I was working for a Houston-based Halliburton in 2009 when my wife passed away suddenly at the age of 34.
We buried her next to family in Chattanooga. When I got to the funeral home, three divisions of Halliburton - not just the one I worked for - sent huge six-foot-tall flower arrangements. They'd not contacted me or anybody who was helping me out with things that I knew of, so I don't know how they got the info of where to send things.
I went back to work two weeks later (and even after that, had to work my way up gradually to doing a full day over the course of a week). The official company policy was that we got three days of bereavement leave. I asked what to do about the extra time I'd taken off, and a division VP (2-3 org chart positions above my direct manager) said "Put down that you were gone for three days, and don't worry about it."
Other than the coworker (who was from a different country and grew up in a different culture) that walked into my office two weeks later and said "She's dead, get over it", I couldn't have asked for a more supportive company to work for during such a tragedy.
Depending on the interface hardware, they might be better off at this point (both power usage and dependability wise) to look at one of the many commercial VAX emulators that run on server-class PC hardware and have available hardware to connect certain types of interface cards.
I used to run a pair hobbyist/enthusiast sites for fans of DEC's VAX and PDP-11 series of machines.
Shortly after 9/11, I got a phone call from someone at the Pentagon who was looking for certain parts so they could repair an older VAX that had been damaged in the attack. I was able to get them in touch with a third-party reseller who still had those bits in the back of a dusty warehouse.
It was surprising that they hadn't upgraded to Alpha (which had been out almost ten years) then; the telco where I worked had one big system that had gone through three company changes (DEC -> Compaq -> HP) and had been upgraded in-chassis from VAX to Alpha.
I think all large systems sold to the federal government are required to have service/support available for something like 5 to 10 years after final sale availability; can't find concrete details via Google.
Been there, done that. I almost went to work with Jher @ IO after I left Texas.Net, but ended up at OnRamp. Sitting up on the 12th floor of 7th and Brazos for Y2K, listening to my police scanner and watching the crazyness down on 6th, chatting with colleagues across town and across the country on IRC as we all did the same thing - waiting for a problem that "never came" because we'd all worked to make sure it didn't happen.
The I/O performance on the free "VMWare Server" product *sucks* - because it's running on top of a host OS, and not on the bare metal. I'm not surprised that FreeBSD Jails had better performance. VMWare Server is great for test environments and such, but I wouldn't ever use it in production. It's not at all near the same class of product as the VMWare Infrastructure stuff (ESX, ESXi, etc.)
VMWare offers VMWare ESXi as a free download, and I/O performance under it would have been orders of magnitude better. However, it does have the drawback of requiring a Windows machine (or a Windows VM) to run the VMWare Infrastructure management client.
Back in 2000, I got a letter from a Sun attorney threatening me with a lawsuit over some material on the "Rumors" section of my web site. They didn't like the fact that I'd copied documents (blueprints/engineering drawings) from their web server to mine and those documents were marked "Proprietary and Confidential". They also disliked the fact that I used the color purple on my web site and had a logo that was vaguely reminiscent of theirs.
I countered with the fact that I got the documents from a search on their publicly-accessible web server, and that after AOL, the next six top visitors of the site were Sun employees themselves hitting it from internal Sun proxy servers, and that no one had ever expressed concern over the logo or the purple color since the site was created in '97.
After a couple of weeks of negotiations, we came to an agreement and I made this public statement:
"I'm happy to announce that I have amicably resolved my situation with Sun regarding SunHELP.org. The site will function much like it has in the past, but in a manner that protects Sun's trademarks. In fact, although I will continue to operate independently of Sun, Sun has offered to help me provide you with better information about Sun and its products. I am pleased with the outcome and the manner in which this situation was resolved. I now consider this matter closed."
A couple of weeks later, I got a FedEx delivery of a brand-new Ultra 10 workstation as a "thank you" for "resolving the dispute in a friendly and speedy manner that avoided litigation". Since then, I've had good relations with the company. I was a member of the Opensolaris Pilot Program and have talked in email with both Scott McNealy and Jonathan Schwartz. Sun has greatly improved their relationship with third-party supporters since 2000; in fact, in 2006 they donated a fully-loaded T1000 system to SunHELP.
