If you're talking about building some sort of archival-type repository (like, keeping years worth of satellite imagery, for example), then you should probably look at the Centera from EMC. They scale into the petabyte range.
Providing you can find some sort of filesystem to support it (good luck), you could stash multiple arrays behind your host, or you could put in a TagmaStore from HDS with several arrays behind it. I'm not entirely sure how large the Tagma will scale, but the number 32 petabytes sticks in my head from a whitepaper somewhere.
I'd also question the perceived need to create one big filesystem to hold your whole petabyte of data. I'm a storage geek for a living, and I've found that usually after you start drilling into the application requirements, you find out that the app folks are either trying to use a data warehouse solution that's too small for the environment, or they're simply not aware of other alternatives available in their chosen app. No offense, but it sounds like you've had snowshoes strapped to your feet and directed to take a stroll through a minefield.
All of my legal documents (passport, driver's license, employment paperwork, insurance paperwork, bank & investment accounts, vehicle registrations, credit cards, and so on) have my full, legal name, since that's why I was given a "full, legal name" in the first place. So, I am "William" on paper and to those to whom I am not known, but "Bill" socially.
I have had problems with this in two instances:
- When the people from EMC's support center call me , I answer the phone "Hello, this is Bill." They ask for "William". I reply that yes, I am he. They ask again for William.
- Way back, when I got my skymiles account with Delta (they were actually just called "frequent flyer miles" at the time), I used "Bill" as my name. Since then, when I attempt to have my miles credited to my account, they tell me that I have to have a card in my name. When I attempt to explain to them that "Bill" is short for "William" and has been for the last several hundred years, they stare at me blankly, tell me that the amplifiers go to eleven, and repeat that I have to have a card in my name.
Next to impossible? Perhaps for the rank amateur! So far, out of several different manual transmission vehicles that I've driven (including a large F9000 box van), the only one I have been unsucessful in my operation of a handphone while driving and shifting is my motorcycle. And, honestly, that's more of a noise problem than anything else. A couple companies make some nice noise-cancelling boom mics that will interface with your average handphone.
To be more on-topic: The EPA Estimates (there's a keyword for ya! It sounds much more marketable than "wild-ass guess") really only serve to try to compare one car against another, thinking only in terms of gas miliage. My daily beater was rated at 27/37 when it rolled out of the showroom in 1997. I've gotten it as high as 43 (78 mph avg. speed, novemeber, from somewhere in Indiana to somewhere just south of Milwaukee, late at night. Doesn't make sense to me, either, but I did the math four times, just to be sure), as low as 18 (probably burning an eighth of an inch off the clutch and a quarter off the tires in the process), and I usually see about 30-40 for my daily commute (35 miles each way, half the time in heavy traffic, almost all the time on city highways). I religiously check my gas miliage (it's a great early warning indicator!), and I've played with some different variables in the car's 270k miles.
I've found that tire pressure really does take away a couple mpg, after slightly deflating a set of tires I was getting ready to replace. I measure no difference in miliage among dino oil, syn-blend, or synthetic. A nasty air filter will cut an mpg or so off. Winter is always worse than summer, all else being equal.
The biggest gain, however -- the one that got me to 40mpg on my commute -- is shifting behavior. No shock, really, but I didn't expect the gain that I was able to acheive. If I let the engine rev, it's a lot more fun, but I'll pull low-to-mid 30s. If, however, I wait until the RPMs in my current gear are just about 100 over the "lugging point" in the next higher gear, and shift at that moment, I get into fifth really fast, I don't lug the engine (that's really bad. don't do that. you might save some gas, and some effort, but pulling motors out -- especially tranvsere ones -- is a real PITA that you just don't want to do), and I push my miliage to around 40. It seems like I get just a couple more miles out of a fillup if I rev-match instead of using the clutch. Double-clutching drops about 25-50 miles off my fillup total...
If that's too much work for you, buy a bike. Mine gets between 60 and 70 mpg, riding solo, and being extremely heavy on the throttle. I can't bring myself to old-lady the poor thing, so I'm not sure what I could get it up to...
I have worked in several union shops (manufacturing companies) in the past, and currently work for a RBOC (union shop) being contracted out to a large aerospace manufacturer (union shop). Since I'm in IT, I'm not a bargained employee. Here's what I have witnessed:
At the RBOC for whom I work, the local CWA decided to threaten to go on strike. The company was doing poorly (as every telecom was/is) and needed to cut costs to stay in business. Instead of offering all-expense-paid benefits to the employees, the company wanted to do a more traditional "we pay most, you pay some" health plan -- I think it works out to around $20-40 per bi-weekly paycheck for a family plan. The union nearly walked (and I mean it was down to the *last* minute). I do not have any desire to have co-workers that maintain that mentality.
At one manufacturing facility, I was on the floor of the DC, hooking up some fibre. We had the union electrical workers run the cable from cabinet to cabinet, and they turned it over to me so I could actually hook it up. While plugging the fibre into the switch, it slipped out of my hand, went through the hole in the floor, and landed in the cable tray under the floor. I nearly had a greivance filed against me because I reached down and picked it up (without pulling the floor tile, no less!), instead of calling in the union electricians again to pluck the cable from the basket, about 8 inches below the floor. I do not wish to work with people that have that mentality.
At a different manufacturer, I needed a null-modem serial cable built. I'm quite versed in cutting silver satin cable, crimping ends on to them, and assembling DB25 adapters. Instead of being able to put that together in the 10 to 15 minutes it would have taken me, I had to wait 2 weeks for the on-staff, union electricians to build the cable for me. I gave them the exact pin-outs, and yet, they managed to cross the wires. Instead of being able to open the DB hood and change the pinouts myself, I had to send it back to them and wait another 2 weeks until they could "get around" to fixing it. I do not wish to work with people with that mentality.
At that same company, I had to wait for about 3 days after I was hired, for a union member to come and move a desk from the office next to mine, so that I'd have a place to put things, like my computer and phone and whatnot. Three days, I had no desk, even though there were three of them in the office next door. Simply because they had a guy who would file a grievance if anyone moved furniture except him. I really don't want to work with anyone with that sort of mentality.
