...
You shall ensure that your use of the Service does not restrict, inhibit, interfere with, or degrade any other user's use of the Service, nor represent (in the sole judgment of Comcast) an overly large burden on the network. In addition, you shall ensure that your use of the Service does not restrict, inhibit, interfere with, disrupt, degrade, or impede Comcast's ability to deliver and provide the Service and monitor the Service, backbone, network nodes, and/or other network services....
Given that with this clause it's fairly trivial (and accurate no less) for them to claim that you are placing an overly large burden on the network. Given that they are in fact hold the power to make that decision, in a way that is abundantly clear. It's quite obvious that this clause in the AUP of comcast makes it trivial, and legally enforcable for them to terminate your service. People should be happy they don't have their service terminated, at least with throttling you can continue to have service. If you feel that throttling is just totally unreasonable, terminate the service from your side.
There's no way in hell you'll win a case against a major ISP about false advertising or guaranteed service crapola. You'll get laughed out of court fairly quickly (or you should). If you actually manage to win a case, they'll immediately change the TOS, which they are allowed to do and every time they say "6 Megabit/sec" it'll be followed by an asterix and a footnote that says "peak speed".
This clearly isn't the advice you asked for. Personally, I'd make effective use of shelves (and or cabinets), and use the longest table that will fit on the longet dimention. Get the next longest table for the other dimension. There should just be room for the door to open, and the chair to be out of the way when someone is sitting in there. You can stack desktops and tower cases underneath. Have a working surface for repairs on top. Hook the laptop dock into the KVM, and put the dock up high (I once packed 10 computers into a room that was 6.5x9.5 or so at a small startup, oh and that was also my office). Now, that I've given you the token advice you've asked for. Let me try giving you my real advice:
I've been reasonable effective with the passive aggressive stance, of not supporting something so stupid. I'm not sure I can visualize just how dumb this is (I'm not good with descriptions of space). If this is truly a political issue, put in everything you can fit in with a reasonable about of space. The rest of it became "do without". I've seen 60 person offices run of development offices run off 3 machines in a server room that run all of the IT infrastructure for the company. It's stupid, but it can be done. A decent desk and an LCD monitor are all that's needed. It'll easily fit within a 7x7 room (a square room roughly of the right size).
You'll be shocked and amazed at the types of results you get from, "I've done everything I can with the resources I have. This project will continue to be a nightmare and always behind the eightball until we decide to do it right. I'll continue to do my best to support it as it is, but it'll take more time, and cost a lot more money then just having done this properly the first time. It will continue to cost us money, and I can give you estimates of the amount of time it will take for resolving this properly will become profitable".
Generally speaking, no sane boss will argue against that. I've come dreadfully close to being fired on several occasions because for this. However, I was kept around as "the guy who got stuff done". Generally letting people suffer the consequences of their stupidity is the single most effective and convincing way to get them to see the error.
I used to work with a woman who everytime you asked her to test things you developed for her to automated a business process she was in charge of that "it was so broken, that I'll just do it by hand". No matter how far or near you were to the mark, if it didn't work perfectly the first time she would refuse to work towards fixing it. Wouldn't explain what she needed or what was wrong. She used to do that to everyone. And everyone worked really hard to coax her into discussing it like a rational person. I found the most effective way to deal with her was to walk out. Wait 3 months until she was completely overwhelmed by the problem you were in the middle of automated. Dust off the old code, work with her for a day and finish up the automation. No one every understood that, all she wanted was the attention of how much crap she had to do, and all the crap she did by hand for you. Most importantly, she liked working harder, not smarter. So automating it before it was absolutely necessary ruined her mind set. Generally speaking, letting someone suffer the consequences of their decision is the ultimate way of convincing them that they were wrong.
Ironically, I did get laid off about 2 months after explaining to my boss that he needed to find a way to make backups. He could make me repsonsible for them, and I'd do them. He could motivate the lazy piece of crap who hadn't gotten them made in the 9 months he'd worked there (even more irritating, he dismantled the old backups that worked). Since I was the one who'd get to spend 96 straight hours in the office rebuilding our network due to no backups, I had a bit more vested interest in seeing them work. I worked really hard to be ahead of the game in everything I did, and I'd be responsible for cle
Uhhh, I've given that advice before, but generally it goes like this: Put 3 months living expenses (not earnings, those numbers should have a gap if you can arrange it, hopefully in the positive cash flow direction *sigh* it's sad that I probably have to point that out to some of my friends). Take the rest of what you have, divide it into 3 month living expense chunks. Put those into 3 month CD's. Put them into CD's where each one is three months longer then the last until you run out of chunks. As they come up, put them into the longest length one you have. Generally I'd cap that at 12-18 months living expenses. As extra money becomes available, put that into some longer term investment. Hopefully over the 12-18 months, there'll be a good time to get out of the market if need be.
The problem I have with your advice is that, having a 5 year CD come up in 3 years will do me no good if I lose my job. I'll have to cash it out and lose a great deal of the interest and possible princepal. Use CD's as a form of unemployement insurance, so you can lose your income or deal with unexpected events reasonable quickly. With this sort of scheme, your three months in cash holds you until the first CD. Each CD will allow you to reach the next CD's cash out.
