Still not solved the IP address issues and authentication issues and printer names/types/addresses.
Re:I didn't miss anything. Read the law.
on
The $54 Million Laptop
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Are you unable to comprehend what a law means? If the law says they have to cover it they have to cover it, no discussion. Tell your local cops that the speed limit law actually may not really mean you can't drive over the posted speed and watch them laff thier asses off and write you a ticket. She wins this point slam dunk.
As far as identity theft, as I recall there are laws in some states (CA is one) where if your data is lost the company has to offer you ID Theft protection, thats all they would have had to do. IBM (an ex-employer) lost a data tape with my employment records and even though the data on the tap was encrypted and you'd need a mainframe tape drive to read it they gave me a years worth of ID Theft protection.
Her point that BB could have settled this situation easily instead of jerking her around is perfectly valid. The lady deserves some payback for her lost time, her lost data, her lost music and possibly puntive damages as BB deliberately misled her about the status of her computer. Maybe 50K would do it, I don't know but the $54M did grab headlines, got her noticed, got 1000's of people to read her blog and gave BB a small black eye.
Bullsh*t. You been watching too much Hollywood crap. They'd have to have a ladder to reach the tiles, some way to cut the Cat 5 cable, put a connector on the end (non-trivial if fiber), then have to splice the router into the cable, set the router IPs to be on the same subnet as the bank (unless you know this you'll need a sniffer program to grab it). While they are doing this they can't cause a noticable outage and I doubt the banks DNS is going to give the laptop an IP without some kind of login and authentication. Plus you probably need to know what kind of printers they are running, thier IP addresss and/or name before you can get to them to install the Trojan/virus.
I'm one of them. I did embedded for many years, I loved it but 90% of the work was defense systems and it was so cyclical. And most of the projects were poorly managed over budget, software always got screwed for hardware. I got my MBA, left for Technology consulting and never went back. I get offers all the time for a 25-30% pay cut to go back. Seems to me that programmers who know C and Assembler and can write tight code, know OS internals, and can interface to hardware are almost as extinct as IBM mainframe COBOL commandos, so we should (by the forces of ecomonics) command an above market salary.
This was modded Insightful? How idiotic to Mod Econ 101 Theory as Insightful. The whole thread is off down some rat-hole.
Currency devaluation has nothing to do with the "upgrades" the US Telecomm system needs. This isn't $100B cash that is dumped on the market by the Federal Reserve, it would be the "investment" to get things to where they needed to be. And it wouldn't occur overnight either but over 3-5 years. $100B isn't even inflationary to the economy as a whole, $13.21 Trillion was the size of the US Economy in 2006 so $100B is 1/132 of the economy size (lesser as the economy grows. It's even less than the market value of Google (approx 170B), and only 1/4 that of Exxon ($470B).
FYI - As of December 2006, currency in circulation -- that is, U.S. coins and paper currency in the hands of the public--totaled about $820 billion dollars.
You can also ask the residents of Serbia, Croatia, Sudan, Congo, and Zimbabwe if the Geneva Convention is real. Unfortunately, I see this "cybercrime" issue becoming the domain of the UN which means nothing worth a crap will ever be done about it.
I'm good, email/posts just aren't really good for discussions like this. Your background may give you a bit more insight/judgement than the average manager when it comes to personality and performance.
If someone expects to be an IT Manager after 7 yrs right out of undergrad/DeVry they are crazy. I don't want someone that agressive in my group, he quest for power (that's what it is) is scary. I'd immediately worry he might try to make himself look better at someone else expense to get ahead. At 7 yrs I think I was like a Sr' Developer, maybe a team lead but was no where near ready for Management. He might talk himself into Manager job at a small company but he won't be sucessful, he just doesn't have the experiences. Now if he had a top-notch MBA I'd say he would be someone I'd start looking at and see if he could grow to the job in 3-4 yrs. His kind of personality is more suited to the consulting world than the development world IMHO.
IMHO, leaving a past job after 6-12 months does NOT imply someone failed. As bad as the IT business was after the dot com bust and 9/11 i can see multiple job. IT has not been "hot" other than the last 3-4 yrs.
