So I've just been checking this out, browsing around and looking at what there is to see in the iTunes Music Store. I've been really excited to see this, because I've been wanting a reasonable online music service for a while.
So I decide on a test. I like Dirty Vegas' "Days Go By", but I don't have the CD. That would be a pretty cool song to buy for a buck. So I browse on over to "Electronica" and look for the CD. I find it. Yay!
You can't buy the song "Days Go By".
You can buy any of the other songs on the CD individually, and you can buy the whole CD including "Days Go By" for a paltry $12. But you can't just by the one song that everyone might actually want by itself.
BOGUS! I had no idea they would do something like that. Surprised? Not really. But I am sorely disappointed.
Surprise! woman here who uses linux and other and reads/. regularly - oooooo shocking.
Yeah, me too.:-)
Though this does not mean it's specifically a "woman" thing, it seems quite weird. I tend to think the reasons we women find it hard to get our "bearings" is that we're thinking of a million things at once, while the male, well, you can fill that in...
Actually, it's pretty well established that women have poorer spatial skills than men. Why? Well, we are physically smaller, and we have smaller brains. It was not understood for a long time how women could test out to be as intelligent as men even though we have smaller brains. The answer turn out to be that though we have as much gray matter as men, we have less white matter. While gray matter is used in cognition, white matter is used for spatial skills.
I know my spatial skills aren't as good as those of many men I know, but I don't take it personally. It's a small price to pay to not have to deal with having a penis!
At least you aren't in bullpens, or open plan. For a span of nearly 2.5 years I only had a cube of my own for two months. The rest of the time was shared cube, corral, or open office.
So I don't think cubes are so bad. If you can, get nice big ones. I think 10'x10' is ideal. Make sure everyone has a large bookcase in addition to drawers and some lockable storage. Everyone should have a large whiteboard, a guest chair, and a coat hook. Install keyboard trays everywhere.
Some cubes are available with sliding doors. Ours looked a lot like frosted shower doors. These were very popular.
Definitely configure the desks so that people don't have their backs to their "doors".
Good lighting is important! Be careful, though. There's a particular cube system that features lamps that attach to the underside of shelves with gigantic magnets. Be sure not to get those. I've worked at *two* places that had them!
I don't like the super-tall walls, but then I'm too short to see over the default height. Where I've seen the super-tall walls the top parts were glass. This helps to keep the place from seeming like a dungeon.
I do have to confess I really detest that word. When I see "Administrator" I think button-pusher and tape-changer. In companies with larger IT shops I've found the more senior techies get titles that end in "Engineer". The "Engineer" moniker suggests that you are involved in designing infrastructure, not just care and feeding.
I used to be a "Senior Server Engineer", but since I'm at a start-up now I've been busted down to a mere "System Administrator":-)
As far as a more generic title for the group of IT folks, I'd suggest "Operations Engineers", or perhaps "Information Operations Engineers" if you need to be more specific. Of course, if you're absolutely allergic to "Engineer" you can always go with "Administrator". Bleh.
I've had some nerve injuries that caused numbness and tingling in my feet that took the better part of a year to heal. (The causes were getting stomped by a horse and really bad snowboard boots.) I'd say hope is far from lost for your tongue.
But my weirdest nerve injury story was actually from one of my horses. She had a bunch of work done under heavy sedation. Evidently while she was doped up she leaned onto her halter and damaged the nerves in her face. The next day when I came out to ride her half of her face was drooping, like she was some sort of stroke victim. It was terrible looking! This may sound trivial but she was a very valuable show horse at the time so it was rather alarming. Her face eventually went back to normal, but not for many, many months.
I do think you should talk to the dentist about getting a refund, though. Filing suit seems like overkill, though.
Riding a horse, even just for a movie with a stuntman doing the real work, is dangerous and painful without years of practice.
Like most activities, if your horseback riding is either painful or dangerous you are most likely doing it wrong. It would not surprise me if in the rush of a movie production schedule the actor was insufficiently conditioned for the requisite amount of speed work that was required. An appropriate training program for a rider will be both safe and no more painful than an average trip to the gym, however.
(Yeah, I ride. Click my link if you want.)
Since Macguire is playing Pollard, I assume he had to get reeeaally skinny for the role. (The self-destructive habits of jockeys in order to maintain weight is one of the themes of the book.) I have to wonder if that might have something to do with any theoretical health issues.
