I think best practices and the ideal implementation in your code is beyond the scope of a tutorial or a book. You're not expecting to finish it and be an expert. Tutorials are a great way to get practical knowledge (something you won't get much of in most classes (not that they don't offer other advantages)). I think any text that attempts to introduce every single such detail would end up with most of it being lost on the reader and what would have been simple enough becoming convoluted. Learn the language, then learn to make best use of it.
This is basically how I learned PHP. Without any PHP or mysql experience or even understanding the concept of a loop, I used tutorials from webmonkey.com and made cobbled together a weak CMS system over the course of a couple weeks. When I finished I immediately wanted to start over using what I'd learned.
Apparantly you're ignoring conservation of energy. If you're powering an electric motor to raise (or increase the potential energy of) the weight, with the added step, you're decreasing efficiency and using more electricity than you would if you had just plugged in a lamp.
I'm pretty sure it was 40 when I enlisted, but I don't remember. I was a programmer so I was surrounded by people who scored in the 99th percentile anyway (just ask them). One of my best friends always hung out with people in Security Forces because "they don't all think they are better than everyone else." Seems the common computer nerd tries to make up for his lack of physical prowess by overestimating the value of uninteresting knowledge.
"I highly doubt the average Slashdotter, who is generally well educated,..."
I wish I had mod points so I could mark this post funny. People here, in general, are idiots like everywhere else. When I was in the Air Force people always used to be surprised when someone would do something stupid; they thought that since you had to score in the 40th percentile in the ASVAB test to get in the Air Force rather than the 30th as in the Navy, the people should be smarter.
That's pretty much what I already do, minus the jackass style lack of foresight. Dish is already doing it. I suppose if internet connection speeds were never going to get any better than today, you'd be right. And last I heard, 99% of what Comcast was throttling was illegal.
Remind me again why you're going to store streaming video on your hard drive? You're not. Because 1) you're not going to need to, and 2) that'll make it tougher to charge you every time you watch it.
Optical storage's days are numbered. Flash memory and fast internet connections are making it worthless. I see On Demand or Pay Per View or whatever you want to call it as the way movies will be watched in 5 years. Someone (not Apple) will take what NetFlix does and do it right.
And now we won't need to worry about anyone changing a light bulb that isn't in their contract. Or, if it is in their contract, they'll be sure to have the correct form filled out first. I've never seen a union get anything useful for the people that need it most, but they sure can do harm to the industry that creates their jobs.
In a business class about 4 years ago (I can't remember what class it was, but it doesn't matter), we discussed a shrimpers union that had just scored some big deal. A deal that I argued would ultimately move their jobs to Southwest Asia.
I can appreciate your position, but frankly, I wish this would happen to more people making a living on eBay. If you want an online store, set up an online store. The thing that makes eBay most worthless to me (as a buyer) is the fact that it's basically more of an online mall than the swap meet I expect.
So you're saying they chose which product to use based on the product rather than the morals of the company behind it? So that's why slashdotters make so many bad decisions..
Time to Rewrite the Rules of Telecom Now that voice calls can be sent over the Net, existing phone regulations are becoming irrelevant. The FCC has to make some tough choices
Since its launch in April, 2002, Internet telephony company Vonage has been a rip-roaring success. Over the last year, the Edison (N.J.) company signed up 45,000 customers, who pay a flat rate of $39.99 a month for unlimited local and long-distance calling, plus caller ID, voice mail, call waiting, and a bevy of other services.
Vonage can offer such low prices because its calls are sent through a customer's broadband connection, a technology known as voice over Internet protocol (VOIP). Sending sound in packets over the Net is cheaper and more efficient than routing calls over traditional copper wires and phone company circuit switches. And VOIP has been exempt from telecommunications taxes and standards. Until now.
In the next few days, the Minnesota State Public Utility Commission plans to hand down an order mandating that Vonage be held to the same standards, taxes, and requirements as more traditional telecom operations. In Minnesota's view, if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and looks like a duck, it's a duck.
THE REAL PROBLEM. More like a sitting duck, say Vonage and a chorus of VOIP evangelists. They argue that the convoluted, often irrational, web of telecom regulations that have evolved over the last century threaten to kill a vibrant new technology and stifle greater efficiency and sorely needed investment in the ailing sector. "To single out VOIP as a telephone service is a terrible misunderstanding of the Internet industry. I would submit that, someday, the phrase Internet telephony will sound as archaic as 'horseless carriage' sounds today," says Vint Cerf, one of the designers of the Internet protocol and vice-president for technology and Internet architecture at MCI (MCWEQ ).
