I'm completely flabbergasted that no one seems to see any hypocrisy when it comes to the topic of "Lies".
When Bill Clinton lies, people get offended. When George W. Bush lies, people die.
And you're the one who's flabbergasted??? Seriously? Are you kidding me??? Call me a left-wing hypocrite if that's makes you feel better, but please do get off your high horse of righteous indignation.
VSS has actually gotten quite a bit better than it used to be and is used by virtually all large-scale teams that use Visual Studio primarily because the integration tools for SVN and Git completely suck.
Hopefully, they're backing up their source-safe repository with subversion or something. On my team, we lost our SourceSafe repository because it got corrupted, that was about seven years ago, and we've never used source-safe since that time.
SVN support has gotten better every day, and before that, at least there was CVS. CVS wasn't perfect, but at least it had near-universal support. Git is a very recent up and comer, I don't think it's fair to compare Git with SourceSafe support-wise, it's not only newer, but has many more capabilities than SourceSafe.
As an example: I have a rule that takes any message sent from myself (i.e. when I bcc myself), creates a task of said message, and correctly populates the subject, body and category fields, and then deletes the e-mail.
Rules-based filtering is one reason I have switched to google apps, and I could never go back to a clients-based-only solution. With google apps, my spam filtering is server-side, and my rules-based filtering is server-side. Don't get me wrong, I still use Outlook as a mail client with gmail, and I love Outlook's rules-based filtering, but there are just some filters that wouldn't be useful to me if I couldn't do them at the server level in real time.
My nagios system alerts, my banking balance/transaction alerts, any urgent messages that I want forwarded to my phone, any urgent messages I'd want forwarded immediately to other people, etc. Those would be pretty useless to me if I couldn't do them server side. I guess you could say I should just leave my desktop computer running with Outlook running and checking email 24/7, but that option is not that attractive to me, I travel a lot, I have multiple computers, and I'd rather read/handle each message only once.
As to David Allen's "Getting Things Done" system, note that there are some GTD greasemonkey scripts for gmail and google calendaring, and I believe those scripts have even been bundled in a firefox extension to make their installation easier.
Where is my gmail and google calander offline mode?
For email, that's why you have POP/IMAP access, you can plug in any email client (including Outlook) and still benefit from spam filtering, custom server-side filtering, and/or one centralized address book.
For your calendar, that's why you have RSS subscriptions, ical synching, and/or Outlook (one way or two way) synchronization. Until fairly recently (I think that was one month ago), you had to use a third party (partly crippled 5 calendars only) shareware utility to synchronize your Outlook calendar with google calendar, but now google came out with its free synching utility for Outlook and that works pretty well (and since many calendars have standardized on the Outlook database for keeping calendars, it opens it up to those other calendars as well).
So basically, you already have your off-line mail client and your off-line calendaring solution, it's just that instead of offering you a one-size-fits-all solution -- google is now offering you the ability to pretty much plug in any mail/calendaring software out there.
If I were the power co owning this plant, I'd be ticked if the plant was dark for 2 days. With the price of energy these days, and the amount of energy a single Nuclear plant can generate, you're talking some real serious cash when the thing is down for 2 days.
Yeah, you'd be pissed, or you could be silently ecstatic too, either way it really depends on how your incentives are structured. If the Enron debacle taught us anything, it was that some power plants made more money for their owners, the more frequently their power plants failed, and the longer they failed.
...the functionality is awfully similar to GigaPan.
Thanks for the clarification.
I can just imagine the Microsoft Press Release now, Microsoft Silverlight 3.0, the technology that brought goatse to an entire other level.
Don't Chinese people feel humiliated because their largest technology company helps citizens to violate IPR laws?
Humiliated? I doubt it. Insulted, most certainly. The US Supreme Court has already decided that the linking was legal in the US. IPR laws, my ass. You can frame this anyway you want. Whether it's on one large web site, or on many little web sites, the linking is legal in the US either way. It's the hosting and the sharing that are not.
