t the very least, Microsoft offers VB.NET and C# which are both equally supported by Microsoft and most vendors; they also have J# and C++, which have varying degrees of support (I can create web projects using C#, J#, or VB.NET;.NET Compact Framework projects with C# or VB.NET;.NET Windows Forms applications with any language.) All of these languages are supported out of the box with Visual Studio 2005.
Tell me again how VB.NET differs from C#, aside from the syntax candy. Last I checked, they supported almost exactly the same feature set, while the other languages that MS advertised as being supported were cut down to fit in a C# shaped hole.
Well, this is a good reason to install a 'dead man switch' - a special script which will destroy everything it can reach if you don't perform some 'keep-alive' action during a month.
This is part of the reason that, in some industries, it's standard practice to be told when you can take vacation, and the procedure is very much like being fired - your email stops working, your accounts are deactivated, and your boss tells you to take two or three weeks off. I believe that they generally pay well enough to offset the suddenness of your vacation plans.
There are even fewer who can lock out someone who had root.
That's really sad - even I can do something like that, and I don't do security for a living. The main thing to do is use layers - nobody gets access to all the systems required for remote access and everybody needs to get through at least one user-level authentication before they can flex their root priveleges.
As an example, run remote access through a VPN that requires a user-level authentication. The interesting stuff sits on some other servers, protected by the same user accounts, plus rules on who can sudo and who can't. The people who run the authentication infrastructure don't have access to these boxes, and the people who have access to the boxes can't see the authentication stuff. You end up with three groups of people running your systems, the network, the sysadmin, and the application stuff that runs on the app servers. Since the sysadmins have access to root on the app servers, they generally have only user-level access to the auth boxes (one person may have root, but only one, with the password stored in a safe offsite or controlled by a securid). This means that, in order to compromise the app servers, you must compromise 2 of these groups. This doesn't address trojans or backdoors, but it's a good place to start.
Indeed, my own plant manager at a fortune-500 company would regularly take all the employees' timesheets, and erase/rewrite them, to bill time from where it should have been billed, to where he thought he could get away with the least pressure.
Did you xerox your timesheets at that job? I know I would.
I recently asked a former customer of mine, who works IT for a large university, why people would hire IBM over a smaller company with more expertise. He said that as far as his boss is concerned, if you hire IBM and they screw something up, you are covered because you went with IBM.
That's why I hate large companies. They care more about avoiding blame than actually getting things done. I could make the opposite claim, that IBMGS is the worst choice due to their questionable hiring practicies and lack of available expertise. A known quantity is generally safer than a big name.
Perhaps the server had to be taken down for a quarter of a day (2 hours) and the company has 200 employees?
The server? Obviously you don't work in IT - there are usually several - dozens of servers, depending on the size of the org, each with a particular task. The fact is, we don't know what they did or how it impacted productivity. Also, as someone else pointed out already, charging lost productivity is asinine and opens the door to all sorts of padding.
Thus, the Federal Government has no legal powers that are not explicitly set forth in the Constitution.
Congress does have the right to regulate interstate commerce and provide for the general welfare. I wonder if they can argues that that covers a national ID.
I stick by this one hey, sometimes you have to read between the lines on some issues and in his posting is just oozing of attempts at showing the "over" complex nature of implementing Open Source solutions (even though Java isnt opensrc). If it was an envorinment of pros who know whats up the problem the it would be resolved in a day or two.
I didn't get that at all; all the complexity was in justifying the usage of eclipse and the JDK to write a java app. I was in a similar situation, and it took me about a half hour to set everything up, plus another month while the USPS did a postal security clearance. It would have taken longer to get eclipse approved (6 months to never) if it wasn't already on the approved list.
And in all due respect the Java SDK comes as a rpm or a deb file in Linux most of the time and requires you to type in a command or click a button (you cant get much easier then that dood). So a 31 step manual is perhaps, some dork in your FOSS has gone to the Sun website and just downloaded some dumb ass doco and sent the thing to you while thinking "here ya go now piss off i have other things to do".
RTFC: the 31 step process is for getting permission to install the JDK.
Further to that i dont want to hear this "oh it has to be easy otherwise no body will use it" because your dealing on a different level here.
That's not what he said. It's more like "my company is insane."
The specific producst mentioned were Sun's JDK (which we'll skip as it's not open-source), Eclipse and Apache. So looking at the final two.