If you need someone and they have the skills, my approach has been to hire them for the short term to get you over the hump, treat them well, give them some mentoring to help with "issues" and try to get a good longer term employee. Or hire a contractor, I need them to come in and do a job, I don't really care if they stay long term, I can find another one where I got them. No one is going to stay somewhere 20 yrs anymore, if you can get 3 yrs out of an good IT person consider yourself lucky. In some places such as India yearly turnover can be 100% or more. The only person I don't hire is one I think is lying about skills, is negative or abusive, can't work in a team (some expections here) or has a poor background check (such as an arrest record).
Are you are saying 6-9 months to train a developer? That's way outside the norm with an experienced person. If you are talking developing really deep technical knowledge and expertise in a product that can take years and I see your point. Regardless of which type of job, it's a two way street, you can't expect people to stay at a bad job in a good economy so you have to develop methods to keep them interested and feed thier needs or they'll leave. Or you can go the hard-ass way and say if they get trained on X it's Y months of time the company is owed or if they leave it's Z dollars owed. However I'm not sure those can be upheld in court if someone didn't pay.
If it takes 3-4 months to train an IT Manager for your small company you picked the wrong person. I expect them to be proficient in 60 days and by six months they are going to be making changes to get things going better, not just learning the job. IT Management is not hard, I've managed a department of 50 people before with no problems. Of course before that I managed projects of 25 people and $10M of budget so I was experienced.
Interesting observation that people who have a "pattern" of short-term jobs must have issues about happiness or failure requiring therapy. I find that very negative and discriminatory. Not every long term employee is "happy" and well-adjusted. I've known many who could not do anything else so they stayed in the job.
Agreed. I didn't get there until late 30's (now late 40's). But I did see that age in that role in the Dot com days and I see it in startups , but management there is much different than "traditional IT".
I deal with failing or failed IT projects for a living [bfwa.com], and most of those failures occur for the same relatively small set of reasons.
Me too, and I agree. However getting Senior Management to change thier ways is tough. I've done this work for NASA, DOD, IBM and now another big firm (competitor to IBM) and I see same song different verse over and over.
Fred Brooks book is good as is Ed Yourdon's book "Death March"
been there done that except for the Secetary. Even have the MBA. I decided it was more fun and rewarding to take the Management skills and Tech skills and make a LOT more money as a Consultant. I'm basically a high paid internal consultant for a very large IT outsourcer. Work is fun, travel isn't too bad and I make more than I did as a Manager with less stress.
Thats very short-sighted. Is that YOUR personal policy or company policy? People change jobs for all sorts of reasons, contracts get cancelled or end and firms don't want people on the bench, companies (small ones especially) go under, maybe they had a family or health reason to change, they work for a frim that likes to Death March the people, they have a really bad manager, or maybe they are really sharp and mastered the old job. I have had some really sharp guys master a product or task in a couple months then get bored. You have to ASK, not assume
I've not used the language in 25 yrs so I only knew it as FORTRAN. Dictionary.com still shows it all caps and also as "Fortran" and "fortran". But they mention that ANSI decreed, in about 1985 via the ANSI FORTRAN Technical Committee TC, that it should be "Fortran".
Seems Sun has made some big changes since I worked there and we had early generation SunRays. The other issue we used to have is SunRays were expensive.
I haven't used FORTRAN since FORTRAN77 so I don't know what improvements were made.
Scientists writing software in any language is not a pretty sight. They don't think code.
FORTRAN was designed for Mathematical programming as a language most any scientist, mathmatician, phycisist or Engineer could use since APL is so cryptic. I never said it was optimized for scientists.
I worked in an office with a lot of SunRays, bandwidth can be a problem with large numbers of the devices (100 or so). You need a T3 to support a good sized office or else you need a local server, both of which the orginal poster didn't want to spend $$$ on. Plus you can only run SunRay's off Solaris servers 1ast time I looked.
COBOL, FORTRAN and Ada (the proper spellings are the first two are Acronyms) are still very much around and are no where near obsolete. Older for sure but there are millions of lines of COBOL code out there on mainframes crunching away. The problem is the language is not taught in schools anymore so no one is avaialble to take care of the older code. That's the main reason the code is migrated to something like Java.
FORTRAN (the current version) is still very much alive in academia. You'll find a lot of scientists still write programs in the language. In fact that was what it was designed for, it's NOT a General Purpose Language such as Java, Pascal, C/C++.