As to getting blocked, we're the ones getting blocked right now, we're the ones who should be embarrassed. Our copyright zealots are getting out of control. They're attacking foreign servers. They're attacking legal US content owners even some within the US. Denial of service attacks are not fun. They're destructive. They tie up a lot of infrastructure. Except for a commercial web site, who wouldn't want to block the US? After all, I know of many non-commercial US sites that block all the IPs coming from Ukraine or Ethiopia simply because they don't want to deal with all the crap that's coming from over there (and by that, I mean no disrespect to any Ukrainian or Ethiopian here). I realize it's only a tiny-tiny percentage that spoils it for the rest of the country, but ultimately if there is a destructive rogue group of vigilantes within your country, you damn better do something about them -- otherwise you may find yourself completely cut off and isolated from the rest of the World.
The accessibility during offline time is the real killer for me, as I don't have a cellular card for my laptop and can't be bothered to pay for wifi at hotspots, so it certainly can't replace a desktop text editor.
If you use the US English version of google docs and if you check the box that says you're willing to try their advanced features, you can work on google docs while off-line. It downloads a google client to your machine and allows you to work off-line using your internet browser, and when you get back online -- it syncs back the changes.
At least, that's what I have and that's what I have been using so far, but since I use a paid google apps account -- may be this feature is not available to the free accounts yet.
Good question. No, I didn't just mean an "unlimited" data set, although that would have been sufficient as an answer, I meant both an "unlimited" *and* an "infinite" data set.
Forget P2P, when one of my family members watches youtube, or uses Skype, my own access gets really slow and my web browser starts timing out. This is not a question of legislation, this is mostly a question of resource allocation. I still want to use youtube, and skype, for my own purposes, so I do not want to make those things illegal, but I just want to automatically shut down/throttle my family members when they're using too much bandwidth on their side.
Doesn't Excel have a 65k row limit? At least my version of Excel does. Or when you say large dataset - which always means different things to different people - would the 65k row max not limit you?
Why would he even need the rows of Excel? VBA can work through most data structure just like many other programming languages.
as a DBA...
That's right as a DBA, the first thing you think about is the database. Tell me, how would you handle an infinite data set? You could, right? It's just that you couldn't rely on the database to do most of the work for you.
With one of my professors, it was "You can use any language you want as long as it can do the job it's required to do and your TA is willing to accept it". That approach worked really well for us. The TAs were very flexible. In fact, I would tend to think the job of grading projects was much more interesting because of all the variations in the student's work. Remember, you've said it yourself, this is not supposed to be a class on syntax. At my school at least, they didn't teach us the languages, they taught us the concepts (and you were supposed to learn the computer languages on your own, and of course, every Professor had their favorite pet language they had been developing/using for the last twenty years).
For the lecture itself, I think the choice should be left to the Professor teaching the class in question. If the Professor is an expert in Logo, let him use that -- if that's what he wants. If the Professor is an expert in pseudo-code and wants to use that -- let him use that. If the Professor is an Expert in VBA, let him use that if that's what he wants to use. Hopefully, your faculty is made up of smart people. If they're smart, just let them use the tool of their choice -- they'll probably do a far better job with them (than giving them some pre-assigned tool). An chances are, the students will gravitate toward the common tools already used in the industry.
The thing is, VBA may not be considered a grown-up language to you, but I can almost guarantee that if you run into a Physics Professor who's an expert in VBA -- he/she will be able to do things in it that you couldn't even dream was possible. So I would advise you against going down that road of trying to prove them wrong, I'm pretty sure you won't be able to. So let that Professor teach in VBA if he wants to, but don't let him force you to teach in a tool you don't want to teach in.
My concern is that email would, for some reason or another take all my information hostage. What kind of accountability would Google offer for a free service, in contrast to the one offered by Dreamhost?
First off, the free version of gmail allows you to download all your email using either POP/IMAP access, all you have to do is go into your "settings", enable POP access, and check the first radio button that says to "Enable POP for all mail (even mail that's already been downloaded)". Second, you could also create a filter that forwards all your gmail email to your backup hotmail account (that filter is server-side, so technically it would be working all the time, but better still if your hotmail account could check other accounts using IMAP/POP -- you could set it to check your gmail account at a regular interval -- without deleting anything). Third, I believe there are also some third party freeware/shareware utilities that allow you to backup your data (but those also use POP to access gmail, so I'm not sure what's so different about them from normal POP clients).
