I side with your admin on this one. Having all your eggs in one basket is always a piss-poor idea, especially when your basket is a Windows box. You want people to be able to work on *something*, even if a single thing (like email) is down for a couple of hours.
Of course, your manager should have just bought three reasonable machines to being with.
Pah. Better to buy 2 or 3 reasonable servers that perform all of those functions with good failover/load balancing.
Now, Windows may not be your choice for such a configuration...
Will the emerging DEBT FREE comm giant, OUT COMPETE, the remaining DEBT LADEN survivors?
It's very unlikely that the debtors will want to run Worldcom. First off, all the major debtors, and there are a number of them, would have to agree to this. Otherwise the other debtors would have to buy out the debtors that didn't agree and the one's who didn't agree would want as much as they could get for their share.
The debtors are not going to want to run a telecom, there's no money to be made there. They'll want to sell off the assets at any price they can get to secure something and write the rest off as a bad investment.
It's more complicated that this, really, but I'm not reading where these banks are going to want to run Worldcom.
The best thing that could happen is that the banks, in cooperation with the relatively healthy telecoms (Verizon, SWB), would finance the purchase of the major assets of Worldcom. There's going to be big disruptions as Worldcom customers move around, but this scenario keeps all the infrastructure up and running.
The worst thing that could happen is that the Worldcom debtors can't afford to sell the long-haul telecom assets for what the market is willing to pay and shutting down is their best option. I certainly hope the Fed would pressure them not to do this.
Give me a break, people act like.com's invented this kind of behavior. Companies have been abusing employees since before the.com era. 16 hours a day without bonuses or overtime? Boo-hoo, our servicemen do that shit everyday.
And slaves were treated equally badly, or worse. So?
That others do evil does not justify you in doing the same. That others do good does not lessen the merit in your doing the same.
I don't think the comment you are replying to was trying to apologize for the behavior, it was just pointing out it has nothing to do with being a.com, that it's nothing new and that this is not news.
I have a hard time believing online registrations are doing them anything worthwhile...
I always thought it was just a simple way to prevent deep linking. Sure, you can link to a NYT story, but you'll stop and realize that the NYT is bringing it to you and not whiznews.com.
Over any long period, the stock market more or less tracks the growth in the GNP. Tax revenues track the growth in the GDP. In either case, they can't outperform some broad measure of economic growth over the long run.
Which is more prudent, to depend on some future economy to be able to support you in your retirement, or to invest a portion of what you earn along the way for retirement?
The pay as you go plan is actually less reliable in that it depends upon the future economy and the Government's ability to borrow against the future to pay out pensions.
Then, there's the political reality that future generations may cut back pensions if they are feeling squeezed themselves.
Of course, present generations seem to think that our collective incomes and estates are all subject to taxes to support whatever fancy that strikes them at the moment. I don't see this trend changing at all, so maybe it doesn't matter. It might be more efficient if the Government just collected our wages directly and cut us checks based on what it is deemed fair.
He says the internet will never be popular...then he realizes he is wrong, turns the company around on a dime, and now they are a dominant force concerning the internet.
I welcome the day that MS becomes a dominant force concerning Linux. It would imply that Linux World Domination was achieved.
I don't hear any proposals to eliminate Social Security. The safety net will be in place under all serious proposals.
The current "privatization" proposals mandate some small percentage of what currently goes into the "Social Security Trust Fund" to private investing.
This would just be mandating what all credible financial advisers recommend as good retirement planning.
I would be in favor of increasing the Social Security Tax to allow for this percentage as an additional savings. Of course, the Democrats who need to demagogue this issue wouldn't consider any sensible proposals in this regard.
Yes, if you take really, really long periods you can overcome the 1929 crash, the 70's bear market and the.com collapse, but 20 year loss cycles are long enough that age and retirement force people to eat the capital losses in order to use their money before they die and people who suffer market downturns at the wrong point in their lives are never going to recover the loss.
Sure, 20 year cycles are sometimes flat, but you're supposed to invest for retirement for 35 to 40 years. You aren't supposed to be in equities heavily just 10 to 12 years before retirement.