Nick at ThinkSecret probably ended up with some free Apple gear in exchange for shutting his site down - after all for Apple, "no publicity is bad publicity".
Meant to complement H&P, not replace it
on
Inside the Machine
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Jon Stokes had an incredibly ambitious goal: to write an accessible book that covers much of the same ground as Hennessy and Patterson's Computer Architecture and Computer Organization and Design.
He actually says in the book that it should be used as an introduction, before someone dives into H&P.
I agree with the various reasons for the elimination of the Morse test, but I wanted to pass the 5wpm exam (its a pride/accomplishments thing) before they made this change.
Now I guess I'll just need to find a ham who is willing to "test" me and say "okay you know it good enough to pass the test" since there will be no more official tests.
I have nobody to blame but myself; got my Technician license (KD5LQR now K5WCB) in 2000 and have had plenty of time to do it before now.
Not new at all - quite a few Rev. A iMac G5s had this problem. I bought this 17" in November, and the bad caps finally failed in March. Apple sent me a new midplane and I swapped it out myself, but from what I hear they're now requiring people to take their machines to an authorized Apple service provider to get the work done.
Best keyboard I've run across lately is the Matias Tactile Pro.
Designed for a Mac, but works great on a PC/Linux machine as well (I'm on one right now, hooked to a KVM that has both a Windows system and a Mac mini on it).
Sun is just reselling the Tadpole and Naturetech portables. I've got one of the Naturetech systems right now (for review on sunhelp.org) and <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrbill/sets/48<nobr>9<wbr></wbr></nobr> 821/">some pictures up</a>. It's *very* nice, but *very* pricey.
Angels and Demons was *MUCH* better than TDVC. Digital Fortress was lacking in actual technical knowledge.
From reading TDVC, it was obvious that Dan Brown had just read "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" (published 20 years ago) and written a book around some of the ideas in it.
CCNA v3.0 now includes a lab simulation as well; it hasnt been a multiple-choice-questions-only test for at least a year. They've changed it to make it more difficult and get rid of all the "paper CCNAs" who've never touched a switch before.
Re:Actors getting paid again?
on
Recycling TV Ads
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Doesn't really matter, if they were paid as a work-for-hire, or were paid scale by the hour. Most likely, they were paid for the work they did, and the ad agency owns all rights to the commercial.
A similar example - I wrote a chapter for a computer book a couple of years ago, and was paid per-page for the work I did. I found out a year or so later that they (the publishing company) had re-used my chapter in a newer edition of the book (Solaris 9 cert study guide versus the Sol8 one I wrote for) . However, that was well within their right, as it was a work-for-hire and they owned all rights to what I'd produced and could do what they wanted with it.
You then have to deal with Richard Morrell's ego, and his "NOBODY IS PAYING US FOR THIS GPL-LICENSED SOFTWARE!" rants, and his "unless you've paid us for this free software, sod off" rants. Maybe he should start up a company with Theo from OpenBSD.
Netapp's not *that* bad - its fairly easy to get "under the table" license codes for NFS and CIFS for "bought off ebay" home hobbyist/non-profit filer hardware. I've got a FA520 sitting in my living room.
There's a small effort underway by a couple of their upper-level tech staff to have an official low cost or free "home license" program, but it hasn't made much headway yet. Right now it's pretty much "here's a working license code, don't share it, don't use it for production/profit purposes, and don't call us for support".
The guy in the article should be able to *use* his filers just fine with the old license codes; he'll only have to pay NetApp if he wants ONTAP (the filer OS) upgrades or hardware support (replacement drives or other parts).
Funny, when I had a problem getting a FireGL4 to do hardware GL acceleration (using the ATI-provided drivers) under RedHat AW 2.1 a couple of weeks ago, I emailed ATI.
Their response: "Regarding your Linux issue: We currently do not offer support for Linux operating system. If you wish you may Submit feedback on this driver to our ATI Linux Driver Feedback form at http://apps.ati.com/linuxDfeedback/"
Slashdot Mirror
I was working for a Houston-based Halliburton in 2009 when my wife passed away suddenly at the age of 34.
We buried her next to family in Chattanooga. When I got to the funeral home, three divisions of Halliburton - not just the one I worked for - sent huge six-foot-tall flower arrangements. They'd not contacted me or anybody who was helping me out with things that I knew of, so I don't know how they got the info of where to send things.