The rush to lump VOIP in with phone services obscures the larger problem: The 100-year-old regulatory structure for telephones is no longer adequate for today's advanced telecom services. These rules were written in a time when each technology delivered one type of service: Voice traveled over copper wires. Broadcast radio and TV signals flew through the air. Multichannel video journeyed across a coaxial cable.
The Internet has changed all that. Since information now travels digitally -- a sequence of 1s and 0s -- no distinction remains between a voice call, an e-mail, or a video stream, and it costs no more if that information goes cross-town or cross-country. For voice calls, that means the system of fees that carriers pay each other to send long-distance, regional, and local voice minutes are fast becoming obsolete. "Over time, VOIP will make the telecom system as we know it irrelevant," says Blair Levin, a former Federal Communications Commission chief of staff who's now a telecom analyst at investment firm Legg Mason in Washington, D.C.
BATTLE WITH THE STATES. That puts at least $14 billion in so-called access fees at stake, according to a 2001 FCC analysis, the latest numbers available. These are the fees that long-distance and upstart telecoms pay the Baby Bells -- Verizon (VZ ), SBC (SBC ), BellSouth (BLS ), and Qwest (Q ) -- and other local-exchange carriers to "terminate" calls, or pass them over their networks to the end customer. As carriers move traffic onto the Internet backbone, those fees no longer apply.
Small wonder MCI plans to shift 25% of its voice traffic to the Internet backbone by the end of 2003. By 2005, 100% of MCI's traffic will be carried over the Net, instead of traditional copper lines.
With so much up for grabs, states are taking an interest. On Aug. 12, Alabama ordered a "declaratory ruling" on whether VOIP will be subject to so-called access and interconnection charges that apply to traditional phone calls. Ohio's Public Utility Commission has opened an inquiry into how providers are using VOIP and whether such efforts con
Twisters, hurricanes, floods (oh my)
LATEST HEADLINES
Tape Technology Stretches Out
Oracle chats up PeopleSoft customers
Romanian nabbed for launching Blaster-F
DISASTER RECOVERY NEWS
Twisters, hurricanes, floods (oh my)
Ridge sees technology, agency restructuring bolstering homeland security
Moving networked storage farther and faster
Story by Matt Villano
SEPTEMBER 03, 2003 ( CIO ) - The evening of Sunday, May 4, 2003, at Aeneas Internet and Telephone began as any previous Sunday evening had. The Jackson, Tenn.-based company that serves about 10,000 Internet and 2,500 telephone customers was closed for the weekend, awaiting the return of its 17 employees the next morning. Just before midnight, however, all hell broke loose. An F-4 category twister touched down just outside of town, then tore through Jackson's downtown area, leveling houses, historical sites and municipal buildings alike. The tornado ripped straight through Aeneas's one-story building, leaving only a pile of rubble.
Meanwhile, Aeneas CIO and Operations Manager Josh Hart, who'd heard about multiple tornadoes in the area that day, was home, 52 miles away in Martin, Tenn., huddling in his bathroom with his family. As soon as he was able, he flipped on the TV for news footage of the devastation. What he saw looked like "a war zone," bricks and concrete everywhere and piles upon piles of rubble.
At 2 a.m., with those images in the background, Hart's cell phone rang--it was Aeneas Network Administrator Jason Warren calling from what he likened to Ground Zero to report that everything in Jackson was lost. Another call came in from CEO Jonathan Harlan.
"I'm listening to [Warren] tell me what it's like, and he says, 'It doesn't even look like there was an office here,'" remembers Hart, 25. "The tornado destroyed our computers, our desks, everything. I couldn't believe what he was telling me."
Aeneas lost nearly $1 million in hardware and software that night, and an estimated 72 hours of downtime. But just as Aeneas in Virgil's Aeneid endured the worst the gods had to offer, so too did this Aeneas. This one, however, was wise enough to have created a contingency plan--one that minimized the damage and kept the company afloat during its darkest hour.
