I own a small consulting firm. We do software development, business intelligence reporting and general technology support for small ($5M->$100M) businesses.
Got a call today from someone in India on the domain "tech contact" cell phone (I guess its their custom to piss people off before trying to sell something). Crappy connection sounded like it was routed though Moscow while the spammers were having a slow day:
Telemarketer: "Hello, I'm calling from [can't understand] something somthing India would like to partner with you"
Me: It's very hard to hear you. What do you want?
Telemarketer: We are an outsourcing firm in [somewhere] and can lower your development costs.
Me: Our business requires face-to-face contact with the clients. You really can't help us.
Telemarketer: We are very competitive and can lower your development costs.
Me: Can you show up at a client's location in 2 hours or less to meet a Service Level Agreement?
Telemarketer: We can lower your development costs.
Me: [Click]
Just for shits and giggles, has anybody ever outsourced for a significantly comlplex project and had it come back on time, under budget, without boatloads of annoyances?
I've worked for three separate companies that have outsourced for software development. The results ranged from disastrous to mediocre. why do they keep doing it?
Everyone raise their equivalent electronic hands who thinks the City of Boston is going to increase manning for the IT staff to accommodate this increase in workload, scope, and new technology implementation?
No hands. Sucks to be an IT admin for the City of Boston about now.
Nothing will happen for the near future. The city will say "We don't have enough money to implement this" (which is probably true) and ask for more money, which will be rejected. Eventually someone will get a court order, ordering them to comply with the law, and it will go around for a while, as they decide if it's cheaper to spend millions of dollars on an upgrade, whatever the court fines the city, or to take it out of the School Lunch program.
I'd give them another 10 or 20 years before this is implemented.
As an ex-employee, it's no longer his call as to "who gets the keys"
Wrong! The SOP was that he was only to turn the passwords over to the Mayor. This has been covered extensively. This requirement DOES go away if you're fired... you don't [by default] have to turn over ANY passwords! Just say "I don't work here any more, and I don't have your passwords." Meanwhile, if you do still work there, then you're still bound by the agreement you already made to follow the policies and procedures, which means he was bound to turn the passwords only over to the mayor.
I'll give passwords to anybody who can produce written authorization from any executive, officer or elected official with the authority to do so.
"SOP" is completely meaningless unless it's law or a written policy authorized by the City, that the employee signed.
If the Mayor wants the passwords, that's fine with me. In fact, assuming it was just a few logins, I'd even give it to him for free, regardless of whetehr I was still an employee or not. In fact, if they want to pay for my services, I'll happily root all their servers and routers and tell them what the new passwords are.
.
OTOH, I guess that explains why I'm not in jail and have more business than I can handle. The first rule of successfully working with others is "Don't be an asshole."
All he needs is written authorization from the city to turn over the passwords to whoever they say.
Any other refusal just makes him a dick and he belongs in jail.
As an ex-employee, it's no longer his call as to "who gets the keys"
They've decided to thwart piracy by not releasing any games. Sounds like a Winner. In fact, they can also save a bunch of money by firing all the employees.
If they wait long enough, their customer will discover the Actual Reality game "Women."
"Women" are much less predictable, while being much more enjoyable. Unfortunately, you generally don't want the MM version, since it's typically infected.
Please RTFA and the website. The filter is opaque. THe user is sent gibberish as a password, and it only makses sense if you have the opaque window to create letters and numbers from the gibberish.
It is mot possible to decode without knowing the one time padd. And the one time padd is implemented in the physical world, by the window.
It's not a one-time-pad if you use it twice.
It's probably better than nothing, but not by much.
If a 15-year-old "analyst" writes one of the most "clearest and most thought-provoking insights" for your publication, that says a lot more about your publication (and the state of American journalism) than the 15-year-old in question.
What it says is that most people working in "business" are disconnected from reality and produce nothing of value.
The only real problem is that some moron let this kid inside to see the Slurm factory and now he knows.
Everyone who is claiming that linux should be used and its those stupid MS users that cause this are missing the point and have never spent one second working in a corporate IT enviroment. The fact is that every single security measure that is put in place is met with overwhelming opposition by the user base as well as the executives. A spam filter is looked at as the unholy antichrist because it blocks.00001% of legitimate emails. I have worked corporated IT for years and have constantly had to fight for just the basic's in security. IT is not given the authority to do its job. I am sure there is some IT guy that worked for the county that is now unemploy
I'll admit it's been about 15 years since I was in Banking, but either these bank people were all morons or things have really changed.
