How this post got moderated up as "interesting" as opposed to "flamebait" is beyond me... But back on-topic:
There is more to computing than CPU performance, but, conversely, it is a factor. It would be better, in a sense, to do benchmarks of the type: this configuration is better for playing Doom, this one for being a web server, this one for running Microsoft Office, etc.
The problems are two-fold. First it is very hard to agree on an intersting application to benchmark against (and even if you do then to define it unambigously -- think of the IIS vs. Apache "benchmarks" out there). Second, there are just too many possible combinations in building and configuring a complete system. You would never get a comprehensive benchmark.
So for the moment we only have component benchmarks. Yes, they are difficult: you actually have to apply some intelligence and knowledge to use them in a "real world" situation. That's why we get paid big bucks. The alternative is to find a vendor you trus and buy whatever they recommend.
Presumably this modification is only going to catch player that have been hacked to Region 0 (All Regions)? Most hacks seems to set the player to a specific, non-zero, region with an option to change it on the fly (is this true?) or on command. I don't think the mod will catch these players.
The basic argument is that Red Hat's and Debian's make their money from support agreements, not selling packages. This might be true, can anybody who's checked out Red Hat's financials provide any insight?
By that definition, most environments are broken. There are Win32 extensions to perl, so that's a broken development environment, to give a less exotic example than the kernel. Java has the microsoft packages.
There will always be local extensions to your development enviroments. The trick is to know when to use them and when not to use them.
Maybe of greater concern is that developers are not usually very careful to ensure portability. Do you use sysconf(3), [f]pathconf(3), et al. a lot in your code? No? Do you still use strcmp(3) instead of strcoll(3). Anybody still using signal over sigaction (shudder!)? How about alloca, mknod, or vfork from BSD or [dej]rand48, popen, or remque from SYSV? Even ioctl is not part of POSIX.1 -- ever used it? Then don't worry about the development environment: worry about your code first.
[I thought this one was to good to leave as one long string... -- cybaea]
May the moderators moderate moderately
Ok so you all think you have it bad..
A condensed version of my 2 years spent at a now defunct pre-ipo startup.
Back in 1998 I decided to stop playing Descent on kali long enough to actually go out and look for a job. I found the secret to getting a job here in silicon valley a few years earlier, basically go to the mercury news web site and search the classifieds for "FAX (408)" and sort out what job you want from there. I faxed out to 100 companies looking for IT people saying to myself I'll take whoever bites first.
Bad Mistake.
I started working for a consulting group that worked for the now defunct startup for 36k@yr. Basically this consulting firm had been leeching money from the startup for the last 3 years to deliver a product that was limited to only 1 platform (we'll keep it nameless to stop o/s flame wars) and was leaps and bounds the worst piece of crap ever to be passed off as software. I guess I could tell you its function. Basically video transmission across the internet. But the thing required a t1 line to get 30fps on a 320x240 window. Something Real has been doing for a while.
I questioned the lead from the consulting group about his product choices and offered my advice which he took as a threat. He would constantly belittle me thinking somehow this was going to change my mind and make me see things with his "vision" I don't back down from bullshitters.
So began his abuse of power. He would go into rants about how I didn't order this or I didn't order that. Well duh! I'm not about to charge 6k to my plastic so I can buy his lame ass team new computers. I wasn't about to charge that money then have to sit there with the accounting department trying to justify my re-imbursement. Not to mention it takes time to get all that processed which would have gone into interest charges. He would constantly go around telling people I didn't have my finances in order. I would try and do things the normal way, you know, submitting a credit app/resellers license to a vendor and get net 30 terms. He wouldn't go for that either, we had to do all our purchases through fry's with his sales rep.
In retaliation to me trying to do things right he started to strip me of my power and access. He ordered one of his toadies to remove my access from all machines on the network including mail and file servers. Told everyone to no longer include me in meetings because I was counterproductive to his "Vision" Basically he was making it impossible for me to do my own job. I couldn't create new accounts, I couldn't troubleshoot the servers when they went poof, nothing. He made his toadies take over my former responsibilities and reduced my job to basically just sitting at a desk surfing the web. Because the toadies started getting the extra workload they began resenting me (to this day I can still feel it)
One day my CEO comes by with some potential investors. I was working in the lab on our prototype (herein will be referred to as "POS") when the lead from the consulting group walked by, checked to see if I was in there, then walked over to the CEO and the investors and started bringing them down my way. When they got to the door he came in and started talking about our product. Then he proceeds to tell the investors, "The prototyped would have been finished if "me" had ordered the parts which he can't do because he doesn't have his personal finances in order. He'll get it right eventually because I'm going to repeat to "me" over and over again until he gets it in his head". The words stung me pretty hard. I looked up at the CEO and investors. The investors looked shocked and the CEO, well lets just say he had a look which let me know he felt my pain. After they left I scribbled a note saying I quit and taped that with my key to the door and left.
