You were lucky, I was in a company once where change had to be approved in a similar process. Except the departmental meetings to bring up the change issue was once a week, the inter-departmental meetings to bring up changes across stakeholders in different departments was maybe once a month (if you were lucky). Once you got the whole project together and sat through many inter-departmental meetings listening to petty catfights in HR or finance and got everybody to sign off on the approval, you had to go in front of the review board which met quarterly. Good luck if the review board just met last week before you got that last signature.
I tried implementing some things like upgrade a Mac OS X Server from 10.1 to 10.3. By the time I was done just getting the project together, 10.4 had been out for 6 months. I was about to get out of the job when the whole company tanked and got taken over.
Unless of course, there is a nice warning that the file is also available for free with a higher quality and you can play that 'better quality' music on any player unencumbered. There is indeed a warning that DRM-enabled music (non-iTunes Plus music and video) cannot be played on non-Apple products.
The argument is moot for most customers that use the iTunes store since they all have iPods of some sort anyway. The customers that don't, know better and the customers that didn't knew due to ignorance only have to spend 99c to find out and they might get a refund anyway.
Yes it is their fault. Their fault for not thinking. People think that paying a mortgage is the same as paying rent while it isn't. Who's fixing your house if you rent? Who's paying taxes? Who's paying the insurance? Who's paying (in some cases) the gas, water and electricity?
Now you go live from your apartment that's 3000 sq. ft. with a lawn (and a pool) and a garage. Now who has to pay for all that? Yes, your gas will at least triple than what you paid before unless you take out the money to get double paned windows and shutters like you had on your apartment. But now you can't call your landlord to fix your roof, you'll have to pay out of pocket that $10,000 bill and yes, it's recurrent every 15 years unless you go more expensive and get an aluminum roof.
Calculate before you buy. And if you read ANY information on it, if you get an 1% adjustable percentage from your mortgage dealer, unless you can afford a 10-15% percentage rate hike anytime in the next 30 years (which is the life of your mortgage) DON'T TAKE IT. Opt for the, more expensive yet less risky fixed percentage. Oh, you can't afford a 5% percentage rate mortgage. DON'T BUY A HOUSE, rent until you can afford.
I was pondering a buy a few years ago myself. I could afford it given my conditions back then but after calculating and adding all the costs, it's only $100/month more expensive to rent than to buy and I don't have to cut my own lawn and I have a lifeguard at the pool. And recently, I took a paycut of 30% so I wouldn't have to travel as much, I live comfortably, I am happy with my current job and my family has a combined income of a little over 100k allowing me to have an SUV go on 2 trips this year and I had enough left to pay for a rather large wedding this year. If I would've bought, I would've made it but I would have to work harder, possibly had to skip over the wedding (possibly even dating her) and a trip and be less happy with my job.
1) This is the average. Your company might have 700MB/user, in my organization, it's close to 1TB/user/year that gets added. We're doing medical imaging.
2) It's not just tape libraries. The cost for D2D2T or D2D2D (what we're doing) goes way up compared to a 'simple' backup scheme. Especially if you're like us and require mulitple gigabit streams, disk storage can't be just 4 cheap SATA disks in RAID5. We have 2 storage arrays with 14 drives each for general access and another storage array with 10 SATA disks for primary backup and those things don't come very cheap especially since you need multiple servers to handle the load.
3) Encryption, tape rotation or multiple locations add to the costs.
4) If you're buying a solution eg. from IBM (Tivoli), you need to pay for a consultant and/or another employee to get that stuff running. We're doing what we're doing with open source and it's going well, but if you can't and need to pay for software, it adds up (especially for Windows systems)
I think the city's still thinks it's the early 90's:
WebFacing requires Internet Explorer 5.5 or greater. You can down-load the latest version from http://www.microsoft.com/ie.
Re:Writing hello world is not a manager job
on
Fire Your IT Boss
·
· Score: 1
I hate those type of managers. My current 'manager' doesn't see me for a month or longer and even then he just sticks his head in to say hi, he trusts that I do what I do best. He only needs to talk to someone if there is a problem with the results of said someone. We all have our place in an organization, if we know what we need to do, we don't need anyone questioning us unless there is a problem with our (or subsequently) the end product.
Managers that manage people instead of the product of their mini-organization (basically every manager should be 'boss' over their own mini-company in my view) don't have enough to do. Managing people is for HR.
