The corporate overlords shut off my groups.google.com access so I followed the instructions and notified the proxy administrator. I was told that I would not be granted access to usenet archives because I might access porn. When I pointed out that the binaries are not available in the archive I was then told that I might look up detailed instructions on how to make a bomb. I'm not kidding that's the excuse I got. When I pointed out that the company already trusts me with millions of dollars worth of data and systems, the least they should worry about is me looking for bomb instructions I was told the real reason was that they could not restrict what I was reading to non entertainment posts.
Now I just work around them and point out whenever possible that since company resources are not to be used for personal resons, they should not expect me to use my personal resources for company reasons. They drew the line and expect me to respect it, they should respect the line as well.
I also have a penchant for pointing out to management that since the executives don't trust them, I shouldn't either. They just love that. In the meantime I work the alloted time and no more(for them).
Often when I have to spend a lot of time researching a problem I mention to my manager that I would have already found the answer on groups.google.com but being the pointy haired boss that he is it's a waste of breath.
It's fairly common for financial packages designed for the mainframe to have the option of having source code included. But you're right sometimes companies would put a key piece of code that had no business being changed in object code only.
I currently work in a mixed mode environment I love working client/server and mainframe but I am starting to be cured of the mainframe side. Not because of anything to do with the technology but because of the overly paranoid rules of the "QA" people who don't know anything but their rule book. You should never put non-technical people in a position of standards enforcement, but most shops do this. It is also a drain to have the responsibility of providing emergency production support but not having the authority to actually fix the problem, but this is unique to this shop(I hope).
We use citrix in our prod environment because our users were allowed to buy their own software, not realizing that the current harware configurations were not powerful enough to run the software. So our management decided that instead of telling the users, "I guess you bought a pile of junk you can't use", decided to throw good money after bad and installed citrix. While citrix works, kind of, it is expensive, overly complex to set up and trouble shoot and is prone to crashing.
Can you tell I hate my short sighted, obsequious management?
I can see it now, because of security issues all sporting events require facial recognition technology. To offset the cost of implementing the technology the stadiums sell the data to advertisers and lease space for directional sound equipment so they can target ads to specific people in the stadium. Or they could decide to target ads to certain demographics. All white guys in their 40's will get ads for Michale Bolton's greatest hits. Bleh
Apparently 5 minutes of brisk pumping will give you 20 minutes of
So if you are heavy into the Pr0n 5 minutes of pumping will get you 20 minutes of pumping?
If you have an infinite number of monkeys pumping an infinite number of generators generating electricity for an infinite number of CD players then Michael Bolton will still be a no talent ass clown.
Pumping up the volume takes on a whole new meaning.
Maybe they can make a pelvic thrust model. It's marital aid AND an electrical generator.
Cat
So what if I'm lame and tired. At least I didn't make a beowolf cluster of vibrators joke.
Re:Good for some, nightmare for others
on
Peek-a-Boo(ty)
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· Score: 1
As long as policies are in place that forbid it, once someone complains about a cow-orker looking at porn, pull the logs, verify it and give a single warning. After that it's termination time. It's really very simple, and cheap.
Cat
Re:Good for some, nightmare for others
on
Peek-a-Boo(ty)
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
On the other side, as a Security Manager in a bank who's sometimes asked to go find out if person XYZ has been accessing nakedhairyeyebrowedcheerleaders.com, I can see how this utility might make it impossible for me to do my job.
Here's a novel idea. How about monitoring employess productivity instead. I could care less if my employees look at porn as long as no one complains and the work gets done. As soon as one of those two criteria change, then I get involved.
A spokeswoman for the studios involved in the MGM suit said that although the studios favor new technological advances, "new technology must go hand in hand with copyright protection." She declined to comment on the claim that keyword-based recording violates copyrights, focusing instead on ReplayTV 4000's ability to send shows over the Internet and delete commercials automatically.
What does editing commercials out have to do with copyright protection? I can understand having a problem with sharing movies but sharing TV shows that broadcast for free seems just a tad over the top.
Here, you can have this free product but you may not give it to others.
If you're still looking for an IT-job, the smart thing to do right now is to be searching for an IT job in a non-IT sector. Think banking, insurance, consultancy,...
