I don't see why you can't roll up the two. Certainly, it would save a lot of time and effort, and after it worked you wouldn't be appreciably worse off when they eventually fire you.
Not in all cases. Your contract may attach you to a specific spot in the org chart. You'll still be serving a particular bureaucratic master. You'll have to honor his ulterior motives and unstated plans, carry his water and fight his battles, or you'll discover you're more expendable than a "civil servant" with tenure and some collective bargaining leverage.
This is particularly the case of contractors hired by OMB Circular A-76 provisions, which are often executed as headcount-by-headcount replacement of salaried personnel with contractor equivalents.
Sorry. Not every contractor works on a "project" or in an "independent consultant" role. Some contractors are just cogs in the same old machine.
But that's bad business. Giving away a 10% discount when you can just take with no further consideration than the actual bankruptcy purchase price of the IP and the small cost of lawyers to persuasively make your case to the bankruptcy court? Completely unnecessary.
You're paying the lawyers anyway, and you'd have to buy the IP to even have the chance to ask every Joe Bagodonuts "Mother may I", so you might as well just do it and save yourself some money. Even if you have to retain a few lawyers to fend off the trivial number of lawsuits from butt-hurt former Borders customers who think they have some say in the matter, it's a lot cheaper than playing nice.
Lets face it, nice guys finish last. Bad guys who get caught and punished still usually come out ahead of the nice guys.
Or, if they have one or two braincells working on critical thinking, they'll wonder and worry, call the support site for the organization whose server they're trying to use, and get told (after waiting on hold for several hours) "that warning doesn't mean anything; your connection is as private and secure as it always has." And that will be that.
If we're gonna hypothesize some kind of public groundswell in support of long-delayed technological deployments, can we get it behind IPv6 first? kthxbye.
It doesn't matter how much was revealed. He violated company policy and discussed an unreleased product. Microsoft might have budgeted millions of dollars in advertising to coincide with an official announcement
That was my initial thought. He got canned for poaching in Marketing's forest. Never mind the other reasons you cite; those, while potentially valid, are based on rational concerns and consideration for the uncertainty of the future, the kinds of things you realistically can't expect in corporate leadership levels. On the other hand, reaching your hand into someone else's bowl? Even animals understand what to do about that.
It seems like this submission made it to the front page simply because it's about Microsoft and it gives people a chance to shake their fist.
Also true. I'm still puzzled why Microsoft+Nokia still pisses people off. Maybe it's the whole "I thought Nokia was to cool to do that!" Maybe it's akin to the fuming impotent rage Joe Jackson sings about in Is She Really Going Out with Him?
Well, unless time travel is involved, pigeonholing the story in "apple.slashdot.org" isn't well justified by a comment 9 minutes after the story went live.
Kind of a slow week, apple-wise. Maybe the editors have decided to start padding out specific subjects with off-topic stories. It's not as if they particularly care, and the obvious asymmetry between "apple" and "yro" may jeopardize page views somehow.
I suppose they could be gaining users, and that some users...aren't using the browser, leading to paradoxical loss of browser share. More users of Firefox using less browser.
Ow. I think I just sprained my brain.
Let's try this again. Browser share is user share, unless (A) some users are using more than one browser, or (B) some browser users aren't actually using the browser, in defiance of the actual meaning of the phrase "browser user". Like, "non-driving driver", or "non-drinking drinker".
I had 20 year old floppies, those DD 3.5" disks that only had the write-protect hole. About 95% of them (sample size of 300+) were completely readable as of last month.
I misinterpreted what the highlighted portion meant. I pictured 3.5" floppies that only had a write-protect hole, by virtue of not having the write-enable slide to block the hole. The best example of those would be AOL diskettes, and I would not have been surprised to hear you or anyone else report that those things had survived intact and readable beyond the heat-death of the universe.
Note the lovely picture. That is a nine-track tape reel in all its 2nd Millennium glory. At best, 6250 bits per linear inch of tape (bpi). So a 10.5" diameter reel with 2400 feet of 1/2"-wide tape would be an amazing 172 megabytes (binary, aka mebibytes) of raw bits; subtract some for format losses.