The company is not alone. After a nationwide scramble to prepare for high-impact, low-probability events similar to the attacks of Sept. 11, CIOs have since realized that their organizations are far more likely to succumb to another type of event--one that has a high probability of occurring and, curiously enough, is probably simpler to predict: the weather. For example, in June, while the Atlantic seaboard was bracing for the start of hurricane season, Arizona was busy battling forest fires. And in Harris County, Texas, in 2001, a tropical storm and resulting flood taught one IT executive the importance of flexibility.
Both Aeneas's Hart and Steven W. Jennings, Harris County's executive director of central technology, share their experiences here in an effort to provide best practices and battle-tested secrets about which preparations work best. According to Carol Kelly, vice president of government strategies for Meta Group, these are lessons from which everyone can learn. "When disaster strikes, you want to be ready with a plan of action and an approach of how to deal," she says. "You might be ready for the next terrorist attack, but if you're not ready for the next nor'easter, your plans won't amount to much."
Big plans for a small company
Aeneas launched its contingency plan when it was founded in 1996; since then, CIO Hart has enhanced the strategy gradually almost every year. In early 2002, as the ISP neared 10,000 Internet customers, he and his network administrator, Warren, thought up the company's most comprehensive approach yet. While they determined that the likelihood of a terrorist attack on the western Tennessee town of Jackson, population 59,600, was slim to none, they concluded that because of the municipality's location in the central U.S.'s infamous Tornado A
AN JOSE, Calif. -- While I.B.M. officials deny it, evidence is being offered by stricken employees that unusually large numbers of men and women who worked for the giant computer corporation over the past few decades have been dying prematurely.
I.B.M. employees, and relatives of employees who have died, are claiming in a series of very bitter lawsuits that I.B.M. workers have contracted cancer and other serious illnesses from chemicals they were exposed to in semiconductor and disk-drive manufacturing, laboratory work and other very basic industrial operations.
Dr. Richard Clapp, a respected epidemiologist from Boston University who was hired by a group of 40 plaintiffs in San Jose, said statistical analyses he has run from data provided by the company have shown troubling elevations of breast cancer, non-Hodgkins lymphoma and brain cancer among I.B.M. employees. He also said the cancers appeared to be occurring in I.B.M. employees at ages younger than the U.S. average.
Some of the stories are chilling. Gary Adams, a chemist, sadly offers the names of friends and co-workers from the mid-1960's to late 1970's who were part of a small product development group in Building 13 at the I.B.M. complex on San Jose's South Side: John Wong, Ray Hawkins, Gordon Mol, Dewayne Johnson, Al Smith, Dan Fields, Robert Cappell, Ken Hart.
All of them died after contracting malignant illnesses, most of them succumbing in their 30's and 40's. Incredibly, four of them died after developing brain cancer, a rare disease in adults.
"There are not many still around," said Mr. Adams, who had a nonmalignant bone tumor removed from his left leg in 1985 and now suffers from a precancerous condition in his esophagus. "If we'd known all this from the beginning," he said, "we'd never have gone to work for I.B.M. We'd all have become shoe salesmen or something."
More than 200 plaintiffs in California, New York and Minnesota have sued I.B.M., which has spent many decades cultivating a reputation as a corporation that emphasized workplace safety and went out of its way to protect its employees. The lawsuits insist that the reality was otherwise, that officials at I.B.M. knew that workers were being put at risk of contracting cancer and other serious illnesses by their regular exposure to a variety of poisonous chemicals, many known to be carcinogens.
Companies that provided chemicals to I.B.M. are also defendants in the suits. The workers were not told of the risks, according to the lawsuits, even after they began showing symptoms of systemic chemical poisoning.
Alida Hernandez, a retired I.B.M. employee, held a number of jobs that required her to work with toxic chemicals. She learned she had breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy in 1993. She told me this week, "If they had told me when I first interviewed that I would be working with hazardous chemicals that might cause cancer, I would not have gone to work."
I.B.M. has vehemently denied all of the plaintiffs' claims, and is being represented by Jones Day, one of the firms that represented R. J. Reynolds in the tobacco industry's fight against a long line of lawsuits.
I.B.M. officials have said all along -- and repeated to me this week -- that they do not believe there is any scientific basis for any of the plaintiffs' claims. There is no evidence, they said, that any employee contracted cancer as a result of exposure to chemicals at I.B.M. In a work force as large as I.B.M.'s, they said, many workers will die from many different illnesses, including cancer.
I.B.M. officials also said they will present their own experts who will refute Dr. Clapp's findings.