I'm also wondering if they included that scene from the book where the prostitute blows smoke rings from her you-know-what. (!)
I once had to explain to my parents how to resize a window.
You think that's bad. I once had to explain to the CEO of the Silicon Valley technology start-up at which I was employed that in order to move a window all you had to do was to left click the title bar and drag. Until then had always would right-click the title bar and choose "Move".
My mom thought for ages that the computer was locking up when the screen-saver came on. These days she's doing ok, though like you I've given up mailing her attachments. I just stick the stuff on my website. She says her computer gets "tired" and has to rest from time to time.
I've been involved with gift exchanges with a boyfriend's family, and they were universally characterized by extreme *apathy*. Nobody cared anymore. Each person would just tell their giver what they wanted. Most often it was a gift certificate in the predetermined gift amount. It was like everyone just handed the person next to them $75. Completely and utterly pointless.
My family goes *nuts* at Christmas. Everyone gives and gets mountains of gifts. Everyone is excited about both what they are giving and receiving. It's great!
Shopping for that perfect Christmas gift for each person gives me some time to reflect on them, think about their likes and dislikes. I love surprising people with something they never even knew they wanted! It's so much fun! I would never want to miss that. Maybe that's why doing gift exchanges seems so totally depressing to me.
Mom thought it'd be a great idea if she and her "girls" went shopping all day on Black Friday. So Mom, my sisters (ages 23 and 20), my niece (age 2 mo) and I bundled into the car at 7:30 am, trucked it 2 hours to the outlet mall, and went Shopping.
First we had to stop at the bank, though, for Mom to get money. The ATM was broken so she had to go use a teller. She came back to the car chuckling. The teller had asked Mom if she was going shopping, so Mom said, "Yep, just me and my girls!" The teller told her that it was going to be really crowded out, so my mom really ought to think about getting some of those "straps" for us.
We enjoyed the image of the three of us straining against our toddler leashes.;-)
So anyway, the mall was in fact insanely crowded, but it was sort of fun anyway. I mean, I love Christmas so it was cool to get into the spirit a little. But one day of it was plenty. I can guarantee you that the rest of my shopping will be online!:-)
Probably the *best* company gift I've ever received was a personalized latte mug. Everyone got one with their name on it. It's the only mug that doesn't walk away!
I'm a big fan of yo-yos. Letter openers (the plastic kind with a little razor safely hidden) are really useful. If you're going more high-end I'd recommend one of the nice messenger style bags. They seem to be appreciated.
I've received a couple of watches and never used any of them. Also, I am so sick of getting men's shirts I could scream. Luckily one of the founders here is a woman. She went out of her way to have some women's shirts embroidered with our logo for the females here. Finally, logo gear I can really use!
If I ever wear a skirt to work, there is a 100% chance that at some point during the day I will be required to crawl under someone's desk.
Nice clothes and sysadmining don't mix.:-)
Sarah
Re:Your dressed casually to the first day of work?
on
Cool Work Shirts?
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· Score: 3, Informative
It's not like I'm old school, I'm in my mid-twenties, but who wears anything but a suit to the first day of work?
No one wears a suit to work in Silicon Valley. Now if you go up to the city and check out the financial institutions I am sure there are suit wearers. But in my eight years working in the valley itself anyone wearing a suit has been nothing but a subject for derision. This was not a dot com boom phenomenon, either. There were perhaps more pink haired, pierced folks around during the boom days, but the dress code has pretty much stayed the same since I've worked here.
Someone showing up for an interview in a suit might as well have "I'M NEW HERE" stamped on their forehead. Usually the very first thing they are told is to lose the suit.
The sales guys don't wear suits. Even the CEOs don't wear suits. Sure, their button-down shirts are probably tailor made and cost a mint, and their slacks are impeccably pressed, but there is no tie in sight, much less a jacket.
People who are not "customer facing" generally can dress however they like as long as the relevant parts are covered. At my current job many of the engineers wear shorts and sandals all the time. Jeans and t-shirts are very common, too. I usually go for khakis or something similar, with jeans on Friday.
In my years as a sys admin there have been a number of situations where I've prevented a user from reading mail that has been delivered. Two spring to mind immediately. In one case, both a man and his son worked for the same company. The man and his wife were killed in a car accident. This information came out at work before the son could be told. I was instructed to monitor all the son's incoming mail and remove any condolence messages until the son could be found (I think he was traveling) and told about his parents. I could have more easily blocked all incoming mail, but the user would surely have noticed and called the Help Desk about it. So I archived the sympathy messages until he had received the news in person, at which time I returned them to his spool.
