Naturally, no industry is *completely* free of belt-tightening, but among my circle of friends and colleagues, the market appears to be reasonably stable.
Medical, education and government sectors are still going strong and are usually immune to recessions. In the current one though, due to reasons I'm still puzzling over, many state governments are low on cash right now and are asking employees to stay home w/o pay for unknown periods of time. The federal government though hasn't told anyone to stay home w/o pay as far as I know. I'm a contractor for the federal government and haven't heard a peep regarding my job being in jeopardy.
You also have to keep in mind that *most* people, even in this economy, are employed and still doing well. The US unemployment rate is at,what, around 6.7 percent or so, or about one in every fifteen people? Around 4 percent of the country is ALWAYS employed, generally due to some chronic issue (can't or won't work for some reason) or just due to normal between-job transitions. It sounds about right - I've been unemployed for about 5 percent of my career. It doesn't take much - a six month stretch in an otherwise employed 10 year career.
People who don't want to work, don't qualify for unemployment, or who aren't currently looking do not count in the unemployment numbers. There may be other categories but I know those off the top of my head.
Why didn't he just follow the orders, leave, then file a complaint? I'm not defending Amtrak here, since it sounds like they were in the wrong, but it's like getting pulled over by the police. The side of the road is not the place to argue your case. The officer is not a judge, and you aren't the jury.
So if you get pulled over for no legitimate reason you are going to accept getting arrested (if that is the punishment for the fake reason you were pulled over) and complain later? The officer is not *the* judge but he is a judge and sometimes they make poor decisions. Stop the stupid decisions from even being made. Explain your rights up front. There is such a thing as false arrest. I'd prefer to tell the cop myself instead of letting him find out by the case winding its way through the court system.
Out of all the different denominations of Christians that entered this country 400 years ago you are going to choose one of them to pick on to support your claims this is due to a minority using their religion to make Facebook change their ways? Obviously you have bigger issues to sort out before you have any right to post here.
Well. Linux does this better than any new Windows version. Install Linux, and all supported hardware is there. Install Windows, and then go hunt for drivers. Signed drivers.
I bet he drags the drivers of those companies into the spotlight, that refuse to create a Linux driver, partially because MS told them to do so, and partially because they have something shady to hide (like their most expensive product and their cheapest product only differing in the driver code).
*devil's advocate mode on*Gee, imagine that, all *supported* hardware have drivers available in Linux. What about the unsupported hardware? For Windows you can go to the manufacturer and download the latest drivers (obviously this is harder if the driver is your NIC/modem) for Windows. For Linux the manufacturer *may* have a driver but all the more likely you may have to find it on some unknown website and have to *compile* it because most kernel-space and user-space software for Linux has to be compiled. You may get lucky with a binary RPM though if there is one available. Most people don't have driver issues when using Windows because they don't have exotic hardware. If they do have exotic hardware a person may find themselves searching for a driver for any OS unless they have it on a driver CD from the original retail package. Exotic hardware is even harder to have a driver for Linux available unless the manufacturer is Linux-friendly.
This guy really calls himself anything?? How incompetent can you be?
The whole point of having a computer, is to be able to automate things.
This is mostly done trough writing programs. But then you have programs, and the OS, and you want them to work together in a specific way.
A comforting little automation there... an quick rename of just those files, while replacing a word inside them... let two tools work together for more comfort...
All this glue in between is filled with shell scripting, or as he calls it "the command line".
If you can't do that, you're not really using the computer. If there would be a computer license, this would be the major thing you would have to be able to do.
When you're only being able to eat pre-chewed food, you're dead, every time the pre-chewer has a problem.
When I came from Windows, this "glue" scripts, and the little automation of repetitive tasks, including the use of DBUS, and even Greasemonkey, were the first thing that made me say "Wow, I love Linux". All this shit that I had to work countless hours on on Windows... and all this comfort that I previously could not even imagine... dissolved into some small shell scripts. Everything was so easy. And most importantly: Everything suddenly was possible.
Windows has VBscript, Perl, and now the PowerShell (not to mention batch files are still usable). What "shit" did you have to work countless hours on in Windows?*devil's advocate mode off*
To support your post I'll state that if the command line is dead as the article author says, Microsoft wouldn't have made PowerShell nor would they have made Windows Server 2008 Core which is a completely CLI-version of Windows for servers.
The holidays are at Christmas, hence "Christmas Holidays". Sheesh!
Really? How do you figure? Christmas is only a single holiday so why refer to it in the plural? It sounds stupid and is grammatically incorrect. Why don't we refer to the New Year's holidays since it is only a single holiday consisting of a single day? Why not start referring to Thanksgiving as the Thanksgiving holidays? If we're going to be grammatically incorrect we may as well be consistent throughout the entire calendar year. "Christmas holidays" does not include Hanukkah and Kwanzaa so I hope that isn't the rationale here. People who celebrate those would be disenfranchised if so and we wouldn't want those million people to mount an uprising against the other 300 million people in the U.S. because they are disenfranchised.