It also forces you to throttle your cost of living... If you live by the rules, you've got to put together more CD's (or add to your CD's as they come up) if you want to significantly change your cost of living. Which forces you to save, and decide what you really need vs what you really want vs what you can actually safely afford to do.
Ironically, I've never done it. Several of my friends have, and sleep better at night knowing they have 12 months if they lose their job before they have to dip into long term investments. I generally have left far too much cash in a savings account or in one large CD, thinking I'd pay off my big ticket items (2nd mortgage and a trunk payment) in the interest of cashflow. Pretty soon, the trunk will be done, and the 2nd will follow quickly... Then it'll take a lot smaller CD's to pull it all off.
I'd prioritize putting money into a Roth IRA before a CD, and matching your 401K, and maxing it if you can afford it. A Roth IRA, you can pull out the princepal without any penalties. So you can view that as a cash fund of last resort. However, the long term tax benefits are too good to pass up given that it's capped how much you can put in per year.
Actually if you read the papers about the arguments, the people who argued hardest for the Electoral College is actually the South. The South had huge populations, but incredibly small populations of eligible voters (White Land owning men). Because of the changes in who is eligible, this bit of history has been erased. Partial reasons for including the Electoral College as written in the Constitution (see the 3/5ths rule right in the middle of it), is so that the South would get authority commesurate with the number of slaves, yet without letting the slaves vote.
Ironically, the electoral college is one of the last vestiges of Slavery with any weight in the Constitutions. In fact, Jefferson wouldn't have gotten elected if not for the Electoral College. I believe other early elections had the outcome affected also.
See here, or just google for "Slavery" and "Electoral College".
My largest concern for the Electoral college is the sense of "my vote doesn't count", and the fact that we've devolved into two parties and that's it. The lack of any third party candidate to get real traction concerns me. Effectively there is a lot less of a market place where people can't pick from more people. It'd be novel to have a legitimate opportunity to clue the established political machine that things should change, without them having to make it blazingly obvious to the entire public that the system is incredibly broken.
I'm reasonable sure you the article you are referring to is from Joel on Software.
JWZ might have also written one about it, but I don't recall it. I read quite a bit of his stuff a while back. What you are discussing sounds exactly like a Joel on Software article.
Clearly you are not from Europe. There it literally is the right of the artist to control your ability to appreciate their creation. It literally is a moral issue there, as opposed to copyright in the US which is ostensible to serve the greater good of the public by encouraging the creation of new art and/or science.
While I agree with you to a certain extent. Ultimately, I think letting the artist control there work isn't the end of the world. If there is truely demand for the content you want, it'll get served (assuming you really want cleaned up content, that is never asserted in your statement). If you are willing to pay extra for "cleaned up" content, your needs/desires will get served. People will start to make movies and what not that don't need to be cleaned up. If they aren't economically viable, they won't. I mean, there is a demand for porn, and that was really taboo at various points in history. The market place can resolve this issue, and allow the creators of content to have some assurances that their works will be preserved as they originally intended (weather that be Disney or Vivid). Which should encourage them to make content... If allowing others to sell unlicensed derived works is seen as a strong discouragement to the creation of content, it should be seen as unconstitutional. Literally, that's pretty much what the Constitution says the Congrees (and/or Federal Gov't at large) are supposed to be doing.
I'd have to read up on the legalities of making and delivering a derived work. I mean, derived works are legitimate. I'm not aware of what the ruling would be on a derived work and what sort of arrangements must be made before I can distribute my derived work on yours. It's an area of Copyright I'm not terrible aware of the precedents and inners workings of. My guess is that it's not allowed under the law, as this is the legal machinary that is used to make the GPL work. I mean, if you can modify a movie and distribute the derived work, what is to stop a person from modifying the binaries from RedHat to remove the "naught bits", without distribution of the source? Allowing this would seriously undercut the ability of the F/OSS movement, and a lot of other licensing terms.
Clearly you've never had hit a bug in hardware or software. As someone who has had fsck turn up errors on both reiserfs and ext3 while running with Journals, I can assure you, that a really good fsck is a wonderful thing. Bugs in hardware or software can reduce the "journaling" to nothing. Journaling is really about applying database ACID technology to filesystems in the event of an crash. It's also pretty speedy.
But that's OK, 'cause you're paying for it by subsidizing it with your first class postage on other mail. You do realize you subsidize the discounted postage bulk mail pays with your full rate first class postage, right?
That's silly... It's actually the other way around... Bulk mail is subsidizing first class mail, not the other way around bub. The bulk mailers get a lower rate because they come pre-sorted, and generally with bar codes on them or other machine readable notations to facilitate the delivery. They cover the costs of driving past everyone's door. The larger the number of pieces of mail, the more letters the delivery costs are amortized over. If bulk mailers stopped sending mail, there'd be a huge spike in the price of stamps. For those of us keeping score, that means they are good for us, not bad. Thanks, for playing...
