I don't really know if the current Global Warming is a man made effect or not. But given some of the consequences of Global Warming shouldn't we be.
A. Preparing for a global climatic change
Should we rebuild New Orleans a couple of times or wait for a change in the weather. To many people are pointing to changes in the weather to totally ignore the potential consequences. If we are talking about a 10,000 year cycle, we don't have the data to say how bad hurricanes and such will be. We don't know exactly how high the oceans will rise? (This could take another 3 years before they understand the stability of the Arctic ice shelfs).
Micheal Crichton pointed out that glaciers seem to be advancing at a higher rate in his book. Did he ever consider that some of this data may be skewed by "the glaciers are moving faster because the ice is melting faster".
I guess my gut feeling went to the side of the Global Warming nuts when President Bush said there wasn't enough evidence to support one side or the other. This pretty much convinced me that there was a problem, since he hasn't gotten anything else correct.
Further, for every job outsourced from the U.S., nine new jobs are actually created in the U.S.
Yeah, but those jobs are being created at WalMart and Burger King
Does this shit go on in Canada? My wife and I are seriously considering moving there. This is just one of the reasons.
If I go to a few more Canucks, Maple Leafs, Canadians hockey games I think I'll know the national anthem.
Just because we think they're out to get us doesn't mean we're paranoid.
I really don't think they're specifically after us techies, I think they have liberals in mind mostly. I mean terrorists.
I agree with what you are saying, but I want to think that there is something wrong with there speculations. I'm now lawyer but I want to think that there is a certain time limit on how long you can know someone if infringing on you patent and doing something about it. If there is some legal people here I wish they would clear this up for me.
Considering that they would have to deal with Google, Apple, Red Hat, Suse, IBM, Mozilla and every other Open Source group, I think that a law suit would be a last ditch effort. Vista and there new line of Office tools need to be innovative and show value for there cost or MS is going to have some lean times.
I believe your right. This doesn't sound like a 500 person organization, more like a 25 maybe 100 person organization. If it's a large company they may get all huffy and find themselves in some deep shit. I've seen it before where groups of people bitch and complain and nobody ever tells the IT department. Then they get Senior Management involved, who then finds out than none of their needs or issues were communicated to the IT Department. Senior Management usually gets cheerfull when they find themselves in the middle of an immature pissing contest and they really love it when a number of people organize and get all riled up over something like this. The whole tone of this story sounds off for a large organization.
--No Backup Systems
--No Storage Space
These sound like budget issues. Do you think that if the IT staff, just tries really hard or is competent that they can just create File Storage and Backup Systems out of thin air.
Actually using it and requiring that it be used. I have been into so many places that use a debit card the same as a credit card and/or use it without the requirement of a signature or a PIN. The damn thing scares the hell out of me.
As soon as I find a bank in my area that is more security conscious I'm moving my account there.
I have already heard of people losing money from there account via webbanking, when they didn't even know they had a web account. The financial system is way out of hand with there lack of security.
If a hacker were to ever do us a favor he would use these security holes and steal money from a couple hundred politicians election finance accounts. Then we would see some action.
The best reporting I've seen on this issue was a story on the nightly news where they ambushed a Senator who was all proud of how they had made everything more secure with the regulations they had passed. They showed the senator all the information they were still able to come up with and how easy that information could be used to steal their identity. The senator was more than a bit peeved, but they pointed out that the current loopholes allowed them to legally obtain that information.
What would the esteemed Slashdot readers think of shifting all these machines to a Linux distro
This is like going to a Republican convention and asking them if we should go to war.
There are at least 2 other admins that I know of that are in the same boat as I am. Without the capability to create Shared documents it just is not going to work.
I see this over and over again in small and medium size businesses where they use shared documents for scheduling and such. So when it comes to adopting OpenOffice it becomes a dead end almost immediately.
Also if Open Office opens a MS Shared document that is shared it locks it up for all of the other users.
That was point number one.
Point number 2 is that nobody knows how to code in Open Office and there is not extensive documentation on it.
Recently we had a process which came up that didn't need shared documents, so I requested that the user try doing the coding in Open Office and use that instead. He came back 2 days later and said that it was to difficult and that he was able to use code he found for MS Office.
