You're taking comments by people on Slashdot as a) important, b) relevant. There's your first mistake.
Of course since we're both commenting here too and not being called into work to work on these problems, means our comments are completely irrelevant too.
The "Internet" needs to get some perspective on how important random comments from the peanut gallery are.
Only a relative few have the skill and training to even make a semi-informed comment on the situation, topped off with at least a couple of decades of experience running real-life reactors.
The best software for the end-user wins under BSD. If it's the open-source version, great. If a company wants to put millions into an effort to make something better and wants to get paid for it, great too.
The best software for the developers wins under GPL. End-users be damned. "It'll do that when you learn to code, or I get around to it."
GPL means you're scared of competition and someone really doing something useful but expensive to write with your code that requires paid developers and a price tag.
Also at a $1B company. IT Department has kept up with behind the scenes proxy tech, including interception of inbound/outbound mail ports, even SSL (keys don't match... man-in-the-middle attack, basically) and almost everyone in the technical services division (at least 1000 people) have local Admin rights.
Haven't had a significant virus outbreak beyond a single machine or a couple of machines in eight years.
Malware, etc... everything's proxied. They oversee all, and monitor all.
The religion of "lockdown" yields good results, but not hiring morons -- while still watching, knowing, and actively intruding on your network traffic, yields even better results.
Sometimes I believe "lockdown" culture comes from a need for someone to feel "important". If it's really important, watch it all -- "lockdown" isn't going to stop as much as just knowing exactly what machines are talking to others, what they're sending, and proxying everything.
I've had a list of 20-25 applications that get installed (by myself) after any new "image" gets dropped on my desk. If I were in the "lockdown" environment, I could cost and time justify each and every one as part of the "image" for my job role.
I'm sure there are some groups/departments that are in "lockdown", but not ours.
Oh and yes... they do run inventory software on all the machines, and know what's installed. So yeah... we all know that and don't install stupid non-work-related crap, because we know that's also being monitored.
You just nailed the solution, and maybe didn't even realize it.
"This laptop is yours to take care of. If you surf around and get a virus infection, the time spent cleaning it up by our IT department will be deducted from your paycheck."
Sounds wacky, but it would seriously work. Tie bad behavior to people's wallets, and they'll figure out amazing solutions to not do that bad behavior... OR... they'll invest in their own bare-metal backup/recovery system and fix their own problems.
The fact is -- we treat IT like computers are still new and people are still going to "keyboarding" classes to learn to stop writing and start typing. Most folks would be a lot more motivated if they were monetarily responsible for damage they cause.
And it's "guessing" that I'm hundreds of miles from where I am because some 'tard at Comcast has put something goofy in their DNS, and apparently that stupid website actually trusts it.
Just because he had a semi-decent business idea and he and OTHERS implemented it, doesn't mean he has any real web-coding skill. I'm sure if he's a founder and still writing code at the $75 million level, that says something about his business skill too... doubt he's the primary mover and shaker. He's stuck in a back corner, getting crankier and crankier and decided to rant about his tools instead of fixing them.
Ahh, you just hit the real crux of the game. To these guys, they're in charge... so telling each other "you're wrong" is their whole world view.
The fact that millions of people agree or disagree with them, doesn't matter at all to their distorted view of the world. They argue amongst themselves and whatever us "millions" do, must have happened because of something THEY did, not our own free will.
Who answers with "Hello" still? Waste of time. Look at Caller ID, "Hi XXX."
Or... "This is XXX." That one always throws the telemarketers... "Is X there?" "Didn't I just say that?"
Or my favorite, old military and any kind of "Operations" job folks... we just answer with our last name. One word, contact established, identity verified... go with your traffic.
"Full-time" and "part-time" are made up constructs.
How about if you wrote code that was 100% bug-free for four days you get the fifth off? Just an idea.
It's the incentives for both parties that have to be agreeable to both sides or business doesn't get done. Number of days in the week is negotiable I'd you can prove you do it better than your peers.