Curious, I thought with an efficient enough fuel cell (run off natural gas) you could generate power in your home, avoid the inefficiency of losing power during the power line travel... (if I remember my physics, correctly, the power lost during transmission is proportional to i^2 where i is the current). I thought the process of transforming the energy to and from that state was fairly inefficient (but better then sending it down the power line without doing it. It's been a long time. I thought it was the sorta link you could end up using to take yourself off the power grid, or better yet sell the power back to the power company. The question becomes what is the efficiency of transportation of natural gas. I'm not sure.
It's like the fact that modern day farms are actually far less efficient then ones from 100 years ago, from an energy perspective. Used to be that farming was a net energy benefit.... Not true any more. If I remember correctly between all of the oil products used, and automation, something like 100 times the energy is put in, then is extracted from the food produced on it.
This guy sounds like a whack job, but I believe he's referencing some reasonable sources:
Read here.
Generally, I've found that when you get a bunch of idiots in a room, not much useful happens. A lot gets said, a lot of plans get laid. Not a lot of real work gets done.
Generally speaking, the solution to incompetence is to fire people. Generally starting at the top, and replacing them with competent people. They will generally proceed with the firing. Meeting to discuss their lack of competence isn't going to help. It's generally a situation of the blind leading the blind (if you were really good at large scale IT, why don't you actually work there, short of previous experience, running a corporate network generally has little to do with personal experince on a home network. If it really is such a problem, you should apply for the job with seriously good incentive based pay). As someone who was one half of the IT departement (SA, programming, help desk, DBA duties) at a fast growing company that went from 10 to 150 people in about 4 years, I can assure that most users outside of IT have no idea what is easy, and what is hard. The number of stupid requests put in by "knowledgable users" was insane.
Lack of backups is a serious problem. However, you haven't described why. In my experience, it's a lack of budget or priority. Generally speaking, good backup units are one of the single most expensive pieces of equipment an IT place will purchase (backups generally scale with the type of IT equipment you buy, if you buy $10K servers, your buying $25K backup libraries. If you purchase $1K servers, you buy $2-4K tape drives. I've never been purchasing $100K+ computers, I'm not sure what type of tape solution they need). The next most common reason for no backups, is literally not enough hours in the day, or backups are such a tremendous strain on the production systems that they can't be run during business hours. Which means that they can't finish. I've seen a fully justified case of not making backups as it literally wasn't cost effective. We could have made backups, but just regenerating the data was far more cost effective. The hardware and software we needed just wasn't justifiable for the volume of data. Critical data we made backups of. The scads of other data we had that turned over regularly wasn't worth it. In the end, we ended up building a hot spare and kept short term online backups on it. Getting a tape unit capable of the storage requirements was too expensive. We generated about 1-2TB/hr, 99% of which would never ever be needed again and after two weeks it was so outdated it had no value. We processed the 1% upon being identified. So backing it up was just stupid. Unless a bug was found in the identification algorithm, then it was useful to have the other 99%. Generally, you just started with the oldest data still of use and processed it all again.
Lack of storage space, is generally attributable to users if users don't have a quota. Given a group of 2 people, at least one of them is a digital pack rat. I'd say given a group of 1, but I've seen a handful of non-pack rats. For the record, I'm a pack rat, but when I am good about cleaning up when disk space gets tight. In my experience, the solution to storage is to parcel it out by type of usage. 80% of the usages will have no problems. The others will use petabytes of storage if they are given access to it. At which point, it's strictly a budget issue and resolving the issue with the users. Generally speaking, near-line storage on CD or DVD that the user could burn themselves, or spooled for an IT professional to do was the solution. We did all CD's of data in triplicate. The original user got one, their supervisor got one, and the IT department held onto one. CD's go bad, and people tend to lose them, hence the three copies held by independent people. What is needed is an archival plan for moving data from online to offline, or deleting it.
try/finally isn't automatically run when you go out of scope. Yes the finally block is always run when you leave scope, but you must remember to wrap blocks of code with it, and put the proper contents in it. With C++ a destructor is always run when you go out of scope. Always barring an exception happening during an exception handling.
I wish Java had that, even if I didn't get to clean up memory with it. If only so I could use it to close files that go out of scope. Even if I had to declare the variable special to promise to never ever make a copy of the reference. I'd put up with that to deal with simple things like closing happening automatically without having to remember to add the try/finally block.
You read the book differently when you realize at page 20 you know the "surprise" ending that the basic plot doesn't even discuss the elements of it for 200 pages. The only completely obvious tell I remember was that the "real" battles used lessons learned about techniques he'd done only on the "simulator". I don't believe that was more then 20-30 pages before it was revealed in the book. It might have been a good guess on your part, unless I missed several other more subtle foreshadowings.
I read the book in my mid-20's, and it was an enjoyable read. Maybe I liked it so much, because I was very clever for a person my age growing up, and that I was a physical misfit all my life. I've been one of the tallest people in my age group nearly all my life. Which is very unusual. So maybe Ender's struggles were something I related to better.
Personally, I enjoyed Ender's struggles and having to deal with bullies and older children. His having more and more pressure heaped on him until he broke (or didn't). Dealing with greater and greater handicaps and overcoming was fairly compelling to me. His time in school was the best part of the book. The stuff where he was battling the aliens wasn't that great, but I did like it far better then the rest of Card's other books.