1984, while having substance pertaining to this issue, would not have the desired affect. Basically it doesn't have enough substance. To achieve the proper affect you should drop an unabridged version of the Oxford English dictionary on his head, preferably from 3 stories up.
Okay these are good points and I'm not arguing agains't this.
What I would like to know.
People keep siteing interglacial time periods and saying that it was warmer then.
With what accuracy can we predict a natural interglacial warming period?
Are we in one, have we maxed, if we are heading to the max couldn't it still be worse than a past warming period.
Maybe we aren't at the max maybe we are at the very beginning. Will Seattle turn into a dry wasteland in 5, 10,50 or 100 years?
Will my stock profits on utilities and Exxon/Mobile cover my air-conditioning bill in retirement?
Okay, I'll apologize in advance, but I recently had a bad experience with Novell and am not too sympathetic with Novell in this latest advertising war.
Although it was not an upgrade of Enterprise version to Enterprise Version, I had a bad experience with a Suse upgrade recently. I purchased the software from Novell and it was shipped to me. I then proceeded to upgrade my wifes computer from 9.3 to 10.0. I had over 50 packages which failed to load and at the end grub was not able to upgrade properly.
I am finally going to resort to booting with Knoppix and try to save as many of her files as possible and re-install.
This is one of the ways in which I judge software before using it in a production environment and from this experience all I can say is it isn't even close. I have used Linux for 8 years and this has got to have been one of the worst experiences I have had in about 5 years with Linux.
There is no way I am going to allow Novell Enterprise Linux into a production environment and I may kick the ass of the next YAST clicking technician that comes in saying we should switch our linux servers over to Novell Suse.
I believe this is Novell's fault and it pisses me off, because this is going to be or could create a weakness in the adoption of linux. After so many have done so much to get it this far.
I know every linux person is going to say you shouldn't upgrade you should do a fresh install. You should put all of your files in a directory and then copy that directory over to another computer and then do a fresh install.
Well guess what, if you were one of my users/customers that would just work fine, but let's look at the bottom 20% of the average joe blow user I run into. The directory concept has just completely gone over their head. They save pretty much everything on their Desktop with occasional saves to a directory so that nobody can find those files (their version of security). They've got shit scattered all over their hard drives. Yeah we could lock it down, <RANT type=facetious> but these are executives and executive secretaries that have to be able to do whatever they want. They know exactly what they are doing because they have above average intelligence. So it must be that knew OS that was installed or that new Office Suite </RANT>
Okay I'll shutup now, thanks for letting me get that off my chest and I'll continue to use RH. I still haven't decided what to do with my NOVL stock.
You can put Word, Excel on a drive somewhere and get multiple users editing those files using Word, Excel menu functions. Eg: in Excel Tools->Share Workbook. This can be very useful for small groups trying to get docs out of the door.
Yes, this is what I mean. This has killed deployment of OO in a number of locations that I am aware of, most of them being small to medium ( 200) sized businesses.
Maybe they'll add some of the file sharing features that are in MS Office. This has been a major stumbling block to bringing OO into small to medium size businesses.
Yes, I do choose tools based on ?political reasons?.
What is my confidence in the tool/company/support being available in the future?
Do I think there is a possibility that we could find ourselves with an application that has a backend that could cost us a lot more in the future? Either through cost of rewriting the code or cost of licensing.
Most of the applications we are currently using with MySQL are fairly simple. But over the years they have become fairly large.
1. MySQL was easy to use and train newbies on.
a. Summer interns can work on these projects.
b. We have a proprietary database solution which handles enterprise applications.
2. MySQL roadmap indicated that they were headed in a direction which would allow us eventually replace our proprietary solution with MySQL. Therefore train newbies on what we are going to use in the future.
3. MySQL was/is faster than PostgreSQL. This made it ideal for storing a large amount of temporary data and being able to sort through it.
4. Testing 4 years ago showed that PostgreSQL was very slow during Inserts, so slow that I didn't think that it was going to be able to work for any of our enterprise applications.
So yes now I am revisiting the decisions of future cost and #2 above for ?political reasons?. Why? Because I think PostgreSQL has improved from when I last tested it and it along with SQLite may be our future.
I initially started using MySQL because it was faster than PostgreSQL.
But now with the involvement of SCO and Oracle in this little project I am looking to write future applications on PostgreSQL or SQLlite. I cannot see any good coming from Oracle's involvement with Innobase or SCO involvement with MySQL.