Later that night I got a phone call from the lead begging me to come back. Well not quite begging, but he was being apologetic in a "well I'm just saying I'm sorry, doesn't mean I mean it" way. Turned out the CEO went back to the lab to talk to me and found the note, went back and chewed this guy out. I agreed to go back (you'd think I learned my lesson)
2 weeks later I got a call from the CEO's office. They had some weird network problem that needed fixing so I went down there. Problem got fixed in like 5 minutes and a reboot. So I decided I'd do some more to get the whole office running smoothly. I found a extra machine, put some server software on it, started getting rid of all the peer network sharing ect, ect. I happened upon the CEO's desk and noticed he was paying almost 10k@month to the consulting firm for me of which %40 went back to the lead. This explains why I wasn't hired on permanent yet. About 8pm I got a call from the CEO asking me to come to his house, his home PC needed some doctoring. So I packed up and went on over.
There was no sick PC when I arrived. He poured me some wine and started telling me about the sorted past him and the lead had had for the last 3 years. Turned out this guy had his fingers into everything and it was either all going back to him or his church in some way or another. The sales guy at fry's was a member of his church, the ISP we used he held stock in and was getting a referral bonus, and myself, sheesh I was his kids college fund. The platform we used he had stock in, the software we used belonged to him and if the IPO was to market it they would have to pay a royalty fee to him. Basically this guy was out to screw this IPO 7 ways to Sunday out of investors money. Well after that we talked about fishing, next day he rented a boat and we went out for bass.
I'm going to condense a bunch of stuff here. Basically it gets worse. I get hired after having to sit through a personal review where this guy tries to rip me apart with lies. Um also he starts to hire all these glass eyed religious fanatics from his church which on a daily basis remind me that I'm going to hell for not being in their religion. Oh yeah that and constantly dropping off their religious books anonymously on my desk. We hire a new dev team, the lead gets fired, the company moves to alameda because the CEO doesn't like the drive from SJC to Sunnyvale.
So by this time I am really caught in the middle of a huge stinkin pile of excrement. I have the dev team from the consulting group resenting me thinking I got their boss fired because I was "buddy buddy" with the CEO. The religious fanatics resent me thinking I ruined this man. The new dev team in Sacramento is uncertain of me because they think I did this single handedly to the ex lead. People start rumors about me just to be mean. It really got weird.
The CEO got what he wanted out of me. A scapegoat for everyone to resent and focus on instead of him. It was pretty fucked.
Then came time for the move. They wouldn't pay for a mover no matter how many quotes I got. I must have received at least 10 quotes from 10 movers. They told me it was my responsibility to get the equipment moved since there wasn't any acceptable quotes. Something told me they were trying to get me to quit but my macho said to show these guys what I was made of. The day of the move nobody offered to help me, they just threw trash all around the space. The sales guys were ripping the local phone books in half and leaving them on the floor. It took 3 U-haul (biggest truck) loads and 18 hour days for a weekend to get all the crap moved (think crap for 30 people). Only a few casualties here and there. Big gouge in the conference room table. In my tired stupor I smashed the U-haul into the basketball hoop at our old office and left it bent at a 45% angle. Other than that the move went smoothly.
Monday came and I called in to say I wasn't about to come in. I was totally sore and hurting but supposedly the CEO was there screaming and yelling that I hadn't unpacked anything. I got him on the phone and told him he can have the lazy sob's that didn't pack their own shit unpack it and sort it out themselves. I hung up and went to sleep.
Next day I went in, this time the CEO was ranting even worse than ever. Our new office was right next to the Oakland raiders HQ. Some drunken raider fan plowed into a ma-bell box that had all the copper for the entire business park. Our website, DNS, everything was all depending on that connection. It took pacbell a month to get it straightened out.
Comment if anyone has this happen to them... You wake up, 15 minutes your dressed and drivin to work, 1.5 hours later your at work, completely oblivious to what happened during your commute. Repeat the mental shutdown on the way home. It started to wear on me to the point where I started saying to myself I should deduct my commute time from my work time. 3 hours a day of commuting sucks for anyone who's ever had to do it. So I started working 5 hour days with a day off here and there.
