Basically, the Chrsitian Socialists Union in Bavaria or Christian Democratic Union as it is known in the rest of Germany is the "Conservative" party of German politics. It's the big conservative party, so I guess for Americans it's the equivalent of the Republican Party. Helmut Kohl, practically Chancellor for life there for about 15 years, was from the CDU/CSU.
Politically active Christians in the USA would find the CDU/CSU's positions on many issues abhorrent; the Christian label is just an historical anachronism from what I could tell during my two years in Germany.
Gerhardt Schroeder, the current Chancellor, is from the major "liberal" opposition party- I forget the name now. For what it is worth, West Germany only had one Chancellor in the postwar era from the opposition party. All the rest were CDU/CSU until the "wiedervereinigung".
I am reminded of a story by Arthur C. Clarke. Two IBM programmers are brought out to Sri Lanka to work in a monastery at the top of a mountain. The monks believe that if all the nearly infinite names of God are recited, the universe will come to an end. Their job is to write a program that will be run on a mainframe at the monastery to try and generate all those names. Someone out there probably knows the name of this short story.
BTW, one of the posts near the top of this discussion is correct. The Roman Catholic Church (my flavor of Christianity) is now very much at ease with the results of all the scientific discoveries of the past few centuries. One of our fundamentalist friends is a "Young Earth Creationist". Sorry, but I gotta laugh when told that humans and dinosaurs walked the Earth together. All the animals were vegetarians (even T-Rex) until Adam and Eve shared that apple/pomegranate. Huh?
Dear Fellow Slashdotters, most of the world's religions are fine with scientific discovery. The great "undiscovered country" out there is the focus of most religions. What are humans capable of when their mind, body and spirit are all completely aligned on their spritual "North Star"? What matters is not material things but things like love, hope, joy, justice and so on. Mother Teresa (already beatified, now awaiting canonization- Sainthood. Similar to a certification from Verisign finally completing for the tech-obsessed) spoke of the spiritual poverty of Americans as compared with the spiritual wealth of the poor of Calcutta. Religion does not need these routine bashings on Slashdot. I have found most of it is good for helping keep the neighbor's kids from trying to break into my house. Without it, I am certain that mere Earthly laws and law enforcement will leave us much poorer in every way. Since the tyranny of the ACLU and atheists was unleashed by the Warren Court, we have seen what happens when God is driven out of America at every turn. As a lifelong historian, I truly believe that America was better off when it wasn't trying to force religion out of the public sphere at every turn. I would be fine with seeing crosses, stars of David, crescents, and Buddha statues all over America. Let the government referee the occasional conflict instead of suppressing them unevenly which is the current game. Studying anything BUT our major legacy of faith, Christianity, is fine for public educational facilities now.(e.g. universities down to elementary shcools) The anti-Chrisitan crowd that has been extending its reach through government is totally fine with promoting every religion but Chrisitanity. The Founding Fathers wisely chose not to establish state religions, (unlike Europe where tax dollars go straight to state religions) but their separation of Church and State was trying to protect BOTH. The protection of the State should not come at the expense of one particular practice of faith. If it must be paid, it should be paid evenly by Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and so on. The Constitution guarantees freedom of religion, not freedom from religion. Everyone has made a religious choice since exposure to religion is inescapable. If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. -Rush
Let me see if I can help sort out your reactions...
In 1997, my wife and our two year old son were approaching a large, busy intersection at the speed limit. There were three lanes going in each direction, east and west, two more lanes southbound only. Needless to say (you would think), there was a traffic light above the intersection of the eastbound and southbound lanes. A driver turned from the westbound lanes into the southbound lanes and just kept right on going through the red light. She told the police she didn't realize there was a light there! She struck our 1991 Honda Accord in the left rear wheel area with the wheel absorbing most of the impact. The Accord was spun at least 180 degrees by the impact and my son's carseat was tipped over, but he was unhurt. My wife suffered a spinal injury that still impinges on her spinal cord and caused the doctors to recommend she refrain from lifting anything over 15 pounds. This pretty much ended her career as an RN. Now she is having trouble with chest and hand pain related to the nerve impingement. She has had extensive physical therapy and chiropractic care for 7 years now. Thanks to listening to my idiot brother-in-law, I had reduced our underinsured motorist coverage a few months before this accident and we ended up with about 35,000 USD cash for a lifetime of reduced mobility and pain. Nationwide Insurance deliberately dragged their feet trying to get us to accept a reduced settlement. We finally sued them near the lawsuit deadline and they settled within two months thereafter. The mitigating factor was their idiot driver had blabbed about being "100 percent responsible" for the accident. Thank God! Even with that, Nationwide jerked us around for an extra year and a half beyond what they should have. I loathe them. They sent their adjusters here to Southern California in the wake of our wildfires last fall and my coworkers overheard them laughing about underpaying claims and dragging things out.