I could understand Oracle becoming more involved with PostgreSQL, because I can see PostgreSQL being more of a stepping stone to Oracle.
SCO well their just SCO, and I don't see them doing anything but creating mischief within the OS community.
Oh, but I like this one. Because the next time someone says that firefox has just as many exploits as IE and that we should just switch back to IE. I'll say " Oh, you mean like the one that crashes your browser if you go to a malicious site ". vs the browser that we were using that had 15% of IT working on adware, spyware and inherent system crashes.
In another commentary, David Coursey, a columnist for eWeek, expressed concern about moving the state to OpenDocument formats.
"I am concerned that by requiring OpenDocument that Mr. Quinn [state CIO] may be aligning Massachusetts with what becomes a second-rate file format as Microsoft keeps expanding into XML and metadata and OpenDocument may have trouble keeping up."
I thought OpenOffice already supported XML?
George Ou, writing on ZDNet, recently compared the new Open Office Calc product to Microsoft Excel and found it lacking, writing, "[i]f someone from Open Office can explain why it takes more than 100 times longer to create and load spreadsheet documents and why it uses up several more times memory that Microsoft Excel to work with the same data, I'd love to hear it."
I've never run into this except when opening the first document. I may be wrong, but I think MS Office in some cases opens some of it's support files when it opens Windows. And I am really confused by their assertion that it uses up so much of the computer resources. I have yet to see a typical workstation that couldn't be slowed down by opening up MS Word.
The only problem I have with OpenOffice is that it doesn't share files on a file server as well as MS Office and as far as I can tell OO has no plans to improve or work on this. What I mean specifically is that multiple users can share and open a document at the same time and make changes in MS Office. For medium and small offices this has become almost essential because of their dependence on it since Office 2000. We've also run into problems where an OpenOffice user has a file open and this prevents a MS Office user from opening the same file. ( I haven't tested any of this in the last 3 months but we tried it in May to determine whether we could avoid buying MS Office on a set of workstations which were being purchased, since we couldn't get past these issues we had to shell our $300 extra for each workstation).
Celia hit Corpus Christi in 1970. It was an odd hurricane that most residents and weathermen thought was going to stall and dye out before it hit. Three days before it hit it was a tropical depression, when it made landfall it was Category 3 130 mph with gusts to 180 (officially), some stations reported gusts of 210 (probably tornadoes) Around the same time there were experiments going on in the Mid-West with cloud seeding and it was speculated that someone had tried seeding the tropical depression to see what effect it had on it.
I have had 2 managers who had a poor technical background and were in the top 3 of the best managers I ever had. They also were the best preparation I could have had for management. Basically because I had to learn to talk in normal english instead of technical detail. One of the worst managers I had was a PhD. Although at one time or another he understood or knew what was going on he couldn't accept that anyone else knew better than he did. No matter how many times you went over it with him and explained it to him ( I had dreams of beating him over the head with a bat ). He always seemed to be just wasting our time with meetings and extraneous crap, losing focus of current or long term project goals.
Yeah, I was getting cynical about a lot of the concerns about wireless security also. My wife gets the neighborhood police blotter and about 7 months ago a guy was caught about 2 blocks from my house poaching wireless access. Neighbors had called in an unknown vehicle with a person inside using a computer.
That was the only place I had heard of it.
I'm kind of amazed at how much crap I found out that goes on in my neighborhood since she started receiving those reports. Since she started reading that thing she has authorized me to put bars on the windows, put in steel doors, and put razor wire on the back-yard fence. I still can't have a gun, but I can put in a swimming pool, which is considered deadlier ( read "Freakanomics") , which I guess would be classified as a moat.
I'd have to check again, but I believe that a/b/g could better be described as standards for carrier freguencies and i is the security protocol. So you could have an a with i protocol or b or g. I believe that refering to it as simply i with reference to a/b/g is a misnomer. Anyway i is something that has been talked about for more than a year and none of the manufacturers seem to be willing to add it to their systems. Maybe they think that they can sell g to everyone and then they'll start advertising more about the security issues of wireless and sell routers with g and i. Makes sense business wise.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't really know if the current Global Warming is a man made effect or not. But given some of the consequences of Global Warming shouldn't we be.