You know, you could've just said that Eclipse and Apache aren't GPL programs. The salient point here is that there are a handful of licenses, or which GPL is the most prevalent; legal could easily say that any app under the GPL is ok to use and just verify that it is under that license before approving it.
What were they doing in that time? Highly paid lawyers were sitting around a desk grilling my manager about what this software would be used for. Then they debated whether or not someone could come after Corporation X in the future if they learned that their editor was used to create a project.
Say what? Is IBM going to come after company X for using their product, which is under GPL, to develop some other project? That's insane.
Even worse, if you consider that we are the aliens, and our species has simply invaded and conquered this planet an aen ago. We adapted, survived, and destroyed our own history. If you don't understand the destroyed part of that, go to a library and read some 6,000 year old books. Assuming you knew the language, you wouldn't find the books. They're lost, damaged, and/or intentionally destroyed over the years.
Or, we're barely evolved apes who have no brothers in the stars, and the only things supporting your imaginings are the X files and the Bible.
How interesting. It's customary for people here to post links to pages that support their arguments rather than undermine them, but you've gone and done the opposite. There's an awful lot of material in his IMDB profile, a considerable amount of which doesn't pertain to either Star Wars, Indiana Jones or American Graffiti.
Sorry, I only looked back about 30 years. In that time frame, SW and Raiders account for all but a couple of his titles.
If I had a few hundred million dollars laying around, I'd slack off, too. What? Make another hit movie? Screw that. I'm going to lounge on my private yacht off the coast of Hawaii. Don't call me, I'll call you.
Well me too. Difference is, I don't claim to be an artist. Also, look at speilberg - he's done more than 2 things and a lot of variety too.
Do you really think that Lucas made any of the Star Wars films strictly for fun or the art of storytelling and not to make a profit?
Seriously, who could ever think that? Lucas is a hack who got lucky (American Graffiti notwithstanding) and he's been flogging that horse for 20 years. Okay, I liked Indiana jones, but Jesus Christ, check out his profile! He hasn't done anything else!
But what happens when those two servers are no longer redundant backups but are both used and expected and taken for granted? One pops, the other might not cut it any more?
That's not a hardware problem. Your organization needs repair work.
That way, the "spare" isn't "wasting space" (as far as the PHB is concerned), when things are going well you get double the performance, you have no downtime switching servers when one fails, and because you're placing half the stress on each machine, you more than halve the risk of a failure.
Hehe, good luck. Your boss won't allow another server until the two original ones are screaming for air.
You deal with it or you get yourself a new boss. If you're a startup, it's understandable, but established companies should be doing things as you say.
Labor is the same way, and in many industries (IT being a perfect example) labor costs are almost the entire cost of production. Sure, there are servers and ethernet cables to buy, but commodity hardware has made it so that the vast majority of IT costs are in terms of actual dollars paid for salaries, benefits, etc. to the people that run the servers, write the code, make it all happen.
So if the market for IT jobs is suddenly or gradually flooded with people who are willing and able to work for lower wages, the costs of IT services will tend to go down, too (assuming there's some competition in the market, of course). You can buy hosted web services from lots of competiting companies, so the price of web hosting will go down. Outsourced helpdesk support will also get cheaper. The price of Windows won't necessarily go down, but that's because they have a pretty effective monopoly on desktop OS software (slightly different rules apply).
The problem here is that you're conflating IT and tech workers with fungible assets (webhosting). We aren't fungible. You're also assuming that companies are rational when all available evidence points to the opposite. The presence of a large influx of cheap labor allows companies to lower salaries, true, but it also can limit the output of those workers, as talent is no longer paid what it is worth - you can hire a kid to run a bunch of servers for $12/hr and he'll do ok for normal stuff. You can hire another kid to build webapps for accounting firms (slightly higher rate here). What you can't do is build something truly innovative like google or the first browser or really reliable clustering, just to name a few things.
Of course, the response by talent is to go found a company and try to get big or bought before some large corp crushes them with money (this is one of those nasty departures from theory), thus countering the idiots who think that all tech workers are fungible and pay accordingly.
And it's not a zero-sum game, either--after people do adjust and retrain back to their original salary levels, they're by definition working in fields where the "home" economy has more competitive advantage, so the net economic effect is positive. Everybody gets lower prices, and (assuming people retrain to original salaries), everybody is making as much as they were before. It doesn't work out perfectly, but that's the general idea.
