I build an alarm system for a major campus art museum back in the day. This was no small affair - we were replacing an old system that never worked well. The old system had vibration sensors on all the panes in the skylights. Unfortunately these sensors were not only unreliable but also worked in groups of a couple dozen sensors for a skylight area and all sensors had to be calibrated together - a very time-consuming process as it involved after-hours work up on a 30-40 foot airlift (with all tools on teathers to protect the art, of course) and also involved removing the diffuser panel under each of the glass panes. Needless to say the skylights were soon unprotected. We replaced these with redundant infrared motion detectors covering all skylight entry points.
Also, the old system had sensors in groups so when an alarm went off (or went bad) you only got a general area of the problem. We replaced this with about 150-200 individual zones. Every door and every motion detector was on a separate zone. In addition, we had a custom made map of the museum with lights for each alarmed door or zone so the central guard could immediately see where the alarm was coming from. Problems were easy to fix - no hunting down a bad switch from among 20 or 30.
We had several pan/zoom cameras with motion-detection capability. A time-lapse recorder ran constantly and sped up to full-speed when motion was detected.
The security room was upgraded with steel walls and bulletproof glass. In addition, being a campus-run museum, a duplicate alarm receiver was installed at police dispatch (no maps, just a printer showing alarms).
The central guard could control all the lighting in the museum and speak to or listen to anywhere in the museum through the intercom/speaker system.
There's more but all-in-all it was a heck of a system and fun to build.
The end result: management cut back all but one of the off-hours guards (the one in the control room) and eventually cut that person as well since, after all, the alarms went to the police station anyway...
I generally stop drinking coffee every two years. That's I when I race from San Francisco to Hawaii in the Pacific Cup. Our watch schedules generally resemble something like 4 hours on, 4 hours off 24x7 for 10-12 days (depending on type of boat, wind, etc.)
Fumbling around to brew coffee just cuts into sleep time and drinking coffee on watch just makes it harder to get back to sleep. As one tactician commented about staying as rested as possible to be able to make good decisions and keep pushing, "sleep is a weapon".
Since I don't want to combine a massive headache with the inevitable seasickness that hits during the first 1-2 days I slowly cut back on the coffee so I'm off of it completely a week or two before the race.
Of course I start back up as soon as I get back from Hawaii.
A California court held that upskirt video was not illegal.
The feds are working on outlawing peeping Tom activities.
You need a lawyer to determine your rights which will depend on the laws and court decisions of your state and details like whether or not anyone caught on video was a minor (big no-no).
I have an 8 week old baby girl you insensitive clod. We're lucky to see a DVD. Hell, we're lucky to see 5 hours of sleep. However we do enjoy pizza, beer and a movie at baby night at the Parkway Theater in Oakland.
"Smart" means getting tried and true equipment designed for the purpose. A good timer will do everything you need reliably and with minimum power draw. Just be sure to get a timer with non-volatile memory and a backup battery for the clock.
Any decent timer will allow you to add a rain sensor that will turn off the sprinklers if it rains. Most rain sensors consist of pieces of material that absorb water and swell up causing them to push a switch. The sprinklers won't resume till the sensor dries out and the amount of moisture needed to stop the sprinklers is adjustable. Butt simple and reliable.
If you want to get way fancy then you can get a system that incorporates soil moisture sensors.
Depending on your situation you may want to check out subsurface drip irrigation for the lawn. Subsurface drip is generally more expensive but really excels 1) in very hot areas, 2) for oddly shaped or narrow areas that don't work well with sprinklers, 3) where it is often windy and 4) on steep slopes.
I've thought for a long time that the entire case should be recorded and then shown to a jury. Both sides can present their best cases and nobody can get away with theatrics.
Atty 1: "So has your buggering of small animals caused harm to your eyesight making you an unfit witness?"
Atty 2: "Objection"
Judge: "Sustained - the jury is instructed to disregard."