A. Preparing for a global climatic change
Should we rebuild New Orleans a couple of times or wait for a change in the weather. To many people are pointing to changes in the weather to totally ignore the potential consequences. If we are talking about a 10,000 year cycle, we don't have the data to say how bad hurricanes and such will be. We don't know exactly how high the oceans will rise? (This could take another 3 years before they understand the stability of the Arctic ice shelfs).
Micheal Crichton pointed out that glaciers seem to be advancing at a higher rate in his book. Did he ever consider that some of this data may be skewed by "the glaciers are moving faster because the ice is melting faster".
I guess my gut feeling went to the side of the Global Warming nuts when President Bush said there wasn't enough evidence to support one side or the other. This pretty much convinced me that there was a problem, since he hasn't gotten anything else correct.
Further, for every job outsourced from the U.S., nine new jobs are actually created in the U.S.
Yeah, but those jobs are being created at WalMart and Burger King
Does this shit go on in Canada? My wife and I are seriously considering moving there. This is just one of the reasons.
If I go to a few more Canucks, Maple Leafs, Canadians hockey games I think I'll know the national anthem.
Just because we think they're out to get us doesn't mean we're paranoid.
I really don't think they're specifically after us techies, I think they have liberals in mind mostly. I mean terrorists.
Hell, we'd be happier if they would read the freaking laws before they passed them. Remember baby steps here. Baby steps.
I agree with what you are saying, but I want to think that there is something wrong with there speculations. I'm now lawyer but I want to think that there is a certain time limit on how long you can know someone if infringing on you patent and doing something about it.
If there is some legal people here I wish they would clear this up for me.
Considering that they would have to deal with Google, Apple, Red Hat, Suse, IBM, Mozilla and every other Open Source group, I think that a law suit would be a last ditch effort.
Vista and there new line of Office tools need to be innovative and show value for there cost or MS is going to have some lean times.
I believe your right. This doesn't sound like a 500 person organization, more like a 25 maybe 100 person organization.
If it's a large company they may get all huffy and find themselves in some deep shit. I've seen it before where groups of people bitch and complain and nobody ever tells the IT department. Then they get Senior Management involved, who then finds out than none of their needs or issues were communicated to the IT Department. Senior Management usually gets cheerfull when they find themselves in the middle of an immature pissing contest and they really love it when a number of people organize and get all riled up over something like this.
The whole tone of this story sounds off for a large organization.
--No Backup Systems
--No Storage Space
These sound like budget issues. Do you think that if the IT staff, just tries really hard or is competent that they can just create File Storage and Backup Systems out of thin air.
Actually using it and requiring that it be used. I have been into so many places that use a debit card the same as a credit card and/or use it without the requirement of a signature or a PIN. The damn thing scares the hell out of me.
As soon as I find a bank in my area that is more security conscious I'm moving my account there.
I have already heard of people losing money from there account via webbanking, when they didn't even know they had a web account. The financial system is way out of hand with there lack of security.
If a hacker were to ever do us a favor he would use these security holes and steal money from a couple hundred politicians election finance accounts. Then we would see some action.
The best reporting I've seen on this issue was a story on the nightly news where they ambushed a Senator who was all proud of how they had made everything more secure with the regulations they had passed. They showed the senator all the information they were still able to come up with and how easy that information could be used to steal their identity. The senator was more than a bit peeved, but they pointed out that the current loopholes allowed them to legally obtain that information.
What would the esteemed Slashdot readers think of shifting all these machines to a Linux distro
This is like going to a Republican convention and asking them if we should go to war.
There are at least 2 other admins that I know of that are in the same boat as I am. Without the capability to create Shared documents it just is not going to work.
I see this over and over again in small and medium size businesses where they use shared documents for scheduling and such. So when it comes to adopting OpenOffice it becomes a dead end almost immediately.
Also if Open Office opens a MS Shared document that is shared it locks it up for all of the other users.
That was point number one. Point number 2 is that nobody knows how to code in Open Office and there is not extensive documentation on it.
Recently we had a process which came up that didn't need shared documents, so I requested that the user try doing the coding in Open Office and use that instead. He came back 2 days later and said that it was to difficult and that he was able to use code he found for MS Office.
