In this day an age why not automate? They could have an automatic press which pushes all the keys in at once. 1.1s per key @ 104 keys per keyboard as opposed to 2-5 seconds for a machine to do the whole thing. I'll all for creating jobs and keeping people employed, but I'd rather not have to worry about buying products from companies that support these kind of environments.
In all likely hood all these big companies already knew the conditions in these factories and are only acting on it now since it was made public.
The only downfall I could see to home plug would be similar to wifi, especially in a condo/apartment type setting. Depending how the power is setup in the building your homeplug could leak back in to the general power distribution just like X10 Technology and its "Home ID" being limited to just 16 channels
Mind you, most people don't use homeplug technology so unless people start snooping on power lines for carrier signals they probably wouldn't notice anyway:-)
Depends how hungry I am, I've eaten in the shower, drank beer in the shower, hell I've eaten pizza or a sandwhich while taking a crunch. At the bar, I even drink beer while pissing at a urinal. So yes, I do eat in a bathroom:-)
If you dont like the conditions of a job, dont work for the company. its that simple. You do not have a right to work for a company just because you want too. Its the employers right to hire who they want and pose specific restrictions on the job, and requirements to hold that job.
While I don't agree that religion belongs in the work place, thats the employers choice. Deal with it, or work for a company that makes useful products instead
A friend of mine was bored at work and wrote a Mario Brothers side scroller in Javscript, which included simple a simply but accurate physics of when Mario jumps and falls, just like in the console version. He also wrote a multiplayer animated version of Monopoly in Javascript with the help of a back-end php script for connectivity.
The biggest hurdle in programming fun things in javascript is the browser the user is using(speed of execution issues) and the processing capabilities of their computer.
if you work at a company that releases software that has not been fully tested, then the company you work for is unprofessional as well.
Really? Its impossible to "fully test" anything. Every software program I've used has bugs, made by million/billion dollar companies. Its impossible to recreate every possible scenario to test for bugs, so by your logic nothing is fully tested so nothing should be released.
Just look at any release of Windows, any browser, any software program that isn't "Hello, World!" I promise you'll find service packs, updates, bug fixes, etc because the program wasn't fully tested and fixed before release.
Seriously, Admins you need to clean this stuff out. I like reading slashdot at work, but this stuff causes it to be blocked by our "censorship" program. If I cant read slashdot, what am I supposed to do for 8 hours in my cubicle. Work is out of the question!:-)
My biggest question is where on this blue marble do you live with insane restrictions like that.
I get 60Gb a month on my home connection, 6Gb on my smart phone, and unlimited internet at my University where I take night courses.
But I agree with a previous post. Use a squid-cache. However, Squid-cache isn't the most friendly thing to setup. I'd look in to a solution like IPCop or Smoothwall which are easy to install with Squid or Squid-like plug-ins
Privacy and data retention policies (We know Google loves to data mine your gmail accounts) Supported Protocols (POP, IMAP, Web-based, MS Exchange Compatible, etc) Service Level Agreement Data backup policies Ease of administration Integrated Spam/Phishing and Anti-virus filters (Both inbound and outbound) Integration with existing AD/LDAP Services for authentication
Many many moons ago (And I'm not talking about when I drop my pants) my dialup ISP did this.
I was on the un-metered plan. I could surf all I wanted, no limits. However, the more I used the lower my traffic was prioritized until I was at the bottom of the list.
I think this is a fair way of doing it to be honest. Regular end users just want their net to work... period... So why should they be bogged down by guys like me who download 100Gb a month? If my torrents slow down overtime, Im not concerned since its something I shouldn't really be doing anyway
Its not that we're actually running out of IP addresses, its they were poorly allocated to begin with.
In total, there are 4.2 Billion IP's available in the IPv4 Space.
Summary of wasteful allocation:
1) 10.X.X.X for internal usage,
2) 192.168.X.X for internal usage
3) 172.18.X.X for internal usage
4) 127.X.X.X reserved for localhost,
5) 169.254.X.X for "I'm not on a network" IP's
6) Everything 1.X.X.X - 10.X.X.X is reserved for IANA.
So adding this up we've wasted
1) 16,581,375
2) 65,025
3) 65.025
4) 16,581,375
5) 65.025
6) 149,232,375 Total : 182,560,200 IP's unusable.