Or it should be. But we humans don't like it when the other guy gets a better deal than we have. Even if he does more work or gives up other things in life that we don't always see.
And they do that through that $150/month boob tube. Seriously, until you pull the plug on it and realize you're just paying someone else to do a never-ending sales pitch directly to you in your own living room to buy crap you don't need, you don't get it.
We have rabbit ears for local stations that aren't on all that often and our AppleTV makes a decent Netflix streamer. Lately we've been on a trip of watching old 70s TV shows like "Emergency!" which is a hoot for both of us. TV back then was cheesy, entertaining. Compared to today where it's serious and dark and overly-emotional with lots of death and worry. As if the idea is to stress viewers out? Then commercials come on reminding you of how you don't have your life together if you're not carrying a credit card that gives you "double-bonus-points" or some crap.
"What's in your wallet?" Seriously? Not you freakin' 22% credit card!
We "deserve" this and the kids "deserve" that. Yeah. Whatever. Dump the cable/dish bill and go out and do something useful.
Americans have the lowest amount of vacation time in the developed countries.
Imagine the things we might do if we had the time to. Telecommuting is 100% possible for a large percentage of office workers, but companies keep leasing buildings, paying to heat/cool them, buying furniture no one likes, and generally acting like it's still 1955 and phone lines are expensive. All the while, the Marketing department cranks out "Green company" BS enough to fill a landfill with.
Vacations are maxed out at most U.S. companies at around 5-6 weeks a year after 10 years of service, and sabbaticals that would actually educate the staff, non-existent. Instead company HR departments give lip-service to community efforts by scheduling single-day Habitat for Humanity events. Would 80% slack off more with more vacation? Yes. But only 20% of the people realty get things done anyway.
Greenspan is about to release a technical paper lamenting the fact that U.S. Companies are unwilling to spend on long-term development in an effort to keep piles and piles of liquid assets, mostly cash.
We'll continue to go "nowhere fast" with that attitude. Can you think of some serious long-term projects that really need to get done at your company that aren't because the company says there's no budget? Does your company's cash balance sheet look pretty flush?
Time to quit worrying and put capital to work long-term.
All depends on if your public regulators in your area made the incumbent telco battery-back the DSL system.
I'm not making an argument for having a land-line, my assumption is that the upstream inter-machine trunks are all going to be overloaded and phones are utterly useless in a real disaster.
I'm just sharing that the battery banks are diesel-generator backed-up at all CO's, and that they're high in the priority list for emergency managers behind hospitals, morgues (keeping the generators at morgues running for refrigeration is very high priority), public safety dispatch/radio facilities, and then private companies that own "infrastructure".
Both COs and large data centers are on that "second tier" disaster list for fuel deliveries. In a real disaster, the fuel doesn't even get to the "top tier"... so it doesn't really matter.
This whole "10,000 calls to 911" over a snowstorm is just a precursor to how many people are going to die when a real disaster happens in the overpopulated East Coast.
Most CO's have days worth of diesel and generators on hand to keep the -48VDC battery plant charged up. In many States, they're required to by the regulators. Check yours. No the generators won't always start up, or might blow a coolant loop or something, but the original Bell COs were into engineering in "five 9s" and "six 9s" uptime twenty to thirty years before anyone revived the terminology of telco in data center marketing slicks.
They make cordless phone base units that pair with cell phones over bluetooth these days, if you're trying to put a "phone in every room". They also make similar boxes that pair to the cell phone(s) over bluetooth and feed out a standard phone line, that can be used to back-feed the house to as many phones as the little box's ring voltage generator can drive.
The main reason these days to have a real land-line is call audio quality, since it's not stuffed through a 18Kb/s CODEC or less. Cell phone calls sound like crap.