Atty 1: "No further questions"
Any question/response ruled inadmissable would be deleted - no chance of influencing the jury either intentionally or by accident.
If the jury pool is tainted or unable to reach a verdict, just seat a new jury and replay the recordings.
If evidence or judge's instructions are ruled incorrect or inadmissable by a higher court just edit the recording and show it to a new jury. This also eliminates the problem of a witness who dies before a retrial.
I have one of these: http://www.intrinsyc.com/products/cerfcube /
Add a microdrive for storage. Doesn't win awards for speed, storage or ram but the ~3 inch cube takes nearly no space, looks cool, is silent and draws very little power.
Reread the law. It doesn't say anything about where you are driving. It simply says it's illegal to drive drunk. Period. End of statement.
Other laws specifically mention locations (illegal to drive on a highway unless you meet certain criteria for lamps, tires, brakes, license, seatbelts, etc.; illegal to engage in a speed contest on a highway, and so on).
The law prohibits certain activities whether or not they are on private property: smoking crack, shooting people, torturing animals and...driving drunk.
You have the absolute right to drive a vehicle any time you want, any way you want without registration or license in the US... as long as its on your private property.
Not true. For a long time California had two drunk driving statutes that were virtually identical except one was "on a highway" and the other was anywhere else. (Note: "highway" in legal terms means essentially any public street, road, etc.) I believe there was a similar split for reckless.
They have updated the laws since I last looked at them back when I worked for the PD on campus. Now it reads "23152. (a) It is unlawful for any person who is under the influence of any alcoholic beverage or drug, or under the combined influence
of any alcoholic beverage and drug, to drive a vehicle."
It doesn't say "on a highway", it says it is illegal to drive drunk. Period.
You may argue that such a law is unjust but it is the law.
Since these were alledgedly large commercial sites I would expect that they would be doing business in California but I haven't heard a peep. But...and IANAL...is there a loophole?
If I read the law correctly it requires disclosure if you (the company) somehow disclose confidential information. Now if your server merely downloads malicious code to your customer and THEIR computer discloses the information...
By the time the Mozilla story was posted on Slashdot the fix was already available - the link was even posted with the story.
I don't see a patch posted with this story so I guess there's no way Microsoft can win the patch-speed race for this bug - all we will be able to do is place bets on just how much slower Microsoft is. Predictions, anyone?
My old roommate worked for a firm that made automatic real-time meter readers and associated equipment to help facilitate real-time pricing and usage control.
Managing the grid turns out to be a problem. If buildings or factories are programmed to shed load as the price increases then you can cause a situation where the load drop causes a price drop which signals the systems to start up again. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Additionally there is the problem that some systems can respond quickly (reduce to minimum lighting) while others have much longer startup/shutdown times (assembly lines, utility peaker plants).
Balancing everything to prevent gaming the system and to ensure reliabilty will have to be addressed before such systems can reach widespread use.
I heard an intersting bit on the radio the other day interviewing a guy who is making a movie called "Michael Moore Hates America" which is due out later this year. In it he tries, in Michael Moore style, to interview Moore himself while documenting the errors, and more importantly, the ommissions in Moore's films.
Check out their links page for plenty of sites by people working to track down inaccuracies in Moore's works and an article about how Ray Bradbury is annoyed that Moore stole the title from his similarly titled book without asking and without returning his calls to Moore.
I bought the MH-C401FS at a ham-radio swap mostly because I was buying new batteries since my old Kodak batteries were only good for a few shots in the digicam and the charger had a 12v as well as 120v supply.
I was very pleasantly surprised to find that the charger restored the Kodak batteries as well (up to ~100 shots instead of ~10).
I later saw this review of the charger: http://www.imaging-resource.com/ACCS/C40 1FS/C401A. HTM
One nice thing is that each cell is independently charged. This is a very nice feature when you have things like the Motorola FRS radios that use 3 cells. Chargers that only charge pairs of batteries are a real pain. Avoid them.
