It's one thing to work 60+ hour weeks in exchange for 6-9+ weeks of vacation. Sounds like you may still be working around a 2000 hr workyear. It's working a 3000+ hr workyear that seems insane to me.
I'm willing to give up 1/3 of my waking time over the course of a year (roughtly 2000 hrs) in exchange for the $ I need for neccessities and toys. I'm not willing to spend more time working over the course of the year than I do enjoying the fruits of my labor.
Since I'm salaried, why haven't I been replaced by someone who lives to work? Because during those 2000 hrs that I am working, I'm working hard. I'm not chatting at the water cooler, I'm not taking the two optional 15 minute paid breaks, I'm not randomly surfing the Internet and I'm not buying/selling stuff on eBay. (All things which most bosses can't say of the majority of their employees.)
Based on the info I could find online Lake Ontario contains just over 1.6 trillion(US) metric tons of water or almost 3.6 quadrillion(US) pounds. One BTU is required to heat 1 pound of water 1 degree (F).
According to a cooling calculator online, a 30x60 office building would require approx 23.5 million BTU cooling over the course of a month. This assumes the building is insulated (I'm sure all Toronto buildings are) and that it's longest wall faces the sun. It also assumes cooling 24 hours a day. (If somone out there is a cooling systems engineer or contractor, why not share the actual cooling needs for typical office builings?)
Based on the numbers (and assuming the cooling plant is fairly efficient) then you should be able to cool somewhere around 51 million such buildings for three months (about the max cooling season there) before you have transfered enough heat to raise the lake's temperature one degree. I suspect if you used accurate heat transfer numbers you'd find it would take even more time.
In other words, before you could make any significant difference in the lake temperature, the next winter should re-cool the water already as others have mentioned.
I had always believed that hardware would vastly outperform software RAID. I was recently attending training with two Dell employees (from the server/storage area, not tele-sales drones.) They said that in all of their current tests, software RAID on Linux outperformed hardware RAID, even on high-end cards. It's just not a fact that the sales Dept. likes to be common knowledge.
The reason they gave is that the even a fraction of modern CPU performance still far outclasses the chips on hardware RAID cards. Also, data cached on the card still has to go over the PCI bus, but data cached in RAM... well, it's already available.
A RedHat employee who was there confirmed that RedHat has seen the same thing in their own testing. For performance go with software RAID. With anything over about a 800Mhz CPU, you would be hard pressed to notice the CPU use.
In fact, unless you are doing something that is virtually entirely computational like SETI@Home, you are going to be generating a fair amount of output. Enough that the faster disk IO actually increases your speed more than what would be gained by moving the RAID load to seperate hardware. It also lets you spread disks over a couple SATA controllers and potentially multiple PCI buses (if your MB supports it.)
It wont pass either, like most of his garbage, but still scary hes still trying.
What is scary to me is that the money behind these types of bills can afford to have someone re-introduce them over and over, perhaps just changing the wording a little. All it takes is for one of them to slip by unnoticed and get passed. Then we have a law in place and it would be hard to remove it.
For anybody who thinks that it's easy to get a stupid law removed from the books, consider the 1937 law which sets the price of milk based on how far the dairy farm is from Eau Claire, Wisconsin. (The further away, the more you get.) The idea was to encourage dairy production outside of WI.
According to USDA statistics, milk production in California is over 63% higher than that in Wisconsin. Despite how obvious it is that this law is bogus, it still wasn't overturned when it was due to expire around 1999. Guess the contributions and PAC money did the trick.
So obviously, if Hatch manages to get one of these rediculous laws passed, we'll probably be stuck with it indefinately.
Of course RAMBUS didn't first release the standard into the public domain. I don't see any way that new-SCO can retract something like this after OLD-SCO (either directory or by complacency) gave everyone full rights to use it. Even if new-SCO could retract the rights, all current users (including Linux) would be grandfathered in.
in a couple of generations, humanity will be immune to said organisims
Only if a) the organism is sufficiently fatal, b) it is sufficiently contagious and c) everyone not naturally immune dies off.
If the organism isn't lethal enough, people will survive it and pass on their non-immune genes to the next generation. Just look at chicken-pox or the hosts of other diseases which are still around.
I think he means that many modern-day X apps send way more traffic than they need to/should and don't scale back when being run remotely.