The long and the short of it is that I have seen first hand, in several different companies, how the unions' protection of a single employee has lowered the efficiency of the company, and of the other employees of the company. I've heard this brought up time after time, and I can't think of any way to make my day at work worse than by bringing in a union.
I've been in a good number of very large data centres (both colo and in-house), and I have yet to see one that is designed for the comfort of humans. Fact is, once the box is installed, you really don't have any good reason to wander in there. In fact, there is a large manufacturing facility in the Pittsburgh area which will not let you on the floor unless you have a valid change control ticket.
That having been said, you data centre is going to have to be at whatever temperature the equipment needs. So, if you've got several racks of Clariion, you're going to need to pump more air in than if you're just running a couple racks of PCs. Sometimes, in order to keep some peices of equipment cool, you need to pump so much air that the rest of the DC is cooler. I was in a DC that was comfortably at about 70 or so before they installed a few racks of storage gear. That gear started getting temp alarms until they cranked the thermostat down to 65. (And that wasn't a result of the equipment being too far out from the AC. One of the units was only a few floor tiles away).
Keeping your DC around 65 or 70 is probably your best bet. You could play with it, by bringing the temperature up a little bit and seeing what breaks, but that's not real smart. Wear heavy clothing if you have to into the DC, but primarily you should avoid going in there unless you absolutely can't avoid it. That's not workspace, that's equipment space.
On a more amusing note... I worked for a very small company once which had some PCs in the data centre which ran a CTI application. There were these two women that refused to do their work from their desk and insisted in working at the rack in the DC. The room was pretty well packed wall-to-wall -- when I had to get in to do physical cable moves, or server installs, or what-have-you, I was forever tripping over these two. The solution was simple: I cited an increased amount of hardware in the room and brought the temp down to the lowest setting. They found it so hard to work while trying to keep their elbows over their chests, they finally went back to their desks and worked from there. There *can* be advnatages to having an overly-cold DC.
Novell has had a package out for some time now that does this quite well... It was NAL (Novell Application Launcher) and it got turned into part of ZENWorks a few years ago. I assume they're still supporting it, although, I haven't done anything Novell-related in a few years. Great NDS integration, and an application image generation that works great (takes a snAPPshot of your system before install and after install and then saves the deltas to apply to other PCs), will allow you to choose what icons show up where, and will check to make sure the app is installed, allowed to run, has availible licenses, and is of the right version before launching. If it's not installed, or needs an upgrade, it'll install it automatically. It's really flexible and quite sturdy... Maybe MS will have something that's that easy in Active Driectory soon, but Novell's had that working with NDS for years now.
This is true. However, if you look at the lawsuit, it's being filed by the advertisers and the websites that are selling the advertising. It is not being brought by the persons viewing the pages. Ergo, the advertisers, pending a win in court, will set a precedent that it violates copyright to alter the advertising. Follow that through to the next logical conclusion: Will it be a similar violation of copyright to use junkbuster proxies or Mozilla's "Block images from this server" option?
For this reason, and this reason alone, I belive Gator is in the right -- Once the page is served up, we have the right to view it however we choose (with graphics, without graphics, in Courier New, 72-point font, without sound, through a translator, etc etc etc).
Now, if the USERS were suing Gator for altering their web-browsing experience without their permission, Gator should lose.
I wind up doing a lot of work with some larger spreadsheets (storage system implementation documentation), as well as some fairly massive CSV imports from perl scripts. I haven't needed to do a lot of formulas/macros in the spreadsheet (since most of my spreadsheets are a result of perl scripts, I just make the script do it!), however, I've found that OOo has wound up working much much better than Excel for me. It's faster, it has better importing, great interoperability with my cow'orkers using Office, and the file sizes are smaller. Plus, I can install a copy on my laptop, both work desktops, and my three PCs at home (running Win2k, WinXp, and Linux across the 6 boxes that I use) without any fear of Microsoft Visual Gestappo Suite XP coming down on me, or my employer. I've been playing around with StarOffice for the last few versions and found it a bit cumbersome and broken (imports not working right, limited versions of Office formats to export to, really slow on my dual P2-233 linux box). OpenOffice, however, has completely impressed me.
Indeed, that would be a pretty shaky legal standing. That's why, according to the article, they're kicking around the idea of federal legislation to establish an agency that will enforce and collect this royalty. That could put book publishers on a little sturdier ground, legally speaking, when they start complaining to Amazon about the used books availible there.
I've worked in a few different companies, some tech-based, some not. I've noticed that there seem to be two basic theories on how the employer perceives the value of its employees:
We assign value to our employees because we recognize that our business depends on having skilled, dependable, professional people.
We assign value to our employees because we have a certain task that needs to be done a certain way in a certain amount of time for a certain cost.
A perfect example of a firm that follows the latter school of thought would be the Professional Services arm of EMC. In my time there, I found that institutionally, they regarded their employees as distateful things that they had to have around. There was a high amount of demand on the employee to accomplish tasks in a certain fashion on a certain timetable. The employee's input on that timetable or execution process was not very highly sought after. Employees were laid off, while workload was increased in an effort to maximize profits. While maximizing profits is not a Bad Thing, attempting to do it in this fashion is not wise, long term. The result is that the majority of the folks employed there are looking to jump ship: Contractors were hired on at a third of their contracting weekly take -- their other choice was to simply have their contract cancelled (this, of course, at the same time that the job market was heading downward. In this environment, the employer has very little regard for the employee, and is a pretty awful place to work: If you try to leave you will be coerced either with money, or with an implied threat of your new employer (who happens to be an EMC customer) getting trouble if they hire you -- no matter if your contact with that client was through EMC or not, and no matter if there was any teaming agreement in place.
The other end of that spectrum is the company which has more long-term vision: They are also interested in maximizing profits, but they realize that their operations will run more smoothly if they reciprocate some of the loyalty that they expect from their employees. In this instance, the employer might make a demand of you (for example, sacrifice 18 hours of a weekend in a data centre), however, they will realize that this is a hardship and rather than just have you suck it up, give you something in return (a few days off, for example).