Ada is not dead yet. It's no longer mandated for defense work, but like Cobol there is a lot of it out there in use that still needs care and feeding.
Learning good programming practices and making them habits, understanding algorithms, knowing how a program compiles into an executable, knowing about the structure of the OS and the chipset all will make you a better programmer.
I've written code in Assembler (8085, 8031, X86 and IBM 360), BASIC, FORTRAN, C, C++, Ada, Java, APL, ALGOL, SNOBOL, COBOL, Simula, PL/I and others. Each one had a different way of implementing things but if you know how that "thing" is supposed to work from first principles you can adapt.
Expensive for YOU, not them. If 25% (to use the lower #) of the 350 people on a widebody plane used the service during the flight that would be 80 people times $10, thats $800 revenue PER FLIGHT. That's like selling another two or three tickets. The equipment such as the router and wiring (assuming they won't do wireless) will add weight to the plane increasing fuel costs a few dollars a flight. The cost of the equipment might run an few 1000's but that'll be written off. So there is a LOT of profit to them amd a lot of expense for the user (seeing as Home DSL runs $30-50/month in the USA).
Voice is NOT large amounts of data. It's about 8Kbit/Sec for POTS quality. They may block things like Torrents and on-line games which are the bandwidth hogs. But as someone else says blocking VoIP might actually be a good thing. The passengers won't strangle the guy yelling into his PC mike next to you.
Hubble does not "see" the pictures you find published. The data is a series of binary values in different frequencys and intensities depending on what filter is in use and which "camera" (WFC or COS) it came from. The colors are "false" colors created on the ground to match the data values as closely as possible.
Source of your information please? I think this is wrong. I worked on Hubble (software) and I NEVER heard that story and I knew many people from the original development team.
I seriously doubt that. F22 airframe is mostly titanium and it's got to take 9G turns which are much more stressful then Mach3 level flight. The PW119 engines are very powerful but only about 25% more than what is on the F16 and the plane is much bigger. The benefit of these engines in their high efficency which allows supercruise w/o afterburners which saves 40% on fuel consumption. Go look at http://www.f22fighter.com/
You should NOT be marked Troll, as you have a very valid point EXCEPT the Ethics to be applied should NOT be the personal ethics but the CORPORATE Ethics. If they perceive an ethical conflict they need to go to the Management to clear it up IAW company policy. Lacking a set of corporate ethics or policies to guide someone in a case like this is a different problem.
You DO want employees who don't cheat, steal, etc. But those are MORALS you talk about not Ethics. The company has to set the standard as they bear the ultimate burden of responsibilty in this case. You never want someone who cuts ethical corners to do a "good job" as I've seen that come back and bite projects severely. My job is going into troubled projects, discovering and correcting the problems and puting them back on track. You will be amazed at the times people avoid the ethical thing to do in order to meet deadlines and "do a good job". Sure you met one deadline but you put the whole project at risk and perhaps the company too!
Did you EVER stop to think that there was a REASON the policy said don't turn it off? Customers are often morons about technology, thats why they hire IBM [Side note..I am an ex-IBMer] and then IBM hires and trains operators. The appropriate action would be for the customer to submit a request to IBM to turn the machine off against policy and in the request they agree to hold IBM harmless from any negative action that may result. Yelling at an operator is way out of line and your department manager should have a talk with the manager of the person who went ballistic. Either there may be a reason and the guy is normally easy to get along with or this person is a problem and the customer needs to address it before he goes postal the next time.
"Fuck the customer" was the right reply in the context that IBM should NOT turn that machine off until they can CYA. When you are IBM (or other big vendors) mistakes can turn into lawsuits just because they think IBM will use thier deep pockets to settle the issue. Then IBM fires the Manager AND the Operator. Better to say NO and let the Management handle it than screw up by turning it off.
In your case, better to remain silent about such issues in a public forum until you are more experienced and can understand how this could play out. Or if you want to learn go ask your boss/mentor how things like this should be handled if you were in the shoes of the operator. Could be a good learning tool for you.
The point of the bolts is to stiffen the structure against the several G's of launch and the vibrations as well. In low-G things don't need to be very strong but against the stresses of liftoff it needs stiffening or it would shake apart or collapse.
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Still not solved the IP address issues and authentication issues and printer names/types/addresses.
