So developers are using Linux, and supporting it themselves, and execs are using Macs.
I brought Ubuntu with me on day one on the new job. It's getting a warm reception. I tried suggesting Macs for the other execs and sales staff but they didn't want them. Some of the sales people want to stay with their Windows laptops, which is fine, we expected to support those anyway. The other execs surprised me by opting to move to Linux instead, even our CEO. I thought they'd be more amped about getting Macbooks, but no one really wanted one. That was a surprise.
For some of the older IBM laptops we're experimenting with PuppyLinux. Seeing if we can get some more mileage out of them. But Ubuntu is getting a warm reception. Even caught one of the staff borging the Windows box in the flex work area with a live CD. Hiring hasn't been any problem. I've managed to find some blue chip Linux/PHP developers for about the same as we were paying the Windows only staff. Maybe the current job market played into the ease of that transition, but we had some really good candidates to pick from.
Moving off Exchange was a little more choppy but we got it done. There was one Gmail gotcha that delayed our roll out for a week but we got past that. Another surprise was after people uploaded their old messages to Gmail was how fast they dumped Outlook. We had planned on supporting Outlook but most everyone switched over to the Gmail interface on their own, a few had already been using Gmail anyway.
Linux is completely capable as a desktop OS in the working world. We have saved quite a lot of money just in licensing fees. Not only could we find skilled Linux people, we found them at competitive local market rates. Where we had three Windows developers, today we have one OSS developer and we're still meeting our development targets. Now we're moving on replacing services running on the remaining Windows servers so we can retire them. The savings are significant. It's a big win for me, although at this point it's picking off the low hanging fruit. Still, it's some good fruit. We're standing up servers for the cost of the hardware. Rolling out some pretty sophisticated services for the cost of the developer. Our next area of consolidation will be cutting loose some of the outsource providers and moving some of those services back in house. You can do things like that when you're not blowing your budget on Microsoft licensing.
The chuckleheads with the rifles aside, there were Republican protests at the Democratic convention, why weren't they arrested and photographed? The same thing happened in '04. The FBI started intimidating political activists. And now we find out the FBI was behind the raids in St. Paul.
There have been rumors going back a long way that Rove had friendlies in the FBI that were using police powers in primarily political investigations.
Don't forget that a lot of/. readers supported this administration and are, at least in my mind, partially responsible for the thuggish, heavy-handed tactics our government feels it can employ with near impunity. Guess you could call it trickle down stupidity. But many of you voted for the bozos at the top. If they keep to their usual form they'll either blame the victims or blame Clinton.
Moral of the story: go over your bank statements line-by-line every month, and question anything that looks funny.
I check my bank account for unusual charges daily. I've only got one bill that can pull from our account and that's the local utility. They submit something like a bank draft every month. At least twice in three years I've gotten a call from my credit union when our water bill was unusually high and they wanted to confirm the amount. One of those turned out the utility misread our water meter.
The real moral of the story is monitor your accounts yourself regularly and stick with a small bank or credit union that knows you. JP Morgan Chase doesn't notice any but the top 1%-2% of their customers.
they litigate the party who exposes them for attempting fraud.
If they litigate, it would seem like the background research would become public record. Even if the court allowed it under seal, they can't keep it sealed forever. And when it becomes public record then the credit card companies come out looking really bad.
I'm disappointed Discovery didn't call their bluff. With the traffic the Mythbusters get someone would pick up the ad slots. The story of the suit would be advertising you can't buy. I'd do it.
Liberals, on the other hand, most likely will jump at you and tell you how wrong you are.
We tried it your way and what we got was eight of the most disastrous years in the history of this nation. They got a right to be pissed off. If we were the country we used to be they'd be out finding out who voted for Bush and burn their houses down. So count yourself lucky if they do is get a little miffed.
And I wish I had a nickel for every dogmatic, right wing know-it-all willing to go out of their way to tell me, and anyone else they disagree with, what they "need" to do.
We tried things your way and it was a train wreck. Step aside.
Because of "intelligence" agency surveillance in the U.S., commerce in the U.S. is no longer safe. So companies are taking their business elsewhere.
I think it's even more basic than that. If you act like a dick, your friends start to avoid you. Claim the right to snoop any data you want without due process and organizations will route around you or encrypt their traffic.
In the old days other countries could count on the US to do the right thing and play by the rules. Since we've thrown the rule book away we've started losing friends and other countries don't trust us to do the right thing anymore. It's really pretty simple.
