The Democrats and Republicans are cut from the same power hungry we know best fabric. Both groups want to impose their world view on the rest of nation. Both parties seek to eliminate the Bill of Right, the only difference is each party has opted to start with different amendments. Our only hope is to keep them at odds, if true cooperation breaks out, we'll be working in big corporations' org charts for healthcare and kibble, with 100 percent tax fully deducted.
Older code is running on emulators now a days. The fastest VAX ever is modern Intel box emulating the older hardware. This allows older applications to continue to run, covering the loss of source code in some cases.
The issue will be what's running in the back room. Just like Y2K, anyone who wants to be in business and avoid the lawyers is going to have to do some prep work.
>>>Do you realize the damage that an unlicensed real estate professional can do to a home buyer or home seller?
Someone who doesn't own a house? None of these problems would be the Realtor's problem. He refers you to a home inspector who may or may not be worth the fee. The title company insures the lender, if you're borrowing for the purchase. If you're bright enough to ask, you can also get a second title policy covering your interests.
What does the realor do? He brokers the sale, that means getting an owner and together. His motivation is to close the sale and collect his cut. Any licensing and regulation exists to minimize your option to sue him.
As previously noted, a cooperative approach, California style driving will put more cars closer together than some east coast (Washintgon DC) locations.
Think and spec. Understand the customer's requirements and make sure the customer understands the customer requirements. I was once filler on a project, converting customer data for a product to product upgrade. My group was lightly loaded so I was servicing another group. I spend 6 weeks talking to customer, something the project lead thought was a waste of my time. He metric was "how many lines of code have you produced?" In that time I generated a database (MSAccess) with tables of the old data formats, new data formats and cross references. I also noted custom conversions requirements. The customer got reports of what was going where, what data couldn't be converted at all, and assumptions. I got corrections, updates and revisions to my assumptions. After all this, one morning I wrote a program that generated code out of my database, the main routine to set up i/o to drive the generated code, and about a dozen routines that covered the custom flags. Before lunch time, I'd generated over 18,000 lines of code and had test data available. Because of the close customer contact, there was no conversion cleanup once the live database was in place. My manager, who understood my approach, kept the project lead calmed down.
Onepoint is right. First of all, you can afford to see more bands if the ticket/cover is a reasonable charge. I saw Oingo Boingo at a campus club for free. Suzanne Vega, Squeeze, Utah Phillips all for reasonable prices at venues where you see and hear the music. I don't get people willing to pony up to see music on the JumboTron and poorly placed speakers. Pick out your favorite clubs and drop in. If you don't like the band, well hey, you didn't dump big chunk. The Ticket Monopoly is now charging their fees even if you hit the venue box office.
I booked 2 round trips (Southwest) and hotel to get into a show which was sold out in Southern California once. Turned out to be less to fly out of state than the local monopoly, and gave an excuse for a hotel stay.
Diebold will release the ethics poll results tonight at 20:05 when the polls close on the west coast. You don't need to vote, Diebold has already totaled your ballot.
As a proper flunky in the Bush administration, A Gonzales is following the defining goal, No Corporation Left Behind established by his fearless leader. By taking on the task and expense of enforcing copy write, corporate balance sheets will look better and Bush core constituents, our corporate overlords, will pocket a larger bonus at the end of each quarter. No longer will corporations pay lawyers to file copy write cases, our taxes will fund this corporate benefit. After all, if it's good for business, it's good for America right?
A disaster tolerant system will have servers configured at multiple sites with real time data update. OpenVMS can do this with the remote sites being far enough away you need to fly there. How do I restore service? is the the wrong question, ask How do avoid downtime even if a site fails?
The Amsterdam Police IT group recently announced a 10 year uptime. OpenVMS.org has details on celebrating 10 years of uninterrupted service.
Don't omit jobs or lie when covering your skipping out. You need to be able to document your history and avoid any issue of misrepresenting yourself. Some companies will dig into your past and missing jobs can disqualify you or be considered grounds for termination.