1984, while having substance pertaining to this issue, would not have the desired affect. Basically it doesn't have enough substance. To achieve the proper affect you should drop an unabridged version of the Oxford English dictionary on his head, preferably from 3 stories up.
Okay these are good points and I'm not arguing agains't this. What I would like to know. People keep siteing interglacial time periods and saying that it was warmer then. With what accuracy can we predict a natural interglacial warming period? Are we in one, have we maxed, if we are heading to the max couldn't it still be worse than a past warming period. Maybe we aren't at the max maybe we are at the very beginning. Will Seattle turn into a dry wasteland in 5, 10,50 or 100 years? Will my stock profits on utilities and Exxon/Mobile cover my air-conditioning bill in retirement?
Okay, I'll apologize in advance, but I recently had a bad experience with Novell and am not too sympathetic with Novell in this latest advertising war.
Although it was not an upgrade of Enterprise version to Enterprise Version, I had a bad experience with a Suse upgrade recently. I purchased the software from Novell and it was shipped to me. I then proceeded to upgrade my wifes computer from 9.3 to 10.0. I had over 50 packages which failed to load and at the end grub was not able to upgrade properly.
I am finally going to resort to booting with Knoppix and try to save as many of her files as possible and re-install.
This is one of the ways in which I judge software before using it in a production environment and from this experience all I can say is it isn't even close. I have used Linux for 8 years and this has got to have been one of the worst experiences I have had in about 5 years with Linux.
There is no way I am going to allow Novell Enterprise Linux into a production environment and I may kick the ass of the next YAST clicking technician that comes in saying we should switch our linux servers over to Novell Suse.
I believe this is Novell's fault and it pisses me off, because this is going to be or could create a weakness in the adoption of linux. After so many have done so much to get it this far.
I know every linux person is going to say you shouldn't upgrade you should do a fresh install. You should put all of your files in a directory and then copy that directory over to another computer and then do a fresh install.
Well guess what, if you were one of my users/customers that would just work fine, but let's look at the bottom 20% of the average joe blow user I run into. The directory concept has just completely gone over their head. They save pretty much everything on their Desktop with occasional saves to a directory so that nobody can find those files (their version of security). They've got shit scattered all over their hard drives. Yeah we could lock it down, <RANT type=facetious> but these are executives and executive secretaries that have to be able to do whatever they want. They know exactly what they are doing because they have above average intelligence. So it must be that knew OS that was installed or that new Office Suite </RANT>
Okay I'll shutup now, thanks for letting me get that off my chest and I'll continue to use RH. I still haven't decided what to do with my NOVL stock.
After 10 years of doing system admin I have never needed a CD to mp3 translator. Really can't see that I ever will.
You can put Word, Excel on a drive somewhere and get multiple users editing those files using Word, Excel menu functions. Eg: in Excel Tools->Share Workbook. This can be very useful for small groups trying to get docs out of the door.
Yes, this is what I mean. This has killed deployment of OO in a number of locations that I am aware of, most of them being small to medium ( 200) sized businesses.
Maybe they'll add some of the file sharing features that are in MS Office. This has been a major stumbling block to bringing OO into small to medium size businesses.
Yes, I do choose tools based on ?political reasons?.
What is my confidence in the tool/company/support being available in the future?
Do I think there is a possibility that we could find ourselves with an application that has a backend that could cost us a lot more in the future? Either through cost of rewriting the code or cost of licensing.
Most of the applications we are currently using with MySQL are fairly simple. But over the years they have become fairly large.
1. MySQL was easy to use and train newbies on.
a. Summer interns can work on these projects.
b. We have a proprietary database solution which handles enterprise applications.
2. MySQL roadmap indicated that they were headed in a direction which would allow us eventually replace our proprietary solution with MySQL. Therefore train newbies on what we are going to use in the future.
3. MySQL was/is faster than PostgreSQL. This made it ideal for storing a large amount of temporary data and being able to sort through it.
4. Testing 4 years ago showed that PostgreSQL was very slow during Inserts, so slow that I didn't think that it was going to be able to work for any of our enterprise applications.
So yes now I am revisiting the decisions of future cost and #2 above for ?political reasons?. Why? Because I think PostgreSQL has improved from when I last tested it and it along with SQLite may be our future.
I initially started using MySQL because it was faster than PostgreSQL.