Four of the 40 lawsuits in San Jose are due to go to trial next month. All the suits are being watched extremely closely by the semiconductor industry, which had been warned for years that chip-making and other processes requiring the use of tremendous amounts of toxic chemicals (such as Rob Malda's manseekin
By David Becker Staff Writer, CNET News.com September 2, 2003, 4:00 AM PT
As digital media publishers scramble to devise a foolproof method of copy protection, Microsoft is ready to push digital rights management into a whole new arena--your desktop. Office 2003, the upcoming update of the company's market-dominating productivity package, for the first time will include tools for restricting access to documents created with the software. Office workers can specify who can read or alter a spreadsheet, block it from copying or printing, and set an expiration date.
The technology is one of the first major steps in Microsoft's plan to popularize Windows Rights Management Services, a wide-ranging plan to make restricted access to information a standard part of business processes.
Analysts say it represents a badly needed new avenue for boosting sales of Microsoft's server software and an opportunity to lock out competitors, including older versions of Office. It also gives businesses that skipped on the last round or two of Office upgrades a new reason to bite this time.
"If Office 2003 was just another incremental upgrade, they'd have a hard time getting businesses interested," said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst for Jupiter Research. "For most people, the pinnacle of functionality in Office applications came in 1995. But there are more things that can be done using Office as a platform for delivering new services."
The new rights management tools splinter to some extent the long-standing interoperability of Office formats. Until now, PC users have been able to count on opening and manipulating any document saved in Microsoft Word's ".doc" format or Excel's ".xls" in any compatible program, including older versions of Office and competing packages such as Sun Microsystems' StarOffice and the open-source OpenOffice. But rights-protected documents created in Office 2003 can be manipulated only in Office 2003.
"There's certainly a lock-in factor," said Matt Rosoff, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft. "Microsoft would love people to use Office and only Office. They made very sure that Office has these features that nobody else has."
Information Rights Management (IRM) tools will be included in the professional versions of all Office applications, including the Word processor and Excel spreadsheet programs.
To use IRM features, businesses will need a server running Microsoft's Windows Server 2003 operating system and Windows Rights Management Services software. The server software will record permission rules set by the document creator, such as other people authorized to view the document and expiration dates for any permissions. When another person receives that document, they briefly log in to the Windows Rights Management server--over the Internet or a corporate network--to validate the permissions.
Dan Leach, Microsoft's lead product manager for Office, said rights management features were built into the new Office based on ongoing discussions with customers.
"We asked people what types of things would you like to do that you can't do now, and what they said is they'd like to spread large amounts of information around to more of their people--but they have concerns that the wider they spread information, the more likely it is to become available to the wrong people," he said.
Gartenberg said there's a valid need for such services, especially as office workers become more mobile and more sensitive information is stored on PCs.
"If you're a senior executive and you're carrying around your five-year business plan, you probably want to have that information secured so only you can read it," he said.
Businesses can lock down such documents now with third-party tools such as encryption software, but embedded rights management tools in the document creation software are much easier and more likely to be used, Gartenberg said. "The harder you make security to use for the end us
WOW.
First, why do you care if you're getting weird looks. You could simply point at your ass which is not as fat as your coworkers'.
Second, how do you work out at work without smelling like an ass for the rest of the day? Which brings us to another option, which is..
Finally, why not just do it at home if at work isn't working out?
First, there is no bad economy. There are high gas prices.
I usually try to help my friends build their computers. The key things to remember are: the best time to build a computer is as long as you can hold out, because the longer you wait, the faster and cheaper your hardware is going to be. Also, look at pricepoint. You know how Walmart has those labels on their price tags that say "17.8 cent/oz" ? Do that with your hard drives. Right now, 120gb drives are $100 on pricewatch, 160gb drives are $160. 120 has the best price point. Athlon prices increase about $10 each until you get to 2200, where they jump by like $40. Keep in mind that if you build a computer for a reasonable amount of money you can do it more often if you choose to and you'll never finish building one and be unhappy with the speed.
Slashdot Mirror
I think best practices and the ideal implementation in your code is beyond the scope of a tutorial or a book. You're not expecting to finish it and be an expert. Tutorials are a great way to get practical knowledge (something you won't get much of in most classes (not that they don't offer other advantages)). I think any text that attempts to introduce every single such detail would end up with most of it being lost on the reader and what would have been simple enough becoming convoluted. Learn the language, then learn to make best use of it.