There is no reason why private networks need three different ranges of IP's for private use. Most, if not all businesses can get away with using the 192.168 or the 172.18 ranges(Exceptions would be google, governments, and research places with over 65k machines)
Then you have residential users who think they need an IP for each computer and their xbox.
Realistically, a company with a mail server, web server, ftp server etc... only needs one IP and a NAT to do port forwarding to the inside network.
If they clamp down on IP usage and free up some of the wastefully reserved IP ranges we wouldn't be having this discussion
Makes sense to me. The most efficent places to store data centers is in the northern US or Canada where you have sub-zero temperatures from November - March and ranging between 0-15 in April/May and Sept/Oct and the rest of the year 20-30+ (Celcius of course)
With these lower temperatures they could run a data center entirely off outside air from September - May each year. Put a heppa filter in between to scrub out dirt and dust and vola, o'natural cooling solutions
It really depends on how the company was managed. I work for a smaller company, (50 employees), we have three IT staff including myself. (7 programmers, and a bunch of useless accountants/sales people)
We get away with it quite easily. Everything is properly managed. We use Group Policies to manage PC Configuration, System Inventory software to track assets and whats actually installed/used on each PC, we use WSUS to push out Windows updates, and a host of other system automation tools.
We have a VoIP phone system hooked up to a PRI allowing us to manage/configure phones in a matter of seconds
Our hardware vendor is prompt, most system replacements happen same day or next day depending on when we order, all our systems are modern hardware, so we're not constantly replacing things.
So most of the time, 3 IT people is actually too much since we've automated most of our jobs and it just involves us checking logs and doing physical stuff
Since its already \.'d
Note that the âoeABCâ consultants were a small part of the overall project team and had been brought in relatively late by âoeBigFirmâ in an attempt to get the âoeFUBARâ project into production; they neither initiated nor managed the project. [NOTE for those of you who have written or done Google searches: "Bob Winsom", like all the other names in the memo as transcribed below, is a pseudonym.]
CONFIDENTIAL MEMORANDUM â" EYES ONLY
Over the past two weeks, Iâ(TM)ve conducted confidential off-site group interviews with all of the ABC consultants working on the FUBAR project. I did this at [ABC manager's] request, after a few of these consultants spoke privately about FUBAR with him. The feedback was consistent and raises serious doubts about whether the FUBAR project, as currently pursued, can ever yield a successful production deployment.
This report groups those comments into several broad areas. It is relatively unfiltered and extremely direct (no withholding). It represents the private comments of ABC consultants who have little to gain and possibly much to lose by being so blunt. These are not the whinings of purists picking nits. These are the grounded assessments of top-notch IT professionals who have among them a century or two of experience bringing projects to completion â" particularly those involving [specific IT] technology â" and who are down in the FUBAR trenches every day.
QUALITY OF WORK AND EFFORT
ISSUE: Several consultants said â" and the rest pretty much agreed â" that far too many of the deliverables, artifacts, and activities (e.g., algorithms, source code, system configuration, design/architecture documents, testing, defect tracking, scheduling etc.) are substantially below any acceptable professional standards and represent a profound threat to FUBAR ever going into production.
EXAMPLES: The code base is very fragile. A lot of it is bad old code that BigFirm didnâ(TM)t have time to rewrite two years ago, but now is five times its original size and even worse. One consultant said he took a code listing, picked pages at random, and found problems on every page he selected. There is pervasive hard coding of what should be adjustable parameters or at least meaningfully named constants (e.g., # of [key items] hard-coded throughout with the literal value â3â, a constant named âninety_eightâ(TM)). Builds take all night. App releases donâ(TM)t run acceptably, if at all, in a production environment. Developers check in files that wonâ(TM)t even compile.
RISKS: The FUBAR project keeps being touted as a world-class development team, but it is not producing world-class, or even minimally-professional, results. This already shows up in the project delays and quality issues of the releases to date. What the team is producing will not only be very difficult to support and modify, it will in all likelihood be unusable, resulting in a complete failure of the FUBAR project.
PROJECT PLANNING AND EXECUTION
ISSUE: Project planning and execution is all to often poor or missing completely. Milestone dates, usually unrealistic if not impossible, are based on political considerations or wishful thinking, not bottom-up grounding. Necessary and useful activities are delayed or canceled with the justification âoeWe have no time for thatâ, but the project phase ends up taking as long or longer than if the activities had been carried out. Dates are set, but nobody scrambles until the last minute. Risks are not actively tracked or managed.
