So you're running through this jungle see, and you can run above ground or down in tunnels, but you have to jump over scorpions as big as you in the tunnels, or hop on the heads of alligators (nicely spaced in a line) above ground. Oh, and don't touch a fallen log or it will hurt. Or fire. You can't run AROUND any of these things, you must go over them, because you are in a VERY LARGE HURRY to run AS FAR AS POSSIBLE because there are bars of gold and silver and bags of money just sitting around this jungle and you have to collect them (fortunately you have no encumberance or weight-allowance issues)...and then twenty minutes later (if you don't die first) you just stop running.
You're playing this line, and this line keeps moving, and actually moves faster and faster, and you steer the line, trying to keep the line from hitting itself, except that of course it will INEVITABLY hit itself as it fills the screen, you just want to avoid that for as long as possible.
You play a small shooting thing that can move in a limited way around the bottom of the screen. At the top of the screen are these long bugs with several sections. The long bugs break apart when you shoot the middle pieces. Sometimes the bugs hit mushrooms and turn. You can shoot the mushrooms too. Once in a while a scorpion will fall out of the sky at you. Oh, and spiders float around in your little limited-movement area, just to make things more fun.
Along the same lines...different platform...you play a little shooting thing. Letters of the alphabet fall out of the sky at you. You must type the correct letter to shoot the falling ones before they hit you. They fall at increasingly rapid rates. You must learn to type or die trying. (ok, that one actually has a pretty good premise outside the "game" context...but as a "game" it was bizarre).
It's the schoolyard difference between "fighting dirty" and "fighting fair." (not that kids are permitted to fight in the schoolyard anymore) Kids seemed to have instinctive rules about what it was ok to do and what was unacceptable. Anti-trust law is the same.
Businesses should compete to win market share. That's the point of a free market. If you have the best product at the best prices with the best service (or some combination thereof) then customers will choose your product over others. If everyone chooses your product, you "win." Anti-trust law, or the laws forbidding "anti-competitive" behavior are designed to curb those behaviors which actually HARM the "free market" and harm the consumers. Microsoft has used its size and market share, its influence with other companies, its political lobbying power, and every other means available to it, while producing products that are (IMHO) just garbage. Competitors are not "competed" out of the market, they are FORCED out of the market. Consumers pay a lot for rotten products. No one "wins" except Microsoft, but we recognize that they have done so in a dirty and unfair way.
Anti-trust law exists to "encourage" companies to "fight fair" and COMPETE rather than combining/merging their way into dominance, or using their dominance rather than superior/cheaper products to win market share.
Not a stupid question though...of course, the goal of a business is to do more business and earn more than the competition, and it's easiest to do that if you wipe OUT the competition...but that isn't acceptable behavior. This sounds trite, but focus on serving your customers, not screwing your competition, and you'll probably end up with a better result. Plus you'll be able to live comfortably in the same brain with your conscience.
I had an incident where one employee left a cell phone at their desk, it rang (one of those really annoying music rings) on and off for nearly an hour. Another employee (next cube over) turned it off. The first employee went ballistic about that. That was fun. Once in a while I'll have an employee who just spends wayyy too much time talking on their cell phone. Lovely to deal with that as well.
The reason companies never wanted people making personal calls at work was not the cost of the (mostly local) calls, but the cost of their NONPRODUCTIVE EMPLOYEES. When employees have cell phones (as most do now), they feel much more justified in sitting around on the phone since the "cost" is theirs. People who know not to spend hours on personal calls on their desk phones seem to have no compunction about doing the same thing on their cell phones.
So what's the solution? In my experience, the RATIONAL answer is to speak to each person when you feel that they've crossed a line, and make a decision suited to the problem. In my experience, the rational answer will get you reamed. Employees who care so little about their responsibilities to their work and to their co-workers tend also to have no compunction about arguing "disparate treatment" (as though cell-phone users are a protected minority). We are forced to make inane blanket policies that hurt the decent employees who probably ARE contributing their personal cell minutes to the company, in order to stop the bad behavior of a few. I've been told by HR that I cannot tell ONE employee to "leave the cell phone in your car" I must make the rule for EVERY employee in the department (not that I have, I'd rather lose the productivity of the lamer employees than disgruntle the better ones).
Did you complete the form, checking "no" to the question asking whether your hardware met their requirements?
I think it's a good idea to submit the form completed in situations like this. If they have a clue, they're using the form to judge the market for non-Windows potential users of the service. If so, the number of people who drop out at that screen MIGHT be measured, but the number of people who submit with a "no" probably is.
With Research Triangle Park being the home of RedHat, as well as sizeable groups from IBM, Sun, NetApp, and others...I'll bet that plenty of their potential customers are proud users of anything-but-Windows. Best that they hear it early.
I wish I could remember what I did. I tried several things that DIDN'T work.
I remember being grateful that Solaris still had/usr/ucb, I found commands there that did still work. It's been seven years, and the details are a bit hazy. I was far from a guru at the time (still far from a guru) so I'm sure I thrashed quite a bit until I stumbled on something that would work.
Since it really halted all useful activity on the box, what I'd probably do now is just boot from CD and move everything back. Brute force is at least fast.
Sorry I didn't learn enough from the experience to offer anything insightful!
Along the same lines. On a customer's precious and mission-critical machine. Intending to copy filesystems to new volumes I'd created, I started with:
mv/usr/newusr
I managed to get it stopped, but not before/usr/bin and/usr/sbin had moved. Finding any useful commands still functioning to let me assess the damage and fix it was interesting. I needed to do something like this once to learn, deep down, that everything is different when working as root.
Use your company's organizing documents as tools to keep your company on the right path. For instance, write your charter and bylaws (or equivalent) in such a way that they will be difficult to change. Make the ways of changing those documents dependent on buy-in from people who are NOT stockholders or officers. Perhaps use third-party interest groups or trustees whose requirements are to act in consideration of the highest ethical standard for the business, best interest of the customers, and best interest of the community.
Then write the documents to make your company uninteresting to professional beancounters who simply want to be officers for personal pecuniary reasons. For instance, you could put executive compensation directly into the hands of lower-level employees, or into compensation committees composed of customer representatives, third-parties, and employees.