His point was that when you're calling out for help, you're in a very long line of people waiting for that help. I listen to police scanners and hear my city run out of Ambulances on busy nights in GOOD conditions. You think anyone's coming in the really bad conditions that would trigger a need for that land-line to call 911?
Calling loved ones isn't going to happen if they're outside of the affected area. Trunks will be full. No telephone carrier budgets or builds out to handle massive amounts of in or outbound calls in an area. There's a few special systems set up for high-level emergency responders to over-ride regular calls on the cellular side of things now, but most areas haven't paid for it for any but the very highest officials.
Communications is always the first thing to break down in a disaster scenario. Either due to sheer overload, or due to massive power outages that last longer than the backup systems can operate.
No phone line is going to work adequately, land-line or cellular-based for the "last mile" once you hit the log-jam of fast-busy and "all circuits busy" switch messages at the Inter-Machine Trunks. And no one local is going to be capable of responding to your call to 911 unless you get lottery-level lucky.
No matter how "serious" we got about alternatives they would still be more expensive than drilling in the Gulf, thus... I call bullshit unless you're the type that says government should have mandated so-called "clean" solutions (that would have polluted the crap out of the manufacturing sites for solar panels, electric generator/motors, whatever green tech we had back then), back then.
And to say that we didn't "get serious" about it after the 70's OPEC crisis, is kinda silly. Have you seen the first Honda Civic compared to the cars commonly on the roads of the 1970's, and how small and fuel-efficient it was... and they sold like hot-cakes? The Datsuns? The Sunbeam with its flywheel to keep it moving?
Folks were plenty "serious", then they forgot as the boomers got old. They moved up to the Honda Accord and the Toyota Camry got bigger every few years.
The reality is, we're as "serious" about this stuff as our wallets allow and if you remove the almost 50% taxes on a gallon of gasoline, the transport, refining, and delivery of the product is dirt cheap. There are companies selling bottled water inside the gas station for four to six times as much money per gallon as the gasoline coming from the pump, that has already been taxed at double its price.
You want to "get serious", go for it. Buy a non-government subsidized Coal-Fired Chevy Volt -- oh wait, you can't... they're all subsidized. Ok, how about a nice Nuclear-driven Nissan Leaf? Oh... those too are subsidized. And they just move the pollution to the electric plant. They aren't really "green". Going to have to deal with all the heavy metals in their "high-tech" batteries somehow too, and recycle that stuff and rebuild it. Thousands of tons of it.
If you want REAL energy use change via government policy (which is usually a bad thing IMHO), the society needs to change. Start handing out tax kickbacks to companies that CLOSE office buildings and have workers work from home. Telcommuting tax incentives would drop road useage by significant amounts. Add another tax break for companies that do not have ANYONE on a "9-5" schedule... everyone's on Flex time.
Pushing "green" expensive tech that can't compete on a level playing field, isn't the answer. Changing the way we do business and taking away the need to drive in bumper-to-bumper traffic, is. Not all are office workers, but imagine if the office buildings that need to be heated, cooled, and generally take up twice the space a typical office worker needs to get work done these days... faded as a necessary space in our society...
[Disclaimer... as if it's necessary to disclaim everything these days... I work for a manufacturer of telecommuting products.]
IPhone users had one significant reason to switch from unlimited to metered: It allowed them to tether. If you switch back, do you get to keep tethering? Judging by what VZ has said they're going to offer, the assumption would be yes. But leave it to AT&T to completely screw this up.
Slashdot Mirror
Government truthiness!
You're taking comments by people on Slashdot as a) important, b) relevant. There's your first mistake.
Of course since we're both commenting here too and not being called into work to work on these problems, means our comments are completely irrelevant too.
The "Internet" needs to get some perspective on how important random comments from the peanut gallery are.
Only a relative few have the skill and training to even make a semi-informed comment on the situation, topped off with at least a couple of decades of experience running real-life reactors.
The best software for the end-user wins under BSD. If it's the open-source version, great. If a company wants to put millions into an effort to make something better and wants to get paid for it, great too.