EXAMPLES: Count how many times FUBAR ever produced a production-quality deliverable on anything close to a scheduled date. Even the current effort probably requires a year to get something into production, but the schedule says four months. Managers create work tasks, but then never track progress or completion. One ABC consultant created a risks
May it's just me but instead of killing the astronauts why don't they just disconnect the shuttle from the rocket boosters, wait for the shuttle to get far enough away from the rockets either by the shuttle engaging its propulsion systems or by gravity, then blow up the tanks.
By this the crew can either fly the shuttle back to the runway or jump using the provided gear.
While I feel for the people on dial-up or other narrow-band style connections, there isn't much anyone can do for them.
Times change. While the majority of internet users in the states are on broadband(70% or more according to Web Site Optimization.com) . In my opinion it would be unfeasible to maintain two sites, one for narrow band users and one for high speed users.
Those people in rural area's still have the ability to get high speed internet, such as satellite, direct line of site towers, cellular or even DSL.
Why do I feel Im the only person, without reading the article thought this was about TCP/IP Ports:-P, Looking at the official IANA list of TCP/IP ports, what the hell is half the crap? More over, most of it. Out of the first 1024, I can only count about a dozen or so ports of use.
Off topic? Yes...
In the article though, they missed another useless ones, Serial and MIDI come to mind. As does a VGA connector since most cards don't come with them anymore. Hell, Even Coax cable is going the way of the dino in our HDMI/Component world
And yet, it doesn't matter the slightest... over 5,000,000 possibilities to when easter will happen, and they all occur within 6 weeks of each other(Last 2 weeks of March, and all of April), all on Sundays... So I look at it as a 1 in 6 chance of knowing when easter will be each year.
It largely depends on your development environment. A previous employer I worked for refused to acknowledge any code not written in VB/.NET for apps/scripting. Even though these languages are occasionally useful, for my purposes(report generating/parsing) they rarely were.
At my current employer I have free control to use whatever I see fit. My boss asked me to write something to parse and compare transaction logs. I told him I was installing perl, he said thats fine... So I scripted in perl , couple hundred lines of code now saves 10-15 minutes of manual comparison everyday.
Where I would use a Visual language to program interfaces, I'd never use PERL even though it can with the help of outside.dll's or modules. On the otherside, I'd never consider using any language other then perl for parsing data.
Is the company a Monday - Friday 9-5 style shop?
If it is try this
-Program all PC's to do a system update of whatever needs to be done after people leave (around 6 or 7pm)
-Program all PC's to do a scheduled shut down after updates are done, but set a 5 minute delay. This way if a user is actively using the system they can cancel the shut down and keep working.
-Use a Wake on LAN feature to turn computers back on systematically starting at 7:30/8am. Don't do it all at once because as mentioned the load on the DHCP/Proxies/Domain Controller will be hell. But if you have 1000 pc's break it up in to 1 minute intervals. If you turn on 16 computers every minute for 1 hour then you'll lessen the load and still have everyone's PC's up and running by time they come in.
So apparently 6Billion out of the 6.6Billion (Ref) people on earth have interweb access! Some how overnight the Internet usage went from 1.1Billion (Ref) to 6Billion overnight!
To debunk this author just a little more, Facebook has a comprehensive developer system which allows anyone to program features in to facebook. And the beauty is, facebook controls the style of the interface so it doesn't look like myspace does
The problem is if they put a bandwidth tester on the website it is not going to make a difference. ISP's generally wont intefere with web traffic on port 80 or 443 or any other HTTP based protocol. But when you start using SIP protocol on Ports 5060, 5061, and in vonages case 10000-20000 the ISP and network providers degrade those services. So your bandwidth tester on the web will show you have a steller connection, especially on Comcast which has the PowerBoost for the first 10Mb of a file(15Mb on Speed Tier) you will show nice speeds which doesn't reflect your poor SIP protocol performance. Unfortunately there is no easy way to test a SIP connection speeds or performance.
