One major problem is that a lot of spam is through botnets and the spammers would not get charged the e-mail fees, people with zombied computers would.
That's a non-issue.
Want to block a ton of spam? Reject any inbound smtp connections that have no reverse DNS record, then use regular expressions on those that do to refuse connections from dynamic/home/dsl/dial_up/etc. (I tried to post the regexes, but slashdot whined about " Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!")
Stop talking to dynamic IPs and about 90% of the world's spam will immediately vanish.
Give them the requirements and the deadline and leave them alone.
Come in late, leave early and take long lunches. About once a week stop by and ask each one how things are going. If there's anything causing problems, try to eliminate it or steer around it.
If they're really seasoned, they only need you because they're probably not socially polished enough to deal with your boss without getting fired.
Would you replace Oracle with PostgreSQL if "all" you had in house were Oracle gurus?
It's not a valid comparison, since nobody buys Oracle because they happen to like it, they buy it because their application(s) require it.
However if a company can switch to an applicaton that can handle Postgres instead of Oracle, they would be crazy to not make the switch, ditch the Oracle DBAs and hire Postgres DBAs. You can buy a lot of geeks in any flavor you want (even 24x7x365 geeks) for 6 million bucks.
Given Oracle's licensing fees (a 32 processor system is about 6 million dollars for the licence), I'd be hard pressed to find an application that couldn't be re-written at a significant savings.
"Remembering everything" really isn't all that important.
I might not remember all the data types and parameters for some object, but Google does. I do, however know important things, like "If your application runs like crap on a 16 processor Oracle server, the solution isn't to move to a 32 processor Oracle server for an extra 1/2 million dollars. The solution is to re-architect the software, select better algorithms and even consider that maybe Oracle isn't the correct hammer for this particular nail." (nothing against Oracle, it was just an example)
What's the BFD? It's a publicity photo. If they want to stick in a flag and smooth over the face, I couldn't care less.
If AP is going to stop running retouched photos, they'll never show stock photo of a politician again. They're pretty much all retouched.
Not that it really makes much difference anyway. AP is already dead.
They might as well be complaining about using fake linseed oil on their buggy-whips. They are no longer a big fish in a little pond, they're a cow in a little pond full of piranha. When every phone has a camera and every citizen has a direct connection to the rest of the world, AP has very little to offer.
Yanking good drive out of a production machine to see whether raid works is one of the first things you SHOULD do. Basic risk management and verifying how far your comfort zone of things running actually go.
Want to test RAID? Knock yourself out!
Do it before it goes into production. Not after.
The "old guy" method finds the bad firmware while the problem is only an annoyance. The "I found it on Google" method will get you fired and the company sued (and they'll lose too.)
Lawyer: "So you walked over to a perfectly happy, working production server, and yanked out a drive 'to see what would happen' and took down the airport baggage tracking system for 6 hours?"
I'm 51 years old and have been a MVS, OS/390, z/OS systems programmer for going on 30 years now. Outside of the usual mainframe system administration duties I've picked up; Unix - Unix System Services under MVS. BSD, Linux Security and Encryption knowledge and experience Disaster recovery requirements. Networking at home and work. In short the job that I'm doing now I couldn't have done just a few years ago and I expect the same will be true in the future. Anyone who is still in the field for twenty or so years has to have the ability to adapt and grow.
Wow! There are a lot of us old bastards around! 8-)
It's hard to get into a monoculture shop (like head to the grindstone ), however the good part is that I no longer want to work in those places. The really interesting jobs are actually pretty easy to get when no matter what they ask about, you can say "Yeah, I did " to almost anything they want (and not be lying).
Another advantage is that even if you pay a guy twice what you could get a grad for, if he understands a half-dozen or more of your systems, and you can skip hiring more warm bodies, you're still money ahead.
I don't want to generalize much, but there is a tendency for older IT folks to fall behind, often far behind, the tech curve. You know, as we get older, we have other priorities which is OK, but you want that experience they have, but you also want someone who can take your company forward. But older IT folks are also very capable to get upto speed on newer tech often quite quickly.