If you're getting good offers, by all means feel free to move along. Business is business as the Bobs of Layoff Inc. have made painfully clear. Look at what you're negotiating now that you have some history behind you. When I started, I got major raises twice a year for two years. I kept that job for 18 months and started looking, by that time, any offer that came my way came with a pay cut. I stayed there until the last round of mergers and cheesy minimum raises became the norm. I left 1 month after my final salary review listing that as one reason.
Once you've decided to leave, don't plan on negotiating for a counter offer. They'll brand you as disloyal scum and you've got a good chance of being dropped from the team when you're not prepared.
Yes, you may be costing companies money when you jump ship, but in 2007, loyalty runs from payday to payday. There's no more gold watch and pension plan waiting. If your value to company B is that much more, submit your notice. You may want to consider running your own consulting shop, or working with a consulting team. I do side jobs under my own business and count former employers as customers. If you do that while working, make sure you have documented permission for a side gig. You can negotiate that when you go over the written offer, it's much harder when you're onboard.
Tivo has never hidden their desire to collect and resell data. They tell advertisers what commercials people watch, which SuperBowl clip gets replayed over and over again, and have started to provide data feed to the Neilsen ratings people. Think about about this, what you watch on Tivo can feed into ratings decision machine. I'm also a lifetime subscriber and take advantage of the ability to download and move recordings around. I know I could do this myself, but being able to put a remote in the hands of a 10 year old, or my wife and just have it work tm makes it all worthwhile. Tivo is in business to return something to their shareholders, as long as they make a reasonable product I hope they stick around. This isn't news to anyone who's looked a a setup screen or user guide. It's not like they're changing a privacy policy to squeeze a few more dimes out of each user.
Before selecting media and software, you need to define what the business needs are. Do you need to
a. have 3 different backups run once a week or need to maintain years of infomration
b. have daily incremental backups
c. provide disaster recovery for business restoration
d. preserve regulated information, either financial or healthcare
e. restore custom applications
f. reimage new systems or only preserve data
Backup exec and Acronis both provide reasonable solutions for mostly stable Windows clients. Storing active data on a SAN or file server and making that up increases the backup window for the local box. Now a days, I prefer that solutions with periodic o/s backups on a bootable DVD. Annual backups can serve if your live data isn't at risk locally.
Remember, backups are worthless. It's the restored data that has value. Test your procedures and hardware periodically, make sure you have off site hardware to restore. If your Quantum SDLT220 tape drive is out of support and the only place you get another one is from a reseller on E-Bay who's had one stored . . . . Never trust a single blob of media.
Clean up on server 6. On my last job I went from Systems Admin to Systems Manager, to Project Manager and finally Special Consultant. I was cleaning up and troubleshooting the problems untrained DBAs created, I started calling myself the janitor and managed get other people using it, at least in house.
Exporting company data, work product or internal messages and memos to an out side source could in itself be a security issue. This is a good way to hang yourself. Far better to maintain paper copies, the suggestion to get these notarized above is an excellent idea.
Banned from DefCon every one,
Banned from DefCon just for having a little fun, We brought a little Alpha there
Just a crew of four
But DefCon doesn't want us any more
I wonder why. ..?
OpenVMS was banned uninvited with quick rules change. Only those less secure operating systems need show up. Microsoft will always be welcome.
If you read Fast Food Nation you'll find that McD and the other big burger chains set their own standards, higher than the FDA minimum standards. These are enforced not by slap on the wrist fines, but by loss of contracts.
Of course if you read it cover to cover, you'll probably never want to eat a ground meat in the United States again.
The HP 9000 (PA-RISC) and Alpha been slated for obsolescence ever since the Itanium started
Don't drink the marketing Kool-Aid. The statement above means that that HP dropped two powerful technologies in favor of a vaporware system that still isn't ready to compete. A 4-way Alphaserver ES-45 used to be benchmarked against 8-way Sun/Power boxes and still outmatches today's Itanium offerings. With no future to these products people stopped buying them dropping HP's datacenter profits. At one time Compaq planned to consolidate Unix/VMS/NonStop on Alpha systerms.