The other time someone accidently mailed a bunch of salary information to a large distribution. Thank heaven for single copy message store! I was able to delete it from everywhere fairly quickly. The guys who managed the file servers had a harder job, as they were required to search and destroy any attachments that had already been downloaded and saved.
Since these events one of my qualifications for a mail server is how easily a rogue mail can be excised from the message store.
Basically, I feel like this is one of those things that is part of your job. To say it's unethical is just silly. If the CEO had shoved an envelope under the door of the person's office, and you had had the key to the door, would you have refused to open it?
On the other hand, I totally understand leading users to *believe* that recalling sent messages is impossible. You don't want them to get into the habit of using you as a safety net! When push comes to shove, however, you do your job. Delete the mail and keep your mouth shut.
That said, assuming you were in otherwise good standing they should not have fired you for this. I imagine you could have had a pretty good unlawful termination suit had you been so inclined.
I'm guessing this may be out of your budget range, but you should know about Network Appliance filers' snapshotting capability. The filers create online "backups" by saving the state information about a filesystem. You could have snapshots of the state of the filesystem every day for a week and several times a day. I think they support something like a dozen snapshots at a time.
All this does take up space on the filer, but only the changed blocks have to be saved. As long as your churn is pretty low it's not that much extra space.
If you lose or munge a file, all you have to do is cd to a special.snapshot directory, choose the latest image that has your file intact, and copy it back to the live filesystem. It's perfect for those belly churning "Ooops" situations.
Snapshots are also used for backups, so that you are always backing up a totally static image of the filesystem. No files changing midway through.
Yeah, filers are spendy, but when it comes to fast, reliable, easy to administer file service I really believe they are the best.
Other than that, I think Veritas added a similar capability to VxFS, but I don't recall it being quite as elegant.
I used it at one of my jobs and I was pretty impressed. Our setup was Solaris but they do support Linux. It works with sendmail no problem. It will clean emails and optionally notify the sender, recipient, and IT when a virus is found. It also automatically updates the virus patterns as often as nightly. It was super easy to set up and use.
He lost major brownie points with me over one point in this book.
On page twelve, there are some definitions. "Degrees", "BTU", and "calorie". The definition for calorie is correctly given as the amount of energy needed to increase the heat of 1 cc of water 1 degree celsius. But *then* he continues by saying that a 378 calorie candy bar would raise 13.3356 oz of water 2 degrees Fahrenheit.
Anybody spot the problem?
Food isn't measured calories, it's measured in Calories. One Calorie is a thousand calories. So most candy bars would weigh in around 378 Calories, enough to heat quite a bit more water than he suggests.
While it is not clear how far the "sex education lesson" goes into the finer details of the art of love-making, this X-rated scene is being repeated across China to pander to their basic instincts.
My parents built the house they live in now. Friends and family did the framing. A few things, like the plumbing, cabinetry and masonry were contracted out. My granddad did the electrical and Dad and granddad did the finishing.
The only way this was possible in the first place was that my parents have a good friend who is a (very good) building contractor. He sort of tutored them along. Still, there were plenty of problems. My folks paid a premium for the "best" masons, who left mortar stuck all over all the face of the brick. Dad had to spent days with a rented acid washer cleaning up the mess. The guy who laid the marble in the foyer screwed up so most of it has cracked over time. My granddad fell off the porch roof that he was shingling. Luckily his paratrooper training kicked in-- he tucked, rolled, and was fine. But mostly it was the countless little things that just add up.
Was it worth it? Certainly my parents have a much nicer house than they otherwise could have afforded. But I think it put a huge strain on my parents' marriage. My parents were able to do things exactly the way they wanted, but later they discovered that some things they thought would be really cool just weren't. (The bathroom setup though good in concept has proven to be particularly sub-optimal.) We had to live with my grandparents for a while during the construction and that was pretty hard sometimes.
Basically, I don't think my dad would do it again.
First, hearty agreement with the person who recommended "Fast Food Nation". It's not as much of a gross-out as "The Jungle" was, though there's a bit of that too. It's more about the culture of fast food. Packed with fun trivia! Did you know Willard Scott was the first Ronald McDonald? They didn't keep him because he was too fat.
I recently finished "War and Peace". It's a *great* book. Took me a *long* time to read, but I really enjoyed every bit of it. Truly a pleasure, and not at all what I expected. Give it a shot!