Consider NOT going public, and writing that limit directly into the difficult-to-change bylaws. So few companies go public for useful reasons, it's an almost-certain death-knell to ethical behavior anymore.
On the doing-business side, this is something that would earn my profound respect:
Consider offering a full warranty on your product (i.e. Magnuson-Moss FULL warranty, if your products are consumer grade, or the equivalent if they're not). Knowing that you'll have consequential damages to face if your product is lousy is an incredible incentive to making a non-lousy product. By doing that, you could also create an EULA of approximately a paragraph of big text, understandable by humans. THAT would set you apart from any company I'm aware of.
I wouldn't apologize for being American (though I might apologize for the morons running the country), but the issue isn't an American one, or shouldn't be. Maybe what we need now is a global online currency. Why invest in yet another form of national currency?
As for the IRS and SSA not keeping "accounts" for people...well, there isn't a whole lot of difference. It isn't as though a bank keeps everyone's money in little labelled boxes in the back room. An "account" is simply the bank's way of keeping track of how much of their big pool of money you own. The IRS keeps track of how much you've paid during the year, and when you file you either pay the difference or the difference is paid to you. The SSA keeps something much more like an "account" using an arcane formula to decide how much you get. Both imply really more "accounting" than the bank uses for your checking account.
Do I WANT the government controlling loans and manipulating interest rates? I'm not sure. They do a lot of that already. I just want to hear the discussion. At the moment I can walk to a store, and if they don't use face recognition, and the guy behind the counter doesn't know me, I can buy something anonymously by paying with paper. Paying with plastic means that anyone interested enough and persistent enough, including the government, can know exactly what I bought and when. I'm not sure that government plastic would be particularly worse.
BTW, I've gotten many compliments on the pair I've got...they're a little north of the anatomy you had in mind, but they seem to work fine, I daresay they're bigger than your pair.;-)
Those are good points. Other alternatives might exist though. I think that another poster suggested using and cancelling strings of numbers for single-use purposes. Even if we did stick with our current model of plastic money/accounts, most governments already perform functions like this. Integrating what the IRS does with a new form of plastic and online currency might make sense. As a privacy fanatic, of course, I see the objections clearly. Still, inter-agency firewalling could deal with a lot of the problem.
Aside from our tax "accounts" we already have Social Security accounts as well, so it's not a huge step to simply keeping all the money centrally and using government plastic or online micropayments from government accounts. Plus, efficiency and no profit-margin would decrease transaction costs across the board, the overhead would go down, and that would benefit the economy. Maybe banks are obsolete. Banks often do more harm than good these days, and credit card companies are no-one's friend. It's reasonable to object to banks and credit card companies skimming every transaction because they've "privatized" currency. If the government would have to behave more like a bank in order to re-"publicize" currency, then lets get the legislators debating the pros and cons.
Sorry for the U.S.-centric view in this post, just translate "IRS" and "Social Security" into other countries' equivalents, if any.
THANK YOU! It is obvious, and it's been a problem for a while now. Online transactions aren't the only problem. We have a plastic currency society now, paper money is all but obsolete (though IMHO there will always be a place for it). In order to function now, it is arguably necessary to have a credit or debit card, yet private companies control who can and can't have one, and on what terms. It's just the same as if one person could use a $20 bill free of charge because they're "good" at using money, but another person had to pay $1 out of every $20 to someone else because they're "bad" at using money, and then there's the person who simply isn't allowed to use money at all because he doesn't have much to start with and he's been very bad at using it correctly in the past!
Governments should absolutely be moving with the times and providing transaction-fee-free plastic money and online money. Currency should be as neutral and transparent as possible, in order to facilitate a smooth and efficient marketplace. We've always supported the overhead required to create and manage the paper money, we should do the same for modern currency.
There's no one way, the path to becoming CIO for a Fortune 500 company differs considerably from the path to be CIO for a small organization, or in the public sector.
Speaking for myself, I did systems administration while I was in school, went to Library School and came out with an M.S.I.S. with a focus in database design. I spent some time in a big corporation as a sysadmin. Then saw a great job as a UNIX admin at a Public Television network associated with a University. In a small pond, it was easy to parlay very very very hard work and my degree into my current IT Director/CIO/CTO position.
The thing that made all the difference for me was that from day one I didn't hide in my cube with my nose stuck to an X-Window, I volunteered for everything, and showed my very real interest in the entire organization. I got to know people in every department even though I technically didn't have to do any user support at all. Now, that's what I look for in "management material." Everyone I hire can "communicate well" but the ones who might take my job someday are the ones who see how their jobs relate to what the organization is trying to do, and who tell me how they can support those goals better. Prove to the existing management that you understand technology but can also translate it into achieving business goals, and prove that you think of IT as the means, not the end.
The other thing I managed to do right, I articulated my management philosophy clearly in my interviews. (I've interviewed management candidates who simply cannot tell me what a manager is for!). I told the interviewers in no uncertain terms what I think good managers do, proving that though I had exactly zero previous management experience, that I wouldn't dive in without a clue. For reference, if the interviewers want to hear a philosophy involving squeezing the most out of staff...run. IMHO, management is about supporting your staff, providing them with resources, defending them from abuse, protecting them from distraction, and making resource demands incessently to provide whatever motivation each person needs (far more than "salary" in most cases).
So I guess I suggest picking the kind of organization you want to go to, seeing what kind of qualifications they look for in a PHB, and really loving and believing in the places you apply. (you'll need to, a good PHB works more hours than her subordinates). Then go outside your job description and prove that IT can make things better, not just more expensive. And all the while, think about the best and worst bosses you've ever had and come up with hiring and retention strategies, and a solid management philosophy of your own (I never read a management book) and be ready to articulate it, then to live it.
Realize this though, once you're a PHB, you will not have time to be a technologist anymore. What's more, your staff will see it as unwelcome micromanagement. If you can't give up the root passwords, then don't become an executive. You'll only hate it. Satisfy your technical cravings at home.