Unfortunately I then bought a new camera that uses a proprietary lithium battery.:(
Oh well, I now have extra sets of cells for the GPS, MP3 player, camera flash, etc.
So you are knowingly violating the RFC. Pardon me if I am unconcerned if you mail fails to get through.
And really, what's the problem?
I, too, use a firewall that incorporates NAT. The mailserver has a FQDN and resolving that name will give you the appropriate external IP address of the firewall. This would be enough but for efficiency and to deal with machines without external access I utilize a split-horizon DNS setup so that external requests get the external IP address and inside requests get the internal IP address.
Similarly, my home mailserver which also handles traffic for several friends and organizations I'm involved with has a hostname that resolves back to my static external IP address. The fact that the packets are routed through my NAT box to get to that machine is not an issue.
As to the second issue, reread my original post. Sending email with an alternate from address could be accomodated by the ISP for those who have contacted them for that "value-added" service - not for the random spammer. Note, many ISPs already do block unauthorized From addresses so I'm not inventing anything new here.
I'm with you on port blocking. I don't think ISPs have any business blocking ports. Cutting off zombie machines, sure, but not blocking ports.
This was just a bunch of fluff. I was hoping for some meat. The big ISPs have enough clout that if they force the issue of good practices everyone will have to adapt and the people who will have to adapt are those with broken non-RFC compliant servers.
Best practices can encompass the RFCs and extend them to, well, best practices.
For example:
Per RFCs every place a domain is used it must be fully qualified and resolvable. In addition, the EHLO is supposed to be the primary hostname of the sending machine.
Anti-spam best practice might say that the machine name must resolve back to the connecting IP. Even better, the reverse entry for the IP must include the correct hostname. This way a receiving machine can determine who the sender claims to be, that the DNS entry for that name matches the IP (anyone can spoof the header but it's lots harder to get to the DNS of a legit operation) and that the reverse DNS shows the correct hostname (which would be harder on those who have low-end connections where they don't have control over the reverse DNS entries but no problem for most IT operations - anyone with a small operation can send through their ISP anyway).
If the major ISPs required just these items to match there would be a brief period of pain while everyone scrambles to fix broken systems but the gains from stopping viruses and spam would be enormous and tracing back to and blocking the remaining spam would be easier.
I also saw nothing about information sharing among the large ISPs so they could quickly act against a spammer or quickly disable the web accounts to which the spam is directing people (carefully, of course, or fake spam could be a means of a DOS attack).
Similarly, there was no mention of blocking email where the from address doesn't match the ISP. A couple years ago I dealt with massive backscatter from spam sent by an Earthlink customer THROUGH the Earthlink server. I tried to get an answer from them on why they were allowing someone to send out email "from" our domain when they have no relationship to us. Silence. Sure this is a pain for some people but people who want legitimate extra services can sign up for them. It's not so different than paying for a static extra IPs. If you want to send from a different domain we'll unblock it for you for a small monthly fee after determining that you are authorized to represent that domain.
This just scratches the surface but all in all this "best practices" is a joke.
It's all in the name
on
SATA vs ATA?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I bought a machine from with a controller from Promise and I think I know how they got the name. They kept promising me things.
I was using SuSE 8.2 and they had no drivers but they "promised" that they would be out by the end of the month. Of course I could compile them myself but since that required installing the OS which was impossible without the drivers that required finding another machine and dealing with other problems.
After about 3 months of "promise" after "promise" (this month for sure) they told me it the drivers would be out "in a couple months". The longer I waited the longer away the drivers were scheduled.
It wasn't like I had grabbed 8.2 when it was released either. Promise's Linux "support" was way behind and they basically told me that Linux is their poor stepchild that gets leftover resources when Windows stuff is done.
