwanted spamcallers, mostly those calls around supper time. He gets so many, its down to an art form at this point. When he sees a caller-ID number he doesn't recognize, he just doesn't say hello, he launches directly into his tirade.
He's recorded a few of his best pieces, where the poor women on the other end of the line are in tears thinking they are going to prison or are not going to be paid by the marketeers. His deep alpha male command voice means most people just cave in within a few seconds, but he's surprised by the number who try to stick to the script for a short while.
It goes a little something like this:
Him> "FBI terrorism strike force hot-line. Do not hang up on this call, it has already been traced. If you hang up against my orders, you WILL be prosecuted on felony charges!"
Caller> "Ummm, We've noticed that your account is, ummm, well, ummmm, wait, is this really the FBI?"
Him> "Do you realize how much trouble you could be in for dialing this number? We here at the FBI have exactly ZERO sense of humor for illegal calls into the federal phone system."
Spammer> "Ummmm, well, its a computer that dials the numbers, we're just supposed to read this script on the screen. I didn't mean to dial your number."
Him> "Please state for the record your name, your current location, and the name of the company you are currently working for. If we cannot verify any of this information as being 100% truthfully accurate, you face federal felony charges of lying to a federal agent. The minimum sentence for that charge alone is one year in federal prison"
Usually he gets all kinds of information out of the poor telemarketer idiot from that point on. Most of them are in places like florida or oklahoma where there is high unemployment and lots of ignorant people who will do any job.
Despite this, he thinks his number hasn't been put on anywhere near enough telespammer blacklists. But he's working on it.
There are also some great tapes made by the call-centre training companies to show how abusive some called people can get. Lots of full-on screaming, cursing and threatening psychos get caught on the quality control tapes. Unscrupulous cold call centres in Britain (which is all of them) have a procedure to deal with these psychos. Their is a button on the console to trigger an alternate script for complete psychos, where they then give the name of a competitor. BT's call centre will say "Sorry sir, Vodaphone wishes you a pleasant day" before hanging up.
the AC
If they were smart, they would get their site posted to slashdot after first making sure their 56k modem was up to withstanding a slashdot effect.
Oh, wait. Nevermind.
The many war{driving|storming|floating|biking|hiking} groups here in Europe would likely participate next time.
I just got a new laptop and I'll be getting netstumbler up and running RSN. Part two of my driving around Europe vacation is about to begin. That should provide a nice map of a few dozen cities by the end of the month.
the AC
Lots of posters are posting links to their favorite web comics. Almost all of them are coming up as followed links in my browser.
I gotta get a life
the AC
[oooohhh, shiny. A couple of fresh links I haven't seen before...^D]
It seems that Blue Stone is more correct on this one. The license notice with the DVD prohibits lending or viewing by more than the original owner. Even if the original owner wants to view the DVD in the presence of a large group of friends.
/.)
If we were in the US, our actions would be criminalised already. As it is, here in Europe, it will be another year or so before such an action becomes a criminal action (see several stories on NTK, the Register, and
It is a sad state of affairs when loaning materiels becomes a criminal act, and if Belgium adopts the new EUCD directive even public libraries will be forced to shut down or start charging for every book lent or read. Get a clue. The copyright corporations are buying some very bad laws, and there is nothing we can do about it until it gets so bad that everyone is a criminal and forces our politicians to revoke the bad laws.
the AC
This isn't news, Dhell has been doing this for a few weeks now. I was talking with some people on wednesday evening about this very topic.
Dell has dropped all their OS-less machines, and now only offer machines with M$-OS pre-installed, at an increased price which can't be negotiated away. Even for their largest customers. Even for corporations with site-license agreements with M$. All because M$ used a carrot-and-stick approach, threatening to remove all discounts unless non-OS options disappeared, and offering a greater discount than H-Paq if they went with a 100% M$ offering.