If the company has no loyalty to you, expect that every time you need something, you'll have to complain loudyly. If, however, they realize that a happy employee will be a very productive one, they will nearly always treat you fairly and rarely put you in a position where you need to make demands
I have no more than a most basic understanding of how trademark law works, however, since this is a computer telephony-type project, they might want to think about picking a new name before they get sued. This two-bit company I worked for a couple years back registered a very similar word as their trademark for a digital recording system: VOCALS.
Note that I make no judgement on the hows and whys of the way that whole process works, but I've seen enough news stories of this sort of thing that they might want to consider coming up with something else. If they were wildly and completely different, I wouldn't even bring it up, but one is VoIP and the other is a digital voice-recording system that ties into the phone system on one end and a database & data-collection application on the other-end...
What's especially difficult is when some of the commercials are for upcoming episodes of the same show!
And what's REALLY difficult is when you're using TiVO.. not paying a whole lot of attention... and they play a TiVO ad which "simulates" the TiVO menus. The first couple times I had that happen to me, I was pretty freaked out, thinking my TiVO had somehow lost its mind...
I've never been in a position where I've been asked to take a paycut, temporary or otherwise. I've taken a paycut to switch jobs (beleive me: ANYTHING to not have to work for EMC!), and I've talked extensively with folks in the tech sector that have taken paycuts to continue working. I've always sworn up and down that I'd never take a paycut, that I'd just walk.
Four months of unemployment, however, with no jobs out there, watching the cash I had saved up to use on buying a new mmotorcycle go down the drain, wasting it on stupid things like rent, utilities, and food, will kind of change your perspecitve, I think. I would think that it depends heavily on the company itself, and your position in the job market:
If the company is looking strong, long-term, and you're pretty sure things are going to get much better, then it might be worth it. Taking a cut could actually help the company's cashflow problems and buy them enough time to get the next big contract, or do something rebuild.
This is probably pretty unlikely, though. I'd think that if the company has gotten this bad, you're probably looking pretty hopeless, long term. In which case, you have three options: You can quit now, quit later, or get laid off later. Quitting now means no unemployment (at least not in my state, to the best of my knowlegde), and no job in this oh-so-stellar job market. Getting laid off means that you'll be looking for a job while all your former coworkers are also looking for a job, but you'd have unemployment, most likely, and possibly some sort of severange package (but I wouldn't count on it).
I'd say your best option is to take your paycut now and start shopping for a new job immediately. Job search as though you are unemployed today and need a job. Chances are, you can keep yourself afloat on the reduced salary long enough to find a new home at a company that might be a little more stable.
There's a last option that you could explore, however, lawyers are expensive and even if you did win, there probably wouldn't be any money left for you to have, and you'd be stuck with no job, no mon-ay, and a nice, fat lawyer bill.
While it is true that someone with access to the switching equipment in a CO or POP somewhere could, conceiveably, hook a buttset up to your line and listen in, the rooms where that equipment is located are rather tightly controlled (at least in the case of the LEC in my area).
Additionally, the act of simply walking up to the demarc (especially the latest style, which involves putting it outside the walls of your home) and throwing a buttset/recorder/RF broadcasting bug on your lines, is not exactly a trivial act today. Nor is it something that is feasible as this sort of illegal wiretapping is fairly easily detected, and preventable through some fairly basic physical security measures.
In terms of unauthorized illegal use of your phone line, it is very difficult for me to use your phone to make an obscene phone call today: I would need to either tap your line in some illegal fashion (which means breaking in to your house or breaking into the CO and disabling the camera system somehow, or tricking your cordless base into thinking that my radio signal is actually its associated cordless handset), or I have to get your phone from you (which means breaking in, or getting you to hand me your telephone). Again, not trivial, and not practical.
Fast forward to your future, with a napster/gnutella-like system where I can make a telephone by searching for a landline that can dial toll-free to the xxx-yyy area code-exchange that I wish to call. I simply run a search and come up with your user name. I select your user name, since it says the landline is free and there's no one in the queue. I give it the phone number I wish to call and put on my headset. Your computer verifies that I'm not blacklisted (I'm not), and that I'm not trying to dial a toll call, or 911, or any other restricted number (again, I'm not). So it allows me to make my phone call.
Now, you can simply pick up your phone. You don't need to risk your job at the LEC or POP. You don't need to risk getting shot breaking into my house to put a bug on my line. You don't need to sit outside my house with a scanner, trying to find the freq that my phone uses. All you have to do is listen in on an extension. Or, pick up a $99 inductive amplifier at Graybar and listen in without having to lift the phone. You could record it. You could stream it through shoutcast. You could record it for playback later. In fact, you could, conveivably, record every call that comes through automatically. All of these would be trivial, especially when compared to the complexity of performing similar operations today. You can make an Echelon argument, and say that calls are all monitored and keyword-scanned today, but again, that's not a trivial thing for J. Random User to access.
Additionally, if my intentions were more malicious, and I wanted to (for example) make harrasing telephone calls to my ex-girlfriend, I could very easily do so from your phone line. Granted, there could be a blacklisting system in place that might ban my IP address or username after abuse, but it would still place you at risk, and I can still get either a new IP address or a new username and continue abusing. And putting you at risk.
The key here is that while it is possible to commit similar abuses today, there is a high risk involved (see: getting shot, losing job, getting punched in the face when you hand me the phone and I start making obscene phone calls), and the actual process to commit these abuses is not exactly trivial. A system like this, however, would make the risk go away (I might have to get a different IP address or username), and would make the process very, very simple. This is why such a system is fundamentally flawed in terms of security.
...Which means that whoever you're calling on his landline will need to have equipment to decrypt. If calling, say, J. Random Lawyer, Esq., for example, how do I know that he'll be able to provide encryption/decryption services? Or, when I call Aunt Oldperson, how do I explain to her that she needs to go out and buy an x-hundred dollar kit to put on her POTS line so that she can talk to me? Or, what if I'm calling a cell-phone? Relying on some stream encryption is quite impractical...
I see a couple problem with this, however, the biggest drawback would be the complete lack of privacy. What prevents Bob from running such a gateway and then picking up a phone once my call is dialed? Or hooking a recorder up to his line?