You may require a specific skill set or technology, but the reality is that math and customer service hasn't changed all that much.
The servers need to work, the apps need to run and the customers and users need to be happy. If you need someone to twiddle something in the Next Hot New thing, hire the old guy and get him a code monkey.
Additionally, what the employee doesn't do is likely to be as valuable as what they will do. By the time someone hits their 40's or better, they're unlikely to say "screw the company" and fly off for week long drunken orgy with your secretary. They're also unlikely to do socially inappropriate things in front of customers or do really stupid things with your hardware like yanking good drives on a production machine "to see if the RAID works".
If you hire the right person, he's also likely to know how to cover your butt when something bad happens, where the young guy with nothing to lose would be just as happy to throw you under the bus.
Sure, it's immoral, and you're violating the other website's TOS. That, however is completely irrelevant.
What is relevant is that any feed you use that isn't backed up a valid contract, can and will disappear at random times, sometimes permanently, as well as contain data you weren't expecting and be missing data you were expecting.
Ask your boss how happy he'll be when the domain owner sells to a spammer and his scraped data is now "Male Enhancement" ads instead of weather data.
If I had a nickel for every time I've heard of an IT guy being [sacked|not replaced after leaving] because some ass in a suit reasoned thusly:
"What do we need an IT guy for? We never have any computer problems!"
You need better geek<->management translations to impress management that what you're doing is valuable.
If you tell the VP that you "just switched them from Frame Relay to VPN over the internet and it's really cool", they'll look at you like you have antlers for about a half a second and then return to talking to their buddies about golf.
If you say "I just reduced our monthly communications bill from $80,000 to $8,000, they'll probably get you an office with a window, a trip on the corporate jet and your own personal hooker.
A lot of people thought that way back then. Not just Bill Gates
And in fact, if you were writing in assembly language, which was quite popular at the time, 64K was a ton of memory.
The interesting part is that Bill Gates is not only the man who made the phrase famous, he's also the cause of the joke. Until the release of Windows, there really wasn't a widespread demand for high-powered computers, and we would all be happily running 80Mhz 486's right now.
The best thing to do is to call your credit card company and inform them that AOL is still continuing to bill you after you've already quit their service, and that you want to block any further attempts by AOL to bill your credit card. Unfortunately, for the money you've already paid, you're probably going to have to see a lawyer, and it just isn't worth it, despite the fact that fraudulent billing is actually a pretty serious offense.
Screw that. Pay AOL with a Shopsafe (Orbiscom) credit card number, and when you want out, you just pop on to your bank's website, find the account number you gave AOL and click "Cancel".
AOL: "Hello, Mr. Popf? We're having trouble processing your credit card payment."
Linux suppot for dialup is next to nil. Yes it's because of those winmodems, but you'd think a couple of the common chipsets would be reverse engineered or something could be done like ndiswrapper.
There's nothing to reverse-engineer. It would be a complete signal-processing application from the ground up.
The reason winmodems are cheap is because there's nobody home. All the interesting stuff is done in software on your machine, where in a real modem, it's done using the modem's processor and firmware.
Meanwhile, at my mom's house in the DC Metro area, USA, the power & internet go out every time there is anything more than a gentle breeze. What's going on?
In the US, the utility companies find "break and fix" to be less expensive than continuous maintenance.
We used to have tree-trimming crews come around every year. Now they wait for a big storm to knock over the trees, then bring in crews to clear the damage and fix the lines.
I think you're right. This "article" screams fake! Notice this part: "I decided to download (Moviemaker) and buy the Digital Plus pack... so I went to Microsoft.com. They have a download place so I went there." Gates wouldn't have said "they", he would have said "we". And the subject says "flame". It is indeed a rant. Most executives would never write such a thing in a permanent medium. In the end, nobody can ever prove or disprove a "leaked" memo, unless the appropriate party fesses up, but this looks fake.