My point here is that when a driver royally screws up, blackbox evidence can help settle the matter clearly and quickly allowing everyone to get on with their post-accident lives. If the driver who rammed my wife had not blabbed, the blackbox could have blabbed for her. Everyone, please be safe out there. When we are approaching an intersection that has been green for 10 seconds or more, but are the only car approaching at that point, my wife and I both slow down and look around carefully now since another fool may "not realize there is a traffic light over that intersection". That was how my wife was hurt. We don't drive smaller cars anymore either. She has an airbagged minivan and I have an airbagged half-ton pickup. Our next vehicle will be a 3/4 ton Suburban. It tows our big trailer well and protects my wife and three children. We'll buy more energy-efficient vehicles when they get safer and can tow 8,000 pounds over the Rockies.
First off, to get some of the positional data in a fashion similar to using the Earth's Iridium satellite network, NASA could drop some RF triangulation devices on Mars. This seems like a cheap, viable option to me.
I would think NASA would like to have their "tumbleweeds" stay parked when something fantastic was found. Perhaps the probe could drop anchor now and then. I'm thinking a magnetized metal disc could be dropped outside the ball and attract to an electromagnet inside the ball. When the engineers are ready to let the ball move again, they switch off the electomagnet's current. Given six disposable discs, a ball could be anchored six times and no need for a motor or drilling system.
Also, how about a kite and harness rig? If the ball/probe needs to make a long run, it could have a harness around it attached to an axle running through it. A kite, attached to the harness, would then be launched from the probe and set it off on a faster run than just having air blowing against a ball on the Martian surface. The harness and kite could be dropped if the probe needed to "be free".
BTW, I highly recommend actually reading the links referenced as I am already seeing a lot of duplicate comments here as in previous discussions. Moderators in particular should check those links, unless you like modding up dupes...
News flash to political newbies...Large corporations with any sense at all donate to BOTH of the major political parties in America. It's called hedging your bets. Additionally, in this "50:50 nation" of Republican rule in the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives (WTF?) neither party has a lifelong lock on anything. If you were MSFT and put all your contributions/eggs in the Pioneer Fund/basket, don't you think this could come back to haunt you in January of 2005 if John Kerry squeaks it out of this "50:50 electorate"?
Here's my take on the political game. If you are a corporation and corporate interests are ONLY served by Republicans, but all your money on RED and push your blue-suited shills hard in front of the cameras. Hmm, but what about all those millions that go to Democrats? Why? Democrats are the friend of the big, established businesses. Like in Europe, Japan and Korea, the government tends to put up barriers to protect the current crop of large corporations in the interest of stability and jobs. Democrats love to fantasize about economic stability and jobs. Look how well it's working out in Europe. The European Central Bank is projecting a whopping 0.4 percent growth rate for 2004 in the Eurozone. The Americazone is steaming along at about ten times that rate while OUR politicians wail about YAGD (Yet Another Great Depression). Economists may love Schumpeterian Destruction and renewal of the economy, but 3M just wants to go on selling overpriced sticky notes. GM wants to go on selling big cars and trucks. Upstarts blow the status quo to heck and profits follow. Case in point, Microsoft and Linux. The bottom line is to hedge your bets. The Republicans can eliminate your taxes and the Democrats can eliminate your competition. If the two balance out, the status quo is preserved and you can just commerce along in relative peace and quiet. Is this a great country or WHAT?
While MS may have pioneered this approach in the tech field, most companies should not be in a position to emulate this callous disregard. After all, MS has long enjoyed monopoly power but hardly anyone can talk of most (any?) PC makers having monopoly power. It seems like such lousy service is not something these PC makers should be able to get away with providing. On the other hand, MS can barely warm over Windows 95 again, throw in a few features, recommend business buyers NOT purchase the product, and foist it on consumers as "Windows Millenium Edition" (not to be confused with the millenium edition of Windows NT known as Windows 2000). Now THAT's monopoly power.
BTW, Neal Stephenson hit this nail on the head in his essay "In the Beginning was the command line" seen here. In the essay, he predicted a future MS operating system would consist of logging on and just seeing one button to click. Voila, I give you "Luna" in XP (years later).
If you put an idiot with a script in front of them on the phone, they may piss off people, but they are less likely to do any real damage.
I actually read the article and found it positively HORRIFYING. Since I am around sysadmins all the time, I forget what it's like to be some gullible consumer running Windows XP Home Edition.
