Hello? The point is that the SIM isn't being actively accessed during a call for anything other than to see if it's "there", and if it's not... the phone says so.
His problem never was the SIM, there are so many other variables that by the time he replaced the SIM, some other problem was fixed. RF interference, a cell site with a bad antenna or hardline, a failure or bad software load in the closest base station, the list goes on and on.
I'm not here to debate whether or not contacts get dirty on things, for God's sake. Pay attention. Let's say the circuit card in the local base station has gold-edge connectors, and they were dirty... and by the time he got the SIM replaced, some poor tech had been paged out, pulled the board in and out a few times to "wipe" the contacts clean, and left after clearing the alarm.
He would believe his SIM replacement "fixed" his problem, but he has absolutely no engineering/technical proof of that.
It's all anecdotal troubleshooting, which is meaningless. People want to assign meaning without hard data all the time. Ironically it's very often the same people who claim to be "scientific".
Case in point: As a licensed pilot, I regularly hear unlicensed and clueless people spouting off about how airplanes work (and laugh about how wrong they are, to myself).
I said I'll believe HIS SIM card story, but as a professional sysadmin and telco engineer, I believe steering everyone ELSE to that as a "common" solution, is silly and just leads to more confusion. If you can find 10,000 people with the same anecdote, the data starts to mean something.
To use another idea we're all used to: How many clueless people have you heard discussing how their computer works? Some are Doctors, Lawyers, or other highly "intelligent" professions, but taken out of their specialty, they'll just start MAKING THINGS UP.
Hey, I'll take your word for it that YOUR problem was fixed with a dirty SIM card, if you like -- but saying it's the FIRST thing to check on a phone with RF problems is kinda like saying the first thing to check when the "Check Engine" light comes on in a car, is to see if the spare tire is in the trunk. Poor troubleshooting. Now, if you're saying "take it to a professional" like you did, I can also live with that logic. The professional may have known your particular model phone had really badly designed pins to connect to the SIM card, but certainly wouldn't share that with you -- he'd just replace the SIM with a nice shiny new one and send you on your way.
That's what I'm saying, the electronics don't work that way... much as you'd like them to. "Poor contact" with a SIM chip is the same thing (to dumb it down) as "poor contact" with a stick of RAM in your desktop machine. It can't "partially work". If you're having RF or connectivity problems, it simply can NOT be related in any way to the SIM. If someone at an Apple or AT&T store said it was, they're untrained salespeople, and just a sign that AT&T isn't the engineering-centric company they once were. It's impossible for a loose SIM to cause connectivity problems without the phone saying, "SIM Card Not Installed". If it's saying that, then yes... the SIM might be making intermittent contact. Making up problems doesn't lead to understanding what's really causing them. Or, as I like to call it... we have a mentality of "If I don't understand how it works, I can just ignore it"... which leads to posts like yours later MAKING UP things that could go wrong. Handsets really aren't as "mysterious" as people make them out to be, and RF connectivity issues don't have anything to do with the SIM card, if you look at a block diagram of how the phones actually work. Don't read any emotion into this message, I'm not MAD or UPSET by the bad troubleshooting, just pointing it out.
Wrong. If a SIM is removed, the phone will shut down and display that the problem is the SIM card. No RF or other "signals" pass through the SIM, it's not part of the circuit for phone service. Just memory that the phone checks that it can read regularly.
Hahaha... so you didn't read TFA (she already won her case - hell that was in the HEADLINE) and you're arguing that I'm making assumptions about the article.
Slashdot commenters are apparently retarded. I'm outta here. I know better than to be dragged into this stupidity.
How do you make that leap from a bad employee, driving everyone nuts, being fired (and rightly so)... to a man setting another human (male or female) on fire on another continent?
People have always treated each other like crap, all you have to do is take any history lesson to see that. Some of the worst atrocities ever were "in other human's interest". I doubt coddling an employee who's bothering EVERYONE else in their office is "progress". Call me skeptical.