Slashdot Mirror
In this day an age why not automate? They could have an automatic press which pushes all the keys in at once. 1.1s per key @ 104 keys per keyboard as opposed to 2-5 seconds for a machine to do the whole thing. I'll all for creating jobs and keeping people employed, but I'd rather not have to worry about buying products from companies that support these kind of environments. In all likely hood all these big companies already knew the conditions in these factories and are only acting on it now since it was made public.
The only downfall I could see to home plug would be similar to wifi, especially in a condo/apartment type setting. Depending how the power is setup in the building your homeplug could leak back in to the general power distribution just like X10 Technology and its "Home ID" being limited to just 16 channels Mind you, most people don't use homeplug technology so unless people start snooping on power lines for carrier signals they probably wouldn't notice anyway :-)
Depends how hungry I am, I've eaten in the shower, drank beer in the shower, hell I've eaten pizza or a sandwhich while taking a crunch. At the bar, I even drink beer while pissing at a urinal. So yes, I do eat in a bathroom :-)
If you dont like the conditions of a job, dont work for the company. its that simple.
You do not have a right to work for a company just because you want too.
Its the employers right to hire who they want and pose specific restrictions on the job, and requirements to hold that job.
While I don't agree that religion belongs in the work place, thats the employers choice. Deal with it, or work for a company that makes useful products instead
A friend of mine was bored at work and wrote a Mario Brothers side scroller in Javscript, which included simple a simply but accurate physics of when Mario jumps and falls, just like in the console version. He also wrote a multiplayer animated version of Monopoly in Javascript with the help of a back-end php script for connectivity.
The biggest hurdle in programming fun things in javascript is the browser the user is using(speed of execution issues) and the processing capabilities of their computer.
if you work at a company that releases software that has not been fully tested, then the company you work for is unprofessional as well.
Really? Its impossible to "fully test" anything. Every software program I've used has bugs, made by million/billion dollar companies. Its impossible to recreate every possible scenario to test for bugs, so by your logic nothing is fully tested so nothing should be released.
Just look at any release of Windows, any browser, any software program that isn't "Hello, World!" I promise you'll find service packs, updates, bug fixes, etc because the program wasn't fully tested and fixed before release.
Seriously, Admins you need to clean this stuff out. I like reading slashdot at work, but this stuff causes it to be blocked by our "censorship" program. If I cant read slashdot, what am I supposed to do for 8 hours in my cubicle. Work is out of the question! :-)
wow dude way to flamebait... this isn't Fark
Its too bad they didn't use actual pictures. It looks completely rendered.
Especially the last one of the power switches
Cool concept though if it is indeed real.
My biggest question is where on this blue marble do you live with insane restrictions like that. I get 60Gb a month on my home connection, 6Gb on my smart phone, and unlimited internet at my University where I take night courses.
But I agree with a previous post. Use a squid-cache. However, Squid-cache isn't the most friendly thing to setup. I'd look in to a solution like IPCop or Smoothwall which are easy to install with Squid or Squid-like plug-ins
Privacy and data retention policies (We know Google loves to data mine your gmail accounts)
Supported Protocols (POP, IMAP, Web-based, MS Exchange Compatible, etc)
Service Level Agreement
Data backup policies
Ease of administration
Integrated Spam/Phishing and Anti-virus filters (Both inbound and outbound)
Integration with existing AD/LDAP Services for authentication
Many many moons ago (And I'm not talking about when I drop my pants) my dialup ISP did this.
I was on the un-metered plan. I could surf all I wanted, no limits. However, the more I used the lower my traffic was prioritized until I was at the bottom of the list.
I think this is a fair way of doing it to be honest. Regular end users just want their net to work... period... So why should they be bogged down by guys like me who download 100Gb a month? If my torrents slow down overtime, Im not concerned since its something I shouldn't really be doing anyway
Its not that we're actually running out of IP addresses, its they were poorly allocated to begin with.
In total, there are 4.2 Billion IP's available in the IPv4 Space.
Summary of wasteful allocation:
1) 10.X.X.X for internal usage,
2) 192.168.X.X for internal usage
3) 172.18.X.X for internal usage
4) 127.X.X.X reserved for localhost,
5) 169.254.X.X for "I'm not on a network" IP's
6) Everything 1.X.X.X - 10.X.X.X is reserved for IANA.
So adding this up we've wasted
1) 16,581,375
2) 65,025
3) 65.025
4) 16,581,375
5) 65.025
6) 149,232,375 Total : 182,560,200 IP's unusable.