Tell you what, chart out 30 years invested in the Stock Market followed by 10-15 years (many are retiring at 70 or beyond by choice these days) and see how well you do.
The 10-12 period of the 70s was the worst you could show, and private investing still wins, big time, over the periods that you should be saving for retirement. If long term investing didn't provide for retirement, then the economy would be contracting, bad, for a long time and the Social Security scheme would be even more untenable. In such a scenario, the people who would be paying in to Social Security would be at or below subsistence themselves.
Social Security has incredibly low overhead (from memory 0.5%? 0.2%?) and can feasibly handle the small accounts people in their teens and twenties are going to have. Private brokerages do not want this business.
Your thinking is one-dimensional here. Don't think typical brokerage accounts, think group pension funds or bonds for the very small amounts, converting to more aggressive instruments when larger amounts become available. If these were widely available, these would have low overheads as well.
The fact is that almost anything outperforms the silly cash-in/cash-out scheme we have now.
By mandating that some small % of monies now going into Social Security be put to work, we're just codifying good long term practices that people should be following. The fact that current avenues for investing small amounts are inappropriate for these monies is an opportunity for the creation of new instruments that could handle them well.
Let's put all of our Social Security money into the stock market. The private sector could make much better use of that money than the nasty old government . ..
Over any long period, the stock market outperforms cash, which is the option you have with not investing Social Security money.
If you invest, there is risk, yes, but there is also reward.
We pretty much know what happens if you just run a Social Security Trust Fund. It's just a big pyramid scheme where the future payees have to pay out all the benefits. It depends on either enslaving the young to pay for pensions or decreasing benefits to sub-poverty levels. There's really no other option.
Besides, it's just a huge strawman anyway. I've heard no proposal that puts all the Social Security money into the market, just sensible plans to move a percentage of the money currently going into the rathole Trust Fund into markets, where it can stimulate the economy.
As a manager I get very tired of hearing about the programmers, sysadmins, etc. complaining that such-and-such can't be done, or otherwise blocking progress. Much more often than not things that "can't be done" just require a re-statement of the problem and some creative application of simple ideas.
When a techie says it can't be done. 9 times out of 10 (s)he means it can't be done under the current constraints. Thease break down into time/features/money.
If you can vary the constraints then you will find that most objections will dissapier.
I can see both views here. Too often, people have a kneejerk reaction to change. It's so much easier to analyze things negatively, shooting holes in a plan rather than putting out suggestions on how to get around the obstacles. You sometimes get in an environment where people are afraid to make positive suggestions for fear of being attacked.
On the other hand, a lot of clever ideas to implement something often lead to a hodgepodge mess that's unsupportable and only approximately works part of the time.
The real problem, I think are managers who think like as reported here:
As a developer I've found that most management-types don't give a hoot about technical details, or much of anything else that a heads-down developer might care about.
Management types who don't care at all about technical details are one of the biggest problems technical people face. They proliferate systems and arrangements that just aren't technically sensible. They shop around, finding someone who says "well, yes, what you are asking can be done... but <good technical reason why that's a bad idea>" and give not a hoot why it shouldn't be done.
Managers of technical people need to "give a hoot" about technical details. They don't have to have a deep understanding like an expert, but they should care that there are tradeoffs and potential problems.
Can you imagine if this statement could be applied to the Accounting Department? "Most Managers don't give a hoot about money and numbers, just as long as you can make them fit into the management's objectives, that's all that's important." That attitude would be criminally actionable. I think it's similarly criminal for technical management not to care about technical details.
Optical telescopes might have a hard time with these asteroids coming "out of the sun", it's true.
Perhaps we could get some space-based RADAR going to detect objects.
Also, if we had really good optical observation, we'd have a good chance of having these blindsiding "out of the sun" objects mapped out and could predict when they might be coming so we could be looking for them.
This is a chicken/egg problem: the vendors say it is not worth to support linux on the desktop/laptop because there ate not enough users, but in the other hand, there are not enough users because they can't get the proper support from the vendors.
And even worse, it abandons a particular target market that's critical for the success of Linux. Developers.
Many developers use Linux on their laptops. The name recognition of those same developers carrying around IBM Thinkpads is a significant advertisement for IBM and their support of Linux.