I keep coming back to the fact that we didn't need all this mass espionage. We knew about the 9/11 hijackers, we just didn't act on what we knew. We knew without spying on Americans, we knew without the Patriot Act, without DHS, NSL's or any number of the dickish, thugish institutions and practices we've wasted billions on since then. And those laws aren't being used for terrorism investigations, they're being for any investigation. I listened to a DHS spokesmen on TV claim that any criminal activity can be used to support terrorism, so they're using those tools even for fairly minor crimes.
We're witnessing nothing less than the sad unwinding of a great nation.
I like it better than the liberals who always think of others are wrong or "stupid" if they don't share the same thought as they do.
Oh, really? You mean like calling someone unpatriotic if they didn't support the war in Iraq? Suggesting they don't support the troops if they have an issue with the chimp in charge. Or calling them a flip-flopper if they reached a different decision based on new information? Or baby killers for having a different view of abortion, or "blame America first" if they happen to point out how our thugish, dickish behavior comes across on the world stage. You mean like that? Because you seem perfectly comfortable with that behavior. Or is it just calling people "stupid" that's off limits?
Evangelicals love her because she is so firmly pro-life, but she fights her with party all the time.
Someone care to explain why that comment in a political discussion constitutes a troll? She is firmly pro-life and conflicts with her party on corruption and fiscal responsibility. She'll appeal to the base but not the party leadership.
The commerce clause certainly prevents a state from imposing tariffs on imports from other states.
Then maybe the solution is something like a VAT. A flat tax applied to all online purchases that gets turned back to the recipients state. That way it's not an individual state imposing a tax tariff on goods and services and the states don't get aced out of internet purchases simply because the vendor is located in another state.
It all starts out with good intentions, doesn't it? I'm sure what would happen is the federal government would start collecting part of the VAT, just to cover their expenses. The hold back portion would go up and up over time. And then they'd start putting strings on the VAT money turned back to states in an effort to drive federal policy down to the state level, ala highway funds.
But other than the tendency of government to act irresponsibly with any type of power it seems like a workable idea. I think you could argue a web site available in some state constitutes at least a virtual presence. But you don't want a retailer subject to 50 different sets of legal requirements, so there have to be limits. Seems like the only fair solution is to apply a uniform VAT. I'd certainly opt for that if it meant a reduction in income taxes.
how does going from ONE nagging wife to TWO nagging wives make for longevity??
What I can't figure. Some of the ancient kings who had a hundred, two hundred wives all living in the same palace. With the dorm effect, could you imagine that? No wonder they fought so many wars back then. 200 wives all on the rag at the same time, I'd be ready to go to war. Who's with me?
Outsource providers - you get what you deserve
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My Job Went To India
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· Score: 1
Maybe it's just been my experience, but the projects I've seen utilizing outsource developers have been almost universally bad. The foreign outsource providers have a small core here, but the heavy lifting is done in India or Pakistan. The work I've seen with my own eyes has been pretty crappy, though YMMV. The sales guys and project managers are usually pretty good, but the coding quality can vary widely. When I say "vary widely" I really mean it can range from average to horrible. The funny thing is, when I point out coding issues, places where they didn't follow good design or where they did something really badly, the project manager runs back around to our CEO and whines that I'm being xenophobic. But I despise poorly constructed and commented code regardless of its national origin.
If you're looking for.NET or Windows development, some of that work is adequate. But just that. The domestic contract providers are more consistent in the quality they deliver and you don't have to fight the language barrier, but their overhead is so high. I can't imagine, as easy as it is to fire people these days, that paying that overhead can be worth it.
After getting into a position to make those decisions, my opinion is companies going low-cost outsource deserve what they get. Unfortunately, most companies are going to care more about the up front costs instead of either the build quality or time to market. And that gets worse in bigger companies, especially if there's a merger or acquisition going on. PM's can find their local dev's cut loose and get saddled with an outsource developer. That would suck.
If you're worried about your job, the only job security you'll ever have is if you run your own company. I did that for a while. Ironically, that led to this job. Move up by moving out really does work. For sure you're never going to get anywhere stuck in a cubicle.
That could mean perl but usually we think of that as being a fancy bash script with perhaps a bit of database interaction rather than a platform for writing server-side (or even client-side?) apps.
I can only speak to the reasons for going with PHP and JAVA in our company. For one, PHP is really maturing as a development language, JAVA is well supported, and maybe over the years I kept running into some of that poorly designed PERL and it left a bad taste.