HR started threatening to make me a hourly employee if I didn't put in my full 8 at the specified times. I told them I'd quit if they did. They did, I quit.
Well after I left the company kept spiraling downward. The Sacramento team all got pink slips. In fact most everyone got pink slips. But by that time I was already at my new job, where I got respect for what I knew and was allowed to implement it.
I got a call from my Old CEO recently. He needed help with some home computer problems again. I told him I was working, no time to call him. Two weeks later I got served papers. The CEO decided he would sue the lead from the consulting firm as a last ditch effort to keep his company afloat. The lead named me personally in the counter suite saying I conspired to slander him, and I gave out his source code and secrets which I didn't. Those wacky religious fanatics go figure.
Lesson I learned from all this.. If it smells like trouble then it probably is. Get out fast. Turn your back and never look back. I hope this can help someone else who is a stressed out IT worker.
--t0qer
May the bridges I burn behind me light my way ahead--bmbr
As somebody else pointed out: most binary files can be watermarked but the method will be different for each type. You'll have to identify all data types that can potentially hold sensitive data, implement a watermark for each, and then implement the checking in your firewall/proxy/ipmasq/whatever.
An alternative (especially if your key files change fairly infrequently) may be to store a hash value for all critical files and check that on outbound attachments etc.
Databases are a problem: it's hard to see how you can prevent people from doing a bcp of all the data and send it. Two things may help: (1) make sure all database activity is logged and (2) include a few dummy database entries that you can search for (e.g. username 'faisifopida' or whatever). Just make sure your applications filter the watermark data out.
Oh, and you'll need to keep the method(s) you emply secret. That sucks and means you'll need to employ several methods at the same time.
If you don't like a future publicly defined by wacky cranks, do something constructive about it. Let's see you creep out from behind that Hollywood water barrel and stand up in the hot light of day.
Speaking of Newt Gingrich as a "science fiction novelist" he argues that there are nobody left to assess technology and its impact on society. "Nobody but hobbyists, day-traders and cranks."
Science, models, thinking about the future and thereby shaping the future is too important to leave to Hollywood. We need informed debate, constructive arguments and a vision that can once again make Americans (and the rest of the world) passionate about science and the future. There are no great dreams anymore because, perhaps, there are no great dreamers.
All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the
dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was
vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may
act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did.
-- T.E.Lawerence (of Arabia):
Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
Dream, then, but know that dreaming in itself is not enough.
A mathematical equation such as a line, curve, or a plan can't really be imagined without a model using the Cartesian co-ordinate system.
Eh, the Ancient Greeks didn't know about Cartesian co-ordinates but I seem to remember that Euclid and a couple of others did a pretty good job of imagining lines, curves, plans and much more besides. Actually, his Elements makes a pretty interesting read. My favoutites are the definitions at the start:
A point is that which has no part.
A line is a breadthless lenght.
The extemities of a line are points.
...and so on.
Your fallacy is that because you can't imagine these concepts without a co-ordinate system then you assume nobody can imagine them. We all do it from time to time, but it is always interesting to try different models. As an excercise, try proving Euclid's Proposition 47 without using a co-ordinate system. Euclid could, surely you can too?
In right-angled triangles the square of the side subtending the right angle is equal to the squares on the sides containing the right angle.
(That is c*c = a*a + b*b in your notation and with the limited markup allowed by/.)
Books are shipped with EULAs! What else would you call this blurb that I find in most paperback books:
Condition of Sale
This book is sold on the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
This is from the UK -- do you have something similar in the US and would it be legal there?
Intel also informed us that the Pentium 4 would strictly be a uniprocessor part, meaning it won't even work in multiprocessor boards.
So, yes, you are right: they don't support SMP so why would they split the bus?
But I question your "intel probably can't afford to design it's next consumer level chip around a few percent of the market" comment.
First of all, if Intel can't afford it, who can?
But more to the point: Is it really only a few percent of the market? I've just ordered a dual PIII and I selected the chip specifically because I could get SMP support. Does anybody have any statistics on single- versus multiple CPU PIII systems shipped? Is it really only "a few percent"?
yeah, OC Workbench has a little thing with a link to some high-magnification pictures of what can happen to your CPU if you don't treat it OK. Can you say "sliced Pentium"?
Members of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to CPUs (SPCC) should not look....! It looks like it could have hurt ("megahurt", as The Register has it).
Liquid cooling indeed. Why do I feel we have come full circle? I remember the liquid cooled machines at CERN - I thought we had gotten rid of those....