I still remember it took the my fourth grade teacher a while to figure out that I'd gamed the system. I'd sit quitely and answer the first several questions she'd ask. Then she'd refuse to call on me. I noticed she'd call on anyone who she thought wasn't paying attention in an attempt to embarrass them. She'd admonish them that they needed to pay more attention. So I intentionally looked like I was goofing off so she'd call on me, so we could keep going rather then stalling on some silly concept she'd just explained. It took her a while to realize that I was acting like I was goofing off just so she'd call on me, not because I was incapable of sitting still for a hour at a time. Even while immitating the mis-behaving children, I was completely capable of paying attention to everything she said. After a while, she just refused to let me particpate except when everyone else was totally stumped. It made for a very long slow year.
I'd agree. My only commentary on a possibly reason is that enough people who continued to read the series might have regretted it just as much as I did. "Ender's Game" was absolutely amazing. Unfortunately, someone had told me the surprise ending years earlier, and I remembered it before it was revealed in the story. The second book in the series wasn't too bad. However, the third book in the series made me seriously revise my opion of Orson Scott Card as an author. I had absolutely no idea why I was reading the book, and by the end, it streched well beyond any plausible set of physics, where the first in the books had generally stayed within the bounds of standard physics which I appreciated. There were some samll liberties taken, but even those are "reasonable" by SCI-FI standards. I couldn't bring myself to read the rest of them. I think there are seven in the series. It soured my opinion of OSC and of "Ender's Game".
Next, you'll be telling me that Buggy Whip makers have declared "horseless carriges" a fad, and their end is neigh... I mean, the credability of the source most definitely has to be questioned. It's nice that he admits that he's biased. I have a hunch that sub-Saharan Africa isn't going to be consuming scads of information via the internet over a phone, or a computer any time soon. I'm fairly confident that water purification, decent roads, and reliable energy are much higher on the list of things to accomplish.
True about the NDA, but that's what made him realize that they weren't going to give him permission. It was a different day and age back then. Especially in academia. Copyright was pretty much summarily ignored, especially with respect to source code. It was fairly common to send your fixes to someone elses code without a second thought. An NDA makes it clear that won't be happening.
Plus, he probably could have distributed his fixes, as he'd own the copyright to the fixes, as long as the person receiving it owned the original work. I believe that's the premise under which AT&T UNIX was distributed, and then had third party fixes given out. Maybe AT&T had a special license that said you could distributed derviate works to anyone who had a license from them for the original. However, I thought that was a fundamental part of copyright. Could be wrong, it's not an area I know a great deal about.
It also means that if anyone gives you the code, you are free to give it to anyone else. Remember, Stallman's original problem that instigated the FSF movement was that he had to sign an NDA to get the source code to a printer driver so he could fix it.
If they hadn't required an NDA, he would have happily fixed the problem, given the fix to anyone who asked, and moved on with his life. However, the NDA and copyright prevented him from doing so.
The case of programs today is very different from that of books a hundred years ago. The fact that the easiest way to copy a program is from one neighbor to another, the fact that a program has both source code and object code which are distinct, and the fact that a program is used rather than read and enjoyed, combine to create a situation in which a person who enforces a copyright is harming society as a whole both materially and spiritually; in which a person should not do so regardless of whether the law enables him to.
It's reasonably clear that RMS things Copyright is harmful, and in his world, harmful things shouldn't exist. I remember reading FSF documents that end up saying that if copyright went away, the world would be a better place. However, I can't find a better cite then that in the 60 seconds I tried. Read RMS's early writtings, it's there. However, he might have changed his mind over the years.
Lets see, that makes Baseball cards sales, and diamond wholesalers in close to in the market of "dishonest practice".
I know that when I was collecting cards you could only get 40-50% of their face value when selling them to a store. Diamonds are generally sold at 2-3 times their wholesale price at jewlery stores. You surely can't sell them back to the stores for more then 25-50% of what you paid for them.
Now in computers generally the margin is much lower, but I've known lots of reputable resellers who sold stuff at way over a reasonable price. They also way under paid. That's just how the second hand market works.
All that said, there's nothing to say this guy isn't a fence dealing in stolen goods. However, the change in price by a factor of 4 isn't that far from any number of reputable business practices you see all the time.
Yeah, if I go to the dinky theater, I can get by cheaper then that, but I get stale popcorn, flat soda, and a dinky little seat.
I'm 6.5ft tall, and just flat out don't fit in most theaters. I end up going to the most expensive theater in town. Then for bonus, no one ever accounts for the fact that humans packed into a small space generate large amounts of heat.
When I saw "Return of the King" during opening weekend, the temp hit probably 85F in the theater (it was probably 25F outside). I had a coat and heavy clothes on. I took the coat off, but couldn't undress any more without being indecent. No on even considered turning the damn fans on the heating or cooling system. It was so dreadfully hot, I had a really hard time enjoying the movie. The sad part was they could have just proped the external exit door open. During the screening of Star Wars III, they did exactly the same thing, but it was brutally hot. The AC really should have been set lower, or at least had the fans on to move some air around.
I really enjoy the theater experience (movies are more visually impressive on the big screen), but lately, it's become very expensive, and more and more uncomfortable. Let me enjoy the movie at home. I'll happily wait until the DVD hits a price I can deal with. Think $12-$15. I'd purchase twice as many movies if they sold them at that price rather then charging $18-$20.