I say "fake" also. Regardless of whether or not he's still in charge, BG has enough clout at MS to find the people responsible and have their ass kicked all the way down the hall and out the door by a bug ugly dude. Along with their managers.
Come on now, COBOL isn't that bad.:P. But seriously Java isn't the language you would use for high performance but rather high portability. That says a lot about how bad the original code was.
All it really means is if all you have is a hammer, all the problems look like nails.
People use what they know. As projects get later, they tend to use what they know best.
I have the same problem at my work. I want to automate and speed up a lot of the reporting my coworkers do by moving the processing over to one of our Linux servers, but Excel is always a problem. Some of our people actually see Excel as a platform in itself. It's become kind of a joke among some of us there. "Excel would make a great Operating System if only it had a decent spreadsheet."
Some of our macros can take upwards of twenty minutes to run.
That's a great opportunity to push for refactoring the spreadsheets and rewriting them as something maintainable. If they typically do a lot of data manipulations, SQL Stored Procedures would be a likely platform to investigate. It's stable, fast and very well documented.
If you want to get some action, let upper management know that their business decisions are based on a bunch of user-created macros with no formal validation, testing or audit trail.
I'm constantly searching for 20-somethings who are more concerned about how their eventual children will live in 2020, than how they themselves are living right now. These people are getting harder and harder to find
They're getting harder to find because nobody wants a life that sucks. And if you fone someone who does, they're typically damaged in some way.
Its a different mindset these days, and while you think your folks are productive, I would comfortably assume that were you up against us on a project, my people would eat your lunch. We work until we ship. THEN we play.
Knock yourself out. I don't sell code, I sell ideas and business processes and charge based on the value I provide to the client, not the hours worked or lines of code. In fact, the actual coding tends to be relatively minimal.
If you need to change diapers between builds, you probably don't want to work for me.
That would account for your hiring difficulties. The only thing more seductive to a programmer than money and toys is having an actual life. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that taking his girlfriend out for a weekend in the mountains is more rewarding than sitting under a flourescent light chasing a segfault at 3am.
I have dived the wrecks of Belize, with the NEW wife (younger and cuter, since I am smarter and richer) and have a great time. Like you say, its a choice. You are happy with yours, I am ecstatic with mine. Good luck.
It's nice diving. I saw my first ray there, but I like Tobermory and the St. Lawrence better. The tropical wrecks deteriorate too quickly.
Good luck with the money and wife. I suspect by the time you hit your 60's you'll wish you had been a little less "driven." The "Trophy Wife" is a little sad; partially because when you marry someone it's supposed to be forever and partially because you now have a wife that married you for money and will leave when you lose yours or someone else comes along with more.
15 years ago, when old timers like me were sweating to ship, it was practically a divorce announcement a week, in my group. Weeks before deadlines, sleeping in our offices, doing build, after build after build, nobody would have considered Redmond to be family friendly.
In fact, if you needed family time, you were considered a bit suspect, or a whiny little bitch.
That's really a personal choice. 15 Years ago, I was in the same position, and made a choice to work normal hours, get married, learn to SCUBA dive, take vacations and have a life.
This magic was accomplished by telling my manager "No, I will not work nights, weekends and holidays."
Today, I'm still married, own a software business, have friends, take vacations and life is good. In fact, if I interview someone and they say they're willing to sell their soul to me, I won't hire them. I want people who have lives. They're happier, more productive and more stable.
If a spammer ever creates a bot that's smart enough to hear the message, call me on my cell phone and convince me it's human, I'll be happy to talk to it.
Whitelisted callers: Ring Ring . . . Answer Phone.
Unknown callers: Ring Ring . . . "If you're a human, please call my cell phone or send me an email containing your name and VOIP ID, and I'll add you to my whitelist, otherwise, have a nice day". Click.
Slashdot Mirror
One major problem is that a lot of spam is through botnets and the spammers would not get charged the e-mail fees, people with zombied computers would.
That's a non-issue.