Are you unable to comprehend what a law means? If the law says they have to cover it they have to cover it, no discussion. Tell your local cops that the speed limit law actually may not really mean you can't drive over the posted speed and watch them laff thier asses off and write you a ticket. She wins this point slam dunk. As far as identity theft, as I recall there are laws in some states (CA is one) where if your data is lost the company has to offer you ID Theft protection, thats all they would have had to do. IBM (an ex-employer) lost a data tape with my employment records and even though the data on the tap was encrypted and you'd need a mainframe tape drive to read it they gave me a years worth of ID Theft protection. Her point that BB could have settled this situation easily instead of jerking her around is perfectly valid. The lady deserves some payback for her lost time, her lost data, her lost music and possibly puntive damages as BB deliberately misled her about the status of her computer. Maybe 50K would do it, I don't know but the $54M did grab headlines, got her noticed, got 1000's of people to read her blog and gave BB a small black eye.
Bullsh*t. You been watching too much Hollywood crap. They'd have to have a ladder to reach the tiles, some way to cut the Cat 5 cable, put a connector on the end (non-trivial if fiber), then have to splice the router into the cable, set the router IPs to be on the same subnet as the bank (unless you know this you'll need a sniffer program to grab it). While they are doing this they can't cause a noticable outage and I doubt the banks DNS is going to give the laptop an IP without some kind of login and authentication. Plus you probably need to know what kind of printers they are running, thier IP addresss and/or name before you can get to them to install the Trojan/virus.
I'm one of them. I did embedded for many years, I loved it but 90% of the work was defense systems and it was so cyclical. And most of the projects were poorly managed over budget, software always got screwed for hardware. I got my MBA, left for Technology consulting and never went back. I get offers all the time for a 25-30% pay cut to go back. Seems to me that programmers who know C and Assembler and can write tight code, know OS internals, and can interface to hardware are almost as extinct as IBM mainframe COBOL commandos, so we should (by the forces of ecomonics) command an above market salary.
This was modded Insightful? How idiotic to Mod Econ 101 Theory as Insightful. The whole thread is off down some rat-hole.
Currency devaluation has nothing to do with the "upgrades" the US Telecomm system needs. This isn't $100B cash that is dumped on the market by the Federal Reserve, it would be the "investment" to get things to where they needed to be. And it wouldn't occur overnight either but over 3-5 years. $100B isn't even inflationary to the economy as a whole, $13.21 Trillion was the size of the US Economy in 2006 so $100B is 1/132 of the economy size (lesser as the economy grows. It's even less than the market value of Google (approx 170B), and only 1/4 that of Exxon ($470B).
FYI - As of December 2006, currency in circulation -- that is, U.S. coins and paper currency in the hands of the public--totaled about $820 billion dollars.
You can also ask the residents of Serbia, Croatia, Sudan, Congo, and Zimbabwe if the Geneva Convention is real. Unfortunately, I see this "cybercrime" issue becoming the domain of the UN which means nothing worth a crap will ever be done about it.
I'm good, email/posts just aren't really good for discussions like this. Your background may give you a bit more insight/judgement than the average manager when it comes to personality and performance.
If someone expects to be an IT Manager after 7 yrs right out of undergrad/DeVry they are crazy. I don't want someone that agressive in my group, he quest for power (that's what it is) is scary. I'd immediately worry he might try to make himself look better at someone else expense to get ahead. At 7 yrs I think I was like a Sr' Developer, maybe a team lead but was no where near ready for Management. He might talk himself into Manager job at a small company but he won't be sucessful, he just doesn't have the experiences. Now if he had a top-notch MBA I'd say he would be someone I'd start looking at and see if he could grow to the job in 3-4 yrs. His kind of personality is more suited to the consulting world than the development world IMHO.
Or as Pogo said (assuming you remember that comic) "We have met the enemy and it is us".
I enjoy the work but it sure can be frustrating to point things out, come back 6 months later and nothing has changed, in fact it's worse.
IMHO, leaving a past job after 6-12 months does NOT imply someone failed. As bad as the IT business was after the dot com bust and 9/11 i can see multiple job. IT has not been "hot" other than the last 3-4 yrs.