The P4's bus, unlike the Athlon's EV6, isn't a Point-to-Point bus, meaning that all CPUs must share the same 3.2GB/s of available system
bandwidth. With a Point-to-Point bus, although it's more complicated to implement, each CPU in a multiprocessor environment gets its own connection to the North Bridge...
IANACD (I am not a chip designer), but this seems to me like a major disadvantage compared with the Athlon. Am I missing something obvious?
The 432-pin Pentium 4 should dissipate around 52W of heat when operating at launch speeds; this puts it below that of the 1GHz Thunderbird
that is currently available.
AMD has steadily
been gaining market share ever since the release of their Athlon last August,
their Thunderbird last June and their Duron shortly thereafter. The company
has come from a microprocessor manufacturer that focused on supplying processors
for the value market segment to a manufacturer that is helping to drive the
desktop market in both performance and value segments.
One of the main reasons
that AMD's recent processor releases have been so successful is because, unlike
their competition, primarily Intel, the K7 architecture and its derivatives
are free from the numerous limitations that 5-year old P6 architecture imposes
on Intel's current flagship, the Pentium III. By reading the above statement,
you'd assume that the Athlon was all but demolishing the Pentium III in terms
of performance. Well, it's not.
The beauty of the K7 architecture
is that it is very scalable, especially when you consider the largely untapped
(by AMD of course) high-end workstation/server market that demands multiprocessor
solutions. So while the Pentium III and its accompanying P6 bus are performing
just fine now, there is a definite need for a more powerful solution for Intel's
future processors if they plan on holding their current market advantage.
Intel gave us a very pleasant
surprise at the Spring 2000 Intel Developer Forum
(IDF) in February: for the first time the Willamette's architecture was discussed
in a decent amount of detail. However, Intel has remained fairly quiet about
the Willamette until now.
In two days, Intel's annual
Fall IDF will commence, and the big topic of the day will be the architecture
upon which the Willamette, or Pentium 4, is based. We were given the go ahead
by Intel to let you all in on the details of this new architecture today so
you can get a head start on your IDF reading, which we will be providing later
this week.
A lot of what we will be
talking about in this article is a follow-up to our initial IDF coverage in
our Intel IDF Report #1 and our IDF
CPU Report articles that were published earlier this year.
There are two key words and phrases you, our readers must note.
First of all, the Pentium 4 marchitecture is now to be described as
Netburst, and the second phrase is that this architecture should be
described as the repeated engineer execution (REE). We know
what REE stands for but we prefer our version.
I purchased an extra capacity battery for my Sony and would get 4-6 hours out of it. With a Crusoe chip it should get close to 8 hours (if you don't use the CD/DVD too much...).
The Sony didn't last long though, it broke after three months. Repair was painful and now it's dead for the third time. I have given up on it: too much hassle.
I would probably consider the IBM: the laptop I write this on is built like a tank (with the weight that goes with that!) and I would trust them more than Sony. I am, however, sure that the Sony will have some nifty features.
PS: Like the AC I'd like to know about your experiences with NetBSD on the IBM. How does it work, exactly?
They haven't even made a chip yet! They have just made a transistor or two.
It is not even clear from the article how small they have gotten the channels: it only says that the technique "scales to" 10nm.
There is a long way from showing that a given technology will sort-of-work in a lab to mass-production. That's one of the reasons for the delay.
Another is that there might not be a market. It is currently quite feasible to get a couple of ~1GHz processors with a few gigs of RAM in a machin we can almost afford. Let's face it: few of us sitting here reading Slashdot are using our quad-Xeon workstations to their fullest. Who would really buy it at, say, 100 times the current price? I've just ordered my dual-PIII and I doubt I could easily use more processor speed. (Memory, maybe.) And I'm sure I wouldn't pay half a million bucks for it!
Despite falling under scrutiny from time to time, it [Moore's law] continues to accurately reflect the progression of chip technology.... Moore's Law in recent years has shortened to reflect a doubling of transistor count and performance every 18 months.
Ahem, a law can not be both accurate and in need of revision within its (original) domain.
For general consumers, I think the potential benefits are that Linux brings a whole set of facilities that are minimal or missing in current proprietary OS's used on handhelds. These systems [i.e. not Linux] were built to run in tiny amounts of memory, and as Moore's law continues to drive the industry, we are very rapidly moving toward handhelds much more like the iPAQ (32 meg of RAM, 16 meg of Flash). We want to ride this curve with modern technology, not systems intended for tiny memory space.