Good points. What I'm getting at is that the Internet has brought a world of claims and considerations into campus. The schools are forced to deal with those liability issues they didn't have before, forcing them into a more adversarial position with the students. Misuse of school property has always been a problem, of course, but a kid sneaking into a building at night and doing something non-destructive might have gotten a slap on the wrist in the past. Today, the Internet on campus gives the kid a whole world to explore. A little harmless cracking will get a student expelled today. The behavior is essentially the same, but where a kid ten years ago would have had to leave campus to break into someone else's building, and the school might have mediated for him if he did, a kid today can crack a server in another country from his dorm room.
The University has a lot more to protect the kid from when he screws up, and politically that just isn't possible in a lot of cases. You would have to ask a current student, but my perception is that the glory days of college students being kind of a privileged group, with a wide social latitude of behavior and activity, is over. IMHO, "academic freedom" has a lot to do with that mindset of being free to explore activity and behavior. Students can no longer trust that the school will protect that freedom, as a kind of parental figure (someone maybe not on the "same side" but more good than bad). Instead, the school, out of self-protection, may be the one trying to prevent the behavior.
Maybe this all depends on the school. I went to two large and liberal public Universities, where mild warnings were the rule. Today, I work at one of them, and things have changed a lot. ~
Working at a University, one change seems to be the position of the school in its role of protecting the academic freedom of students. Traditionally, schools would handle discipline problems internally, often protecting students from law enforcement for minor infractions. That protective layer, acting formally or informally "in loco parentis" let students stretch their wings a little, with a corresponding benefit to academics and research. The Internet has brought the world into the campus. For example, schools now struggle to protect their students from the RIAA, while balancing political necessity. Many schools now actually act, to some degree, as enforcers on behalf of copyright owners. That shift puts the school and the students into more adversarial positions than may have existed before the Internet was big. In the past, schools could "look the other way" or just issue "warnings" while students pushed the envelope of what was and was not allowed, now security concerns and the concerns of private industry have made campuses much less safe places for students to test the waters and try things out.
Many University administrators see that problem very clearly, and try to strike a politically surviveable balance to keep academic freedom alive.
Of course, the bigger the aggregate "work" the smaller each part is in comparison to the whole. Since fair use looks at how much of a total work is used (among other things), it's in the best interest of copyright owners to be very granular in defining their works.
If an author defined their entire life's work as a "work" (even if that were really possible) then surely if I borrow just one measly novel out of twenty, that would be fair use, right?;-) ~
Yes, the "heat problem" is overstated. The left side of mine occasionally feels warmer than the right side.
I bought the set of international travel adapters for mine. If you haven't seen the AC adapter/power cord setup for the iBooks/Powerbooks, that might be your decision right there. The little, compact, sensibly-shaped, light AC adapter has the thin cable to connect to the *Book, which curls easily around built-in cable-management for storage. Then one corner of the adapter, where the prongs come out (and flip back in for storage) is removeable. The international adapter set is just replacement prongs. She can take the two little prong corners she needs, no need for a different adapter, or long cables, or anything else. It's a beautiful, easy to pack, and elegant solution.
As for sturdiness...well I've got no concerns for mine. In fact, I have to spend time outside in a fairly crime-infested neighborhood a few nights a week. I noticed recently that while I used to carry my old plastic G3 Powerbook carefully, assuming I'd have to protect it like a baby in a fight (I'm perhaps overprotective of hardware), I now carry my laptop case (very thin case, no handles) in the same way I subconsciously treat anything on my person I might use as a weapon. In other words, my instincts have decided that not only is the Book tough enough to "take care of itself" in a fight, but I'm flat-out prepared to break someone's face with it (and I don't even have the AppleCare plan;-)).
Ditto on the second battery. Battery life is good, but it won't be enough to get her all the way to Japan. I miss being able to snap out the DVD drive and stick a second battery in its place the way my old G3 Powerbook would, but the 12" G4 is a darned fine machine, more than makes up for that.
Good luck! It probably won't be much fun, but it's do-able, and the Doula will be a big help, so you won't have to be the coach AND keep an eye on the doctors.
One of the best things our childbirth instructor told us was that in her experience, people mostly had the kind of births they thought they would...in other words, the people who went in wanting a natural birth but really believing they'd probably have to have some kind of intervention ended up with that intervention. She said that's why she stopped doing practices based on births going wrong. She said her classes' success rates went up dramatically when she started doing practices based on short, easy, uncomplicated labor. If you can really convince yourselves that you're prepared, and that it's a normal process, and that you'll know instinctively and by training what to do, it'll all be fine.
Of course the bonus is that after about three days, it's impossible to remember how bad it really was;->. She'll forgive you for getting her through it. She'd remember having to do something she hadn't planned to do, like getting an epidural, but she won't remember the pain. So your best bet for avoiding future reproaches is to stick to the plan. At least if your wife is a reproaching sort of person like me;->.
I hope your young Linus, or Schroedinger, or Galadriel appears with a minimum of fuss!
Actually, during my recent pregnancy, I read as much medical literature as I could get my hands on. I read pro and anti midwife opinion pieces. I read statistics. I looked at our state's statistics on things like use of drugs during labor, C-Section rate, episiotomy rates, use of monitors during labor, restriction of food/drink during labor. Then I looked over all of the childbirth class options available to me. I chose the Bradley method. I highly recommend it.
I started with midwives (not lay midwives) and had to leave because they decided I was gestationally diabetic. So at 32 weeks, I had to go to the Family Practice the midwives associated with. Switching was beyond stressful. Imagine my disgust to find that the medical research on gestational diabetes is so fundamentally flawed that the medical community does not even have BASELINE information about what constitutes normal blood sugar during pregnancy. Nice and scientific. As a geek, I was mortally offended by the MD who told me to take insulin, without once looking at the detailed blood sugar test spreadsheet I presented him. Merely on the word of some litigation-paranoid midwives. I refused, and our birthplan specified that we would, by default, refuse all medical intervention during labor and delivery, and that every medical procedure had to be approved by my husband.
Naturally, I had a short, certainly painful but obviously surviveable, and entirely drug-free natural birth. Most mothers who use the Bradley method can say the same.