Dell is fucking freaked by the HP-Compaq merger, HPaq is a giant more scary than even M$. Although everyone in the press is laughing about the mis-match of HP and fuckPaq, Dell and IBM aren't laughing. H-Pucker is huge, and will (already started to) create a nasty price war in the corporate PC industry. One of HPricks competitors is going to go out of business, and you can be sure IBM will most likely survive. So M$ hit Dell hard in the negotiations a few months ago, and now we see the results; make every corp client pay twice for M$ products, or lose the war before even being able to fire a shot.
Doh!ll caved in, and probably are spinning this to their share holders as a great oportunity to increase profit margins over HPhuq.
The sad reality is that there are now lots of corporate clients on M$ license 6.0, where they have already paid per-seat/per-user/per-cockroach for copies of M$-OS. Then when they look at the $$$ amount from Dell, and the same spec machines from and IBM or H-dreck, the costs of that "Pay twice for your OS with every machine" are going to look pretty bad. Dell has phucked themselves over bad this time around, you can bet they aren't going to see any long term profits from this move. The boycott from a very tiny percentage of free-OS freaks isn't going to make a blip in their books, but 50K+ corporations jumping ship in the next 3 years will kill them.
As a very astute industry insider predicted wednesday night over a few beers, "that bitch Carlie may have killed the old HP, but if she secretly carved up the PC market with Bill, then Dell has been doomed from the start"
the AC
Friends next door have bought the first one, and came over last night to watch it on our huge screen. Impressive. Now we don't need to go out and buy our own copy, if we want to see it again (probably not for another month or so), we'll just borrow it again.
We are waiting until the 4 disk set comes out, and we'll buy that version. Between the two of us, we'll have both versions, and can swap as needed.
All of us are waiting for a couple of years from now, after all the films have been released, WETA finishes all the CGI SFX, and Peter Jackson makes the final extra-long directors cut. That will probably be a 7 or more DVD set. Showings will then be day long affairs with a couple of meals between films, lots of drinks, and regular bathroom breaks.
the AC
A quick search on jobserve turns up 19 current job listings requiring Fortran. Not bad for a 30+ year old language. Several satellite, stress engineering and meteorology jobs.
Working code just doesn't stop working because some new language has come out. Imagine having the job of converting 5 million lines of fortran code into visual C++ dotNet code. By the end of the week. With no errors. And no overtime... It just doesn't happen, working code doesn't need to be replaced, and thus it isn't.
I'm still surprised when recruiters ask me about my fortran and cobol skills. I don't list them as skills, because I haven't touched them in more than a decade. But the skillPimps can see I'm an old fart, and the older ones know I started my career with the old languages, because perl and C++ didn't exist in 1972. Hell, Larry Wall was still in diapers when I first touched a computer.
This goes back to the discussion, here and other places, about the difference between coders and computer scientists. Coders insist the only language they know is the only one for the job, because they are too uneducated to understand a language is just a tool. CompSci gurus will just pick up the best tool for the job, whether something ancient like fortran, or something like a procedural language or even assembler.
the AC
9.2 megaPixel, up to 56 Hz refresh in a 22 inch LCD screen. Want!
This is now very high on my luxury wish list. When is the next IT bubble scheduled to happen again? I have to start my plan to get rich on other people's stupidity and greed so I can afford a system like this.
the AC
I created a couple of throw-away hotmail accounts before my current long vacation, as something to hand out to people I really don't want to know after we say goodbye.
There were of the form (slightly changed to protect the poor accounts)
qris9.4food772a@hotmail.com and
3metre3e4w.pa7@hotmail.com
not the kind of addresses a script could guess by incrementing numbers. I carefully un-checked all the "please let M$ partners spam me" boxes as well. For the first 2 weeks after creating these accounts, not a single message came in. Then they both started getting occasional spam, obviously targeted.
A couple of weeks ago I handed out the first address to a number of people while in Spain, and then checked it regularly from cybercafes around Portugal. Within days it was getting 3-10 portuguese language spams per day. Now it gets about 20 spams per day in various languages, but the second account is still only getting 2-3 per day.