Am I reading this wrong, or is he saying that Linux is better than Microsoft because it is bigger!?
So MS Word is good because it is huge and has a ping-pong game built in?
[T]he USPS's role in binding the nation togeather is becoming less and less important.
The provision for the Postal Service in the US Constituion was a mistake.
I don't know specifically about the US, but here in Europe the debate usually centers on the Universal Provision argument. The universal provision is the requirement that the post office must reach the whole country with fairly uniform service and price. That's why they have a monopoly on the delivery of low-cost mail.
In this sense, you could argue (and people do) that the postal service does "bring the nation together" in a way that a commercial operation would not.
"We believe they are developing the largest spam database in the history of the Internet," says Dave McClure, executive director of the U.S. Internet Industry Association, Arlington, Va., which represents some 300 high-tech firms doing business on the Internet.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but is this the Internet Industry Association which doesn't have a web site?
Nah! I'm being unfair. Just because it's a new site, and just because they are an organisation that "provides education on Internet and technology issues, advocates effective public policy for the Internet..." but does not have a privacy statement on it's site, and just because they are affiliate with one of the largest censor organisations in the country (which has "dirversified nto other safety programs to address lifelong injury prevention, including cyber safety, teen impaired driving...",...
Just because they are clueles doesn't mean I have any rights to make fun of them. So please completely ignore this post...
Slashdot Mirror
How this post got moderated up as "interesting" as opposed to "flamebait" is beyond me... But back on-topic:
There is more to computing than CPU performance, but, conversely, it is a factor. It would be better, in a sense, to do benchmarks of the type: this configuration is better for playing Doom, this one for being a web server, this one for running Microsoft Office, etc.
The problems are two-fold. First it is very hard to agree on an intersting application to benchmark against (and even if you do then to define it unambigously -- think of the IIS vs. Apache "benchmarks" out there). Second, there are just too many possible combinations in building and configuring a complete system. You would never get a comprehensive benchmark.
So for the moment we only have component benchmarks. Yes, they are difficult: you actually have to apply some intelligence and knowledge to use them in a "real world" situation. That's why we get paid big bucks. The alternative is to find a vendor you trus and buy whatever they recommend.
Presumably this modification is only going to catch player that have been hacked to Region 0 (All Regions)? Most hacks seems to set the player to a specific, non-zero, region with an option to change it on the fly (is this true?) or on command. I don't think the mod will catch these players.
But what do I know...? Comments?
The latest quarter's results are at http://www.corporate-ir.net/ireye/ir_site.zhtml?ti cker=rhat&script=410& amp; amp;layout= 9&item_id=116923. From here we learn that RH made $9.25M on "subscriptions", $7.8M on services, and $1.44M on "web" in the last three months.
The treminology is a bit confusing, but I guess "subscriptions" is software related sales while "web" are sales of other items from the Red Hat Store?
The cost of revenue was $3.6M, $4.2M, and $58k, respectively, giving net profits of around $5.7M, $3.6M, and $1.5M.
So to answer your question: in profit terms software packages account for 53% compared with 33% for services.
In summary: The "basic argument" is wrong.
Where are my moderator points when I need them?
By that definition, most environments are broken. There are Win32 extensions to perl, so that's a broken development environment, to give a less exotic example than the kernel. Java has the microsoft packages.
There will always be local extensions to your development enviroments. The trick is to know when to use them and when not to use them.
Maybe of greater concern is that developers are not usually very careful to ensure portability. Do you use sysconf(3), [f]pathconf(3), et al. a lot in your code? No? Do you still use strcmp(3) instead of strcoll(3). Anybody still using signal over sigaction (shudder!)? How about alloca, mknod, or vfork from BSD or [dej]rand48, popen, or remque from SYSV? Even ioctl is not part of POSIX.1 -- ever used it? Then don't worry about the development environment: worry about your code first.
[I thought this one was to good to leave as one long string... -- cybaea]
May the moderators moderate moderately
Ok so you all think you have it bad..
A condensed version of my 2 years spent at a now defunct pre-ipo startup.
Back in 1998 I decided to stop playing Descent on kali long enough to actually go out and look for a job. I found the secret to getting a job here in silicon valley a few years earlier, basically go to the mercury news web site and search the classifieds for "FAX (408)" and sort out what job you want from there. I faxed out to 100 companies looking for IT people saying to myself I'll take whoever bites first.
Bad Mistake.