That being said, I don't even think we're talking about the free version of gmail here. Dreamhost is not a free host, most likely a customer of dreamhost already has a domain name, and may be willing to use the paid version of google apps (or the free version of google apps for educational institutions, or the free version for US IRS-recognized non-profit organizations)
The paid version of google apps will cost you $50 per user/per year. That version comes with a Service Level Agreement. I think it said something like 99.9?% uptime, blah, blah, blah... It gives you 25 GB of space per user. It gives you everything a normal free gmail account gives you (i.e. POP/IMAP, filters, etc.). It also allows you to route your MX records and SMTP traffic through a third party for archival, policy management, and any additional filtering and compliance purposes. So if you set up everything properly, all your incoming mail and also your outgoing mail should get archived in one place. In the case of the paid version, google gives you a free limited version of Postini, Postini is one of the third parties you can plug into gmail to act as your go between archive (but there are others, and technically Postini isn't a third party anymore because google acquired it -- but it still acts the same as your mail goes through Postini's servers before it's received or sent out).
Now the educational version of gmail seems to be like the paid version. I say "seems" because I really don't know. It's advertised as having 25 GB per user, it's advertised as having no advertisement, it's advertised as being free, but I really don't know if it has an SLA -- because having an SLA means that your customers can sue you if you don't abide by it.
Now as to the non-profit version, the free version for non-profit organizations may not get an SLA, at least I didn't get one for my non-profit. But to be fair, I didn't qualify for the non-profit version they advertised, there are seven kinds of non-profits recognized by the irs, my organization is recognized as a non-profit fraternal organization, but not as a charity or a religious organization -- so technically it didn't qualify for the non-profit free version -- although google still allowed us to keep our own domain hooked up to it and gave us 6 GB per user plus advertisements (just like the normal free version, except it's using our own domain). But even with that version, as an administrator in charge of the domain name, google still allows you to pass all your emails through a third party archival service, that third party probably won't be Postini (only the paid version of google apps gets limited Postini functionality for free, and for a normal non-profit Postini is too damn expensive anyway), but if you have access to a unix/linux server -- even some virtual server -- you can install some free open source software that can act as a go-between just like Postini will do -- except the open source version is ten times better and more customizable than Postini -- and thankfully even the free version of google apps will allow you to forward your MX records to that third party server.
Everyone is [bashing Bush]. No one has a good reason
Are you sure? Everyone? No one? You must be an omniscient god I take it. That would be the only way to explain your absolute knowledge about the validity of all claims pertaining President George W. Bush.
I would hate to think you'd paint every person who disagrees with our current President as some sort of religious zealot. That I believe, would qualify as [religious] zealotry itself. In any case, I'm not calling everyone who agrees with GWB a zealot, I'm just calling *you* a zealot -- for being so absolute in your representation of the other side.
Personally, I'd like to think that my opinion and motivation are not the same as everyone else on my side. There are crazies and wackos on both sides of the issue. And I realize there are plenty wackos on my side as well. I just find it ironic that you would criticize people for misplacing blame on President Bush, while in the same breadth placing blame on "everyone" who happens to disagree with you. Surely, if the government is not just one person, we, as a mass of people of different beliefs and motivations, must not be just one person either.
Perhaps I should have expanded. Having a policy is fine. I have accidentally run afoul of a no cell phones policy at a country club. However, the difference is that I was asked to not use the phone rather than having someone take it away from me.
Yeah, but you didn't have your six year old with you with his noisy hand-held game.
Country clubs are wise, they stop the problem right at the source. They don't just have a policy against devices, they have a policy against kids. They either prevent you from taking the kids in with you, or they have you check your kids at the door (so they are placed in their own waiting holding area). At an amusement park, apparently it's too much to ask that they confiscate your kids as well, and that you only get to retrieve them when you've had your fun at the end of the day.
I agree with you, many many times MS comes across as very schizophrenic.
With something like 75+ thousands employees (and double that number if you count their consultants, contractors, and joint ventures employees), I would expect MS to be a little bit schizophrenic, and I would be worried if they weren't. Next thing you'll say, it's that the slashdot crowd is schizophrenic as well.
Even on little things: how many times did they rename Vista, for example?
Especially on little things, managing all those little things instead of delegating those little things, that would be called Micro-Management. Not every company can be an Apple.
And how about them getting into, then out of, then back into, then back out of, then etc etc the peripheral hardware market?
You mean by asking hardware manufacturers to pay them money to put their logos on their peripheral products and use their distribution channel. I wouldn't call that getting in or getting out. I'd just call that selling your brand to the highest bidder, whoever might be the current highest bidder of the day.