Really, it's more a matter of keeping the development environment from getting cluttered with more languages we have to support. PHP and JAVA will do everything we need, so why would I want to add PERL to the mix? Or Python, Ruby, ColdFusion,.NET or anything else? Because maybe one of those will do this or that task a little easier? That's not a compelling reason for me. Every new language we add is another item I have to add to our job listings and narrows my potential pool of candidates. And the more obscure the language, the more bizarre personality it seems to attract. Not suggesting PERL coders are strange...well, maybe a little.:)
Really, I'm just trying to keep our platform as clean and simple as possible. The same reason I tend to avoid Microsoft products. Not only do you have to deal with the expense, but the complexity of the licensing and capacity planning. We can stand up LAMP capacity for the cost of the hardware and don't have to worry about running afoul of MS's byzantine licensing goat rope-o-rama.
Groklaw is an example of the power of open source
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Grokking SCO's Demise
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And SCO is a nice pelt to hang on the fence for anyone getting similar ideas. The SCO case was a stereotype of every piece of misinformation MS had ever put out about Linux and they got crushed. It's also a good example for companies thinking about getting in bed with Microsoft, which financed this whole charade. I wonder if Sun will ever live it down that they were part of the clown posse?
IBM showed a lot of foresight and got to dish out a little payback to MS over the OS2 incident. You can't buy that kind of advertising and then using it to tweak Redmond was priceless.
We ran into one of these "gotcha" features in hosted Gmail that's been giving me fits and it all started with a simple mistake. I misspelled a user name. You can change the spelling in the admin module, but it doesn't change the spelling in the contacts and the misspelling still showed up when she logged in. So I tried deleting the user name and recreating the account.
Big mistake.
When you delete a user name you can't recycle it for five days, which pushed us past our roll out date. Their crip work-around is creating a mailing list with that user name. But that has its own set of problems, especially when trying to migrate a large number of users. There's no support unless you get the premium edition. So now we're stuck in the position of paying for support on a service we're not certain will work for us. I'm not inclined to throw money at something to see if it will work when what we're already paying for is working.
Unfortunately, it was one of our key sales people who already had that account name on her business cards. Rolling without her is a non-starter.
It's frustrating because I'm the one who recommended Google and I feel really let down. It's a stupid problem that shouldn't exist in the first place. Even if there's a good reason for it, there should be a giant warning banner with a flashing red neon border warning you that deleting a user results in a five day lock out. Actually, it's been more than five days and I still can't recreate the account.
This one niggling little incident is making me rethink hosted applications. So, yeah, it does sort of benefit MS. Not in our case, we're using hosted SendMail instead of Exchange, but if this type of "feature" deters other companies already using MS solutions, then yeah. Who wants to take a chance on looking bad? There will still be outages with any solution but no one gets fired for recommending MSFT. There's a certain period of time that users are looking for an excuse not to like a new service, just because it's different. If you can get past that time frame, then a small outage can be overlooked. But those first few months have to be smooth. Maybe not flawless, but close to it.
It would almost be better if the free version was a trial and corporate users could get support from day one. This is just maddening. Shape up, Google.
a controversial 'emergency' rule change by the Department of Homeland Security to permit foreign students to work continuously in the US for two-and-a-half years after graduation without an H-1B visa.
A good percentage of you here on/. voted for those chuckleheads. So big surprise when they turn around and dick you by making it easier for your employer to replace you with someone making cardboard slum wages. And even if the next president cuts it off the day they take office, the people already here will be able to stay to middle of their term.
Nice.
Funny how the rules on the war on terror manage to line up with corporate interests, isn't it? Just hilarious.
Arguably one of the worst leaders in the tech industry. It's no wonder his technology positions don't make any sense. That's like picking Jeffery Skilling as an energy advisor...wait, he doesn't need him, he's got Phil Gramm. With the added advantage that Gramm isn't in federal prison...yet.
Let's just pick the most incompetent, corrupt people from every industry we can find and bring them together in one party. It's no wonder his positions on technology don't make any sense. A classic case of the problem dictating the solution.
Apparently to make this work NASA will have to hit the opening of a thermal vent that's less than 2 meters across at the end of a canyon lined with defensive gun placements.
I've had Netflix for almost 2 years now and still love the service.
I've been a member a little longer than that and still like the service. Only a couple minor peeves. The Mist was on top of my rental que for months after it was released. It was getting to be an inside joke.
They suspended my service briefly one time when they got in a snit with my bank. Both sides blamed the other for the charge not going through.
On the other side of the coin I lost two movies when the maid stashed them in with some papers. I reported them missing, they never said a word about it. We sent them back...8 months later when we moved. Another one reported missing turned up in a jacket pocket the next fall.
Is it possible for the fire to travel between the walls down into a finished basement?