Ah, 9-track tape. When men were men, women were not allowed in the computer room, and all programming was in assembler.
BTW, 9-track was a huge advantage over 7-track tape; 9-track could record an entire byte across the width of the tape in one write operation, so each movement of the tape represented the next byte. 7-track tape only could record 7 bits across, so octet-style bytes (everyone's modern favorite) required two tape movements. 7-track was much better suited to the ancient 5- and 6-bit codes like FIELDATA or Baudot, or binary data in machines with multiple-of-three word lengths like 12-bit or 36-bit.
I hope you've enjoyed your visit to my lawn. Now please get off it.
I agree. They're such amazingly obvious traps that you don't even need to be a Mon Calamari flag officer to spot them.
Any organization inclined to pay for MySQL official support or non-free extensions is probably 3/4 of the way to buying the entry level of full Oracle anyway. Whatever you say about MySQL, the probable market for that strategy already doesn't care about free-as-in-libre and will probably just shrug and open the wallet wider when free-as-in-beer goes away. They've already drunk the kool-aid; they already don't mind the vendor lock-in.
The state investigated his work habits by tracking his vehicle. He was eventually fired based on the evidence, which he does not dispute, as he is not seeking reinstatement or back pay. These employees can not be fired without extraordinary evidence; the sort produced by, say, tracking a vehicle.
Or, don't forget, waterboarding. That's pretty good at getting results, too. I bet we can get the guy to admit to being Al Qaeda's inside man in NYC if we're willing to foot the water bill.
GPS tracking is a potentially applicable tool for... tracking locations. It is hunting flies with shotguns for the purposes of monitoring workplace attendance, with the lovely side effect of shredding constitutionally-protected privacy rights.
Your argument seems to be the same kind of weak apologist crap we see in "Think of the children" or "The terrorists will win!" scaremongering. The ends do not justify every means. Otherwise the Bill of Rights is a waste of ink.
I think I just realized you made the same point as me, and probably better. Oh, well, it's late, it's Friday. Maybe some moderator will oblige by uprating you or downrating me as redundant, which would be OK by me.
TFA states that they had not exhausted all non-GPS solutions to tracking him.
Even that formulation misses a critical point: The objective which would have been meaningful to their goal (proving timecard fraud) was not "track him"; the appropriate objective is "verify workplace attendance". The phrase in TFA (yeah, I know, no one reads that... just go with it for a second) "worked odd hours at his job" (emphasis mine) indicates that finding out where he was at any time should not have been the objective... only finding out when he was in the office. (He wasn't working from someplace else, since the presumption is "at his job"... at his place of employment.)
So GPS tracking is solving the wrong problem. A webcam monitoring ingress and egress to his office, or computer system logs... a physical access control like a card entry system would have gone a long ways towards determining the real information they needed.
GPS was the wrong solution because it was answering the wrong question. It's not justified.
Or, to look at it from a business perspective, no meaningful liability until someone can press some kind of human-rights-related lawsuit. Whereas if money had been lost, LOOK OUT.
Sounds like Diginotar came out ahead in the client liability front.
Yeah, all credit to Pournelle and Niven; the technology was feasible. Not the actual creation of an orbital space battleship in months, but the rest of it, sure. Even the alien tech was reasonable for the time (Bussard ramjets, various flavors of laser high-energy laser, hovercraft combat vehicles, centrifugal pseudo-gravity, self-contained biosphere including gardens and biomass recycling, even laser ablation launch).
The physics were impeccable. It's just the project management and logistics of building Michael that were pure fantasy.
The technology wasn't making me scream "FANTASY!". It was the beyond-the-wildest-dream of transporting kilotons of steel, the material for hundreds of fission bombs, whole battleship main batteries, complete and intact Space Shuttles, and thousands of workers into a facility on the extreme Northwest Coast through a landscape devastated by kinetic-energy orbital bombardment, with perfect secrecy, under near-constant orbital observation and continued threat of more bombardment if the Snouts ever suspected war materials were on the move.