Additionally, what about the problem that (at least for me) plauges the current P2P networks: you're halfway through your download (or phone conversation) and the host reboots, disconnects, or otherwise cuts off access?
What about people then using my telephone (which, remember is fully traceable to me) to make obscene or harrasing phone calls? Sure, I could block 911, 900, and toll calls... but what if they want to just call someone and threaten them with bodily harm, or any of the other things that is nastily illegal to do with a telephone? Sure, I might be able to pull up logs to 'prove' it wasn't me (if the logs would be submissible, of course)... but do I want the hassle? I think not.
I suppose we're starting to mildly drift off topic, here, but I've actually been doing this sort of thing (at home) for some time now. While I can't exactly transfer the telemarketers around, I do find great entertainment in keeping them on the phone for quite a while (once I managed to hold one captive for about a half hour), feigning interest, passing the phone around to various members of the household (works best when I'm visiting my parents, and I have half a dozen or more bored people at my disposal), or just acting(?) very stupid and making them explain things over and over. Naturally, when get bored with them, I'll cheerfully wish them a good (day|evening|weekend) and remind them to put me on their do not call list.
I even managed to get some form of sweet revenge with the Lexington, KY newspaper. I was called one evening, at home, and told about some special weekend offer for home-delivery. Understand that ordinarily I would refuse, simply on principle. The irony is that I had *just* finished looking up the number for home-delivery, so that I could take it with me to work the next day and order home-delivery. I figured that in this ONE case, they actually had good timing, and a service that I was going to buy *anyway*, so... fine: I'd order the paper. One problem: the woman that called me could *ONLY* sell me their weekend package, and I wanted the full-blown, 7-day-a-week, normal-price service. I was dumbfounded.
So, the next day, I gave the paper a telephone call and asked to be connected to new subscriptions. I was connected to a very helpful gentleman who explained the whole subscription plan to me about seven or eight times and then I told him the story that I just related. I explained to him that I was a customer that was ready to buy -- all they had to do was take my money. I then told him that because of that experience I was no longer interested in receiving the paper, and that I would be buying the Cincinnati newspaper at my local Kroger instead. He got rather offended at this, and accused me of calling just to waste their valuable time. I somehow supressed a laugh and told him that I knew *EXACTLY* how he felt, since that's the feeling I had after their telemarketing call.
All in all, I doubt that anyone there will ever notice, or even know how I felt about the whole thing... but, still, making an unsolicited call to a telemarketer (yeah, I know, it was just to the company that contracted a telemarketer, but, still) just seemed to drip with delicious irony.
Agreed completely! In fact, it's even worse than how you've put it: In many areas, people don't even have to spend $1500 for hosting rights/static IP: This plan from Cincy Bell, just to use the local example, gives you 768/384k (the "standard" speed offered by CBT), and static IP, no server restictions, for $110/month. No, it's not as fast as a T1... but that's compared to about $40/month for the residential version of the same-speed service. Is it more? Yes. But is it still a good deal, if you want to host servers out of your house? Absolutely. I agree completely that these folks that whine about their *residential* service not providing *business*--class service: I vote we shoot them.
Actually, the article indicates that it uses some sort of RF remote control to operate the elevator.
Does it help patients escape?
on
Hospital Robots
·
· Score: 1
You know! Like that meal-bringing robot in NASA's hospital from The Flight of the Navigator? Or, can you hide inside it from the authorities, while it encourages you to eat recycled food ("it's good for the environment, and OK for you!")?
Seriously, though... I understand that it was once commonplace for people to roll a cart into offices to sell coffee, or whatnot to the worker bees: perhaps the mobile vending machine isn't too far off? Send an instant message to the robot and it'll add you to his route? Hmm.. =)
I can't speak for Ameritech's services, since I just moved out of Ameritech's LATA and back into Cincinnati Bell's... however: Cincy Bell has their ADSL service that they call ZoomTown. Overall, it's kind of a PITA: It's $40/month, 768k/384k, dynamic IP, double NAT (IIRC), and, most annoyingly, you have to authenticate through this nasty web interface (don't get me started). This is the strictly residential program. They have other services that will allow you to bypass their auth portal, get static IP, get the TOS that allows you to run servers, have reverse DNS, multiple IPs, higher speeds, etc etc etc. At a price. The service that I'm going to sign up for, once I find a place to live, is around $300/month for no portal, 1 mbit/768k, static IP, reverse DNS, and, since it's a Business DSL hookup, the TOS allows me to run whatever servers I want (unless I provide spam or illegal things or the standard CYA stuff for the ISP). Since I work for the company that owns CintiBell, I think I might get it even cheaper than that. And I think they have a slightly slower version of that (768k/384k) for less bucks a month.
More than residential? Yes. But it's still a damned good price for that kind of service. I pay $40 for my cable modem today (one of the roadrunner service areas, which I'll be moving out of), and that IP is mostly static, but, in theory, my TOS prohibits me from running servers (so they could turn it off, or otherwise screw with me), and the IP does change some times, which is a hassle. Naturally, there's no reverse DNS, either.
So, the long and the short of it, is that there are areas out there that have the kind of service you're looking for, but it is not residential-class service. It's businnes-class, and you're going to have to pay for it. So stop whining.
I think I need to put my contacts in...
on
Linux Tuning Tricks?
·
· Score: -1, Redundant
...because when I read the headline for this topic in my Slashbox, I could have sworn that it was a discussion of some new Open Source revenue model. I read it as: Linux turning tricks.
As a couple other folks have mentioned, due to things like SafeDisc, there are methods that are used to prevent you from making copies. To recap, it involves putting errors on the disc that, when the game starts, are checked for. If the errors are present, the game starts. Else, it fails or asks you to put in the (original) CD.
Here's my question, though: If you went through the code and took out the bits that made the call to the CDROM to check for the CD/errors, you're in violation of the DCMA, right? Circumventing copy protection device, or whatever?
But, what if you make a bit-for-bit copy (something that Nero Burning ROM is particularly good at, so I hear)? You're not circumventing anything... you're only duplicating the exact errors that they have put on the disc. Granted, you have a copyright violation to deal with, and it doesn't help those folks that have older CD|DVD-ROMs that can't see past the errors... But, from a DCMA vantage point, are you in the clear?