Usually it goes up but yeah, especially in older homes. That's what the horizontal braces between studs are supposed to do in modern construction. Keeps a fire downstairs from using the wall space between studs as a chimney to the attic.
To answer your question about our thermal cam...from the outside, it depends on the home construction and how well it's insulated. Usually no. And through a concrete basement wall, not at all.
It does probably make sense they were going to cut the breaker to the outlet, just to be safe. In older homes the breaker boxes are usually in the basement. Few homes here have basements or are that old. And if you see a large quantity of chemical, even if it's not obviously hazardous, it would be SOP to report it.
I'd still maintain the responding agencies may have over-reacted but after thinking it over, I'm not certain they would have many options. In densely populated areas your discretionary threshold will be a lot lower. Out here, where it's a 1/2 mile to the neighbors house and we're dealing with someone we've known for years, we can exercise a little more flexibility. It's not really fair to compare how we have handled similar situations. It still sucks that people doing things off-normal but not threatening get swept up in the same mechanisms as people being really stupid, or doing something truly dangerous and potentially life-threatening. You can always escalate the level of response but it's tough to unring the bell when you call in the cavalry.
I wonder if the language is any indication of their understanding of the science behind this case?
The anthrax attacks are what the administration used to make the Iraq connection. John McCain himself was one of the people shopping that idea around the news media. You think this bunch would worry about a few post office employees or mail room people dying? So, yeah, the flask is as convenient as it is inexplicable. Dude committing suicide before the feds had a chance to question him, equally convenient. That the politicized Justice Dept. spent so much time stubbornly pursuing the wrong suspect, convenient. Now all this evidence that looks so obvious in one convenient package. That all the agents working this case in the last seven years either didn't see or didn't put together? Talk about straining credibility.
Incompetence raised to a high enough level is indistinguishable from malice. We know they're incompetent and it certainly isn't straining credibility to think this bunch would be capable of doing it deliberately.
You're exactly right, we pull the meter. And dispatch calls the electric utility and let's them know we did the disconnect so the owner doesn't get charged for it. Digging around trying to find a breaker box is nuts.
But I suppose it's just possible they wanted to check the breaker box or the lines in between. It's still peculiar. We try not to have any more people in a home than necessary. We have a thermal camera that can see through walls, and we image the area of the fire and if there's no evidence of a hot spot we run the smoke ejector a few minutes, check the thermal cam again, pack our gear and go home. We don't poke around in the house, don't spray water if we can use a dry chemical extinguisher and if we have to spray water, we use as little as possible.
The last kitchen fire we had the lady had the water mopped up before we left. Got a little dirt on the living room carpet from the hose but we didn't make a big mess. We've been on mutual aid on calls the other department had their hose open while they were walking through the front door. We don't do that. Why ruin the drywall in the living room for a grease fire in the kitchen?
by doing things like this the firefighters are jeopardizing this trust and placing the ability to protect the public safety in danger.
I'm a volunteer fireman and I can tell you all there have been briefings from Homeland Security and other agencies about looking for suspicious materials, not all of it terrorism related. And it's not just us. Mail carriers, delivery drivers, med techs, utility crews, anyone who might be on your property or in your house on any occasional basis.
We do have to be alert for drug labs, but most of the times the cops find them first and have their own hazmat teams.
My question would be if they were working a fire in a window unit on the second floor, what were they doing in the basement?
The rules for household chemicals aren't always real clear. Sounds like the state and local officials over-reacted. Unless there's a specific regulation that covers some compound he was using, it appears like his property was seized without due process. Unless we've taken another step down the road to a police state I don't think you can just declare something looks dangerous and confiscate it. In which case I could walk into anyones garage and start seizing lawn fertilizer, gasoline, paint thinner, ammonia, insecticides and anything else you might normally have around the house. All that stuff looks dangerous to me.
You can use BetterMail for a secure connection to Gmail, but Google still has all your messages and they're unencrypted when they go out from there. In this case store and forward is not your friend.
You could use a simple encryption tool like this one. It's a little less difficult than a system that requires a key exchange but it's also less secure. And there's still a decryption process. Copy, paste, type pass phrase, read.
If there's something that's easy to implement and lets you exchange encrypted messages with other email clients that don't support your encryption scheme, then I don't know about it. Far as I know you have to make a decision to encrypt or not every time you send a message. When you're sending to a compatible client you can at least encrypt the body of the message, but as far as I'm aware, that's the state of the art.
Slashdot Mirror
So developers are using Linux, and supporting it themselves, and execs are using Macs.