Also, ask the HR Director for the phone number and call the consultant directly. You've been given a ton of good advice already, but don't fire off a huge email explaining everything -- making a mountain out of a mole hill. Sometimes a quick informal exchange with the actual developer who requested the data will clear up any issue. For instance, just state your concerns over security, and let the guy himself offer up a solution, the guy may just say, sure just take out the SSN numbers, or "no, I didn't really need all the data", or "actually, I just had a couple of questions". And then, you either accept the offer, or make another counter offer. Usually, it's probably a good idea to exchange phone numbers anyway with such a person. You never know what they might need from you. And you never know what you might need from them. You could hit that guy with a policy and procedures manual, and you could assign him a ticket number, but usually you should reserve such formal treatment for people you don't like or people you don't have direct access to. I say make the call. A quick phone call may solve your concerns, all the while save you hours of work trying to go through a somewhat clueless intermediary.
That never made sense to me. Assuming what we've learned from running tech support (almost all my knowledge of this comes from/. as I've never called them), they keep notes on respective customers, like whether or not they're a douchebag idiot. How hard would it be to agree to a quick and easy ten point scale rating? That way, when a customer calls up, you can quickly see whether or not she's a senile and foul-mouthed octogenarian or a fairly bright kid who tried recommended practices first before calling in?
You're missing something. Me, I love to do tech support. I love it even more when I get a screaming customer on the other line. I don't expect many of you to believe me thought.
The difference between me and some others is that I get to control my environment -- most other tech support people don't have that luxury. I developed a good chunk of the software we supported. I wrote a good chunk of the documentation and tutorials of the software we supported. And when some irate-angry customer called, it was probably my fault or my partner's fault or god forbid it may even have been the customer's fault, but in any of these cases -- I had enough control over my environment to do something about it.
On the other hand, if you work for a company where you're insulated from the development team, insulated from the decision-makers, chances are, you'll be given a manual, or a knowledge-base, or an Access database, which has almost every field pre-defined for you. A script to say over the phone will most likely have already been pre-written for you. Your calls will certainly be recorded as well, so as to make sure you do not deviate any way from your assigned script. And chances are, any good idea you have about triaging calls will probably be rejected/over-ridden by your boss who most likely doesn't even have the authority himself to do any changes to the procedures.
I've been on the other side too, one of my first contract programming job was to write software for sales people inside a huge corporation. The Sales director didn't want me talking to any of the future users (the sales people) of my application. As time went on, it became clearer every day that the software I wrote was a means to control his sales people, not really to help them in any way. In any case, I didn't let this bother me, I actually loved that particular, I was paid more than enough not to question my client, the sales people were paid enough not to question their boss, and I'm sure they were probably smart enough to eventually work around the software I had written for them.
if it keeps the assholes around here from pissing everywhere but in the toilet/urinal, it seems like a good idea.
Don't get your hopes up. The police claims there was a 40% increase in car thefts the first year Grand Theft Auto came out. I hope for your sake this game doesn't go mainstream.
I want to use it in my gigabyte of source code commercial app, which, prior to such inclusion, is legally mine to distribute, which is a use I make of this object, that is, my application. [...] To be blunt, the word "use", (as well as all of its natural permutations) which you depend upon so heavily in your flawed analysis, doesn't have the limited meaning you wish it had -- nor has it ever, or will it ever, have such a limited meaning.
What part of "This info is for my own reference only; it is not going on a Web server." did you not understand? Did you already forget the original context of this discussion, or are you hoping that we accept your standard kindergarten defense? "As a five-year old, my ego is so fragile -- I reserve the right to ignore the context of any previous discussion of any word I want -- even if this discussion was just a second ago -- and even if I was the one who partook in that discussion. From now on, any discussion I participate in won't move forward, any context will have to be repeated explicitly every time, and I shall interpret every little detail in the most literal annoying way that only a five-year old can."?
By the way, those were rhetorical questions, there is no need to answer them.
This is actually a big pet peeve of mine in the systems world. Ever since the Internet made patching software super-easy, every vendor on the planet has been rushing software out the door with major bugs in it.
This is nothing new. Ever since the video camcorder became so affordable, that almost any teenager could get one -- the professional camera man cringed. Ever since MS Access came out for $50 a pop and just about any office administrator were given the role of being the unofficial "database administrator" -- and yet just stuffed all their data into just one large table -- all the professional database designers/admins moaned. The same went for Word Processing or even Type Setting, there used to be a time when one needed an expensive professional Word Processing consultant just to recommend, select, install, train, troubleshoot, make the thing print, and/or make sense of the numerous Word Processing packages that came before Word Perfect and Word.