Use a network sniffer to watch an X app that was writen with remote execution in mind. It will typically send a fraction of the packets for drawing and refreshes in X than one which was only written as if it would always be run locally.
On a 100Mbit LAN, modern desktops may run great, but run remotely over a slower line and you can start to see where thy fall down.
It's hard to get the PHB's to agree to something that's not 1.0:)
Sometimes it works to let them know that most open source software is not released at v1.0 yet even though it may be at v2.2 quality compared to closed-source. If you explain it, some will understand that the version numbering is different and some will completely miss the point.
We've been using FireFox extensively since it was still FireBird and was v0.6 and it has been the default browser on all systems since v0.7. We haven't had many issues with the fact that it is "beta" and in fact it has caused far fewer headaches than fully patched IE v5.5
I had a co-worker who previously worked at BB. He said that while he did indeed NOT receive a commission while at BB, his boss did. He said the sales people were regularly reminded by the manager that failing to sell the extended warranty was like taking money from his wallet. Needless to say there is plenty of incentive for these kids to get the extended warranty on the sale.
He also said that he regularly saw his boss, who DID receive commission, lie to customers and say that he didn't.
Another irritation is that even with the extended warranty, you can expect to be without your item for quite some time if it breaks. I had a camcorder which broke within 4 months of purchase. It took 6 weeks to be repaired. That was pretty annoying since we went on a family vacation during that time.
Actually, wouldn't it be more like receiving a coupon towards $1000 off your next Ford... and it would have to come with the "may not be used in conjunction with other offers" disclaimer.
Yes, that seems more accurate. Then you can go to the dealer and get your $1000 off, or possibly take advantage of the $1500 cash back offer instead; making your coupon basically worthless.
Don't just recommend this to your boss in a conversation. Write him a memo (yeah.. the paper kind.. remember those?) In it explain why you think systems are still compromised and that all of your customers' data (possibly including credit card and more) may be at risk.
Just make sure that if he does nothing it is clear that he was warned and that you tried to do the right thing. Then make a copy of the memo for yourself before giving it to him.
Finally, follow your boss's orders and get back to web programming. Until the security sweep, assume every box IS compromised and don't do foolish things like VPN into it or use the same password you use on your own systems/accounts.
If the boss does nothing and things get really bad, I suppose an anonymous tip to the FBI is in order. (After all, if MY credit card info were on one of those servers, I'd want something done.) When customers start sueing, you have your memo to use as a shield for yourself and to stick it to your boss in court.
And the CEO will think to himself... if we beat our competitor to market, I'll be able to job-hop to a company willing to pay me big bucks. By the time security concerns arise I'll be gone. The great thing is it doesn't matter since the programmers will get the blame and it won't follow me around.
Then he'll look in the eye and say, "Do what you need to do to meet the deadline."
Re:But why would non-geeks want to run Linux?
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Linux for Non-Geeks
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· Score: 1
For example to get the patches for the IE hole announced a week or two ago? Oh wait, MS still hasn't released a patch and people's PCs are being "infected" by some big-name web sites. At least according to this article.
And you are still wrong. Any slashdotter who knows it's a risk knows how to look at the status bar. And they probably notice the [somedomain.com] right after the link. And since/. filters out the blahblahblah@ part, the status bar is going to show a nice short domain name anyhow.
So I bet it's a relatively small minority of slashdotters who do not trust/. links. In fact, many probably distrust URLS in the post more than links. Consider that copied/pasted text is MORE likely trick someone into going to the wrong site since the url isn't checked or decoded before showing up in the post.
The only defense of not making a clickable link is that someone wants to be lazy and not do it. So they would be willing to inconvience everyone else a bit so you don't have to type an extra 15 characters <a href=""></a>. Oh yeah, I guess I did forget they'd have to also take time to type some kind of link text... like maybe the word "link" or "here".
Instead of putting the blame on Microsoft's aggressive marketing, it may be time to ask whether the features that appeal to the Geek have any resonance at all with other users.
My experience with non-geeks and web browsers seems to indicate other reasons.
IE is typically the only browser pre-installed.
Non-geek users rarely know there are alternatives.