What do you say to Henry Ford? He trained his workers and paid them outrageous salaries (got rich doing it, too). Fact is, a race to the bottom is generally destructive, as people don't like to change too much. You may berate them for it, but you have to deal with the realities of the situation.
Job protectionism works out to be the same moral give-and-take as any other kind of trade protectionism: if you protect the current salaries of IT workers, everybody else in the economy (including a lot of other poor, working stiffs) pays for it with higher prices.
I think you exaggerate too much. GM should be a shining example of what you speak, but all analysis points to shoddy management and poor quality as the cause of their problems. Overpaid workers are certainly a problem, but I think you overstate their impact.
Now for a personal example: I build software. Working normally, my productivity can be as high as $250,000/year. In fact, it's likely within 20% of that, as that covers my salary + benefits + profit to the company. The flip side is that I could work harder and longer and double or triple my productivity. Hell, I'm pretty good - I may be able to do even more. Problem is, this would eat up all my free time and wreck my health if I did it for too long. I could also work harder and still have time for other pursuits, such as investing and ski trips. If my work figured out how to get that out of me (by measuring and rewarding), they could also make some good money. The people you describe won't do this - they want to take the whole pie and view salaries as overhead and
Well, the problem is that you have to store it for some 10,000 years. That's 2500 warehouses of pretty dangerous stuff, that you have to protect for a very long time. Protect it from criminals, terrorists, natural disasters. Again for 10,000 years!
So get a 4th gen. breeder reactor and reprocess your waste - you get less waste that only needs babysitting for about 500 years. It's also useless for bombs, so the terror target is reduced to someone willing to spread around low-grade Uranium.
A couple fast breeders could reduce Germany's nuclear waste output by about 90%, but neither we nor the rest of the world are too keen about us having weapons-grade plutonium, even if it's only used in power plants.
So build breeders that don't make weapons grade Pu. They do exist, you know.
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t the very least, Microsoft offers VB.NET and C# which are both equally supported by Microsoft and most vendors; they also have J# and C++, which have varying degrees of support (I can create web projects using C#, J#, or VB.NET; .NET Compact Framework projects with C# or VB.NET; .NET Windows Forms applications with any language.) All of these languages are supported out of the box with Visual Studio 2005.
Tell me again how VB.NET differs from C#, aside from the syntax candy. Last I checked, they supported almost exactly the same feature set, while the other languages that MS advertised as being supported were cut down to fit in a C# shaped hole.
Well, this is a good reason to install a 'dead man switch' - a special script which will destroy everything it can reach if you don't perform some 'keep-alive' action during a month.
This is part of the reason that, in some industries, it's standard practice to be told when you can take vacation, and the procedure is very much like being fired - your email stops working, your accounts are deactivated, and your boss tells you to take two or three weeks off. I believe that they generally pay well enough to offset the suddenness of your vacation plans.
There are even fewer who can lock out someone who had root.
That's really sad - even I can do something like that, and I don't do security for a living. The main thing to do is use layers - nobody gets access to all the systems required for remote access and everybody needs to get through at least one user-level authentication before they can flex their root priveleges.
As an example, run remote access through a VPN that requires a user-level authentication. The interesting stuff sits on some other servers, protected by the same user accounts, plus rules on who can sudo and who can't. The people who run the authentication infrastructure don't have access to these boxes, and the people who have access to the boxes can't see the authentication stuff. You end up with three groups of people running your systems, the network, the sysadmin, and the application stuff that runs on the app servers. Since the sysadmins have access to root on the app servers, they generally have only user-level access to the auth boxes (one person may have root, but only one, with the password stored in a safe offsite or controlled by a securid). This means that, in order to compromise the app servers, you must compromise 2 of these groups. This doesn't address trojans or backdoors, but it's a good place to start.
Indeed, my own plant manager at a fortune-500 company would regularly take all the employees' timesheets, and erase/rewrite them, to bill time from where it should have been billed, to where he thought he could get away with the least pressure.
Did you xerox your timesheets at that job? I know I would.
I recently asked a former customer of mine, who works IT for a large university, why people would hire IBM over a smaller company with more expertise. He said that as far as his boss is concerned, if you hire IBM and they screw something up, you are covered because you went with IBM.
That's why I hate large companies. They care more about avoiding blame than actually getting things done. I could make the opposite claim, that IBMGS is the worst choice due to their questionable hiring practicies and lack of available expertise. A known quantity is generally safer than a big name.