The best software for the developers wins under GPL. End-users be damned. "It'll do that when you learn to code, or I get around to it."
GPL means you're scared of competition and someone really doing something useful but expensive to write with your code that requires paid developers and a price tag.
Informix still works fine and has since the 80's.
Cheap, works better, real support on Linux and it doesn't have to be the RDBMS manufacturer's special distro.
IBM is a lot friendlier to the open community than Oracle, has ever been, too.
What encryption keys? Anyone with a Sercice Monitor can listen in.
Every situation is different. Sounds like you guys are doing the best you can with the cards you've been dealt.
Also at a $1B company. IT Department has kept up with behind the scenes proxy tech, including interception of inbound/outbound mail ports, even SSL (keys don't match... man-in-the-middle attack, basically) and almost everyone in the technical services division (at least 1000 people) have local Admin rights.
Haven't had a significant virus outbreak beyond a single machine or a couple of machines in eight years.
Malware, etc... everything's proxied. They oversee all, and monitor all.
The religion of "lockdown" yields good results, but not hiring morons -- while still watching, knowing, and actively intruding on your network traffic, yields even better results.
Sometimes I believe "lockdown" culture comes from a need for someone to feel "important". If it's really important, watch it all -- "lockdown" isn't going to stop as much as just knowing exactly what machines are talking to others, what they're sending, and proxying everything.
I've had a list of 20-25 applications that get installed (by myself) after any new "image" gets dropped on my desk. If I were in the "lockdown" environment, I could cost and time justify each and every one as part of the "image" for my job role.
I'm sure there are some groups/departments that are in "lockdown", but not ours.
Oh and yes... they do run inventory software on all the machines, and know what's installed. So yeah... we all know that and don't install stupid non-work-related crap, because we know that's also being monitored.
You just nailed the solution, and maybe didn't even realize it.
"This laptop is yours to take care of. If you surf around and get a virus infection, the time spent cleaning it up by our IT department will be deducted from your paycheck."
Sounds wacky, but it would seriously work. Tie bad behavior to people's wallets, and they'll figure out amazing solutions to not do that bad behavior... OR... they'll invest in their own bare-metal backup/recovery system and fix their own problems.
The fact is -- we treat IT like computers are still new and people are still going to "keyboarding" classes to learn to stop writing and start typing. Most folks would be a lot more motivated if they were monetarily responsible for damage they cause.
Ooh. Loading FreeNAS. L33t sk1llZ
Try writing FreeNAS.
Have you seen that website? Godawful.
And it's "guessing" that I'm hundreds of miles from where I am because some 'tard at Comcast has put something goofy in their DNS, and apparently that stupid website actually trusts it.
Just because he had a semi-decent business idea and he and OTHERS implemented it, doesn't mean he has any real web-coding skill. I'm sure if he's a founder and still writing code at the $75 million level, that says something about his business skill too... doubt he's the primary mover and shaker. He's stuck in a back corner, getting crankier and crankier and decided to rant about his tools instead of fixing them.
Ahh, you just hit the real crux of the game. To these guys, they're in charge... so telling each other "you're wrong" is their whole world view.
The fact that millions of people agree or disagree with them, doesn't matter at all to their distorted view of the world. They argue amongst themselves and whatever us "millions" do, must have happened because of something THEY did, not our own free will.
That's their view of it all, anyway.
Who answers with "Hello" still? Waste of time. Look at Caller ID, "Hi XXX."
Or... "This is XXX." That one always throws the telemarketers... "Is X there?" "Didn't I just say that?"
Or my favorite, old military and any kind of "Operations" job folks... we just answer with our last name. One word, contact established, identity verified... go with your traffic.
"Goodbye" is silly too. Just hang up.
Using a VBR and then inserting NOP's sounds like... using a non-variable streaming CODEC.