Strange.
the AC
the west coast of Ireland to enjoy the fast bandwidth
Huh? The community centre has a single basic rate ISDN line, so max they'll have a 128kbps connection to the outside world. DSL? Not anytime soon. The LBW isn't about bandwidth, its about the beer, the exercise, and Linux.
But assuming they install some 10/100 hubs in the centre, then locally they'll have a nice little LAN party.
the AC
Wouldn't the shortest day of the year be more appropriate?
If you don't get the reference, you aren't getting enough User Friendly . Failure to get enough UF in your diet can lead to blindness, so head over there now for a dose.
the AC
We have five racks for the actual computer room, and need around 25 screens for the command console. Add to this bench space for repairs, and things like: a cupboard, bookshelf, plus more storage space, and the design becomes more complicated. We need enough space for three or four admins. Has anyone seen plans for this type of setup ?
:-)
.eu land, will even do machine rooms for food (and drink and ). Leave a reply here if you are hiring
5 racks is not a lot, but leave space for 10 or 15 for future expansion. If the PHB gives you any grief on this, you want to present him with a paper to be signed by the CEO that he is not planning on any growth at all over the next decade. No new customers, no increase in revenue, profits, or employees. That is usually enough to get them to approve a larger space for you and the machines.
You also need to hire someone who has done this before, who knows all about all the little things like glare from the windows and morning/evening temperature shifts in the building and HVAC. A knowledgeable contractor will then sub-contract the various bits to other professionals. Certainly you will need an HVAC team, an electrician, cabling guys, fire suppression specialists, a security guy, and an architect. Yes, all that for just 5 racks and room for 4-10 admins.
You will need aircon to keep the racks cool. Count on 5000 watts of power from 5 fully loaded racks, which equates to 15000 BTU/Hr of cooling needed to keep the servers running. Most office buildings can only do 2-3000 BTU/Hr of cooling in an area, so the machine room will need local, dedicated cooling systems, which possibly means an external chiller and water pipes under the floors.
Each rack requires 3 square metres (or yards) of space, 1 square metre for the rack, and 1 each front and back for the doors. Space above the ceiling and below the floor for cables, electricity, water, fire suppression, drains, etc. Repair area must be separate from the main machine area, physically and electrically.
Electricity will be specced by the electician for the power-on surge, multiplied by the Power Factor. Only a licensed electrician can tell you what all the local laws require/forbid and can sign off the installation with the local authorities. YOU can NOT do this unless you go to night school for a long time and pick up an electrical contractors license. Cheaper to hire a pro
Human work spaces can NOT have any noisy equipment running, the cool looking cabinets should have sound damping. Google for the relevent laws of dB per day exposure in your area. The HVAC guys will have to provide large surface area low noise vents, with multiple zones and controls. Consider putting the fluorescent lights onto 3-phase power. Incandescent floor lamps if you don't/can't.
There are about a thousand things to know about when building a dedicated machine room and "star trek" command centre. My best advice would be to hire the pros, and watch and note everything they do. Then next time an employer asks you about this, you will have a valuable job skill.
Check fatbrain or amazon for books about this topic, I'm sure someone has written this down at least once.
A few years ago I specced out a small machine room, with 16 racks. When the room was originally planned in 1996, the company just didn't count on any growth whatsoever. None! They had two racks then, and figured that would hold them for ever. Totally clueless PHB (but I repeat myself). 3 years later I came on the scene, just before the new building was finished. I pointed out the lack of HVAC, electricity, access control, etc. We asked the HVAC guy if he could cool 30000 Watts of power, and he just laughed. Maximum of 5 desktop PCs in this whole area was his answer, not the 60+ currently planned. Anything more was going to cost $$$, and time. So I got to write up the whole spec for the area over a weekend, and they put it all in, at a huge cost but only delayed the move-in by a week. At first they swore I had over-engineered by a huge amount and threatened lawsuits, but then dropped the whole matter. Last month I saw the room, all 16 racks full of equipment, 90 PCs in the command area, cooling and electricity stressed to the limit. They told me I had saved the company a few years ago, because if they hadn't built the building correctly before moving in, the cost of a retrofit would have been 10X to 20X the original cost, and the lost business due to a year delay would have sunk them even during the internet boom. But I knew enough then to ask all the pros for their advice, rather than do it all myself. A thousand details? Nahh, much, much more.