For those users, every computer comes standard with Windows, Microsoft Word is a text editor, e-mail composer and web page maker, virusses are things you get when you stand in the wind too long, there is also a prince in africa that wants to give them $100,000 and Comic Sans is the best font to use in e-mail conversations and resume's.
Jailbreaking is not that difficult anymore, I've seen less than competent managers do it just so they could load a specific program. Giving them a nice app as a front-end to apt is a good incentive, it gives them what they want, an "app-store" with unofficial programs. If the market or appeal for a product is big enough and the user doesn't mind loading an extra application on their machine (as if they even mind loading that hot-grits-natalie-portman.avi.exe from e-mail) they will do it, Apple will eventually either succumb to it or their app store will die.
But then again, who really cares about their medical records or any records for that matter.
1) People don't care. I work in a University related to a hospital. There have been breaches and people affected are invited to take up an offer of 1 year free privacy protection. How many do you think actually accept that offer? Minimal amount.
2) Yes, it would be easy to hack into such a systems (or any general medical facilities system) but what would be the benefit. The risk is too great and the rewards too little. So what if I know you have herpes, all I can do with it is blackmail you (which is risky in itself if you even care at all), if I steal your current credit card information, you'll get another one, other numbers and other expiration date at minimal effort. The risk is only acceptable if you can pull off a full identity theft without anyone noticing with the information that is leaked (eg. buy assets "liquid" enough to be moved quickly and easily AND backed by your personal information (real credit card, real drivers license etc.)). The easiest way to pull that off is to offer you to give it to me (all of it) at minimal effort, risk and cost (phishing). Hacking is too technically advanced, costly and risky for most 'real' crooks.
And who would pay for all those tests? My tax dollars? And who is going to guarantee that my blood & urine sample won't be used for other purposes like central DNA databases in some 3-letter agency's basement.
The problem with DUI is not the problem, it's the punishment. In some countries in Europe, you get pulled over driving drunk, you get the option of having a blood test done on-site by a certified doctor, your sample remain anonymous and get discarded right after the test. Or you can opt to simply wait in a cell for 4 hour increments for a next test until you're clear. Once you're clear, you go back to driving with a small fine. Here in the US, you get caught with a simple breathalyzer test after drinking one or two glasses and you lose your license for at least a year, you get to pay heavy fines (and in NYS you get to pay those on a yearly basis) and then after a year some board considers whether or not to give your license back. I know somebody who hasn't gotten his license back in 12 years while others just drive around without a license (and subsequently registration and insurance)
For infringement on the copyright of my name. Or didn't they read the EULA that's with Guru in the Dictionary? A guru is a Teacher or an Expert, not a Sales Drone. Since they don't do either of them (teach about or be an expert on Vista), they shouldn't call them Guru's.
I've heard the same story, only with coax cable (yes, I've been around that long...).
If their network is CAT-5 based on smart switches (HP, Cisco or any somewhat decent network vendor, heck even Linksys and Netgear have smart switches) they can find it quite simply by running a simple command on the switches, I even have a perl script that will do it for me.
Of course, it wouldn't surprise me if they still use 'dumb' switches or if the consultants simply said among them: let's get these stupid , just sit around and rack up the charges.
Re:I disagree with what's written on the main page
on
DIY Hybrid Car Kit
·
· Score: 1
You have to watch out if you do it yourself. I built things powered by electric motors (not cars) and the main problem is that if you need lots of force in an instant, the engine can deliver it (electric motors are very powerful) but the rest of the mechanics might not be able to stand the force or move it that quick and you'll end up twisting or breaking something down the line. A lot of constructions where electric motors power a driveshaft use special gearboxes for that.
I wouldn't doubt it was a network problem causing it. From a personal experience, I know Microsoft Windows (2000 and 2003) doesn't handle failover well and usually it's because the network drivers have to be supplied by a vendor (Broadcom or Via or whatever cheap crap they put in the servers these days) and everything it SHOULD be able to do, has to be or is re-implemented in software by the vendor (like trunking etc.). Then, when something unusual happens, both the Windows network stack and the driver might try to fix it or wait on each other to fix it or something else.
Unix-type systems have networking closer to the kernel and not in nor dependent on the driver. The driver only translates general kernel commands into electronic signals on the bus so 1) it will always adhere to standards (like trunking and vlan instead of relying on Broadcom or Cisco's or Intel's "standard"), 2) it will always work on virtually every card, even if it's a $15 one and 3) if it fails, it will fail across all platform and get fixed quicker by the community.
