Back in the 80's I had an analyst working for me that seemed to become more unstable as each day passed.
We had a big project that he was working on and making great progress but then he started feeling like the software he created was his and not the company's.
I talked it over with the regional VP as we did not have any reason to fire this guy but yet feeling more flaky with him all of the time.
Plus replacing him would set the project back months.
So I went in each evening (only lived a mile from the office) and made a backup of the files just in case.
The project was successful and in retrospect making the backups kept me sane and kept the pressure off of him that he would feel if I was nervous or watching him too closely.
It seems we attract those things we fear.
Dealing with brilliant but somewhat unstable (supposedly) individuals is a tricky balance and occasionally the situation can tip in the wrong direction.
Guess it is like the ship full of yoyo's that sank 600 times.
"I, and the reflection of that who I am, too will pass away"
The "I am" part is eternal. The "I" part is the personality and somewhat changes each lifetime. At best we get a dim reflection of who we truly are in each lifetime.
I do believe though that Michael DeBakey most likely had a reflection as strong as anyone on Earth for he was truly remarkable in all aspects.
I am sure that many identify with what you are saying.
I though tend to detach from what seems to be the unfairness of life. Why does someone get 99 years and another only 18 years... the truth is that there is no true understanding.
The Dalai Lama said (paraphrased)
My friends will pass away
My enemies will pass away
My happiness and dreams will pass away
My sorrows and failures will pass away
I, and the reflection of that who I am, too will pass away
Along the same lines... I was raised in Ohio and lived on State Route 69.
When i got home from the military in the 60's the route had been changed to State Route 235.
Mom said it was changed because the college students were stealing all of the road signs along the highway but she did not know why they would be doing that.
That is a good point about not listing everything that requires backing up.
I was on a customer's site one day in Detroit showing a new engineer about installing a mini-computer from the company we were working for at the time.
On another mini-computer located about 50 feet away a customer did a sector by sector backup to another disk and in the process copied the wrong way and lost all of their information that represented two years work.
He immediately panicked and looked around to see who he could blame the error on and decided to blame us... it was really pathetic because the other workers there knew he did it but he could not bring himself to admit it.
We finished the installation and left so I never did here what happened to him.
He was a doctor that specialized in bone deterioration and apparently the data could not be reproduced or re-keyed for some reason.
"At my job they're replacing a bunch of Tandem code that runs some of our core IT infrastructure with Wintel servers. It makes me ill to even be near the work, because they're taking something that just quietly works and "upgrading" it to something that doesn't."
I feel your pain. Back in the 90's I did some programming for the Tandem non-stops systems. They were great systems.
For those unaware... it had two of everything as in "tandem" and would switch over if a failure was detected. Lots of banks use these systems and they were literally non-stops. 100% uptime!!!
I think that I knew this at one time but had forgotten. Thanks for sharing it.
Here is the last paragraph of the article from Snopes about Laura;
"She was barely 17 and she had taken the life of a friend. She has since carried the weight of this, and it changed her, at least according to those who knew her before and after. Only rarely has she spoken of this with the press (although she has often been asked), but even on those occasions her answers have been oblique, almost as if she cannot bear to think of it, let alone speak of it."
Expect the beta on SourceForge or FreshMeat in a couple of weeks. I imagine by now there are at least three different projects begun since this hit Slashdot. Go Open Source!
An eighteen year old girl from my town who is the valedictorian of her senior class was driving and was also text messaging. She went left of center and hit an older couple head-on killing the wife immediately and the husband died a few days later.
So here she is... having everything her way (having to choose between Harvard and Yale) and suddenly she is facing the awesome responsibility of killing two individuals through neglect... something that was preventable.
Yeah... these stories are anecdotal... never-the-less one may learn from others bad judgments and experiences.
The couple are dead. She is brilliant having taken calculus in the 7th grade... and yet her cleverness can not restore these two humans back to life.
While an engineer at McDonnell Douglas each pay grade had a certain size office. If you get promoted then you might get the bigger credenza, a thicker rug, the walls might be moved out two feet, a bigger desk... that was to keep harmony with the jealous types of somebody's office being bigger/better than another person's. All based on pay grade.