But now with the involvement of SCO and Oracle in this little project I am looking to write future applications on PostgreSQL or SQLlite. I cannot see any good coming from Oracle's involvement with Innobase or SCO involvement with MySQL.
I could understand Oracle becoming more involved with PostgreSQL, because I can see PostgreSQL being more of a stepping stone to Oracle.
SCO well their just SCO, and I don't see them doing anything but creating mischief within the OS community.
Oh, but I like this one.
Because the next time someone says that firefox has just as many exploits as IE and that we should just switch back to IE. I'll say " Oh, you mean like the one that crashes your browser if you go to a malicious site ". vs the browser that we were using that had 15% of IT working on adware, spyware and inherent system crashes.
In another commentary, David Coursey, a columnist for eWeek, expressed concern about moving the state to OpenDocument formats.
"I am concerned that by requiring OpenDocument that Mr. Quinn [state CIO] may be aligning Massachusetts with what becomes a second-rate file format as Microsoft keeps expanding into XML and metadata and OpenDocument may have trouble keeping up."
I thought OpenOffice already supported XML?
George Ou, writing on ZDNet, recently compared the new Open Office Calc product to Microsoft Excel and found it lacking, writing, "[i]f someone from Open Office can explain why it takes more than 100 times longer to create and load spreadsheet documents and why it uses up several more times memory that Microsoft Excel to work with the same data, I'd love to hear it."
I've never run into this except when opening the first document. I may be wrong, but I think MS Office in some cases opens some of it's support files when it opens Windows. And I am really confused by their assertion that it uses up so much of the computer resources. I have yet to see a typical workstation that couldn't be slowed down by opening up MS Word.
The only problem I have with OpenOffice is that it doesn't share files on a file server as well as MS Office and as far as I can tell OO has no plans to improve or work on this. What I mean specifically is that multiple users can share and open a document at the same time and make changes in MS Office. For medium and small offices this has become almost essential because of their dependence on it since Office 2000. We've also run into problems where an OpenOffice user has a file open and this prevents a MS Office user from opening the same file. ( I haven't tested any of this in the last 3 months but we tried it in May to determine whether we could avoid buying MS Office on a set of workstations which were being purchased, since we couldn't get past these issues we had to shell our $300 extra for each workstation).
Celia hit Corpus Christi in 1970. It was an odd hurricane that most residents and weathermen thought was going to stall and dye out before it hit. Three days before it hit it was a tropical depression, when it made landfall it was Category 3 130 mph with gusts to 180 (officially), some stations reported gusts of 210 (probably tornadoes)
Around the same time there were experiments going on in the Mid-West with cloud seeding and it was speculated that someone had tried seeding the tropical depression to see what effect it had on it.
I have had 2 managers who had a poor technical background and were in the top 3 of the best managers I ever had. They also were the best preparation I could have had for management. Basically because I had to learn to talk in normal english instead of technical detail.
One of the worst managers I had was a PhD. Although at one time or another he understood or knew what was going on he couldn't accept that anyone else knew better than he did. No matter how many times you went over it with him and explained it to him ( I had dreams of beating him over the head with a bat ). He always seemed to be just wasting our time with meetings and extraneous crap, losing focus of current or long term project goals.
Yeah, I was getting cynical about a lot of the concerns about wireless security also. My wife gets the neighborhood police blotter and about 7 months ago a guy was caught about 2 blocks from my house poaching wireless access. Neighbors had called in an unknown vehicle with a person inside using a computer. That was the only place I had heard of it. I'm kind of amazed at how much crap I found out that goes on in my neighborhood since she started receiving those reports. Since she started reading that thing she has authorized me to put bars on the windows, put in steel doors, and put razor wire on the back-yard fence. I still can't have a gun, but I can put in a swimming pool, which is considered deadlier ( read "Freakanomics") , which I guess would be classified as a moat.
I'd have to check again, but I believe that a/b/g could better be described as standards for carrier freguencies and i is the security protocol. So you could have an a with i protocol or b or g. I believe that refering to it as simply i with reference to a/b/g is a misnomer.
Anyway i is something that has been talked about for more than a year and none of the manufacturers seem to be willing to add it to their systems. Maybe they think that they can sell g to everyone and then they'll start advertising more about the security issues of wireless and sell routers with g and i. Makes sense business wise.