Perhaps it occurred to them that the developers would run Linux on the laptop without regard to brand, so it's not much of a loss.
Seriously, though, it's a pretty impressive turn around time and should give some credence to those of us making arguments that the support is really there for open source projects like Apache, even though there's no "1-800-HELPME" number nor an expensive maintenance and support agreement.
You can have your maintenance and support agreement, complete with 24x7 support line, if that's what you need, by contracting with someone like Covalent. Covalent will be providing those patches pretty soon for their releases, it seems.
Software's so bad because it's still handcrafted, and the interchangable parts don't. Cars sucked too when when they were done the same way.
This has got to be one of the worst analogies I've heard this week. This is just so wrong headed on so many levels that I hardly know where to begin.
First, the software that most people write is largely based on many many layers of interchangeable parts.
Second, the comparison is so bad because autos have design and implementation lead times measured in years, while most software projects are far more fluid.
Software that is manufactured like cars (like Windows, for example) is highly automated with fewer actual options. The software manufacturing process is more rigid and more repeatable than anything car manufacturers ever do. Actually, automotive design is just about as handcrafted as software design is. The car manufacturers run up mock-up cars, and that's a hand-crafted process. In manufacturing, the software process is actually more automated. Machines spit out burned CDs into cases, cases are loaded into boxes and shipped to warehouses.
Software design and implementation is a much more fluid process, where new requirements are constantly integrated and user feedback causes sometimes radical changes.
Even when massive redesigns are necessary, the interchangeable parts between projects are often more interchangeable than anything you see in auto design.
For example, if you find your application requires an upgrade to a big RDBMS for it's data store, this is often possible with not that much rework. In automotive terms, that would be like changing the engine out of a sports car for a huge truck diesel. Not feasible.
Software design and implementation is a creative Engineering process. So is auto design and implementation, for that matter. People have attempted to automate these processes for years and have had some success. You can't take the Engineering out of it. It still involves analysis and creative thought, not just plugging modules together and making a final product.
29 members of Congress have been accused of spousal abuse.
7 have been arrested for fraud.
19 have been accused of writing bad checks.
3 have been arrested for assault.
71 have credit reports so bad they can't qualify for a credit card.
14 have been arrested on drug-related charges.
8 have been arrested for shoplifting.
21 are current defendants in lawsuits.
Last I checked, neither being accused of a crime, being arrested for a crime, having bad credit nor being a defendant in a lawsuit makes you a criminal.
And in 1998 alone, 84 were stopped for drunk driving, but released after they claimed Congressional immunity.
Congressional immunity is a necessary evil. Otherwise, state, local and Federal law enforcement could imprison members of Congress to influence or prevent their voting.
However, it is disgusting that Congress doesn't hold itself to a very high ethical standard when things like this are brought to their attention.
Re:Be careful with the cutting edge...
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Of course, your manager should have just bought three reasonable machines to being with.
Pah. Better to buy 2 or 3 reasonable servers that perform all of those functions with good failover/load balancing.
Now, Windows may not be your choice for such a configuration...
Ever thought of defusing this problem by going by Richard?
As it stands, you've really got it sticking out there for everybody to notice.
Kahn's used to be a regional brand in the midwest, but I see that they now say that they are marketed in all 50 states.
I remember well the ad campaigns when I was a kid. Kahn's - The Weiner the World Awaited.
It's very unlikely that the debtors will want to run Worldcom. First off, all the major debtors, and there are a number of them, would have to agree to this. Otherwise the other debtors would have to buy out the debtors that didn't agree and the one's who didn't agree would want as much as they could get for their share.
The debtors are not going to want to run a telecom, there's no money to be made there. They'll want to sell off the assets at any price they can get to secure something and write the rest off as a bad investment.
It's more complicated that this, really, but I'm not reading where these banks are going to want to run Worldcom.
The best thing that could happen is that the banks, in cooperation with the relatively healthy telecoms (Verizon, SWB), would finance the purchase of the major assets of Worldcom. There's going to be big disruptions as Worldcom customers move around, but this scenario keeps all the infrastructure up and running.