The reality is that this is the way the world works. It ebbs and flows. It evolves. It innovates, then it consolidates. It turns your work into a commodity. And soon enough, your non-technical kid sister can do the same work you used to do ten years ago, only in about a fraction of the time, and in the most sloppily fashion imaginable.
If you want to do something about it, you can teach, you can write a technical book, you can create your own certification program, and/or you can help make the tools that will help the new script kiddies that are about to replace you. After all, those kiddies -- those newbies -- are coming. They're just step behind you. And when they end up getting your job, they're not going to get paid much.
Another option is simply to look for new opportunities, predict where the next waves are coming from, retrain yourself constantly, go into management, start a business, or simply do nothing and -- continue to bitch about how the World is going to hell -- at exactly the precise time you ended up mastering your own trade.
Also they seem to be forcing *remote* collaboration through their own collaboration product called "UNA". If they want to make it a real contest, they should force a contest between multiple people collaborating in the same room with one of them sitting in front of the keyboard with Microsoft Notepad, versus the same number of people collaborating remotely through this thing called "UNA".
"One Microsoft Notepad vs. Multiple Commercial Copies of UNA", that would be a cool contest to do, and I'm not a Microsoft Notepad fan boy (in fact, I hate the thing), but I would expect Notepad to win hands down in that contest.
And every year, I would redo the contest, but I would add one more handicap to the team in the same room using notepad. I'd tie their hands together, so they would be forced to type with their little pinky finger. I would make their room airtight and I'd cut off the oxygen going into their room. And if the Notepad team does survive my challenge, and win again of course, I'd call my methodology the pinky finger no-oxygen method, so I could slap a patent on it, and compete directly against "UNA".
Rules
# For both the Dragon and the Hydra challenges, developers must collaborate on a single solution. In the Dragon challenge, the developers collaborate through email and the shared version control repository. In the Hydra challenge, developers collaborate in real-time using UNA itself.
Slashdot Mirror
When Bill Clinton lies, people get offended. When George W. Bush lies, people die.
And you're the one who's flabbergasted??? Seriously? Are you kidding me??? Call me a left-wing hypocrite if that's makes you feel better, but please do get off your high horse of righteous indignation.
Hopefully, they're backing up their source-safe repository with subversion or something. On my team, we lost our SourceSafe repository because it got corrupted, that was about seven years ago, and we've never used source-safe since that time.
SVN support has gotten better every day, and before that, at least there was CVS. CVS wasn't perfect, but at least it had near-universal support. Git is a very recent up and comer, I don't think it's fair to compare Git with SourceSafe support-wise, it's not only newer, but has many more capabilities than SourceSafe.
Rules-based filtering is one reason I have switched to google apps, and I could never go back to a clients-based-only solution. With google apps, my spam filtering is server-side, and my rules-based filtering is server-side. Don't get me wrong, I still use Outlook as a mail client with gmail, and I love Outlook's rules-based filtering, but there are just some filters that wouldn't be useful to me if I couldn't do them at the server level in real time.
My nagios system alerts, my banking balance/transaction alerts, any urgent messages that I want forwarded to my phone, any urgent messages I'd want forwarded immediately to other people, etc. Those would be pretty useless to me if I couldn't do them server side. I guess you could say I should just leave my desktop computer running with Outlook running and checking email 24/7, but that option is not that attractive to me, I travel a lot, I have multiple computers, and I'd rather read/handle each message only once.
As to David Allen's "Getting Things Done" system, note that there are some GTD greasemonkey scripts for gmail and google calendaring, and I believe those scripts have even been bundled in a firefox extension to make their installation easier.
For email, that's why you have POP/IMAP access, you can plug in any email client (including Outlook) and still benefit from spam filtering, custom server-side filtering, and/or one centralized address book.
For your calendar, that's why you have RSS subscriptions, ical synching, and/or Outlook (one way or two way) synchronization. Until fairly recently (I think that was one month ago), you had to use a third party (partly crippled 5 calendars only) shareware utility to synchronize your Outlook calendar with google calendar, but now google came out with its free synching utility for Outlook and that works pretty well (and since many calendars have standardized on the Outlook database for keeping calendars, it opens it up to those other calendars as well).