Several maintenance men were paid full time to keep this stupidity going.
Keep in mind that the data is from Sumerian tablets estimated to be approximately 6000 years old or perhaps even older.
The crux of the story is that a sun with its planets passed through our solar system. This sun did not have enough energy to burn so was a dwarf. The Sumerians called this sun Marduk(also known as Nibiru).
Now Earth was not yet one of the planets of our sun but there was one called Tiamet that resided in the orbit where the asteroid belt is now located.
Marduk did not hit Tiamet directly but the energy of passing so close to the planet and the passing of two other planets of Marduk cause Tiamet to split into two halves. Another one of Marduk's planets named "North Wind" did hit one half of Tiamet and deflected it into what is now the Earth's orbit.
A moon of Tiamet named "Kingu" followed that same half of Tiamet that has became what is now Earth. Kingu is now our moon. Other moons of Tiamet are the comets that pass near. These moons were scattered by Marduk's attraction to them.
In addition Marduk's attractive energies destroyed the other half of Tiamet and created a bracelet of rubble in the orbit where Tiamet originally occupied and this we call the asteroid belt.
The interesting thing is that the Bible (old testament) correlates much of this information that the Sumerians originally put together. Perhaps the Sumerians were the original source of the data.
Another interesting thing is that science is slowly but surely confirming all that was written by the Sumerians including ALL of the planets (including Pluto) which was known about in Sumerian days. It is as if science is slowly catching up with the ancient knowledge.
The book is called "The Twelfth Planet" and is a really interesting read. Obviously I can not provide all of the explanation and insight here in a post as the book is 438 pages in length.
My father-in-law had his license to fly Cessna size aircraft and would always let someone know his flight plan in case something went wrong. Fortunately nothing did when he was at the controls but he had a ton of stories about others who made mistakes and either paid or nearly paid for them with their lives.
It could have been as simple as a heart attack for there is no doubt about it that Steve was very well trained and could react to emergencies most professionally... and yet not to tell someone where he was going (in the sparse unforgiving area he would be flying in) was a mistake that could only have negative effect on his survivability.
I, like many slashdotters here, spent many hours looking at the small maps provided and indicating if a wreck was observed. There were three wrecks in the photos I was given to search... unfortunately none were Steve's. There is not even a good sense in where he might had been heading so that more pinpointing technology could be employed.
I do understand about technology failure for i have worked in that arena since 1962 and traditionally the pass phrase is that if anything can go wrong then it will... and typically in the most critical manner possible.
However it always takes two things to create a problem. As an example one does not need to have a spare tire unless a flat occurs, nor is it necessary to have a fire extinguisher unless a fire breaks out... the trick is that we usually can not determine when these things will occur and so we prepare just in case.
My point is that Steve did not prepare as well as he might have prepared and so the possible zone for searching was immense.
Eventually his plane will be found and the location in which it is found will tell a big story about where he was going and what he was doing and how the accident occurred to begin with.
"Can you find what I think is unusual about my sig? I will posit that you cannot."
Most common letter "E" not used.
I used to live in Sedona Arizona and people were always climbing up the red rocks and not being able to get down. It is always easier going up because of hand-holds and moving more slowly against gravity.
I rescued many individuals stuck at the top of Bell Rock or lost in the maze of canyons.
One time an EMT guy from Michigan broke his leg at dusk on a ridge in Boynton Canyon. The initial rescue squad (2 guys) did not know how to get to the top so I took one up while the other was organizing the stretcher on a bicyle wheel and getting additional help.
This guy Steve Fossett seemed to have a death wish with no flight plan, no beacon, no emergency calling... What was he thinking? Perhaps that he snatched himself from the jaws of death so many times that this would be just one more? Tempting fate can and does get you killed.
In one way it is refreshing to hear a CEO describe in truth what is going on whether one agrees with him/her or not. Usually a CEO stands behind innuendos and words with double meanings to avoid a head on collision. Not so with this one apparently.