Hey, if you are going to be more sensitive to the few thousand people who celebrate Kwanzaa and the few million who celebrate Hanukkah then yes, you better be more sensitive to those who celebrate Christmas considering they are in the majority. But this isn't about Hanukkah and Kwanzaa (the submission said "Christmas holidays" not "holiday season"). It is about Christmas. There is only one Christmas holiday, whether it consists of multiple calendar days or not. Case closed.
A holiday that consists of multiple days is still 1 holiday and therefore does not justify a plural form of "holiday". The plural of "day" would be warranted but not "holiday".
uh, since when has there been more than one Christmas? Do you politically correct people know how stupid you sound to other, more sane, people? This could be modded as off-topic but then again I did reply to something within the submission text so is it really off-topic or did I just bring up something some people just don't want to talk about?
Even fanatical Christians celebrate New Year's and Christmas Eve, so "holiday season" is an accurate term to describe a number of separate single days usually associated with revelry and gift-giving. Some people even use these days for traveling and vacationing.
Whatever happened to "Merry Christmas *and* a Happy New Year"? Just because it is an accurate term doesn't mean it is a good one. There was nothing wrong with the original term and it acknowledged that Christmas actually still exists despite how much secularists hate it. And again, we have 2 holidays in January, 1 in February, another in March and so on. Why is this time of year only referred to as "holiday season"? The average holiday count is still 1 per month. The reason? It is to gradually remove the existence of Christmas, to put it on the backburner, to institute more secularism. You do it gradually enough then people don't notice. The bad thing is that some people don't care but many people still do. Other people also don't realize the agenda behind it. If there isn't an agenda behind it then there shouldn't have been any reason many companies and the media jump on the bandwagon the last few years to change the greeting or goodbye from "Merry Christmas and Happy New Year" to "happy holidays". The original greeting was just fine and still is except for those who don't want to acknowledge Christmas.
Not everyone is Christian (and several religions have holidays around this time of the year.) And for many Christians around the world, Christmas is 12 days long. Look up the Twelve Days of Christmas on Wikipedia if you must.
Diversity does not entail ignoring all holidays and calling it a "holiday season". Diversity means *acknowledging* everyone. You can't acknowledge something if you totally ignore it by never calling it by name. The whole point of "holiday season" is so secularists can have one more win by ignoring Christmas. Christmas has been celebrated for thousands of years and only in the last few years have companies and the media thought they should try not offending the minorities by referring to this time of year by "holiday season". The worst and IMO, the stupidest, sounding term I've heard is "Christmas holidays". I'd love to know where the people who say that got the idea that Christmas is made of up more than one holiday. It may be made up of more than 1 day, as you state above, but no way there is more than one holiday. That is another way that people can just lump all the other holidays into Christmas to piggyback on it's existence and diffuse it.
In this holiday season, I'm sure you've received gifts that excited your brain -- and others that you already want to resell on an auction site."
Actually I received gifts for Christmas, not this holiday season, you insensitive clod! We have holidays all year round. Why should Christmas be recast as an entire holiday season (gift giving is irrelevant as far as calling it a holiday season) in its own right, other than for being able to ignore its existence by not calling it by name?
Mod me down if you want but only if you have good reason to; disagreement is not a valid reason. If this comment wasn't geared toward Christmas then it shouldn't have been posted the day after but instead near Hanukkah or Kwanzaa, but no one ever pays attention to those holidays anyway, at least, the retailers don't pay attention to them when they advertise sales. Their excuse for using "holiday season" is to falsely state their inclusion of other holidays. I guess lies don't matter as long as you turn a profit. What's your excuse for using "holiday season"?
Sharepoint is your best bet here.
The only alternative I can think of is checking your docs into your source control.
I already spouted off on SharePoint doesn't enforce checkout in another post so I won't repeat that here. So I'll comment on version control aspects of it as well as version control in general. In this case, unless the poster can make his customers go to his server all the time for his document then any version control system is going to be useless, much like SharePoint would be. If the poster can redirect all customers to his site for doc retrieval then SharePoint may work.
However, once your database gets into the multi-gigabyte range (as in lots of checkout/checkins with large documents) the SharePoint web pages don't want to work right. We've run into this problem at work. We need to upgrade the server it is running on and until we do we have to click on a link multiple times before SharePoint will load a page. Sometimes the request times out, not sure if it is the DB having problems or something else. The DB is SQL Server. It is very annoying and productivity drops often.
Microsoft SharePoint does not enforce document checkout to modify a document, at least with the free version we use at work. I believe the pay version is the same because I used it a while back prior to a customer deployment. You can also view documents in a File Share type view and modifying documents that way won't even give you an option to do a checkout prior to the modifications. There is no version history either when accessing the files using a File Share view.