Bwahah... I love the ASSumptions that come out in Slashdot comments. Been working in "Corporate Procedure-ville, er... America" for more than 20 years. Same shit, different names. Accounting always whines about paperwork, staff always screws up the forms. Bosses get paid no matter if their forms are right or wrong, because someone fixes the form for them. Staff says, "Form is too complex/vague", boss wonders where problem is, since he always gets paid.
Plus, I've worked with people LIKE this person before, and been annoyed to shit by their incessant nagging at OTHER people.
If *I* can see that nothing ever changes in the above cycle, why shouldn't the person actually DOING the job, and adjust their attitude accordingly? Sure, send the standard "You're doing it wrong" form letter every three-six months, but making it personal and starting to get pissy with co-workers, doesn't fix it. Hasn't in the last 20 years, that I've seen.
I know how to fill out forms, and frankly, I enjoy watching with amusement from afar when admins and morons who CAN'T fill out forms can't communicate and people don't get paid. It's the standard corporate circus. "Nothing new to see here, move along!"
(Honestly, this is a sign the boss made HIRING mistakes. Big ones.)
I've worked in plenty of positions where I have no "real" power. Sheesh. Who hasn't? It's not my company. Want power, start a company and take the risks yourself, I say.
So no, I won't be working in Accounting any time soon... I could see from time spent in Internships and "Summer Hire" programs in college how it all worked -- a number of decades ago. And taking a job in Accounting is a surefire way to either a) A very unfufilling life thinking you can teach idiots of all flavors to fill out simple forms along with a "crusader" mentality that will eventually get you fired in tough times (this example), or b) if you're smart, you smile and "get it" and when people want their money, they'll naturally come asking for help filling out the form. You sleep better at night in example b).
The only positive - Accounting is about the most stable job anyone could EVER ask for, if you're not a jerk or insane, and the company doesn't go under. Anyone who can work as hard as this person to LOSE an Accounting job, really outdid herself, on a personal and emotional level.
I'm talking about reality, not the law. If laws are in place that make people THINK they're entitled to someone else employing them and firing them "fairly", fine. But she's still fired, and lost far more money than the penalty that was imposed on the employer. In other words... they don't owe her anything now, and she still lost by her own hand, net result. If she were smarter she would have noted her boss was upset with her behavior LONG before he fired her, and toned down her annoying behavior just below his threshold, if she really wanted to keep the job.
Yeah, I hear ya. I just think it's tacky. If the guy REALLY is that good, we'd all know who he was. Like Schneier, say? I get it that he's gotta make a living somehow, though.
I think the best security folks are probably slogging it out somewhere out there in the trenches (I know a few) and because their lawyers say so, they can't talk about what they're working on anyway... what they're doing isn't in books.
LOL. It was once. Only those with the ability to work on the technology had that kind of title. I know, it died over a decade ago. Call me old-fashioned, but I miss it.
Never said "OVER" promotion. Said "self-promotion". I don't think the reviewer needed to mention that he had his own security book at all. Wasn't relevant to the review in the slightest.
Sorry I guess I just remember when places like Slashdot weren't just here for the money, and when reviewers did it to help others out, not to put a link in the review to where someone could buy their book.
If I wanted to see the guy's reviewer credentials, I could Google his name.
Even cooler, was when commenters would take care of it for the guy... "Hey, pay attention - this reviewer also wrote a book [here] and he knows what he's talking about."
The guy didn't have to link in his review of someone else's book to his own book at all. He chose to self-promote by doing a review. Lame.
Ahhh, crap. Good point.:-) So as long as computers are run by humans... hahaha... oh well. Been fun chatting about it anyway. I'd settle for having a few "network administrators" who call our support line actually having a working knowledge of TCP/IP! ("What's a port? You're talking over my head!"... from someone with the title, Network Administrator. And no, not from a small company either...)
Only the misuse of the term "shameless self-promotion" makes it seem "over the top". People use that phrase too much when they mean, "He's an ass and over-promotes himself." I don't.