Slashdot Mirror
67TB is not almost a petabyte.
Let's build ten of those for $78,670 for 670TB and then we've got an almost petabyte...
If you're talking about building some sort of archival-type repository (like, keeping years worth of satellite imagery, for example), then you should probably look at the Centera from EMC. They scale into the petabyte range.
Providing you can find some sort of filesystem to support it (good luck), you could stash multiple arrays behind your host, or you could put in a TagmaStore from HDS with several arrays behind it. I'm not entirely sure how large the Tagma will scale, but the number 32 petabytes sticks in my head from a whitepaper somewhere.
I'd also question the perceived need to create one big filesystem to hold your whole petabyte of data. I'm a storage geek for a living, and I've found that usually after you start drilling into the application requirements, you find out that the app folks are either trying to use a data warehouse solution that's too small for the environment, or they're simply not aware of other alternatives available in their chosen app. No offense, but it sounds like you've had snowshoes strapped to your feet and directed to take a stroll through a minefield.
All of my legal documents (passport, driver's license, employment paperwork, insurance paperwork, bank & investment accounts, vehicle registrations, credit cards, and so on) have my full, legal name, since that's why I was given a "full, legal name" in the first place. So, I am "William" on paper and to those to whom I am not known, but "Bill" socially.
I have had problems with this in two instances:
- When the people from EMC's support center call me , I answer the phone "Hello, this is Bill." They ask for "William". I reply that yes, I am he. They ask again for William.
- Way back, when I got my skymiles account with Delta (they were actually just called "frequent flyer miles" at the time), I used "Bill" as my name. Since then, when I attempt to have my miles credited to my account, they tell me that I have to have a card in my name. When I attempt to explain to them that "Bill" is short for "William" and has been for the last several hundred years, they stare at me blankly, tell me that the amplifiers go to eleven, and repeat that I have to have a card in my name.
Next to impossible? Perhaps for the rank amateur! So far, out of several different manual transmission vehicles that I've driven (including a large F9000 box van), the only one I have been unsucessful in my operation of a handphone while driving and shifting is my motorcycle. And, honestly, that's more of a noise problem than anything else. A couple companies make some nice noise-cancelling boom mics that will interface with your average handphone.
To be more on-topic: The EPA Estimates (there's a keyword for ya! It sounds much more marketable than "wild-ass guess") really only serve to try to compare one car against another, thinking only in terms of gas miliage. My daily beater was rated at 27/37 when it rolled out of the showroom in 1997. I've gotten it as high as 43 (78 mph avg. speed, novemeber, from somewhere in Indiana to somewhere just south of Milwaukee, late at night. Doesn't make sense to me, either, but I did the math four times, just to be sure), as low as 18 (probably burning an eighth of an inch off the clutch and a quarter off the tires in the process), and I usually see about 30-40 for my daily commute (35 miles each way, half the time in heavy traffic, almost all the time on city highways). I religiously check my gas miliage (it's a great early warning indicator!), and I've played with some different variables in the car's 270k miles.
I've found that tire pressure really does take away a couple mpg, after slightly deflating a set of tires I was getting ready to replace. I measure no difference in miliage among dino oil, syn-blend, or synthetic. A nasty air filter will cut an mpg or so off. Winter is always worse than summer, all else being equal.
The biggest gain, however -- the one that got me to 40mpg on my commute -- is shifting behavior. No shock, really, but I didn't expect the gain that I was able to acheive. If I let the engine rev, it's a lot more fun, but I'll pull low-to-mid 30s. If, however, I wait until the RPMs in my current gear are just about 100 over the "lugging point" in the next higher gear, and shift at that moment, I get into fifth really fast, I don't lug the engine (that's really bad. don't do that. you might save some gas, and some effort, but pulling motors out -- especially tranvsere ones -- is a real PITA that you just don't want to do), and I push my miliage to around 40. It seems like I get just a couple more miles out of a fillup if I rev-match instead of using the clutch. Double-clutching drops about 25-50 miles off my fillup total...
If that's too much work for you, buy a bike. Mine gets between 60 and 70 mpg, riding solo, and being extremely heavy on the throttle. I can't bring myself to old-lady the poor thing, so I'm not sure what I could get it up to...
I have worked in several union shops (manufacturing companies) in the past, and currently work for a RBOC (union shop) being contracted out to a large aerospace manufacturer (union shop). Since I'm in IT, I'm not a bargained employee. Here's what I have witnessed:
At the RBOC for whom I work, the local CWA decided to threaten to go on strike. The company was doing poorly (as every telecom was/is) and needed to cut costs to stay in business. Instead of offering all-expense-paid benefits to the employees, the company wanted to do a more traditional "we pay most, you pay some" health plan -- I think it works out to around $20-40 per bi-weekly paycheck for a family plan. The union nearly walked (and I mean it was down to the *last* minute). I do not have any desire to have co-workers that maintain that mentality.
At one manufacturing facility, I was on the floor of the DC, hooking up some fibre. We had the union electrical workers run the cable from cabinet to cabinet, and they turned it over to me so I could actually hook it up. While plugging the fibre into the switch, it slipped out of my hand, went through the hole in the floor, and landed in the cable tray under the floor. I nearly had a greivance filed against me because I reached down and picked it up (without pulling the floor tile, no less!), instead of calling in the union electricians again to pluck the cable from the basket, about 8 inches below the floor. I do not wish to work with people that have that mentality.
At a different manufacturer, I needed a null-modem serial cable built. I'm quite versed in cutting silver satin cable, crimping ends on to them, and assembling DB25 adapters. Instead of being able to put that together in the 10 to 15 minutes it would have taken me, I had to wait 2 weeks for the on-staff, union electricians to build the cable for me. I gave them the exact pin-outs, and yet, they managed to cross the wires. Instead of being able to open the DB hood and change the pinouts myself, I had to send it back to them and wait another 2 weeks until they could "get around" to fixing it. I do not wish to work with people with that mentality.