I actually thought Michael was an awesome concept, and I still do. It's just the deus ex machina thing of pulling together Earth's first orbital warship in months from the scavanged scrap of nearly-collapsed civilization and kicking the elephantine ass of an invading interstellar race that bothered me.
Of course, the whole premise of successfully kicking said alien ass depends on the extreme unlikelihood of it happening, so I guess that works out in the plot's favor.
Yeah, it was a good book. Just pretty wildly escapist and hand-waving towards the end.
Most of the smart switches I know of can be configured to shut down a port reporting more MACs than authorized on a particular wire. You know, so that (A) the chucklehead at the end of the wire isn't exchanging equipment on you, like plugging his home laptop into your corporate net, or (B) the chucklehead at the end of the wire isn't fanning his port out without authorization by plugging it into his own little "workgroup" switch.
As to source IPs... routers should do the same, really. If it's office equipment, it shouldn't be moving around (changing switch ports) or changing IP addresses (other than the centrally-issued DHCP one) at all.
Yeah, fission- or fusion-pumped X-ray lasers are a staple of military hard SF. Footfall was full of them, right at the end, where somehow the US constructed a secret Project Orion battleship with X-ray laser launchers and parasite fighters (Space Shuttles fitted with missile racks in the cargo bays). I call this hard SF, but the technologist inside me was screaming "FANTASY!" the whole time.
Anyway, speaking of fantasy masquerading as hard technology, SDI was also supposed to build orbital nuke-pumped X-ray lasers as part of their "look down, shoot down" anti-ICMB system.
Slashdot Mirror
And Steve has to be taken back to the Genius Bar to replace his battery pack.
Yup, it fits all the facts.
Maybe; maybe not.
I don't see why you can't roll up the two. Certainly, it would save a lot of time and effort, and after it worked you wouldn't be appreciably worse off when they eventually fire you.
Not in all cases. Your contract may attach you to a specific spot in the org chart. You'll still be serving a particular bureaucratic master. You'll have to honor his ulterior motives and unstated plans, carry his water and fight his battles, or you'll discover you're more expendable than a "civil servant" with tenure and some collective bargaining leverage.
This is particularly the case of contractors hired by OMB Circular A-76 provisions, which are often executed as headcount-by-headcount replacement of salaried personnel with contractor equivalents.
Sorry. Not every contractor works on a "project" or in an "independent consultant" role. Some contractors are just cogs in the same old machine.
I've seen a lovely piece of advice which is strikingly on point.
"Don't choose the lesser of two evils. Don't choose evil at all."
But that's bad business. Giving away a 10% discount when you can just take with no further consideration than the actual bankruptcy purchase price of the IP and the small cost of lawyers to persuasively make your case to the bankruptcy court? Completely unnecessary.
You're paying the lawyers anyway, and you'd have to buy the IP to even have the chance to ask every Joe Bagodonuts "Mother may I", so you might as well just do it and save yourself some money. Even if you have to retain a few lawyers to fend off the trivial number of lawsuits from butt-hurt former Borders customers who think they have some say in the matter, it's a lot cheaper than playing nice.
Lets face it, nice guys finish last. Bad guys who get caught and punished still usually come out ahead of the nice guys.
Oh, right, "ethics." They've heard of them.
Or, if they have one or two braincells working on critical thinking, they'll wonder and worry, call the support site for the organization whose server they're trying to use, and get told (after waiting on hold for several hours) "that warning doesn't mean anything; your connection is as private and secure as it always has." And that will be that.
If we're gonna hypothesize some kind of public groundswell in support of long-delayed technological deployments, can we get it behind IPv6 first? kthxbye.
It doesn't matter how much was revealed. He violated company policy and discussed an unreleased product. Microsoft might have budgeted millions of dollars in advertising to coincide with an official announcement
That was my initial thought. He got canned for poaching in Marketing's forest. Never mind the other reasons you cite; those, while potentially valid, are based on rational concerns and consideration for the uncertainty of the future, the kinds of things you realistically can't expect in corporate leadership levels. On the other hand, reaching your hand into someone else's bowl? Even animals understand what to do about that.