I went back to work two weeks later (and even after that, had to work my way up gradually to doing a full day over the course of a week). The official company policy was that we got three days of bereavement leave. I asked what to do about the extra time I'd taken off, and a division VP (2-3 org chart positions above my direct manager) said "Put down that you were gone for three days, and don't worry about it."
Other than the coworker (who was from a different country and grew up in a different culture) that walked into my office two weeks later and said "She's dead, get over it", I couldn't have asked for a more supportive company to work for during such a tragedy.
Depending on the interface hardware, they might be better off at this point (both power usage and dependability wise) to look at one of the many commercial VAX emulators that run on server-class PC hardware and have available hardware to connect certain types of interface cards.
I used to run a pair hobbyist/enthusiast sites for fans of DEC's VAX and PDP-11 series of machines.
Shortly after 9/11, I got a phone call from someone at the Pentagon who was looking for certain parts so they could repair an older VAX that had been damaged in the attack. I was able to get them in touch with a third-party reseller who still had those bits in the back of a dusty warehouse.
It was surprising that they hadn't upgraded to Alpha (which had been out almost ten years) then; the telco where I worked had one big system that had gone through three company changes (DEC -> Compaq -> HP) and had been upgraded in-chassis from VAX to Alpha.
I think all large systems sold to the federal government are required to have service/support available for something like 5 to 10 years after final sale availability; can't find concrete details via Google.
Whoops, forgot to log in before posting this one.
Er, derp, I should have logged in before posting that.
Been there, done that. I almost went to work with Jher @ IO after I left Texas.Net, but ended up at OnRamp.
Sitting up on the 12th floor of 7th and Brazos for Y2K, listening to my police scanner and watching the crazyness down on 6th,
chatting with colleagues across town and across the country on IRC as we all did the same thing - waiting for a problem that
"never came" because we'd all worked to make sure it didn't happen.
The I/O performance on the free "VMWare Server" product *sucks* - because it's running on top of a host OS, and not on the bare metal.
I'm not surprised that FreeBSD Jails had better performance. VMWare Server is great for test environments and such, but I wouldn't ever use it in production.
It's not at all near the same class of product as the VMWare Infrastructure stuff (ESX, ESXi, etc.)
VMWare offers VMWare ESXi as a free download, and I/O performance under it would have been orders of magnitude better.
However, it does have the drawback of requiring a Windows machine (or a Windows VM) to run the VMWare Infrastructure management client.
Back in 2000, I got a letter from a Sun attorney threatening me with a lawsuit over some material on the "Rumors" section of my web site. They didn't like the fact that I'd copied documents (blueprints/engineering drawings) from their web server to mine and those documents were marked "Proprietary and Confidential". They also disliked the fact that I used the color purple on my web site and had a logo that was vaguely reminiscent of theirs.
I countered with the fact that I got the documents from a search on their publicly-accessible web server, and that after AOL, the next six top visitors of the site were Sun employees themselves hitting it from internal Sun proxy servers, and that no one had ever expressed concern over the logo or the purple color since the site was created in '97.
After a couple of weeks of negotiations, we came to an agreement and I made this public statement:
"I'm happy to announce that I have amicably resolved my situation with Sun regarding SunHELP.org. The site will function much like it has in the past, but in a manner that protects Sun's trademarks. In fact, although I will continue to operate independently of Sun, Sun has offered to help me provide you with better information about Sun and its products. I am pleased with the outcome and the manner in which this situation was resolved. I now consider this matter closed."
A couple of weeks later, I got a FedEx delivery of a brand-new Ultra 10 workstation as a "thank you" for "resolving the dispute in a friendly and speedy manner that avoided litigation". Since then, I've had good relations with the company. I was a member of the Opensolaris Pilot Program and have talked in email with both Scott McNealy and Jonathan Schwartz. Sun has greatly improved their relationship with third-party supporters since 2000; in fact, in 2006 they donated a fully-loaded T1000 system to SunHELP.
Nick at ThinkSecret probably ended up with some free Apple gear in exchange for shutting his site down - after all for Apple, "no publicity is bad publicity".