I started working for a consulting group that worked for the now defunct startup for 36k@yr. Basically this consulting firm had been leeching money from the startup for the last 3 years to deliver a product that was limited to only 1 platform (we'll keep it nameless to stop o/s flame wars) and was leaps and bounds the worst piece of crap ever to be passed off as software. I guess I could tell you its function. Basically video transmission across the internet. But the thing required a t1 line to get 30fps on a 320x240 window. Something Real has been doing for a while.
I questioned the lead from the consulting group about his product choices and offered my advice which he took as a threat. He would constantly belittle me thinking somehow this was going to change my mind and make me see things with his "vision" I don't back down from bullshitters.
So began his abuse of power. He would go into rants about how I didn't order this or I didn't order that. Well duh! I'm not about to charge 6k to my plastic so I can buy his lame ass team new computers. I wasn't about to charge that money then have to sit there with the accounting department trying to justify my re-imbursement. Not to mention it takes time to get all that processed which would have gone into interest charges. He would constantly go around telling people I didn't have my finances in order. I would try and do things the normal way, you know, submitting a credit app/resellers license to a vendor and get net 30 terms. He wouldn't go for that either, we had to do all our purchases through fry's with his sales rep.
In retaliation to me trying to do things right he started to strip me of my power and access. He ordered one of his toadies to remove my access from all machines on the network including mail and file servers. Told everyone to no longer include me in meetings because I was counterproductive to his "Vision" Basically he was making it impossible for me to do my own job. I couldn't create new accounts, I couldn't troubleshoot the servers when they went poof, nothing. He made his toadies take over my former responsibilities and reduced my job to basically just sitting at a desk surfing the web. Because the toadies started getting the extra workload they began resenting me (to this day I can still feel it)
One day my CEO comes by with some potential investors. I was working in the lab on our prototype (herein will be referred to as "POS") when the lead from the consulting group walked by, checked to see if I was in there, then walked over to the CEO and the investors and started bringing them down my way. When they got to the door he came in and started talking about our product. Then he proceeds to tell the investors, "The prototyped would have been finished if "me" had ordered the parts which he can't do because he doesn't have his personal finances in order. He'll get it right eventually because I'm going to repeat to "me" over and over again until he gets it in his head". The words stung me pretty hard. I looked up at the CEO and investors. The investors looked shocked and the CEO, well lets just say he had a look which let me know he felt my pain. After they left I scribbled a note saying I quit and taped that with my key to the door and left.
Later that night I got a phone call from the lead begging me to come back. Well not quite begging, but he was being apologetic in a "well I'm just saying I'm sorry, doesn't mean I mean it" way. Turned out the CEO went back to the lab to talk to me and found the note, went back and chewed this guy out. I agreed to go back (you'd think I learned my lesson)
2 weeks later I got a call from the CEO's office. They had some weird network problem that needed fixing so I went down there. Problem got fixed in like 5 minutes and a reboot. So I decided I'd do some more to get the whole office running smoothly. I found a extra machine, put some server software on it, started getting rid of all the peer network sharing ect, ect. I happened upon the CEO's desk and noticed he was paying almost 10k@month to the consulting firm for me of which %40 went back to the lead. This explains why I wasn't hired on permanent yet. About 8pm I got a call from the CEO asking me to come to his house, his home PC needed some doctoring. So I packed up and went on over.
There was no sick PC when I arrived. He poured me some wine and started telling me about the sorted past him and the lead had had for the last 3 years. Turned out this guy had his fingers into everything and it was either all going back to him or his church in some way or another. The sales guy at fry's was a member of his church, the ISP we used he held stock in and was getting a referral bonus, and myself, sheesh I was his kids college fund. The platform we used he had stock in, the software we used belonged to him and if the IPO was to market it they would have to pay a royalty fee to him. Basically this guy was out to screw this IPO 7 ways to Sunday out of investors money. Well after that we talked about fishing, next day he rented a boat and we went out for bass.
I'm going to condense a bunch of stuff here. Basically it gets worse. I get hired after having to sit through a personal review where this guy tries to rip me apart with lies. Um also he starts to hire all these glass eyed religious fanatics from his church which on a daily basis remind me that I'm going to hell for not being in their religion. Oh yeah that and constantly dropping off their religious books anonymously on my desk. We hire a new dev team, the lead gets fired, the company moves to alameda because the CEO doesn't like the drive from SJC to Sunnyvale.
So by this time I am really caught in the middle of a huge stinkin pile of excrement. I have the dev team from the consulting group resenting me thinking I got their boss fired because I was "buddy buddy" with the CEO. The religious fanatics resent me thinking I ruined this man. The new dev team in Sacramento is uncertain of me because they think I did this single handedly to the ex lead. People start rumors about me just to be mean. It really got weird.