The worst thing that could happen is that the Worldcom debtors can't afford to sell the long-haul telecom assets for what the market is willing to pay and shutting down is their best option. I certainly hope the Fed would pressure them not to do this.
I don't know what this has to do with LoTR, though...
And slaves were treated equally badly, or worse. So?
That others do evil does not justify you in doing the same. That others do good does not lessen the merit in your doing the same.
I don't think the comment you are replying to was trying to apologize for the behavior, it was just pointing out it has nothing to do with being a .com, that it's nothing new and that this is not news.
I always thought it was just a simple way to prevent deep linking. Sure, you can link to a NYT story, but you'll stop and realize that the NYT is bringing it to you and not whiznews.com.
Not really. The people who are reading the article probably won't be blocking, so they're ideal targets.
Am I on topic?
Which is more prudent, to depend on some future economy to be able to support you in your retirement, or to invest a portion of what you earn along the way for retirement?
The pay as you go plan is actually less reliable in that it depends upon the future economy and the Government's ability to borrow against the future to pay out pensions.
Then, there's the political reality that future generations may cut back pensions if they are feeling squeezed themselves.
Of course, present generations seem to think that our collective incomes and estates are all subject to taxes to support whatever fancy that strikes them at the moment. I don't see this trend changing at all, so maybe it doesn't matter. It might be more efficient if the Government just collected our wages directly and cut us checks based on what it is deemed fair.
I welcome the day that MS becomes a dominant force concerning Linux. It would imply that Linux World Domination was achieved.
The current "privatization" proposals mandate some small percentage of what currently goes into the "Social Security Trust Fund" to private investing.
This would just be mandating what all credible financial advisers recommend as good retirement planning.
I would be in favor of increasing the Social Security Tax to allow for this percentage as an additional savings. Of course, the Democrats who need to demagogue this issue wouldn't consider any sensible proposals in this regard.
Sure, 20 year cycles are sometimes flat, but you're supposed to invest for retirement for 35 to 40 years. You aren't supposed to be in equities heavily just 10 to 12 years before retirement.
Tell you what, chart out 30 years invested in the Stock Market followed by 10-15 years (many are retiring at 70 or beyond by choice these days) and see how well you do.
The 10-12 period of the 70s was the worst you could show, and private investing still wins, big time, over the periods that you should be saving for retirement. If long term investing didn't provide for retirement, then the economy would be contracting, bad, for a long time and the Social Security scheme would be even more untenable. In such a scenario, the people who would be paying in to Social Security would be at or below subsistence themselves.
Your thinking is one-dimensional here. Don't think typical brokerage accounts, think group pension funds or bonds for the very small amounts, converting to more aggressive instruments when larger amounts become available. If these were widely available, these would have low overheads as well.
The fact is that almost anything outperforms the silly cash-in/cash-out scheme we have now.
By mandating that some small % of monies now going into Social Security be put to work, we're just codifying good long term practices that people should be following. The fact that current avenues for investing small amounts are inappropriate for these monies is an opportunity for the creation of new instruments that could handle them well.
Over any long period, the stock market outperforms cash, which is the option you have with not investing Social Security money.
If you invest, there is risk, yes, but there is also reward.
We pretty much know what happens if you just run a Social Security Trust Fund. It's just a big pyramid scheme where the future payees have to pay out all the benefits. It depends on either enslaving the young to pay for pensions or decreasing benefits to sub-poverty levels. There's really no other option.
Besides, it's just a huge strawman anyway. I've heard no proposal that puts all the Social Security money into the market, just sensible plans to move a percentage of the money currently going into the rathole Trust Fund into markets, where it can stimulate the economy.
Next thing you know, they'll have a CPU that can cook a roast. Oh wait, Intel did that already - the Pentium 4 @ 2.53 GHz.
I still don't get it.
The guy is supposed to be a Verizon employee testing to make sure that the coverage is Universal.
Really Brain Dead... Like, they would test coverage with two guys on Cell Phones saying "Can you hear me now" "yep" "good".
When a techie says it can't be done. 9 times out of 10 (s)he means it can't be done under the current constraints. Thease break down into time/features/money.
If you can vary the constraints then you will find that most objections will dissapier.