You're forgetting the cost of batteries. After ~3 years, your full warranty will have expired and your batteries will be down to like 50% of original capacity if not less. Repair costs could easily get over $10,000 for the battery pack, not talking about the cost to get it installed. No extended warranties, from the dealer or otherwise cover hybrid battery repairs and yes, I've read the fine print.
But our parents and grandparents had jobs back then. Now that all factory workers are unionized, they're kids and grandkids out of a jobs because the factory moved to places less expensive and less complainy.
If you're abused at your job, go and find another one. This can be done in any field. If you see that your field is always being abused, go to another field. There is no shortage of jobs in the US. I drive around times and it seems like everybody is hiring from small stores that anyone can do, forklift operators at big box stores, drivers for all types of vehicles, cashiers, desk and management jobs and even medical and IT. People are afraid of change and seem to want to hang around in an "abusive" environment too long and then they complain. I'm a young IT guy without any type of meaningful degree and I haven't been out of a job for more than 30 days. Sure, sometimes I have to move to a better place but I'm open to do that.
If our grandparents and parents would've walked out of their factory where they were "abused", management would've changed it after the first 10 left because without workers, there is no product. Those 10 would be either out of a job for a while but eventually they would get into another job. I know my grandfather did it, he refused to get unionized instead he stood up to management, took his experience elsewhere and earned a good penny being a foreman in a chemical factory until he retired.
I see the problem where I currently work too much. The facility people are unionized which makes it that they can't get fired. But our offices are never clean and nobody can help it, everything is leaking and we're out of heat or airconditioning at least twice a month. And they're definitely not short-staffed, they consist of about 10-15% of the workforce. On the other hand, they have recently reduced part of that workforce because it's apparently cheaper to get a contractor to renovate an office for $120,000 than let the paid-for facilities people screw it up (they renovated that same office 3 times and every time something was wrong).
even RS-232 didn't last that long. Tell that to all those microboard programmers. I still see RS-232 ports regularly on new machines and I still have all the cables at home to convert the 9-pin to 25-pin or to a null cable or... you get the idea.
I don't know how or why you would store any digital data that long. But if you can bribe somebody to put it in the GNU Hurd kernel, it will probably float around within a few years in SVN or FTP or so and within 25 years, maybe you can actually use the kernel as well.
That's all I would do. Keep it online for the next 25 years. The internet isn't going anywhere. I just stored something on a few USB flash drives to keep around for the next 10 years. I know for sure nobody cares about this data within 10 years anyway and most likely it's going to be trashed anyway or it's going to be found by someone that will try to reuse our offices once we vacated them. We just found a bunch of old biology books, floppy drives with stuff on them and brains on formaldehyde in some of the offices upstairs. Nobody cares what they were for, you'll need a historian to find out.
If you want something for school, you should go Mac. The licenses are not crazy expensive, everything has at least 15% discount from retail price for hardware, about 50% on software (even more if you negotiate with their sales people) and you can manage 300 clients and 5-10 servers with a single admin (at least I can) by employing Remote Desktop and Open Directory.
Next to that, it has everything Open Source available through either Fink or a native compile. It doesn't cost anything in client licenses (their servers come including all applications with unlimited licenses) if you buy or lease the hardware (except what you need to buy for MS Office and Photoshop).
Nobody says you have to use your SSN to authorize yourself. When I first came to the US and tried to open a bank account, I didn't have a SSN yet. They told me to use my phone number which magically has exactly the same number of digits. I've been using it ever since for transactions (phone and cable companies) that don't require my financial history to be verified, of course they won't give me a credit line larger than $300 but that's no problem for those transactions since the bill shouldn't amount to more than that.
iGo chargers? I don't know how they work nor am I affiliated with them. But I have exactly 4 chargers in my home: 2 car chargers (for we have 2 cars), a big charger and a small charger that charge all 3 cell phones, Nokia N800, nintendo ds, 2 powerbooks, gps and a bluetooth headset. Not to mention, the GPS and Bluetooth both use USB. Nokia (for a cell and the n800) has the same 'standard' plug on all their devices.
[quote]Overstock.com dropped all of its New York affiliates[/quote]
This measure was supposed to boost local businesses and lower unemployment. Do you think if Amazon and NewEgg drop theirs, the $50m in revenue will be paid out in unemployment?
