Actually, in this case it had nothing to do with compensation. The employer in question is all about "brand" and if HR deems an employee doesn't fit the brand (and most IT people certainly don't), they get the brush-off.
If you'd read, it's not that either. It's that companies are only looking for perfect candidates...
So true! Us IT people at my previous $WORK (a fortune 50 retailer) saw that time and time again. We'd referred great, intelligent, skilled people for open technical positions and HR would not even pass them on to the technical interview telling us "they weren't $WORK-enough". So the positions would stay open for months on end while the rest of us worked our asses off to cover the workload.
I know from personal experience how important her fans where to her:
In the late 90's my wife and I, during a vacation in Ireland, actually knocked on the door of Dragonhold-Underhill. Many of the dust jackets on her books give very good clues about where she lives and several of them mention she welcomes visits from fans as long as you call ahead. Try as we might during our previous 5 days in Ireland we were unable to find a number we could reach her at, although I did manage to call her stables but she wasn't there. After a bit of driving around Wicklow we found her home and decided we'd take the chance to knock on the door, politely apologize for showing up unannounced, and ask if we could talk to Anne for a moment. Todd answered the door, said hold on and closed it again. We figured that was it and prepared to leave. A minute later he opens the door again and there is Anne! I gave her a enormous hug (I couldn't help it) which I believe made Todd nervous for a minute but Anne laughed and said you don't get a greeting like that at your door everyday. She warmly and kindly invited us into her home and chatted with us over tea and cookies for an hour. She introduced us to her mother, daughter, and Todd and gave us a tour of her home. On the way out she told us we should drive through Wicklow Pass and we'd see her vision of Pern. I'll never forget that day and often share the story with new readers of her books.
One thing I learned during our visit was the main reason she stopped writing was due to a combination of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and arthritis. She had tried speech to text programs but they didn't work for her because of the way she wrote and how her creative process worked.
She was a fabulous lady who will be missed dearly by many, many people. She will always be the Masterharper. May her dragons sing her between!
I don't believe we were talking about the needs of business. We were talking about Joe Dad and his family. The average Windows user, not the enterprise. In that context a kindergarten teacher is exactly representative.
Even Office for the Mac lacks "perfect".doc compatibility. Does your average home user need perfect.doc compatibility? No.
the FLOSS community has not been able to come up with competitive Office solutions (please, do not say OpenOffice.org is that solution - people who say that have no idea what they're talking about), including integration with the said hypothetical suite.
This statement is complete crap. OpenOffice.org is just as good, if not better, than MS Office in most areas. My wife who's a kindergarten teacher uses it for all of her lesson plans, to make name tags for events, to make desk tags for the kids, etc. She does more with it than her colleagues manage to do on their PCs or Macs with MS Office.
Please tell me where OpenOffice.org is lacking, especially in the context of Joe Dad and his family.
You've totally lost the point already. The discussion centers around normal, non-geek users. None of them are going to care that you can have an OS in 50MB of RAM. While I don't agree with the original article, many of the comments are bang on.
I attempted to launch a start-up of 150 people on linux thin clients (using KDE desktops) 3 years ago. While the system worked almost flawlessly, was infinitely cheaper than windows fat clients, and easier to admin than the windows thin clients we also used, it still didn't work for the users. They were all non-geeks (TV people) and couldn't get past it not working like windows, not running MS Office (plus the compatibility problems of Star Office and MS Office), not being able to play.wmv files, etc. Now consider they had an IT staff to admin the server, add apps, and configure printers. Do you really think these users could have successfully used a linux desktop all on their own??
I use strict HELO requirements, greylisting, RBLs, and finally SpamAssassin on my home server. Very few spams make even make it to the SpamAssassin checks. Adding the HELO requirements and greylisting reduced the number spam emails SpamAssassin had to check from >100 emails per day down to an average of about 5 per week.
I haven't had any issues with greylisting. I know of no emails that I haven't eventually received and even web-page sign-ups/registrations have gotten through without a hitch.
There are also filters for postfix that can reject connections based on the age of the domain. If the domain is less than 4 days old, it's likely to be a spammer. I haven't implemented it yet but if the tide of spam swells again, that will be my next line of defense.