How about some Hippocratic Oath action here? You know, "First, do no harm." The Formatters who fail to fully disclose that consumers are going to lose their family's digital photo albums, video clips of newborns, and contact information for friends and family worldwide are lacking in redeeming human value. If you are a Formatter, please find a new line of work- TODAY.
Call ME gullible, but given our reasonably wide-open markets for building, selling, and supporting PC's, I would think the companies using these "Support Centers" will suffer for their callous disregard for their customers. What's worse is that these practices end up staining all of us in Information Technology as uncaring a-holes. In the future, those PC customers will move on to technologies that they can handle on their own. Hell, they might just buy Apples or some extremely dumbed-down desktop Linux. Just try explaining where "Desktop" is located in Windows Explorer to the average consumer if you think Windows is "simple and intuitive". And the Desktop is the first thing seen after logon!
Whenever I am on top of Mount Soledad in La Jolla, California I find my keyless entry fob is utterly useless. About 200 meters west of that point is an array of various antennae, so that is obviously related to this problem. I wonder how many other such "dead spots" there are?
I am a GURU on the I.T. certification game. Certification and degrees have a place, just as experience has a place. Which do I consider the most important after 8 years of working in I.T.? I rank them 1- Experience, 2- Degrees, 3- Certifications. During the boom, one or two of these three was usually sufficient to get a job, sounds like you had EXPERIENCE, the most valuable of the three. Congratulations on your timing. Hell, I lucked out too with some well-timed moves during the boom, getting in over my head at times and letting my butt catch up later. For anyone else believing they too can succeed as you have, I would advise against it. The boom is over and I.T. is settling into being a normal business component that will have its' share of ups and downs in the coming decades. I don't expect it will ever get as "frothy" as 1998-2000 again in my lifetime.
If someone who wants an I.T. job can get all three of these tools into their kitbag, by all means they should. Even if they can jump NOW into a great gig if they will forego the degree, long-term that usually haunts you. Managers usually want degree-holders to move up. Additionally, your lightweight kitbag makes you more dependent on your current position and limits your future options.
The husband of a dear friend of mine has loads of experience; no degrees or certs. His gig dried up with the I.T. bust (in Austin, Texas) and he has been barely-working ever since. It's heartbreaking to get the doors slammed in your face, calls not returned over and over because you can't get a look when everyone else has the Big Three.
Not only that, some certs get "hot" now and then. e.g. The Security certs have been hot commodities since 9/11/01. On the other hand, don't jump in way over your head thinking your cert means you REALLY know the subject matter.
Experience is the best teacher, but necessity is a MOTHER.
In today's I.T. market, I guess there are two major considerations to stick in the hopper before you decide:
1. Tinkering with this agreement could put you in a bad light with the new bosses. That said, I know a number of people who have significantly altered or rejected these agreements without significant fallout. Just keep in mind you are managing some "first impressions".
2. Each I.T. worker is very busy trying to just get the work of at least two people done and our bosses aren't much different. I have to wonder just how much time and energy these bosses would have left later for pursuing breach of contract claims against you at a later time. Reasonably speaking, if I was in the bosses' Johnston and Murphy's later on, it would depend upon the time and effort involved. Big breach, go after the employee. Little breach, let it slide, the next TPS Report is due on Friday after all...
SCO takes another page from the Microsoft book of institutional intimidation and scalp hunting.
Besides, who the heck goes to the SCO site anyway? SCO already has taken all the good code off their web pages, so why bother? If the security analysts hadn't noticed the code that would DDOS SCO's site, nobody would have noticed its' unavailability.
Some advice for the voters of South Florida (my sister being one of them. She even survived the Palm Beach County Butterfly Ballot of 2000):
Don't complain about lack of options. You've got to pick a few when you do multiple choice. Those are the breaks.
Feel free to suggest poll ideas if you're feeling creative. I'd strongly suggest reading the past polls first.
This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.
I am a severe skeptic of every technology company around, but have found myself engulfed by Microsoft as a Windows Geek because they just keep surprising me by not going totally braindead. (in spite of The Inquirer's article) Is it just me or didn't MS servers go from 10 percent of the market (LAN Manager on DOS or OS/2), to 20 percent (Novell ignored this), to 38 percent (where I thought they would peak), to 55 percent now? These Windows 200X Servers are pretty impressive examples of how the Borg has expanded through embrace and extend. In the meantime, Linux has been killing off the NIX'es and Novell to become the other big kid on this block. All the while, I have seen boneheaded move after boneheaded move by MS that tempted me to write them off, learn Java and Linux, and start looking for a job with "The Rebel Alliance". The phenomenal price hikes, the horrific defense they put on against David Boies and the Justice Department, SQL Slammer, Blaster, the refusal to backport Active Directory's Group Policies to pre-Windows 2X (Windows 2000, XP, 2003) machines, the forcing of Exchange customers wanting Exchange 2000 to deploy Active Directory (on Windows 200X Servers only), MSN, losing their lawsuit with Sun over Java, the threatened arbitrary defrocking of Windows NT 4.0 MCSE's (Microsoft Certified Sales Engineers:) )that was only averted four months from the deadline, and more. This company has committed about a zillion errors and it keeps coming back from them all smiling, profitable, and supremely confident like some sort of liquid metal-based Terminator soaking up shotgun blasts. Sixty billion in the bank will do that for you, I suppose.