I am disgusted by the government of my state. I moved from PA to NY for a better job, but literally everything is higher taxed and more expensive. The taxes don't make any sense either. I live near Rochester, NY. Depending on the locality you're in, you can pay 6% (Henrietta) to 10% (Greece) taxes on a variety of things but if you send a letter it's all Rochester, NY. And then there is the paper store, I mean government agencies. Everything needs a permit, paper, registration or a tax. You can't get a single piece of paper without paying at least $10 for it.
Do you really know the meaning of the words "day" in the original language? No, it's only the Catholic Church and some other prominent so-called "christian" organizations that promote that idea.
On the other hand, Genesis is one of the oldest book in the world that has survived thousands of years with minimal to no copying or translation differences across translations (only difference is in interpretation) since it has been written down. It's also available in almost all religions (the Christian, Jewish and Islamic religions) and languages (anywhere there was an influence of the before mentioned) of this world, it can be found in more than 90% of the world, most likely a translation will survive within 2000 years.
It's also one of those books that has the basic/simplistic/root names (in all those languages) for members of the universe we can see with the naked eye (planet, moon, sun, stars, earth, life, male, female, sea, animals, vegetation) all in those 3 chapters as well as some abstract (religious/social) passages like cursing, naming, unions of man and woman, God, clothing.
Not to mention that the millions you're winning out of the pot is going to be settled at a much lower value (probably around 10-20%) which will be paid out over 20 years or longer.
If you won the approximate value of 10M in 2007 money back in 1987 (which from what I remember was one of the biggest pots) and got settled for a 10% payout over 20 years, you would be getting an extra $25,000 this year which is not really all that much anymore while back in 1987 that would've been a decent year income. And then we have the current state of our economy, the return might be even lower if you won 10M these days. Not to talk about the lifestyle you'll get used to the first years of your payout, you won't be able to afford that lifestyle anymore over those 20 years because the money devaluates so fast (and there is no decent investment (unless you gamble on the stock markets) I know off that matches up to the devaluation of money).
Slashdot Mirror
You were lucky, I was in a company once where change had to be approved in a similar process. Except the departmental meetings to bring up the change issue was once a week, the inter-departmental meetings to bring up changes across stakeholders in different departments was maybe once a month (if you were lucky). Once you got the whole project together and sat through many inter-departmental meetings listening to petty catfights in HR or finance and got everybody to sign off on the approval, you had to go in front of the review board which met quarterly. Good luck if the review board just met last week before you got that last signature.
I tried implementing some things like upgrade a Mac OS X Server from 10.1 to 10.3. By the time I was done just getting the project together, 10.4 had been out for 6 months. I was about to get out of the job when the whole company tanked and got taken over.
Unless of course, there is a nice warning that the file is also available for free with a higher quality and you can play that 'better quality' music on any player unencumbered. There is indeed a warning that DRM-enabled music (non-iTunes Plus music and video) cannot be played on non-Apple products.
The argument is moot for most customers that use the iTunes store since they all have iPods of some sort anyway. The customers that don't, know better and the customers that didn't knew due to ignorance only have to spend 99c to find out and they might get a refund anyway.
iFrames, ActiveX, Browser-as-a-desktop, external-facing daemons for internal systems... anything that isn't buggy that comes from them?
Use object tags and use HTML or XHTML Strict people and it won't happen to you.
Yes it is their fault. Their fault for not thinking. People think that paying a mortgage is the same as paying rent while it isn't. Who's fixing your house if you rent? Who's paying taxes? Who's paying the insurance? Who's paying (in some cases) the gas, water and electricity?
Now you go live from your apartment that's 3000 sq. ft. with a lawn (and a pool) and a garage. Now who has to pay for all that? Yes, your gas will at least triple than what you paid before unless you take out the money to get double paned windows and shutters like you had on your apartment. But now you can't call your landlord to fix your roof, you'll have to pay out of pocket that $10,000 bill and yes, it's recurrent every 15 years unless you go more expensive and get an aluminum roof.
Calculate before you buy. And if you read ANY information on it, if you get an 1% adjustable percentage from your mortgage dealer, unless you can afford a 10-15% percentage rate hike anytime in the next 30 years (which is the life of your mortgage) DON'T TAKE IT. Opt for the, more expensive yet less risky fixed percentage. Oh, you can't afford a 5% percentage rate mortgage. DON'T BUY A HOUSE, rent until you can afford.