I contacted my vendor and had them swap the Promise card for a 3-ware. I tossed in the disk and loaded SuSE without any need for downloading or compiling drivers. I'm running RAID-5 on 4 120GB drives. I had a drive fail a couple months back but just hot-swapped/rebuilt it with no problem. The machine was up for about a year before I had to shut it down to replace a failed tape drive but I've had no trouble with the 3-ware.
...How the bleep did this get by the editors. All this is is links to a couple of generic sites on earthquakes and some vague and unsubstantiated assertion about increasing frequency.
The first link points to a recent earthquake map that has been available for ages. It's on my bookmarks to look at when there is an interesting event.
The other is an article on NASA earthquake research.
Nothing in either points to an increase in frequency and indeed typing "earthquake" and "increase" into Google news turns up no interesting articles.
I guess those top-secret black government agencies have done a great job of keeping this monumental (non) story out of the news.
Check out the "Linux Administration Handbook" by Evi Nemith, Garth Snyder, Trent R. Hein et. al. It's published by Prentice Hall and is a pretty good overview of the tasks you'll be expected to do.
Also, check out the books in Sybex's Craig Hunt Linux Library series - he doesn't actually write all of them but most are pretty good. (Don't know how O'Reilly let him escape after writing the excellent "TCP/IP Network Administration".)
Back in the 80s I did custom programming for small businesses. The vast majority were just basic pay for services but sometimes there were alternate agreement. For example, that's how I got my private pilot's license.
Another client distributed natural foods and always sent me off with a few bags of goodies - they always had a stack of stuff that was fine except for damaged labels and such.
I ended up with some suits/ties/etc. from a men's clothier.
Dealing with IRS accounting for all that is a pain, though.:)
The article's conclusion seems too nice to US companies. Compare the article:
"It could be that (U.S. companies) feel what they're doing is more than adequate and just as protective of the customer."
with this passage from a MetLife insurance application (printed entirely in bold in the original, emphasis mine):
We may use what we know about you in order to offer you our other products and services. We may disclose this information (other than consumer reports and health information) to our affiliates so that they can offer their products and services, or ours, to you. By law, we don't have to let you prevent these disclosures. Our affiliates include life, car and home insurers, securities firms, broker-dealers, a bank, a legal plans company and financial advisors. In the future we may have affiliates in other businesses.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, if budget is no object...but it is.
I build an alarm system for a major campus art museum back in the day. This was no small affair - we were replacing an old system that never worked well. The old system had vibration sensors on all the panes in the skylights. Unfortunately these sensors were not only unreliable but also worked in groups of a couple dozen sensors for a skylight area and all sensors had to be calibrated together - a very time-consuming process as it involved after-hours work up on a 30-40 foot airlift (with all tools on teathers to protect the art, of course) and also involved removing the diffuser panel under each of the glass panes. Needless to say the skylights were soon unprotected. We replaced these with redundant infrared motion detectors covering all skylight entry points.
Also, the old system had sensors in groups so when an alarm went off (or went bad) you only got a general area of the problem. We replaced this with about 150-200 individual zones. Every door and every motion detector was on a separate zone. In addition, we had a custom made map of the museum with lights for each alarmed door or zone so the central guard could immediately see where the alarm was coming from. Problems were easy to fix - no hunting down a bad switch from among 20 or 30.
We had several pan/zoom cameras with motion-detection capability. A time-lapse recorder ran constantly and sped up to full-speed when motion was detected.
The security room was upgraded with steel walls and bulletproof glass. In addition, being a campus-run museum, a duplicate alarm receiver was installed at police dispatch (no maps, just a printer showing alarms).
The central guard could control all the lighting in the museum and speak to or listen to anywhere in the museum through the intercom/speaker system.
There's more but all-in-all it was a heck of a system and fun to build.
The end result: management cut back all but one of the off-hours guards (the one in the control room) and eventually cut that person as well since, after all, the alarms went to the police station anyway...
Fumbling around to brew coffee just cuts into sleep time and drinking coffee on watch just makes it harder to get back to sleep. As one tactician commented about staying as rested as possible to be able to make good decisions and keep pushing, "sleep is a weapon".