There is no reason why private networks need three different ranges of IP's for private use. Most, if not all businesses can get away with using the 192.168 or the 172.18 ranges(Exceptions would be google, governments, and research places with over 65k machines)
Then you have residential users who think they need an IP for each computer and their xbox.
Realistically, a company with a mail server, web server, ftp server etc... only needs one IP and a NAT to do port forwarding to the inside network.
If they clamp down on IP usage and free up some of the wastefully reserved IP ranges we wouldn't be having this discussion
Makes sense to me. The most efficent places to store data centers is in the northern US or Canada where you have sub-zero temperatures from November - March and ranging between 0-15 in April/May and Sept/Oct and the rest of the year 20-30+ (Celcius of course) With these lower temperatures they could run a data center entirely off outside air from September - May each year. Put a heppa filter in between to scrub out dirt and dust and vola, o'natural cooling solutions
It really depends on how the company was managed. I work for a smaller company, (50 employees), we have three IT staff including myself. (7 programmers, and a bunch of useless accountants/sales people) We get away with it quite easily. Everything is properly managed. We use Group Policies to manage PC Configuration, System Inventory software to track assets and whats actually installed/used on each PC, we use WSUS to push out Windows updates, and a host of other system automation tools. We have a VoIP phone system hooked up to a PRI allowing us to manage/configure phones in a matter of seconds Our hardware vendor is prompt, most system replacements happen same day or next day depending on when we order, all our systems are modern hardware, so we're not constantly replacing things. So most of the time, 3 IT people is actually too much since we've automated most of our jobs and it just involves us checking logs and doing physical stuff
Since its already \.'d Note that the âoeABCâ consultants were a small part of the overall project team and had been brought in relatively late by âoeBigFirmâ in an attempt to get the âoeFUBARâ project into production; they neither initiated nor managed the project. [NOTE for those of you who have written or done Google searches: "Bob Winsom", like all the other names in the memo as transcribed below, is a pseudonym.]
CONFIDENTIAL MEMORANDUM â" EYES ONLY
Over the past two weeks, Iâ(TM)ve conducted confidential off-site group interviews with all of the ABC consultants working on the FUBAR project. I did this at [ABC manager's] request, after a few of these consultants spoke privately about FUBAR with him. The feedback was consistent and raises serious doubts about whether the FUBAR project, as currently pursued, can ever yield a successful production deployment.
This report groups those comments into several broad areas. It is relatively unfiltered and extremely direct (no withholding). It represents the private comments of ABC consultants who have little to gain and possibly much to lose by being so blunt. These are not the whinings of purists picking nits. These are the grounded assessments of top-notch IT professionals who have among them a century or two of experience bringing projects to completion â" particularly those involving [specific IT] technology â" and who are down in the FUBAR trenches every day.
QUALITY OF WORK AND EFFORT
ISSUE: Several consultants said â" and the rest pretty much agreed â" that far too many of the deliverables, artifacts, and activities (e.g., algorithms, source code, system configuration, design/architecture documents, testing, defect tracking, scheduling etc.) are substantially below any acceptable professional standards and represent a profound threat to FUBAR ever going into production.
EXAMPLES: The code base is very fragile. A lot of it is bad old code that BigFirm didnâ(TM)t have time to rewrite two years ago, but now is five times its original size and even worse. One consultant said he took a code listing, picked pages at random, and found problems on every page he selected. There is pervasive hard coding of what should be adjustable parameters or at least meaningfully named constants (e.g., # of [key items] hard-coded throughout with the literal value â3â, a constant named âninety_eightâ(TM)). Builds take all night. App releases donâ(TM)t run acceptably, if at all, in a production environment. Developers check in files that wonâ(TM)t even compile.
RISKS: The FUBAR project keeps being touted as a world-class development team, but it is not producing world-class, or even minimally-professional, results. This already shows up in the project delays and quality issues of the releases to date. What the team is producing will not only be very difficult to support and modify, it will in all likelihood be unusable, resulting in a complete failure of the FUBAR project.