Non-geeks seem to fear that installing something like Mozilla FireFox will "break the Internet" on their PC
Of those who try to switch, a portion will use some website built using MS tools which *requires* IE in order to function
I have seen quite a few non-geeks who absolutely love the pop-up blocking and other features of FireFox. So in my experience, bundling, vendor lock-in and lack of knowledge all seem to be more of a factor than IE6 being superior to the average bloke.
*Note* Would those who have gotten certs only for the money please change careers. You're degrading the value of certifications.
There are a lot of people in the computer field who don't have a clue what they are doing. It isn't only those who have paper certs. You might as well say, "will those of you who suck at IT get out of the field", and hope they realize that they are the ones you are talking to. Consider these:
In colege, one of my classmates was a complete air-head. I once spent a full hour explaining why they couldn't average a series of percentages and get meaningful values. At one point or another during the year I knew them they had asked for help from every single person in the class. They passed, got their degree, and were unleashed on an unsuspecting world.
At my previous job, one co-worker got their certs the hard way... real world experience, classes, and turoring by others. After 5 attempts, they finally passed their TCP/IP test and got a cert. Since then I fixed serveral servers they messed up and was called in regularly to work on small projects that were beyond their abilities.
This person had 3 years experience, certs, and couldn't admin their way out of paper bag.
The third person I will mention was at the same company. They were a UNIX admin for only about one year with only about 2 years total experience working with computers. They already had an AIX cert, and one day decided they were bored and wanted to try MCSE (with no prior Windows admin experience.) They studied a couple of weeks, took the tests and passed.
Of the three, I would hire the 3rd in a second and would probably stamp "Do not hire" on applications from the other two. The third was able to learn fast, comprehend and apply what they learned. Today (6 years later) they have Solaris, Oracle and Linux certs and are a senior UNIX team admin at a well-known fortune 500 company.
For all intents and puposes, the third was only a paper cert with little or no real-world Windows experience.
That begs the question... what eliminiation criteria would be appropriate to weed only the first two out of the applicant pool?
Do interviewers expect anything other than "I hope to be working here in a long-term capacity."
At least I assume you hurt your chances by saying, "I hope to be working somewhere else with better pay and benefits. This job is really just a springboard to a better career."
You started out correctly, but then you described RAID3. RAID5 is Redundant striped disks, with a XOR bit stored on each of the disks, for each of the stripes.
Close.. very close. Actually, the XOR block is written to one of the drives for each stripe (not to each of them) and is alternated between drives for each stripe. So each stripe has one XOR block on a single drive and that XOR block is written to a different drive each time. A good diagram for this can be found here.
The grandparent post could have been describing RAID-4 as well as RAID-3. The only real difference is that data is broken into blocks in RAID-4 (and 5) but is striped at the byte-level in RAID-3. His post doesn't say what level the striping is being done.
How exactly do they make a believer out of a CIO who's test linux rollout has reduced costs on the project by 30% over the past 6 months?
A LOT of companies have testbed installs out to see for themselves what the TCO is. You would expect them to believe their own results in their own company more than a magic MS fud-bus.
I'm also not so sure that the non-tech managers would appreciate the implied 'you wouldn't know good TCO or ROI if it bit you' message.
Apparently, however, they won't be able to use lost SCOsource licensing as special damages. That loss of income would not be ireversible since the licenses could always be purchased later.
Besides, the fact that the judge felt there was uncertainty of copyright transfer means that Novell couldn't have acted with malice. If Novell actually belived it had ownership then there is no slander of title.
Pretty valid comment. My first C book barely mentioned security. Oh, it may have said something like, "be sure to avoid string overruns" but it never went into any details on how to do that. (Fortunately I didn't stop learning how to code after just one book.)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm willing to give up 1/3 of my waking time over the course of a year (roughtly 2000 hrs) in exchange for the $ I need for neccessities and toys. I'm not willing to spend more time working over the course of the year than I do enjoying the fruits of my labor.
Since I'm salaried, why haven't I been replaced by someone who lives to work? Because during those 2000 hrs that I am working, I'm working hard. I'm not chatting at the water cooler, I'm not taking the two optional 15 minute paid breaks, I'm not randomly surfing the Internet and I'm not buying/selling stuff on eBay. (All things which most bosses can't say of the majority of their employees.)