Why exactly is the wire transfer system even on the same network as the PCs?
Why do bank users even have removable drives and active USB ports?
In fact, I'm willing to give you my secret patented method for avoid stupid bullshit assignments: "Say No". If you're valuable, chances are excellent that you won't be fired and they'll find some other poor soul to stuff into that slot.
The secret to a happy life is being selective about how much BS you accept and from who.
Of course it's slow and sort-of sucks. That's it's purpose.
The only real point of online "games" is suck up as much of your money as possible for as many months as possible. Actual content is expensive and as long as your credit card payment doesn't bounce, there's absolutely no reason in the world why any company would make any game any better than the minimum to keep you from canceling.
On a less obvious note, the perceived value of a task is related to how much time and work you have invested it it, making the value of time spent in the game a self-fulfilling wish (I spent hundreds of hours doing this, therefor it must be a valuable task).
Want something really interesting to do with your time? Find or make a job that doesn't suck. Learn to SCUBA dive. Meet new people. Find a girlfriend (or a wife). Go explore the real world.
AT&T clearly states on their website its $0.015 which translates to 1.5 cents per KB.
I've been around since data was shoveled through modems that were so slow that you could actually type faster than the modem could transfer, and data was sent dial-up over expensive long distance phone lines.
And it was still cheaper than 1.5 cents/KB.
Does AT&T send a free jar of Vaseline with each new contract?
Be always squeaky clean and nice. The next step is tricky... you see, men deceive themselves that they can get the girls. It's the other way round. Human biology works the other way.
Men merely demonstrate that they at least have some capability of being molded into a domesticated breeding partner.... and then the girls take their pick.
Thereafter make yourself available. Place yourself in contexts where the opposite gender exist. Going to Linux meetings or motorbike meets is not what I mean. Church socials are an excellent place, visit married friends (with eligible friends and sisters),...
That's a great point!
You can't "get" women> . They're selective (at least any one you would want is selective). What you're actually doing it making yourself more interesting and attractive (in a "I could marry this guy at some point" way, not a "I wonder if he can get backstage passes?" way).
Also, you sound young, so this is going to sound amazingly stupid, however I'll say it anyway:
Find someone you actually like a lot, not just someone you want to screw. Sex is great, but wears off after a while. Even the guys who snag supermodels figure out that "really hot" doesn't outweigh "dumb as a stump", "boring" or "psycho bitch on wheels."
If you're lucky enough to have any single girls in the class, you'll immediately have something in common and you'll both be doing something that's fun and that you're both new at, which puts you both on equal footing.
SCUBA is something you can do together when you're not doing the geek-thing, and it's generally done in small groups or just the two of you, so you won't need to deal with every goober on the planet that's "reel gud wit cumpooters" (unlike trolling the bars).
If you don't have any single girls in class get certified anyway, since you'll almost always find them on dive boats, and they usually appreciate a hand with heavy stuff like tanks and weights. As an added bonus, everybody looks like crap when they get out of the water, so female divers aren't generally the stuck-up appearance-obsessed type.
More and more providers drop their usenet servers. Nobody allows inbound telnet anymore. Bash and Linux have nothing to do with the internet (except for the downloading part). Email is full of spam. Html without plugins is still full of ads, and even google can't keep the price comparison pages out of the search results anymore.
I have all the usenet I can handle for a few bucks/month. Linux has apps that are more functional and "less warm and fuzzy" than the boatload of crap that ships with any recent windows, and telnet still works just fine on a number of ports.
Thanks to a small application of geekiness, my email contains no spam (at least no more than it did 20 years ago) and my web browsing contains no ads. Once you turn off Javascript and most of the content handlers, a small collection of regular expressions kills almost everything else.
The "real" internet is still there, in fact it's stronger than ever, you just need to view and filter it properly. The spammers and ads actually require a very minor amount of technology to stop them, and in fact, I find the challenge both relaxing and fascinating.
It's like getting a new, free puzzle every morning. Which is what the original internet was all about.