the AC
Freelancer looking for a job in
Hey, I had an old room mate who formally placed easter eggs into some (maybe all) of his projects.
He was a project manager for a large "internet products" company, designing and building large software projects. Early on in the process, he would get the programmers and QA and other creative types together over beers when there were no other managers around. He would then ask them if they wanted to put an easter egg into the project. The answer was always Yes!, so they would come up with a secret code name for the module, and then QA would be able to test it, project leaders could review it, and the module name would exist from the very first sign-off by managers. Since they basically followed an "extreme programming" style, writing out the test cases and specifics of each function before coding, some slight obfuscation would occur around the eggs exact function. He'd then place a rule that the easter egg module couldn't be coded until 90% of the other code was finished, but the programmers would all have modules coded in advance waiting for the 90% day.
When the easter eggs were all ready, they would all vote for the best (or best two) and put that into the code. Then the QA people could also write test cases around the trigger code, to make sure the easter eggs did exactly what they were supposed to do, and nothing more. Usually they also had a secret credits page, since the company would never allow former employees to tell which projects they worked on (because they now outsource most of their projects to India, VietNam and China and the idiotic^Wpatriotic american customers wouldn't understand).
Because of this, liability of the programmers and the project management team would be negated. The original design specs would contain the easter egg code, just under a name that looked like all the other modules. Just in case the lawyers came after them later, but I've never heard of it happening.
the AC
After the revolution, from 1923 to 1931, the russians used a 5 day week, with 6 weeks in each month, and 12 months in each year. The extra 5 days were specially named holidays related to revolutionary dates. Each worker got 1 day in 30 off, staggered throughout the community so no more than 1/30th of the workers were off each day. (Not everybody in russia used the calendar. The navy stuck to the gregorian calendar because all their navigation books were in that format, tribal regions stayed with their historic versions, others just ignored the decree)
It was a complete disaster, the idea was to get an extra boost from worker productivity by not allowing weekends or other time off. It had the opposite effect, workers were exhausted after 29 days of continuous work, and productivity fell dramatically.
In 1931, they switched to a 6 day week, with 5 week months, and one day each week was a rest day for everyone. Productivity jumped 50% or more in the first few months of using the new calendar.
This should be a lesson to managers who try to pull too much work out of their employees. People need time off on a regular basis to recover from the effects of working 8+ hours per day for 5 or 6 days. After spending too much time working, the body and mind can't maintain the output.
the AC
The french revolutionary calendar started with year 1, but they made it retroactive a year and called that year 0. Programmers!
WhirldClown may shut down entire sections of UUnyet if they can't find buyers soon. They'll break the system up into affordable chunks and sell off what they can. Some of it they'll shut down for good, to take the tax writeoff. Other sections will be shut down because they can't afford the experienced people any more. Big reseller companies haven't been paying their bills, some for almost a year.
/. may just disappear for hours each day, and ISPs are going to have to raise rates if they want redundant routes to avoid the worst congestion. The two biggest european carriers are in trouble, and redundancy is about to become very expensive.
Lately there have been lots of problems in the European networks, with large numbers of BGP4 routes going missing because of people switching away from ebone. The ebone guys have done a great job with too few experts, but slowly entropy and bit rot is causing problems. The dropped or blackholed or null-routed routes mean that major areas can't see each other for hours on end, until the BGP routes stabilize and find new routes. And those new routes tend to quickly saturate with traffic, leading to lots of lost packets and huge lags.