According to a cooling calculator online, a 30x60 office building would require approx 23.5 million BTU cooling over the course of a month. This assumes the building is insulated (I'm sure all Toronto buildings are) and that it's longest wall faces the sun. It also assumes cooling 24 hours a day. (If somone out there is a cooling systems engineer or contractor, why not share the actual cooling needs for typical office builings?)
Based on the numbers (and assuming the cooling plant is fairly efficient) then you should be able to cool somewhere around 51 million such buildings for three months (about the max cooling season there) before you have transfered enough heat to raise the lake's temperature one degree. I suspect if you used accurate heat transfer numbers you'd find it would take even more time.
In other words, before you could make any significant difference in the lake temperature, the next winter should re-cool the water already as others have mentioned.
The reason they gave is that the even a fraction of modern CPU performance still far outclasses the chips on hardware RAID cards. Also, data cached on the card still has to go over the PCI bus, but data cached in RAM... well, it's already available.
A RedHat employee who was there confirmed that RedHat has seen the same thing in their own testing. For performance go with software RAID. With anything over about a 800Mhz CPU, you would be hard pressed to notice the CPU use.
In fact, unless you are doing something that is virtually entirely computational like SETI@Home, you are going to be generating a fair amount of output. Enough that the faster disk IO actually increases your speed more than what would be gained by moving the RAID load to seperate hardware. It also lets you spread disks over a couple SATA controllers and potentially multiple PCI buses (if your MB supports it.)
Of course RAMBUS didn't first release the standard into the public domain. I don't see any way that new-SCO can retract something like this after OLD-SCO (either directory or by complacency) gave everyone full rights to use it. Even if new-SCO could retract the rights, all current users (including Linux) would be grandfathered in.
Only if a) the organism is sufficiently fatal, b) it is sufficiently contagious and c) everyone not naturally immune dies off.
If the organism isn't lethal enough, people will survive it and pass on their non-immune genes to the next generation. Just look at chicken-pox or the hosts of other diseases which are still around.
Even if this is accurate, it's not much of an issue. A 64 bit value can go from 0ns to a few months more than 58,494 years.
I think he means that many modern-day X apps send way more traffic than they need to/should and don't scale back when being run remotely.
Use a network sniffer to watch an X app that was writen with remote execution in mind. It will typically send a fraction of the packets for drawing and refreshes in X than one which was only written as if it would always be run locally.
On a 100Mbit LAN, modern desktops may run great, but run remotely over a slower line and you can start to see where thy fall down.
TightVNC combined with inteligent resolution and compression options can be quite speedy on a 64k line.
Sometimes it works to let them know that most open source software is not released at v1.0 yet even though it may be at v2.2 quality compared to closed-source. If you explain it, some will understand that the version numbering is different and some will completely miss the point.
We've been using FireFox extensively since it was still FireBird and was v0.6 and it has been the default browser on all systems since v0.7. We haven't had many issues with the fact that it is "beta" and in fact it has caused far fewer headaches than fully patched IE v5.5
He also said that he regularly saw his boss, who DID receive commission, lie to customers and say that he didn't.
Another irritation is that even with the extended warranty, you can expect to be without your item for quite some time if it breaks. I had a camcorder which broke within 4 months of purchase. It took 6 weeks to be repaired. That was pretty annoying since we went on a family vacation during that time.
Don't you mean there's no place like 0010111101101000011011110110110101100101 ?
Yes, that seems more accurate. Then you can go to the dealer and get your $1000 off, or possibly take advantage of the $1500 cash back offer instead; making your coupon basically worthless.
Don't just recommend this to your boss in a conversation. Write him a memo (yeah.. the paper kind.. remember those?) In it explain why you think systems are still compromised and that all of your customers' data (possibly including credit card and more) may be at risk.
Just make sure that if he does nothing it is clear that he was warned and that you tried to do the right thing. Then make a copy of the memo for yourself before giving it to him.
Finally, follow your boss's orders and get back to web programming. Until the security sweep, assume every box IS compromised and don't do foolish things like VPN into it or use the same password you use on your own systems/accounts.
If the boss does nothing and things get really bad, I suppose an anonymous tip to the FBI is in order. (After all, if MY credit card info were on one of those servers, I'd want something done.) When customers start sueing, you have your memo to use as a shield for yourself and to stick it to your boss in court.
Of course, don't trust the results of ANYTHING you run on a compromised system including what you see in regedit.