Killing the line to play nice with Intel means that Intel wins, IBM wins, Sun wins and HP is left waiting for the release of Itanium systms that will make the company just another white box builder. The only difference between HP and the mom and pop store down the block is that one of these will have better service and accurate records of warrantees.
Does anyone else hate taking off your shoes, even Birkenstocks or Tevas, as part of the "normal" screening process. I've started wearing my shoes which automatically gets you the secondary search. Of course you don't have to stand around in socks where everyone else is walking. As a rule, the secondary search doesn't take very long and TSA will carry my bags to secondary area, that's a nice plus with Laptop, laptop bag, carryone bag, overcoat, Scott-E-Vest jacket filled with PDA, phone, assorted music player . . . I'm dark skinned and wear a beard as to make it things even more fun.
The test rate on screeners was 70 percent before 9/11 and remains 70 even after adding all the new standard proceedures. So what exactly is the benefit of standing around on a dirty, often wet floor in my socks?
Bury the devils while we have the chance
on
Back to the Bunker
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
As Leslie Fish points out in The Digwell Carol if we take the chance to bury them now, maybe we can get on with our lives. Anyone else feel like chipping in for a concrete pour to be arranged at the mouth of bunker this week?
Before you start spending money you need to know what the company requirements are. There are excellent tools and options, including real time raid-1 over mutliple sites, but the business case will drive your requirements.
Servers - how long can they be down? Do you have replacement plans in case your data center gets hit by the next earthquake/hurricane/fill_in_the_disaster. Having tapes off site means nothing if you don't have hardware for restore. Can you get Hardware X if everyone else is looking for X, maybe Y is the new standard and you're application needs X version 1.2.
Desktops, are files on a server or local? Do you have a standard desktop that can be rolled out and copies of the server. Can the desktops go 2 weeks, but you need the servers back in 12 hours. You need a plan before things get ugly.
Speaking of tapes, as mentioned you need to periodically check your restore. Backups don't matter, it's whether or not you can restore your data that counts. How often, incremental or full. Be careful shipping tapes. Since 9/11 I've noticed tapes shipped with certain carriers have read issues at the remote site. Is this X-rays on cargo or just a bad run of tapes?
Before you start to design a solution, you need to define the problem and expectations. Are you providing services to customer or do you have gaggle of developers that need porn and music? Are you getting mail in html format with attachments of the latest dancing baby video? Is downtime less expensive than redundancy, what's the business impact?
Does renting rack space at a data center with redundant connections, air, power, generator and 7x24 staffing make sense? Or do you need to run the exchange server under Bob's desk so it can be rebooted regularly? Can you try to block audio/video files?
There are a variety of bandwidth solutions, I have customers with multiple OC-3s and customers with a DSL business line. The answer is: it depends on business impact and downtime tolerance. Many redudant solutions get postponed once the cost is known.
Before you can propose a technical solution, you need to know the political layout.
As long as big business (and this includes government) buys from the low bidder then we'll continue to see fast and cheap as the criteria for designing and shipping software. The CFO doesn't care that the Windows needs regular reboots (outages), ships with no backup capabilities and behaves in erratic fashion. He might be concerned about the cost of security, if it were presented properly, but only if there were cost savings available.
In this day and age, the goal is to make a quick buck, meet your quarterly goals, collect the bonus and score another job based your great quarter. Downtime usually isn't an issue so you wind up with Microsoft spreading into desktops and datacenters. It's cheap and you can hire a reboot monkey to admin these systems. Of course we can replace the big box and the guys who've kept it running 7x24 for the last 23 years without any outages. They cost too much to keep around anyway and don't have any colors but green or amber.