It happens that I believe that all should have equal access but then I do not run an ISP. It seems clear that multiple levels of service can be commanded by varying levels of payments. Sort of like steak or hamburger.
It will be interesting to see how all of this finally works out.
I heard that the supervisors in charge of building submarines had to be on board the first time it submerged for the same reason... higher quality. When your own neck is on the line then the subtle mistakes seem to matter more.
There is a lot that can go wrong with a traffic light system at an intersection so to prevent things like opposing Green lights there is a device installed that is called a "Conflict Monitor" and its sole purpose is to monitor hundreds of different conditions and put the traffic lights in "Flash" if something is detected as being wrong.
As an example if the "Yellow Light" is less than 2.7 seconds in length then the intersection goes into flash automatically and stays that way until it is reset manually and hopefully the problem is repaired.
Things like losing DC1 or DC2 power requires the intersection to go into flash within 125 ms.
Each intersection usually has the conflict monitor tested every six months so if an accident occurs there is a track record of the conflict monitor being tested for ALL possible combinations of faults.. these records are used in court to verify a properly operating intersection including "Walk" and "Don't Walk" signs.
Most conflict monitors can monitor 16 channels of data and compare on the fly if something is not right. The conflict monitor is only connected to monitor and has no control to operate the intersection... it is there simply to monitor for unsafe conditions and if detect put the intersection into Flash.
The times... they are a changin. I sense that those wired differently from the average human will find themselves sought after by many in the upcoming years. Whether it will be with guns or job offers... that I can not say.
I remember when I was in the 3rd grade (50's) and the teacher pulled down a map of Earth that showed the seven continents. I said "Looks Mrs. Beard, if you push all the continents together they fit together like a puzzle". Her retort was "Don't be ridiculous that is a stupid thing to say" and for years i thought my insights were stupid and kept them to myself.
I imagine that there are many who post here have also experienced put downs and learned just to keep quiet. Eventually though one is forced to speak out against the obvious... but i have always wondered why what i saw as obvious went un-noticed by the majority.
One of the reasons i read Slashdot is the insights posted by the posters here often are equal or exceed my own imagination. I do not get fed by any other site except this one in that manner. I believe that Slashdot is unique in that way with all of the intelligent and "wired differently" people who read and post here.
Your comments are appreciated and thanks for replying
There is nothing wrong with being able to think four or five steps ahead of others... except that others will disagree with what you say until it begins to occur then they will "You were right"... but then the next time they will will not have learned.
I imagine that there are lots of individuals on Slashdot who can envision more steps ahead than most others in their organization and it is painful sometimes to watch occur exactly what you predicted would occur.
Software design is especially like this... A department head says they want "only this" but you see as soon as they get "this" then the next evolutionary step is that they will want "that and other" also. I usually build it into the program with switches to keep it off until they ask for it.
Don't discredit yourself because you think out of the "box" so to speak. You may be wired differently for a purpose more than you can imagine.
Some say we are in Iraq because Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.
Some say we are in Iraq because Saddam was willing to take Euro's in place of dollars for his oil... The dollars we would never have had to pay back... we would have just printed more.
Some say we are in Iraq because it has a portal located in it that is a shortcut across the galaxy and we wanted to control it. The other portal being located in Israel.
Some say that great change is upon us and that we should simply allow for it.
You seem to be the kind that should just allow for the great change and be in a space of letting go and remembering why you are upon Earth at this time.
Some say that the changes will be horrific and yet others will find peace. Worry not about others for each will be where they are to be in the correct moments.
Know that greed is a fear... some individuals fear humanity, some fear death, some fear not having enough and there is no limit to any of this.
Don't fall into the trap of believing if others do it then it is OK for you to do it. Follow your heart for it alone knows the way.
Slashdot Mirror
Back in the 80's I had an analyst working for me that seemed to become more unstable as each day passed.
We had a big project that he was working on and making great progress but then he started feeling like the software he created was his and not the company's.
I talked it over with the regional VP as we did not have any reason to fire this guy but yet feeling more flaky with him all of the time.