Jon Stokes had an incredibly ambitious goal: to write an accessible book that covers much of the same ground as Hennessy and Patterson's Computer Architecture and Computer Organization and Design.
He actually says in the book that it should be used as an introduction, before someone dives into H&P.
True, you've got a point there.
I agree with the various reasons for the elimination of the Morse test, but I wanted to pass the 5wpm exam (its a pride/accomplishments thing) before they made this change.
Now I guess I'll just need to find a ham who is willing to "test" me and say "okay you know it good enough to pass the test" since there will be no more official tests.
I have nobody to blame but myself; got my Technician license (KD5LQR now K5WCB) in 2000 and have had plenty of time to do it before now.
I had one of the prior version, the PCR-1000 (used 9pin serial instead of USB). Awesome little receiver.
Apple switched because IBM doesn't care about the desktop/laptop market anymore.
They'd rather concentrate on PPC variants for game consoles, which represent a much, much larger market and more business than Apple was giving them.
Not new at all - quite a few Rev. A iMac G5s had this problem. I bought this 17" in November, and the bad caps finally failed in March. Apple sent me a new midplane and I swapped it out myself, but from what I hear they're now requiring people to take their machines to an authorized Apple service provider to get the work done.
I took pictures of the midplane/motherboard replacement process, clearly showing the bad/bulging caps on the original system board.
Best keyboard I've run across lately is the Matias Tactile Pro. Designed for a Mac, but works great on a PC/Linux machine as well (I'm on one right now, hooked to a KVM that has both a Windows system and a Mac mini on it).
Er, make that: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrbill/sets/489821/
Sun is just reselling the Tadpole and Naturetech portables. I've got one of the Naturetech systems right now (for review on sunhelp.org) and <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrbill/sets/48<nobr>9<wbr></wbr></nobr> 821/">some pictures up</a>. It's *very* nice, but *very* pricey.
Isn't Sun's Directory Server based off this as well? I thought they'd acquired all the old Netscape stuff back in the Netscape/iPlanet days.
Angels and Demons was *MUCH* better than TDVC. Digital Fortress was lacking in actual technical knowledge.
From reading TDVC, it was obvious that Dan Brown had just read "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" (published 20 years ago) and written a book around some of the ideas in it.
CCNA v3.0 now includes a lab simulation as well; it hasnt been a multiple-choice-questions-only test for at least a year. They've changed it to make it more difficult and get rid of all the "paper CCNAs" who've never touched a switch before.
Doesn't really matter, if they were paid as a work-for-hire, or were paid scale by the hour. Most likely, they were paid for the work they did, and the ad agency owns all rights to the commercial.
A similar example - I wrote a chapter for a computer book a couple of years ago, and was paid per-page for the work I did. I found out a year or so later that they (the publishing company) had re-used my chapter in a newer edition of the book (Solaris 9 cert study guide versus the Sol8 one I wrote for) . However, that was well within their right, as it was a work-for-hire and they owned all rights to what I'd produced and could do what they wanted with it.
You then have to deal with Richard Morrell's ego, and his "NOBODY IS PAYING US FOR THIS GPL-LICENSED SOFTWARE!" rants, and his "unless you've paid us for this free software, sod off" rants. Maybe he should start up a company with Theo from OpenBSD.
There's a small effort underway by a couple of their upper-level tech staff to have an official low cost or free "home license" program, but it hasn't made much headway yet. Right now it's pretty much "here's a working license code, don't share it, don't use it for production/profit purposes, and don't call us for support".
The guy in the article should be able to *use* his filers just fine with the old license codes; he'll only have to pay NetApp if he wants ONTAP (the filer OS) upgrades or hardware support (replacement drives or other parts).
I host the Filers-At-Home mailing list.
Yeah, but with IP over Avian Carriers, your "denial of service" is called "bubba with a shotgun".
Funny, when I had a problem getting a FireGL4 to do hardware GL acceleration (using the ATI-provided drivers) under RedHat AW 2.1 a couple of weeks ago, I emailed ATI.
Their response: "Regarding your Linux issue: We currently do not offer support for Linux operating system. If you wish you may Submit feedback on this driver to our ATI Linux Driver Feedback form at http://apps.ati.com/linuxDfeedback/"
I wouldn't call that "Officially" supported.