Bill Gates understood that you don't need to be better, you need to meet the minimum standard and be the low bidder. With the introduction of Windows, the minimum standard creeps lower, allowing his next product even more market share. We're beginning to see a backlash with security and reliablity becoming issues again.
If a VAX booted in 1983 can run an application without a reboot for 17 years (Year 2000 shutdown) why doesn't can't a modern system stay up for week?
The advanced senior English teacher in my high school was really the basketball coach. He taught just enough to justify staying on the payroll. One corner of the class was called to task for "using big words" in our work. Being a bunch of snotty high school kids, that only increased our syllable count. A typical class was time spent writing while he worked out basketball plays.
Sometimes we'd have class discussion. Since most of the reading fell in to the above category, we'd do the discussion without reading. There's an art to to asking questions about something you haven't read and aren't "prepared" for. We dropped the ball once, he went down the rows asking if everyone had done the reading. Less than half the class answered yes, then he turned around and gave us writing assignment.
the internet and the information age are exposing US cluture to the rest of the world in a big way.
The biggest way to win Hearts and Minds in Iraq would be to hand out laptops and provide wireless access for all. Around the world people are beginning to insist on their Miranda rights due to big media influence. In other words, Law and Order did more for world wide democracy than G W Bush ever will.
How about an ammendment making supplying pipe and pipe fitting tools illegal. Pipes are bad and have been used in robberies, assaults and murders. Anyone using a length of pipe is up to no good. Tools to modify pipe should be strictly regulated, access must be controlled by a licensing board of government professionals.
There are no dangerous weapons, only dangerous men.
Slashdot Mirror
The Democrats and Republicans are cut from the same power hungry we know best fabric. Both groups want to impose their world view on the rest of nation. Both parties seek to eliminate the Bill of Right, the only difference is each party has opted to start with different amendments. Our only hope is to keep them at odds, if true cooperation breaks out, we'll be working in big corporations' org charts for healthcare and kibble, with 100 percent tax fully deducted.
The issue will be what's running in the back room. Just like Y2K, anyone who wants to be in business and avoid the lawyers is going to have to do some prep work.
Someone who doesn't own a house? None of these problems would be the Realtor's problem. He refers you to a home inspector who may or may not be worth the fee. The title company insures the lender, if you're borrowing for the purchase. If you're bright enough to ask, you can also get a second title policy covering your interests.
What does the realor do? He brokers the sale, that means getting an owner and together. His motivation is to close the sale and collect his cut. Any licensing and regulation exists to minimize your option to sue him.
As previously noted, a cooperative approach, California style driving will put more cars closer together than some east coast (Washintgon DC) locations.
Think and spec. Understand the customer's requirements and make sure the customer understands the customer requirements. I was once filler on a project, converting customer data for a product to product upgrade. My group was lightly loaded so I was servicing another group. I spend 6 weeks talking to customer, something the project lead thought was a waste of my time. He metric was "how many lines of code have you produced?" In that time I generated a database (MSAccess) with tables of the old data formats, new data formats and cross references. I also noted custom conversions requirements. The customer got reports of what was going where, what data couldn't be converted at all, and assumptions. I got corrections, updates and revisions to my assumptions. After all this, one morning I wrote a program that generated code out of my database, the main routine to set up i/o to drive the generated code, and about a dozen routines that covered the custom flags. Before lunch time, I'd generated over 18,000 lines of code and had test data available. Because of the close customer contact, there was no conversion cleanup once the live database was in place. My manager, who understood my approach, kept the project lead calmed down.
I booked 2 round trips (Southwest) and hotel to get into a show which was sold out in Southern California once. Turned out to be less to fly out of state than the local monopoly, and gave an excuse for a hotel stay.
Diebold will release the ethics poll results tonight at 20:05 when the polls close on the west coast. You don't need to vote, Diebold has already totaled your ballot.