I brought Ubuntu with me on day one on the new job. It's getting a warm reception. I tried suggesting Macs for the other execs and sales staff but they didn't want them. Some of the sales people want to stay with their Windows laptops, which is fine, we expected to support those anyway. The other execs surprised me by opting to move to Linux instead, even our CEO. I thought they'd be more amped about getting Macbooks, but no one really wanted one. That was a surprise.
For some of the older IBM laptops we're experimenting with PuppyLinux. Seeing if we can get some more mileage out of them. But Ubuntu is getting a warm reception. Even caught one of the staff borging the Windows box in the flex work area with a live CD. Hiring hasn't been any problem. I've managed to find some blue chip Linux/PHP developers for about the same as we were paying the Windows only staff. Maybe the current job market played into the ease of that transition, but we had some really good candidates to pick from.
Moving off Exchange was a little more choppy but we got it done. There was one Gmail gotcha that delayed our roll out for a week but we got past that. Another surprise was after people uploaded their old messages to Gmail was how fast they dumped Outlook. We had planned on supporting Outlook but most everyone switched over to the Gmail interface on their own, a few had already been using Gmail anyway.
Linux is completely capable as a desktop OS in the working world. We have saved quite a lot of money just in licensing fees. Not only could we find skilled Linux people, we found them at competitive local market rates. Where we had three Windows developers, today we have one OSS developer and we're still meeting our development targets. Now we're moving on replacing services running on the remaining Windows servers so we can retire them. The savings are significant. It's a big win for me, although at this point it's picking off the low hanging fruit. Still, it's some good fruit. We're standing up servers for the cost of the hardware. Rolling out some pretty sophisticated services for the cost of the developer. Our next area of consolidation will be cutting loose some of the outsource providers and moving some of those services back in house. You can do things like that when you're not blowing your budget on Microsoft licensing.
The chuckleheads with the rifles aside, there were Republican protests at the Democratic convention, why weren't they arrested and photographed? The same thing happened in '04. The FBI started intimidating political activists. And now we find out the FBI was behind the raids in St. Paul.
There have been rumors going back a long way that Rove had friendlies in the FBI that were using police powers in primarily political investigations.
Don't forget that a lot of /. readers supported this administration and are, at least in my mind, partially responsible for the thuggish, heavy-handed tactics our government feels it can employ with near impunity. Guess you could call it trickle down stupidity. But many of you voted for the bozos at the top. If they keep to their usual form they'll either blame the victims or blame Clinton.
Don't hold the trade show there next year. Don't reward stupidity by continuing to patronize them.
And, yes, I realize as an American saying that I'm inviting the same reaction to our thuggish behavior.
Moral of the story: go over your bank statements line-by-line every month, and question anything that looks funny.
I check my bank account for unusual charges daily. I've only got one bill that can pull from our account and that's the local utility. They submit something like a bank draft every month. At least twice in three years I've gotten a call from my credit union when our water bill was unusually high and they wanted to confirm the amount. One of those turned out the utility misread our water meter.
The real moral of the story is monitor your accounts yourself regularly and stick with a small bank or credit union that knows you. JP Morgan Chase doesn't notice any but the top 1%-2% of their customers.
they litigate the party who exposes them for attempting fraud.
If they litigate, it would seem like the background research would become public record. Even if the court allowed it under seal, they can't keep it sealed forever. And when it becomes public record then the credit card companies come out looking really bad.
I'm disappointed Discovery didn't call their bluff. With the traffic the Mythbusters get someone would pick up the ad slots. The story of the suit would be advertising you can't buy. I'd do it.
Liberals, on the other hand, most likely will jump at you and tell you how wrong you are.
We tried it your way and what we got was eight of the most disastrous years in the history of this nation. They got a right to be pissed off. If we were the country we used to be they'd be out finding out who voted for Bush and burn their houses down. So count yourself lucky if they do is get a little miffed.
And I wish I had a nickel for every dogmatic, right wing know-it-all willing to go out of their way to tell me, and anyone else they disagree with, what they "need" to do.
We tried things your way and it was a train wreck. Step aside.
Because of "intelligence" agency surveillance in the U.S., commerce in the U.S. is no longer safe. So companies are taking their business elsewhere.
I think it's even more basic than that. If you act like a dick, your friends start to avoid you. Claim the right to snoop any data you want without due process and organizations will route around you or encrypt their traffic.
In the old days other countries could count on the US to do the right thing and play by the rules. Since we've thrown the rule book away we've started losing friends and other countries don't trust us to do the right thing anymore. It's really pretty simple.