Perhaps the server had to be taken down for a quarter of a day (2 hours) and the company has 200 employees?
The server? Obviously you don't work in IT - there are usually several - dozens of servers, depending on the size of the org, each with a particular task. The fact is, we don't know what they did or how it impacted productivity. Also, as someone else pointed out already, charging lost productivity is asinine and opens the door to all sorts of padding.
Thus, the Federal Government has no legal powers that are not explicitly set forth in the Constitution.
Congress does have the right to regulate interstate commerce and provide for the general welfare. I wonder if they can argues that that covers a national ID.
I stick by this one hey, sometimes you have to read between the lines on some issues and in his posting is just oozing of attempts at showing the "over" complex nature of implementing Open Source solutions (even though Java isnt opensrc). If it was an envorinment of pros who know whats up the problem the it would be resolved in a day or two.
I didn't get that at all; all the complexity was in justifying the usage of eclipse and the JDK to write a java app. I was in a similar situation, and it took me about a half hour to set everything up, plus another month while the USPS did a postal security clearance. It would have taken longer to get eclipse approved (6 months to never) if it wasn't already on the approved list.
And in all due respect the Java SDK comes as a rpm or a deb file in Linux most of the time and requires you to type in a command or click a button (you cant get much easier then that dood). So a 31 step manual is perhaps, some dork in your FOSS has gone to the Sun website and just downloaded some dumb ass doco and sent the thing to you while thinking "here ya go now piss off i have other things to do".
RTFC: the 31 step process is for getting permission to install the JDK.
Further to that i dont want to hear this "oh it has to be easy otherwise no body will use it" because your dealing on a different level here.
That's not what he said. It's more like "my company is insane."
The specific producst mentioned were Sun's JDK (which we'll skip as it's not open-source), Eclipse and Apache. So looking at the final two.
You know, you could've just said that Eclipse and Apache aren't GPL programs. The salient point here is that there are a handful of licenses, or which GPL is the most prevalent; legal could easily say that any app under the GPL is ok to use and just verify that it is under that license before approving it.
What were they doing in that time? Highly paid lawyers were sitting around a desk grilling my manager about what this software would be used for. Then they debated whether or not someone could come after Corporation X in the future if they learned that their editor was used to create a project.
Say what? Is IBM going to come after company X for using their product, which is under GPL, to develop some other project? That's insane.
I think you got "geeky" confused with "fired".
I dare you to find an evidence trail leading to him. Who do you think built the systems that log everything?
Even worse, if you consider that we are the aliens, and our species has simply invaded and conquered this planet an aen ago. We adapted, survived, and destroyed our own history. If you don't understand the destroyed part of that, go to a library and read some 6,000 year old books. Assuming you knew the language, you wouldn't find the books. They're lost, damaged, and/or intentionally destroyed over the years.
Or, we're barely evolved apes who have no brothers in the stars, and the only things supporting your imaginings are the X files and the Bible.
How interesting. It's customary for people here to post links to pages that support their arguments rather than undermine them, but you've gone and done the opposite. There's an awful lot of material in his IMDB profile, a considerable amount of which doesn't pertain to either Star Wars, Indiana Jones or American Graffiti.
Sorry, I only looked back about 30 years. In that time frame, SW and Raiders account for all but a couple of his titles.
If I had a few hundred million dollars laying around, I'd slack off, too. What? Make another hit movie? Screw that. I'm going to lounge on my private yacht off the coast of Hawaii. Don't call me, I'll call you.
Well me too. Difference is, I don't claim to be an artist. Also, look at speilberg - he's done more than 2 things and a lot of variety too.
Do you really think that Lucas made any of the Star Wars films strictly for fun or the art of storytelling and not to make a profit?
Seriously, who could ever think that? Lucas is a hack who got lucky (American Graffiti notwithstanding) and he's been flogging that horse for 20 years. Okay, I liked Indiana jones, but Jesus Christ, check out his profile! He hasn't done anything else!
But what happens when those two servers are no longer redundant backups but are both used and expected and taken for granted? One pops, the other might not cut it any more?
That's not a hardware problem. Your organization needs repair work.
Can someone please translate that into a sentence? Seriously... I can wade through some of the typical grammatical errors, but come on...
"I'm really pissed because I just got dicked over by my supplier and there's nothing here to shoot!"