Nah, I was just talking about the "security industry" in general. Good coding practices could put the entire "security industry" out of business overnight... but we all see how well that's working.
Oh, trust me, I'm well aware of the closed-mindedness about a number of topics, from people claiming they're more intelligent than I.
All I said was that someone who OBVIOUSLY was a pain in the ass to her co-workers, her boss, etc... was probably DUE to be fired. This is pretty clear in the article.
What's also clear is that the boss strategically handled it the wrong way and had to pay some money in this case.
But that piddly amount was a lot cheaper than keeping someone on the payroll who wasn't getting along with ANYONE on the job.
There are probably people cheering her replacement has arrived -- and it is probably someone they can work with -- without being scolded in e-mail about their stupid internal expense forms.
Priorities. She placed her need to scold people over her need to retain her job. Her boss didn't document OTHER incidents that had happened in such a way that a court of law could admit them into evidence, so he got slapped with a SMALL fine (compared to continuing to pay her salary, hell it didn't even pay for the entire 6 months of time she looked for a job), and moved on.
The fact that this silly incident was even newsworthy is amazing. Happens all the time.
Labor of love, for sure. The guy that started SANS has a house on a Hawaiian island now, or so I've heard...
Books go out of date too fast, but starting up a "school" where the students write all the curriculum while you speak on how "great" your training organization is... was brilliant!
It's just shameless self-promotion of his book in a review of someone else's book. As someone else pointed out, neither guy is probably making any real money off of either book, since they're both telling us all the obvious.
That computer security (in the current environment) isn't just a never-ending revenue stream for book-writers who tell us what we already knew: People don't care enough to do it properly because it's too inconvenient and expensive.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope. Thanks for playing.
Hello? The point is that the SIM isn't being actively accessed during a call for anything other than to see if it's "there", and if it's not... the phone says so.
His problem never was the SIM, there are so many other variables that by the time he replaced the SIM, some other problem was fixed. RF interference, a cell site with a bad antenna or hardline, a failure or bad software load in the closest base station, the list goes on and on.
I'm not here to debate whether or not contacts get dirty on things, for God's sake. Pay attention. Let's say the circuit card in the local base station has gold-edge connectors, and they were dirty... and by the time he got the SIM replaced, some poor tech had been paged out, pulled the board in and out a few times to "wipe" the contacts clean, and left after clearing the alarm.
He would believe his SIM replacement "fixed" his problem, but he has absolutely no engineering/technical proof of that.
It's all anecdotal troubleshooting, which is meaningless. People want to assign meaning without hard data all the time. Ironically it's very often the same people who claim to be "scientific".
Case in point: As a licensed pilot, I regularly hear unlicensed and clueless people spouting off about how airplanes work (and laugh about how wrong they are, to myself).
I said I'll believe HIS SIM card story, but as a professional sysadmin and telco engineer, I believe steering everyone ELSE to that as a "common" solution, is silly and just leads to more confusion. If you can find 10,000 people with the same anecdote, the data starts to mean something.
To use another idea we're all used to: How many clueless people have you heard discussing how their computer works? Some are Doctors, Lawyers, or other highly "intelligent" professions, but taken out of their specialty, they'll just start MAKING THINGS UP.
Hey, I'll take your word for it that YOUR problem was fixed with a dirty SIM card, if you like -- but saying it's the FIRST thing to check on a phone with RF problems is kinda like saying the first thing to check when the "Check Engine" light comes on in a car, is to see if the spare tire is in the trunk. Poor troubleshooting. Now, if you're saying "take it to a professional" like you did, I can also live with that logic. The professional may have known your particular model phone had really badly designed pins to connect to the SIM card, but certainly wouldn't share that with you -- he'd just replace the SIM with a nice shiny new one and send you on your way.