I did this. I work at a major Insurance company now after running my own tech consulting firm during the boom. Luckily I got in before things really got bad. The sad thing is that in companies like this mediocrity is encouraged. The systems are horribly designed and bad data is everywhere in the production environment. The manager who hired me later gloated that she could take her pick of the good laid off consultants and didn't have to pay them much.
Typically what happens in companies like this is poorly designed and maintained systems will get cleaned up during a recession when the good technical people will work here because they have little choice. When the economy gets better the good ones leave and the mediocre programmers and analysts perform at script kiddie level. For example, my supervisor actually told me, "It's in production so it must be right" when I uncovered a bug in prod. Or for another example, I was told by the resident "expert" that cursors are not inefficient when compared to set processing in stored procedures. And of course the clueless supervisors believe the "expert" because he's been around longer and has a CS degree. Even though I've actually worked as a DBA and have experience designing and implementing database systems(they work on a purchased system).
So while it is safer to work in a non-technical company it is often infuriating having to deal with the abundance of incompetants.
I actually preferred f-29 retaliator to any other flight sims I've played. The problem I have with flight sims is there tends to be too much realism in the game. IOW, you can't really have a good dog fight because the weapons are designed to be fired from a mile off. Retaliator also fit on a 1.44 floppy. Anyone know of a good arcade like flight sims that doesn't take hours to learn how to play and has multiplayer capability?
I remember when CD players were too expsensive and people would make the same sort of argument. I also remember when DVD players were "too expensive" Hell, to some people they still are. I know I paid $150 bucks for one Tivo and $30 bucks for another one. The first one I got I happened to have a lot of disposable income and paid over $1000 bucks for which included the lifetime sub. It's still in use and worth more than a lot of stock I bought at the same time.
I am still awed by the fact that this thing can do all its PVR work and still run a FTP, Telnet and web daemons all on a 53 Mhz PPC chip with 16 M of RAM.
BTW, I have rented DVDs and recorded them on the Tivo when I knew I wouldn't have time to watch the movie and didn't want to pay for another day of rental.
If an ISP has unlimited access which it is calculating on the basis of an average SINGLE user with a SINGLE machine, and it states it clearly in its contract that you are paying for a single-user/single-machine, then anyone putting more than that on their link is in breach of their contract.
The funny thing is that I never signed a contract and when I mentioned this to a rep one time she replied, "well you to had to agree to the terms in order to load the software".
"Oh you mean the software that is still in the shrink wrap?".
Even if I agreed to the single-user/single machine bs I am using a switch which means only one user/machine is accessing the internet at any given time. It's like plugging in a different machine every few minutes, except that it's a lot faster and I don't have to plug and unplug cables to do it.
Cat
Re:The first Slashdot troll post investigation
on
KaZaa Suspends Downloads
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
I have a real problem with the offtopic mods. Often when discussing an article, discussion will drift away from the original article. I think this is to be encouraged or at least looked upon neutrally. Not everyone is so anal retentive that they need every post to be under its "proper" article. Sometimes there isn't a proper place for it, like the comment that spurred this extended conversation.
Well the 35,000 emails could simply have been one email to the allemployees@stupidcompany.com address. Often companies will not block usage of the global mailing address until they get burned with it.
We--and our rights--have survived more serious conflicts than this; we will survive this one too.
But the problem here is that our apparent leaders have not been able to define the parameters of this war in any meaningful sense. How will we know when it is over if they cannot define it? For some reason I doubt they will tell us it's over if it is in their best interest for it to continue.
Maybe these laws are there to prevent you from losing your job, health and general well-being... you drug advocates seem to miss how much suffering is caused to children and spouses in families where one of the parents is a drug addict. Please try to think about the other people too and not only your own selfish pleasures.
That's not a good enough reason to send people who are responsible users to prison. The war on some drugs causes more problems than it tries to solve and it hasn't solved any problems. It is unlikely it ever will.
Look at what Reagan's war on drugs did to the drug scene. Before Reagan marijuana was prevalent and cocaine and heroin were expensive and used primarily by well to do people. Since law enforcement tend to go after the rich last they start hitting the pot shipments. So as any busness would do, the cartels changed their business strategy and started producing more cocaine and heroin because it's easier to smuggle. So now instead of prevalent illicit use of a rather harmless drug we have crack and heroin which is cheaper to obtain than pot.
So then what do they do? They decide they should lock up the users for a long time. That didn't work so they created asset forfeiture laws. Not good enough yet, we need conspiracy laws to go with it. So what we have now is a situation where all it takes is three people to testify that you are conspiring to distribute drugs and they can seize your property and send you to prison for life, all on hearsay.