The risk of NEEDING a C-Section and having it be *gasp* three minutes away is absurdly low. The risk, if you're in a hospital, of being drugged, ignored, "monitored," and impatiently told that your labor is not "progressing" according to the rigid schedule set according to almost no scientifically valid standards, then guilted into a C-Section, is about 20%. I think you'll find, as I did, that the risk of death and serious complication to the MOTHER of MAJOR ABDOMINAL SURGERY, plus the difficult to discern risk of death to the fetus, added to the low apgar scores (associated with long-term poor performance by babies), plus the difficulty in bonding and starting breastfeeding, plus the usual feelings of failure and regret by women in that situation...all add up, at least in my book, to staying the heck out of the hands of the OB/Gyns and surgeons responsible.
Then there are all the other less-drastic "interventions" and their inevitable harm to mother and baby (don't get me started on episiotomy)...I can't fathom any reason other than FUD, misinformation, and peer pressure that ANYONE would choose an OB if any other rational options exist. (I am NOT a home-birth advocate by any means, but rational middle ground exists in most places). Heck, you don't even have to do the literature review I did to figure out how bad the OB practice is. Just ask the OB you're considering how often he/she (mostly he) considers episiotomy to be necessary, despite years of evidence that it does more harm than good...ask what their C-Section rate is. Ask what their rate of using epidurals and other labor drugs is. Then decide if you're willing to roll the dice and risk that those things will happen to your wife with those likelihoods.
Labor is not the time to realize that you can't stand up to a medical professional who is using "fetal distress" as an excuse to drug/snip/slice. You'll find that midwives have much higher healthy outcomes, and much lower rates of any of those interventions. A competent midwife will admit that C-Sections are sometimes necessary and be able to tell you about the two or three times she took someone in (in plenty of time, those scare tactics above are absurd...birth just doesn't work that way) for a C-Section.
My advice is to check out the Bradley Method, the childbirth classes take longer (12 weeks) and are much more demanding on dad than any others I looked at, but the success rate is profoundly impressive. They, unlike even Lamaze, define success as a healthy
Another place to look, if you've got an RV campground nearby, some of those have really good trading libraries. Lots of Danielle Steele and similar muck, but good books too. Full-time RV'ers are...interesting...people. You might be surprised at what you find in those swap shelves.
Likewise, lots of used bookstores will give pretty decent credit for trade-ins (you usually get less cash than credit for trade when you sell). You'll diminish your collection slowly that way, but used bookstores are wonderous places to spend a lot of time if you've got a good one. If you spent money on more books rather than shipping costs you'd be able to keep that trading up indefinitely.
Yep, the library. If you're feeling guilty for reading books for "free," I'm sure they'd be happy to take some of yours off you hands.
As for moderation, librarians are well trained to select materials. If you have suggestions, they might even take them. I've been really impressed with the sci fi sections of several public libraries I've visited, but going to library school (IANAL(ibrarian)) I realized just how many librarians are also geeks, though perhaps not all of the computer variety.
Bookstores tend to be "more of the same," where libraries are "the cream of the crop." Not true of all bookstores or all libraries, but you might be pleasantly surprised.
The other great thing about libraries is that the librarians are also trained to be able to make recommendations about books you might like based on some you've read and liked. Kind of like what Amazon tries and mostly fails to do, but with people. Rather than looking at a meaningless list of titles in someone's collection, you can go look in person, save yourself shipping costs, and get some good suggestions.
Thank you! I run an IT department in a smallish (~200 person) organization, and that is the most DIFFICULT thing to get across to the rest of management. For whatever reason, staff here think they'll get better results from bothering my programmers if they can't print, and telling long sagas about their need for new application functionality to my poor sysadmins. That said, we're comfortable, but not too comfortable with our staffing ratio here.
We have ~200 workstations, mostly PC but some Mac, and we're headed for Linux as much as possible. Server side we're 13 Suns (Ultra10-E5500), 2 NetApp filers (talk about low maintenance!) and 8 Win2K. For those machines, we've got 1 UNIX admin, 1 admin/manager and 3 Windows admins. These folks also do our telephone admin work, user training, asset management, and "whatever else comes up." We have two guys who do nothing but network and security administration (56-site WAN, keeps 'em hopping). We've also got three big-gun programmers since I'm allergic to outsourcing and we can't get things we need off-the-shelf.
By comfortable, but not too comfortable, I mean that we have time for long lunches, don't ever turn down vacation requests, have time to send people for training, and let 'em read trade rags at work. Our jobs are mostly 40 hour jobs. Our turnover is incredibly low, and for two out of the last four years, we had NO ONE leave the department. That all said, we have lots of projects, and unsophisticated users who keep us hopping most of the time.
"The best cure for bad speech is more speech." (I'm sorry I don't know who said that first)
If someone libels you in a *public* online forum, then they've given you the opportunity to explain your position, refute their facts, point out their cowardice in posting anonymously, and otherwise come out on top.
Sometimes, also, it's important to remember that while sticking to our natural, fundamental rights, things don't always work out "fairly" as a child might define it. In the larger view, allowing free and open anonymous public commentary without fear of legal action or reprisal is an amazing benefit which tends to improve life. Unfortunately, while the benefits accrue to everyone, the negative aspects hit a few specific people. Someone who loses their business due to libel is not treated "fairly" and the instinctive reaction is to find a legal remedy. Unless the legal remedy can be carved out narrowly enough to address the wrong without lessening the free-speech benefit to all, it's not worth it. It might well be worth it to the guy who lost his business, but businesses can be rebuilt, lost rights are harder to fix. It's unfair, and people of good conscience should work to find ways outside the legal system to respond to these unfair episodes (for instance through moderation ala Slashdot).
Forget the lawyers, sit down at your keyboard and compose thoughtful responses to the nasty posts.
Slashdot Mirror
So you're running through this jungle see, and you can run above ground or down in tunnels, but you have to jump over scorpions as big as you in the tunnels, or hop on the heads of alligators (nicely spaced in a line) above ground. Oh, and don't touch a fallen log or it will hurt. Or fire. You can't run AROUND any of these things, you must go over them, because you are in a VERY LARGE HURRY to run AS FAR AS POSSIBLE because there are bars of gold and silver and bags of money just sitting around this jungle and you have to collect them (fortunately you have no encumberance or weight-allowance issues)...and then twenty minutes later (if you don't die first) you just stop running.