So basically, you already have your off-line mail client and your off-line calendaring solution, it's just that instead of offering you a one-size-fits-all solution -- google is now offering you the ability to pretty much plug in any mail/calendaring software out there.
Humiliated? I doubt it. Insulted, most certainly. The US Supreme Court has already decided that the linking was legal in the US. IPR laws, my ass. You can frame this anyway you want. Whether it's on one large web site, or on many little web sites, the linking is legal in the US either way. It's the hosting and the sharing that are not.
As to getting blocked, we're the ones getting blocked right now, we're the ones who should be embarrassed. Our copyright zealots are getting out of control. They're attacking foreign servers. They're attacking legal US content owners even some within the US. Denial of service attacks are not fun. They're destructive. They tie up a lot of infrastructure. Except for a commercial web site, who wouldn't want to block the US? After all, I know of many non-commercial US sites that block all the IPs coming from Ukraine or Ethiopia simply because they don't want to deal with all the crap that's coming from over there (and by that, I mean no disrespect to any Ukrainian or Ethiopian here). I realize it's only a tiny-tiny percentage that spoils it for the rest of the country, but ultimately if there is a destructive rogue group of vigilantes within your country, you damn better do something about them -- otherwise you may find yourself completely cut off and isolated from the rest of the World.
If you use the US English version of google docs and if you check the box that says you're willing to try their advanced features, you can work on google docs while off-line. It downloads a google client to your machine and allows you to work off-line using your internet browser, and when you get back online -- it syncs back the changes.
At least, that's what I have and that's what I have been using so far, but since I use a paid google apps account -- may be this feature is not available to the free accounts yet.
Good question. No, I didn't just mean an "unlimited" data set, although that would have been sufficient as an answer, I meant both an "unlimited" *and* an "infinite" data set.
Forget P2P, when one of my family members watches youtube, or uses Skype, my own access gets really slow and my web browser starts timing out. This is not a question of legislation, this is mostly a question of resource allocation. I still want to use youtube, and skype, for my own purposes, so I do not want to make those things illegal, but I just want to automatically shut down/throttle my family members when they're using too much bandwidth on their side.
Good research.
With one of my professors, it was "You can use any language you want as long as it can do the job it's required to do and your TA is willing to accept it". That approach worked really well for us. The TAs were very flexible. In fact, I would tend to think the job of grading projects was much more interesting because of all the variations in the student's work. Remember, you've said it yourself, this is not supposed to be a class on syntax. At my school at least, they didn't teach us the languages, they taught us the concepts (and you were supposed to learn the computer languages on your own, and of course, every Professor had their favorite pet language they had been developing/using for the last twenty years).
For the lecture itself, I think the choice should be left to the Professor teaching the class in question. If the Professor is an expert in Logo, let him use that -- if that's what he wants. If the Professor is an expert in pseudo-code and wants to use that -- let him use that. If the Professor is an Expert in VBA, let him use that if that's what he wants to use. Hopefully, your faculty is made up of smart people. If they're smart, just let them use the tool of their choice -- they'll probably do a far better job with them (than giving them some pre-assigned tool). An chances are, the students will gravitate toward the common tools already used in the industry.
The thing is, VBA may not be considered a grown-up language to you, but I can almost guarantee that if you run into a Physics Professor who's an expert in VBA -- he/she will be able to do things in it that you couldn't even dream was possible. So I would advise you against going down that road of trying to prove them wrong, I'm pretty sure you won't be able to. So let that Professor teach in VBA if he wants to, but don't let him force you to teach in a tool you don't want to teach in.
First off, the free version of gmail allows you to download all your email using either POP/IMAP access, all you have to do is go into your "settings", enable POP access, and check the first radio button that says to "Enable POP for all mail (even mail that's already been downloaded)". Second, you could also create a filter that forwards all your gmail email to your backup hotmail account (that filter is server-side, so technically it would be working all the time, but better still if your hotmail account could check other accounts using IMAP/POP -- you could set it to check your gmail account at a regular interval -- without deleting anything). Third, I believe there are also some third party freeware/shareware utilities that allow you to backup your data (but those also use POP to access gmail, so I'm not sure what's so different about them from normal POP clients).