The CEO got what he wanted out of me. A scapegoat for everyone to resent and focus on instead of him. It was pretty fucked.
Then came time for the move. They wouldn't pay for a mover no matter how many quotes I got. I must have received at least 10 quotes from 10 movers. They told me it was my responsibility to get the equipment moved since there wasn't any acceptable quotes. Something told me they were trying to get me to quit but my macho said to show these guys what I was made of. The day of the move nobody offered to help me, they just threw trash all around the space. The sales guys were ripping the local phone books in half and leaving them on the floor. It took 3 U-haul (biggest truck) loads and 18 hour days for a weekend to get all the crap moved (think crap for 30 people). Only a few casualties here and there. Big gouge in the conference room table. In my tired stupor I smashed the U-haul into the basketball hoop at our old office and left it bent at a 45% angle. Other than that the move went smoothly.
Monday came and I called in to say I wasn't about to come in. I was totally sore and hurting but supposedly the CEO was there screaming and yelling that I hadn't unpacked anything. I got him on the phone and told him he can have the lazy sob's that didn't pack their own shit unpack it and sort it out themselves. I hung up and went to sleep.
Next day I went in, this time the CEO was ranting even worse than ever. Our new office was right next to the Oakland raiders HQ. Some drunken raider fan plowed into a ma-bell box that had all the copper for the entire business park. Our website, DNS, everything was all depending on that connection. It took pacbell a month to get it straightened out.
Comment if anyone has this happen to them... You wake up, 15 minutes your dressed and drivin to work, 1.5 hours later your at work, completely oblivious to what happened during your commute. Repeat the mental shutdown on the way home. It started to wear on me to the point where I started saying to myself I should deduct my commute time from my work time. 3 hours a day of commuting sucks for anyone who's ever had to do it. So I started working 5 hour days with a day off here and there.
HR started threatening to make me a hourly employee if I didn't put in my full 8 at the specified times. I told them I'd quit if they did. They did, I quit.
Well after I left the company kept spiraling downward. The Sacramento team all got pink slips. In fact most everyone got pink slips. But by that time I was already at my new job, where I got respect for what I knew and was allowed to implement it.
I got a call from my Old CEO recently. He needed help with some home computer problems again. I told him I was working, no time to call him. Two weeks later I got served papers. The CEO decided he would sue the lead from the consulting firm as a last ditch effort to keep his company afloat. The lead named me personally in the counter suite saying I conspired to slander him, and I gave out his source code and secrets which I didn't. Those wacky religious fanatics go figure.
Lesson I learned from all this.. If it smells like trouble then it probably is. Get out fast. Turn your back and never look back. I hope this can help someone else who is a stressed out IT worker.
--t0qer
May the bridges I burn behind me light my way ahead--bmbr
As somebody else pointed out: most binary files can be watermarked but the method will be different for each type. You'll have to identify all data types that can potentially hold sensitive data, implement a watermark for each, and then implement the checking in your firewall/proxy/ipmasq/whatever.
An alternative (especially if your key files change fairly infrequently) may be to store a hash value for all critical files and check that on outbound attachments etc.
Databases are a problem: it's hard to see how you can prevent people from doing a bcp of all the data and send it. Two things may help: (1) make sure all database activity is logged and (2) include a few dummy database entries that you can search for (e.g. username 'faisifopida' or whatever). Just make sure your applications filter the watermark data out.
Oh, and you'll need to keep the method(s) you emply secret. That sucks and means you'll need to employ several methods at the same time.
Bruce Sterling's comments are spot on:
Speaking of Newt Gingrich as a "science fiction novelist" he argues that there are nobody left to assess technology and its impact on society. "Nobody but hobbyists, day-traders and cranks."
Science, models, thinking about the future and thereby shaping the future is too important to leave to Hollywood. We need informed debate, constructive arguments and a vision that can once again make Americans (and the rest of the world) passionate about science and the future. There are no great dreams anymore because, perhaps, there are no great dreamers.
Dream, then, but know that dreaming in itself is not enough.
Eh, the Ancient Greeks didn't know about Cartesian co-ordinates but I seem to remember that Euclid and a couple of others did a pretty good job of imagining lines, curves, plans and much more besides. Actually, his Elements makes a pretty interesting read. My favoutites are the definitions at the start:
...and so on.