Want to block a ton of spam? Reject any inbound smtp connections that have no reverse DNS record, then use regular expressions on those that do to refuse connections from dynamic/home/dsl/dial_up/etc. (I tried to post the regexes, but slashdot whined about " Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!")
Stop talking to dynamic IPs and about 90% of the world's spam will immediately vanish.
Let them go where they want, do what they want and then at the end of the year when you get the machines back, re-image the drives.
If you have to restrict a site, do a few nobody cares about.
Give them the requirements and the deadline and leave them alone.
Come in late, leave early and take long lunches. About once a week stop by and ask each one how things are going. If there's anything causing problems, try to eliminate it or steer around it.
If they're really seasoned, they only need you because they're probably not socially polished enough to deal with your boss without getting fired.
Would you replace Oracle with PostgreSQL if "all" you had in house were Oracle gurus?
It's not a valid comparison, since nobody buys Oracle because they happen to like it, they buy it because their application(s) require it.
However if a company can switch to an applicaton that can handle Postgres instead of Oracle, they would be crazy to not make the switch, ditch the Oracle DBAs and hire Postgres DBAs. You can buy a lot of geeks in any flavor you want (even 24x7x365 geeks) for 6 million bucks.
Given Oracle's licensing fees (a 32 processor system is about 6 million dollars for the licence), I'd be hard pressed to find an application that couldn't be re-written at a significant savings.
"Remembering everything" really isn't all that important.
I might not remember all the data types and parameters for some object, but Google does. I do, however know important things, like "If your application runs like crap on a 16 processor Oracle server, the solution isn't to move to a 32 processor Oracle server for an extra 1/2 million dollars. The solution is to re-architect the software, select better algorithms and even consider that maybe Oracle isn't the correct hammer for this particular nail." (nothing against Oracle, it was just an example)
What's the BFD? It's a publicity photo. If they want to stick in a flag and smooth over the face, I couldn't care less. If AP is going to stop running retouched photos, they'll never show stock photo of a politician again. They're pretty much all retouched.
Not that it really makes much difference anyway. AP is already dead.
They might as well be complaining about using fake linseed oil on their buggy-whips. They are no longer a big fish in a little pond, they're a cow in a little pond full of piranha. When every phone has a camera and every citizen has a direct connection to the rest of the world, AP has very little to offer.
Yanking good drive out of a production machine to see whether raid works is one of the first things you SHOULD do. Basic risk management and verifying how far your comfort zone of things running actually go. Want to test RAID? Knock yourself out!
Do it before it goes into production. Not after.
The "old guy" method finds the bad firmware while the problem is only an annoyance. The "I found it on Google" method will get you fired and the company sued (and they'll lose too.)
Lawyer: "So you walked over to a perfectly happy, working production server, and yanked out a drive 'to see what would happen' and took down the airport baggage tracking system for 6 hours?"
I'm 51 years old and have been a MVS, OS/390, z/OS systems programmer for going on 30 years now. Outside of the usual mainframe system administration duties I've picked up; Unix - Unix System Services under MVS. BSD, Linux Security and Encryption knowledge and experience Disaster recovery requirements. Networking at home and work. In short the job that I'm doing now I couldn't have done just a few years ago and I expect the same will be true in the future. Anyone who is still in the field for twenty or so years has to have the ability to adapt and grow.
Wow! There are a lot of us old bastards around! 8-)
It's hard to get into a monoculture shop (like head to the grindstone ), however the good part is that I no longer want to work in those places. The really interesting jobs are actually pretty easy to get when no matter what they ask about, you can say "Yeah, I did " to almost anything they want (and not be lying).
Another advantage is that even if you pay a guy twice what you could get a grad for, if he understands a half-dozen or more of your systems, and you can skip hiring more warm bodies, you're still money ahead.
I don't want to generalize much, but there is a tendency for older IT folks to fall behind, often far behind, the tech curve. You know, as we get older, we have other priorities which is OK, but you want that experience they have, but you also want someone who can take your company forward. But older IT folks are also very capable to get upto speed on newer tech often quite quickly.