I don't think SharePoint is the answer here anyway unless the poster is able to force all his customers to go to his website to retrieve documents. If his model is more of a distribution model then obviously SharePoint is useless. He mentioned what happens if someone in a foreign country opens his documents, the question is whether when that person does that they are going to do it over the Internet and get the document from his server every time or open a local copy.
Their Cisco MARS appliance was an acquisition of Protego Networks. Their LMS suite that I mentioned in my first post also came from another company (or at least some of the individual apps did and then Cisco tried to glue them together) but I don't recall which one. Despite the MARS appliance and software now being under Cisco's control for at least 3 years (since I've known about it) and the same with Cisco LMS you would think that Cisco would perform some assimilation and make the apps integrate better with their native products. I'm not too thrilled to hear that they are yet again possibly acquiring software outside the company because they don't hardly take any time to do assimilation development or fix any glaring problems that the original company never bothered to fix.
I will add that I'm not impressed with their hardware, but am impressed with their *firmare*. In terms of price performance, speed of switching, density, etc etc, they have competitors that beat them handily, without compromising fundamental reliability.
I agree with the hardware comment to a point. We have FWSMs and IDSM-2s at work. The following numbers are my best recollection from a recent round of performance testing a few weeks ago. The FWSMs can only do 2.5Gbps with TCP (3.0Gbps with UDP). Peak throughput for the IDSMs are only 500Mbps I believe(whatever it is it is much lower than the switching throughput). We have a 20Gb backbone but it is useless when you are having to use FWSMs and IDSMs between segments which severely drop your throughput. Other vendors can reach 20Gbps with their firewalls. Why can't Cisco? I'm not a networking person but maybe the problem is the fact that the FWSMs and IDSMs are modules instead of stand-alone devices. Any ideas?
Since ChiefArcher mentioned a gripe about Cisco (delays in shipping hardware), I'll mention mine too. They make great hardware. I don't think anyone can dispute that. However their server software for managing that hardware is just....crap. Cisco Security Manager is slow, non-clusterable except with 3rd party (Veritas) software, and has some really dangerous default behavior which can't be changed. The backend runs on a server and a thick client is an administrator's interface to the backend and/or to network devices. In the case of CSM the devices are IDSs, firewalls, and VPNs. THe thick client is just that, thick. It is developed in Java and is just horrendously slow. A change in the thick client running on XP can require a restart of the services *on the server* thereby basically requiring an administrator to make the change anyway. It is ludicrous.
Their other management app, LAN Management Solution, is just a cobbled together bunch of stuff that seems to barely work. If you breathe wrong it can break. We use the Solaris version at work. It doesn't have a thick client; all management is through a web browser. Managing it on the CLI at the OS level though is dog slow (takes 10 minutes to completely startup). The least little change in the GUI requires a restart. It is also expensive just like CSM (CSM is mid 5 digits for a single server to manage 500 devices). We've found many faults with both apps at work over the last 6 months beyond what I've mentioned above. I recommend staying away from them. I hope that their adventures into blade servers is better. They seem to do better at hardware than software.
My company hasn't given a Christmas bonus in several years. I weep for the guys at Google, I really do.
How many slashdotters work for a company that gives a Christmas bonus? Maybe that should be a poll question.
I've worked at my company since 12/2002 (I was 24). Besides that year and last year, every year we've had a *Christmas* bonus. It was specifically called that; same with the *Christmas* party. We aren't big enough to worry about having to exclude Christians in the name of diversity. Last year right before the bonuses were given out they announced a change where the money that we would have gotten in our bonuses would now be a raise (although we still had received raises in previous years in addition to a Christmas bonus) and be spread over the entire following year. Typically my raises were 4-5% when most people's were about 3% (I do exceptional work). This year though I was surprised to not only get a 4% raise but they still sent out a bonus. The bonus wasn't as much as the previous years (about 33% of a regular bonus) but considering their new policy I was surprised. The included Christmas card mentioned that in these tough times the company wanted to give back to their employees. I greatly appreciated the gesture. A few months ago they sent out a similar amount (at least mine was similar) for similar reasons (high gas prices, etc.). My company has about 200 employees and is a gov't contractor. Bonuses come out of company profits.
when we drive cars that have half or one third the fuel efficiency they could have,
Gasoline engines are more efficient now than they were in the 70s however due to the increased weight that many vehicles possess the resulting MPG is less. When you put a 400HP engine in a crossover utility vehicle (XUV) weighing almost 2 tons you tend to not get that great of gas mileage however the efficiency is still there as far as I know (I'm not an engine builder).