That's what I'm saying, the electronics don't work that way... much as you'd like them to. "Poor contact" with a SIM chip is the same thing (to dumb it down) as "poor contact" with a stick of RAM in your desktop machine. It can't "partially work". If you're having RF or connectivity problems, it simply can NOT be related in any way to the SIM. If someone at an Apple or AT&T store said it was, they're untrained salespeople, and just a sign that AT&T isn't the engineering-centric company they once were. It's impossible for a loose SIM to cause connectivity problems without the phone saying, "SIM Card Not Installed". If it's saying that, then yes... the SIM might be making intermittent contact. Making up problems doesn't lead to understanding what's really causing them. Or, as I like to call it... we have a mentality of "If I don't understand how it works, I can just ignore it"... which leads to posts like yours later MAKING UP things that could go wrong. Handsets really aren't as "mysterious" as people make them out to be, and RF connectivity issues don't have anything to do with the SIM card, if you look at a block diagram of how the phones actually work. Don't read any emotion into this message, I'm not MAD or UPSET by the bad troubleshooting, just pointing it out.
Wrong. If a SIM is removed, the phone will shut down and display that the problem is the SIM card. No RF or other "signals" pass through the SIM, it's not part of the circuit for phone service. Just memory that the phone checks that it can read regularly.
Hahaha... so you didn't read TFA (she already won her case - hell that was in the HEADLINE) and you're arguing that I'm making assumptions about the article.
Slashdot commenters are apparently retarded. I'm outta here. I know better than to be dragged into this stupidity.
How do you make that leap from a bad employee, driving everyone nuts, being fired (and rightly so)... to a man setting another human (male or female) on fire on another continent?
People have always treated each other like crap, all you have to do is take any history lesson to see that. Some of the worst atrocities ever were "in other human's interest". I doubt coddling an employee who's bothering EVERYONE else in their office is "progress". Call me skeptical.
Bwahah... I love the ASSumptions that come out in Slashdot comments. Been working in "Corporate Procedure-ville, er... America" for more than 20 years. Same shit, different names. Accounting always whines about paperwork, staff always screws up the forms. Bosses get paid no matter if their forms are right or wrong, because someone fixes the form for them. Staff says, "Form is too complex/vague", boss wonders where problem is, since he always gets paid.
Plus, I've worked with people LIKE this person before, and been annoyed to shit by their incessant nagging at OTHER people.
If *I* can see that nothing ever changes in the above cycle, why shouldn't the person actually DOING the job, and adjust their attitude accordingly? Sure, send the standard "You're doing it wrong" form letter every three-six months, but making it personal and starting to get pissy with co-workers, doesn't fix it. Hasn't in the last 20 years, that I've seen.
I know how to fill out forms, and frankly, I enjoy watching with amusement from afar when admins and morons who CAN'T fill out forms can't communicate and people don't get paid. It's the standard corporate circus. "Nothing new to see here, move along!"
(Honestly, this is a sign the boss made HIRING mistakes. Big ones.)
I've worked in plenty of positions where I have no "real" power. Sheesh. Who hasn't? It's not my company. Want power, start a company and take the risks yourself, I say.
So no, I won't be working in Accounting any time soon... I could see from time spent in Internships and "Summer Hire" programs in college how it all worked -- a number of decades ago. And taking a job in Accounting is a surefire way to either a) A very unfufilling life thinking you can teach idiots of all flavors to fill out simple forms along with a "crusader" mentality that will eventually get you fired in tough times (this example), or b) if you're smart, you smile and "get it" and when people want their money, they'll naturally come asking for help filling out the form. You sleep better at night in example b).
The only positive - Accounting is about the most stable job anyone could EVER ask for, if you're not a jerk or insane, and the company doesn't go under. Anyone who can work as hard as this person to LOSE an Accounting job, really outdid herself, on a personal and emotional level.
I'm talking about reality, not the law. If laws are in place that make people THINK they're entitled to someone else employing them and firing them "fairly", fine. But she's still fired, and lost far more money than the penalty that was imposed on the employer. In other words... they don't owe her anything now, and she still lost by her own hand, net result. If she were smarter she would have noted her boss was upset with her behavior LONG before he fired her, and toned down her annoying behavior just below his threshold, if she really wanted to keep the job.
