I recently put an RT-16N in service in my office running DD-WRT. As the the Internet sez, the stock firmwire is crap, but this thing flies while running DD-WRT.
I've been the poor schmo carrying the pager. (Government job: Didn't get paid to carry the pager, but, if I got called in, was paid for a minimum of 2 hours regardless of how long I was there and the time was either OT or part of my 40 hours.) I'm currently a volunteer EMT in my local FD and have many friends who are career firefighters. The lawyer is *SO* off-base with his analogy. Paid FFs are paid for their time in station. They are not paid for the small (depending on location) percentage of time that they are off saving the world. They're paid to train, watch TV, train some more, sleep, train just a bit more, and -- yeah -- respond when the tones go off.
As a volunteer, I carry a pager. If it goes off (EMS-side), I respond if I can. If I can't, someone else has it covered. I put in my 40 for The Man. Then I put in another 10-15/wk because I want to. My brothers who volunteer at my station and are career down the road do the exact same thing. I get paid for when I'm ON-DUTY. They get paid for when they're ON-DUTY. For me, on-duty is sitting at my desk coding. For them, on-duty is either available-in-quarters, available-in-district, training, or on the scene. Their 40 is a bit different than mine. The point, though, is that duty hours are duty hours.
There is a fundamental difference between an ATM and a voting machine, though. In an ATM, you MUST keep track of the user who was standing at the machine doing the transaction. With a voting machine, you MUST NOT keep track of who is standing at the machine at any given time. Doing so could leak information about how that person voted.
And, as has been proven, a company that can do one well can real screw up the other (hint: begins with a 'D' and rhymes with "re-told").
He was on all of the local (Baltimore) news programs (and some national ones, too, I think) last week after the Maryland debacle -er- primary. Didn't catch any of them myself, but I'm sure they were good. Also note, check out his blog regularly if the e-voting issue interests you.
-J
Re:Harris Miller is not a good representative
on
Brave New Ballot
·
· Score: 1
Dude, you missed the point there at the end. Okay, sure, an unscrupulous poll worker could reprogram the machine to silently reject certain votes. But, at the end of the day, when an anomaly is found (and, they're found even where they don't exist, so it will be found), the paper ballot still exists and can be hand counted. Without the machine.
I worked for a company that -- like yours -- was building out from scratch. The boss (that's Mr. Idiot to you) wanted real high-tech. So, we got a box of access cards and a bunch of readers. We had to supply the computer -- running nothing newer that Win98 -- in 2002. After that debacle was past, we got to find out how much fun it was to need both the card and our fingerprint to get into the office. Ignoring the security part, what do you think happens when you have a band-aid on the one finger that you use to get into the office? Well, being as I was the admin and had (and I think still to this day have) the master key to the office, I let myself in the Orville-and-Wilbur way. Then, I went ahead and programmed all of my fingers into the system. Great way to waste a half hour, yeah. But, if I were to injure myself on the job again and need a cast to ny fingertips, at least I could still get to work the next day...
That's what I was thinking initially. However, this is a school we're talking about. Many (most?) schools allow students to plug their desktops into the network ethernet and use their laptops on the school's wireless LAN. We are talking about private machines here. Of course, there is the acceptible use policy (or whatever a given school calls it) dictating what is okay for the student to do. I can't imaging it saying "no running viruses", though.
Specificaly, it is against HIPPA regulations for someone to look at medical records without permission or need for their job. For example, an IT guy would not be allowed to look at a medical record on someone's screen, if, say, they remoted in (or walked by, or had network access to a share).
Now, IANAL, but I think you've just shown yourself the loophole. If there's a reason for the admin to log into that machine and he sees information that's there that he "shouldn't see", it's actually ok. Why? He needed to see it in order to do his job. Yeah, it sounds a bit nit-picky, but I think I might perhaps possibly have something of a leg to stand on with this.