What to make of this? An old friend long ago advised me that whatever IBM is doing, do the opposite. He has long been an MS guy and it has paid off for both of us. Will it go on forever? Extremely unlikely. When twenty year olds come to me these days asking for long-range IT advice, I recommend Open Source. You will learn more, you have the time to learn it, and it's not going away. If they need to learn MS later, it will be easy after Open Source. MS won't be going away any time soon, but eventually we will ALL perceive that IT is not just about desktops, servers, and mainframes. When it comes to money, we need to remember those cell phones, Blackberry's, PDA's, gaming consoles, set top boxes, supercomputers, Distributed.net, manufacturing control systems, routers, firewalls, and dozens of things that don't come to mind. When viewed in its' totality, this market has MANY big players. The winds of change are blowing and the devices are bypassing MS's chokehold on innovation in its markets. Adam Smith's invisible hand will crash right through MS discounts, Justice Department inaction, and legions of lawyers to bring us the computing solutions we need. A pox on Darl McBride!
VMware is a bread-and-butter product for people like me delivering computer classes. The company has steadily introduced better and better features for educational customers and I fear we will be kicked to the curb as EMC tries to please enterprise storage-type customers instead. I also suspect that VMware may start to fade into an expensive, proprietary sort of space, ceding the cheap and dirty part of this market to Microsoft's Connectix products.
BTW, a severe gotcha I learned with VMware is that if you create a VM, then Ghost it to multiple systems, those VM's each end up with the same MAC address. Lesson learned, got to use a rollback utility on the original VM or just add a new virtual network adapter to each node's VM after the Ghost has finished.
Hey, you must be the same Dan "Effugas" who wrote the Appendix on cryptography in the back of a Check Point study guide I have used a LOT. Nice to see you actively Slashdot!
What I want is one of those robotic horses (a chevaline) and a Kevlar duster-type coat. That would make me a Cosmic Cowboy of the Future. Wait, would that make me Cowboy Neal?
Let's not even start talking about the Mouse Army among these rogues on Slashdot... Thousands of teenage Asian girls, oh boy.
With a name like Smalley, I can see why this guy went into nanotechnology. Now I understand why Dr. Karl Maxxum was the chief architect of the Empire State Building;)
The Onion-America's Finest News Source recently covered this topic. It was discovered that there was a huge surge in office productivity during the Internet outage triggered by the Detroit to NYC blackout a few months ago.
On second thought, it sounds like not enough people had a contingency plan and were left with nothing to do but work. Better to have that contingency plan...
There's another spoof of the original Matrix movie called "Computer Boy". It's pretty funny. It was obviously filmed in Britain and the lead actor is often dead-on at mocking yet capturing Keanu Reeves simultaneously. My favorite part is the spoof of the duel between Neo and Morpheus. Neo proves to have been a fast learner. Be sure and fast-forward through the scene with the ducks. Time and budget were lacking for the part where Neo is shown encased in the pod with "a tube sticking out of his ass", so they filled it with footage of ducks swimming in a pond! Really pointless and drawn out so skip it.
Look for Computer Boy at ifilm.com. The geocities site they mention was unavailable when I posted this bit.
Cross Site Scripting attack protection is a standard feature of many network security products these days. Check Point NG with Application Intelligence (Feature Pack 4 in other words) includes XSS protection as part of its' so-called SmartDefense. I am curious if anyone has run into situations where SmartDefense is screwing up legitimate traffic, especially traffic that resembles an XSS attack.
BTW, does anybody have some good recommendations for cheaper alternatives with pretty comparable protection to Check Point? I would like something that is as defensive, but not as configurable or extensible.
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot's US-centricism is showing...
Basically, the Chrsitian Socialists Union in Bavaria or Christian Democratic Union as it is known in the rest of Germany is the "Conservative" party of German politics. It's the big conservative party, so I guess for Americans it's the equivalent of the Republican Party. Helmut Kohl, practically Chancellor for life there for about 15 years, was from the CDU/CSU.