I keep coming back to the fact that we didn't need all this mass espionage. We knew about the 9/11 hijackers, we just didn't act on what we knew. We knew without spying on Americans, we knew without the Patriot Act, without DHS, NSL's or any number of the dickish, thugish institutions and practices we've wasted billions on since then. And those laws aren't being used for terrorism investigations, they're being for any investigation. I listened to a DHS spokesmen on TV claim that any criminal activity can be used to support terrorism, so they're using those tools even for fairly minor crimes.
We're witnessing nothing less than the sad unwinding of a great nation.
I like it better than the liberals who always think of others are wrong or "stupid" if they don't share the same thought as they do.
Oh, really? You mean like calling someone unpatriotic if they didn't support the war in Iraq? Suggesting they don't support the troops if they have an issue with the chimp in charge. Or calling them a flip-flopper if they reached a different decision based on new information? Or baby killers for having a different view of abortion, or "blame America first" if they happen to point out how our thugish, dickish behavior comes across on the world stage. You mean like that? Because you seem perfectly comfortable with that behavior. Or is it just calling people "stupid" that's off limits?
Stupid is as stupid does.
Evangelicals love her because she is so firmly pro-life, but she fights her with party all the time.
Someone care to explain why that comment in a political discussion constitutes a troll? She is firmly pro-life and conflicts with her party on corruption and fiscal responsibility. She'll appeal to the base but not the party leadership.
The commerce clause certainly prevents a state from imposing tariffs on imports from other states.
Then maybe the solution is something like a VAT. A flat tax applied to all online purchases that gets turned back to the recipients state. That way it's not an individual state imposing a tax tariff on goods and services and the states don't get aced out of internet purchases simply because the vendor is located in another state.
It all starts out with good intentions, doesn't it? I'm sure what would happen is the federal government would start collecting part of the VAT, just to cover their expenses. The hold back portion would go up and up over time. And then they'd start putting strings on the VAT money turned back to states in an effort to drive federal policy down to the state level, ala highway funds.
But other than the tendency of government to act irresponsibly with any type of power it seems like a workable idea. I think you could argue a web site available in some state constitutes at least a virtual presence. But you don't want a retailer subject to 50 different sets of legal requirements, so there have to be limits. Seems like the only fair solution is to apply a uniform VAT. I'd certainly opt for that if it meant a reduction in income taxes.
how does going from ONE nagging wife to TWO nagging wives make for longevity??
What I can't figure. Some of the ancient kings who had a hundred, two hundred wives all living in the same palace. With the dorm effect, could you imagine that? No wonder they fought so many wars back then. 200 wives all on the rag at the same time, I'd be ready to go to war. Who's with me?
Maybe it's just been my experience, but the projects I've seen utilizing outsource developers have been almost universally bad. The foreign outsource providers have a small core here, but the heavy lifting is done in India or Pakistan. The work I've seen with my own eyes has been pretty crappy, though YMMV. The sales guys and project managers are usually pretty good, but the coding quality can vary widely. When I say "vary widely" I really mean it can range from average to horrible. The funny thing is, when I point out coding issues, places where they didn't follow good design or where they did something really badly, the project manager runs back around to our CEO and whines that I'm being xenophobic. But I despise poorly constructed and commented code regardless of its national origin.
If you're looking for .NET or Windows development, some of that work is adequate. But just that. The domestic contract providers are more consistent in the quality they deliver and you don't have to fight the language barrier, but their overhead is so high. I can't imagine, as easy as it is to fire people these days, that paying that overhead can be worth it.
After getting into a position to make those decisions, my opinion is companies going low-cost outsource deserve what they get. Unfortunately, most companies are going to care more about the up front costs instead of either the build quality or time to market. And that gets worse in bigger companies, especially if there's a merger or acquisition going on. PM's can find their local dev's cut loose and get saddled with an outsource developer. That would suck.
If you're worried about your job, the only job security you'll ever have is if you run your own company. I did that for a while. Ironically, that led to this job. Move up by moving out really does work. For sure you're never going to get anywhere stuck in a cubicle.
That could mean perl but usually we think of that as being a fancy bash script with perhaps a bit of database interaction rather than a platform for writing server-side (or even client-side?) apps.
I can only speak to the reasons for going with PHP and JAVA in our company. For one, PHP is really maturing as a development language, JAVA is well supported, and maybe over the years I kept running into some of that poorly designed PERL and it left a bad taste.