2. I see nothing irrational or excessive at all. The US has deliberately sent the Lucetania into a battle zone in order to enter WWI, disregarded intelligence that could have prevented Pearl Harbor, entered a virtual battle in Tonkin to enter Vietnam, and made up stories on WMD to enter Iraq. In that light an NSA backdoor does not seem more preposterous to me. And there have been news items on this, even from Bruce Schneier.
And hindsight is 20/20. Lots of intelligence reports prior (over the summer) to 9/11 showed that *something* was going to happen but no one had any idea when. Lots of good clues were available but the right people didn't have the information at the right time due to the lack of government information sharing. If you think it is bad now just think what it was like 60 years ago. The gov't doesn't ignore information because they want something bad to happen. They filter out what they think is just noise in order to get to the rest of the noise. Read the 9/11 Commission Report sometime and you'll see what I mean. It isn't easy until after things happen and then the light bulb comes on but by then it is too late.
In response to your WMD remark (and this applies to 9/11 intelligence reports too), a lot of intelligence information is just wrong. It is gathered by either gov't employees in the field or by tribesmen who are allied with the U.S. The information is as best as it can be. Sometimes it is accurate but by the time the right people get it it is just useless. This especially happens when you are dealing with a loosely organized group of individual like al-Qaeda who can pick up and move everything on a moment's notice. Bottom line is that your conspiracy theories are based on events or data that are being taken out of context to suit your argument. But no big surprise here on slashdot; carry on.
Now that there's ambien and those other zombie drugs, people are sleep driving, jogging, typing, cooking, and eating. I wish I was making those up but every single one has reportedly happened. Maybe drugs that screw with your brain that much that yo go into a semi-conscious zombie haze should be taken off the market. I'm not saying this lady necessarily took them, but that sort of thing has been known to happen on some sleep aids.
Somehow when those activities are being performed by people asleep they are being done just as well when the person is awake. The real problem comes when people are doing those activitites and then fall asleep. Usually when the order of activities is like that is when people stop driving on the road, stop jogging on the sidewalk, start cooking without potholders; that's when major accidents can happen. That is also a sign of sleep deprivation if it occurs for just a few seconds and if the person doesn't know it ever happened. Bad things can happen then but yet for sleep-insertactivity it seems people are "aware" of what they are doing and do it properly w/o incident. It's weird.
But all in all it's pretty good, and I could hardly see going back to XP now.
So what exactly do you get out of Vista (besides the inability to copy some files sometimes) that you don't get out of XP which justifies the time and money involved in an upgrade, not to mention your stating that you wouldn't want to go back to XP?
And you think DVDs are a big deal? Think again. On healthcare for example, we are beaten by Cuba!
I guess you are among those who do not believe that some of these so called 3rd world countries are *slightly* ahead of us especially in what a cellphone can be used for. Now, that's a fact.
It's nice to think of the "advantages" of a system in use by another country especially when you conveniently ignore the disadvantages of the same system. In the case of Cuba, I think most people know that it is a communist country. Many people don't want to pay for someone else's healthcare or at least more than they already do in the United States. Socialist programs are not better when you look at the whole picture; they only benefit the poor (or lazy in some cases). The gov't acts as Robin Hood in that case.
A 3rd world country just now building their infrastructure can go straight for the newest technology as long as they can afford it. Current users don't have their service interrupted because there are no current users or existing service. It is a bit harder to do that in the United States. Regulations in the United States are much different in the States than in 3rd world countries which allows them to reduce feature sets without being hurt by their competition. On the surface, you sound like a Democrat by espousing only the advantages of a system (socialized healthcare) that actually isn't any better than what we have in the U.S. when analyzed properly but using them as a reason why it must be better w/o looking at the downsides.
If the gov't should bail anyone out it is Tesla Motors. But the gov't isn't bailing them out. They are just having trouble securing loans right now (they are good for it though) like many other companies and individuals. If the gov't gives them the money to finish their cars for those who have ordered them then the cars can be sold and the gov't can be paid back. No harm done. Since this isn't an issue of them making (or have already made) bad decisions I don't feel it is a bad thing they are getting temporary help from the gov't since the financial industry isn't willing to do so (in the form of loans). The caveat to this situation is that I hope it better become just temporary by way of Tesla paying the gov't back ASAP. To those companies who made bad decisions and now want help from mommy, I say too bad, but unfortunately Congress said differently.
Really, the whole point of design patterns is to have a common vocabulary. How is that useful if you're going to bastardize your terminology due to stubborn ignorance?
I agree but I'm not sure if we can make a difference. The same thing happened with measuring data capacity. We now have bibytes to measure data capacity in base 2 and regular bytes to measure in base 10 just because people had trouble with the original. They bastardized the terminology and ironically, what changed was the original terms now refer to the bastardized form (base 10 instead of base 2) and the new terms refer to the original base 2 form.