Politically active Christians in the USA would find the CDU/CSU's positions on many issues abhorrent; the Christian label is just an historical anachronism from what I could tell during my two years in Germany.
Gerhardt Schroeder, the current Chancellor, is from the major "liberal" opposition party- I forget the name now. For what it is worth, West Germany only had one Chancellor in the postwar era from the opposition party. All the rest were CDU/CSU until the "wiedervereinigung".
...This story is a TROLL.
I am reminded of a story by Arthur C. Clarke. Two IBM programmers are brought out to Sri Lanka to work in a monastery at the top of a mountain. The monks believe that if all the nearly infinite names of God are recited, the universe will come to an end. Their job is to write a program that will be run on a mainframe at the monastery to try and generate all those names. Someone out there probably knows the name of this short story.
BTW, one of the posts near the top of this discussion is correct. The Roman Catholic Church (my flavor of Christianity) is now very much at ease with the results of all the scientific discoveries of the past few centuries. One of our fundamentalist friends is a "Young Earth Creationist". Sorry, but I gotta laugh when told that humans and dinosaurs walked the Earth together. All the animals were vegetarians (even T-Rex) until Adam and Eve shared that apple/pomegranate. Huh?
Dear Fellow Slashdotters, most of the world's religions are fine with scientific discovery. The great "undiscovered country" out there is the focus of most religions. What are humans capable of when their mind, body and spirit are all completely aligned on their spritual "North Star"? What matters is not material things but things like love, hope, joy, justice and so on. Mother Teresa (already beatified, now awaiting canonization- Sainthood. Similar to a certification from Verisign finally completing for the tech-obsessed) spoke of the spiritual poverty of Americans as compared with the spiritual wealth of the poor of Calcutta. Religion does not need these routine bashings on Slashdot. I have found most of it is good for helping keep the neighbor's kids from trying to break into my house. Without it, I am certain that mere Earthly laws and law enforcement will leave us much poorer in every way. Since the tyranny of the ACLU and atheists was unleashed by the Warren Court, we have seen what happens when God is driven out of America at every turn. As a lifelong historian, I truly believe that America was better off when it wasn't trying to force religion out of the public sphere at every turn. I would be fine with seeing crosses, stars of David, crescents, and Buddha statues all over America. Let the government referee the occasional conflict instead of suppressing them unevenly which is the current game. Studying anything BUT our major legacy of faith, Christianity, is fine for public educational facilities now.(e.g. universities down to elementary shcools) The anti-Chrisitan crowd that has been extending its reach through government is totally fine with promoting every religion but Chrisitanity. The Founding Fathers wisely chose not to establish state religions, (unlike Europe where tax dollars go straight to state religions) but their separation of Church and State was trying to protect BOTH. The protection of the State should not come at the expense of one particular practice of faith. If it must be paid, it should be paid evenly by Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and so on. The Constitution guarantees freedom of religion, not freedom from religion. Everyone has made a religious choice since exposure to religion is inescapable. If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. -Rush
Let me see if I can help sort out your reactions...
In 1997, my wife and our two year old son were approaching a large, busy intersection at the speed limit. There were three lanes going in each direction, east and west, two more lanes southbound only. Needless to say (you would think), there was a traffic light above the intersection of the eastbound and southbound lanes. A driver turned from the westbound lanes into the southbound lanes and just kept right on going through the red light. She told the police she didn't realize there was a light there! She struck our 1991 Honda Accord in the left rear wheel area with the wheel absorbing most of the impact. The Accord was spun at least 180 degrees by the impact and my son's carseat was tipped over, but he was unhurt. My wife suffered a spinal injury that still impinges on her spinal cord and caused the doctors to recommend she refrain from lifting anything over 15 pounds. This pretty much ended her career as an RN. Now she is having trouble with chest and hand pain related to the nerve impingement. She has had extensive physical therapy and chiropractic care for 7 years now. Thanks to listening to my idiot brother-in-law, I had reduced our underinsured motorist coverage a few months before this accident and we ended up with about 35,000 USD cash for a lifetime of reduced mobility and pain. Nationwide Insurance deliberately dragged their feet trying to get us to accept a reduced settlement. We finally sued them near the lawsuit deadline and they settled within two months thereafter. The mitigating factor was their idiot driver had blabbed about being "100 percent responsible" for the accident. Thank God! Even with that, Nationwide jerked us around for an extra year and a half beyond what they should have. I loathe them. They sent their adjusters here to Southern California in the wake of our wildfires last fall and my coworkers overheard them laughing about underpaying claims and dragging things out.