You're playing this line, and this line keeps moving, and actually moves faster and faster, and you steer the line, trying to keep the line from hitting itself, except that of course it will INEVITABLY hit itself as it fills the screen, you just want to avoid that for as long as possible.
You play a small shooting thing that can move in a limited way around the bottom of the screen. At the top of the screen are these long bugs with several sections. The long bugs break apart when you shoot the middle pieces. Sometimes the bugs hit mushrooms and turn. You can shoot the mushrooms too. Once in a while a scorpion will fall out of the sky at you. Oh, and spiders float around in your little limited-movement area, just to make things more fun.
Along the same lines...different platform...you play a little shooting thing. Letters of the alphabet fall out of the sky at you. You must type the correct letter to shoot the falling ones before they hit you. They fall at increasingly rapid rates. You must learn to type or die trying. (ok, that one actually has a pretty good premise outside the "game" context...but as a "game" it was bizarre).
~
It's the schoolyard difference between "fighting dirty" and "fighting fair." (not that kids are permitted to fight in the schoolyard anymore) Kids seemed to have instinctive rules about what it was ok to do and what was unacceptable. Anti-trust law is the same.
Businesses should compete to win market share. That's the point of a free market. If you have the best product at the best prices with the best service (or some combination thereof) then customers will choose your product over others. If everyone chooses your product, you "win." Anti-trust law, or the laws forbidding "anti-competitive" behavior are designed to curb those behaviors which actually HARM the "free market" and harm the consumers. Microsoft has used its size and market share, its influence with other companies, its political lobbying power, and every other means available to it, while producing products that are (IMHO) just garbage. Competitors are not "competed" out of the market, they are FORCED out of the market. Consumers pay a lot for rotten products. No one "wins" except Microsoft, but we recognize that they have done so in a dirty and unfair way.
Anti-trust law exists to "encourage" companies to "fight fair" and COMPETE rather than combining/merging their way into dominance, or using their dominance rather than superior/cheaper products to win market share.
Not a stupid question though...of course, the goal of a business is to do more business and earn more than the competition, and it's easiest to do that if you wipe OUT the competition...but that isn't acceptable behavior. This sounds trite, but focus on serving your customers, not screwing your competition, and you'll probably end up with a better result. Plus you'll be able to live comfortably in the same brain with your conscience.
~
If I ever get one of those, I'll let you know.
~
I had an incident where one employee left a cell phone at their desk, it rang (one of those really annoying music rings) on and off for nearly an hour. Another employee (next cube over) turned it off. The first employee went ballistic about that. That was fun. Once in a while I'll have an employee who just spends wayyy too much time talking on their cell phone. Lovely to deal with that as well.
The reason companies never wanted people making personal calls at work was not the cost of the (mostly local) calls, but the cost of their NONPRODUCTIVE EMPLOYEES. When employees have cell phones (as most do now), they feel much more justified in sitting around on the phone since the "cost" is theirs. People who know not to spend hours on personal calls on their desk phones seem to have no compunction about doing the same thing on their cell phones.
So what's the solution? In my experience, the RATIONAL answer is to speak to each person when you feel that they've crossed a line, and make a decision suited to the problem. In my experience, the rational answer will get you reamed. Employees who care so little about their responsibilities to their work and to their co-workers tend also to have no compunction about arguing "disparate treatment" (as though cell-phone users are a protected minority). We are forced to make inane blanket policies that hurt the decent employees who probably ARE contributing their personal cell minutes to the company, in order to stop the bad behavior of a few. I've been told by HR that I cannot tell ONE employee to "leave the cell phone in your car" I must make the rule for EVERY employee in the department (not that I have, I'd rather lose the productivity of the lamer employees than disgruntle the better ones).
Anyway, there are two sides to every story.
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I saw the same.
Did you complete the form, checking "no" to the question asking whether your hardware met their requirements?
I think it's a good idea to submit the form completed in situations like this. If they have a clue, they're using the form to judge the market for non-Windows potential users of the service. If so, the number of people who drop out at that screen MIGHT be measured, but the number of people who submit with a "no" probably is.
With Research Triangle Park being the home of RedHat, as well as sizeable groups from IBM, Sun, NetApp, and others...I'll bet that plenty of their potential customers are proud users of anything-but-Windows. Best that they hear it early.
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I wish I could remember what I did. I tried several things that DIDN'T work.
/usr/ucb, I found commands there that did still work. It's been seven years, and the details are a bit hazy. I was far from a guru at the time (still far from a guru) so I'm sure I thrashed quite a bit until I stumbled on something that would work.
I remember being grateful that Solaris still had
Since it really halted all useful activity on the box, what I'd probably do now is just boot from CD and move everything back. Brute force is at least fast.
Sorry I didn't learn enough from the experience to offer anything insightful!
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Try it and see :-)
Sorry to be flip. I don't suggest doing that. It's more than a path problem.
~
Along the same lines. On a customer's precious and mission-critical machine. Intending to copy filesystems to new volumes I'd created, I started with:
/usr /newusr
/usr/bin and /usr/sbin had moved. Finding any useful commands still functioning to let me assess the damage and fix it was interesting. I needed to do something like this once to learn, deep down, that everything is different when working as root.
mv
I managed to get it stopped, but not before
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Use your company's organizing documents as tools to keep your company on the right path. For instance, write your charter and bylaws (or equivalent) in such a way that they will be difficult to change. Make the ways of changing those documents dependent on buy-in from people who are NOT stockholders or officers. Perhaps use third-party interest groups or trustees whose requirements are to act in consideration of the highest ethical standard for the business, best interest of the customers, and best interest of the community.
Then write the documents to make your company uninteresting to professional beancounters who simply want to be officers for personal pecuniary reasons. For instance, you could put executive compensation directly into the hands of lower-level employees, or into compensation committees composed of customer representatives, third-parties, and employees.