I am almost finished with "Guns, Germs and Steel". It describes how different people in different locations on earth came to develop the technologies that they did. The author argues convincingly that more advanced cultures owe their success to location, location, location. Specifically, the availability of domesticable plants and large animals drove the development of agriculture, and agriculture led to more advanced societies.
I'm listening to "The Orchid Thief" on audio. It's pretty good. The stories of Victorian orchid hunters are more interesting than the modern storyline, IMHO.
On my "to read" pile are "The Dive from Clausen's Pier" and Ian Rankin's "Dead Souls". "The Dive from Clausen's Pier" is sort of a chick book, I think. It's about a girl who feels suffocated with her life. I've just heard good things about Ian Rankin. I'm not usually into mysteries but i thought I'd give it a try.
The downside is that your pens and manuals don't move with you. In practise this encourages people to work out of their briefcases, which is convenient for techs who spend most of their time onsite.
I've heard stories of failed attempts at hotelling workers. Basically, the experiment came to a screeching halt when it was discovered that employees were solving their storage problems by keeping critical and confidential papers in the trunks of their cars.
As far as using full names goes, the Sendmail FAQ explains sufficiently well why that's a bad idea. See Q3.5.
Especially in a corporate environment, people expect to have reasonable looking user names. Most folks won't put up with being sfc123; it just is not professional.
This means that while it's a good idea to have guidelines, you can't be too much of a stickler. If a sales guy was jschmoe at his last three jobs, and all his contacts know his email as jschmoe, then it's really best if he can continue to be jschmoe. Forcing him to be joes341 instead doesn't make anyone happy.
Collisions are certainly an issue, but that's not the only problem. For example, a popular default choice might be first initial last name. Using that standard at one job we ended up with a "pharter" (say it out loud), and at another job there would have been an "aryan". These things just don't work.
Ideally I like to allow users their choice of login. I encourage them to select one of first initial last name, first name last initial, or initials. Every now and then someone will come along and want a login like "coolguy" or something completely random. Depending on the company culture and whether the user is "customer facing" I might be lenient.
I've worked in organizations up to a few thousand users and this system has worked fine. In a truly huge organization you'd end up having user names that look like AOL, though. Certainly in an educational environment I imagine a more authoritarian system would be warranted.
At work I've been running an IPsec VPN on FreeBSD for quite a while now. It's a great thing-- sort of tricky to set up but runs like top once it's up. I never was able to figure out how to work NAT into the picture, though. On Linux NAT and firewalling and FreeS/WAN are very well integrated, but on FreeBSD we use KAME which has a very IPv6 sensibility. No need for NAT in IPv6, so it just doesn't seem to play nice.
This article explains the trick to it-- run NAT on the internal interface! Should have thought of that!:-)
BTW, if anyone is curious KAME to FreeS/WAN VPNs work just fine. Ours was set up that way for quite some time.
I had never downloaded music in my life before six weeks ago. After all, I have plenty of disposable income. If I want a CD I buy it. No big deal.
Then my mom asked me to mix a few CDs for my sister's wedding reception. It was a pretty small wedding, just family and friends, and they just wanted to throw some CDs on for dance music. They came up with a song list and emailed it over.
The intersection of the songlist and my personal library was quite small. I did have a few of the songs already. I went out and probably spent $80 on CDs so I could rip the "special" songs myself and be assured of a good rip. But that only covered maybe one CD worth of the music.
The rest I reluctantly downloaded. I mean, I'm all for fair use and everything, and you can pry my iPod from my cold dead heads, but I think that downloading music to avoid paying for it is Wrong. Call me old-fashioned. But in this case I didn't feel I had a choice. I needed about 65 songs-- maybe 4 CDs worth of music. I would have been more than happy to pay $80 to get copies of those songs. But I didn't have that option. To get all those specific songs, I probably would have had to buy at least 30 CDs. Using our $20 a CD figure, that's $600. There was just no way.
That's when I realized what morons the record companies really are. They are too busy fighting their consumers to sell them what they want. Give me a way to download good quality copies of individual songs for a reasonable price and I am all over it. It would be so easy! I want to be ethical, make it easy for me for heaven's sake!
Slashdot Mirror
So I've just been checking this out, browsing around and looking at what there is to see in the iTunes Music Store. I've been really excited to see this, because I've been wanting a reasonable online music service for a while.