My point here is that when a driver royally screws up, blackbox evidence can help settle the matter clearly and quickly allowing everyone to get on with their post-accident lives. If the driver who rammed my wife had not blabbed, the blackbox could have blabbed for her. Everyone, please be safe out there. When we are approaching an intersection that has been green for 10 seconds or more, but are the only car approaching at that point, my wife and I both slow down and look around carefully now since another fool may "not realize there is a traffic light over that intersection". That was how my wife was hurt. We don't drive smaller cars anymore either. She has an airbagged minivan and I have an airbagged half-ton pickup. Our next vehicle will be a 3/4 ton Suburban. It tows our big trailer well and protects my wife and three children. We'll buy more energy-efficient vehicles when they get safer and can tow 8,000 pounds over the Rockies.
First off, to get some of the positional data in a fashion similar to using the Earth's Iridium satellite network, NASA could drop some RF triangulation devices on Mars. This seems like a cheap, viable option to me.
I would think NASA would like to have their "tumbleweeds" stay parked when something fantastic was found. Perhaps the probe could drop anchor now and then. I'm thinking a magnetized metal disc could be dropped outside the ball and attract to an electromagnet inside the ball. When the engineers are ready to let the ball move again, they switch off the electomagnet's current. Given six disposable discs, a ball could be anchored six times and no need for a motor or drilling system.
Also, how about a kite and harness rig? If the ball/probe needs to make a long run, it could have a harness around it attached to an axle running through it. A kite, attached to the harness, would then be launched from the probe and set it off on a faster run than just having air blowing against a ball on the Martian surface. The harness and kite could be dropped if the probe needed to "be free".
BTW, I highly recommend actually reading the links referenced as I am already seeing a lot of duplicate comments here as in previous discussions. Moderators in particular should check those links, unless you like modding up dupes...
News flash to political newbies...Large corporations with any sense at all donate to BOTH of the major political parties in America. It's called hedging your bets. Additionally, in this "50:50 nation" of Republican rule in the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives (WTF?) neither party has a lifelong lock on anything. If you were MSFT and put all your contributions/eggs in the Pioneer Fund/basket, don't you think this could come back to haunt you in January of 2005 if John Kerry squeaks it out of this "50:50 electorate"?
Here's my take on the political game. If you are a corporation and corporate interests are ONLY served by Republicans, but all your money on RED and push your blue-suited shills hard in front of the cameras. Hmm, but what about all those millions that go to Democrats? Why? Democrats are the friend of the big, established businesses. Like in Europe, Japan and Korea, the government tends to put up barriers to protect the current crop of large corporations in the interest of stability and jobs. Democrats love to fantasize about economic stability and jobs. Look how well it's working out in Europe. The European Central Bank is projecting a whopping 0.4 percent growth rate for 2004 in the Eurozone. The Americazone is steaming along at about ten times that rate while OUR politicians wail about YAGD (Yet Another Great Depression). Economists may love Schumpeterian Destruction and renewal of the economy, but 3M just wants to go on selling overpriced sticky notes. GM wants to go on selling big cars and trucks. Upstarts blow the status quo to heck and profits follow. Case in point, Microsoft and Linux. The bottom line is to hedge your bets. The Republicans can eliminate your taxes and the Democrats can eliminate your competition. If the two balance out, the status quo is preserved and you can just commerce along in relative peace and quiet. Is this a great country or WHAT?
While MS may have pioneered this approach in the tech field, most companies should not be in a position to emulate this callous disregard. After all, MS has long enjoyed monopoly power but hardly anyone can talk of most (any?) PC makers having monopoly power. It seems like such lousy service is not something these PC makers should be able to get away with providing. On the other hand, MS can barely warm over Windows 95 again, throw in a few features, recommend business buyers NOT purchase the product, and foist it on consumers as "Windows Millenium Edition" (not to be confused with the millenium edition of Windows NT known as Windows 2000). Now THAT's monopoly power.
BTW, Neal Stephenson hit this nail on the head in his essay "In the Beginning was the command line" seen here. In the essay, he predicted a future MS operating system would consist of logging on and just seeing one button to click. Voila, I give you "Luna" in XP (years later).
If you put an idiot with a script in front of them on the phone, they may piss off people, but they are less likely to do any real damage.
I actually read the article and found it positively HORRIFYING. Since I am around sysadmins all the time, I forget what it's like to be some gullible consumer running Windows XP Home Edition.
How about some Hippocratic Oath action here? You know, "First, do no harm." The Formatters who fail to fully disclose that consumers are going to lose their family's digital photo albums, video clips of newborns, and contact information for friends and family worldwide are lacking in redeeming human value. If you are a Formatter, please find a new line of work- TODAY.