As a proper flunky in the Bush administration, A Gonzales is following the defining goal, No Corporation Left Behind established by his fearless leader. By taking on the task and expense of enforcing copy write, corporate balance sheets will look better and Bush core constituents, our corporate overlords, will pocket a larger bonus at the end of each quarter. No longer will corporations pay lawyers to file copy write cases, our taxes will fund this corporate benefit. After all, if it's good for business, it's good for America right?
A disaster tolerant system will have servers configured at multiple sites with real time data update. OpenVMS can do this with the remote sites being far enough away you need to fly there. How do I restore service? is the the wrong question, ask How do avoid downtime even if a site fails?
The Amsterdam Police IT group recently announced a 10 year uptime. OpenVMS.org has details on celebrating 10 years of uninterrupted service.
Don't omit jobs or lie when covering your skipping out. You need to be able to document your history and avoid any issue of misrepresenting yourself. Some companies will dig into your past and missing jobs can disqualify you or be considered grounds for termination.
If you're getting good offers, by all means feel free to move along. Business is business as the Bobs of Layoff Inc. have made painfully clear. Look at what you're negotiating now that you have some history behind you. When I started, I got major raises twice a year for two years. I kept that job for 18 months and started looking, by that time, any offer that came my way came with a pay cut. I stayed there until the last round of mergers and cheesy minimum raises became the norm. I left 1 month after my final salary review listing that as one reason.
Once you've decided to leave, don't plan on negotiating for a counter offer. They'll brand you as disloyal scum and you've got a good chance of being dropped from the team when you're not prepared.
Yes, you may be costing companies money when you jump ship, but in 2007, loyalty runs from payday to payday. There's no more gold watch and pension plan waiting. If your value to company B is that much more, submit your notice. You may want to consider running your own consulting shop, or working with a consulting team. I do side jobs under my own business and count former employers as customers. If you do that while working, make sure you have documented permission for a side gig. You can negotiate that when you go over the written offer, it's much harder when you're onboard.
Tivo has never hidden their desire to collect and resell data. They tell advertisers what commercials people watch, which SuperBowl clip gets replayed over and over again, and have started to provide data feed to the Neilsen ratings people. Think about about this, what you watch on Tivo can feed into ratings decision machine. I'm also a lifetime subscriber and take advantage of the ability to download and move recordings around. I know I could do this myself, but being able to put a remote in the hands of a 10 year old, or my wife and just have it work tm makes it all worthwhile. Tivo is in business to return something to their shareholders, as long as they make a reasonable product I hope they stick around. This isn't news to anyone who's looked a a setup screen or user guide. It's not like they're changing a privacy policy to squeeze a few more dimes out of each user.
a. have 3 different backups run once a week or need to maintain years of infomration
b. have daily incremental backups
c. provide disaster recovery for business restoration
d. preserve regulated information, either financial or healthcare
e. restore custom applications
f. reimage new systems or only preserve data
Backup exec and Acronis both provide reasonable solutions for mostly stable Windows clients. Storing active data on a SAN or file server and making that up increases the backup window for the local box. Now a days, I prefer that solutions with periodic o/s backups on a bootable DVD. Annual backups can serve if your live data isn't at risk locally.
Remember, backups are worthless. It's the restored data that has value. Test your procedures and hardware periodically, make sure you have off site hardware to restore. If your Quantum SDLT220 tape drive is out of support and the only place you get another one is from a reseller on E-Bay who's had one stored . . . . Never trust a single blob of media.
Clean up on server 6. On my last job I went from Systems Admin to Systems Manager, to Project Manager and finally Special Consultant. I was cleaning up and troubleshooting the problems untrained DBAs created, I started calling myself the janitor and managed get other people using it, at least in house.
Exporting company data, work product or internal messages and memos to an out side source could in itself be a security issue. This is a good way to hang yourself. Far better to maintain paper copies, the suggestion to get these notarized above is an excellent idea.
Banned from DefCon just for having a little fun,
We brought a little Alpha there
Just a crew of four
But DefCon doesn't want us any more
I wonder why. .