Plus replacing him would set the project back months.
So I went in each evening (only lived a mile from the office) and made a backup of the files just in case.
The project was successful and in retrospect making the backups kept me sane and kept the pressure off of him that he would feel if I was nervous or watching him too closely.
It seems we attract those things we fear.
Dealing with brilliant but somewhat unstable (supposedly) individuals is a tricky balance and occasionally the situation can tip in the wrong direction.
Sounds like this case in SF tipped all the way.
Guess it is like the ship full of yoyo's that sank 600 times.
"I, and the reflection of that who I am, too will pass away"
The "I am" part is eternal. The "I" part is the personality and somewhat changes each lifetime.
At best we get a dim reflection of who we truly are in each lifetime.
I do believe though that Michael DeBakey most likely had a reflection as strong as anyone on Earth for he was truly remarkable in all aspects.
I am sure that many identify with what you are saying.
I though tend to detach from what seems to be the unfairness of life. Why does someone get 99 years and another only 18 years... the truth is that there is no true understanding.
The Dalai Lama said (paraphrased)
My friends will pass away
My enemies will pass away
My happiness and dreams will pass away
My sorrows and failures will pass away
I, and the reflection of that who I am, too will pass away
Along the same lines... I was raised in Ohio and lived on State Route 69.
When i got home from the military in the 60's the route had been changed to State Route 235.
Mom said it was changed because the college students were stealing all of the road signs along the highway but she did not know why they would be doing that.
3rd grade was the best three years of my life.
That is a good point about not listing everything that requires backing up.
I was on a customer's site one day in Detroit showing a new engineer about installing a mini-computer from the company we were working for at the time.
On another mini-computer located about 50 feet away a customer did a sector by sector backup to another disk and in the process copied the wrong way and lost all of their information that represented two years work.
He immediately panicked and looked around to see who he could blame the error on and decided to blame us... it was really pathetic because the other workers there knew he did it but he could not bring himself to admit it.
We finished the installation and left so I never did here what happened to him.
He was a doctor that specialized in bone deterioration and apparently the data could not be reproduced or re-keyed for some reason.
"At my job they're replacing a bunch of Tandem code that runs some of our core IT infrastructure with Wintel servers. It makes me ill to even be near the work, because they're taking something that just quietly works and "upgrading" it to something that doesn't."
I feel your pain. Back in the 90's I did some programming for the Tandem non-stops systems. They were great systems.
For those unaware... it had two of everything as in "tandem" and would switch over if a failure was detected. Lots of banks use these systems and they were literally non-stops. 100% uptime!!!
I think that I knew this at one time but had forgotten. Thanks for sharing it.
Here is the last paragraph of the article from Snopes about Laura;
"She was barely 17 and she had taken the life of a friend. She has since carried the weight of this, and it changed her, at least according to those who knew her before and after. Only rarely has she spoken of this with the press (although she has often been asked), but even on those occasions her answers have been oblique, almost as if she cannot bear to think of it, let alone speak of it."
Expect the beta on SourceForge or FreshMeat in a couple of weeks. I imagine by now there are at least three different projects begun since this hit Slashdot. Go Open Source!
No chairs were harmed in the making of this presentation.
An eighteen year old girl from my town who is the valedictorian of her senior class was driving and was also text messaging. She went left of center and hit an older couple head-on killing the wife immediately and the husband died a few days later.
So here she is... having everything her way (having to choose between Harvard and Yale) and suddenly she is facing the awesome responsibility of killing two individuals through neglect... something that was preventable.
Yeah... these stories are anecdotal... never-the-less one may learn from others bad judgments and experiences.
The couple are dead. She is brilliant having taken calculus in the 7th grade... and yet her cleverness can not restore these two humans back to life.
It will haunt her for her entire life.
While an engineer at McDonnell Douglas each pay grade had a certain size office. If you get promoted then you might get the bigger credenza, a thicker rug, the walls might be moved out two feet, a bigger desk... that was to keep harmony with the jealous types of somebody's office being bigger/better than another person's. All based on pay grade.