Yeah, I hear ya. I just think it's tacky. If the guy REALLY is that good, we'd all know who he was. Like Schneier, say? I get it that he's gotta make a living somehow, though.
I think the best security folks are probably slogging it out somewhere out there in the trenches (I know a few) and because their lawyers say so, they can't talk about what they're working on anyway... what they're doing isn't in books.
LOL... yeah, as if being a /. elder matters or counts for anything. That and $3 will maybe get me a cup of coffee at *$. Hah.
Note the Slashdot ID number on my username. Yeah, I've been doing this a long time.
LOL. It was once. Only those with the ability to work on the technology had that kind of title. I know, it died over a decade ago. Call me old-fashioned, but I miss it.
Never said "OVER" promotion. Said "self-promotion". I don't think the reviewer needed to mention that he had his own security book at all. Wasn't relevant to the review in the slightest.
Sorry I guess I just remember when places like Slashdot weren't just here for the money, and when reviewers did it to help others out, not to put a link in the review to where someone could buy their book.
If I wanted to see the guy's reviewer credentials, I could Google his name.
Even cooler, was when commenters would take care of it for the guy... "Hey, pay attention - this reviewer also wrote a book [here] and he knows what he's talking about."
The guy didn't have to link in his review of someone else's book to his own book at all. He chose to self-promote by doing a review. Lame.
Ahhh, crap. Good point. :-) So as long as computers are run by humans... hahaha... oh well. Been fun chatting about it anyway. I'd settle for having a few "network administrators" who call our support line actually having a working knowledge of TCP/IP! ("What's a port? You're talking over my head!"... from someone with the title, Network Administrator. And no, not from a small company either...)
Only the misuse of the term "shameless self-promotion" makes it seem "over the top". People use that phrase too much when they mean, "He's an ass and over-promotes himself." I don't.
Nah, I was just talking about the "security industry" in general. Good coding practices could put the entire "security industry" out of business overnight... but we all see how well that's working.
Oh, trust me, I'm well aware of the closed-mindedness about a number of topics, from people claiming they're more intelligent than I.
All I said was that someone who OBVIOUSLY was a pain in the ass to her co-workers, her boss, etc... was probably DUE to be fired. This is pretty clear in the article.
What's also clear is that the boss strategically handled it the wrong way and had to pay some money in this case.
But that piddly amount was a lot cheaper than keeping someone on the payroll who wasn't getting along with ANYONE on the job.
There are probably people cheering her replacement has arrived -- and it is probably someone they can work with -- without being scolded in e-mail about their stupid internal expense forms.
Priorities. She placed her need to scold people over her need to retain her job. Her boss didn't document OTHER incidents that had happened in such a way that a court of law could admit them into evidence, so he got slapped with a SMALL fine (compared to continuing to pay her salary, hell it didn't even pay for the entire 6 months of time she looked for a job), and moved on.
The fact that this silly incident was even newsworthy is amazing. Happens all the time.
He has no shame about it, and it's self-promotion. What's the problem with calling a spade a spade?
I didn't say he OVER promoted himself.
Just said it has nothing to do with the review...
Labor of love, for sure. The guy that started SANS has a house on a Hawaiian island now, or so I've heard...
Books go out of date too fast, but starting up a "school" where the students write all the curriculum while you speak on how "great" your training organization is... was brilliant!
It's just shameless self-promotion of his book in a review of someone else's book. As someone else pointed out, neither guy is probably making any real money off of either book, since they're both telling us all the obvious.
Hmm, good point.
That computer security (in the current environment) isn't just a never-ending revenue stream for book-writers who tell us what we already knew: People don't care enough to do it properly because it's too inconvenient and expensive.
Down near the bottom of the review, there's a link to the review author's own book. As if it had anything to do with the book being reviewed?
Why do you make up things that have nothing to do with what I said, or this case?