There is a lot of excess capacity, but none of it is being used for the moment. Putting expensive kit on the ends of the fibres and hiring expensive guys to run it just can't be done in this economy. So the internet isn't going to be as reliable as we've been used to, sites like
Thats the inevetable result of this shakeout, more expensive internet for everyone, and lower reliability for a while. A few years down the road, it will get cheap and reliable again, but that will take some effort.
the AC
You may be at +5 funny, but knowing some scummy marketers in my lifetime, I'd moderate this as +5 "frighteningly close to reality".
the AC
Butterscotch is not my favourite flavour
Alcohol is a vasodialator, so you do get increased bloodflow, especially in surface capillary veins. So you do suffer from hypothermia at a greater rate, but you also prevent frostbite. Depending on the amount of exposed skin, drinking small amounts alcohol is often considered a good thing. If your boots get wet and then freeze, drinking is the only thing you can do to help keep the circulation going and save your toes. Alcohol and water are both vasodialators, but alcohol works best. Caffeine is a vasoconstrictor, which is a bad thing for frostbite. Brandy contains lots of sugars, so would have an overall warming effect, assuming he had reasonable clothing.
Chilling batteries can cause the output voltage to rise, because the internal resistance is a complex function based on temperature. I've seen the graphs of battery output for satellites, very non-linear, with several peaks and dips for different temperatures.
the AC
Had a nice long chat this evening with the head of engineering of a KPNQuest competitor. His take: Finally, maybe we can make some money.
There is a glut of dark fibre in Europe (as in the US), and that is keeping prices too low to make any money. The fibre itself isn't very expensive, its the cisco and juniper boxes on the ends of the fibres and the overpriced CCIE's (that's me) that drive up everyone's costs.
This guy was buying lots of rounds of drinks, because over the last week he's had customers coming to him for replacement bandwidth, and he was able to quadruple the price and they were still happy. A 400% increase just put the prices back where they were a few years ago, barely enough to keep running. Even with all the cost cutting, far below where they can maintain any SLA's, they still couldn't make any profit. Now maybe they can stay in business another year.
There was an entire side rant about how the monopoly telcos in each country have used profits from other divisions (mobile phone traffic, leased lines, government subsidies, illegal tax breaks *cough*fraudtelecon*cough*) to keep the prices so low that KPNQuest and others can't stay in the market. Soon, we'll be back to a single monopoly in each country (or, with mergers, just a few for all of Europe), and then we'll look back on the good ol' days when bandwidth was so cheap there was something called the internet that didn't cost $2000/month for a 64k leased line. The commission claims to have an investigation going, but they are so fucking corrupt nothing will come of it except a whitewash and praise for the criminal telcos. In Brussels, ranting and raving about the commission is a required activity on a friday evening in any bar.
On the bad side, there are now a bunch of really good networking engineers on the market, and the market really sucks right now. As one recruiter told me, he's got CCIE's jumping on CCNP salaries, and 500+ CCNP's who can't get a job. Any CV with the mention of CCNA (or MCSE) goes straight into the bin.
the AC
Yes, I have been drinking, why do you ask? Pissed has two meanings in this post
Thanx alot chris d. First you tell everyone the lone gunmen died, spoiling it for those on the west coast. Now you tell everyone about an eclipse that hasn't yet happened on the west coast for a few more hours. You could have let them discover the sudden disappearance of the sun with total surprise, rather than spoil it for them.
/. used to handle time sensitive stories in the good ol' days (of last weekend) :-)
You should follow the fine example set by Hemos when he waited until closing time to announce the Festival of Inappropriate Technology this past weekend in London. That was how
the AC
We've had a simulated solar eclipse for the last week. Fscking rain
Oops, I just saw the fiancee bit. Ignore my advice about the spouse-can-never-work visa, and don't get married before you go over. On your own you can do your own visa shopping.