Your fallacy is that because you can't imagine these concepts without a co-ordinate system then you assume nobody can imagine them. We all do it from time to time, but it is always interesting to try different models. As an excercise, try proving Euclid's Proposition 47 without using a co-ordinate system. Euclid could, surely you can too?
(That is c*c = a*a + b*b in your notation and with the limited markup allowed by /.)
Huh? It's the same with PayPal:
from the terms and conditions. AFAIK it has always been like this.
It's not really an issue at the moment, is it? From the Terms of Use:
That "available soon" has been there since they started...
Books are shipped with EULAs! What else would you call this blurb that I find in most paperback books:
This is from the UK -- do you have something similar in the US and would it be legal there?
Hmm, it's there at the bottom of the page:
So, yes, you are right: they don't support SMP so why would they split the bus?
But I question your "intel probably can't afford to design it's next consumer level chip around a few percent of the market" comment.
First of all, if Intel can't afford it, who can?
But more to the point: Is it really only a few percent of the market? I've just ordered a dual PIII and I selected the chip specifically because I could get SMP support. Does anybody have any statistics on single- versus multiple CPU PIII systems shipped? Is it really only "a few percent"?
yeah, OC Workbench has a little thing with a link to some high-magnification pictures of what can happen to your CPU if you don't treat it OK. Can you say "sliced Pentium"?
Members of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to CPUs (SPCC) should not look....! It looks like it could have hurt ("megahurt", as The Register has it).
Liquid cooling indeed. Why do I feel we have come full circle? I remember the liquid cooled machines at CERN - I thought we had gotten rid of those....
From the article:
IANACD (I am not a chip designer), but this seems to me like a major disadvantage compared with the Athlon. Am I missing something obvious?
The article says:
Works for me - here is the summary:
More at http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.h tml?i=1301&p=2.
The Register has a nice anti-hype article about the P4.
My favourite is
I'll bet you almost anything that a MS installation would chmod 06711 most of the files and make sure root is the owner.
Buggy code will take down your system and corrupt the fs on the way.
I'll bet you almost anything that a MS installation would chmod 06711 many of the files. No, I'm not running as root, but so what? The install did.
I purchased an extra capacity battery for my Sony and would get 4-6 hours out of it. With a Crusoe chip it should get close to 8 hours (if you don't use the CD/DVD too much...).
The Sony didn't last long though, it broke after three months. Repair was painful and now it's dead for the third time. I have given up on it: too much hassle.
I would probably consider the IBM: the laptop I write this on is built like a tank (with the weight that goes with that!) and I would trust them more than Sony. I am, however, sure that the Sony will have some nifty features.
PS: Like the AC I'd like to know about your experiences with NetBSD on the IBM. How does it work, exactly?
They haven't even made a chip yet! They have just made a transistor or two.
It is not even clear from the article how small they have gotten the channels: it only says that the technique "scales to" 10nm.
There is a long way from showing that a given technology will sort-of-work in a lab to mass-production. That's one of the reasons for the delay.
Another is that there might not be a market. It is currently quite feasible to get a couple of ~1GHz processors with a few gigs of RAM in a machin we can almost afford. Let's face it: few of us sitting here reading Slashdot are using our quad-Xeon workstations to their fullest. Who would really buy it at, say, 100 times the current price? I've just ordered my dual-PIII and I doubt I could easily use more processor speed. (Memory, maybe.) And I'm sure I wouldn't pay half a million bucks for it!
Ahem, a law can not be both accurate and in need of revision within its (original) domain.
Am I reading this wrong, or is he saying that Linux is better than Microsoft because it is bigger!?
So MS Word is good because it is huge and has a ping-pong game built in?
I don't know specifically about the US, but here in Europe the debate usually centers on the Universal Provision argument. The universal provision is the requirement that the post office must reach the whole country with fairly uniform service and price. That's why they have a monopoly on the delivery of low-cost mail.
In this sense, you could argue (and people do) that the postal service does "bring the nation together" in a way that a commercial operation would not.
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"Where do you come from?"
Correct me if I'm wrong, but is this the Internet Industry Association which doesn't have a web site?
Nah! I'm being unfair. Just because it's a new site, and just because they are an organisation that "provides education on Internet and technology issues, advocates effective public policy for the Internet..." but does not have a privacy statement on it's site, and just because they are affiliate with one of the largest censor organisations in the country (which has "dirversified nto other safety programs to address lifelong injury prevention, including cyber safety, teen impaired driving ...", ...
Just because they are clueles doesn't mean I have any rights to make fun of them. So please completely ignore this post...
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"Where do you come from?"