If you need someone and they have the skills, my approach has been to hire them for the short term to get you over the hump, treat them well, give them some mentoring to help with "issues" and try to get a good longer term employee. Or hire a contractor, I need them to come in and do a job, I don't really care if they stay long term, I can find another one where I got them. No one is going to stay somewhere 20 yrs anymore, if you can get 3 yrs out of an good IT person consider yourself lucky. In some places such as India yearly turnover can be 100% or more. The only person I don't hire is one I think is lying about skills, is negative or abusive, can't work in a team (some expections here) or has a poor background check (such as an arrest record).
Are you are saying 6-9 months to train a developer? That's way outside the norm with an experienced person. If you are talking developing really deep technical knowledge and expertise in a product that can take years and I see your point. Regardless of which type of job, it's a two way street, you can't expect people to stay at a bad job in a good economy so you have to develop methods to keep them interested and feed thier needs or they'll leave. Or you can go the hard-ass way and say if they get trained on X it's Y months of time the company is owed or if they leave it's Z dollars owed. However I'm not sure those can be upheld in court if someone didn't pay.
If it takes 3-4 months to train an IT Manager for your small company you picked the wrong person. I expect them to be proficient in 60 days and by six months they are going to be making changes to get things going better, not just learning the job. IT Management is not hard, I've managed a department of 50 people before with no problems. Of course before that I managed projects of 25 people and $10M of budget so I was experienced.
Interesting observation that people who have a "pattern" of short-term jobs must have issues about happiness or failure requiring therapy. I find that very negative and discriminatory. Not every long term employee is "happy" and well-adjusted. I've known many who could not do anything else so they stayed in the job.
Agreed. I didn't get there until late 30's (now late 40's). But I did see that age in that role in the Dot com days and I see it in startups , but management there is much different than "traditional IT".
I deal with failing or failed IT projects for a living [bfwa.com], and most of those failures occur for the same relatively small set of reasons. Me too, and I agree. However getting Senior Management to change thier ways is tough. I've done this work for NASA, DOD, IBM and now another big firm (competitor to IBM) and I see same song different verse over and over. Fred Brooks book is good as is Ed Yourdon's book "Death March"
been there done that except for the Secetary. Even have the MBA. I decided it was more fun and rewarding to take the Management skills and Tech skills and make a LOT more money as a Consultant. I'm basically a high paid internal consultant for a very large IT outsourcer. Work is fun, travel isn't too bad and I make more than I did as a Manager with less stress.
Thats very short-sighted. Is that YOUR personal policy or company policy? People change jobs for all sorts of reasons, contracts get cancelled or end and firms don't want people on the bench, companies (small ones especially) go under, maybe they had a family or health reason to change, they work for a frim that likes to Death March the people, they have a really bad manager, or maybe they are really sharp and mastered the old job. I have had some really sharp guys master a product or task in a couple months then get bored. You have to ASK, not assume
I've not used the language in 25 yrs so I only knew it as FORTRAN. Dictionary.com still shows it all caps and also as "Fortran" and "fortran". But they mention that ANSI decreed, in about 1985 via the ANSI FORTRAN Technical Committee TC, that it should be "Fortran".
Seems Sun has made some big changes since I worked there and we had early generation SunRays. The other issue we used to have is SunRays were expensive.
I haven't used FORTRAN since FORTRAN77 so I don't know what improvements were made. Scientists writing software in any language is not a pretty sight. They don't think code. FORTRAN was designed for Mathematical programming as a language most any scientist, mathmatician, phycisist or Engineer could use since APL is so cryptic. I never said it was optimized for scientists.
I worked in an office with a lot of SunRays, bandwidth can be a problem with large numbers of the devices (100 or so). You need a T3 to support a good sized office or else you need a local server, both of which the orginal poster didn't want to spend $$$ on. Plus you can only run SunRay's off Solaris servers 1ast time I looked.
COBOL, FORTRAN and Ada (the proper spellings are the first two are Acronyms) are still very much around and are no where near obsolete. Older for sure but there are millions of lines of COBOL code out there on mainframes crunching away. The problem is the language is not taught in schools anymore so no one is avaialble to take care of the older code. That's the main reason the code is migrated to something like Java.
FORTRAN (the current version) is still very much alive in academia. You'll find a lot of scientists still write programs in the language. In fact that was what it was designed for, it's NOT a General Purpose Language such as Java, Pascal, C/C++.