Usenet, telnet, bash, text-based email, html without plugins, privoxy, linux. It's all still there. Leave the Flash ads and latest "screw you" schemes for the "consumers".
For What It's Worth, I don't know how anybody can stand it. I walked up to a Co-worker's Vista machine running IE and just about had a seizure as the endless barrage of blinking flashing running ads flew about his screen, occupying at least 2/3rds of the real estate. I don't know why the lusers even bother.
If my machines looked like that, I'd unplug them all and do something useful like cook for a living.
As long as the Bill of Rights is still in effect, they can't compel the passphrase, and even if it's crackable by No Such Agency, they would never confirm they had the capability by wasting it on such a meaningless charge.
A properly encrypted laptop is just a really cool-looking battery-operated space heater.
If you don't like this sort of thing, then don't buy one of these. May I recommend the JitterBug.
I know it was intended as a small poke, but a small light single-purpose device that performs flawlessly is miles ahead of a complex expensive device that does a bunch of stuff poorly.
Just to make things clear, I'm not a Luddite, and actually like (and develop) really cool technology. I just find it amusing that people will just about drool over the capabilities of a small device that wouldn't make it as a kids toy if it were full-size.
Call me when it has excellent voice and/or thought recognition and a non-intrusive wide-screen HUD with a good refresh rate.
It's about having a device like your computer with you at all times.
I have a device like my computer with me at all times when I want to be near a computer.
It's my computer.
If people only realized how much crap they've been programmed to "need", there would be riots in the streets, complete with pitchforks and burning torches.
Nobody really cares if you buy an iPhone or anything else as long as it ensures that you'll pay them $50/month forever, for a "data plan".
Just for an example, most of the Northeast US has great water. A lot of it is some of the best water on the planet. We still buy it @ $1+/bottle and it's a huge industry based on nothing except marketing-created need.
Has anybody besides me noticed that the goal of almost every business is to get you to pay them every month for something you don't need and never new you wanted until they decided for you?
Is that really worse? On what planet do you work where non-techies have perfect data?
"I'm not gonna restore your accounting data because it could be off by a few thousand dollars. You're better off restarting from scratch, so you have a perfect data set." "I'm not gonna restore your patient records, because some addresses may be wrong. Better off waiting to let them call you and get their information then, rather than going through a suspect data set and verify it."
Actually, it would be: "I'm really sorry Mrs. Jones died, I guess there must have been some missing data in the 'drug allergies' section. I've never seen anybody swell up like that before! Do you think her survivors will be angry?"
People like you are a lot of what's wrong with the world. You cover your ass so much that you don't accomplish what your clients really want or need.
Do you know what's worse than "No Data"?
Bad Data.
What my clients really need is data they can trust.
Telling someone "Here's your data, I got some of it back for you, but I'm not sure how much you lost or if the stuff I got back for you is correct" is great for your mother's vacation pictures. It's not great for your bank, insurance company, doctor, school or anybody else that needs to have verifiable, correct data.
I've been doing consulting and software development for around 30 years, and when I was young and dumb, thought I could fix anything. Now I know better and have found that in this situation, the phrase "Wow, that's too bad. Where are your backups?" works nicely.
While there are all sorts of voodoo, data scraping bit-remunging apps available, at the point before you do anything you have no liability. After you "recover" the data, you're on the hook for everything forever.
All you need is for the customer to come back 2 years later and tell you they were sued into the dirt because something they were required to disclose was missing or incorrect and you'll wish you never took the job.
And even if they don't sue, there will be a never-ending stream of phone calls about broken documents, files they can't find and all sorts of other "un-tidyness".
And even if they don't call, there will be eternal uncertainty about the quality of the recovered data. Are their financials correct? What was that number that had the letters nearby really supposed to be?
My favorite drive recovery method is now BackupPC. You set it up, configure it for an appropriate number of incremental backups each day and let it fly. When a drive craps out, replace it, click the appropriate checkbox on the "Restore" page and press the "go" button. No doubt, no lawsuits, no untidyness.
Do-it-yourself Data Recovery is great if you like to putter with things and have lots of time and no liability (employees generally can't be sued by their employer) however when actual money is at stake, it's better to just send the drive out and let someone who is actually equipped and staffed to do the recovery handle the work.