It seems like this submission made it to the front page simply because it's about Microsoft and it gives people a chance to shake their fist.
Also true. I'm still puzzled why Microsoft+Nokia still pisses people off. Maybe it's the whole "I thought Nokia was to cool to do that!" Maybe it's akin to the fuming impotent rage Joe Jackson sings about in Is She Really Going Out with Him?
Well, unless time travel is involved, pigeonholing the story in "apple.slashdot.org" isn't well justified by a comment 9 minutes after the story went live.
Kind of a slow week, apple-wise. Maybe the editors have decided to start padding out specific subjects with off-topic stories. It's not as if they particularly care, and the obvious asymmetry between "apple" and "yro" may jeopardize page views somehow.
I see that Microsoft has stepped up and started doing their own Linux license shakedown.
I see a strong uptick in "$699 Linux License" trollage on this forum, except with "Microsoft" instead of "SCO" in the text.
Will it vaporize when you pass through an Aperture Science Material Emancipation Grill, leaving you haunted and remorseful?
Exactly what problem does Mozilla think they're solving by accelerating release cycles?
I suppose they could be gaining users, and that some users...aren't using the browser, leading to paradoxical loss of browser share. More users of Firefox using less browser.
Ow. I think I just sprained my brain.
Let's try this again. Browser share is user share, unless (A) some users are using more than one browser, or (B) some browser users aren't actually using the browser, in defiance of the actual meaning of the phrase "browser user". Like, "non-driving driver", or "non-drinking drinker".
Dammit, my brain still hurts.
I had 20 year old floppies, those DD 3.5" disks that only had the write-protect hole. About 95% of them (sample size of 300+) were completely readable as of last month.
I misinterpreted what the highlighted portion meant. I pictured 3.5" floppies that only had a write-protect hole, by virtue of not having the write-enable slide to block the hole. The best example of those would be AOL diskettes, and I would not have been surprised to hear you or anyone else report that those things had survived intact and readable beyond the heat-death of the universe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_tape_data_storage#Open_reels
Note the lovely picture. That is a nine-track tape reel in all its 2nd Millennium glory. At best, 6250 bits per linear inch of tape (bpi). So a 10.5" diameter reel with 2400 feet of 1/2"-wide tape would be an amazing 172 megabytes (binary, aka mebibytes) of raw bits; subtract some for format losses.
Ah, 9-track tape. When men were men, women were not allowed in the computer room, and all programming was in assembler.
BTW, 9-track was a huge advantage over 7-track tape; 9-track could record an entire byte across the width of the tape in one write operation, so each movement of the tape represented the next byte. 7-track tape only could record 7 bits across, so octet-style bytes (everyone's modern favorite) required two tape movements. 7-track was much better suited to the ancient 5- and 6-bit codes like FIELDATA or Baudot, or binary data in machines with multiple-of-three word lengths like 12-bit or 36-bit.
I hope you've enjoyed your visit to my lawn. Now please get off it.
I agree. They're such amazingly obvious traps that you don't even need to be a Mon Calamari flag officer to spot them.
Any organization inclined to pay for MySQL official support or non-free extensions is probably 3/4 of the way to buying the entry level of full Oracle anyway. Whatever you say about MySQL, the probable market for that strategy already doesn't care about free-as-in-libre and will probably just shrug and open the wallet wider when free-as-in-beer goes away. They've already drunk the kool-aid; they already don't mind the vendor lock-in.
There's even a documentary about it.
The state investigated his work habits by tracking his vehicle. He was eventually fired based on the evidence, which he does not dispute, as he is not seeking reinstatement or back pay. These employees can not be fired without extraordinary evidence; the sort produced by, say, tracking a vehicle.
Or, don't forget, waterboarding. That's pretty good at getting results, too. I bet we can get the guy to admit to being Al Qaeda's inside man in NYC if we're willing to foot the water bill.