OpenVMS was banned uninvited with quick rules change. Only those less secure operating systems need show up. Microsoft will always be welcome.
Of course if you read it cover to cover, you'll probably never want to eat a ground meat in the United States again.
Don't drink the marketing Kool-Aid. The statement above means that that HP dropped two powerful technologies in favor of a vaporware system that still isn't ready to compete. A 4-way Alphaserver ES-45 used to be benchmarked against 8-way Sun/Power boxes and still outmatches today's Itanium offerings. With no future to these products people stopped buying them dropping HP's datacenter profits. At one time Compaq planned to consolidate Unix/VMS/NonStop on Alpha systerms.
Killing the line to play nice with Intel means that Intel wins, IBM wins, Sun wins and HP is left waiting for the release of Itanium systms that will make the company just another white box builder. The only difference between HP and the mom and pop store down the block is that one of these will have better service and accurate records of warrantees.
The test rate on screeners was 70 percent before 9/11 and remains 70 even after adding all the new standard proceedures. So what exactly is the benefit of standing around on a dirty, often wet floor in my socks?
As Leslie Fish points out in The Digwell Carol if we take the chance to bury them now, maybe we can get on with our lives. Anyone else feel like chipping in for a concrete pour to be arranged at the mouth of bunker this week?
Servers - how long can they be down? Do you have replacement plans in case your data center gets hit by the next earthquake/hurricane/fill_in_the_disaster. Having tapes off site means nothing if you don't have hardware for restore. Can you get Hardware X if everyone else is looking for X, maybe Y is the new standard and you're application needs X version 1.2.
Desktops, are files on a server or local? Do you have a standard desktop that can be rolled out and copies of the server. Can the desktops go 2 weeks, but you need the servers back in 12 hours. You need a plan before things get ugly.
Speaking of tapes, as mentioned you need to periodically check your restore. Backups don't matter, it's whether or not you can restore your data that counts. How often, incremental or full. Be careful shipping tapes. Since 9/11 I've noticed tapes shipped with certain carriers have read issues at the remote site. Is this X-rays on cargo or just a bad run of tapes?
Does renting rack space at a data center with redundant connections, air, power, generator and 7x24 staffing make sense? Or do you need to run the exchange server under Bob's desk so it can be rebooted regularly? Can you try to block audio/video files?
There are a variety of bandwidth solutions, I have customers with multiple OC-3s and customers with a DSL business line. The answer is: it depends on business impact and downtime tolerance. Many redudant solutions get postponed once the cost is known.
Before you can propose a technical solution, you need to know the political layout.
In this day and age, the goal is to make a quick buck, meet your quarterly goals, collect the bonus and score another job based your great quarter. Downtime usually isn't an issue so you wind up with Microsoft spreading into desktops and datacenters. It's cheap and you can hire a reboot monkey to admin these systems. Of course we can replace the big box and the guys who've kept it running 7x24 for the last 23 years without any outages. They cost too much to keep around anyway and don't have any colors but green or amber.
Bill Gates understood that you don't need to be better, you need to meet the minimum standard and be the low bidder. With the introduction of Windows, the minimum standard creeps lower, allowing his next product even more market share. We're beginning to see a backlash with security and reliablity becoming issues again.
If a VAX booted in 1983 can run an application without a reboot for 17 years (Year 2000 shutdown) why doesn't can't a modern system stay up for week?
Sometimes we'd have class discussion. Since most of the reading fell in to the above category, we'd do the discussion without reading. There's an art to to asking questions about something you haven't read and aren't "prepared" for. We dropped the ball once, he went down the rows asking if everyone had done the reading. Less than half the class answered yes, then he turned around and gave us writing assignment.
The biggest way to win Hearts and Minds in Iraq would be to hand out laptops and provide wireless access for all. Around the world people are beginning to insist on their Miranda rights due to big media influence. In other words, Law and Order did more for world wide democracy than G W Bush ever will.
There are no dangerous weapons, only dangerous men.