I'll agree to this. Mostly. The admins of a machine should be at the level of ownership of that machine -- unless the level defers to a higher level. That is, if the Applied Math Dept or the Computer Science Dept wants to admin their own machines (ie, have admins to take care of all dept machines -- not to have each user take care of his/her "own" machine), this should be allowed.
Truly "personal" computers on the university network are another story. I don't know the best ending to that one.
I think you're missing something important here. The admin rights are being taken away from the local heretofore admins in favor of giving them to the corporate-level admins. As an admin to whom this has happened, I can tell you that this policy change / procedure change / whatever marketing-speak term you want to give it is a Very Bad Thing. The corporate IT people -- even if they know what they're doing (personally, I've found that too many ppl at the "corporation-wide" IT support level know less about computers than my dog) -- cannot do as good (good at all??) a job at the admin stuff as a local admin could.
I gotta say: As an admin, I enjoy having the ability to remotely see what's going on on my machines. If they're users' desktops, it's much easier to just get a view of their screen (think PC-Anywhere) than to keep asking them what they see now only to get half answers and useless replies.
That having been said, what the university wants to do is 1) completely different and b) a Very Bad Thing. In my case, *I* am the admin and the machines are *MINE*. The university is looking to force anyone who wants to use its network to give them root on their machines? Puh-lease. It's time for departments who don't want to lose control of their PCs at this university to start looking for an outside ISP. Chances are there's already money in the budget for it: they probably kick in to the general IT infrastructure budget already.
I have to disagree with the whole form-by-email thing for a few reasons:
a) You're starting to take the (IMHO overly-) simple concept of having problems emailed in and making it more complicated. As time goes on, you're going to realize that it'd be nice if the form had this-or-that capability or just a bit of functionality, etc. You're going to end up right where you started: wanting a ticket-tracking system.
b) As a local sysadmin without a ticket-tracking system and as a customer of the enterprise-wide IT dept which does have a tracking system (which only they can access -- I submit a helpdesk ticket via email using a form I designed because they always were bouncing my requests back to me with requests for more info), I feel I've seen it from both (all?) sides. The email system is bad because, as I said before, the email will never have all of the info you want. Even when you kick the ticket back to the client with requests for specific information, the information still isn't all there.
It's for this reason that one of these days I'm planning on rolling my own inventory tracker / trouble ticket / work task ticket system (where linking a trouble/work ticket to a particular inventory item is the most important part). I have very specific needs on this job that I haven't before on any of my 4 previous sysadmin jobs. If I could find something already made which took care of this, great. I haven't been able to find anything, though. Guess we're in the same boat. Well, similar, at least.
From what I've seen in my school's CS department, F/OSS is favored for one reason: price. Most professors don't have the cash to cough up for huge expensive programs. (Of course, there's also the fact that when you're working on cutting-edge research, that year-old product just doesn't cut it. But, I digress....) And, it took over a year for the department to be able to replace a couple of severly under- and non-performing printers in the labs.
When you look at it from that perspective, F/OSS seems like a pretty good idea. Not to mention, oftentimes the F/OSS solution is better software, too.
(This isn't to say that MS is necessarily bad -- at least not in the eyes of the department. I just found out that they've got an MSDN Academic Alliance Membership which will let any student use almost any piece of MS software -- except Office, iirc -- for free. And, there are just as many PCs in the undergrad lab as there are linux PCs.)
I'll have to agree on the "who do you know" part. A classmate of mine whose first experience with a computer was freshman "Intro to C" got a summer job doing (fairly menial) software development stuff after freshman year. I had been around computers all my life and was fairly good at windoze tech support by then. The only jobs I could land involved either fries, donuts, or valeting in the south Florida summer heat -- even towards the end of my schooling.
If you're plain lucky, you might be able to find something with what you've got. Most likely, though, you're going to find the college-summer job search even harder than your after-college job search -- which itself is no piece of cake. -J
More important possibly than negotiating your way out of being audited, maybe you can negotiate something long term once they have audited you. You must have tech support if you ship a product. Can we say SLA? If they like your product enough that they're going to go through the effort to bring in the big guns, they're going to want some sort of support (once your marketing guys remind them as such).