You may require a specific skill set or technology, but the reality is that math and customer service hasn't changed all that much.
The servers need to work, the apps need to run and the customers and users need to be happy. If you need someone to twiddle something in the Next Hot New thing, hire the old guy and get him a code monkey.
Additionally, what the employee doesn't do is likely to be as valuable as what they will do. By the time someone hits their 40's or better, they're unlikely to say "screw the company" and fly off for week long drunken orgy with your secretary. They're also unlikely to do socially inappropriate things in front of customers or do really stupid things with your hardware like yanking good drives on a production machine "to see if the RAID works".
If you hire the right person, he's also likely to know how to cover your butt when something bad happens, where the young guy with nothing to lose would be just as happy to throw you under the bus.
Sure, it's immoral, and you're violating the other website's TOS. That, however is completely irrelevant.
What is relevant is that any feed you use that isn't backed up a valid contract, can and will disappear at random times, sometimes permanently, as well as contain data you weren't expecting and be missing data you were expecting.
Ask your boss how happy he'll be when the domain owner sells to a spammer and his scraped data is now "Male Enhancement" ads instead of weather data.
If I had a nickel for every time I've heard of an IT guy being [sacked|not replaced after leaving] because some ass in a suit reasoned thusly: "What do we need an IT guy for? We never have any computer problems!"
You need better geek<->management translations to impress management that what you're doing is valuable.
If you tell the VP that you "just switched them from Frame Relay to VPN over the internet and it's really cool", they'll look at you like you have antlers for about a half a second and then return to talking to their buddies about golf.
If you say "I just reduced our monthly communications bill from $80,000 to $8,000, they'll probably get you an office with a window, a trip on the corporate jet and your own personal hooker.
Wow! You were college friends with Bill Gates?
A lot of people thought that way back then. Not just Bill Gates
And in fact, if you were writing in assembly language, which was quite popular at the time, 64K was a ton of memory.
The interesting part is that Bill Gates is not only the man who made the phrase famous, he's also the cause of the joke. Until the release of Windows, there really wasn't a widespread demand for high-powered computers, and we would all be happily running 80Mhz 486's right now.
It's your forum. Delete his crap and move on.
The best thing to do is to call your credit card company and inform them that AOL is still continuing to bill you after you've already quit their service, and that you want to block any further attempts by AOL to bill your credit card. Unfortunately, for the money you've already paid, you're probably going to have to see a lawyer, and it just isn't worth it, despite the fact that fraudulent billing is actually a pretty serious offense.
Screw that. Pay AOL with a Shopsafe (Orbiscom) credit card number, and when you want out, you just pop on to your bank's website, find the account number you gave AOL and click "Cancel".
AOL: "Hello, Mr. Popf? We're having trouble processing your credit card payment."
Me: "No shit? Have a nice day. click."
Linux suppot for dialup is next to nil. Yes it's because of those winmodems, but you'd think a couple of the common chipsets would be reverse engineered or something could be done like ndiswrapper.
There's nothing to reverse-engineer. It would be a complete signal-processing application from the ground up.
The reason winmodems are cheap is because there's nobody home. All the interesting stuff is done in software on your machine, where in a real modem, it's done using the modem's processor and firmware.
I changed my phone's email address to @vtext.com and disabled it's normal phone#@vtext.com.
So far none of the spammers have guessed it.
Meanwhile, at my mom's house in the DC Metro area, USA, the power & internet go out every time there is anything more than a gentle breeze. What's going on?
In the US, the utility companies find "break and fix" to be less expensive than continuous maintenance.
We used to have tree-trimming crews come around every year. Now they wait for a big storm to knock over the trees, then bring in crews to clear the damage and fix the lines.
I think you're right. This "article" screams fake! Notice this part: "I decided to download (Moviemaker) and buy the Digital Plus pack ... so I went to Microsoft.com. They have a download place so I went there." Gates wouldn't have said "they", he would have said "we". And the subject says "flame". It is indeed a rant. Most executives would never write such a thing in a permanent medium. In the end, nobody can ever prove or disprove a "leaked" memo, unless the appropriate party fesses up, but this looks fake.