This is basically how I learned PHP. Without any PHP or mysql experience or even understanding the concept of a loop, I used tutorials from webmonkey.com and made cobbled together a weak CMS system over the course of a couple weeks. When I finished I immediately wanted to start over using what I'd learned.
Pet peeve. I'm sick of getting emails like this:
Subject: What are we going to do
Message: about our employees looking at porn all day?
Apparantly you're ignoring conservation of energy. If you're powering an electric motor to raise (or increase the potential energy of) the weight, with the added step, you're decreasing efficiency and using more electricity than you would if you had just plugged in a lamp.
I'm pretty sure it was 40 when I enlisted, but I don't remember. I was a programmer so I was surrounded by people who scored in the 99th percentile anyway (just ask them). One of my best friends always hung out with people in Security Forces because "they don't all think they are better than everyone else." Seems the common computer nerd tries to make up for his lack of physical prowess by overestimating the value of uninteresting knowledge.
"I highly doubt the average Slashdotter, who is generally well educated, ..."
I wish I had mod points so I could mark this post funny. People here, in general, are idiots like everywhere else. When I was in the Air Force people always used to be surprised when someone would do something stupid; they thought that since you had to score in the 40th percentile in the ASVAB test to get in the Air Force rather than the 30th as in the Navy, the people should be smarter.
That's pretty much what I already do, minus the jackass style lack of foresight. Dish is already doing it. I suppose if internet connection speeds were never going to get any better than today, you'd be right. And last I heard, 99% of what Comcast was throttling was illegal. Remind me again why you're going to store streaming video on your hard drive? You're not. Because 1) you're not going to need to, and 2) that'll make it tougher to charge you every time you watch it.
Optical storage's days are numbered. Flash memory and fast internet connections are making it worthless. I see On Demand or Pay Per View or whatever you want to call it as the way movies will be watched in 5 years. Someone (not Apple) will take what NetFlix does and do it right.
And now we won't need to worry about anyone changing a light bulb that isn't in their contract. Or, if it is in their contract, they'll be sure to have the correct form filled out first. I've never seen a union get anything useful for the people that need it most, but they sure can do harm to the industry that creates their jobs. In a business class about 4 years ago (I can't remember what class it was, but it doesn't matter), we discussed a shrimpers union that had just scored some big deal. A deal that I argued would ultimately move their jobs to Southwest Asia.
Looks like the countersink flange went out on the CD-7 unit multiplier, knocking out hydraulic torque to the electric heat riser. That's right. Loser.
I can appreciate your position, but frankly, I wish this would happen to more people making a living on eBay. If you want an online store, set up an online store. The thing that makes eBay most worthless to me (as a buyer) is the fact that it's basically more of an online mall than the swap meet I expect.
So you're saying they chose which product to use based on the product rather than the morals of the company behind it? So that's why slashdotters make so many bad decisions..
Second, the point isn't to go complain about Microsoft's products. It's to complain about Microsoft's business products.
By Jane Black
Time to Rewrite the Rules of Telecom
Now that voice calls can be sent over the Net, existing phone regulations are becoming irrelevant. The FCC has to make some tough choices
Since its launch in April, 2002, Internet telephony company Vonage has been a rip-roaring success. Over the last year, the Edison (N.J.) company signed up 45,000 customers, who pay a flat rate of $39.99 a month for unlimited local and long-distance calling, plus caller ID, voice mail, call waiting, and a bevy of other services.
Vonage can offer such low prices because its calls are sent through a customer's broadband connection, a technology known as voice over Internet protocol (VOIP). Sending sound in packets over the Net is cheaper and more efficient than routing calls over traditional copper wires and phone company circuit switches. And VOIP has been exempt from telecommunications taxes and standards. Until now.
In the next few days, the Minnesota State Public Utility Commission plans to hand down an order mandating that Vonage be held to the same standards, taxes, and requirements as more traditional telecom operations. In Minnesota's view, if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and looks like a duck, it's a duck.
THE REAL PROBLEM. More like a sitting duck, say Vonage and a chorus of VOIP evangelists. They argue that the convoluted, often irrational, web of telecom regulations that have evolved over the last century threaten to kill a vibrant new technology and stifle greater efficiency and sorely needed investment in the ailing sector. "To single out VOIP as a telephone service is a terrible misunderstanding of the Internet industry. I would submit that, someday, the phrase Internet telephony will sound as archaic as 'horseless carriage' sounds today," says Vint Cerf, one of the designers of the Internet protocol and vice-president for technology and Internet architecture at MCI (MCWEQ ).