Really, it's more a matter of keeping the development environment from getting cluttered with more languages we have to support. PHP and JAVA will do everything we need, so why would I want to add PERL to the mix? Or Python, Ruby, ColdFusion, .NET or anything else? Because maybe one of those will do this or that task a little easier? That's not a compelling reason for me. Every new language we add is another item I have to add to our job listings and narrows my potential pool of candidates. And the more obscure the language, the more bizarre personality it seems to attract. Not suggesting PERL coders are strange...well, maybe a little. :)
Really, I'm just trying to keep our platform as clean and simple as possible. The same reason I tend to avoid Microsoft products. Not only do you have to deal with the expense, but the complexity of the licensing and capacity planning. We can stand up LAMP capacity for the cost of the hardware and don't have to worry about running afoul of MS's byzantine licensing goat rope-o-rama.
And SCO is a nice pelt to hang on the fence for anyone getting similar ideas. The SCO case was a stereotype of every piece of misinformation MS had ever put out about Linux and they got crushed. It's also a good example for companies thinking about getting in bed with Microsoft, which financed this whole charade. I wonder if Sun will ever live it down that they were part of the clown posse?
IBM showed a lot of foresight and got to dish out a little payback to MS over the OS2 incident. You can't buy that kind of advertising and then using it to tweak Redmond was priceless.
We ran into one of these "gotcha" features in hosted Gmail that's been giving me fits and it all started with a simple mistake. I misspelled a user name. You can change the spelling in the admin module, but it doesn't change the spelling in the contacts and the misspelling still showed up when she logged in. So I tried deleting the user name and recreating the account.
Big mistake.
When you delete a user name you can't recycle it for five days, which pushed us past our roll out date. Their crip work-around is creating a mailing list with that user name. But that has its own set of problems, especially when trying to migrate a large number of users. There's no support unless you get the premium edition. So now we're stuck in the position of paying for support on a service we're not certain will work for us. I'm not inclined to throw money at something to see if it will work when what we're already paying for is working.
Unfortunately, it was one of our key sales people who already had that account name on her business cards. Rolling without her is a non-starter.
It's frustrating because I'm the one who recommended Google and I feel really let down. It's a stupid problem that shouldn't exist in the first place. Even if there's a good reason for it, there should be a giant warning banner with a flashing red neon border warning you that deleting a user results in a five day lock out. Actually, it's been more than five days and I still can't recreate the account.
This one niggling little incident is making me rethink hosted applications. So, yeah, it does sort of benefit MS. Not in our case, we're using hosted SendMail instead of Exchange, but if this type of "feature" deters other companies already using MS solutions, then yeah. Who wants to take a chance on looking bad? There will still be outages with any solution but no one gets fired for recommending MSFT. There's a certain period of time that users are looking for an excuse not to like a new service, just because it's different. If you can get past that time frame, then a small outage can be overlooked. But those first few months have to be smooth. Maybe not flawless, but close to it.
It would almost be better if the free version was a trial and corporate users could get support from day one. This is just maddening. Shape up, Google.
a controversial 'emergency' rule change by the Department of Homeland Security to permit foreign students to work continuously in the US for two-and-a-half years after graduation without an H-1B visa.
A good percentage of you here on /. voted for those chuckleheads. So big surprise when they turn around and dick you by making it easier for your employer to replace you with someone making cardboard slum wages. And even if the next president cuts it off the day they take office, the people already here will be able to stay to middle of their term.
Nice.
Funny how the rules on the war on terror manage to line up with corporate interests, isn't it? Just hilarious.
Arguably one of the worst leaders in the tech industry. It's no wonder his technology positions don't make any sense. That's like picking Jeffery Skilling as an energy advisor...wait, he doesn't need him, he's got Phil Gramm. With the added advantage that Gramm isn't in federal prison...yet.
Let's just pick the most incompetent, corrupt people from every industry we can find and bring them together in one party. It's no wonder his positions on technology don't make any sense. A classic case of the problem dictating the solution.
Apparently to make this work NASA will have to hit the opening of a thermal vent that's less than 2 meters across at the end of a canyon lined with defensive gun placements.
Many NASAians died getting us this information.
I've had Netflix for almost 2 years now and still love the service.
I've been a member a little longer than that and still like the service. Only a couple minor peeves. The Mist was on top of my rental que for months after it was released. It was getting to be an inside joke.
They suspended my service briefly one time when they got in a snit with my bank. Both sides blamed the other for the charge not going through.
On the other side of the coin I lost two movies when the maid stashed them in with some papers. I reported them missing, they never said a word about it. We sent them back...8 months later when we moved. Another one reported missing turned up in a jacket pocket the next fall.
For years of service that's a pretty good record.