Gee thanks, for looking out for us big brother.
All of this was brought to us because of idiots like yourself who seem to think it's the government's busniess to make sure we don't mess around with our own brains.
Yeah I know it was off topic and I responded to a troll but I'm sick of seeing morons defend bad laws.
People who are patriotic, who will die / kill to protect the law (you know, like police, marines, etc) they follow the law at all times even if the law isnt all that moral.
No, you are talking about nationalism or authoritarianism, not patriotism. A patriot will fight against the government when it has strayed from its founding principles. The people you have called patriots do not fit that description.
If you treat your employees with dignity and trust they will ensure that the janitor will not have access to sensitive data. If my employer treats me like a turd I will certainly make it easier for said janitor. I've never worked in an environment where truly sensitive data could have been acccessed by a janitor and I think such speculation is specious at best.
Slashdot Mirror
The corporate overlords shut off my groups.google.com access so I followed the instructions and notified the proxy administrator. I was told that I would not be granted access to usenet archives because I might access porn. When I pointed out that the binaries are not available in the archive I was then told that I might look up detailed instructions on how to make a bomb. I'm not kidding that's the excuse I got. When I pointed out that the company already trusts me with millions of dollars worth of data and systems, the least they should worry about is me looking for bomb instructions I was told the real reason was that they could not restrict what I was reading to non entertainment posts.
Now I just work around them and point out whenever possible that since company resources are not to be used for personal resons, they should not expect me to use my personal resources for company reasons. They drew the line and expect me to respect it, they should respect the line as well.
I also have a penchant for pointing out to management that since the executives don't trust them, I shouldn't either. They just love that. In the meantime I work the alloted time and no more(for them).
Often when I have to spend a lot of time researching a problem I mention to my manager that I would have already found the answer on groups.google.com but being the pointy haired boss that he is it's a waste of breath.
Cat
I do this too. Only I use a pad and pencil. I've written some brilliant code that way. I've also written a lot of strange gibberish. YMMV.
It's fairly common for financial packages designed for the mainframe to have the option of having source code included. But you're right sometimes companies would put a key piece of code that had no business being changed in object code only.
I currently work in a mixed mode environment I love working client/server and mainframe but I am starting to be cured of the mainframe side. Not because of anything to do with the technology but because of the overly paranoid rules of the "QA" people who don't know anything but their rule book. You should never put non-technical people in a position of standards enforcement, but most shops do this. It is also a drain to have the responsibility of providing emergency production support but not having the authority to actually fix the problem, but this is unique to this shop(I hope).
Cat
We use citrix in our prod environment because our users were allowed to buy their own software, not realizing that the current harware configurations were not powerful enough to run the software. So our management decided that instead of telling the users, "I guess you bought a pile of junk you can't use", decided to throw good money after bad and installed citrix. While citrix works, kind of, it is expensive, overly complex to set up and trouble shoot and is prone to crashing.
Can you tell I hate my short sighted, obsequious management?
Cat
Alright! Now I can pay to get bitchslapped!
Cat
I can see it now, because of security issues all sporting events require facial recognition technology. To offset the cost of implementing the technology the stadiums sell the data to advertisers and lease space for directional sound equipment so they can target ads to specific people in the stadium. Or they could decide to target ads to certain demographics. All white guys in their 40's will get ads for Michale Bolton's greatest hits. Bleh
Cat
If you have an infinite number of monkeys pumping an infinite number of generators generating electricity for an infinite number of CD players then Michael Bolton will still be a no talent ass clown.
Pumping up the volume takes on a whole new meaning.
Maybe they can make a pelvic thrust model. It's marital aid AND an electrical generator.
Cat
So what if I'm lame and tired. At least I didn't make a beowolf cluster of vibrators joke.
As long as policies are in place that forbid it, once someone complains about a cow-orker looking at porn, pull the logs, verify it and give a single warning. After that it's termination time. It's really very simple, and cheap.
Cat
Cat
What does editing commercials out have to do with copyright protection? I can understand having a problem with sharing movies but sharing TV shows that broadcast for free seems just a tad over the top.
Here, you can have this free product but you may not give it to others.