I can see both views here. Too often, people have a kneejerk reaction to change. It's so much easier to analyze things negatively, shooting holes in a plan rather than putting out suggestions on how to get around the obstacles. You sometimes get in an environment where people are afraid to make positive suggestions for fear of being attacked.
On the other hand, a lot of clever ideas to implement something often lead to a hodgepodge mess that's unsupportable and only approximately works part of the time.
The real problem, I think are managers who think like as reported here:
Management types who don't care at all about technical details are one of the biggest problems technical people face. They proliferate systems and arrangements that just aren't technically sensible. They shop around, finding someone who says "well, yes, what you are asking can be done... but <good technical reason why that's a bad idea>" and give not a hoot why it shouldn't be done.
Managers of technical people need to "give a hoot" about technical details. They don't have to have a deep understanding like an expert, but they should care that there are tradeoffs and potential problems.
Can you imagine if this statement could be applied to the Accounting Department? "Most Managers don't give a hoot about money and numbers, just as long as you can make them fit into the management's objectives, that's all that's important." That attitude would be criminally actionable. I think it's similarly criminal for technical management not to care about technical details.
Perhaps we could get some space-based RADAR going to detect objects.
Also, if we had really good optical observation, we'd have a good chance of having these blindsiding "out of the sun" objects mapped out and could predict when they might be coming so we could be looking for them.
And even worse, it abandons a particular target market that's critical for the success of Linux. Developers.
Many developers use Linux on their laptops. The name recognition of those same developers carrying around IBM Thinkpads is a significant advertisement for IBM and their support of Linux.
Perhaps it occurred to them that the developers would run Linux on the laptop without regard to brand, so it's not much of a loss.
You can have your maintenance and support agreement, complete with 24x7 support line, if that's what you need, by contracting with someone like Covalent. Covalent will be providing those patches pretty soon for their releases, it seems.
This has got to be one of the worst analogies I've heard this week. This is just so wrong headed on so many levels that I hardly know where to begin.
First, the software that most people write is largely based on many many layers of interchangeable parts.
Second, the comparison is so bad because autos have design and implementation lead times measured in years, while most software projects are far more fluid.
Software that is manufactured like cars (like Windows, for example) is highly automated with fewer actual options. The software manufacturing process is more rigid and more repeatable than anything car manufacturers ever do. Actually, automotive design is just about as handcrafted as software design is. The car manufacturers run up mock-up cars, and that's a hand-crafted process. In manufacturing, the software process is actually more automated. Machines spit out burned CDs into cases, cases are loaded into boxes and shipped to warehouses.
Software design and implementation is a much more fluid process, where new requirements are constantly integrated and user feedback causes sometimes radical changes.
Even when massive redesigns are necessary, the interchangeable parts between projects are often more interchangeable than anything you see in auto design.
For example, if you find your application requires an upgrade to a big RDBMS for it's data store, this is often possible with not that much rework. In automotive terms, that would be like changing the engine out of a sports car for a huge truck diesel. Not feasible.
Software design and implementation is a creative Engineering process. So is auto design and implementation, for that matter. People have attempted to automate these processes for years and have had some success. You can't take the Engineering out of it. It still involves analysis and creative thought, not just plugging modules together and making a final product.
'tis their job to find bugs.
"Program testing can show the presence of bugs, but never show their absence." - Edsger Dijkstra, 1972
7 have been arrested for fraud.
19 have been accused of writing bad checks.
3 have been arrested for assault.
71 have credit reports so bad they can't qualify for a credit card.
14 have been arrested on drug-related charges.
8 have been arrested for shoplifting.
21 are current defendants in lawsuits.
Last I checked, neither being accused of a crime, being arrested for a crime, having bad credit nor being a defendant in a lawsuit makes you a criminal.
Congressional immunity is a necessary evil. Otherwise, state, local and Federal law enforcement could imprison members of Congress to influence or prevent their voting.
However, it is disgusting that Congress doesn't hold itself to a very high ethical standard when things like this are brought to their attention.
If Gentoo rocks, does Rock Gentoo?
In some sense, anything that confers an advantage for survival is a strength.