To put things in a different perspective, how happy would you be if the county tried to sell your house for unpaid taxes because billy-bob "who's really good with computers" did their drive recovery and your tax payments were on one of the bad spots?
I like to keep the load down on spamhaus, so anything I can reject locally is a Good Thing. In any event, it's not a huge deal to maintain, I've got about two dozen lines that I haven't changed in over a year, and they reject an absolute ton of spam from home-zombies.
Slashdot Mirror
Got a call today from someone in India on the domain "tech contact" cell phone (I guess its their custom to piss people off before trying to sell something). Crappy connection sounded like it was routed though Moscow while the spammers were having a slow day:
Just for shits and giggles, has anybody ever outsourced for a significantly comlplex project and had it come back on time, under budget, without boatloads of annoyances?
I've worked for three separate companies that have outsourced for software development. The results ranged from disastrous to mediocre. why do they keep doing it?
Everyone raise their equivalent electronic hands who thinks the City of Boston is going to increase manning for the IT staff to accommodate this increase in workload, scope, and new technology implementation? No hands. Sucks to be an IT admin for the City of Boston about now.
Nothing will happen for the near future. The city will say "We don't have enough money to implement this" (which is probably true) and ask for more money, which will be rejected. Eventually someone will get a court order, ordering them to comply with the law, and it will go around for a while, as they decide if it's cheaper to spend millions of dollars on an upgrade, whatever the court fines the city, or to take it out of the School Lunch program.
I'd give them another 10 or 20 years before this is implemented.
As an ex-employee, it's no longer his call as to "who gets the keys"
Wrong! The SOP was that he was only to turn the passwords over to the Mayor. This has been covered extensively. This requirement DOES go away if you're fired... you don't [by default] have to turn over ANY passwords! Just say "I don't work here any more, and I don't have your passwords." Meanwhile, if you do still work there, then you're still bound by the agreement you already made to follow the policies and procedures, which means he was bound to turn the passwords only over to the mayor. I'll give passwords to anybody who can produce written authorization from any executive, officer or elected official with the authority to do so.
"SOP" is completely meaningless unless it's law or a written policy authorized by the City, that the employee signed.
If the Mayor wants the passwords, that's fine with me. In fact, assuming it was just a few logins, I'd even give it to him for free, regardless of whetehr I was still an employee or not. In fact, if they want to pay for my services, I'll happily root all their servers and routers and tell them what the new passwords are.
. OTOH, I guess that explains why I'm not in jail and have more business than I can handle. The first rule of successfully working with others is "Don't be an asshole."
All he needs is written authorization from the city to turn over the passwords to whoever they say. Any other refusal just makes him a dick and he belongs in jail.
As an ex-employee, it's no longer his call as to "who gets the keys"
They've decided to thwart piracy by not releasing any games. Sounds like a Winner. In fact, they can also save a bunch of money by firing all the employees.
If they wait long enough, their customer will discover the Actual Reality game "Women."
"Women" are much less predictable, while being much more enjoyable. Unfortunately, you generally don't want the MM version, since it's typically infected.
Please RTFA and the website. The filter is opaque. THe user is sent gibberish as a password, and it only makses sense if you have the opaque window to create letters and numbers from the gibberish.
It is mot possible to decode without knowing the one time padd. And the one time padd is implemented in the physical world, by the window.
It's not a one-time-pad if you use it twice.
It's probably better than nothing, but not by much.
If a 15-year-old "analyst" writes one of the most "clearest and most thought-provoking insights" for your publication, that says a lot more about your publication (and the state of American journalism) than the 15-year-old in question.
What it says is that most people working in "business" are disconnected from reality and produce nothing of value.
The only real problem is that some moron let this kid inside to see the Slurm factory and now he knows.
I'll admit it's been about 15 years since I was in Banking, but either these bank people were all morons or things have really changed.
Get another job.
Shift work is physically unheathy: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1274227
In fact, I'm willing to give you my secret patented method for avoid stupid bullshit assignments: "Say No". If you're valuable, chances are excellent that you won't be fired and they'll find some other poor soul to stuff into that slot.
The secret to a happy life is being selective about how much BS you accept and from who.
Of course it's slow and sort-of sucks. That's it's purpose.
The only real point of online "games" is suck up as much of your money as possible for as many months as possible. Actual content is expensive and as long as your credit card payment doesn't bounce, there's absolutely no reason in the world why any company would make any game any better than the minimum to keep you from canceling.