:-)
Get some language classes, there's probably a goethe institute in boston, and certainly an alliance francaise. Time to start cramming in the languages before you go over, and continue once you get there. It will help if you seem to be making an effort, no matter how bad you are at the beginning.
it will fulfill my "I will leave the country if Bush is elected" prophecy
Great! Political refugees from the US. Just what we need now
the AC
As a foreigner who has worked in switzerland a few times, here are a few pointers...
.ch, talk with the other ex-pats (find an irish pub) and find out all the things they had to do to get a visa and then a job. Plan on at least one trip back home to gather documents and to apply from outside the country.
.ch right now, not one of them has anything lined up after their current contracts end. They all work for banks, the biggest IT employment sector in .ch, and the banks are now all cutting back on projects leaving the market saturated with programmers. The slowdown in the US is arriving in Europe, just delayed about a year, since we had Y2K and then the euro conversion to spread IT spending over several years. Now the euro exists and nobody has any more large IT conversion projects on their budgets.
1) TV. Forget about U.S. shows, the crap over here is just as bad as the U.S. If you want to get the premium UK satellite channels (meaning in english), you must have a mailing address in the UK to get the decoder cards. But there is a ton of old US shows dubbed into various languages, great fun to watch reruns of Seinfeld in kinderdeutch. Best idea, don't buy a TV, go out more often. You wont regret it after the withdrawl symptoms stop.
If you get broadband, you can always P2P/IRC the latest episodes of the major shows like friends and sex and the city(Rachel dies, the lone gunmen die, Carrie dies). I know americans who regularly have sitcom nights in their places, watching low quality divx bootlegs of US shows. Tomorrow night we are watching the new spiderman movie a few days before it opens in cinemas.
2) Language may not be a major problem in Geneva, but is a complete barrier in all other parts of the country. Plan on spending your first few months in language classes. Life will be much, much easier if you can carry on conversations with government officials (i.e. visa officers) in their native language. You will not get a spouse visa if you don't speak the language, period! No matter what the law says, the petty beaurocrats come up with an infinite number of impossible tasks until you can argue with them about the details. And Swiss German != German German (hoch deutch), Swiss German is much, much easier and flexible.
All the Swiss IT workers speak fluent english, so you don't have an advantage being a native speaker.
3) Visa. If your wife accepts the visa offered by the company, it will have a clause forbidding spouses from ever seeking employment or even attempting to gain a work visa. I've seen couples ejected from the country because the husband had taken the standard spouse-never-works visa, and then the wife tried to change her resident-only visa after they had been there for a while. You must make sure your wife insists on a spouse-can-work visa, even if they say it is impossible or will take too long. Otherwise you will sit around as a house husband while she works (not a bad idea).
Also, to get a work visa, you must be a universite graduate, and bring all the supporting documentation. Thats bac+4 (high school diploma + bachelors or 4 year uni equivalent). Bring the originals with you in your carry on luggage, they are worth more than their weight in gold. Get a signed and stamped letter from your universite in addition to all the other docs, with a contact number so they can validate the diploma.
After you get to
4) broadband. It exists in the centre of every major town in the country. Does not exist in outlying areas or small villages. Cheaper than in the US, and some providers let you have servers, static IPs, etc.
5) Laws, who cares. Have fun, stay off the drugs.
6) Don't ship anything from the states unless this will be a permanent move. Sell all the big items in the US (car, white goods) and buy the same over here. Expect to pay 25% higher over here, due to purchasing power parity (the big mac index). Everything you can get in the states can be found here. Everything. Except decent mexican food.
I've known americans who shipped their cars over from an east coast port. Cost is about US$800 shipping, US$500-1000 making it compliant. Then you are forbidden to sell it for at least one year after it gets legal on the road, but the re-sell value is often about the same as you paid for it new in the US. Just the way the market works.