So I decide on a test. I like Dirty Vegas' "Days Go By", but I don't have the CD. That would be a pretty cool song to buy for a buck. So I browse on over to "Electronica" and look for the CD. I find it. Yay!
You can't buy the song "Days Go By".
You can buy any of the other songs on the CD individually, and you can buy the whole CD including "Days Go By" for a paltry $12. But you can't just by the one song that everyone might actually want by itself.
BOGUS! I had no idea they would do something like that. Surprised? Not really. But I am sorely disappointed.
Sarah
http://www.uphs.upenn.edu/news/News_Releases/may99 /gur.shtml
Surprise! woman here who uses linux and other and reads /. regularly - oooooo shocking.
:-)
Yeah, me too.
Though this does not mean it's specifically a "woman" thing, it seems quite weird. I tend to think the reasons we women find it hard to get our "bearings" is that we're thinking of a million things at once, while the male, well, you can fill that in...
Actually, it's pretty well established that women have poorer spatial skills than men. Why? Well, we are physically smaller, and we have smaller brains. It was not understood for a long time how women could test out to be as intelligent as men even though we have smaller brains. The answer turn out to be that though we have as much gray matter as men, we have less white matter. While gray matter is used in cognition, white matter is used for spatial skills.
I know my spatial skills aren't as good as those of many men I know, but I don't take it personally. It's a small price to pay to not have to deal with having a penis!
Sarah
At least you aren't in bullpens, or open plan. For a span of nearly 2.5 years I only had a cube of my own for two months. The rest of the time was shared cube, corral, or open office.
So I don't think cubes are so bad. If you can, get nice big ones. I think 10'x10' is ideal. Make sure everyone has a large bookcase in addition to drawers and some lockable storage. Everyone should have a large whiteboard, a guest chair, and a coat hook. Install keyboard trays everywhere.
Some cubes are available with sliding doors. Ours looked a lot like frosted shower doors. These were very popular.
Definitely configure the desks so that people don't have their backs to their "doors".
Good lighting is important! Be careful, though. There's a particular cube system that features lamps that attach to the underside of shelves with gigantic magnets. Be sure not to get those. I've worked at *two* places that had them!
I don't like the super-tall walls, but then I'm too short to see over the default height. Where I've seen the super-tall walls the top parts were glass. This helps to keep the place from seeming like a dungeon.
Finally, headphones, headphones, headphones.
Sarah
I do have to confess I really detest that word. When I see "Administrator" I think button-pusher and tape-changer. In companies with larger IT shops I've found the more senior techies get titles that end in "Engineer". The "Engineer" moniker suggests that you are involved in designing infrastructure, not just care and feeding.
I used to be a "Senior Server Engineer", but since I'm at a start-up now I've been busted down to a mere "System Administrator"
As far as a more generic title for the group of IT folks, I'd suggest "Operations Engineers", or perhaps "Information Operations Engineers" if you need to be more specific. Of course, if you're absolutely allergic to "Engineer" you can always go with "Administrator". Bleh.
Sarah
I've had some nerve injuries that caused numbness and tingling in my feet that took the better part of a year to heal. (The causes were getting stomped by a horse and really bad snowboard boots.) I'd say hope is far from lost for your tongue.
But my weirdest nerve injury story was actually from one of my horses. She had a bunch of work done under heavy sedation. Evidently while she was doped up she leaned onto her halter and damaged the nerves in her face. The next day when I came out to ride her half of her face was drooping, like she was some sort of stroke victim. It was terrible looking! This may sound trivial but she was a very valuable show horse at the time so it was rather alarming. Her face eventually went back to normal, but not for many, many months.
I do think you should talk to the dentist about getting a refund, though. Filing suit seems like overkill, though.
Sarah
Riding a horse, even just for a movie with a stuntman doing the real work, is dangerous and painful without years of practice.
Like most activities, if your horseback riding is either painful or dangerous you are most likely doing it wrong. It would not surprise me if in the rush of a movie production schedule the actor was insufficiently conditioned for the requisite amount of speed work that was required. An appropriate training program for a rider will be both safe and no more painful than an average trip to the gym, however.
(Yeah, I ride. Click my link if you want.)
Since Macguire is playing Pollard, I assume he had to get reeeaally skinny for the role. (The self-destructive habits of jockeys in order to maintain weight is one of the themes of the book.) I have to wonder if that might have something to do with any theoretical health issues.