PROJECT PLANNING AND EXECUTION
ISSUE: Project planning and execution is all to often poor or missing completely. Milestone dates, usually unrealistic if not impossible, are based on political considerations or wishful thinking, not bottom-up grounding. Necessary and useful activities are delayed or canceled with the justification âoeWe have no time for thatâ, but the project phase ends up taking as long or longer than if the activities had been carried out. Dates are set, but nobody scrambles until the last minute. Risks are not actively tracked or managed.
EXAMPLES: Count how many times FUBAR ever produced a production-quality deliverable on anything close to a scheduled date. Even the current effort probably requires a year to get something into production, but the schedule says four months. Managers create work tasks, but then never track progress or completion. One ABC consultant created a risks
Pfhh Adobe had Cold Fusion years ahead of these guys. Cold Fusion
May it's just me but instead of killing the astronauts why don't they just disconnect the shuttle from the rocket boosters, wait for the shuttle to get far enough away from the rockets either by the shuttle engaging its propulsion systems or by gravity, then blow up the tanks. By this the crew can either fly the shuttle back to the runway or jump using the provided gear.
While I feel for the people on dial-up or other narrow-band style connections, there isn't much anyone can do for them. Times change. While the majority of internet users in the states are on broadband(70% or more according to Web Site Optimization.com) . In my opinion it would be unfeasible to maintain two sites, one for narrow band users and one for high speed users. Those people in rural area's still have the ability to get high speed internet, such as satellite, direct line of site towers, cellular or even DSL.
Why do I feel Im the only person, without reading the article thought this was about TCP/IP Ports :-P, Looking at the official IANA list of TCP/IP ports, what the hell is half the crap? More over, most of it. Out of the first 1024, I can only count about a dozen or so ports of use.
Off topic? Yes...
In the article though, they missed another useless ones, Serial and MIDI come to mind. As does a VGA connector since most cards don't come with them anymore. Hell, Even Coax cable is going the way of the dino in our HDMI/Component world
And yet, it doesn't matter the slightest... over 5,000,000 possibilities to when easter will happen, and they all occur within 6 weeks of each other(Last 2 weeks of March, and all of April), all on Sundays... So I look at it as a 1 in 6 chance of knowing when easter will be each year.
It largely depends on your development environment. A previous employer I worked for refused to acknowledge any code not written in VB/.NET for apps/scripting. Even though these languages are occasionally useful, for my purposes(report generating/parsing) they rarely were. .dll's or modules. On the otherside, I'd never consider using any language other then perl for parsing data.
At my current employer I have free control to use whatever I see fit. My boss asked me to write something to parse and compare transaction logs. I told him I was installing perl, he said thats fine... So I scripted in perl , couple hundred lines of code now saves 10-15 minutes of manual comparison everyday.
Where I would use a Visual language to program interfaces, I'd never use PERL even though it can with the help of outside
Is the company a Monday - Friday 9-5 style shop? If it is try this -Program all PC's to do a system update of whatever needs to be done after people leave (around 6 or 7pm) -Program all PC's to do a scheduled shut down after updates are done, but set a 5 minute delay. This way if a user is actively using the system they can cancel the shut down and keep working. -Use a Wake on LAN feature to turn computers back on systematically starting at 7:30/8am. Don't do it all at once because as mentioned the load on the DHCP/Proxies/Domain Controller will be hell. But if you have 1000 pc's break it up in to 1 minute intervals. If you turn on 16 computers every minute for 1 hour then you'll lessen the load and still have everyone's PC's up and running by time they come in.
So apparently 6Billion out of the 6.6Billion (Ref) people on earth have interweb access! Some how overnight the Internet usage went from 1.1Billion (Ref) to 6Billion overnight!
To debunk this author just a little more, Facebook has a comprehensive developer system which allows anyone to program features in to facebook. And the beauty is, facebook controls the style of the interface so it doesn't look like myspace does
The problem is if they put a bandwidth tester on the website it is not going to make a difference. ISP's generally wont intefere with web traffic on port 80 or 443 or any other HTTP based protocol. But when you start using SIP protocol on Ports 5060, 5061, and in vonages case 10000-20000 the ISP and network providers degrade those services. So your bandwidth tester on the web will show you have a steller connection, especially on Comcast which has the PowerBoost for the first 10Mb of a file(15Mb on Speed Tier) you will show nice speeds which doesn't reflect your poor SIP protocol performance. Unfortunately there is no easy way to test a SIP connection speeds or performance.