Cat
Typically what happens in companies like this is poorly designed and maintained systems will get cleaned up during a recession when the good technical people will work here because they have little choice. When the economy gets better the good ones leave and the mediocre programmers and analysts perform at script kiddie level. For example, my supervisor actually told me, "It's in production so it must be right" when I uncovered a bug in prod. Or for another example, I was told by the resident "expert" that cursors are not inefficient when compared to set processing in stored procedures. And of course the clueless supervisors believe the "expert" because he's been around longer and has a CS degree. Even though I've actually worked as a DBA and have experience designing and implementing database systems(they work on a purchased system).
So while it is safer to work in a non-technical company it is often infuriating having to deal with the abundance of incompetants.
Cat
I actually preferred f-29 retaliator to any other flight sims I've played. The problem I have with flight sims is there tends to be too much realism in the game. IOW, you can't really have a good dog fight because the weapons are designed to be fired from a mile off. Retaliator also fit on a 1.44 floppy. Anyone know of a good arcade like flight sims that doesn't take hours to learn how to play and has multiplayer capability?
Cat
I remember when CD players were too expsensive and people would make the same sort of argument. I also remember when DVD players were "too expensive" Hell, to some people they still are. I know I paid $150 bucks for one Tivo and $30 bucks for another one. The first one I got I happened to have a lot of disposable income and paid over $1000 bucks for which included the lifetime sub. It's still in use and worth more than a lot of stock I bought at the same time.
I am still awed by the fact that this thing can do all its PVR work and still run a FTP, Telnet and web daemons all on a 53 Mhz PPC chip with 16 M of RAM.
BTW, I have rented DVDs and recorded them on the Tivo when I knew I wouldn't have time to watch the movie and didn't want to pay for another day of rental.
Cat
"Oh you mean the software that is still in the shrink wrap?".
Even if I agreed to the single-user/single machine bs I am using a switch which means only one user/machine is accessing the internet at any given time. It's like plugging in a different machine every few minutes, except that it's a lot faster and I don't have to plug and unplug cables to do it.
Cat
I have a real problem with the offtopic mods. Often when discussing an article, discussion will drift away from the original article. I think this is to be encouraged or at least looked upon neutrally. Not everyone is so anal retentive that they need every post to be under its "proper" article. Sometimes there isn't a proper place for it, like the comment that spurred this extended conversation.
Cat
Actually hydogren can be stored in metal hydrides. This is a convenient and safe way to store hydrogen and is what some fuel cells use today.
Cat
Well the 35,000 emails could simply have been one email to the allemployees@stupidcompany.com address. Often companies will not block usage of the global mailing address until they get burned with it.
Cat
Perhaps that is the point.
Cat
Look at what Reagan's war on drugs did to the drug scene. Before Reagan marijuana was prevalent and cocaine and heroin were expensive and used primarily by well to do people. Since law enforcement tend to go after the rich last they start hitting the pot shipments. So as any busness would do, the cartels changed their business strategy and started producing more cocaine and heroin because it's easier to smuggle. So now instead of prevalent illicit use of a rather harmless drug we have crack and heroin which is cheaper to obtain than pot.
So then what do they do? They decide they should lock up the users for a long time. That didn't work so they created asset forfeiture laws. Not good enough yet, we need conspiracy laws to go with it. So what we have now is a situation where all it takes is three people to testify that you are conspiring to distribute drugs and they can seize your property and send you to prison for life, all on hearsay.
Gee thanks, for looking out for us big brother.
All of this was brought to us because of idiots like yourself who seem to think it's the government's busniess to make sure we don't mess around with our own brains.
Yeah I know it was off topic and I responded to a troll but I'm sick of seeing morons defend bad laws.
Cat
Cat
If you treat your employees with dignity and trust they will ensure that the janitor will not have access to sensitive data. If my employer treats me like a turd I will certainly make it easier for said janitor. I've never worked in an environment where truly sensitive data could have been acccessed by a janitor and I think such speculation is specious at best.
Cat
Dim sum, AKA chinese dumplings, is not an esoteric reference, unless you're a redneck. But even a cracker like me knows what Dim sum is.
Cat
That's not much of a worry if you treat your employees with dignity and respect.
I'm sure most big companies would rather subject employees to strip searches than treat them like professionals.
Cat
We scan your email for your own protection.
no
no
no
no
no
no
INAL, but I think you have to sell or intend to sell the devices in order to be infringing the patents. Cat