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Naturally, no industry is *completely* free of belt-tightening, but among my circle of friends and colleagues, the market appears to be reasonably stable.
Medical, education and government sectors are still going strong and are usually immune to recessions. In the current one though, due to reasons I'm still puzzling over, many state governments are low on cash right now and are asking employees to stay home w/o pay for unknown periods of time. The federal government though hasn't told anyone to stay home w/o pay as far as I know. I'm a contractor for the federal government and haven't heard a peep regarding my job being in jeopardy.
You also have to keep in mind that *most* people, even in this economy, are employed and still doing well. The US unemployment rate is at,what, around 6.7 percent or so, or about one in every fifteen people? Around 4 percent of the country is ALWAYS employed, generally due to some chronic issue (can't or won't work for some reason) or just due to normal between-job transitions. It sounds about right - I've been unemployed for about 5 percent of my career. It doesn't take much - a six month stretch in an otherwise employed 10 year career.
People who don't want to work, don't qualify for unemployment, or who aren't currently looking do not count in the unemployment numbers. There may be other categories but I know those off the top of my head.
Why didn't he just follow the orders, leave, then file a complaint? I'm not defending Amtrak here, since it sounds like they were in the wrong, but it's like getting pulled over by the police. The side of the road is not the place to argue your case. The officer is not a judge, and you aren't the jury.
So if you get pulled over for no legitimate reason you are going to accept getting arrested (if that is the punishment for the fake reason you were pulled over) and complain later? The officer is not *the* judge but he is a judge and sometimes they make poor decisions. Stop the stupid decisions from even being made. Explain your rights up front. There is such a thing as false arrest. I'd prefer to tell the cop myself instead of letting him find out by the case winding its way through the court system.
Out of all the different denominations of Christians that entered this country 400 years ago you are going to choose one of them to pick on to support your claims this is due to a minority using their religion to make Facebook change their ways? Obviously you have bigger issues to sort out before you have any right to post here.
Well. Linux does this better than any new Windows version. Install Linux, and all supported hardware is there. Install Windows, and then go hunt for drivers. Signed drivers. I bet he drags the drivers of those companies into the spotlight, that refuse to create a Linux driver, partially because MS told them to do so, and partially because they have something shady to hide (like their most expensive product and their cheapest product only differing in the driver code).
*devil's advocate mode on*Gee, imagine that, all *supported* hardware have drivers available in Linux. What about the unsupported hardware? For Windows you can go to the manufacturer and download the latest drivers (obviously this is harder if the driver is your NIC/modem) for Windows. For Linux the manufacturer *may* have a driver but all the more likely you may have to find it on some unknown website and have to *compile* it because most kernel-space and user-space software for Linux has to be compiled. You may get lucky with a binary RPM though if there is one available. Most people don't have driver issues when using Windows because they don't have exotic hardware. If they do have exotic hardware a person may find themselves searching for a driver for any OS unless they have it on a driver CD from the original retail package. Exotic hardware is even harder to have a driver for Linux available unless the manufacturer is Linux-friendly.
This guy really calls himself anything?? How incompetent can you be? The whole point of having a computer, is to be able to automate things. This is mostly done trough writing programs. But then you have programs, and the OS, and you want them to work together in a specific way. A comforting little automation there... an quick rename of just those files, while replacing a word inside them... let two tools work together for more comfort... All this glue in between is filled with shell scripting, or as he calls it "the command line".
If you can't do that, you're not really using the computer. If there would be a computer license, this would be the major thing you would have to be able to do. When you're only being able to eat pre-chewed food, you're dead, every time the pre-chewer has a problem.
When I came from Windows, this "glue" scripts, and the little automation of repetitive tasks, including the use of DBUS, and even Greasemonkey, were the first thing that made me say "Wow, I love Linux". All this shit that I had to work countless hours on on Windows... and all this comfort that I previously could not even imagine... dissolved into some small shell scripts. Everything was so easy. And most importantly: Everything suddenly was possible.
Windows has VBscript, Perl, and now the PowerShell (not to mention batch files are still usable). What "shit" did you have to work countless hours on in Windows?*devil's advocate mode off*
To support your post I'll state that if the command line is dead as the article author says, Microsoft wouldn't have made PowerShell nor would they have made Windows Server 2008 Core which is a completely CLI-version of Windows for servers.
The holidays are at Christmas, hence "Christmas Holidays". Sheesh!
Really? How do you figure? Christmas is only a single holiday so why refer to it in the plural? It sounds stupid and is grammatically incorrect. Why don't we refer to the New Year's holidays since it is only a single holiday consisting of a single day? Why not start referring to Thanksgiving as the Thanksgiving holidays? If we're going to be grammatically incorrect we may as well be consistent throughout the entire calendar year. "Christmas holidays" does not include Hanukkah and Kwanzaa so I hope that isn't the rationale here. People who celebrate those would be disenfranchised if so and we wouldn't want those million people to mount an uprising against the other 300 million people in the U.S. because they are disenfranchised.