GPS tracking is a potentially applicable tool for... tracking locations. It is hunting flies with shotguns for the purposes of monitoring workplace attendance, with the lovely side effect of shredding constitutionally-protected privacy rights.
Your argument seems to be the same kind of weak apologist crap we see in "Think of the children" or "The terrorists will win!" scaremongering. The ends do not justify every means. Otherwise the Bill of Rights is a waste of ink.
I think I just realized you made the same point as me, and probably better. Oh, well, it's late, it's Friday. Maybe some moderator will oblige by uprating you or downrating me as redundant, which would be OK by me.
TFA states that they had not exhausted all non-GPS solutions to tracking him.
Even that formulation misses a critical point: The objective which would have been meaningful to their goal (proving timecard fraud) was not "track him"; the appropriate objective is "verify workplace attendance". The phrase in TFA (yeah, I know, no one reads that... just go with it for a second) "worked odd hours at his job" (emphasis mine) indicates that finding out where he was at any time should not have been the objective... only finding out when he was in the office. (He wasn't working from someplace else, since the presumption is "at his job"... at his place of employment.)
So GPS tracking is solving the wrong problem. A webcam monitoring ingress and egress to his office, or computer system logs... a physical access control like a card entry system would have gone a long ways towards determining the real information they needed.
GPS was the wrong solution because it was answering the wrong question. It's not justified.
Or, to look at it from a business perspective, no meaningful liability until someone can press some kind of human-rights-related lawsuit. Whereas if money had been lost, LOOK OUT.
Sounds like Diginotar came out ahead in the client liability front.
Yeah, all credit to Pournelle and Niven; the technology was feasible. Not the actual creation of an orbital space battleship in months, but the rest of it, sure. Even the alien tech was reasonable for the time (Bussard ramjets, various flavors of laser high-energy laser, hovercraft combat vehicles, centrifugal pseudo-gravity, self-contained biosphere including gardens and biomass recycling, even laser ablation launch).
The physics were impeccable. It's just the project management and logistics of building Michael that were pure fantasy.
The technology wasn't making me scream "FANTASY!". It was the beyond-the-wildest-dream of transporting kilotons of steel, the material for hundreds of fission bombs, whole battleship main batteries, complete and intact Space Shuttles, and thousands of workers into a facility on the extreme Northwest Coast through a landscape devastated by kinetic-energy orbital bombardment, with perfect secrecy, under near-constant orbital observation and continued threat of more bombardment if the Snouts ever suspected war materials were on the move.
I actually thought Michael was an awesome concept, and I still do. It's just the deus ex machina thing of pulling together Earth's first orbital warship in months from the scavanged scrap of nearly-collapsed civilization and kicking the elephantine ass of an invading interstellar race that bothered me.
Of course, the whole premise of successfully kicking said alien ass depends on the extreme unlikelihood of it happening, so I guess that works out in the plot's favor.
Yeah, it was a good book. Just pretty wildly escapist and hand-waving towards the end.
Most of the smart switches I know of can be configured to shut down a port reporting more MACs than authorized on a particular wire. You know, so that (A) the chucklehead at the end of the wire isn't exchanging equipment on you, like plugging his home laptop into your corporate net, or (B) the chucklehead at the end of the wire isn't fanning his port out without authorization by plugging it into his own little "workgroup" switch.
As to source IPs... routers should do the same, really. If it's office equipment, it shouldn't be moving around (changing switch ports) or changing IP addresses (other than the centrally-issued DHCP one) at all.
Yeah, fission- or fusion-pumped X-ray lasers are a staple of military hard SF. Footfall was full of them, right at the end, where somehow the US constructed a secret Project Orion battleship with X-ray laser launchers and parasite fighters (Space Shuttles fitted with missile racks in the cargo bays). I call this hard SF, but the technologist inside me was screaming "FANTASY!" the whole time.
Anyway, speaking of fantasy masquerading as hard technology, SDI was also supposed to build orbital nuke-pumped X-ray lasers as part of their "look down, shoot down" anti-ICMB system.