I remembered reading a news story back several months about the same kind of system. Unfortunately the yahoo! page has expired but there's a mention of it in this blog as well:
http://blogs.adventnet.com/weblog_entry.php?e=8977
Exactly. Go price out some Avid gear and you'll see what we mean.
In my short experience with television, we used an Avid Airspace which runs unix but it was a turnkey solution.
Yeah, if I could only get a decent modeline to work from my from Nvidia 6600 to my HD Sony KV-30HS420 TV, I'd be a very happy camper. I've tried the powerstrip route to no avail. It just shouldn't be this hard to get a good looking HD Widescreen output under linux.
This article http://www.startribune.com/535/story/45512.html from a year ago would make me believe the researchers in Australia were not the first to accomplish this. Either that or they've taken a long time to tell anyone about it. The Star Tribune article is actually more interesting in that it gives more specifics on how the cells were actually grown.
If they want to force someone to expose their private data, they should get a warrant to do that once you are suspected of a crime not before. As others have said, this treats everyone like a criminal.
That's a good point. I hadn't thought of it from the angle of the spam inviting us to the website. I was thinking more from a network admin point of view: you suddenly have tens of thousands of connections from tens of thousands of different IPs hitting the website within the span of a minute or two.
It is by definition a DDoS because that's the intent. Overwhelm the spammer's website with traffic, comment posts (and no revenue generating orders) from tens of thousands of individual PC's at the same time. Isn't it in effect a botnet (albet one that we ask to be part of)?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I don't support Blue Security. I think it's an excellent system and I'm glad Blue Security does it and I signed up a long time ago.
I tried to do this for a small startup about 2.5 years ago. I used Wyse WinTerms, a couple of good, beefy HP servers and Windows Terminal Services for roughly 30 users. The biggest issue I ran into was local devices not working. We just had too many times where someone needed to use a CD-Rom, a PDA, etc. and it just didn't work. It was supposed to but didn't. You really need to look hard at how your users use their current enviroment and make sure they can still do the same things as easily as they do now (or get an policy in place that says they can't do those things). I would imagine in a school enviroment that flash drives are used heavily and I'd be sure to make certain that data can get passed easily from the citrix/terminal server to the client to the flash drive.
Yeah, I was wondering the same thing. Which Tier-1 ISP was willing to help this guy out. I do believe that the Blue Security method of whacking spammer's websites probably looks a lot like a DDoS (which in effect it is). But which ISP was foolish enough to take logs from a know major spammer and use them to Blackhole Filter packets going TO a legitimate site (filtering packets from maybe, but to?).
Apparently you haven't looked too deeply. In addition to the other obvious alternatives others have suggested, Zimbra http://www.zimbra.com/ does all the group scheduling stuff that exchange does. They've even added resource scheduling recently. Best of all it uses a bunch of great open source projects and glues them together nicely. The "network" version is far, far cheaper than exchange.
Saying it's only a couple thousand dollars is mostly incorrect. Unix SysAdmin salaries in Minnesota are far below Unix SysAdmin salaries in the Silicone Valley area. In many cases $25-30K less for the same level of position at similar sized companies.
From the most recent SAGE Salary Survey, average Unix Admin salaries by market:
Washington, DC 91,098
Silicon Valley, CA 90,513
Chicago, IL 77,295
Houston, TX 58,968
Although there are more and more cases of malware authors trying to hold systems for ransom. Being able to take someone off the net via a DDoS or deleting files is a lot less effective than permanently taking out their hardware when the victim refuses to pay up.
I too remember the bios AV systems, they were a PITA but effective and necessary.
I even doubt the game would create much more interest in racing than already exists. Teenagers have been racing cars since they had access to them.
I'd be more likely to believe that the game made the drivers believe that they could actually control a car safely at 100 mph. Mind you, I'm certainly not putting any blame on the game for this accident. The fault lies solely with the drivers and their parents. I play DoD but I don't go loading my grandfather's WWII Walther Mod-PP and "taking the hill" in my neighborhood.
From what I see, you're not really getting much of a deal on your shares though. At the start of the year your shares of Pixar were worth $53.11 (assuming here that the run-up over this month is due to the buyout rumors), now you're going to get 2.3 Disney shares for each, which today are worth 26, so you're getting a total value of $59.8 for you Pixar shares but not in cash, in Disney stock. Now in the last 2 years Disney stock has gone absolutely no where whereas Pixar has increased 100%. Sounds like a raw deal for the shareholders to me.