Hey, if you are going to be more sensitive to the few thousand people who celebrate Kwanzaa and the few million who celebrate Hanukkah then yes, you better be more sensitive to those who celebrate Christmas considering they are in the majority. But this isn't about Hanukkah and Kwanzaa (the submission said "Christmas holidays" not "holiday season"). It is about Christmas. There is only one Christmas holiday, whether it consists of multiple calendar days or not. Case closed.
A holiday that consists of multiple days is still 1 holiday and therefore does not justify a plural form of "holiday". The plural of "day" would be warranted but not "holiday".
With the Christmas holidays
uh, since when has there been more than one Christmas? Do you politically correct people know how stupid you sound to other, more sane, people? This could be modded as off-topic but then again I did reply to something within the submission text so is it really off-topic or did I just bring up something some people just don't want to talk about?
FYI, weather != whether and loose != lose. People can mod this down for being off-topic if they want but it is also informative. Decisions, decisions.
Even fanatical Christians celebrate New Year's and Christmas Eve, so "holiday season" is an accurate term to describe a number of separate single days usually associated with revelry and gift-giving. Some people even use these days for traveling and vacationing.
Whatever happened to "Merry Christmas *and* a Happy New Year"? Just because it is an accurate term doesn't mean it is a good one. There was nothing wrong with the original term and it acknowledged that Christmas actually still exists despite how much secularists hate it. And again, we have 2 holidays in January, 1 in February, another in March and so on. Why is this time of year only referred to as "holiday season"? The average holiday count is still 1 per month. The reason? It is to gradually remove the existence of Christmas, to put it on the backburner, to institute more secularism. You do it gradually enough then people don't notice. The bad thing is that some people don't care but many people still do. Other people also don't realize the agenda behind it. If there isn't an agenda behind it then there shouldn't have been any reason many companies and the media jump on the bandwagon the last few years to change the greeting or goodbye from "Merry Christmas and Happy New Year" to "happy holidays". The original greeting was just fine and still is except for those who don't want to acknowledge Christmas.
Not everyone is Christian (and several religions have holidays around this time of the year.) And for many Christians around the world, Christmas is 12 days long. Look up the Twelve Days of Christmas on Wikipedia if you must.
Diversity does not entail ignoring all holidays and calling it a "holiday season". Diversity means *acknowledging* everyone. You can't acknowledge something if you totally ignore it by never calling it by name. The whole point of "holiday season" is so secularists can have one more win by ignoring Christmas. Christmas has been celebrated for thousands of years and only in the last few years have companies and the media thought they should try not offending the minorities by referring to this time of year by "holiday season". The worst and IMO, the stupidest, sounding term I've heard is "Christmas holidays". I'd love to know where the people who say that got the idea that Christmas is made of up more than one holiday. It may be made up of more than 1 day, as you state above, but no way there is more than one holiday. That is another way that people can just lump all the other holidays into Christmas to piggyback on it's existence and diffuse it.
In this holiday season, I'm sure you've received gifts that excited your brain -- and others that you already want to resell on an auction site."
Actually I received gifts for Christmas, not this holiday season, you insensitive clod! We have holidays all year round. Why should Christmas be recast as an entire holiday season (gift giving is irrelevant as far as calling it a holiday season) in its own right, other than for being able to ignore its existence by not calling it by name?
Mod me down if you want but only if you have good reason to; disagreement is not a valid reason. If this comment wasn't geared toward Christmas then it shouldn't have been posted the day after but instead near Hanukkah or Kwanzaa, but no one ever pays attention to those holidays anyway, at least, the retailers don't pay attention to them when they advertise sales. Their excuse for using "holiday season" is to falsely state their inclusion of other holidays. I guess lies don't matter as long as you turn a profit. What's your excuse for using "holiday season"?
Sharepoint is your best bet here. The only alternative I can think of is checking your docs into your source control.
I already spouted off on SharePoint doesn't enforce checkout in another post so I won't repeat that here. So I'll comment on version control aspects of it as well as version control in general. In this case, unless the poster can make his customers go to his server all the time for his document then any version control system is going to be useless, much like SharePoint would be. If the poster can redirect all customers to his site for doc retrieval then SharePoint may work.
However, once your database gets into the multi-gigabyte range (as in lots of checkout/checkins with large documents) the SharePoint web pages don't want to work right. We've run into this problem at work. We need to upgrade the server it is running on and until we do we have to click on a link multiple times before SharePoint will load a page. Sometimes the request times out, not sure if it is the DB having problems or something else. The DB is SQL Server. It is very annoying and productivity drops often.