On a less obvious note, the perceived value of a task is related to how much time and work you have invested it it, making the value of time spent in the game a self-fulfilling wish (I spent hundreds of hours doing this, therefor it must be a valuable task). Want something really interesting to do with your time? Find or make a job that doesn't suck. Learn to SCUBA dive. Meet new people. Find a girlfriend (or a wife). Go explore the real world.
AT&T clearly states on their website its $0.015 which translates to 1.5 cents per KB.
I've been around since data was shoveled through modems that were so slow that you could actually type faster than the modem could transfer, and data was sent dial-up over expensive long distance phone lines.
And it was still cheaper than 1.5 cents/KB.
Does AT&T send a free jar of Vaseline with each new contract?
Be always squeaky clean and nice. The next step is tricky... you see, men deceive themselves that they can get the girls. It's the other way round. Human biology works the other way. Men merely demonstrate that they at least have some capability of being molded into a domesticated breeding partner.... and then the girls take their pick. Thereafter make yourself available. Place yourself in contexts where the opposite gender exist. Going to Linux meetings or motorbike meets is not what I mean. Church socials are an excellent place, visit married friends (with eligible friends and sisters), ...
That's a great point!
You can't "get" women> . They're selective (at least any one you would want is selective). What you're actually doing it making yourself more interesting and attractive (in a "I could marry this guy at some point" way, not a "I wonder if he can get backstage passes?" way).
Also, you sound young, so this is going to sound amazingly stupid, however I'll say it anyway:
Find someone you actually like a lot, not just someone you want to screw. Sex is great, but wears off after a while. Even the guys who snag supermodels figure out that "really hot" doesn't outweigh "dumb as a stump", "boring" or "psycho bitch on wheels."
Take SCUBA lessons.
If you're lucky enough to have any single girls in the class, you'll immediately have something in common and you'll both be doing something that's fun and that you're both new at, which puts you both on equal footing.
SCUBA is something you can do together when you're not doing the geek-thing, and it's generally done in small groups or just the two of you, so you won't need to deal with every goober on the planet that's "reel gud wit cumpooters" (unlike trolling the bars).
If you don't have any single girls in class get certified anyway, since you'll almost always find them on dive boats, and they usually appreciate a hand with heavy stuff like tanks and weights. As an added bonus, everybody looks like crap when they get out of the water, so female divers aren't generally the stuck-up appearance-obsessed type.
More and more providers drop their usenet servers. Nobody allows inbound telnet anymore. Bash and Linux have nothing to do with the internet (except for the downloading part). Email is full of spam. Html without plugins is still full of ads, and even google can't keep the price comparison pages out of the search results anymore.
I have all the usenet I can handle for a few bucks/month. Linux has apps that are more functional and "less warm and fuzzy" than the boatload of crap that ships with any recent windows, and telnet still works just fine on a number of ports.
Thanks to a small application of geekiness, my email contains no spam (at least no more than it did 20 years ago) and my web browsing contains no ads. Once you turn off Javascript and most of the content handlers, a small collection of regular expressions kills almost everything else.
The "real" internet is still there, in fact it's stronger than ever, you just need to view and filter it properly. The spammers and ads actually require a very minor amount of technology to stop them, and in fact, I find the challenge both relaxing and fascinating.
It's like getting a new, free puzzle every morning. Which is what the original internet was all about.
Our internet is still there.
Usenet, telnet, bash, text-based email, html without plugins, privoxy, linux. It's all still there. Leave the Flash ads and latest "screw you" schemes for the "consumers".
For What It's Worth, I don't know how anybody can stand it. I walked up to a Co-worker's Vista machine running IE and just about had a seizure as the endless barrage of blinking flashing running ads flew about his screen, occupying at least 2/3rds of the real estate. I don't know why the lusers even bother.
If my machines looked like that, I'd unplug them all and do something useful like cook for a living.
IAANAL (I Am Also Not a Lawyer)
As long as the Bill of Rights is still in effect, they can't compel the passphrase, and even if it's crackable by No Such Agency, they would never confirm they had the capability by wasting it on such a meaningless charge.
A properly encrypted laptop is just a really cool-looking battery-operated space heater.