Several maintenance men were paid full time to keep this stupidity going.
Keep in mind that the data is from Sumerian tablets estimated to be approximately 6000 years old or perhaps even older.
The crux of the story is that a sun with its planets passed through our solar system. This sun did not have enough energy to burn so was a dwarf. The Sumerians called this sun Marduk(also known as Nibiru).
Now Earth was not yet one of the planets of our sun but there was one called Tiamet that resided in the orbit where the asteroid belt is now located.
Marduk did not hit Tiamet directly but the energy of passing so close to the planet and the passing of two other planets of Marduk cause Tiamet to split into two halves. Another one of Marduk's planets named "North Wind" did hit one half of Tiamet and deflected it into what is now the Earth's orbit.
A moon of Tiamet named "Kingu" followed that same half of Tiamet that has became what is now Earth. Kingu is now our moon. Other moons of Tiamet are the comets that pass near. These moons were scattered by Marduk's attraction to them.
In addition Marduk's attractive energies destroyed the other half of Tiamet and created a bracelet of rubble in the orbit where Tiamet originally occupied and this we call the asteroid belt.
The interesting thing is that the Bible (old testament) correlates much of this information that the Sumerians originally put together. Perhaps the Sumerians were the original source of the data.
Another interesting thing is that science is slowly but surely confirming all that was written by the Sumerians including ALL of the planets (including Pluto) which was known about in Sumerian days. It is as if science is slowly catching up with the ancient knowledge.
The book is called "The Twelfth Planet" and is a really interesting read. Obviously I can not provide all of the explanation and insight here in a post as the book is 438 pages in length.
Thanks for the comprehensive reply
My father-in-law had his license to fly Cessna size aircraft and would always let someone know his flight plan in case something went wrong. Fortunately nothing did when he was at the controls but he had a ton of stories about others who made mistakes and either paid or nearly paid for them with their lives.
It could have been as simple as a heart attack for there is no doubt about it that Steve was very well trained and could react to emergencies most professionally... and yet not to tell someone where he was going (in the sparse unforgiving area he would be flying in) was a mistake that could only have negative effect on his survivability.
I, like many slashdotters here, spent many hours looking at the small maps provided and indicating if a wreck was observed. There were three wrecks in the photos I was given to search... unfortunately none were Steve's. There is not even a good sense in where he might had been heading so that more pinpointing technology could be employed.
I do understand about technology failure for i have worked in that arena since 1962 and traditionally the pass phrase is that if anything can go wrong then it will... and typically in the most critical manner possible.
However it always takes two things to create a problem. As an example one does not need to have a spare tire unless a flat occurs, nor is it necessary to have a fire extinguisher unless a fire breaks out... the trick is that we usually can not determine when these things will occur and so we prepare just in case.
My point is that Steve did not prepare as well as he might have prepared and so the possible zone for searching was immense.
Eventually his plane will be found and the location in which it is found will tell a big story about where he was going and what he was doing and how the accident occurred to begin with.
thanks again for your response
"Can you find what I think is unusual about my sig? I will posit that you cannot."
Most common letter "E" not used.
I used to live in Sedona Arizona and people were always climbing up the red rocks and not being able to get down. It is always easier going up because of hand-holds and moving more slowly against gravity.
I rescued many individuals stuck at the top of Bell Rock or lost in the maze of canyons.
One time an EMT guy from Michigan broke his leg at dusk on a ridge in Boynton Canyon. The initial rescue squad (2 guys) did not know how to get to the top so I took one up while the other was organizing the stretcher on a bicyle wheel and getting additional help.
This guy Steve Fossett seemed to have a death wish with no flight plan, no beacon, no emergency calling... What was he thinking? Perhaps that he snatched himself from the jaws of death so many times that this would be just one more? Tempting fate can and does get you killed.
In one way it is refreshing to hear a CEO describe in truth what is going on whether one agrees with him/her or not. Usually a CEO stands behind innuendos and words with double meanings to avoid a head on collision. Not so with this one apparently.