At that same company, I had to wait for about 3 days after I was hired, for a union member to come and move a desk from the office next to mine, so that I'd have a place to put things, like my computer and phone and whatnot. Three days, I had no desk, even though there were three of them in the office next door. Simply because they had a guy who would file a grievance if anyone moved furniture except him. I really don't want to work with anyone with that sort of mentality.
The long and the short of it is that I have seen first hand, in several different companies, how the unions' protection of a single employee has lowered the efficiency of the company, and of the other employees of the company. I've heard this brought up time after time, and I can't think of any way to make my day at work worse than by bringing in a union.
I've been in a good number of very large data centres (both colo and in-house), and I have yet to see one that is designed for the comfort of humans. Fact is, once the box is installed, you really don't have any good reason to wander in there. In fact, there is a large manufacturing facility in the Pittsburgh area which will not let you on the floor unless you have a valid change control ticket.
That having been said, you data centre is going to have to be at whatever temperature the equipment needs. So, if you've got several racks of Clariion, you're going to need to pump more air in than if you're just running a couple racks of PCs. Sometimes, in order to keep some peices of equipment cool, you need to pump so much air that the rest of the DC is cooler. I was in a DC that was comfortably at about 70 or so before they installed a few racks of storage gear. That gear started getting temp alarms until they cranked the thermostat down to 65. (And that wasn't a result of the equipment being too far out from the AC. One of the units was only a few floor tiles away).
Keeping your DC around 65 or 70 is probably your best bet. You could play with it, by bringing the temperature up a little bit and seeing what breaks, but that's not real smart. Wear heavy clothing if you have to into the DC, but primarily you should avoid going in there unless you absolutely can't avoid it. That's not workspace, that's equipment space.
On a more amusing note... I worked for a very small company once which had some PCs in the data centre which ran a CTI application. There were these two women that refused to do their work from their desk and insisted in working at the rack in the DC. The room was pretty well packed wall-to-wall -- when I had to get in to do physical cable moves, or server installs, or what-have-you, I was forever tripping over these two. The solution was simple: I cited an increased amount of hardware in the room and brought the temp down to the lowest setting. They found it so hard to work while trying to keep their elbows over their chests, they finally went back to their desks and worked from there. There *can* be advnatages to having an overly-cold DC.
Rhode Island is already tiny! They can't afford to lose any ground. Maybe MA and CT are ganging up on RI to re-border them out of existance! :)
Novell has had a package out for some time now that does this quite well... It was NAL (Novell Application Launcher) and it got turned into part of ZENWorks a few years ago. I assume they're still supporting it, although, I haven't done anything Novell-related in a few years. Great NDS integration, and an application image generation that works great (takes a snAPPshot of your system before install and after install and then saves the deltas to apply to other PCs), will allow you to choose what icons show up where, and will check to make sure the app is installed, allowed to run, has availible licenses, and is of the right version before launching. If it's not installed, or needs an upgrade, it'll install it automatically. It's really flexible and quite sturdy... Maybe MS will have something that's that easy in Active Driectory soon, but Novell's had that working with NDS for years now.
This is true. However, if you look at the lawsuit, it's being filed by the advertisers and the websites that are selling the advertising. It is not being brought by the persons viewing the pages. Ergo, the advertisers, pending a win in court, will set a precedent that it violates copyright to alter the advertising. Follow that through to the next logical conclusion: Will it be a similar violation of copyright to use junkbuster proxies or Mozilla's "Block images from this server" option?
For this reason, and this reason alone, I belive Gator is in the right -- Once the page is served up, we have the right to view it however we choose (with graphics, without graphics, in Courier New, 72-point font, without sound, through a translator, etc etc etc).
Now, if the USERS were suing Gator for altering their web-browsing experience without their permission, Gator should lose.
I wind up doing a lot of work with some larger spreadsheets (storage system implementation documentation), as well as some fairly massive CSV imports from perl scripts. I haven't needed to do a lot of formulas/macros in the spreadsheet (since most of my spreadsheets are a result of perl scripts, I just make the script do it!), however, I've found that OOo has wound up working much much better than Excel for me. It's faster, it has better importing, great interoperability with my cow'orkers using Office, and the file sizes are smaller. Plus, I can install a copy on my laptop, both work desktops, and my three PCs at home (running Win2k, WinXp, and Linux across the 6 boxes that I use) without any fear of Microsoft Visual Gestappo Suite XP coming down on me, or my employer. I've been playing around with StarOffice for the last few versions and found it a bit cumbersome and broken (imports not working right, limited versions of Office formats to export to, really slow on my dual P2-233 linux box). OpenOffice, however, has completely impressed me.
Indeed, that would be a pretty shaky legal standing. That's why, according to the article, they're kicking around the idea of federal legislation to establish an agency that will enforce and collect this royalty. That could put book publishers on a little sturdier ground, legally speaking, when they start complaining to Amazon about the used books availible there.
We assign value to our employees because we recognize that our business depends on having skilled, dependable, professional people.
We assign value to our employees because we have a certain task that needs to be done a certain way in a certain amount of time for a certain cost.
A perfect example of a firm that follows the latter school of thought would be the Professional Services arm of EMC. In my time there, I found that institutionally, they regarded their employees as distateful things that they had to have around. There was a high amount of demand on the employee to accomplish tasks in a certain fashion on a certain timetable. The employee's input on that timetable or execution process was not very highly sought after. Employees were laid off, while workload was increased in an effort to maximize profits. While maximizing profits is not a Bad Thing, attempting to do it in this fashion is not wise, long term. The result is that the majority of the folks employed there are looking to jump ship: Contractors were hired on at a third of their contracting weekly take -- their other choice was to simply have their contract cancelled (this, of course, at the same time that the job market was heading downward. In this environment, the employer has very little regard for the employee, and is a pretty awful place to work: If you try to leave you will be coerced either with money, or with an implied threat of your new employer (who happens to be an EMC customer) getting trouble if they hire you -- no matter if your contact with that client was through EMC or not, and no matter if there was any teaming agreement in place.