This is how many of the govt contractors go from having just a foot in the door to having multi-million dollar contracts. Now that I think about it, isn't this a similar business model as drug trafficking?
The first tech company I "left" was a real winner. After two rounds of layoffs (more on that in a second), I received a call at home on the weekend. The first one said, "This is so-and-so from HR at the company. I really need to speak to you as soon as possible. Please call me at home: XXX-XXX-XXXX." The second one said, "This is so-and-so again. I really don't want to do this as a voicemail, but I have no choice. Dug-Its-Own-Grave, Inc. has decided to shift gears and refocus and you aren't part of that new direction. You should receive a sunday delivery from fedex [or whatever] with your severance information. All the information you need is in there. Please don't come in tomorrow." Joke was on them: I wouldn't have been coming in that day anyway since I was out of the country on vacation for the past week and a half and the next week.
The first round of layoffs at Dug-Its-Own-Grave, Inc. consisted of everyone in the office receiving an email to go to some big office-wide meeting as some conference room too small for the whole company. In actuality, there were 6 or 7 rooms being used. 2 were for people being laid off. The rest were to explain that everyone was to go back to their desks, take their stuff -- probably best to take your company laptops, too -- and leave immediately so that those who were laid off could pack up and be escorted out by the police without being oogled. I had had the combination to the server room there for months because I sysadmined a few project machines. I had to get in that afternoon to do some work -- and couldn't. The code had been changed and IT wouldn't give me the code or let me in. One of the few cases when IT was in on it with HR, I suppose.
When I resigned from my next position, it was as one of two sysadmins of a company. Out of courtesy to the other guy (who was often in over his head even while I was there), I gave four weeks' notice. I had hoped that during those four weeks, they'd advertise, maybe do some interviews, etc. My co-worker was a really nice guy, and I didn't want my leaving to screw him over completely. They did nothing with those four weeks. My accounts remained active. root wasn't changed. Nothing. In fact, I was still able to ssh into my work accounts for a few months after leaving. (The first time was an accident -- ran the wrong ssh command and got into the work server. After that, I checked once in a while to see if they had finally figured it out. Never bothered checking whether they had changed root. didn't care. The password was always impossible to remember while I was there....
Bottom line: Some places are paranoid. Others aren't smart enough to be paranoid.
Slashdot Mirror
I recently put an RT-16N in service in my office running DD-WRT. As the the Internet sez, the stock firmwire is crap, but this thing flies while running DD-WRT.
I've been the poor schmo carrying the pager. (Government job: Didn't get paid to carry the pager, but, if I got called in, was paid for a minimum of 2 hours regardless of how long I was there and the time was either OT or part of my 40 hours.) I'm currently a volunteer EMT in my local FD and have many friends who are career firefighters. The lawyer is *SO* off-base with his analogy. Paid FFs are paid for their time in station. They are not paid for the small (depending on location) percentage of time that they are off saving the world. They're paid to train, watch TV, train some more, sleep, train just a bit more, and -- yeah -- respond when the tones go off.
As a volunteer, I carry a pager. If it goes off (EMS-side), I respond if I can. If I can't, someone else has it covered. I put in my 40 for The Man. Then I put in another 10-15/wk because I want to. My brothers who volunteer at my station and are career down the road do the exact same thing. I get paid for when I'm ON-DUTY. They get paid for when they're ON-DUTY. For me, on-duty is sitting at my desk coding. For them, on-duty is either available-in-quarters, available-in-district, training, or on the scene. Their 40 is a bit different than mine. The point, though, is that duty hours are duty hours.
There is a fundamental difference between an ATM and a voting machine, though. In an ATM, you MUST keep track of the user who was standing at the machine doing the transaction. With a voting machine, you MUST NOT keep track of who is standing at the machine at any given time. Doing so could leak information about how that person voted.
And, as has been proven, a company that can do one well can real screw up the other (hint: begins with a 'D' and rhymes with "re-told").