New Topic - 7) Housing. If you are renting, the landlords will never refund your security deposit (2 to 12 months of rent) if you don't play the game like a swiss from the very beginning. They will always claim in some sub-clause the apartment was in a perfect, new condition before you moved in, and when you leave they will find a few flaws and keep the money. Before you sign a lease, get a bailiff (huissier in french, I forget the german word) to inspect the place and note all the damage and problems. That legal document will help you when you move out. Swiss landowners are some of the worst in Europe for cheating renters. Cheating foreigners is a national sport, and supported by the local cantons.
Getting back to the original question: job market.
Someone already mentioned jobserve.co.uk. Start there, see what is available. In my opinion, not much right now, but things seem to be picking up slowly.
I know a bunch of oracle/J2EE programmers in Zurich and Geneva and Basel. They are all looking for something new outside of
If you are lucky enough to move to Geneva, working for an international org is your best bet. But beware, these places are nothing like an american company, they are festering cesspools of political manoeuvering and infighting (bitter, moi?). Google around for some horror stories from people who have escaped these kafka-esque places. Pure coders are not needed, but people who can admin systems, networks, servers, as well as whip up simple new interfaces to purchased software packages. Lots of SNA, X.25, MVS, GCOS8, SAS. If these don't strike terror in your heart, you don't have the skillset needed to work in the antiquated environments of the internation orgs, but many of them are moving to almost 100% mickey$oft nightmares.
the AC
If they are registered as a telephone company in the US, they have to route E911 calls to a local PSAP (public safety access point). Its one of the first tested requirement before turning up any commercial voice telecoms equipment. Every one of the 50 states PUC's require it before the first customer makes a call.
:-)
Something is very fishy about this. Perhaps they are counting on the DSL line still having a working phone which can call 911. I can't find them listed as a registered telco in the US either.
Look at their customer FAQ. There is a long list of area codes they can't call, especially all toll numbers like 1-900, and all competing telco access numbers like 1010-att. I have a sneaky suspicion they are not hooked into the national SS7 network, but instead have some kind of simple interface into voice trunks in a few places. Their international rates are the worst I've seen in years, US$0.35/minute to belgium. Ouch.
There may be a problem with their non-geographic use of area codes. Since they have purchased blocks of phone numbers from a bunch of area codes, maybe it would fuck up older PSAPs if they get delivered a non-local number. I can just see a police dispatcher in Oregon freaking out because she has a call coming in from a New Jersey phone number (hold on sir, we'll have someone there in three days
the AC
I was at the American embassy a while ago and saw a sign posted warning americans not to attempt to set up MLM scams in Europe. I asked the visa officer about it, and he said the embassy was aware of a number of americans currently in prison for setting up amway or herbalife MLM scams.
When the fraud police see the posters going up, they track back the number and arrest the scammer. Locals are allowed to avoid prison time by cooperating fully in testifying against their recruiter. If the recruiter is a local, lather, rinse, repeat. At the top, they always catch an american or a russian, and throw them in prison.
Americans tend to be ex-military trailer trash types who did a tour on a NATO base, and think they can come back and scam the locals, since they discover the american market is completely saturated a million times over. The russians are mafia wannabes who add physical intimidation, threats, blackmail and other nasty things to increase ROI. Its the russians the police are after, since there are other crimes than just conspiracy and finacial fraud. But they prosecute the americans just as vigorously, because they tend to make full confessions and claim that since fraud is legal in the US, it must be legal here.
Ex-pat groups always get americans or brits trying to set up a new MLM network. But the ex-pat types tend to be intelligent enough to know it can't work, so the scammers move on.
But I still see posters around town. Stopping these scams even with good laws on the books is like playing whak-a-mole.
the AC
He is using a FlashLinker from Lik-Sang in Taiwan. Covered before on /.
:-)
Fortunately, the UK doesn't (yet) outlaw a simple data cable as a DMCA circumvention device, unlike other countries with far fewer freedoms for CompSci students.
So when the UK gets its laws in order, then Nintendo can crack down on eeeviiiilll hackers like Adrian, who obviously are going to use this webserver as a warez site
the AC