Microsoft SharePoint does not enforce document checkout to modify a document, at least with the free version we use at work. I believe the pay version is the same because I used it a while back prior to a customer deployment. You can also view documents in a File Share type view and modifying documents that way won't even give you an option to do a checkout prior to the modifications. There is no version history either when accessing the files using a File Share view.
I don't think SharePoint is the answer here anyway unless the poster is able to force all his customers to go to his website to retrieve documents. If his model is more of a distribution model then obviously SharePoint is useless. He mentioned what happens if someone in a foreign country opens his documents, the question is whether when that person does that they are going to do it over the Internet and get the document from his server every time or open a local copy.
Their Cisco MARS appliance was an acquisition of Protego Networks. Their LMS suite that I mentioned in my first post also came from another company (or at least some of the individual apps did and then Cisco tried to glue them together) but I don't recall which one. Despite the MARS appliance and software now being under Cisco's control for at least 3 years (since I've known about it) and the same with Cisco LMS you would think that Cisco would perform some assimilation and make the apps integrate better with their native products. I'm not too thrilled to hear that they are yet again possibly acquiring software outside the company because they don't hardly take any time to do assimilation development or fix any glaring problems that the original company never bothered to fix.
I will add that I'm not impressed with their hardware, but am impressed with their *firmare*. In terms of price performance, speed of switching, density, etc etc, they have competitors that beat them handily, without compromising fundamental reliability.
I agree with the hardware comment to a point. We have FWSMs and IDSM-2s at work. The following numbers are my best recollection from a recent round of performance testing a few weeks ago. The FWSMs can only do 2.5Gbps with TCP (3.0Gbps with UDP). Peak throughput for the IDSMs are only 500Mbps I believe(whatever it is it is much lower than the switching throughput). We have a 20Gb backbone but it is useless when you are having to use FWSMs and IDSMs between segments which severely drop your throughput. Other vendors can reach 20Gbps with their firewalls. Why can't Cisco? I'm not a networking person but maybe the problem is the fact that the FWSMs and IDSMs are modules instead of stand-alone devices. Any ideas?
Since ChiefArcher mentioned a gripe about Cisco (delays in shipping hardware), I'll mention mine too. They make great hardware. I don't think anyone can dispute that. However their server software for managing that hardware is just....crap. Cisco Security Manager is slow, non-clusterable except with 3rd party (Veritas) software, and has some really dangerous default behavior which can't be changed. The backend runs on a server and a thick client is an administrator's interface to the backend and/or to network devices. In the case of CSM the devices are IDSs, firewalls, and VPNs. THe thick client is just that, thick. It is developed in Java and is just horrendously slow. A change in the thick client running on XP can require a restart of the services *on the server* thereby basically requiring an administrator to make the change anyway. It is ludicrous.
Their other management app, LAN Management Solution, is just a cobbled together bunch of stuff that seems to barely work. If you breathe wrong it can break. We use the Solaris version at work. It doesn't have a thick client; all management is through a web browser. Managing it on the CLI at the OS level though is dog slow (takes 10 minutes to completely startup). The least little change in the GUI requires a restart. It is also expensive just like CSM (CSM is mid 5 digits for a single server to manage 500 devices). We've found many faults with both apps at work over the last 6 months beyond what I've mentioned above. I recommend staying away from them. I hope that their adventures into blade servers is better. They seem to do better at hardware than software.
My company hasn't given a Christmas bonus in several years. I weep for the guys at Google, I really do. How many slashdotters work for a company that gives a Christmas bonus? Maybe that should be a poll question.
I've worked at my company since 12/2002 (I was 24). Besides that year and last year, every year we've had a *Christmas* bonus. It was specifically called that; same with the *Christmas* party. We aren't big enough to worry about having to exclude Christians in the name of diversity. Last year right before the bonuses were given out they announced a change where the money that we would have gotten in our bonuses would now be a raise (although we still had received raises in previous years in addition to a Christmas bonus) and be spread over the entire following year. Typically my raises were 4-5% when most people's were about 3% (I do exceptional work). This year though I was surprised to not only get a 4% raise but they still sent out a bonus. The bonus wasn't as much as the previous years (about 33% of a regular bonus) but considering their new policy I was surprised. The included Christmas card mentioned that in these tough times the company wanted to give back to their employees. I greatly appreciated the gesture. A few months ago they sent out a similar amount (at least mine was similar) for similar reasons (high gas prices, etc.). My company has about 200 employees and is a gov't contractor. Bonuses come out of company profits.
when we drive cars that have half or one third the fuel efficiency they could have,
Gasoline engines are more efficient now than they were in the 70s however due to the increased weight that many vehicles possess the resulting MPG is less. When you put a 400HP engine in a crossover utility vehicle (XUV) weighing almost 2 tons you tend to not get that great of gas mileage however the efficiency is still there as far as I know (I'm not an engine builder).