That way, the "spare" isn't "wasting space" (as far as the PHB is concerned), when things are going well you get double the performance, you have no downtime switching servers when one fails, and because you're placing half the stress on each machine, you more than halve the risk of a failure.
Hehe, good luck. Your boss won't allow another server until the two original ones are screaming for air.
But what to do when your boss doesn't get it?
You deal with it or you get yourself a new boss. If you're a startup, it's understandable, but established companies should be doing things as you say.
Labor is the same way, and in many industries (IT being a perfect example) labor costs are almost the entire cost of production. Sure, there are servers and ethernet cables to buy, but commodity hardware has made it so that the vast majority of IT costs are in terms of actual dollars paid for salaries, benefits, etc. to the people that run the servers, write the code, make it all happen.
So if the market for IT jobs is suddenly or gradually flooded with people who are willing and able to work for lower wages, the costs of IT services will tend to go down, too (assuming there's some competition in the market, of course). You can buy hosted web services from lots of competiting companies, so the price of web hosting will go down. Outsourced helpdesk support will also get cheaper. The price of Windows won't necessarily go down, but that's because they have a pretty effective monopoly on desktop OS software (slightly different rules apply).
The problem here is that you're conflating IT and tech workers with fungible assets (webhosting). We aren't fungible. You're also assuming that companies are rational when all available evidence points to the opposite. The presence of a large influx of cheap labor allows companies to lower salaries, true, but it also can limit the output of those workers, as talent is no longer paid what it is worth - you can hire a kid to run a bunch of servers for $12/hr and he'll do ok for normal stuff. You can hire another kid to build webapps for accounting firms (slightly higher rate here). What you can't do is build something truly innovative like google or the first browser or really reliable clustering, just to name a few things.
Of course, the response by talent is to go found a company and try to get big or bought before some large corp crushes them with money (this is one of those nasty departures from theory), thus countering the idiots who think that all tech workers are fungible and pay accordingly.
And it's not a zero-sum game, either--after people do adjust and retrain back to their original salary levels, they're by definition working in fields where the "home" economy has more competitive advantage, so the net economic effect is positive. Everybody gets lower prices, and (assuming people retrain to original salaries), everybody is making as much as they were before. It doesn't work out perfectly, but that's the general idea.
What do you say to Henry Ford? He trained his workers and paid them outrageous salaries (got rich doing it, too). Fact is, a race to the bottom is generally destructive, as people don't like to change too much. You may berate them for it, but you have to deal with the realities of the situation.
Job protectionism works out to be the same moral give-and-take as any other kind of trade protectionism: if you protect the current salaries of IT workers, everybody else in the economy (including a lot of other poor, working stiffs) pays for it with higher prices.
I think you exaggerate too much. GM should be a shining example of what you speak, but all analysis points to shoddy management and poor quality as the cause of their problems. Overpaid workers are certainly a problem, but I think you overstate their impact.
Now for a personal example: I build software. Working normally, my productivity can be as high as $250,000/year. In fact, it's likely within 20% of that, as that covers my salary + benefits + profit to the company. The flip side is that I could work harder and longer and double or triple my productivity. Hell, I'm pretty good - I may be able to do even more. Problem is, this would eat up all my free time and wreck my health if I did it for too long. I could also work harder and still have time for other pursuits, such as investing and ski trips. If my work figured out how to get that out of me (by measuring and rewarding), they could also make some good money. The people you describe won't do this - they want to take the whole pie and view salaries as overhead and
Well, the problem is that you have to store it for some 10,000 years. That's 2500 warehouses of pretty dangerous stuff, that you have to protect for a very long time. Protect it from criminals, terrorists, natural disasters. Again for 10,000 years!
So get a 4th gen. breeder reactor and reprocess your waste - you get less waste that only needs babysitting for about 500 years. It's also useless for bombs, so the terror target is reduced to someone willing to spread around low-grade Uranium.
A couple fast breeders could reduce Germany's nuclear waste output by about 90%, but neither we nor the rest of the world are too keen about us having weapons-grade plutonium, even if it's only used in power plants.
So build breeders that don't make weapons grade Pu. They do exist, you know.
And energy is well planned in Europe, we will not get accidential supply crisis.
Well, neither do we ;)
How's the buff Asian guy next to you going to feel when he and his machine are doused in cooking oil?
Buff asian guy at a lan party? Who has time to get good enough to go to lan parties and still hit the gym for an hour each day?