Since I don't want to combine a massive headache with the inevitable seasickness that hits during the first 1-2 days I slowly cut back on the coffee so I'm off of it completely a week or two before the race.
Of course I start back up as soon as I get back from Hawaii.
The feds are working on outlawing peeping Tom activities.
You need a lawyer to determine your rights which will depend on the laws and court decisions of your state and details like whether or not anyone caught on video was a minor (big no-no).
Of course there is the direct approach.
I have an 8 week old baby girl you insensitive clod. We're lucky to see a DVD. Hell, we're lucky to see 5 hours of sleep. However we do enjoy pizza, beer and a movie at baby night at the Parkway Theater in Oakland.
"Smart" means getting tried and true equipment designed for the purpose. A good timer will do everything you need reliably and with minimum power draw. Just be sure to get a timer with non-volatile memory and a backup battery for the clock.
Any decent timer will allow you to add a rain sensor that will turn off the sprinklers if it rains. Most rain sensors consist of pieces of material that absorb water and swell up causing them to push a switch. The sprinklers won't resume till the sensor dries out and the amount of moisture needed to stop the sprinklers is adjustable. Butt simple and reliable.
If you want to get way fancy then you can get a system that incorporates soil moisture sensors.
Depending on your situation you may want to check out subsurface drip irrigation for the lawn. Subsurface drip is generally more expensive but really excels 1) in very hot areas, 2) for oddly shaped or narrow areas that don't work well with sprinklers, 3) where it is often windy and 4) on steep slopes.
I've thought for a long time that the entire case should be recorded and then shown to a jury. Both sides can present their best cases and nobody can get away with theatrics.
Atty 1: "So has your buggering of small animals caused harm to your eyesight making you an unfit witness?"
Atty 2: "Objection"
Judge: "Sustained - the jury is instructed to disregard."
Atty 1: "No further questions"
Any question/response ruled inadmissable would be deleted - no chance of influencing the jury either intentionally or by accident.
If the jury pool is tainted or unable to reach a verdict, just seat a new jury and replay the recordings.
If evidence or judge's instructions are ruled incorrect or inadmissable by a higher court just edit the recording and show it to a new jury. This also eliminates the problem of a witness who dies before a retrial.
Don't know if it qualifies as a "blog" but I regularly check FactCheck: http://www.factcheck.org/
I have one of these:e /
http://www.intrinsyc.com/products/cerfcub
Add a microdrive for storage. Doesn't win awards for speed, storage or ram but the ~3 inch cube takes nearly no space, looks cool, is silent and draws very little power.
Should have read:
a net gain of _outsourced_ jobs in the US
Other laws specifically mention locations (illegal to drive on a highway unless you meet certain criteria for lamps, tires, brakes, license, seatbelts, etc.; illegal to engage in a speed contest on a highway, and so on).
The law prohibits certain activities whether or not they are on private property: smoking crack, shooting people, torturing animals and...driving drunk.
Not true. For a long time California had two drunk driving statutes that were virtually identical except one was "on a highway" and the other was anywhere else. (Note: "highway" in legal terms means essentially any public street, road, etc.) I believe there was a similar split for reckless.
They have updated the laws since I last looked at them back when I worked for the PD on campus. Now it reads "23152. (a) It is unlawful for any person who is under the influence of any alcoholic beverage or drug, or under the combined influence of any alcoholic beverage and drug, to drive a vehicle."
It doesn't say "on a highway", it says it is illegal to drive drunk. Period.
You may argue that such a law is unjust but it is the law.
Since these were alledgedly large commercial sites I would expect that they would be doing business in California but I haven't heard a peep. But...and IANAL...is there a loophole?
If I read the law correctly it requires disclosure if you (the company) somehow disclose confidential information. Now if your server merely downloads malicious code to your customer and THEIR computer discloses the information...