The rush to lump VOIP in with phone services obscures the larger problem: The 100-year-old regulatory structure for telephones is no longer adequate for today's advanced telecom services. These rules were written in a time when each technology delivered one type of service: Voice traveled over copper wires. Broadcast radio and TV signals flew through the air. Multichannel video journeyed across a coaxial cable.
The Internet has changed all that. Since information now travels digitally -- a sequence of 1s and 0s -- no distinction remains between a voice call, an e-mail, or a video stream, and it costs no more if that information goes cross-town or cross-country. For voice calls, that means the system of fees that carriers pay each other to send long-distance, regional, and local voice minutes are fast becoming obsolete. "Over time, VOIP will make the telecom system as we know it irrelevant," says Blair Levin, a former Federal Communications Commission chief of staff who's now a telecom analyst at investment firm Legg Mason in Washington, D.C.
BATTLE WITH THE STATES. That puts at least $14 billion in so-called access fees at stake, according to a 2001 FCC analysis, the latest numbers available. These are the fees that long-distance and upstart telecoms pay the Baby Bells -- Verizon (VZ ), SBC (SBC ), BellSouth (BLS ), and Qwest (Q ) -- and other local-exchange carriers to "terminate" calls, or pass them over their networks to the end customer. As carriers move traffic onto the Internet backbone, those fees no longer apply.
Small wonder MCI plans to shift 25% of its voice traffic to the Internet backbone by the end of 2003. By 2005, 100% of MCI's traffic will be carried over the Net, instead of traditional copper lines.
With so much up for grabs, states are taking an interest. On Aug. 12, Alabama ordered a "declaratory ruling" on whether VOIP will be subject to so-called access and interconnection charges that apply to traditional phone calls. Ohio's Public Utility Commission has opened an inquiry into how providers are using VOIP and whether such efforts con
Twisters, hurricanes, floods (oh my) LATEST HEADLINES Tape Technology Stretches Out Oracle chats up PeopleSoft customers Romanian nabbed for launching Blaster-F DISASTER RECOVERY NEWS Twisters, hurricanes, floods (oh my) Ridge sees technology, agency restructuring bolstering homeland security Moving networked storage farther and faster Story by Matt Villano SEPTEMBER 03, 2003 ( CIO ) - The evening of Sunday, May 4, 2003, at Aeneas Internet and Telephone began as any previous Sunday evening had. The Jackson, Tenn.-based company that serves about 10,000 Internet and 2,500 telephone customers was closed for the weekend, awaiting the return of its 17 employees the next morning. Just before midnight, however, all hell broke loose. An F-4 category twister touched down just outside of town, then tore through Jackson's downtown area, leveling houses, historical sites and municipal buildings alike. The tornado ripped straight through Aeneas's one-story building, leaving only a pile of rubble. Meanwhile, Aeneas CIO and Operations Manager Josh Hart, who'd heard about multiple tornadoes in the area that day, was home, 52 miles away in Martin, Tenn., huddling in his bathroom with his family. As soon as he was able, he flipped on the TV for news footage of the devastation. What he saw looked like "a war zone," bricks and concrete everywhere and piles upon piles of rubble. At 2 a.m., with those images in the background, Hart's cell phone rang--it was Aeneas Network Administrator Jason Warren calling from what he likened to Ground Zero to report that everything in Jackson was lost. Another call came in from CEO Jonathan Harlan. "I'm listening to [Warren] tell me what it's like, and he says, 'It doesn't even look like there was an office here,'" remembers Hart, 25. "The tornado destroyed our computers, our desks, everything. I couldn't believe what he was telling me." Aeneas lost nearly $1 million in hardware and software that night, and an estimated 72 hours of downtime. But just as Aeneas in Virgil's Aeneid endured the worst the gods had to offer, so too did this Aeneas. This one, however, was wise enough to have created a contingency plan--one that minimized the damage and kept the company afloat during its darkest hour. The company is not alone. After a nationwide scramble to prepare for high-impact, low-probability events similar to the attacks of Sept. 11, CIOs have since realized that their organizations are far more likely to succumb to another type of event--one that has a high probability of occurring and, curiously enough, is probably simpler to predict: the weather. For example, in June, while the Atlantic seaboard was bracing for the start of hurricane season, Arizona was busy battling forest fires. And in Harris County, Texas, in 2001, a tropical storm and resulting flood taught one