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Doesn't my monthly ISP bill pay for that delivery already?
Actually, in this case it had nothing to do with compensation. The employer in question is all about "brand" and if HR deems an employee doesn't fit the brand (and most IT people certainly don't), they get the brush-off.
If you'd read, it's not that either. It's that companies are only looking for perfect candidates ...
So true! Us IT people at my previous $WORK (a fortune 50 retailer) saw that time and time again. We'd referred great, intelligent, skilled people for open technical positions and HR would not even pass them on to the technical interview telling us "they weren't $WORK-enough". So the positions would stay open for months on end while the rest of us worked our asses off to cover the workload.
Christopher's Tripods trilogy is aimed at the younger reader. There's even an old British TV adaptation of the first two books.
I'll second the Tripods trilogy. I got them around 8-10 myself.
I know from personal experience how important her fans where to her:
In the late 90's my wife and I, during a vacation in Ireland, actually knocked on the door of Dragonhold-Underhill. Many of the dust jackets on her books give very good clues about where she lives and several of them mention she welcomes visits from fans as long as you call ahead. Try as we might during our previous 5 days in Ireland we were unable to find a number we could reach her at, although I did manage to call her stables but she wasn't there. After a bit of driving around Wicklow we found her home and decided we'd take the chance to knock on the door, politely apologize for showing up unannounced, and ask if we could talk to Anne for a moment. Todd answered the door, said hold on and closed it again. We figured that was it and prepared to leave. A minute later he opens the door again and there is Anne! I gave her a enormous hug (I couldn't help it) which I believe made Todd nervous for a minute but Anne laughed and said you don't get a greeting like that at your door everyday. She warmly and kindly invited us into her home and chatted with us over tea and cookies for an hour. She introduced us to her mother, daughter, and Todd and gave us a tour of her home. On the way out she told us we should drive through Wicklow Pass and we'd see her vision of Pern. I'll never forget that day and often share the story with new readers of her books.
One thing I learned during our visit was the main reason she stopped writing was due to a combination of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and arthritis. She had tried speech to text programs but they didn't work for her because of the way she wrote and how her creative process worked.
She was a fabulous lady who will be missed dearly by many, many people. She will always be the Masterharper. May her dragons sing her between!
Even Office for the Mac lacks "perfect" .doc compatibility. Does your average home user need perfect .doc compatibility? No.
This statement is complete crap. OpenOffice.org is just as good, if not better, than MS Office in most areas. My wife who's a kindergarten teacher uses it for all of her lesson plans, to make name tags for events, to make desk tags for the kids, etc. She does more with it than her colleagues manage to do on their PCs or Macs with MS Office.
Please tell me where OpenOffice.org is lacking, especially in the context of Joe Dad and his family.
I attempted to launch a start-up of 150 people on linux thin clients (using KDE desktops) 3 years ago. While the system worked almost flawlessly, was infinitely cheaper than windows fat clients, and easier to admin than the windows thin clients we also used, it still didn't work for the users. They were all non-geeks (TV people) and couldn't get past it not working like windows, not running MS Office (plus the compatibility problems of Star Office and MS Office), not being able to play .wmv files, etc. Now consider they had an IT staff to admin the server, add apps, and configure printers. Do you really think these users could have successfully used a linux desktop all on their own??
I haven't had any issues with greylisting. I know of no emails that I haven't eventually received and even web-page sign-ups/registrations have gotten through without a hitch.
There are also filters for postfix that can reject connections based on the age of the domain. If the domain is less than 4 days old, it's likely to be a spammer. I haven't implemented it yet but if the tide of spam swells again, that will be my next line of defense.
A-Ha! I've found more info on "Information Music" but the website isn't answering. http://www.soundtomind.com/ The Academic Commons has some info as well: http://www.academiccommons.org/library/spam-music
I remembered reading a news story back several months about the same kind of system. Unfortunately the yahoo! page has expired but there's a mention of it in this blog as well: http://blogs.adventnet.com/weblog_entry.php?e=8977
Exactly. Go price out some Avid gear and you'll see what we mean. In my short experience with television, we used an Avid Airspace which runs unix but it was a turnkey solution.