I'm also wondering if they included that scene from the book where the prostitute blows smoke rings from her you-know-what. (!)
I once had to explain to my parents how to resize a window.
You think that's bad. I once had to explain to the CEO of the Silicon Valley technology start-up at which I was employed that in order to move a window all you had to do was to left click the title bar and drag. Until then had always would right-click the title bar and choose "Move".
My mom thought for ages that the computer was locking up when the screen-saver came on. These days she's doing ok, though like you I've given up mailing her attachments. I just stick the stuff on my website. She says her computer gets "tired" and has to rest from time to time.
Next machine I buy them will definitely be a Mac.
Sarah
I've been involved with gift exchanges with a boyfriend's family, and they were universally characterized by extreme *apathy*. Nobody cared anymore. Each person would just tell their giver what they wanted. Most often it was a gift certificate in the predetermined gift amount. It was like everyone just handed the person next to them $75. Completely and utterly pointless.
:-)
My family goes *nuts* at Christmas. Everyone gives and gets mountains of gifts. Everyone is excited about both what they are giving and receiving. It's great!
Shopping for that perfect Christmas gift for each person gives me some time to reflect on them, think about their likes and dislikes. I love surprising people with something they never even knew they wanted! It's so much fun! I would never want to miss that. Maybe that's why doing gift exchanges seems so totally depressing to me.
Yeah, I *love* Christmas!
Sarah
Mom thought it'd be a great idea if she and her "girls" went shopping all day on Black Friday. So Mom, my sisters (ages 23 and 20), my niece (age 2 mo) and I bundled into the car at 7:30 am, trucked it 2 hours to the outlet mall, and went Shopping.
;-)
:-)
First we had to stop at the bank, though, for Mom to get money. The ATM was broken so she had to go use a teller. She came back to the car chuckling. The teller had asked Mom if she was going shopping, so Mom said, "Yep, just me and my girls!" The teller told her that it was going to be really crowded out, so my mom really ought to think about getting some of those "straps" for us.
We enjoyed the image of the three of us straining against our toddler leashes.
So anyway, the mall was in fact insanely crowded, but it was sort of fun anyway. I mean, I love Christmas so it was cool to get into the spirit a little. But one day of it was plenty. I can guarantee you that the rest of my shopping will be online!
Sarah
Probably the *best* company gift I've ever received was a personalized latte mug. Everyone got one with their name on it. It's the only mug that doesn't walk away!
I'm a big fan of yo-yos. Letter openers (the plastic kind with a little razor safely hidden) are really useful. If you're going more high-end I'd recommend one of the nice messenger style bags. They seem to be appreciated.
I've received a couple of watches and never used any of them. Also, I am so sick of getting men's shirts I could scream. Luckily one of the founders here is a woman. She went out of her way to have some women's shirts embroidered with our logo for the females here. Finally, logo gear I can really use!
Sarah
But I really liked Spirited away
Really? So did I!
But you know, I think they should just ditch all that silly anime and show more
Brak!
If I ever wear a skirt to work, there is a 100% chance that at some point during the day I will be required to crawl under someone's desk.
Nice clothes and sysadmining don't mix.
Sarah
No one wears a suit to work in Silicon Valley. Now if you go up to the city and check out the financial institutions I am sure there are suit wearers. But in my eight years working in the valley itself anyone wearing a suit has been nothing but a subject for derision. This was not a dot com boom phenomenon, either. There were perhaps more pink haired, pierced folks around during the boom days, but the dress code has pretty much stayed the same since I've worked here.
Someone showing up for an interview in a suit might as well have "I'M NEW HERE" stamped on their forehead. Usually the very first thing they are told is to lose the suit.
The sales guys don't wear suits. Even the CEOs don't wear suits. Sure, their button-down shirts are probably tailor made and cost a mint, and their slacks are impeccably pressed, but there is no tie in sight, much less a jacket.
People who are not "customer facing" generally can dress however they like as long as the relevant parts are covered. At my current job many of the engineers wear shorts and sandals all the time. Jeans and t-shirts are very common, too. I usually go for khakis or something similar, with jeans on Friday.
Sarah
In my years as a sys admin there have been a number of situations where I've prevented a user from reading mail that has been delivered. Two spring to mind immediately. In one case, both a man and his son worked for the same company. The man and his wife were killed in a car accident. This information came out at work before the son could be told. I was instructed to monitor all the son's incoming mail and remove any condolence messages until the son could be found (I think he was traveling) and told about his parents. I could have more easily blocked all incoming mail, but the user would surely have noticed and called the Help Desk about it. So I archived the sympathy messages until he had received the news in person, at which time I returned them to his spool.