By the time the Mozilla story was posted on Slashdot the fix was already available - the link was even posted with the story.
I don't see a patch posted with this story so I guess there's no way Microsoft can win the patch-speed race for this bug - all we will be able to do is place bets on just how much slower Microsoft is. Predictions, anyone?
My old roommate worked for a firm that made automatic real-time meter readers and associated equipment to help facilitate real-time pricing and usage control.
Managing the grid turns out to be a problem. If buildings or factories are programmed to shed load as the price increases then you can cause a situation where the load drop causes a price drop which signals the systems to start up again. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Additionally there is the problem that some systems can respond quickly (reduce to minimum lighting) while others have much longer startup/shutdown times (assembly lines, utility peaker plants).
Balancing everything to prevent gaming the system and to ensure reliabilty will have to be addressed before such systems can reach widespread use.
Check out their links page for plenty of sites by people working to track down inaccuracies in Moore's works and an article about how Ray Bradbury is annoyed that Moore stole the title from his similarly titled book without asking and without returning his calls to Moore.
I bought the MH-C401FS at a ham-radio swap mostly because I was buying new batteries since my old Kodak batteries were only good for a few shots in the digicam and the charger had a 12v as well as 120v supply.
0 1FS/C401A. HTM
:(
I was very pleasantly surprised to find that the charger restored the Kodak batteries as well (up to ~100 shots instead of ~10).
I later saw this review of the charger:
http://www.imaging-resource.com/ACCS/C4
One nice thing is that each cell is independently charged. This is a very nice feature when you have things like the Motorola FRS radios that use 3 cells. Chargers that only charge pairs of batteries are a real pain. Avoid them.
Unfortunately I then bought a new camera that uses a proprietary lithium battery.
Oh well, I now have extra sets of cells for the GPS, MP3 player, camera flash, etc.
So you are knowingly violating the RFC. Pardon me if I am unconcerned if you mail fails to get through.
And really, what's the problem?
I, too, use a firewall that incorporates NAT. The mailserver has a FQDN and resolving that name will give you the appropriate external IP address of the firewall. This would be enough but for efficiency and to deal with machines without external access I utilize a split-horizon DNS setup so that external requests get the external IP address and inside requests get the internal IP address.
Similarly, my home mailserver which also handles traffic for several friends and organizations I'm involved with has a hostname that resolves back to my static external IP address. The fact that the packets are routed through my NAT box to get to that machine is not an issue.
As to the second issue, reread my original post. Sending email with an alternate from address could be accomodated by the ISP for those who have contacted them for that "value-added" service - not for the random spammer. Note, many ISPs already do block unauthorized From addresses so I'm not inventing anything new here.
I'm with you on port blocking. I don't think ISPs have any business blocking ports. Cutting off zombie machines, sure, but not blocking ports.
This was just a bunch of fluff. I was hoping for some meat. The big ISPs have enough clout that if they force the issue of good practices everyone will have to adapt and the people who will have to adapt are those with broken non-RFC compliant servers.
Best practices can encompass the RFCs and extend them to, well, best practices.
For example:
Per RFCs every place a domain is used it must be fully qualified and resolvable. In addition, the EHLO is supposed to be the primary hostname of the sending machine.
Anti-spam best practice might say that the machine name must resolve back to the connecting IP. Even better, the reverse entry for the IP must include the correct hostname. This way a receiving machine can determine who the sender claims to be, that the DNS entry for that name matches the IP (anyone can spoof the header but it's lots harder to get to the DNS of a legit operation) and that the reverse DNS shows the correct hostname (which would be harder on those who have low-end connections where they don't have control over the reverse DNS entries but no problem for most IT operations - anyone with a small operation can send through their ISP anyway).
If the major ISPs required just these items to match there would be a brief period of pain while everyone scrambles to fix broken systems but the gains from stopping viruses and spam would be enormous and tracing back to and blocking the remaining spam would be easier.