2. I see nothing irrational or excessive at all. The US has deliberately sent the Lucetania into a battle zone in order to enter WWI, disregarded intelligence that could have prevented Pearl Harbor, entered a virtual battle in Tonkin to enter Vietnam, and made up stories on WMD to enter Iraq. In that light an NSA backdoor does not seem more preposterous to me. And there have been news items on this, even from Bruce Schneier.
And hindsight is 20/20. Lots of intelligence reports prior (over the summer) to 9/11 showed that *something* was going to happen but no one had any idea when. Lots of good clues were available but the right people didn't have the information at the right time due to the lack of government information sharing. If you think it is bad now just think what it was like 60 years ago. The gov't doesn't ignore information because they want something bad to happen. They filter out what they think is just noise in order to get to the rest of the noise. Read the 9/11 Commission Report sometime and you'll see what I mean. It isn't easy until after things happen and then the light bulb comes on but by then it is too late.
In response to your WMD remark (and this applies to 9/11 intelligence reports too), a lot of intelligence information is just wrong. It is gathered by either gov't employees in the field or by tribesmen who are allied with the U.S. The information is as best as it can be. Sometimes it is accurate but by the time the right people get it it is just useless. This especially happens when you are dealing with a loosely organized group of individual like al-Qaeda who can pick up and move everything on a moment's notice. Bottom line is that your conspiracy theories are based on events or data that are being taken out of context to suit your argument. But no big surprise here on slashdot; carry on.
Now that there's ambien and those other zombie drugs, people are sleep driving, jogging, typing, cooking, and eating. I wish I was making those up but every single one has reportedly happened. Maybe drugs that screw with your brain that much that yo go into a semi-conscious zombie haze should be taken off the market. I'm not saying this lady necessarily took them, but that sort of thing has been known to happen on some sleep aids.
Somehow when those activities are being performed by people asleep they are being done just as well when the person is awake. The real problem comes when people are doing those activitites and then fall asleep. Usually when the order of activities is like that is when people stop driving on the road, stop jogging on the sidewalk, start cooking without potholders; that's when major accidents can happen. That is also a sign of sleep deprivation if it occurs for just a few seconds and if the person doesn't know it ever happened. Bad things can happen then but yet for sleep-insertactivity it seems people are "aware" of what they are doing and do it properly w/o incident. It's weird.
But all in all it's pretty good, and I could hardly see going back to XP now.
So what exactly do you get out of Vista (besides the inability to copy some files sometimes) that you don't get out of XP which justifies the time and money involved in an upgrade, not to mention your stating that you wouldn't want to go back to XP?
And you think DVDs are a big deal? Think again. On healthcare for example, we are beaten by Cuba! I guess you are among those who do not believe that some of these so called 3rd world countries are *slightly* ahead of us especially in what a cellphone can be used for. Now, that's a fact.
It's nice to think of the "advantages" of a system in use by another country especially when you conveniently ignore the disadvantages of the same system. In the case of Cuba, I think most people know that it is a communist country. Many people don't want to pay for someone else's healthcare or at least more than they already do in the United States. Socialist programs are not better when you look at the whole picture; they only benefit the poor (or lazy in some cases). The gov't acts as Robin Hood in that case.
A 3rd world country just now building their infrastructure can go straight for the newest technology as long as they can afford it. Current users don't have their service interrupted because there are no current users or existing service. It is a bit harder to do that in the United States. Regulations in the United States are much different in the States than in 3rd world countries which allows them to reduce feature sets without being hurt by their competition. On the surface, you sound like a Democrat by espousing only the advantages of a system (socialized healthcare) that actually isn't any better than what we have in the U.S. when analyzed properly but using them as a reason why it must be better w/o looking at the downsides.
If the gov't should bail anyone out it is Tesla Motors. But the gov't isn't bailing them out. They are just having trouble securing loans right now (they are good for it though) like many other companies and individuals. If the gov't gives them the money to finish their cars for those who have ordered them then the cars can be sold and the gov't can be paid back. No harm done. Since this isn't an issue of them making (or have already made) bad decisions I don't feel it is a bad thing they are getting temporary help from the gov't since the financial industry isn't willing to do so (in the form of loans). The caveat to this situation is that I hope it better become just temporary by way of Tesla paying the gov't back ASAP. To those companies who made bad decisions and now want help from mommy, I say too bad, but unfortunately Congress said differently.
Really, the whole point of design patterns is to have a common vocabulary. How is that useful if you're going to bastardize your terminology due to stubborn ignorance?
I agree but I'm not sure if we can make a difference. The same thing happened with measuring data capacity. We now have bibytes to measure data capacity in base 2 and regular bytes to measure in base 10 just because people had trouble with the original. They bastardized the terminology and ironically, what changed was the original terms now refer to the bastardized form (base 10 instead of base 2) and the new terms refer to the original base 2 form.