I was pondering a buy a few years ago myself. I could afford it given my conditions back then but after calculating and adding all the costs, it's only $100/month more expensive to rent than to buy and I don't have to cut my own lawn and I have a lifeguard at the pool. And recently, I took a paycut of 30% so I wouldn't have to travel as much, I live comfortably, I am happy with my current job and my family has a combined income of a little over 100k allowing me to have an SUV go on 2 trips this year and I had enough left to pay for a rather large wedding this year. If I would've bought, I would've made it but I would have to work harder, possibly had to skip over the wedding (possibly even dating her) and a trip and be less happy with my job.
1) This is the average. Your company might have 700MB/user, in my organization, it's close to 1TB/user/year that gets added. We're doing medical imaging.
2) It's not just tape libraries. The cost for D2D2T or D2D2D (what we're doing) goes way up compared to a 'simple' backup scheme. Especially if you're like us and require mulitple gigabit streams, disk storage can't be just 4 cheap SATA disks in RAID5. We have 2 storage arrays with 14 drives each for general access and another storage array with 10 SATA disks for primary backup and those things don't come very cheap especially since you need multiple servers to handle the load.
3) Encryption, tape rotation or multiple locations add to the costs.
4) If you're buying a solution eg. from IBM (Tivoli), you need to pay for a consultant and/or another employee to get that stuff running. We're doing what we're doing with open source and it's going well, but if you can't and need to pay for software, it adds up (especially for Windows systems)
I think the city's still thinks it's the early 90's:
WebFacing requires Internet Explorer 5.5 or greater. You can down-load the latest version from http://www.microsoft.com/ie.
I hate those type of managers. My current 'manager' doesn't see me for a month or longer and even then he just sticks his head in to say hi, he trusts that I do what I do best. He only needs to talk to someone if there is a problem with the results of said someone. We all have our place in an organization, if we know what we need to do, we don't need anyone questioning us unless there is a problem with our (or subsequently) the end product.
Managers that manage people instead of the product of their mini-organization (basically every manager should be 'boss' over their own mini-company in my view) don't have enough to do. Managing people is for HR.
For those users, every computer comes standard with Windows, Microsoft Word is a text editor, e-mail composer and web page maker, virusses are things you get when you stand in the wind too long, there is also a prince in africa that wants to give them $100,000 and Comic Sans is the best font to use in e-mail conversations and resume's.
Jailbreaking is not that difficult anymore, I've seen less than competent managers do it just so they could load a specific program. Giving them a nice app as a front-end to apt is a good incentive, it gives them what they want, an "app-store" with unofficial programs. If the market or appeal for a product is big enough and the user doesn't mind loading an extra application on their machine (as if they even mind loading that hot-grits-natalie-portman.avi.exe from e-mail) they will do it, Apple will eventually either succumb to it or their app store will die.
But then again, who really cares about their medical records or any records for that matter.
1) People don't care. I work in a University related to a hospital. There have been breaches and people affected are invited to take up an offer of 1 year free privacy protection. How many do you think actually accept that offer? Minimal amount.
2) Yes, it would be easy to hack into such a systems (or any general medical facilities system) but what would be the benefit. The risk is too great and the rewards too little. So what if I know you have herpes, all I can do with it is blackmail you (which is risky in itself if you even care at all), if I steal your current credit card information, you'll get another one, other numbers and other expiration date at minimal effort. The risk is only acceptable if you can pull off a full identity theft without anyone noticing with the information that is leaked (eg. buy assets "liquid" enough to be moved quickly and easily AND backed by your personal information (real credit card, real drivers license etc.)). The easiest way to pull that off is to offer you to give it to me (all of it) at minimal effort, risk and cost (phishing). Hacking is too technically advanced, costly and risky for most 'real' crooks.
And who would pay for all those tests? My tax dollars? And who is going to guarantee that my blood & urine sample won't be used for other purposes like central DNA databases in some 3-letter agency's basement.