Yeah, if I could only get a decent modeline to work from my from Nvidia 6600 to my HD Sony KV-30HS420 TV, I'd be a very happy camper. I've tried the powerstrip route to no avail. It just shouldn't be this hard to get a good looking HD Widescreen output under linux.
This article http://www.startribune.com/535/story/45512.html from a year ago would make me believe the researchers in Australia were not the first to accomplish this. Either that or they've taken a long time to tell anyone about it. The Star Tribune article is actually more interesting in that it gives more specifics on how the cells were actually grown.
If they want to force someone to expose their private data, they should get a warrant to do that once you are suspected of a crime not before. As others have said, this treats everyone like a criminal.
That's a good point. I hadn't thought of it from the angle of the spam inviting us to the website. I was thinking more from a network admin point of view: you suddenly have tens of thousands of connections from tens of thousands of different IPs hitting the website within the span of a minute or two. It is by definition a DDoS because that's the intent. Overwhelm the spammer's website with traffic, comment posts (and no revenue generating orders) from tens of thousands of individual PC's at the same time. Isn't it in effect a botnet (albet one that we ask to be part of)? Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I don't support Blue Security. I think it's an excellent system and I'm glad Blue Security does it and I signed up a long time ago.
I tried to do this for a small startup about 2.5 years ago. I used Wyse WinTerms, a couple of good, beefy HP servers and Windows Terminal Services for roughly 30 users. The biggest issue I ran into was local devices not working. We just had too many times where someone needed to use a CD-Rom, a PDA, etc. and it just didn't work. It was supposed to but didn't. You really need to look hard at how your users use their current enviroment and make sure they can still do the same things as easily as they do now (or get an policy in place that says they can't do those things). I would imagine in a school enviroment that flash drives are used heavily and I'd be sure to make certain that data can get passed easily from the citrix/terminal server to the client to the flash drive.
Then if you know how the spammer managed to get Blue Security blackhole filtered, why don't you tell us.
Yeah, I was wondering the same thing. Which Tier-1 ISP was willing to help this guy out. I do believe that the Blue Security method of whacking spammer's websites probably looks a lot like a DDoS (which in effect it is). But which ISP was foolish enough to take logs from a know major spammer and use them to Blackhole Filter packets going TO a legitimate site (filtering packets from maybe, but to?).
Apparently you haven't looked too deeply. In addition to the other obvious alternatives others have suggested, Zimbra http://www.zimbra.com/ does all the group scheduling stuff that exchange does. They've even added resource scheduling recently. Best of all it uses a bunch of great open source projects and glues them together nicely. The "network" version is far, far cheaper than exchange.
Saying it's only a couple thousand dollars is mostly incorrect. Unix SysAdmin salaries in Minnesota are far below Unix SysAdmin salaries in the Silicone Valley area. In many cases $25-30K less for the same level of position at similar sized companies. From the most recent SAGE Salary Survey, average Unix Admin salaries by market: Washington, DC 91,098 Silicon Valley, CA 90,513 Chicago, IL 77,295 Houston, TX 58,968
Although there are more and more cases of malware authors trying to hold systems for ransom. Being able to take someone off the net via a DDoS or deleting files is a lot less effective than permanently taking out their hardware when the victim refuses to pay up. I too remember the bios AV systems, they were a PITA but effective and necessary.
Unfortunately the drivers didn't die and remove themselves from the gene pool, they killed an innocent person.
I even doubt the game would create much more interest in racing than already exists. Teenagers have been racing cars since they had access to them. I'd be more likely to believe that the game made the drivers believe that they could actually control a car safely at 100 mph. Mind you, I'm certainly not putting any blame on the game for this accident. The fault lies solely with the drivers and their parents. I play DoD but I don't go loading my grandfather's WWII Walther Mod-PP and "taking the hill" in my neighborhood.
From what I see, you're not really getting much of a deal on your shares though. At the start of the year your shares of Pixar were worth $53.11 (assuming here that the run-up over this month is due to the buyout rumors), now you're going to get 2.3 Disney shares for each, which today are worth 26, so you're getting a total value of $59.8 for you Pixar shares but not in cash, in Disney stock. Now in the last 2 years Disney stock has gone absolutely no where whereas Pixar has increased 100%. Sounds like a raw deal for the shareholders to me.