-J
He was on all of the local (Baltimore) news programs (and some national ones, too, I think) last week after the Maryland debacle -er- primary. Didn't catch any of them myself, but I'm sure they were good. Also note, check out his blog regularly if the e-voting issue interests you.
-J
Dude, you missed the point there at the end. Okay, sure, an unscrupulous poll worker could reprogram the machine to silently reject certain votes. But, at the end of the day, when an anomaly is found (and, they're found even where they don't exist, so it will be found), the paper ballot still exists and can be hand counted. Without the machine.
-J
I worked for a company that -- like yours -- was building out from scratch. The boss (that's Mr. Idiot to you) wanted real high-tech. So, we got a box of access cards and a bunch of readers. We had to supply the computer -- running nothing newer that Win98 -- in 2002. After that debacle was past, we got to find out how much fun it was to need both the card and our fingerprint to get into the office. Ignoring the security part, what do you think happens when you have a band-aid on the one finger that you use to get into the office? Well, being as I was the admin and had (and I think still to this day have) the master key to the office, I let myself in the Orville-and-Wilbur way. Then, I went ahead and programmed all of my fingers into the system. Great way to waste a half hour, yeah. But, if I were to injure myself on the job again and need a cast to ny fingertips, at least I could still get to work the next day...
-J
Wouldn't that be 'bastardi s ation', then?
-J
-J
I'll agree to this. Mostly. The admins of a machine should be at the level of ownership of that machine -- unless the level defers to a higher level. That is, if the Applied Math Dept or the Computer Science Dept wants to admin their own machines (ie, have admins to take care of all dept machines -- not to have each user take care of his/her "own" machine), this should be allowed.
Truly "personal" computers on the university network are another story. I don't know the best ending to that one.
-J
I think you're missing something important here. The admin rights are being taken away from the local heretofore admins in favor of giving them to the corporate-level admins. As an admin to whom this has happened, I can tell you that this policy change / procedure change / whatever marketing-speak term you want to give it is a Very Bad Thing. The corporate IT people -- even if they know what they're doing (personally, I've found that too many ppl at the "corporation-wide" IT support level know less about computers than my dog) -- cannot do as good (good at all??) a job at the admin stuff as a local admin could.
-J
I gotta say: As an admin, I enjoy having the ability to remotely see what's going on on my machines. If they're users' desktops, it's much easier to just get a view of their screen (think PC-Anywhere) than to keep asking them what they see now only to get half answers and useless replies.
That having been said, what the university wants to do is 1) completely different and b) a Very Bad Thing. In my case, *I* am the admin and the machines are *MINE* . The university is looking to force anyone who wants to use its network to give them root on their machines? Puh-lease. It's time for departments who don't want to lose control of their PCs at this university to start looking for an outside ISP. Chances are there's already money in the budget for it: they probably kick in to the general IT infrastructure budget already.
-J
You know a guy is committed when he buys new RAM for a game.
How about should be committed??
-J
I have to disagree with the whole form-by-email thing for a few reasons:
a) You're starting to take the (IMHO overly-) simple concept of having problems emailed in and making it more complicated. As time goes on, you're going to realize that it'd be nice if the form had this-or-that capability or just a bit of functionality, etc. You're going to end up right where you started: wanting a ticket-tracking system.
b) As a local sysadmin without a ticket-tracking system and as a customer of the enterprise-wide IT dept which does have a tracking system (which only they can access -- I submit a helpdesk ticket via email using a form I designed because they always were bouncing my requests back to me with requests for more info), I feel I've seen it from both (all?) sides. The email system is bad because, as I said before, the email will never have all of the info you want. Even when you kick the ticket back to the client with requests for specific information, the information still isn't all there.
It's for this reason that one of these days I'm planning on rolling my own inventory tracker / trouble ticket / work task ticket system (where linking a trouble/work ticket to a particular inventory item is the most important part). I have very specific needs on this job that I haven't before on any of my 4 previous sysadmin jobs. If I could find something already made which took care of this, great. I haven't been able to find anything, though. Guess we're in the same boat. Well, similar, at least.