It happens that I believe that all should have equal access but then I do not run an ISP. It seems clear that multiple levels of service can be commanded by varying levels of payments. Sort of like steak or hamburger.
It will be interesting to see how all of this finally works out.
Your company has a great idea.
I heard that the supervisors in charge of building submarines had to be on board the first time it submerged for the same reason... higher quality. When your own neck is on the line then the subtle mistakes seem to matter more.
I thought Bush flew and landed a Navy Viking S3 not a F-22
There is a lot that can go wrong with a traffic light system at an intersection so to prevent things like opposing Green lights there is a device installed that is called a "Conflict Monitor" and its sole purpose is to monitor hundreds of different conditions and put the traffic lights in "Flash" if something is detected as being wrong.
As an example if the "Yellow Light" is less than 2.7 seconds in length then the intersection goes into flash automatically and stays that way until it is reset manually and hopefully the problem is repaired.
Things like losing DC1 or DC2 power requires the intersection to go into flash within 125 ms.
Each intersection usually has the conflict monitor tested every six months so if an accident occurs there is a track record of the conflict monitor being tested for ALL possible combinations of faults.. these records are used in court to verify a properly operating intersection including "Walk" and "Don't Walk" signs.
Most conflict monitors can monitor 16 channels of data and compare on the fly if something is not right. The conflict monitor is only connected to monitor and has no control to operate the intersection... it is there simply to monitor for unsafe conditions and if detect put the intersection into Flash.
.
Getting Carly out of HP improved a host of areas within HP including morale. Of course a 21 million dollar severance package didn't hurt her too much.
HP is back to producing again instead of in-fighting.
.
Nice Feedback
The times... they are a changin. I sense that those wired differently from the average human will find themselves sought after by many in the upcoming years. Whether it will be with guns or job offers... that I can not say.
I remember when I was in the 3rd grade (50's) and the teacher pulled down a map of Earth that showed the seven continents. I said "Looks Mrs. Beard, if you push all the continents together they fit together like a puzzle". Her retort was "Don't be ridiculous that is a stupid thing to say" and for years i thought my insights were stupid and kept them to myself.
I imagine that there are many who post here have also experienced put downs and learned just to keep quiet. Eventually though one is forced to speak out against the obvious... but i have always wondered why what i saw as obvious went un-noticed by the majority.
One of the reasons i read Slashdot is the insights posted by the posters here often are equal or exceed my own imagination. I do not get fed by any other site except this one in that manner. I believe that Slashdot is unique in that way with all of the intelligent and "wired differently" people who read and post here.
Your comments are appreciated and thanks for replying
There is nothing wrong with being able to think four or five steps ahead of others... except that others will disagree with what you say until it begins to occur then they will "You were right"... but then the next time they will will not have learned.
I imagine that there are lots of individuals on Slashdot who can envision more steps ahead than most others in their organization and it is painful sometimes to watch occur exactly what you predicted would occur.
Software design is especially like this... A department head says they want "only this" but you see as soon as they get "this" then the next evolutionary step is that they will want "that and other" also. I usually build it into the program with switches to keep it off until they ask for it.
Don't discredit yourself because you think out of the "box" so to speak. You may be wired differently for a purpose more than you can imagine.
No, this is the garden variety diet
Especially if you live in San Francisco
Some say we are in Iraq because Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.
Some say we are in Iraq because Saddam was willing to take Euro's in place of dollars for his oil... The dollars we would never have had to pay back... we would have just printed more.
Some say we are in Iraq because it has a portal located in it that is a shortcut across the galaxy and we wanted to control it. The other portal being located in Israel.
Some say that great change is upon us and that we should simply allow for it.
You seem to be the kind that should just allow for the great change and be in a space of letting go and remembering why you are upon Earth at this time.
Some say that the changes will be horrific and yet others will find peace. Worry not about others for each will be where they are to be in the correct moments.
Know that greed is a fear... some individuals fear humanity, some fear death, some fear not having enough and there is no limit to any of this.
Don't fall into the trap of believing if others do it then it is OK for you to do it. Follow your heart for it alone knows the way.