Uhhh, I'm fairly sure HIPPAA has been around for a lot longer then 2 years. I had to deal with it in one form or another 6-8 years ago.
HIPPAA is only as good as the people who have the data, and the oversight that is administered. I know I had patient data on a CD in my apartment for 4 years with a complete patient data set from a hospital I was doing some data conversion work for. I forgot they gave me an eval copy to spec out a bid for it. I turned it in when I realized I still had it, but in theory I could have sold the information for a small fortune on the black market. It had all the apropriate info to be used to forge SSN cards for illegal immigrants, all the information needed to apply for a credit card, or open a bank account. For extra bonus is had all that for people who were both alive and dead.
I wouldn't ever have done it, but realized that I had an opportunity to do it if I had felt like it.
Yeah, but I draw the line at eating greedy UNIX Systems Administrators... That's no good. Eating lawyers... Good, eating systems administrators trying to make lots of money... Bad...
Sorry, I didn't take the time to format it like it was in the e-mail archive. It had slightly more sturcture there. (I probably should have used "ecode" or "pre" tags). Although, it looks like I only missed one paragraph break now that I go back and check it. It was more readable as an e-mail then mine was.
I'm not taking credit for the lowercase letters however.
She seems like a really nice and smart person. She co-wrote what I've heard is one of the Best UNIX administration books ever. So use a foam tire iron or something... *grin*.
Any chance you can cite that? I've good looking (primarily because I wanted to know when). The closet thing I've found is this
The email I'm referring to is down a little ways.
the break is in the diffie hellman key exchange for des based on 127 bits.
it was done quite a while ago, solving the discrete log problem for the
field 2 ** 127 -1. the work was with ron mullin at the university
of waterloo. the actual implementation of the algorithms was done
on the denelcor hep supercomputer (since defunct) in 1984. there
were several technical papers by mullin and by coppersmith at ibm
yorktown on the method of attack. our paper on the implementation
which includes a description of the algorithm but not the gory details,
was in the proceedings of the international conference on parallel
processing in the summer of 1984. i can send you a copy if you
dont have access to the proceedings. the paper actually won the
best paper award at that conference, no $$, but i got a plaque
for my wall and denelcor sold a machine to nsa.
the reason i mentioned it to van was that sun has now done two talks
at meetings about their security on the network that is based on
des using the diffie hellman key exchange in exactly the field
that we broke. both times the talk was given by the programmer
who is implementing it not the mathematician who decided what to
be implemented. i pointed them again to the papers on it; hope
a number theorist there actually reads them.
Which doesn't clearly state if she did the implementation. It sure reads like she implemented someone from IBM's concept, or she wrote a paper about someone's implementation. I can't really tell from what she wrote.
However, whatever you are referring to appears to be reasonable hard to find on Google. I put in her name, DES, Boulder and encryption and various subsets. Whatever she did appears to be relatively lost to the sands of times as far as Google is concerned.
VM refers to both, just depending on the context. While I agree with you I generally think of VM as Virtual Memory, not as Virtual Machine, it's just one of those things. For the first six months they talked about UML and getting it integrated into the kernel, I thought they were talking about "Unified Modelling Language". Just get over the title. Your initial assumptions and intuition misled you. Shocking.
User Mode Linux is in 2.6, however, I believe they are referring to "Xen" which is a separate "arch" (like PPC, x86, SPARC). It is essentially an "arch" all it's own so that it can implement the low level details it needs to provide to the hosted OS's, but it has to run on top of a standard Linux kernel. It's an interesting concept.
You really shouldn't be so absolute about those things. I've done IP over ssh, which means you can do ICMP, UDP, and TCP over it. Not using ssh and port forwarding, but using ssh, pppd, it can be done. You create a pppd device that is attached to a terminal, the terminal gets created by sshd. You do all the same things at the other end. It's a bit more work on both ends to accomplish it, but anywhere you can do ssh port forwarding, you should be able to tunnel PPP over SSH.
It's standard and fairly simple. You can read about it here
As to why UDP is used, has nothing to do with "faster". The protocol is designed to use UDP, because it's connectionless, it has lower latency, and the TCP connection encapsulates a lot of the properites that NTP measures to correct for latency and transmission delay. If a packet gets dropped via UDP, NTP can compensate for that, with TCP it's much harder. If a packet gets dropped, retransmitting the same one again is stupid (that's what TCP would do), you should transmit a new one with a new timestamp (you can do this via UDP).
Slashdot Mirror
Given that with this clause it's fairly trivial (and accurate no less) for them to claim that you are placing an overly large burden on the network. Given that they are in fact hold the power to make that decision, in a way that is abundantly clear. It's quite obvious that this clause in the AUP of comcast makes it trivial, and legally enforcable for them to terminate your service. People should be happy they don't have their service terminated, at least with throttling you can continue to have service. If you feel that throttling is just totally unreasonable, terminate the service from your side.