The problem with DUI is not the problem, it's the punishment. In some countries in Europe, you get pulled over driving drunk, you get the option of having a blood test done on-site by a certified doctor, your sample remain anonymous and get discarded right after the test. Or you can opt to simply wait in a cell for 4 hour increments for a next test until you're clear. Once you're clear, you go back to driving with a small fine. Here in the US, you get caught with a simple breathalyzer test after drinking one or two glasses and you lose your license for at least a year, you get to pay heavy fines (and in NYS you get to pay those on a yearly basis) and then after a year some board considers whether or not to give your license back. I know somebody who hasn't gotten his license back in 12 years while others just drive around without a license (and subsequently registration and insurance)
For infringement on the copyright of my name. Or didn't they read the EULA that's with Guru in the Dictionary? A guru is a Teacher or an Expert, not a Sales Drone. Since they don't do either of them (teach about or be an expert on Vista), they shouldn't call them Guru's.
I've heard the same story, only with coax cable (yes, I've been around that long...).
If their network is CAT-5 based on smart switches (HP, Cisco or any somewhat decent network vendor, heck even Linksys and Netgear have smart switches) they can find it quite simply by running a simple command on the switches, I even have a perl script that will do it for me.
Of course, it wouldn't surprise me if they still use 'dumb' switches or if the consultants simply said among them: let's get these stupid , just sit around and rack up the charges.
You have to watch out if you do it yourself. I built things powered by electric motors (not cars) and the main problem is that if you need lots of force in an instant, the engine can deliver it (electric motors are very powerful) but the rest of the mechanics might not be able to stand the force or move it that quick and you'll end up twisting or breaking something down the line. A lot of constructions where electric motors power a driveshaft use special gearboxes for that.
I wouldn't doubt it was a network problem causing it. From a personal experience, I know Microsoft Windows (2000 and 2003) doesn't handle failover well and usually it's because the network drivers have to be supplied by a vendor (Broadcom or Via or whatever cheap crap they put in the servers these days) and everything it SHOULD be able to do, has to be or is re-implemented in software by the vendor (like trunking etc.). Then, when something unusual happens, both the Windows network stack and the driver might try to fix it or wait on each other to fix it or something else.
Unix-type systems have networking closer to the kernel and not in nor dependent on the driver. The driver only translates general kernel commands into electronic signals on the bus so 1) it will always adhere to standards (like trunking and vlan instead of relying on Broadcom or Cisco's or Intel's "standard"), 2) it will always work on virtually every card, even if it's a $15 one and 3) if it fails, it will fail across all platform and get fixed quicker by the community.
You're forgetting the cost of batteries. After ~3 years, your full warranty will have expired and your batteries will be down to like 50% of original capacity if not less. Repair costs could easily get over $10,000 for the battery pack, not talking about the cost to get it installed. No extended warranties, from the dealer or otherwise cover hybrid battery repairs and yes, I've read the fine print.
I do, on a regular basis. I'm only the sysadmin so I do stuff like this with it:
#!/bin/sh /dev/null
for (( i = 0 ; i <= 10000; i++ ))
do
qsub sleep10 >
done
And sleep10 is a script that says:
#!/bin/sh
sleep 10
Sometimes I have a bit more fun. If it gets cold in the winter I replace sleep10 with:
#!/bin/sh /dev/random > /dev/null
cat
Oh, in case the scientists want to use it, they do more fun stuff like create gigantic arrays of data in MATLAB or transform images.
But our parents and grandparents had jobs back then. Now that all factory workers are unionized, they're kids and grandkids out of a jobs because the factory moved to places less expensive and less complainy.
If you're abused at your job, go and find another one. This can be done in any field. If you see that your field is always being abused, go to another field. There is no shortage of jobs in the US. I drive around times and it seems like everybody is hiring from small stores that anyone can do, forklift operators at big box stores, drivers for all types of vehicles, cashiers, desk and management jobs and even medical and IT. People are afraid of change and seem to want to hang around in an "abusive" environment too long and then they complain. I'm a young IT guy without any type of meaningful degree and I haven't been out of a job for more than 30 days. Sure, sometimes I have to move to a better place but I'm open to do that.
If our grandparents and parents would've walked out of their factory where they were "abused", management would've changed it after the first 10 left because without workers, there is no product. Those 10 would be either out of a job for a while but eventually they would get into another job. I know my grandfather did it, he refused to get unionized instead he stood up to management, took his experience elsewhere and earned a good penny being a foreman in a chemical factory until he retired.