Ada is not dead yet. It's no longer mandated for defense work, but like Cobol there is a lot of it out there in use that still needs care and feeding.
Learning good programming practices and making them habits, understanding algorithms, knowing how a program compiles into an executable, knowing about the structure of the OS and the chipset all will make you a better programmer.
I've written code in Assembler (8085, 8031, X86 and IBM 360), BASIC, FORTRAN, C, C++, Ada, Java, APL, ALGOL, SNOBOL, COBOL, Simula, PL/I and others. Each one had a different way of implementing things but if you know how that "thing" is supposed to work from first principles you can adapt.
Expensive for YOU, not them. If 25% (to use the lower #) of the 350 people on a widebody plane used the service during the flight that would be 80 people times $10, thats $800 revenue PER FLIGHT. That's like selling another two or three tickets. The equipment such as the router and wiring (assuming they won't do wireless) will add weight to the plane increasing fuel costs a few dollars a flight. The cost of the equipment might run an few 1000's but that'll be written off. So there is a LOT of profit to them amd a lot of expense for the user (seeing as Home DSL runs $30-50/month in the USA).
Voice is NOT large amounts of data. It's about 8Kbit/Sec for POTS quality. They may block things like Torrents and on-line games which are the bandwidth hogs. But as someone else says blocking VoIP might actually be a good thing. The passengers won't strangle the guy yelling into his PC mike next to you.
Hubble does not "see" the pictures you find published. The data is a series of binary values in different frequencys and intensities depending on what filter is in use and which "camera" (WFC or COS) it came from. The colors are "false" colors created on the ground to match the data values as closely as possible.
Source of your information please? I think this is wrong. I worked on Hubble (software) and I NEVER heard that story and I knew many people from the original development team.
I seriously doubt that. F22 airframe is mostly titanium and it's got to take 9G turns which are much more stressful then Mach3 level flight. The PW119 engines are very powerful but only about 25% more than what is on the F16 and the plane is much bigger. The benefit of these engines in their high efficency which allows supercruise w/o afterburners which saves 40% on fuel consumption. Go look at http://www.f22fighter.com/
You should NOT be marked Troll, as you have a very valid point EXCEPT the Ethics to be applied should NOT be the personal ethics but the CORPORATE Ethics. If they perceive an ethical conflict they need to go to the Management to clear it up IAW company policy. Lacking a set of corporate ethics or policies to guide someone in a case like this is a different problem. You DO want employees who don't cheat, steal, etc. But those are MORALS you talk about not Ethics. The company has to set the standard as they bear the ultimate burden of responsibilty in this case. You never want someone who cuts ethical corners to do a "good job" as I've seen that come back and bite projects severely. My job is going into troubled projects, discovering and correcting the problems and puting them back on track. You will be amazed at the times people avoid the ethical thing to do in order to meet deadlines and "do a good job". Sure you met one deadline but you put the whole project at risk and perhaps the company too!
Did you EVER stop to think that there was a REASON the policy said don't turn it off? Customers are often morons about technology, thats why they hire IBM [Side note..I am an ex-IBMer] and then IBM hires and trains operators. The appropriate action would be for the customer to submit a request to IBM to turn the machine off against policy and in the request they agree to hold IBM harmless from any negative action that may result. Yelling at an operator is way out of line and your department manager should have a talk with the manager of the person who went ballistic. Either there may be a reason and the guy is normally easy to get along with or this person is a problem and the customer needs to address it before he goes postal the next time.
"Fuck the customer" was the right reply in the context that IBM should NOT turn that machine off until they can CYA. When you are IBM (or other big vendors) mistakes can turn into lawsuits just because they think IBM will use thier deep pockets to settle the issue. Then IBM fires the Manager AND the Operator. Better to say NO and let the Management handle it than screw up by turning it off.
In your case, better to remain silent about such issues in a public forum until you are more experienced and can understand how this could play out. Or if you want to learn go ask your boss/mentor how things like this should be handled if you were in the shoes of the operator. Could be a good learning tool for you.
The point of the bolts is to stiffen the structure against the several G's of launch and the vibrations as well. In low-G things don't need to be very strong but against the stresses of liftoff it needs stiffening or it would shake apart or collapse.