-J
From what I've seen in my school's CS department, F/OSS is favored for one reason: price. Most professors don't have the cash to cough up for huge expensive programs. (Of course, there's also the fact that when you're working on cutting-edge research, that year-old product just doesn't cut it. But, I digress....) And, it took over a year for the department to be able to replace a couple of severly under- and non-performing printers in the labs.
When you look at it from that perspective, F/OSS seems like a pretty good idea. Not to mention, oftentimes the F/OSS solution is better software, too.
(This isn't to say that MS is necessarily bad -- at least not in the eyes of the department. I just found out that they've got an MSDN Academic Alliance Membership which will let any student use almost any piece of MS software -- except Office, iirc -- for free. And, there are just as many PCs in the undergrad lab as there are linux PCs.)
-J
I'll have to agree on the "who do you know" part. A classmate of mine whose first experience with a computer was freshman "Intro to C" got a summer job doing (fairly menial) software development stuff after freshman year. I had been around computers all my life and was fairly good at windoze tech support by then. The only jobs I could land involved either fries, donuts, or valeting in the south Florida summer heat -- even towards the end of my schooling.
If you're plain lucky, you might be able to find something with what you've got. Most likely, though, you're going to find the college-summer job search even harder than your after-college job search -- which itself is no piece of cake.
-J
More important possibly than negotiating your way out of being audited, maybe you can negotiate something long term once they have audited you. You must have tech support if you ship a product. Can we say SLA? If they like your product enough that they're going to go through the effort to bring in the big guns, they're going to want some sort of support (once your marketing guys remind them as such).
This is how many of the govt contractors go from having just a foot in the door to having multi-million dollar contracts. Now that I think about it, isn't this a similar business model as drug trafficking?
-J
Let the headaches begin!
The first tech company I "left" was a real winner. After two rounds of layoffs (more on that in a second), I received a call at home on the weekend. The first one said, "This is so-and-so from HR at the company. I really need to speak to you as soon as possible. Please call me at home: XXX-XXX-XXXX." The second one said, "This is so-and-so again. I really don't want to do this as a voicemail, but I have no choice. Dug-Its-Own-Grave, Inc. has decided to shift gears and refocus and you aren't part of that new direction. You should receive a sunday delivery from fedex [or whatever] with your severance information. All the information you need is in there. Please don't come in tomorrow." Joke was on them: I wouldn't have been coming in that day anyway since I was out of the country on vacation for the past week and a half and the next week.
The first round of layoffs at Dug-Its-Own-Grave, Inc. consisted of everyone in the office receiving an email to go to some big office-wide meeting as some conference room too small for the whole company. In actuality, there were 6 or 7 rooms being used. 2 were for people being laid off. The rest were to explain that everyone was to go back to their desks, take their stuff -- probably best to take your company laptops, too -- and leave immediately so that those who were laid off could pack up and be escorted out by the police without being oogled. I had had the combination to the server room there for months because I sysadmined a few project machines. I had to get in that afternoon to do some work -- and couldn't. The code had been changed and IT wouldn't give me the code or let me in. One of the few cases when IT was in on it with HR, I suppose.
When I resigned from my next position, it was as one of two sysadmins of a company. Out of courtesy to the other guy (who was often in over his head even while I was there), I gave four weeks' notice. I had hoped that during those four weeks, they'd advertise, maybe do some interviews, etc. My co-worker was a really nice guy, and I didn't want my leaving to screw him over completely. They did nothing with those four weeks. My accounts remained active. root wasn't changed. Nothing. In fact, I was still able to ssh into my work accounts for a few months after leaving. (The first time was an accident -- ran the wrong ssh command and got into the work server. After that, I checked once in a while to see if they had finally figured it out. Never bothered checking whether they had changed root. didn't care. The password was always impossible to remember while I was there....
Bottom line: Some places are paranoid. Others aren't smart enough to be paranoid.