Ahh. That must be the reason government got no more transparent after the new President who promised such, was elected.
They'd obviously go insane.
"Full-time" and "part-time" are made up constructs.
How about if you wrote code that was 100% bug-free for four days you get the fifth off? Just an idea.
It's the incentives for both parties that have to be agreeable to both sides or business doesn't get done. Number of days in the week is negotiable I'd you can prove you do it better than your peers.
Or it should be. But we humans don't like it when the other guy gets a better deal than we have. Even if he does more work or gives up other things in life that we don't always see.
And they do that through that $150/month boob tube. Seriously, until you pull the plug on it and realize you're just paying someone else to do a never-ending sales pitch directly to you in your own living room to buy crap you don't need, you don't get it.
We have rabbit ears for local stations that aren't on all that often and our AppleTV makes a decent Netflix streamer. Lately we've been on a trip of watching old 70s TV shows like "Emergency!" which is a hoot for both of us. TV back then was cheesy, entertaining. Compared to today where it's serious and dark and overly-emotional with lots of death and worry. As if the idea is to stress viewers out? Then commercials come on reminding you of how you don't have your life together if you're not carrying a credit card that gives you "double-bonus-points" or some crap.
"What's in your wallet?" Seriously? Not you freakin' 22% credit card!
We "deserve" this and the kids "deserve" that. Yeah. Whatever. Dump the cable/dish bill and go out and do something useful.
Americans have the lowest amount of vacation time in the developed countries.
Imagine the things we might do if we had the time to. Telecommuting is 100% possible for a large percentage of office workers, but companies keep leasing buildings, paying to heat/cool them, buying furniture no one likes, and generally acting like it's still 1955 and phone lines are expensive. All the while, the Marketing department cranks out "Green company" BS enough to fill a landfill with.
Vacations are maxed out at most U.S. companies at around 5-6 weeks a year after 10 years of service, and sabbaticals that would actually educate the staff, non-existent. Instead company HR departments give lip-service to community efforts by scheduling single-day Habitat for Humanity events. Would 80% slack off more with more vacation? Yes. But only 20% of the people realty get things done anyway.
Greenspan is about to release a technical paper lamenting the fact that U.S. Companies are unwilling to spend on long-term development in an effort to keep piles and piles of liquid assets, mostly cash.
We'll continue to go "nowhere fast" with that attitude. Can you think of some serious long-term projects that really need to get done at your company that aren't because the company says there's no budget? Does your company's cash balance sheet look pretty flush?
Time to quit worrying and put capital to work long-term.
Yes you can. Using local time to file is dumb.
Zulu time (always) on the clock in the aircraft, and time Enroute are all that are neded to file electronically or in the air with AFSS.
All depends on if your public regulators in your area made the incumbent telco battery-back the DSL system.
I'm not making an argument for having a land-line, my assumption is that the upstream inter-machine trunks are all going to be overloaded and phones are utterly useless in a real disaster.
I'm just sharing that the battery banks are diesel-generator backed-up at all CO's, and that they're high in the priority list for emergency managers behind hospitals, morgues (keeping the generators at morgues running for refrigeration is very high priority), public safety dispatch/radio facilities, and then private companies that own "infrastructure".
Both COs and large data centers are on that "second tier" disaster list for fuel deliveries. In a real disaster, the fuel doesn't even get to the "top tier"... so it doesn't really matter.
This whole "10,000 calls to 911" over a snowstorm is just a precursor to how many people are going to die when a real disaster happens in the overpopulated East Coast.
Most CO's have days worth of diesel and generators on hand to keep the -48VDC battery plant charged up. In many States, they're required to by the regulators. Check yours. No the generators won't always start up, or might blow a coolant loop or something, but the original Bell COs were into engineering in "five 9s" and "six 9s" uptime twenty to thirty years before anyone revived the terminology of telco in data center marketing slicks.