Is it possible for the fire to travel between the walls down into a finished basement?
Usually it goes up but yeah, especially in older homes. That's what the horizontal braces between studs are supposed to do in modern construction. Keeps a fire downstairs from using the wall space between studs as a chimney to the attic.
To answer your question about our thermal cam...from the outside, it depends on the home construction and how well it's insulated. Usually no. And through a concrete basement wall, not at all.
It does probably make sense they were going to cut the breaker to the outlet, just to be safe. In older homes the breaker boxes are usually in the basement. Few homes here have basements or are that old. And if you see a large quantity of chemical, even if it's not obviously hazardous, it would be SOP to report it.
I'd still maintain the responding agencies may have over-reacted but after thinking it over, I'm not certain they would have many options. In densely populated areas your discretionary threshold will be a lot lower. Out here, where it's a 1/2 mile to the neighbors house and we're dealing with someone we've known for years, we can exercise a little more flexibility. It's not really fair to compare how we have handled similar situations. It still sucks that people doing things off-normal but not threatening get swept up in the same mechanisms as people being really stupid, or doing something truly dangerous and potentially life-threatening. You can always escalate the level of response but it's tough to unring the bell when you call in the cavalry.
these pictures actually have quite alot of land below
So, where are the impact craters?
I wonder if the language is any indication of their understanding of the science behind this case?
The anthrax attacks are what the administration used to make the Iraq connection. John McCain himself was one of the people shopping that idea around the news media. You think this bunch would worry about a few post office employees or mail room people dying? So, yeah, the flask is as convenient as it is inexplicable. Dude committing suicide before the feds had a chance to question him, equally convenient. That the politicized Justice Dept. spent so much time stubbornly pursuing the wrong suspect, convenient. Now all this evidence that looks so obvious in one convenient package. That all the agents working this case in the last seven years either didn't see or didn't put together? Talk about straining credibility.
Incompetence raised to a high enough level is indistinguishable from malice. We know they're incompetent and it certainly isn't straining credibility to think this bunch would be capable of doing it deliberately.
You're exactly right, we pull the meter. And dispatch calls the electric utility and let's them know we did the disconnect so the owner doesn't get charged for it. Digging around trying to find a breaker box is nuts.
But I suppose it's just possible they wanted to check the breaker box or the lines in between. It's still peculiar. We try not to have any more people in a home than necessary. We have a thermal camera that can see through walls, and we image the area of the fire and if there's no evidence of a hot spot we run the smoke ejector a few minutes, check the thermal cam again, pack our gear and go home. We don't poke around in the house, don't spray water if we can use a dry chemical extinguisher and if we have to spray water, we use as little as possible.
The last kitchen fire we had the lady had the water mopped up before we left. Got a little dirt on the living room carpet from the hose but we didn't make a big mess. We've been on mutual aid on calls the other department had their hose open while they were walking through the front door. We don't do that. Why ruin the drywall in the living room for a grease fire in the kitchen?
by doing things like this the firefighters are jeopardizing this trust and placing the ability to protect the public safety in danger.
I'm a volunteer fireman and I can tell you all there have been briefings from Homeland Security and other agencies about looking for suspicious materials, not all of it terrorism related. And it's not just us. Mail carriers, delivery drivers, med techs, utility crews, anyone who might be on your property or in your house on any occasional basis.
We do have to be alert for drug labs, but most of the times the cops find them first and have their own hazmat teams.
My question would be if they were working a fire in a window unit on the second floor, what were they doing in the basement?
The rules for household chemicals aren't always real clear. Sounds like the state and local officials over-reacted. Unless there's a specific regulation that covers some compound he was using, it appears like his property was seized without due process. Unless we've taken another step down the road to a police state I don't think you can just declare something looks dangerous and confiscate it. In which case I could walk into anyones garage and start seizing lawn fertilizer, gasoline, paint thinner, ammonia, insecticides and anything else you might normally have around the house. All that stuff looks dangerous to me.
You can use BetterMail for a secure connection to Gmail, but Google still has all your messages and they're unencrypted when they go out from there. In this case store and forward is not your friend.
You could use a simple encryption tool like this one. It's a little less difficult than a system that requires a key exchange but it's also less secure. And there's still a decryption process. Copy, paste, type pass phrase, read.
If there's something that's easy to implement and lets you exchange encrypted messages with other email clients that don't support your encryption scheme, then I don't know about it. Far as I know you have to make a decision to encrypt or not every time you send a message. When you're sending to a compatible client you can at least encrypt the body of the message, but as far as I'm aware, that's the state of the art.