And the CEO will think to himself... if we beat our competitor to market, I'll be able to job-hop to a company willing to pay me big bucks. By the time security concerns arise I'll be gone. The great thing is it doesn't matter since the programmers will get the blame and it won't follow me around. Then he'll look in the eye and say, "Do what you need to do to meet the deadline."
For example to get the patches for the IE hole announced a week or two ago? Oh wait, MS still hasn't released a patch and people's PCs are being "infected" by some big-name web sites. At least according to this article.
And you are still wrong. Any slashdotter who knows it's a risk knows how to look at the status bar. And they probably notice the [somedomain.com] right after the link. And since /. filters out the blahblahblah@ part, the status bar is going to show a nice short domain name anyhow.
So I bet it's a relatively small minority of slashdotters who do not trust /. links. In fact, many probably distrust URLS in the post more than links. Consider that copied/pasted text is MORE likely trick someone into going to the wrong site since the url isn't checked or decoded before showing up in the post.
The only defense of not making a clickable link is that someone wants to be lazy and not do it. So they would be willing to inconvience everyone else a bit so you don't have to type an extra 15 characters <a href=""></a>. Oh yeah, I guess I did forget they'd have to also take time to type some kind of link text... like maybe the word "link" or "here".
My experience with non-geeks and web browsers seems to indicate other reasons.
I have seen quite a few non-geeks who absolutely love the pop-up blocking and other features of FireFox. So in my experience, bundling, vendor lock-in and lack of knowledge all seem to be more of a factor than IE6 being superior to the average bloke.
There are a lot of people in the computer field who don't have a clue what they are doing. It isn't only those who have paper certs. You might as well say, "will those of you who suck at IT get out of the field", and hope they realize that they are the ones you are talking to. Consider these:
In colege, one of my classmates was a complete air-head. I once spent a full hour explaining why they couldn't average a series of percentages and get meaningful values. At one point or another during the year I knew them they had asked for help from every single person in the class. They passed, got their degree, and were unleashed on an unsuspecting world.
At my previous job, one co-worker got their certs the hard way... real world experience, classes, and turoring by others. After 5 attempts, they finally passed their TCP/IP test and got a cert. Since then I fixed serveral servers they messed up and was called in regularly to work on small projects that were beyond their abilities.
This person had 3 years experience, certs, and couldn't admin their way out of paper bag.
The third person I will mention was at the same company. They were a UNIX admin for only about one year with only about 2 years total experience working with computers. They already had an AIX cert, and one day decided they were bored and wanted to try MCSE (with no prior Windows admin experience.) They studied a couple of weeks, took the tests and passed.
Of the three, I would hire the 3rd in a second and would probably stamp "Do not hire" on applications from the other two. The third was able to learn fast, comprehend and apply what they learned. Today (6 years later) they have Solaris, Oracle and Linux certs and are a senior UNIX team admin at a well-known fortune 500 company.
For all intents and puposes, the third was only a paper cert with little or no real-world Windows experience.
That begs the question... what eliminiation criteria would be appropriate to weed only the first two out of the applicant pool?
At least I assume you hurt your chances by saying, "I hope to be working somewhere else with better pay and benefits. This job is really just a springboard to a better career."
Close.. very close. Actually, the XOR block is written to one of the drives for each stripe (not to each of them) and is alternated between drives for each stripe. So each stripe has one XOR block on a single drive and that XOR block is written to a different drive each time. A good diagram for this can be found here.
The grandparent post could have been describing RAID-4 as well as RAID-3. The only real difference is that data is broken into blocks in RAID-4 (and 5) but is striped at the byte-level in RAID-3. His post doesn't say what level the striping is being done.
A LOT of companies have testbed installs out to see for themselves what the TCO is. You would expect them to believe their own results in their own company more than a magic MS fud-bus.
I'm also not so sure that the non-tech managers would appreciate the implied 'you wouldn't know good TCO or ROI if it bit you' message.
Besides, the fact that the judge felt there was uncertainty of copyright transfer means that Novell couldn't have acted with malice. If Novell actually belived it had ownership then there is no slander of title.
Pretty valid comment. My first C book barely mentioned security. Oh, it may have said something like, "be sure to avoid string overruns" but it never went into any details on how to do that. (Fortunately I didn't stop learning how to code after just one book.)