Consider NOT going public, and writing that limit directly into the difficult-to-change bylaws. So few companies go public for useful reasons, it's an almost-certain death-knell to ethical behavior anymore.
On the doing-business side, this is something that would earn my profound respect:
Consider offering a full warranty on your product (i.e. Magnuson-Moss FULL warranty, if your products are consumer grade, or the equivalent if they're not). Knowing that you'll have consequential damages to face if your product is lousy is an incredible incentive to making a non-lousy product. By doing that, you could also create an EULA of approximately a paragraph of big text, understandable by humans. THAT would set you apart from any company I'm aware of.
Just some thoughts.
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A pair of what exactly?
;-)
I wouldn't apologize for being American (though I might apologize for the morons running the country), but the issue isn't an American one, or shouldn't be. Maybe what we need now is a global online currency. Why invest in yet another form of national currency?
As for the IRS and SSA not keeping "accounts" for people...well, there isn't a whole lot of difference. It isn't as though a bank keeps everyone's money in little labelled boxes in the back room. An "account" is simply the bank's way of keeping track of how much of their big pool of money you own. The IRS keeps track of how much you've paid during the year, and when you file you either pay the difference or the difference is paid to you. The SSA keeps something much more like an "account" using an arcane formula to decide how much you get. Both imply really more "accounting" than the bank uses for your checking account.
Do I WANT the government controlling loans and manipulating interest rates? I'm not sure. They do a lot of that already. I just want to hear the discussion. At the moment I can walk to a store, and if they don't use face recognition, and the guy behind the counter doesn't know me, I can buy something anonymously by paying with paper. Paying with plastic means that anyone interested enough and persistent enough, including the government, can know exactly what I bought and when. I'm not sure that government plastic would be particularly worse.
BTW, I've gotten many compliments on the pair I've got...they're a little north of the anatomy you had in mind, but they seem to work fine, I daresay they're bigger than your pair.
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Those are good points. Other alternatives might exist though. I think that another poster suggested using and cancelling strings of numbers for single-use purposes. Even if we did stick with our current model of plastic money/accounts, most governments already perform functions like this. Integrating what the IRS does with a new form of plastic and online currency might make sense. As a privacy fanatic, of course, I see the objections clearly. Still, inter-agency firewalling could deal with a lot of the problem.
Aside from our tax "accounts" we already have Social Security accounts as well, so it's not a huge step to simply keeping all the money centrally and using government plastic or online micropayments from government accounts. Plus, efficiency and no profit-margin would decrease transaction costs across the board, the overhead would go down, and that would benefit the economy. Maybe banks are obsolete. Banks often do more harm than good these days, and credit card companies are no-one's friend. It's reasonable to object to banks and credit card companies skimming every transaction because they've "privatized" currency. If the government would have to behave more like a bank in order to re-"publicize" currency, then lets get the legislators debating the pros and cons.
Sorry for the U.S.-centric view in this post, just translate "IRS" and "Social Security" into other countries' equivalents, if any.
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THANK YOU! It is obvious, and it's been a problem for a while now. Online transactions aren't the only problem. We have a plastic currency society now, paper money is all but obsolete (though IMHO there will always be a place for it). In order to function now, it is arguably necessary to have a credit or debit card, yet private companies control who can and can't have one, and on what terms. It's just the same as if one person could use a $20 bill free of charge because they're "good" at using money, but another person had to pay $1 out of every $20 to someone else because they're "bad" at using money, and then there's the person who simply isn't allowed to use money at all because he doesn't have much to start with and he's been very bad at using it correctly in the past!
Governments should absolutely be moving with the times and providing transaction-fee-free plastic money and online money. Currency should be as neutral and transparent as possible, in order to facilitate a smooth and efficient marketplace. We've always supported the overhead required to create and manage the paper money, we should do the same for modern currency.
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There's no one way, the path to becoming CIO for a Fortune 500 company differs considerably from the path to be CIO for a small organization, or in the public sector.
Speaking for myself, I did systems administration while I was in school, went to Library School and came out with an M.S.I.S. with a focus in database design. I spent some time in a big corporation as a sysadmin. Then saw a great job as a UNIX admin at a Public Television network associated with a University. In a small pond, it was easy to parlay very very very hard work and my degree into my current IT Director/CIO/CTO position.
The thing that made all the difference for me was that from day one I didn't hide in my cube with my nose stuck to an X-Window, I volunteered for everything, and showed my very real interest in the entire organization. I got to know people in every department even though I technically didn't have to do any user support at all. Now, that's what I look for in "management material." Everyone I hire can "communicate well" but the ones who might take my job someday are the ones who see how their jobs relate to what the organization is trying to do, and who tell me how they can support those goals better. Prove to the existing management that you understand technology but can also translate it into achieving business goals, and prove that you think of IT as the means, not the end.
The other thing I managed to do right, I articulated my management philosophy clearly in my interviews. (I've interviewed management candidates who simply cannot tell me what a manager is for!). I told the interviewers in no uncertain terms what I think good managers do, proving that though I had exactly zero previous management experience, that I wouldn't dive in without a clue. For reference, if the interviewers want to hear a philosophy involving squeezing the most out of staff...run. IMHO, management is about supporting your staff, providing them with resources, defending them from abuse, protecting them from distraction, and making resource demands incessently to provide whatever motivation each person needs (far more than "salary" in most cases).
So I guess I suggest picking the kind of organization you want to go to, seeing what kind of qualifications they look for in a PHB, and really loving and believing in the places you apply. (you'll need to, a good PHB works more hours than her subordinates). Then go outside your job description and prove that IT can make things better, not just more expensive. And all the while, think about the best and worst bosses you've ever had and come up with hiring and retention strategies, and a solid management philosophy of your own (I never read a management book) and be ready to articulate it, then to live it.
Realize this though, once you're a PHB, you will not have time to be a technologist anymore. What's more, your staff will see it as unwelcome micromanagement. If you can't give up the root passwords, then don't become an executive. You'll only hate it. Satisfy your technical cravings at home.
My $.02
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Does anyone have a link to the SCO/IBM license?
As a non-AIX user, I wouldn't mind seeing an AIX license agreement as well. Does the AIX license refer to the SCO master license?