There's no way in hell you'll win a case against a major ISP about false advertising or guaranteed service crapola. You'll get laughed out of court fairly quickly (or you should). If you actually manage to win a case, they'll immediately change the TOS, which they are allowed to do and every time they say "6 Megabit/sec" it'll be followed by an asterix and a footnote that says "peak speed".
Kirby
This clearly isn't the advice you asked for. Personally, I'd make effective use of shelves (and or cabinets), and use the longest table that will fit on the longet dimention. Get the next longest table for the other dimension. There should just be room for the door to open, and the chair to be out of the way when someone is sitting in there. You can stack desktops and tower cases underneath. Have a working surface for repairs on top. Hook the laptop dock into the KVM, and put the dock up high (I once packed 10 computers into a room that was 6.5x9.5 or so at a small startup, oh and that was also my office). Now, that I've given you the token advice you've asked for. Let me try giving you my real advice:
I've been reasonable effective with the passive aggressive stance, of not supporting something so stupid. I'm not sure I can visualize just how dumb this is (I'm not good with descriptions of space). If this is truly a political issue, put in everything you can fit in with a reasonable about of space. The rest of it became "do without". I've seen 60 person offices run of development offices run off 3 machines in a server room that run all of the IT infrastructure for the company. It's stupid, but it can be done. A decent desk and an LCD monitor are all that's needed. It'll easily fit within a 7x7 room (a square room roughly of the right size).
You'll be shocked and amazed at the types of results you get from, "I've done everything I can with the resources I have. This project will continue to be a nightmare and always behind the eightball until we decide to do it right. I'll continue to do my best to support it as it is, but it'll take more time, and cost a lot more money then just having done this properly the first time. It will continue to cost us money, and I can give you estimates of the amount of time it will take for resolving this properly will become profitable".
Generally speaking, no sane boss will argue against that. I've come dreadfully close to being fired on several occasions because for this. However, I was kept around as "the guy who got stuff done". Generally letting people suffer the consequences of their stupidity is the single most effective and convincing way to get them to see the error.
I used to work with a woman who everytime you asked her to test things you developed for her to automated a business process she was in charge of that "it was so broken, that I'll just do it by hand". No matter how far or near you were to the mark, if it didn't work perfectly the first time she would refuse to work towards fixing it. Wouldn't explain what she needed or what was wrong. She used to do that to everyone. And everyone worked really hard to coax her into discussing it like a rational person. I found the most effective way to deal with her was to walk out. Wait 3 months until she was completely overwhelmed by the problem you were in the middle of automated. Dust off the old code, work with her for a day and finish up the automation. No one every understood that, all she wanted was the attention of how much crap she had to do, and all the crap she did by hand for you. Most importantly, she liked working harder, not smarter. So automating it before it was absolutely necessary ruined her mind set. Generally speaking, letting someone suffer the consequences of their decision is the ultimate way of convincing them that they were wrong.
Ironically, I did get laid off about 2 months after explaining to my boss that he needed to find a way to make backups. He could make me repsonsible for them, and I'd do them. He could motivate the lazy piece of crap who hadn't gotten them made in the 9 months he'd worked there (even more irritating, he dismantled the old backups that worked). Since I was the one who'd get to spend 96 straight hours in the office rebuilding our network due to no backups, I had a bit more vested interest in seeing them work. I worked really hard to be ahead of the game in everything I did, and I'd be responsible for cle
The problem I have with your advice is that, having a 5 year CD come up in 3 years will do me no good if I lose my job. I'll have to cash it out and lose a great deal of the interest and possible princepal. Use CD's as a form of unemployement insurance, so you can lose your income or deal with unexpected events reasonable quickly. With this sort of scheme, your three months in cash holds you until the first CD. Each CD will allow you to reach the next CD's cash out.
It also forces you to throttle your cost of living... If you live by the rules, you've got to put together more CD's (or add to your CD's as they come up) if you want to significantly change your cost of living. Which forces you to save, and decide what you really need vs what you really want vs what you can actually safely afford to do.
Ironically, I've never done it. Several of my friends have, and sleep better at night knowing they have 12 months if they lose their job before they have to dip into long term investments. I generally have left far too much cash in a savings account or in one large CD, thinking I'd pay off my big ticket items (2nd mortgage and a trunk payment) in the interest of cashflow. Pretty soon, the trunk will be done, and the 2nd will follow quickly... Then it'll take a lot smaller CD's to pull it all off.
I'd prioritize putting money into a Roth IRA before a CD, and matching your 401K, and maxing it if you can afford it. A Roth IRA, you can pull out the princepal without any penalties. So you can view that as a cash fund of last resort. However, the long term tax benefits are too good to pass up given that it's capped how much you can put in per year.
Kirby
Ironically, the electoral college is one of the last vestiges of Slavery with any weight in the Constitutions. In fact, Jefferson wouldn't have gotten elected if not for the Electoral College. I believe other early elections had the outcome affected also.
See here, or just google for "Slavery" and "Electoral College".
My largest concern for the Electoral college is the sense of "my vote doesn't count", and the fact that we've devolved into two parties and that's it. The lack of any third party candidate to get real traction concerns me. Effectively there is a lot less of a market place where people can't pick from more people. It'd be novel to have a legitimate opportunity to clue the established political machine that things should change, without them having to make it blazingly obvious to the entire public that the system is incredibly broken.