The other time someone accidently mailed a bunch of salary information to a large distribution. Thank heaven for single copy message store! I was able to delete it from everywhere fairly quickly. The guys who managed the file servers had a harder job, as they were required to search and destroy any attachments that had already been downloaded and saved.
Since these events one of my qualifications for a mail server is how easily a rogue mail can be excised from the message store.
Basically, I feel like this is one of those things that is part of your job. To say it's unethical is just silly. If the CEO had shoved an envelope under the door of the person's office, and you had had the key to the door, would you have refused to open it?
On the other hand, I totally understand leading users to *believe* that recalling sent messages is impossible. You don't want them to get into the habit of using you as a safety net! When push comes to shove, however, you do your job. Delete the mail and keep your mouth shut.
That said, assuming you were in otherwise good standing they should not have fired you for this. I imagine you could have had a pretty good unlawful termination suit had you been so inclined.
Sarah
I'm guessing this may be out of your budget range, but you should know about Network Appliance filers' snapshotting capability. The filers create online "backups" by saving the state information about a filesystem. You could have snapshots of the state of the filesystem every day for a week and several times a day. I think they support something like a dozen snapshots at a time.
.snapshot directory, choose the latest image that has your file intact, and copy it back to the live filesystem. It's perfect for those belly churning "Ooops" situations.
All this does take up space on the filer, but only the changed blocks have to be saved. As long as your churn is pretty low it's not that much extra space.
If you lose or munge a file, all you have to do is cd to a special
Snapshots are also used for backups, so that you are always backing up a totally static image of the filesystem. No files changing midway through.
Yeah, filers are spendy, but when it comes to fast, reliable, easy to administer file service I really believe they are the best.
Other than that, I think Veritas added a similar capability to VxFS, but I don't recall it being quite as elegant.
Sarah
I used it at one of my jobs and I was pretty impressed. Our setup was Solaris but they do support Linux. It works with sendmail no problem. It will clean emails and optionally notify the sender, recipient, and IT when a virus is found. It also automatically updates the virus patterns as often as nightly. It was super easy to set up and use.
Sarah
He lost major brownie points with me over one point in this book.
On page twelve, there are some definitions. "Degrees", "BTU", and "calorie". The definition for calorie is correctly given as the amount of energy needed to increase the heat of 1 cc of water 1 degree celsius. But *then* he continues by saying that a 378 calorie candy bar would raise 13.3356 oz of water 2 degrees Fahrenheit.
Anybody spot the problem?
Food isn't measured calories, it's measured in Calories. One Calorie is a thousand calories. So most candy bars would weigh in around 378 Calories, enough to heat quite a bit more water than he suggests.
Sarah
While it is not clear how far the "sex education lesson" goes into the finer details of the art of love-making, this X-rated scene is being repeated across China to pander to their basic instincts.
No, no, no pandering to pandas!
My parents built the house they live in now. Friends and family did the framing. A few things, like the plumbing, cabinetry and masonry were contracted out. My granddad did the electrical and Dad and granddad did the finishing.
The only way this was possible in the first place was that my parents have a good friend who is a (very good) building contractor. He sort of tutored them along. Still, there were plenty of problems. My folks paid a premium for the "best" masons, who left mortar stuck all over all the face of the brick. Dad had to spent days with a rented acid washer cleaning up the mess. The guy who laid the marble in the foyer screwed up so most of it has cracked over time. My granddad fell off the porch roof that he was shingling. Luckily his paratrooper training kicked in-- he tucked, rolled, and was fine. But mostly it was the countless little things that just add up.
Was it worth it? Certainly my parents have a much nicer house than they otherwise could have afforded. But I think it put a huge strain on my parents' marriage. My parents were able to do things exactly the way they wanted, but later they discovered that some things they thought would be really cool just weren't. (The bathroom setup though good in concept has proven to be particularly sub-optimal.) We had to live with my grandparents for a while during the construction and that was pretty hard sometimes.
Basically, I don't think my dad would do it again.
First, hearty agreement with the person who recommended "Fast Food Nation". It's not as much of a gross-out as "The Jungle" was, though there's a bit of that too. It's more about the culture of fast food. Packed with fun trivia! Did you know Willard Scott was the first Ronald McDonald? They didn't keep him because he was too fat.