If you don't like this sort of thing, then don't buy one of these. May I recommend the JitterBug.
I know it was intended as a small poke, but a small light single-purpose device that performs flawlessly is miles ahead of a complex expensive device that does a bunch of stuff poorly.
Just to make things clear, I'm not a Luddite, and actually like (and develop) really cool technology. I just find it amusing that people will just about drool over the capabilities of a small device that wouldn't make it as a kids toy if it were full-size.
Call me when it has excellent voice and/or thought recognition and a non-intrusive wide-screen HUD with a good refresh rate.
It's about having a device like your computer with you at all times.
I have a device like my computer with me at all times when I want to be near a computer.
It's my computer.
If people only realized how much crap they've been programmed to "need", there would be riots in the streets, complete with pitchforks and burning torches.
Nobody really cares if you buy an iPhone or anything else as long as it ensures that you'll pay them $50/month forever, for a "data plan".
Just for an example, most of the Northeast US has great water. A lot of it is some of the best water on the planet. We still buy it @ $1+/bottle and it's a huge industry based on nothing except marketing-created need.
Has anybody besides me noticed that the goal of almost every business is to get you to pay them every month for something you don't need and never new you wanted until they decided for you?
At the risk of being branded a heretic, if I wanted a crappy computer with a tiny screen and keyboard, I'd buy a Sinclair.
Why does every chunk of plastic in the world want to be my computer?
You are useless.
I'm happy, my clients are happy and I've been in business since usenet traveled on dial-up modems.
By some standards that would be considered a success.
Is that really worse? On what planet do you work where non-techies have perfect data?
"I'm not gonna restore your accounting data because it could be off by a few thousand dollars. You're better off restarting from scratch, so you have a perfect data set." "I'm not gonna restore your patient records, because some addresses may be wrong. Better off waiting to let them call you and get their information then, rather than going through a suspect data set and verify it."
Actually, it would be: "I'm really sorry Mrs. Jones died, I guess there must have been some missing data in the 'drug allergies' section. I've never seen anybody swell up like that before! Do you think her survivors will be angry?"
People like you are a lot of what's wrong with the world. You cover your ass so much that you don't accomplish what your clients really want or need.
Do you know what's worse than "No Data"?
Bad Data.
What my clients really need is data they can trust.
Telling someone "Here's your data, I got some of it back for you, but I'm not sure how much you lost or if the stuff I got back for you is correct" is great for your mother's vacation pictures. It's not great for your bank, insurance company, doctor, school or anybody else that needs to have verifiable, correct data.
I've been doing consulting and software development for around 30 years, and when I was young and dumb, thought I could fix anything. Now I know better and have found that in this situation, the phrase "Wow, that's too bad. Where are your backups?" works nicely.
While there are all sorts of voodoo, data scraping bit-remunging apps available, at the point before you do anything you have no liability. After you "recover" the data, you're on the hook for everything forever.
All you need is for the customer to come back 2 years later and tell you they were sued into the dirt because something they were required to disclose was missing or incorrect and you'll wish you never took the job.
And even if they don't sue, there will be a never-ending stream of phone calls about broken documents, files they can't find and all sorts of other "un-tidyness".
And even if they don't call, there will be eternal uncertainty about the quality of the recovered data. Are their financials correct? What was that number that had the letters nearby really supposed to be?
My favorite drive recovery method is now BackupPC. You set it up, configure it for an appropriate number of incremental backups each day and let it fly. When a drive craps out, replace it, click the appropriate checkbox on the "Restore" page and press the "go" button. No doubt, no lawsuits, no untidyness.
Do-it-yourself Data Recovery is great if you like to putter with things and have lots of time and no liability (employees generally can't be sued by their employer) however when actual money is at stake, it's better to just send the drive out and let someone who is actually equipped and staffed to do the recovery handle the work.
To put things in a different perspective, how happy would you be if the county tried to sell your house for unpaid taxes because billy-bob "who's really good with computers" did their drive recovery and your tax payments were on one of the bad spots?
telnet 127.0.0.1 25 is the only way to send a "fuck you" message 8-)
I like to keep the load down on spamhaus, so anything I can reject locally is a Good Thing. In any event, it's not a huge deal to maintain, I've got about two dozen lines that I haven't changed in over a year, and they reject an absolute ton of spam from home-zombies.