I say "fake" also. Regardless of whether or not he's still in charge, BG has enough clout at MS to find the people responsible and have their ass kicked all the way down the hall and out the door by a bug ugly dude. Along with their managers.
Come on now, COBOL isn't that bad. :P. But seriously Java isn't the language you would use for high performance but rather high portability. That says a lot about how bad the original code was.
All it really means is if all you have is a hammer, all the problems look like nails.
People use what they know. As projects get later, they tend to use what they know best.
I have the same problem at my work. I want to automate and speed up a lot of the reporting my coworkers do by moving the processing over to one of our Linux servers, but Excel is always a problem. Some of our people actually see Excel as a platform in itself. It's become kind of a joke among some of us there. "Excel would make a great Operating System if only it had a decent spreadsheet." Some of our macros can take upwards of twenty minutes to run.
That's a great opportunity to push for refactoring the spreadsheets and rewriting them as something maintainable. If they typically do a lot of data manipulations, SQL Stored Procedures would be a likely platform to investigate. It's stable, fast and very well documented.
If you want to get some action, let upper management know that their business decisions are based on a bunch of user-created macros with no formal validation, testing or audit trail.
I'm constantly searching for 20-somethings who are more concerned about how their eventual children will live in 2020, than how they themselves are living right now. These people are getting harder and harder to find
They're getting harder to find because nobody wants a life that sucks. And if you fone someone who does, they're typically damaged in some way.
Its a different mindset these days, and while you think your folks are productive, I would comfortably assume that were you up against us on a project, my people would eat your lunch. We work until we ship. THEN we play.
Knock yourself out. I don't sell code, I sell ideas and business processes and charge based on the value I provide to the client, not the hours worked or lines of code. In fact, the actual coding tends to be relatively minimal.
If you need to change diapers between builds, you probably don't want to work for me.
That would account for your hiring difficulties. The only thing more seductive to a programmer than money and toys is having an actual life. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that taking his girlfriend out for a weekend in the mountains is more rewarding than sitting under a flourescent light chasing a segfault at 3am.
I have dived the wrecks of Belize, with the NEW wife (younger and cuter, since I am smarter and richer) and have a great time. Like you say, its a choice. You are happy with yours, I am ecstatic with mine. Good luck.
It's nice diving. I saw my first ray there, but I like Tobermory and the St. Lawrence better. The tropical wrecks deteriorate too quickly.
Good luck with the money and wife. I suspect by the time you hit your 60's you'll wish you had been a little less "driven." The "Trophy Wife" is a little sad; partially because when you marry someone it's supposed to be forever and partially because you now have a wife that married you for money and will leave when you lose yours or someone else comes along with more.
15 years ago, when old timers like me were sweating to ship, it was practically a divorce announcement a week, in my group. Weeks before deadlines, sleeping in our offices, doing build, after build after build, nobody would have considered Redmond to be family friendly.
In fact, if you needed family time, you were considered a bit suspect, or a whiny little bitch.
That's really a personal choice. 15 Years ago, I was in the same position, and made a choice to work normal hours, get married, learn to SCUBA dive, take vacations and have a life.
This magic was accomplished by telling my manager "No, I will not work nights, weekends and holidays."
Today, I'm still married, own a software business, have friends, take vacations and life is good. In fact, if I interview someone and they say they're willing to sell their soul to me, I won't hire them. I want people who have lives. They're happier, more productive and more stable.
If a spammer ever creates a bot that's smart enough to hear the message, call me on my cell phone and convince me it's human, I'll be happy to talk to it.
Whitelisted callers: Ring Ring . . . Answer Phone.
Unknown callers: Ring Ring . . . "If you're a human, please call my cell phone or send me an email containing your name and VOIP ID, and I'll add you to my whitelist, otherwise, have a nice day". Click.
Put it on a DVD and hand-deliver it and have them sign for it. Make your boss give you a signed document authorizing the release.