The other end of that spectrum is the company which has more long-term vision: They are also interested in maximizing profits, but they realize that their operations will run more smoothly if they reciprocate some of the loyalty that they expect from their employees. In this instance, the employer might make a demand of you (for example, sacrifice 18 hours of a weekend in a data centre), however, they will realize that this is a hardship and rather than just have you suck it up, give you something in return (a few days off, for example).
If the company has no loyalty to you, expect that every time you need something, you'll have to complain loudyly. If, however, they realize that a happy employee will be a very productive one, they will nearly always treat you fairly and rarely put you in a position where you need to make demands
Note that I make no judgement on the hows and whys of the way that whole process works, but I've seen enough news stories of this sort of thing that they might want to consider coming up with something else. If they were wildly and completely different, I wouldn't even bring it up, but one is VoIP and the other is a digital voice-recording system that ties into the phone system on one end and a database & data-collection application on the other-end...
And what's REALLY difficult is when you're using TiVO.. not paying a whole lot of attention... and they play a TiVO ad which "simulates" the TiVO menus. The first couple times I had that happen to me, I was pretty freaked out, thinking my TiVO had somehow lost its mind...
I've never been in a position where I've been asked to take a paycut, temporary or otherwise. I've taken a paycut to switch jobs (beleive me: ANYTHING to not have to work for EMC!), and I've talked extensively with folks in the tech sector that have taken paycuts to continue working. I've always sworn up and down that I'd never take a paycut, that I'd just walk.
Four months of unemployment, however, with no jobs out there, watching the cash I had saved up to use on buying a new mmotorcycle go down the drain, wasting it on stupid things like rent, utilities, and food, will kind of change your perspecitve, I think. I would think that it depends heavily on the company itself, and your position in the job market:
If the company is looking strong, long-term, and you're pretty sure things are going to get much better, then it might be worth it. Taking a cut could actually help the company's cashflow problems and buy them enough time to get the next big contract, or do something rebuild.
This is probably pretty unlikely, though. I'd think that if the company has gotten this bad, you're probably looking pretty hopeless, long term. In which case, you have three options: You can quit now, quit later, or get laid off later. Quitting now means no unemployment (at least not in my state, to the best of my knowlegde), and no job in this oh-so-stellar job market. Getting laid off means that you'll be looking for a job while all your former coworkers are also looking for a job, but you'd have unemployment, most likely, and possibly some sort of severange package (but I wouldn't count on it).
I'd say your best option is to take your paycut now and start shopping for a new job immediately. Job search as though you are unemployed today and need a job. Chances are, you can keep yourself afloat on the reduced salary long enough to find a new home at a company that might be a little more stable.
There's a last option that you could explore, however, lawyers are expensive and even if you did win, there probably wouldn't be any money left for you to have, and you'd be stuck with no job, no mon-ay, and a nice, fat lawyer bill.
While it is true that someone with access to the switching equipment in a CO or POP somewhere could, conceiveably, hook a buttset up to your line and listen in, the rooms where that equipment is located are rather tightly controlled (at least in the case of the LEC in my area).
Additionally, the act of simply walking up to the demarc (especially the latest style, which involves putting it outside the walls of your home) and throwing a buttset/recorder/RF broadcasting bug on your lines, is not exactly a trivial act today. Nor is it something that is feasible as this sort of illegal wiretapping is fairly easily detected, and preventable through some fairly basic physical security measures.
In terms of unauthorized illegal use of your phone line, it is very difficult for me to use your phone to make an obscene phone call today: I would need to either tap your line in some illegal fashion (which means breaking in to your house or breaking into the CO and disabling the camera system somehow, or tricking your cordless base into thinking that my radio signal is actually its associated cordless handset), or I have to get your phone from you (which means breaking in, or getting you to hand me your telephone). Again, not trivial, and not practical.
Fast forward to your future, with a napster/gnutella-like system where I can make a telephone by searching for a landline that can dial toll-free to the xxx-yyy area code-exchange that I wish to call. I simply run a search and come up with your user name. I select your user name, since it says the landline is free and there's no one in the queue. I give it the phone number I wish to call and put on my headset. Your computer verifies that I'm not blacklisted (I'm not), and that I'm not trying to dial a toll call, or 911, or any other restricted number (again, I'm not). So it allows me to make my phone call.
Now, you can simply pick up your phone. You don't need to risk your job at the LEC or POP. You don't need to risk getting shot breaking into my house to put a bug on my line. You don't need to sit outside my house with a scanner, trying to find the freq that my phone uses. All you have to do is listen in on an extension. Or, pick up a $99 inductive amplifier at Graybar and listen in without having to lift the phone. You could record it. You could stream it through shoutcast. You could record it for playback later. In fact, you could, conveivably, record every call that comes through automatically. All of these would be trivial, especially when compared to the complexity of performing similar operations today. You can make an Echelon argument, and say that calls are all monitored and keyword-scanned today, but again, that's not a trivial thing for J. Random User to access.
Additionally, if my intentions were more malicious, and I wanted to (for example) make harrasing telephone calls to my ex-girlfriend, I could very easily do so from your phone line. Granted, there could be a blacklisting system in place that might ban my IP address or username after abuse, but it would still place you at risk, and I can still get either a new IP address or a new username and continue abusing. And putting you at risk.
The key here is that while it is possible to commit similar abuses today, there is a high risk involved (see: getting shot, losing job, getting punched in the face when you hand me the phone and I start making obscene phone calls), and the actual process to commit these abuses is not exactly trivial. A system like this, however, would make the risk go away (I might have to get a different IP address or username), and would make the process very, very simple. This is why such a system is fundamentally flawed in terms of security.
...Which means that whoever you're calling on his landline will need to have equipment to decrypt. If calling, say, J. Random Lawyer, Esq., for example, how do I know that he'll be able to provide encryption/decryption services? Or, when I call Aunt Oldperson, how do I explain to her that she needs to go out and buy an x-hundred dollar kit to put on her POTS line so that she can talk to me? Or, what if I'm calling a cell-phone? Relying on some stream encryption is quite impractical...
I see a couple problem with this, however, the biggest drawback would be the complete lack of privacy. What prevents Bob from running such a gateway and then picking up a phone once my call is dialed? Or hooking a recorder up to his line?