They make cordless phone base units that pair with cell phones over bluetooth these days, if you're trying to put a "phone in every room". They also make similar boxes that pair to the cell phone(s) over bluetooth and feed out a standard phone line, that can be used to back-feed the house to as many phones as the little box's ring voltage generator can drive.
The main reason these days to have a real land-line is call audio quality, since it's not stuffed through a 18Kb/s CODEC or less. Cell phone calls sound like crap.
Wow, you've just described the problem with most of the Federal Government run from... the D.C. area.
His point was that when you're calling out for help, you're in a very long line of people waiting for that help. I listen to police scanners and hear my city run out of Ambulances on busy nights in GOOD conditions. You think anyone's coming in the really bad conditions that would trigger a need for that land-line to call 911?
Calling loved ones isn't going to happen if they're outside of the affected area. Trunks will be full. No telephone carrier budgets or builds out to handle massive amounts of in or outbound calls in an area. There's a few special systems set up for high-level emergency responders to over-ride regular calls on the cellular side of things now, but most areas haven't paid for it for any but the very highest officials.
Communications is always the first thing to break down in a disaster scenario. Either due to sheer overload, or due to massive power outages that last longer than the backup systems can operate.
No phone line is going to work adequately, land-line or cellular-based for the "last mile" once you hit the log-jam of fast-busy and "all circuits busy" switch messages at the Inter-Machine Trunks. And no one local is going to be capable of responding to your call to 911 unless you get lottery-level lucky.
No matter how "serious" we got about alternatives they would still be more expensive than drilling in the Gulf, thus... I call bullshit unless you're the type that says government should have mandated so-called "clean" solutions (that would have polluted the crap out of the manufacturing sites for solar panels, electric generator/motors, whatever green tech we had back then), back then.
And to say that we didn't "get serious" about it after the 70's OPEC crisis, is kinda silly. Have you seen the first Honda Civic compared to the cars commonly on the roads of the 1970's, and how small and fuel-efficient it was... and they sold like hot-cakes? The Datsuns? The Sunbeam with its flywheel to keep it moving?
Folks were plenty "serious", then they forgot as the boomers got old. They moved up to the Honda Accord and the Toyota Camry got bigger every few years.
The reality is, we're as "serious" about this stuff as our wallets allow and if you remove the almost 50% taxes on a gallon of gasoline, the transport, refining, and delivery of the product is dirt cheap. There are companies selling bottled water inside the gas station for four to six times as much money per gallon as the gasoline coming from the pump, that has already been taxed at double its price.
You want to "get serious", go for it. Buy a non-government subsidized Coal-Fired Chevy Volt -- oh wait, you can't... they're all subsidized. Ok, how about a nice Nuclear-driven Nissan Leaf? Oh... those too are subsidized. And they just move the pollution to the electric plant. They aren't really "green". Going to have to deal with all the heavy metals in their "high-tech" batteries somehow too, and recycle that stuff and rebuild it. Thousands of tons of it.
If you want REAL energy use change via government policy (which is usually a bad thing IMHO), the society needs to change. Start handing out tax kickbacks to companies that CLOSE office buildings and have workers work from home. Telcommuting tax incentives would drop road useage by significant amounts. Add another tax break for companies that do not have ANYONE on a "9-5" schedule... everyone's on Flex time.
Pushing "green" expensive tech that can't compete on a level playing field, isn't the answer. Changing the way we do business and taking away the need to drive in bumper-to-bumper traffic, is. Not all are office workers, but imagine if the office buildings that need to be heated, cooled, and generally take up twice the space a typical office worker needs to get work done these days... faded as a necessary space in our society...
[Disclaimer... as if it's necessary to disclaim everything these days... I work for a manufacturer of telecommuting products.]
IPhone users had one significant reason to switch from unlimited to metered: It allowed them to tether. If you switch back, do you get to keep tethering? Judging by what VZ has said they're going to offer, the assumption would be yes. But leave it to AT&T to completely screw this up.