That being said, I don't even think we're talking about the free version of gmail here. Dreamhost is not a free host, most likely a customer of dreamhost already has a domain name, and may be willing to use the paid version of google apps (or the free version of google apps for educational institutions, or the free version for US IRS-recognized non-profit organizations)
The paid version of google apps will cost you $50 per user/per year. That version comes with a Service Level Agreement. I think it said something like 99.9?% uptime, blah, blah, blah... It gives you 25 GB of space per user. It gives you everything a normal free gmail account gives you (i.e. POP/IMAP, filters, etc.). It also allows you to route your MX records and SMTP traffic through a third party for archival, policy management, and any additional filtering and compliance purposes. So if you set up everything properly, all your incoming mail and also your outgoing mail should get archived in one place. In the case of the paid version, google gives you a free limited version of Postini, Postini is one of the third parties you can plug into gmail to act as your go between archive (but there are others, and technically Postini isn't a third party anymore because google acquired it -- but it still acts the same as your mail goes through Postini's servers before it's received or sent out).
Now the educational version of gmail seems to be like the paid version. I say "seems" because I really don't know. It's advertised as having 25 GB per user, it's advertised as having no advertisement, it's advertised as being free, but I really don't know if it has an SLA -- because having an SLA means that your customers can sue you if you don't abide by it.
Now as to the non-profit version, the free version for non-profit organizations may not get an SLA, at least I didn't get one for my non-profit. But to be fair, I didn't qualify for the non-profit version they advertised, there are seven kinds of non-profits recognized by the irs, my organization is recognized as a non-profit fraternal organization, but not as a charity or a religious organization -- so technically it didn't qualify for the non-profit free version -- although google still allowed us to keep our own domain hooked up to it and gave us 6 GB per user plus advertisements (just like the normal free version, except it's using our own domain). But even with that version, as an administrator in charge of the domain name, google still allows you to pass all your emails through a third party archival service, that third party probably won't be Postini (only the paid version of google apps gets limited Postini functionality for free, and for a normal non-profit Postini is too damn expensive anyway), but if you have access to a unix/linux server -- even some virtual server -- you can install some free open source software that can act as a go-between just like Postini will do -- except the open source version is ten times better and more customizable than Postini -- and thankfully even the free version of google apps will allow you to forward your MX records to that third party server.
Are you sure? Everyone? No one? You must be an omniscient god I take it. That would be the only way to explain your absolute knowledge about the validity of all claims pertaining President George W. Bush.
I would hate to think you'd paint every person who disagrees with our current President as some sort of religious zealot. That I believe, would qualify as [religious] zealotry itself. In any case, I'm not calling everyone who agrees with GWB a zealot, I'm just calling *you* a zealot -- for being so absolute in your representation of the other side.
Personally, I'd like to think that my opinion and motivation are not the same as everyone else on my side. There are crazies and wackos on both sides of the issue. And I realize there are plenty wackos on my side as well. I just find it ironic that you would criticize people for misplacing blame on President Bush, while in the same breadth placing blame on "everyone" who happens to disagree with you. Surely, if the government is not just one person, we, as a mass of people of different beliefs and motivations, must not be just one person either.
Very very well said.
Yeah, but you didn't have your six year old with you with his noisy hand-held game.
Country clubs are wise, they stop the problem right at the source. They don't just have a policy against devices, they have a policy against kids. They either prevent you from taking the kids in with you, or they have you check your kids at the door (so they are placed in their own waiting holding area). At an amusement park, apparently it's too much to ask that they confiscate your kids as well, and that you only get to retrieve them when you've had your fun at the end of the day.
Also, ask the HR Director for the phone number and call the consultant directly. You've been given a ton of good advice already, but don't fire off a huge email explaining everything -- making a mountain out of a mole hill. Sometimes a quick informal exchange with the actual developer who requested the data will clear up any issue. For instance, just state your concerns over security, and let the guy himself offer up a solution, the guy may just say, sure just take out the SSN numbers, or "no, I didn't really need all the data", or "actually, I just had a couple of questions". And then, you either accept the offer, or make another counter offer. Usually, it's probably a good idea to exchange phone numbers anyway with such a person. You never know what they might need from you. And you never know what you might need from them. You could hit that guy with a policy and procedures manual, and you could assign him a ticket number, but usually you should reserve such formal treatment for people you don't like or people you don't have direct access to. I say make the call. A quick phone call may solve your concerns, all the while save you hours of work trying to go through a somewhat clueless intermediary.