Additionally, what about the problem that (at least for me) plauges the current P2P networks: you're halfway through your download (or phone conversation) and the host reboots, disconnects, or otherwise cuts off access?
What about people then using my telephone (which, remember is fully traceable to me) to make obscene or harrasing phone calls? Sure, I could block 911, 900, and toll calls... but what if they want to just call someone and threaten them with bodily harm, or any of the other things that is nastily illegal to do with a telephone? Sure, I might be able to pull up logs to 'prove' it wasn't me (if the logs would be submissible, of course)... but do I want the hassle? I think not.
I suppose we're starting to mildly drift off topic, here, but I've actually been doing this sort of thing (at home) for some time now. While I can't exactly transfer the telemarketers around, I do find great entertainment in keeping them on the phone for quite a while (once I managed to hold one captive for about a half hour), feigning interest, passing the phone around to various members of the household (works best when I'm visiting my parents, and I have half a dozen or more bored people at my disposal), or just acting(?) very stupid and making them explain things over and over. Naturally, when get bored with them, I'll cheerfully wish them a good (day|evening|weekend) and remind them to put me on their do not call list.
I even managed to get some form of sweet revenge with the Lexington, KY newspaper. I was called one evening, at home, and told about some special weekend offer for home-delivery. Understand that ordinarily I would refuse, simply on principle. The irony is that I had *just* finished looking up the number for home-delivery, so that I could take it with me to work the next day and order home-delivery. I figured that in this ONE case, they actually had good timing, and a service that I was going to buy *anyway*, so... fine: I'd order the paper. One problem: the woman that called me could *ONLY* sell me their weekend package, and I wanted the full-blown, 7-day-a-week, normal-price service. I was dumbfounded.
So, the next day, I gave the paper a telephone call and asked to be connected to new subscriptions. I was connected to a very helpful gentleman who explained the whole subscription plan to me about seven or eight times and then I told him the story that I just related. I explained to him that I was a customer that was ready to buy -- all they had to do was take my money. I then told him that because of that experience I was no longer interested in receiving the paper, and that I would be buying the Cincinnati newspaper at my local Kroger instead. He got rather offended at this, and accused me of calling just to waste their valuable time. I somehow supressed a laugh and told him that I knew *EXACTLY* how he felt, since that's the feeling I had after their telemarketing call.
All in all, I doubt that anyone there will ever notice, or even know how I felt about the whole thing... but, still, making an unsolicited call to a telemarketer (yeah, I know, it was just to the company that contracted a telemarketer, but, still) just seemed to drip with delicious irony.
Regarding telling folks to piss off:
Agreed completely! In fact, it's even worse than how you've put it: In many areas, people don't even have to spend $1500 for hosting rights/static IP: This plan from Cincy Bell, just to use the local example, gives you 768/384k (the "standard" speed offered by CBT), and static IP, no server restictions, for $110/month. No, it's not as fast as a T1... but that's compared to about $40/month for the residential version of the same-speed service. Is it more? Yes. But is it still a good deal, if you want to host servers out of your house? Absolutely. I agree completely that these folks that whine about their *residential* service not providing *business*--class service: I vote we shoot them.
Actually, the article indicates that it uses some sort of RF remote control to operate the elevator.
You know! Like that meal-bringing robot in NASA's hospital from The Flight of the Navigator? Or, can you hide inside it from the authorities, while it encourages you to eat recycled food ("it's good for the environment, and OK for you!")?
Seriously, though... I understand that it was once commonplace for people to roll a cart into offices to sell coffee, or whatnot to the worker bees: perhaps the mobile vending machine isn't too far off? Send an instant message to the robot and it'll add you to his route? Hmm.. =)
I can't speak for Ameritech's services, since I just moved out of Ameritech's LATA and back into Cincinnati Bell's... however: Cincy Bell has their ADSL service that they call ZoomTown. Overall, it's kind of a PITA: It's $40/month, 768k/384k, dynamic IP, double NAT (IIRC), and, most annoyingly, you have to authenticate through this nasty web interface (don't get me started). This is the strictly residential program. They have other services that will allow you to bypass their auth portal, get static IP, get the TOS that allows you to run servers, have reverse DNS, multiple IPs, higher speeds, etc etc etc. At a price. The service that I'm going to sign up for, once I find a place to live, is around $300/month for no portal, 1 mbit/768k, static IP, reverse DNS, and, since it's a Business DSL hookup, the TOS allows me to run whatever servers I want (unless I provide spam or illegal things or the standard CYA stuff for the ISP). Since I work for the company that owns CintiBell, I think I might get it even cheaper than that. And I think they have a slightly slower version of that (768k/384k) for less bucks a month.
More than residential? Yes. But it's still a damned good price for that kind of service. I pay $40 for my cable modem today (one of the roadrunner service areas, which I'll be moving out of), and that IP is mostly static, but, in theory, my TOS prohibits me from running servers (so they could turn it off, or otherwise screw with me), and the IP does change some times, which is a hassle. Naturally, there's no reverse DNS, either.
So, the long and the short of it, is that there are areas out there that have the kind of service you're looking for, but it is not residential-class service. It's businnes-class, and you're going to have to pay for it. So stop whining.
...because when I read the headline for this topic in my Slashbox, I could have sworn that it was a discussion of some new Open Source revenue model. I read it as: Linux turning tricks.
d'oh!
As a couple other folks have mentioned, due to things like SafeDisc, there are methods that are used to prevent you from making copies. To recap, it involves putting errors on the disc that, when the game starts, are checked for. If the errors are present, the game starts. Else, it fails or asks you to put in the (original) CD.
Here's my question, though: If you went through the code and took out the bits that made the call to the CDROM to check for the CD/errors, you're in violation of the DCMA, right? Circumventing copy protection device, or whatever?
But, what if you make a bit-for-bit copy (something that Nero Burning ROM is particularly good at, so I hear)? You're not circumventing anything... you're only duplicating the exact errors that they have put on the disc. Granted, you have a copyright violation to deal with, and it doesn't help those folks that have older CD|DVD-ROMs that can't see past the errors... But, from a DCMA vantage point, are you in the clear?