Call ME gullible, but given our reasonably wide-open markets for building, selling, and supporting PC's, I would think the companies using these "Support Centers" will suffer for their callous disregard for their customers. What's worse is that these practices end up staining all of us in Information Technology as uncaring a-holes. In the future, those PC customers will move on to technologies that they can handle on their own. Hell, they might just buy Apples or some extremely dumbed-down desktop Linux. Just try explaining where "Desktop" is located in Windows Explorer to the average consumer if you think Windows is "simple and intuitive". And the Desktop is the first thing seen after logon!
Whenever I am on top of Mount Soledad in La Jolla, California I find my keyless entry fob is utterly useless. About 200 meters west of that point is an array of various antennae, so that is obviously related to this problem. I wonder how many other such "dead spots" there are?
Looks trollish, but I'll bite...
I am a GURU on the I.T. certification game. Certification and degrees have a place, just as experience has a place. Which do I consider the most important after 8 years of working in I.T.? I rank them 1- Experience, 2- Degrees, 3- Certifications. During the boom, one or two of these three was usually sufficient to get a job, sounds like you had EXPERIENCE, the most valuable of the three. Congratulations on your timing. Hell, I lucked out too with some well-timed moves during the boom, getting in over my head at times and letting my butt catch up later. For anyone else believing they too can succeed as you have, I would advise against it. The boom is over and I.T. is settling into being a normal business component that will have its' share of ups and downs in the coming decades. I don't expect it will ever get as "frothy" as 1998-2000 again in my lifetime.
If someone who wants an I.T. job can get all three of these tools into their kitbag, by all means they should. Even if they can jump NOW into a great gig if they will forego the degree, long-term that usually haunts you. Managers usually want degree-holders to move up. Additionally, your lightweight kitbag makes you more dependent on your current position and limits your future options.
The husband of a dear friend of mine has loads of experience; no degrees or certs. His gig dried up with the I.T. bust (in Austin, Texas) and he has been barely-working ever since. It's heartbreaking to get the doors slammed in your face, calls not returned over and over because you can't get a look when everyone else has the Big Three.
Not only that, some certs get "hot" now and then. e.g. The Security certs have been hot commodities since 9/11/01. On the other hand, don't jump in way over your head thinking your cert means you REALLY know the subject matter.
Experience is the best teacher, but necessity is a MOTHER.
TK-421, why aren't you at your post?
I bet he's drunk on Skywalker Ranch Riesling again!
YOU REBEL SCUM!!!
Umm, that's THX-1138. Which starred Robert Duvall, believe it or not! (Hopeless here.)
It's hard to believe it took this long to happen! Hell, that's the most impressive part of this leak!
In today's I.T. market, I guess there are two major considerations to stick in the hopper before you decide:
1. Tinkering with this agreement could put you in a bad light with the new bosses. That said, I know a number of people who have significantly altered or rejected these agreements without significant fallout. Just keep in mind you are managing some "first impressions".
2. Each I.T. worker is very busy trying to just get the work of at least two people done and our bosses aren't much different. I have to wonder just how much time and energy these bosses would have left later for pursuing breach of contract claims against you at a later time. Reasonably speaking, if I was in the bosses' Johnston and Murphy's later on, it would depend upon the time and effort involved. Big breach, go after the employee. Little breach, let it slide, the next TPS Report is due on Friday after all...
SCO takes another page from the Microsoft book of institutional intimidation and scalp hunting.
Besides, who the heck goes to the SCO site anyway? SCO already has taken all the good code off their web pages, so why bother? If the security analysts hadn't noticed the code that would DDOS SCO's site, nobody would have noticed its' unavailability.
No, I bet the real problem here was that the ballot did not contain a CowboyNeal option. Heck, this still confuses me when I am voting.
Or maybe these voters were behind a firewall and someone else's vote from behind that firewall had been counted first?
Don't complain about lack of options. You've got to pick a few when you do multiple choice. Those are the breaks.
Feel free to suggest poll ideas if you're feeling creative. I'd strongly suggest reading the past polls first.
This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.
I was surprised that Wired could only come up with 5 good ideas for fixing the Internet.
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world. Those who understand binary, and those who don't.