IT executive the importance of flexibility. Both Aeneas's Hart and Steven W. Jennings, Harris County's executive director of central technology, share their experiences here in an effort to provide best practices and battle-tested secrets about which preparations work best. According to Carol Kelly, vice president of government strategies for Meta Group, these are lessons from which everyone can learn. "When disaster strikes, you want to be ready with a plan of action and an approach of how to deal," she says. "You might be ready for the next terrorist attack, but if you're not ready for the next nor'easter, your plans won't amount to much." Big plans for a small company Aeneas launched its contingency plan when it was founded in 1996; since then, CIO Hart has enhanced the strategy gradually almost every year. In early 2002, as the ISP neared 10,000 Internet customers, he and his network administrator, Warren, thought up the company's most comprehensive approach yet. While they determined that the likelihood of a terrorist attack on the western Tennessee town of Jackson, population 59,600, was slim to none, they concluded that because of the municipality's location in the central U.S.'s infamous Tornado A
Sick and Suspicious
By BOB HERBERT
AN JOSE, Calif. -- While I.B.M. officials deny it, evidence is being offered by stricken employees that unusually large numbers of men and women who worked for the giant computer corporation over the past few decades have been dying prematurely.
I.B.M. employees, and relatives of employees who have died, are claiming in a series of very bitter lawsuits that I.B.M. workers have contracted cancer and other serious illnesses from chemicals they were exposed to in semiconductor and disk-drive manufacturing, laboratory work and other very basic industrial operations.
Dr. Richard Clapp, a respected epidemiologist from Boston University who was hired by a group of 40 plaintiffs in San Jose, said statistical analyses he has run from data provided by the company have shown troubling elevations of breast cancer, non-Hodgkins lymphoma and brain cancer among I.B.M. employees. He also said the cancers appeared to be occurring in I.B.M. employees at ages younger than the U.S. average.
Some of the stories are chilling. Gary Adams, a chemist, sadly offers the names of friends and co-workers from the mid-1960's to late 1970's who were part of a small product development group in Building 13 at the I.B.M. complex on San Jose's South Side: John Wong, Ray Hawkins, Gordon Mol, Dewayne Johnson, Al Smith, Dan Fields, Robert Cappell, Ken Hart.
All of them died after contracting malignant illnesses, most of them succumbing in their 30's and 40's. Incredibly, four of them died after developing brain cancer, a rare disease in adults.
"There are not many still around," said Mr. Adams, who had a nonmalignant bone tumor removed from his left leg in 1985 and now suffers from a precancerous condition in his esophagus. "If we'd known all this from the beginning," he said, "we'd never have gone to work for I.B.M. We'd all have become shoe salesmen or something."
More than 200 plaintiffs in California, New York and Minnesota have sued I.B.M., which has spent many decades cultivating a reputation as a corporation that emphasized workplace safety and went out of its way to protect its employees. The lawsuits insist that the reality was otherwise, that officials at I.B.M. knew that workers were being put at risk of contracting cancer and other serious illnesses by their regular exposure to a variety of poisonous chemicals, many known to be carcinogens.
Companies that provided chemicals to I.B.M. are also defendants in the suits. The workers were not told of the risks, according to the lawsuits, even after they began showing symptoms of systemic chemical poisoning.
Alida Hernandez, a retired I.B.M. employee, held a number of jobs that required her to work with toxic chemicals. She learned she had breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy in 1993. She told me this week, "If they had told me when I first interviewed that I would be working with hazardous chemicals that might cause cancer, I would not have gone to work."
I.B.M. has vehemently denied all of the plaintiffs' claims, and is being represented by Jones Day, one of the firms that represented R. J. Reynolds in the tobacco industry's fight against a long line of lawsuits.
I.B.M. officials have said all along -- and repeated to me this week -- that they do not believe there is any scientific basis for any of the plaintiffs' claims. There is no evidence, they said, that any employee contracted cancer as a result of exposure to chemicals at I.B.M. In a work force as large as I.B.M.'s, they said, many workers will die from many different illnesses, including cancer.
I.B.M. officials also said they will present their own experts who will refute Dr. Clapp's findings.