Kirby
JWZ might have also written one about it, but I don't recall it. I read quite a bit of his stuff a while back. What you are discussing sounds exactly like a Joel on Software article.
Any chance this article rings true with you?
Kirby
While I agree with you to a certain extent. Ultimately, I think letting the artist control there work isn't the end of the world. If there is truely demand for the content you want, it'll get served (assuming you really want cleaned up content, that is never asserted in your statement). If you are willing to pay extra for "cleaned up" content, your needs/desires will get served. People will start to make movies and what not that don't need to be cleaned up. If they aren't economically viable, they won't. I mean, there is a demand for porn, and that was really taboo at various points in history. The market place can resolve this issue, and allow the creators of content to have some assurances that their works will be preserved as they originally intended (weather that be Disney or Vivid). Which should encourage them to make content... If allowing others to sell unlicensed derived works is seen as a strong discouragement to the creation of content, it should be seen as unconstitutional. Literally, that's pretty much what the Constitution says the Congrees (and/or Federal Gov't at large) are supposed to be doing.
I'd have to read up on the legalities of making and delivering a derived work. I mean, derived works are legitimate. I'm not aware of what the ruling would be on a derived work and what sort of arrangements must be made before I can distribute my derived work on yours. It's an area of Copyright I'm not terrible aware of the precedents and inners workings of. My guess is that it's not allowed under the law, as this is the legal machinary that is used to make the GPL work. I mean, if you can modify a movie and distribute the derived work, what is to stop a person from modifying the binaries from RedHat to remove the "naught bits", without distribution of the source? Allowing this would seriously undercut the ability of the F/OSS movement, and a lot of other licensing terms.
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It's like the fact that modern day farms are actually far less efficient then ones from 100 years ago, from an energy perspective. Used to be that farming was a net energy benefit.... Not true any more. If I remember correctly between all of the oil products used, and automation, something like 100 times the energy is put in, then is extracted from the food produced on it.
This guy sounds like a whack job, but I believe he's referencing some reasonable sources: Read here.
Kirby
Generally speaking, the solution to incompetence is to fire people. Generally starting at the top, and replacing them with competent people. They will generally proceed with the firing. Meeting to discuss their lack of competence isn't going to help. It's generally a situation of the blind leading the blind (if you were really good at large scale IT, why don't you actually work there, short of previous experience, running a corporate network generally has little to do with personal experince on a home network. If it really is such a problem, you should apply for the job with seriously good incentive based pay). As someone who was one half of the IT departement (SA, programming, help desk, DBA duties) at a fast growing company that went from 10 to 150 people in about 4 years, I can assure that most users outside of IT have no idea what is easy, and what is hard. The number of stupid requests put in by "knowledgable users" was insane.
Lack of backups is a serious problem. However, you haven't described why. In my experience, it's a lack of budget or priority. Generally speaking, good backup units are one of the single most expensive pieces of equipment an IT place will purchase (backups generally scale with the type of IT equipment you buy, if you buy $10K servers, your buying $25K backup libraries. If you purchase $1K servers, you buy $2-4K tape drives. I've never been purchasing $100K+ computers, I'm not sure what type of tape solution they need). The next most common reason for no backups, is literally not enough hours in the day, or backups are such a tremendous strain on the production systems that they can't be run during business hours. Which means that they can't finish. I've seen a fully justified case of not making backups as it literally wasn't cost effective. We could have made backups, but just regenerating the data was far more cost effective. The hardware and software we needed just wasn't justifiable for the volume of data. Critical data we made backups of. The scads of other data we had that turned over regularly wasn't worth it. In the end, we ended up building a hot spare and kept short term online backups on it. Getting a tape unit capable of the storage requirements was too expensive. We generated about 1-2TB/hr, 99% of which would never ever be needed again and after two weeks it was so outdated it had no value. We processed the 1% upon being identified. So backing it up was just stupid. Unless a bug was found in the identification algorithm, then it was useful to have the other 99%. Generally, you just started with the oldest data still of use and processed it all again.
Lack of storage space, is generally attributable to users if users don't have a quota. Given a group of 2 people, at least one of them is a digital pack rat. I'd say given a group of 1, but I've seen a handful of non-pack rats. For the record, I'm a pack rat, but when I am good about cleaning up when disk space gets tight. In my experience, the solution to storage is to parcel it out by type of usage. 80% of the usages will have no problems. The others will use petabytes of storage if they are given access to it. At which point, it's strictly a budget issue and resolving the issue with the users. Generally speaking, near-line storage on CD or DVD that the user could burn themselves, or spooled for an IT professional to do was the solution. We did all CD's of data in triplicate. The original user got one, their supervisor got one, and the IT department held onto one. CD's go bad, and people tend to lose them, hence the three copies held by independent people. What is needed is an archival plan for moving data from online to offline, or deleting it.
Kirby
I wish Java had that, even if I didn't get to clean up memory with it. If only so I could use it to close files that go out of scope. Even if I had to declare the variable special to promise to never ever make a copy of the reference. I'd put up with that to deal with simple things like closing happening automatically without having to remember to add the try/finally block.