I am a severe skeptic of every technology company around, but have found myself engulfed by Microsoft as a Windows Geek because they just keep surprising me by not going totally braindead. (in spite of The Inquirer's article) Is it just me or didn't MS servers go from 10 percent of the market (LAN Manager on DOS or OS/2), to 20 percent (Novell ignored this), to 38 percent (where I thought they would peak), to 55 percent now? These Windows 200X Servers are pretty impressive examples of how the Borg has expanded through embrace and extend. In the meantime, Linux has been killing off the NIX'es and Novell to become the other big kid on this block. All the while, I have seen boneheaded move after boneheaded move by MS that tempted me to write them off, learn Java and Linux, and start looking for a job with "The Rebel Alliance". The phenomenal price hikes, the horrific defense they put on against David Boies and the Justice Department, SQL Slammer, Blaster, the refusal to backport Active Directory's Group Policies to pre-Windows 2X (Windows 2000, XP, 2003) machines, the forcing of Exchange customers wanting Exchange 2000 to deploy Active Directory (on Windows 200X Servers only), MSN, losing their lawsuit with Sun over Java, the threatened arbitrary defrocking of Windows NT 4.0 MCSE's (Microsoft Certified Sales Engineers :) )that was only averted four months from the deadline, and more. This company has committed about a zillion errors and it keeps coming back from them all smiling, profitable, and supremely confident like some sort of liquid metal-based Terminator soaking up shotgun blasts. Sixty billion in the bank will do that for you, I suppose.
What to make of this? An old friend long ago advised me that whatever IBM is doing, do the opposite. He has long been an MS guy and it has paid off for both of us. Will it go on forever? Extremely unlikely. When twenty year olds come to me these days asking for long-range IT advice, I recommend Open Source. You will learn more, you have the time to learn it, and it's not going away. If they need to learn MS later, it will be easy after Open Source. MS won't be going away any time soon, but eventually we will ALL perceive that IT is not just about desktops, servers, and mainframes. When it comes to money, we need to remember those cell phones, Blackberry's, PDA's, gaming consoles, set top boxes, supercomputers, Distributed.net, manufacturing control systems, routers, firewalls, and dozens of things that don't come to mind. When viewed in its' totality, this market has MANY big players. The winds of change are blowing and the devices are bypassing MS's chokehold on innovation in its markets. Adam Smith's invisible hand will crash right through MS discounts, Justice Department inaction, and legions of lawyers to bring us the computing solutions we need. A pox on Darl McBride!
VMware is a bread-and-butter product for people like me delivering computer classes. The company has steadily introduced better and better features for educational customers and I fear we will be kicked to the curb as EMC tries to please enterprise storage-type customers instead. I also suspect that VMware may start to fade into an expensive, proprietary sort of space, ceding the cheap and dirty part of this market to Microsoft's Connectix products.
BTW, a severe gotcha I learned with VMware is that if you create a VM, then Ghost it to multiple systems, those VM's each end up with the same MAC address. Lesson learned, got to use a rollback utility on the original VM or just add a new virtual network adapter to each node's VM after the Ghost has finished.
Hey, you must be the same Dan "Effugas" who wrote the Appendix on cryptography in the back of a Check Point study guide I have used a LOT. Nice to see you actively Slashdot!
What I want is one of those robotic horses (a chevaline) and a Kevlar duster-type coat. That would make me a Cosmic Cowboy of the Future. Wait, would that make me Cowboy Neal?
Let's not even start talking about the Mouse Army among these rogues on Slashdot... Thousands of teenage Asian girls, oh boy.
With a name like Smalley, I can see why this guy went into nanotechnology. Now I understand why Dr. Karl Maxxum was the chief architect of the Empire State Building;)
The Onion-America's Finest News Source recently covered this topic. It was discovered that there was a huge surge in office productivity during the Internet outage triggered by the Detroit to NYC blackout a few months ago.
On second thought, it sounds like not enough people had a contingency plan and were left with nothing to do but work. Better to have that contingency plan...
There's another spoof of the original Matrix movie called "Computer Boy". It's pretty funny. It was obviously filmed in Britain and the lead actor is often dead-on at mocking yet capturing Keanu Reeves simultaneously. My favorite part is the spoof of the duel between Neo and Morpheus. Neo proves to have been a fast learner. Be sure and fast-forward through the scene with the ducks. Time and budget were lacking for the part where Neo is shown encased in the pod with "a tube sticking out of his ass", so they filled it with footage of ducks swimming in a pond! Really pointless and drawn out so skip it.
Look for Computer Boy at ifilm.com. The geocities site they mention was unavailable when I posted this bit.
Cross Site Scripting attack protection is a standard feature of many network security products these days. Check Point NG with Application Intelligence (Feature Pack 4 in other words) includes XSS protection as part of its' so-called SmartDefense. I am curious if anyone has run into situations where SmartDefense is screwing up legitimate traffic, especially traffic that resembles an XSS attack.
BTW, does anybody have some good recommendations for cheaper alternatives with pretty comparable protection to Check Point? I would like something that is as defensive, but not as configurable or extensible.