Four of the 40 lawsuits in San Jose are due to go to trial next month. All the suits are being watched extremely closely by the semiconductor industry, which had been warned for years that chip-making and other processes requiring the use of tremendous amounts of toxic chemicals (such as Rob Malda's manseekin
New Office locks down documents
By David Becker
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
September 2, 2003, 4:00 AM PT
As digital media publishers scramble to devise a foolproof method of copy protection, Microsoft is ready to push digital rights management into a whole new arena--your desktop.
Office 2003, the upcoming update of the company's market-dominating productivity package, for the first time will include tools for restricting access to documents created with the software. Office workers can specify who can read or alter a spreadsheet, block it from copying or printing, and set an expiration date.
The technology is one of the first major steps in Microsoft's plan to popularize Windows Rights Management Services, a wide-ranging plan to make restricted access to information a standard part of business processes.
Analysts say it represents a badly needed new avenue for boosting sales of Microsoft's server software and an opportunity to lock out competitors, including older versions of Office. It also gives businesses that skipped on the last round or two of Office upgrades a new reason to bite this time.
"If Office 2003 was just another incremental upgrade, they'd have a hard time getting businesses interested," said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst for Jupiter Research. "For most people, the pinnacle of functionality in Office applications came in 1995. But there are more things that can be done using Office as a platform for delivering new services."
The new rights management tools splinter to some extent the long-standing interoperability of Office formats. Until now, PC users have been able to count on opening and manipulating any document saved in Microsoft Word's ".doc" format or Excel's ".xls" in any compatible program, including older versions of Office and competing packages such as Sun Microsystems' StarOffice and the open-source OpenOffice. But rights-protected documents created in Office 2003 can be manipulated only in Office 2003.
"There's certainly a lock-in factor," said Matt Rosoff, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft. "Microsoft would love people to use Office and only Office. They made very sure that Office has these features that nobody else has."
Information Rights Management (IRM) tools will be included in the professional versions of all Office applications, including the Word processor and Excel spreadsheet programs.
To use IRM features, businesses will need a server running Microsoft's Windows Server 2003 operating system and Windows Rights Management Services software. The server software will record permission rules set by the document creator, such as other people authorized to view the document and expiration dates for any permissions. When another person receives that document, they briefly log in to the Windows Rights Management server--over the Internet or a corporate network--to validate the permissions.
Dan Leach, Microsoft's lead product manager for Office, said rights management features were built into the new Office based on ongoing discussions with customers.
"We asked people what types of things would you like to do that you can't do now, and what they said is they'd like to spread large amounts of information around to more of their people--but they have concerns that the wider they spread information, the more likely it is to become available to the wrong people," he said.
Gartenberg said there's a valid need for such services, especially as office workers become more mobile and more sensitive information is stored on PCs.
"If you're a senior executive and you're carrying around your five-year business plan, you probably want to have that information secured so only you can read it," he said.
Businesses can lock down such documents now with third-party tools such as encryption software, but embedded rights management tools in the document creation software are much easier and more likely to be used, Gartenberg said. "The harder you make security to use for the end us
WOW. First, why do you care if you're getting weird looks. You could simply point at your ass which is not as fat as your coworkers'. Second, how do you work out at work without smelling like an ass for the rest of the day? Which brings us to another option, which is.. Finally, why not just do it at home if at work isn't working out?
Anyone up for that?
My jukebox has 200,000 megs online and takes a few milliseconds between songs. Hard drives are too cheap to bother with cds.
"Do-it-yourself cd changer" ? Isn't that the way a single disc cd player works already?
Yes.
Do you think it's a coincidence that the initials for "Duke Nukem Forever are the same is "Did Not Finish" ?
Wouldn't they need something capable of viewing these digitized formats first?
To all the people who modded this post down: Remember, when you play with fire, you're gonna get bit.
I usually try to help my friends build their computers. The key things to remember are: the best time to build a computer is as long as you can hold out, because the longer you wait, the faster and cheaper your hardware is going to be. Also, look at pricepoint. You know how Walmart has those labels on their price tags that say "17.8 cent/oz" ? Do that with your hard drives. Right now, 120gb drives are $100 on pricewatch, 160gb drives are $160. 120 has the best price point. Athlon prices increase about $10 each until you get to 2200, where they jump by like $40. Keep in mind that if you build a computer for a reasonable amount of money you can do it more often if you choose to and you'll never finish building one and be unhappy with the speed.