I recently finished "War and Peace". It's a *great* book. Took me a *long* time to read, but I really enjoyed every bit of it. Truly a pleasure, and not at all what I expected. Give it a shot!
I am almost finished with "Guns, Germs and Steel". It describes how different people in different locations on earth came to develop the technologies that they did. The author argues convincingly that more advanced cultures owe their success to location, location, location. Specifically, the availability of domesticable plants and large animals drove the development of agriculture, and agriculture led to more advanced societies.
I'm listening to "The Orchid Thief" on audio. It's pretty good. The stories of Victorian orchid hunters are more interesting than the modern storyline, IMHO.
On my "to read" pile are "The Dive from Clausen's Pier" and Ian Rankin's "Dead Souls". "The Dive from Clausen's Pier" is sort of a chick book, I think. It's about a girl who feels suffocated with her life. I've just heard good things about Ian Rankin. I'm not usually into mysteries but i thought I'd give it a try.
The downside is that your pens and manuals don't move with you. In practise this encourages people to work out of their briefcases, which is convenient for techs who spend most of their time onsite.
I've heard stories of failed attempts at hotelling workers. Basically, the experiment came to a screeching halt when it was discovered that employees were solving their storage problems by keeping critical and confidential papers in the trunks of their cars.
As far as using full names goes, the Sendmail FAQ explains sufficiently well why that's a bad idea. See Q3.5.
Especially in a corporate environment, people expect to have reasonable looking user names. Most folks won't put up with being sfc123; it just is not professional.
This means that while it's a good idea to have guidelines, you can't be too much of a stickler. If a sales guy was jschmoe at his last three jobs, and all his contacts know his email as jschmoe, then it's really best if he can continue to be jschmoe. Forcing him to be joes341 instead doesn't make anyone happy.
Collisions are certainly an issue, but that's not the only problem. For example, a popular default choice might be first initial last name. Using that standard at one job we ended up with a "pharter" (say it out loud), and at another job there would have been an "aryan". These things just don't work.
Ideally I like to allow users their choice of login. I encourage them to select one of first initial last name, first name last initial, or initials. Every now and then someone will come along and want a login like "coolguy" or something completely random. Depending on the company culture and whether the user is "customer facing" I might be lenient.
I've worked in organizations up to a few thousand users and this system has worked fine. In a truly huge organization you'd end up having user names that look like AOL, though. Certainly in an educational environment I imagine a more authoritarian system would be warranted.
At work I've been running an IPsec VPN on FreeBSD for quite a while now. It's a great thing-- sort of tricky to set up but runs like top once it's up. I never was able to figure out how to work NAT into the picture, though. On Linux NAT and firewalling and FreeS/WAN are very well integrated, but on FreeBSD we use KAME which has a very IPv6 sensibility. No need for NAT in IPv6, so it just doesn't seem to play nice.
This article explains the trick to it-- run NAT on the internal interface! Should have thought of that!
BTW, if anyone is curious KAME to FreeS/WAN VPNs work just fine. Ours was set up that way for quite some time.
I had never downloaded music in my life before six weeks ago. After all, I have plenty of disposable income. If I want a CD I buy it. No big deal.
Then my mom asked me to mix a few CDs for my sister's wedding reception. It was a pretty small wedding, just family and friends, and they just wanted to throw some CDs on for dance music. They came up with a song list and emailed it over.
The intersection of the songlist and my personal library was quite small. I did have a few of the songs already. I went out and probably spent $80 on CDs so I could rip the "special" songs myself and be assured of a good rip. But that only covered maybe one CD worth of the music.
The rest I reluctantly downloaded. I mean, I'm all for fair use and everything, and you can pry my iPod from my cold dead heads, but I think that downloading music to avoid paying for it is Wrong. Call me old-fashioned. But in this case I didn't feel I had a choice. I needed about 65 songs-- maybe 4 CDs worth of music. I would have been more than happy to pay $80 to get copies of those songs. But I didn't have that option. To get all those specific songs, I probably would have had to buy at least 30 CDs. Using our $20 a CD figure, that's $600. There was just no way.
That's when I realized what morons the record companies really are. They are too busy fighting their consumers to sell them what they want. Give me a way to download good quality copies of individual songs for a reasonable price and I am all over it. It would be so easy! I want to be ethical, make it easy for me for heaven's sake!