Sorry, but Google is full of newsy muck right now, I'd like to see the real agreements.
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Good points. What I'm getting at is that the Internet has brought a world of claims and considerations into campus. The schools are forced to deal with those liability issues they didn't have before, forcing them into a more adversarial position with the students. Misuse of school property has always been a problem, of course, but a kid sneaking into a building at night and doing something non-destructive might have gotten a slap on the wrist in the past. Today, the Internet on campus gives the kid a whole world to explore. A little harmless cracking will get a student expelled today. The behavior is essentially the same, but where a kid ten years ago would have had to leave campus to break into someone else's building, and the school might have mediated for him if he did, a kid today can crack a server in another country from his dorm room.
The University has a lot more to protect the kid from when he screws up, and politically that just isn't possible in a lot of cases. You would have to ask a current student, but my perception is that the glory days of college students being kind of a privileged group, with a wide social latitude of behavior and activity, is over. IMHO, "academic freedom" has a lot to do with that mindset of being free to explore activity and behavior. Students can no longer trust that the school will protect that freedom, as a kind of parental figure (someone maybe not on the "same side" but more good than bad). Instead, the school, out of self-protection, may be the one trying to prevent the behavior.
Maybe this all depends on the school. I went to two large and liberal public Universities, where mild warnings were the rule. Today, I work at one of them, and things have changed a lot.
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Well...not "wrong" exactly, just not complete. I like it better this way.
:-)
I suppose I should make it: "...Consistency is the Hobgoblin of little minds." Thank you for pointing it out though
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Working at a University, one change seems to be the position of the school in its role of protecting the academic freedom of students. Traditionally, schools would handle discipline problems internally, often protecting students from law enforcement for minor infractions. That protective layer, acting formally or informally "in loco parentis" let students stretch their wings a little, with a corresponding benefit to academics and research. The Internet has brought the world into the campus. For example, schools now struggle to protect their students from the RIAA, while balancing political necessity. Many schools now actually act, to some degree, as enforcers on behalf of copyright owners. That shift puts the school and the students into more adversarial positions than may have existed before the Internet was big. In the past, schools could "look the other way" or just issue "warnings" while students pushed the envelope of what was and was not allowed, now security concerns and the concerns of private industry have made campuses much less safe places for students to test the waters and try things out.
Many University administrators see that problem very clearly, and try to strike a politically surviveable balance to keep academic freedom alive.
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Of course, the bigger the aggregate "work" the smaller each part is in comparison to the whole. Since fair use looks at how much of a total work is used (among other things), it's in the best interest of copyright owners to be very granular in defining their works.
;-)
If an author defined their entire life's work as a "work" (even if that were really possible) then surely if I borrow just one measly novel out of twenty, that would be fair use, right?
~
Yes, the "heat problem" is overstated. The left side of mine occasionally feels warmer than the right side.
;-)).
I bought the set of international travel adapters for mine. If you haven't seen the AC adapter/power cord setup for the iBooks/Powerbooks, that might be your decision right there. The little, compact, sensibly-shaped, light AC adapter has the thin cable to connect to the *Book, which curls easily around built-in cable-management for storage. Then one corner of the adapter, where the prongs come out (and flip back in for storage) is removeable. The international adapter set is just replacement prongs. She can take the two little prong corners she needs, no need for a different adapter, or long cables, or anything else. It's a beautiful, easy to pack, and elegant solution.
As for sturdiness...well I've got no concerns for mine. In fact, I have to spend time outside in a fairly crime-infested neighborhood a few nights a week. I noticed recently that while I used to carry my old plastic G3 Powerbook carefully, assuming I'd have to protect it like a baby in a fight (I'm perhaps overprotective of hardware), I now carry my laptop case (very thin case, no handles) in the same way I subconsciously treat anything on my person I might use as a weapon. In other words, my instincts have decided that not only is the Book tough enough to "take care of itself" in a fight, but I'm flat-out prepared to break someone's face with it (and I don't even have the AppleCare plan
Ditto on the second battery. Battery life is good, but it won't be enough to get her all the way to Japan. I miss being able to snap out the DVD drive and stick a second battery in its place the way my old G3 Powerbook would, but the 12" G4 is a darned fine machine, more than makes up for that.
__________
Good luck! It probably won't be much fun, but it's do-able, and the Doula will be a big help, so you won't have to be the coach AND keep an eye on the doctors.
;->. She'll forgive you for getting her through it. She'd remember having to do something she hadn't planned to do, like getting an epidural, but she won't remember the pain. So your best bet for avoiding future reproaches is to stick to the plan. At least if your wife is a reproaching sort of person like me ;->.
One of the best things our childbirth instructor told us was that in her experience, people mostly had the kind of births they thought they would...in other words, the people who went in wanting a natural birth but really believing they'd probably have to have some kind of intervention ended up with that intervention. She said that's why she stopped doing practices based on births going wrong. She said her classes' success rates went up dramatically when she started doing practices based on short, easy, uncomplicated labor. If you can really convince yourselves that you're prepared, and that it's a normal process, and that you'll know instinctively and by training what to do, it'll all be fine.
Of course the bonus is that after about three days, it's impossible to remember how bad it really was
I hope your young Linus, or Schroedinger, or Galadriel appears with a minimum of fuss!
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Actually, during my recent pregnancy, I read as much medical literature as I could get my hands on. I read pro and anti midwife opinion pieces. I read statistics. I looked at our state's statistics on things like use of drugs during labor, C-Section rate, episiotomy rates, use of monitors during labor, restriction of food/drink during labor. Then I looked over all of the childbirth class options available to me. I chose the Bradley method. I highly recommend it.
I started with midwives (not lay midwives) and had to leave because they decided I was gestationally diabetic. So at 32 weeks, I had to go to the Family Practice the midwives associated with. Switching was beyond stressful. Imagine my disgust to find that the medical research on gestational diabetes is so fundamentally flawed that the medical community does not even have BASELINE information about what constitutes normal blood sugar during pregnancy. Nice and scientific. As a geek, I was mortally offended by the MD who told me to take insulin, without once looking at the detailed blood sugar test spreadsheet I presented him. Merely on the word of some litigation-paranoid midwives. I refused, and our birthplan specified that we would, by default, refuse all medical intervention during labor and delivery, and that every medical procedure had to be approved by my husband.