I also saw nothing about information sharing among the large ISPs so they could quickly act against a spammer or quickly disable the web accounts to which the spam is directing people (carefully, of course, or fake spam could be a means of a DOS attack).
Similarly, there was no mention of blocking email where the from address doesn't match the ISP. A couple years ago I dealt with massive backscatter from spam sent by an Earthlink customer THROUGH the Earthlink server. I tried to get an answer from them on why they were allowing someone to send out email "from" our domain when they have no relationship to us. Silence. Sure this is a pain for some people but people who want legitimate extra services can sign up for them. It's not so different than paying for a static extra IPs. If you want to send from a different domain we'll unblock it for you for a small monthly fee after determining that you are authorized to represent that domain.
This just scratches the surface but all in all this "best practices" is a joke.
I bought a machine from with a controller from Promise and I think I know how they got the name. They kept promising me things.
I was using SuSE 8.2 and they had no drivers but they "promised" that they would be out by the end of the month. Of course I could compile them myself but since that required installing the OS which was impossible without the drivers that required finding another machine and dealing with other problems.
After about 3 months of "promise" after "promise" (this month for sure) they told me it the drivers would be out "in a couple months". The longer I waited the longer away the drivers were scheduled.
It wasn't like I had grabbed 8.2 when it was released either. Promise's Linux "support" was way behind and they basically told me that Linux is their poor stepchild that gets leftover resources when Windows stuff is done.
I contacted my vendor and had them swap the Promise card for a 3-ware. I tossed in the disk and loaded SuSE without any need for downloading or compiling drivers. I'm running RAID-5 on 4 120GB drives. I had a drive fail a couple months back but just hot-swapped/rebuilt it with no problem. The machine was up for about a year before I had to shut it down to replace a failed tape drive but I've had no trouble with the 3-ware.
...How the bleep did this get by the editors. All this is is links to a couple of generic sites on earthquakes and some vague and unsubstantiated assertion about increasing frequency.
The first link points to a recent earthquake map that has been available for ages. It's on my bookmarks to look at when there is an interesting event.
The other is an article on NASA earthquake research.
Nothing in either points to an increase in frequency and indeed typing "earthquake" and "increase" into Google news turns up no interesting articles.
I guess those top-secret black government agencies have done a great job of keeping this monumental (non) story out of the news.
That's the first thing I thought, too. Not hard since I only run Linux and no Windoze emulation. :)
Why spend all that money when you ccould simply eliminate cubical walls altogether?
Oh, I forgot...the "Open Office Plan" has already been invented.
Check out the "Linux Administration Handbook" by Evi Nemith, Garth Snyder, Trent R. Hein et. al. It's published by Prentice Hall and is a pretty good overview of the tasks you'll be expected to do.
Also, check out the books in Sybex's Craig Hunt Linux Library series - he doesn't actually write all of them but most are pretty good. (Don't know how O'Reilly let him escape after writing the excellent "TCP/IP Network Administration".)
Back in the 80s I did custom programming for small businesses. The vast majority were just basic pay for services but sometimes there were alternate agreement. For example, that's how I got my private pilot's license.
:)
Another client distributed natural foods and always sent me off with a few bags of goodies - they always had a stack of stuff that was fine except for damaged labels and such.
I ended up with some suits/ties/etc. from a men's clothier.
Dealing with IRS accounting for all that is a pain, though.
"It could be that (U.S. companies) feel what they're doing is more than adequate and just as protective of the customer."
with this passage from a MetLife insurance application (printed entirely in bold in the original, emphasis mine):
We may use what we know about you in order to offer you our other products and services. We may disclose this information (other than consumer reports and health information) to our affiliates so that they can offer their products and services, or ours, to you. By law, we don't have to let you prevent these disclosures. Our affiliates include life, car and home insurers, securities firms, broker-dealers, a bank, a legal plans company and financial advisors. In the future we may have affiliates in other businesses.