Kirby
I read the book in my mid-20's, and it was an enjoyable read. Maybe I liked it so much, because I was very clever for a person my age growing up, and that I was a physical misfit all my life. I've been one of the tallest people in my age group nearly all my life. Which is very unusual. So maybe Ender's struggles were something I related to better.
Personally, I enjoyed Ender's struggles and having to deal with bullies and older children. His having more and more pressure heaped on him until he broke (or didn't). Dealing with greater and greater handicaps and overcoming was fairly compelling to me. His time in school was the best part of the book. The stuff where he was battling the aliens wasn't that great, but I did like it far better then the rest of Card's other books.
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Plus, he probably could have distributed his fixes, as he'd own the copyright to the fixes, as long as the person receiving it owned the original work. I believe that's the premise under which AT&T UNIX was distributed, and then had third party fixes given out. Maybe AT&T had a special license that said you could distributed derviate works to anyone who had a license from them for the original. However, I thought that was a fundamental part of copyright. Could be wrong, it's not an area I know a great deal about.
Kirby
If they hadn't required an NDA, he would have happily fixed the problem, given the fix to anyone who asked, and moved on with his life. However, the NDA and copyright prevented him from doing so.
In the GNU Manifesto, RMS states:
It's reasonably clear that RMS things Copyright is harmful, and in his world, harmful things shouldn't exist. I remember reading FSF documents that end up saying that if copyright went away, the world would be a better place. However, I can't find a better cite then that in the 60 seconds I tried. Read RMS's early writtings, it's there. However, he might have changed his mind over the years.
Kirby
I know that when I was collecting cards you could only get 40-50% of their face value when selling them to a store. Diamonds are generally sold at 2-3 times their wholesale price at jewlery stores. You surely can't sell them back to the stores for more then 25-50% of what you paid for them.
Now in computers generally the margin is much lower, but I've known lots of reputable resellers who sold stuff at way over a reasonable price. They also way under paid. That's just how the second hand market works.
All that said, there's nothing to say this guy isn't a fence dealing in stolen goods. However, the change in price by a factor of 4 isn't that far from any number of reputable business practices you see all the time.
I'm 6.5ft tall, and just flat out don't fit in most theaters. I end up going to the most expensive theater in town. Then for bonus, no one ever accounts for the fact that humans packed into a small space generate large amounts of heat.
When I saw "Return of the King" during opening weekend, the temp hit probably 85F in the theater (it was probably 25F outside). I had a coat and heavy clothes on. I took the coat off, but couldn't undress any more without being indecent. No on even considered turning the damn fans on the heating or cooling system. It was so dreadfully hot, I had a really hard time enjoying the movie. The sad part was they could have just proped the external exit door open. During the screening of Star Wars III, they did exactly the same thing, but it was brutally hot. The AC really should have been set lower, or at least had the fans on to move some air around.
I really enjoy the theater experience (movies are more visually impressive on the big screen), but lately, it's become very expensive, and more and more uncomfortable. Let me enjoy the movie at home. I'll happily wait until the DVD hits a price I can deal with. Think $12-$15. I'd purchase twice as many movies if they sold them at that price rather then charging $18-$20.
Kirby
HIPPAA is only as good as the people who have the data, and the oversight that is administered. I know I had patient data on a CD in my apartment for 4 years with a complete patient data set from a hospital I was doing some data conversion work for. I forgot they gave me an eval copy to spec out a bid for it. I turned it in when I realized I still had it, but in theory I could have sold the information for a small fortune on the black market. It had all the apropriate info to be used to forge SSN cards for illegal immigrants, all the information needed to apply for a credit card, or open a bank account. For extra bonus is had all that for people who were both alive and dead.
I wouldn't ever have done it, but realized that I had an opportunity to do it if I had felt like it.
Kirby
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I'm not taking credit for the lowercase letters however.
She seems like a really nice and smart person. She co-wrote what I've heard is one of the Best UNIX administration books ever. So use a foam tire iron or something... *grin*.
Kirby
The email I'm referring to is down a little ways.
Which doesn't clearly state if she did the implementation. It sure reads like she implemented someone from IBM's concept, or she wrote a paper about someone's implementation. I can't really tell from what she wrote.
However, whatever you are referring to appears to be reasonable hard to find on Google. I put in her name, DES, Boulder and encryption and various subsets. Whatever she did appears to be relatively lost to the sands of times as far as Google is concerned.
Kirby
User Mode Linux is in 2.6, however, I believe they are referring to "Xen" which is a separate "arch" (like PPC, x86, SPARC). It is essentially an "arch" all it's own so that it can implement the low level details it needs to provide to the hosted OS's, but it has to run on top of a standard Linux kernel. It's an interesting concept.
Kirby
It's standard and fairly simple. You can read about it here
As to why UDP is used, has nothing to do with "faster". The protocol is designed to use UDP, because it's connectionless, it has lower latency, and the TCP connection encapsulates a lot of the properites that NTP measures to correct for latency and transmission delay. If a packet gets dropped via UDP, NTP can compensate for that, with TCP it's much harder. If a packet gets dropped, retransmitting the same one again is stupid (that's what TCP would do), you should transmit a new one with a new timestamp (you can do this via UDP).
Kirby