Don't be a dick. I know that's you. Email me the data already.
You're missing something. Me, I love to do tech support. I love it even more when I get a screaming customer on the other line. I don't expect many of you to believe me thought.
The difference between me and some others is that I get to control my environment -- most other tech support people don't have that luxury. I developed a good chunk of the software we supported. I wrote a good chunk of the documentation and tutorials of the software we supported. And when some irate-angry customer called, it was probably my fault or my partner's fault or god forbid it may even have been the customer's fault, but in any of these cases -- I had enough control over my environment to do something about it.
On the other hand, if you work for a company where you're insulated from the development team, insulated from the decision-makers, chances are, you'll be given a manual, or a knowledge-base, or an Access database, which has almost every field pre-defined for you. A script to say over the phone will most likely have already been pre-written for you. Your calls will certainly be recorded as well, so as to make sure you do not deviate any way from your assigned script. And chances are, any good idea you have about triaging calls will probably be rejected/over-ridden by your boss who most likely doesn't even have the authority himself to do any changes to the procedures.
I've been on the other side too, one of my first contract programming job was to write software for sales people inside a huge corporation. The Sales director didn't want me talking to any of the future users (the sales people) of my application. As time went on, it became clearer every day that the software I wrote was a means to control his sales people, not really to help them in any way. In any case, I didn't let this bother me, I actually loved that particular, I was paid more than enough not to question my client, the sales people were paid enough not to question their boss, and I'm sure they were probably smart enough to eventually work around the software I had written for them.
What part of "This info is for my own reference only; it is not going on a Web server." did you not understand? Did you already forget the original context of this discussion, or are you hoping that we accept your standard kindergarten defense? "As a five-year old, my ego is so fragile -- I reserve the right to ignore the context of any previous discussion of any word I want -- even if this discussion was just a second ago -- and even if I was the one who partook in that discussion. From now on, any discussion I participate in won't move forward, any context will have to be repeated explicitly every time, and I shall interpret every little detail in the most literal annoying way that only a five-year old can."?
By the way, those were rhetorical questions, there is no need to answer them.
This is nothing new. Ever since the video camcorder became so affordable, that almost any teenager could get one -- the professional camera man cringed. Ever since MS Access came out for $50 a pop and just about any office administrator were given the role of being the unofficial "database administrator" -- and yet just stuffed all their data into just one large table -- all the professional database designers/admins moaned. The same went for Word Processing or even Type Setting, there used to be a time when one needed an expensive professional Word Processing consultant just to recommend, select, install, train, troubleshoot, make the thing print, and/or make sense of the numerous Word Processing packages that came before Word Perfect and Word.
The reality is that this is the way the world works. It ebbs and flows. It evolves. It innovates, then it consolidates. It turns your work into a commodity. And soon enough, your non-technical kid sister can do the same work you used to do ten years ago, only in about a fraction of the time, and in the most sloppily fashion imaginable.
If you want to do something about it, you can teach, you can write a technical book, you can create your own certification program, and/or you can help make the tools that will help the new script kiddies that are about to replace you. After all, those kiddies -- those newbies -- are coming. They're just step behind you. And when they end up getting your job, they're not going to get paid much.
Another option is simply to look for new opportunities, predict where the next waves are coming from, retrain yourself constantly, go into management, start a business, or simply do nothing and -- continue to bitch about how the World is going to hell -- at exactly the precise time you ended up mastering your own trade.
Also they seem to be forcing *remote* collaboration through their own collaboration product called "UNA". If they want to make it a real contest, they should force a contest between multiple people collaborating in the same room with one of them sitting in front of the keyboard with Microsoft Notepad, versus the same number of people collaborating remotely through this thing called "UNA".
"One Microsoft Notepad vs. Multiple Commercial Copies of UNA", that would be a cool contest to do, and I'm not a Microsoft Notepad fan boy (in fact, I hate the thing), but I would expect Notepad to win hands down in that contest.
And every year, I would redo the contest, but I would add one more handicap to the team in the same room using notepad. I'd tie their hands together, so they would be forced to type with their little pinky finger. I would make their room airtight and I'd cut off the oxygen going into their room. And if the Notepad team does survive my challenge, and win again of course, I'd call my methodology the pinky finger no-oxygen method, so I could slap a patent on it, and compete directly against "UNA".