Naturally, I had a short, certainly painful but obviously surviveable, and entirely drug-free natural birth. Most mothers who use the Bradley method can say the same.
The risk of NEEDING a C-Section and having it be *gasp* three minutes away is absurdly low. The risk, if you're in a hospital, of being drugged, ignored, "monitored," and impatiently told that your labor is not "progressing" according to the rigid schedule set according to almost no scientifically valid standards, then guilted into a C-Section, is about 20%. I think you'll find, as I did, that the risk of death and serious complication to the MOTHER of MAJOR ABDOMINAL SURGERY, plus the difficult to discern risk of death to the fetus, added to the low apgar scores (associated with long-term poor performance by babies), plus the difficulty in bonding and starting breastfeeding, plus the usual feelings of failure and regret by women in that situation...all add up, at least in my book, to staying the heck out of the hands of the OB/Gyns and surgeons responsible.
Then there are all the other less-drastic "interventions" and their inevitable harm to mother and baby (don't get me started on episiotomy)...I can't fathom any reason other than FUD, misinformation, and peer pressure that ANYONE would choose an OB if any other rational options exist. (I am NOT a home-birth advocate by any means, but rational middle ground exists in most places). Heck, you don't even have to do the literature review I did to figure out how bad the OB practice is. Just ask the OB you're considering how often he/she (mostly he) considers episiotomy to be necessary, despite years of evidence that it does more harm than good...ask what their C-Section rate is. Ask what their rate of using epidurals and other labor drugs is. Then decide if you're willing to roll the dice and risk that those things will happen to your wife with those likelihoods.
Labor is not the time to realize that you can't stand up to a medical professional who is using "fetal distress" as an excuse to drug/snip/slice. You'll find that midwives have much higher healthy outcomes, and much lower rates of any of those interventions. A competent midwife will admit that C-Sections are sometimes necessary and be able to tell you about the two or three times she took someone in (in plenty of time, those scare tactics above are absurd...birth just doesn't work that way) for a C-Section.
My advice is to check out the Bradley Method, the childbirth classes take longer (12 weeks) and are much more demanding on dad than any others I looked at, but the success rate is profoundly impressive. They, unlike even Lamaze, define success as a healthy
Another place to look, if you've got an RV campground nearby, some of those have really good trading libraries. Lots of Danielle Steele and similar muck, but good books too. Full-time RV'ers are...interesting...people. You might be surprised at what you find in those swap shelves.
Likewise, lots of used bookstores will give pretty decent credit for trade-ins (you usually get less cash than credit for trade when you sell). You'll diminish your collection slowly that way, but used bookstores are wonderous places to spend a lot of time if you've got a good one. If you spent money on more books rather than shipping costs you'd be able to keep that trading up indefinitely.
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Yep, the library. If you're feeling guilty for reading books for "free," I'm sure they'd be happy to take some of yours off you hands.
As for moderation, librarians are well trained to select materials. If you have suggestions, they might even take them. I've been really impressed with the sci fi sections of several public libraries I've visited, but going to library school (IANAL(ibrarian)) I realized just how many librarians are also geeks, though perhaps not all of the computer variety.
Bookstores tend to be "more of the same," where libraries are "the cream of the crop." Not true of all bookstores or all libraries, but you might be pleasantly surprised.
The other great thing about libraries is that the librarians are also trained to be able to make recommendations about books you might like based on some you've read and liked. Kind of like what Amazon tries and mostly fails to do, but with people. Rather than looking at a meaningless list of titles in someone's collection, you can go look in person, save yourself shipping costs, and get some good suggestions.
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Thank you! I run an IT department in a smallish (~200 person) organization, and that is the most DIFFICULT thing to get across to the rest of management. For whatever reason, staff here think they'll get better results from bothering my programmers if they can't print, and telling long sagas about their need for new application functionality to my poor sysadmins. That said, we're comfortable, but not too comfortable with our staffing ratio here.
We have ~200 workstations, mostly PC but some Mac, and we're headed for Linux as much as possible. Server side we're 13 Suns (Ultra10-E5500), 2 NetApp filers (talk about low maintenance!) and 8 Win2K. For those machines, we've got 1 UNIX admin, 1 admin/manager and 3 Windows admins. These folks also do our telephone admin work, user training, asset management, and "whatever else comes up." We have two guys who do nothing but network and security administration (56-site WAN, keeps 'em hopping). We've also got three big-gun programmers since I'm allergic to outsourcing and we can't get things we need off-the-shelf.
By comfortable, but not too comfortable, I mean that we have time for long lunches, don't ever turn down vacation requests, have time to send people for training, and let 'em read trade rags at work. Our jobs are mostly 40 hour jobs. Our turnover is incredibly low, and for two out of the last four years, we had NO ONE leave the department. That all said, we have lots of projects, and unsophisticated users who keep us hopping most of the time.
---
"The best cure for bad speech is more speech."
(I'm sorry I don't know who said that first)
If someone libels you in a *public* online forum, then they've given you the opportunity to explain your position, refute their facts, point out their cowardice in posting anonymously, and otherwise come out on top.
Sometimes, also, it's important to remember that while sticking to our natural, fundamental rights, things don't always work out "fairly" as a child might define it. In the larger view, allowing free and open anonymous public commentary without fear of legal action or reprisal is an amazing benefit which tends to improve life. Unfortunately, while the benefits accrue to everyone, the negative aspects hit a few specific people. Someone who loses their business due to libel is not treated "fairly" and the instinctive reaction is to find a legal remedy. Unless the legal remedy can be carved out narrowly enough to address the wrong without lessening the free-speech benefit to all, it's not worth it. It might well be worth it to the guy who lost his business, but businesses can be rebuilt, lost rights are harder to fix. It's unfair, and people of good conscience should work to find ways outside the legal system to respond to these unfair episodes (for instance through moderation ala Slashdot).
Forget the lawyers, sit down at your keyboard and compose thoughtful responses to the nasty posts.
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