I see the problem where I currently work too much. The facility people are unionized which makes it that they can't get fired. But our offices are never clean and nobody can help it, everything is leaking and we're out of heat or airconditioning at least twice a month. And they're definitely not short-staffed, they consist of about 10-15% of the workforce. On the other hand, they have recently reduced part of that workforce because it's apparently cheaper to get a contractor to renovate an office for $120,000 than let the paid-for facilities people screw it up (they renovated that same office 3 times and every time something was wrong).
even RS-232 didn't last that long. Tell that to all those microboard programmers. I still see RS-232 ports regularly on new machines and I still have all the cables at home to convert the 9-pin to 25-pin or to a null cable or ... you get the idea.
I don't know how or why you would store any digital data that long. But if you can bribe somebody to put it in the GNU Hurd kernel, it will probably float around within a few years in SVN or FTP or so and within 25 years, maybe you can actually use the kernel as well.
That's all I would do. Keep it online for the next 25 years. The internet isn't going anywhere. I just stored something on a few USB flash drives to keep around for the next 10 years. I know for sure nobody cares about this data within 10 years anyway and most likely it's going to be trashed anyway or it's going to be found by someone that will try to reuse our offices once we vacated them. We just found a bunch of old biology books, floppy drives with stuff on them and brains on formaldehyde in some of the offices upstairs. Nobody cares what they were for, you'll need a historian to find out.
If you want something for school, you should go Mac. The licenses are not crazy expensive, everything has at least 15% discount from retail price for hardware, about 50% on software (even more if you negotiate with their sales people) and you can manage 300 clients and 5-10 servers with a single admin (at least I can) by employing Remote Desktop and Open Directory.
Next to that, it has everything Open Source available through either Fink or a native compile. It doesn't cost anything in client licenses (their servers come including all applications with unlimited licenses) if you buy or lease the hardware (except what you need to buy for MS Office and Photoshop).
Anything owned by News Corp.? Fox News might break the story, but then nobody will take it seriously.
Nobody says you have to use your SSN to authorize yourself. When I first came to the US and tried to open a bank account, I didn't have a SSN yet. They told me to use my phone number which magically has exactly the same number of digits. I've been using it ever since for transactions (phone and cable companies) that don't require my financial history to be verified, of course they won't give me a credit line larger than $300 but that's no problem for those transactions since the bill shouldn't amount to more than that.
iGo chargers? I don't know how they work nor am I affiliated with them. But I have exactly 4 chargers in my home: 2 car chargers (for we have 2 cars), a big charger and a small charger that charge all 3 cell phones, Nokia N800, nintendo ds, 2 powerbooks, gps and a bluetooth headset. Not to mention, the GPS and Bluetooth both use USB. Nokia (for a cell and the n800) has the same 'standard' plug on all their devices.
[quote]Overstock.com dropped all of its New York affiliates[/quote]
This measure was supposed to boost local businesses and lower unemployment. Do you think if Amazon and NewEgg drop theirs, the $50m in revenue will be paid out in unemployment?
I am disgusted by the government of my state. I moved from PA to NY for a better job, but literally everything is higher taxed and more expensive. The taxes don't make any sense either. I live near Rochester, NY. Depending on the locality you're in, you can pay 6% (Henrietta) to 10% (Greece) taxes on a variety of things but if you send a letter it's all Rochester, NY. And then there is the paper store, I mean government agencies. Everything needs a permit, paper, registration or a tax. You can't get a single piece of paper without paying at least $10 for it.
Do you really know the meaning of the words "day" in the original language? No, it's only the Catholic Church and some other prominent so-called "christian" organizations that promote that idea.
On the other hand, Genesis is one of the oldest book in the world that has survived thousands of years with minimal to no copying or translation differences across translations (only difference is in interpretation) since it has been written down. It's also available in almost all religions (the Christian, Jewish and Islamic religions) and languages (anywhere there was an influence of the before mentioned) of this world, it can be found in more than 90% of the world, most likely a translation will survive within 2000 years.
It's also one of those books that has the basic/simplistic/root names (in all those languages) for members of the universe we can see with the naked eye (planet, moon, sun, stars, earth, life, male, female, sea, animals, vegetation) all in those 3 chapters as well as some abstract (religious/social) passages like cursing, naming, unions of man and woman, God, clothing.
Not to mention that the millions you're winning out of the pot is going to be settled at a much lower value (probably around 10-20%) which will be paid out over 20 years or longer.
If you won the approximate value of 10M in 2007 money back in 1987 (which from what I remember was one of the biggest pots) and got settled for a 10% payout over 20 years, you would be getting an extra $25,000 this year which is not really all that much anymore while back in 1987 that would've been a decent year income. And then we have the current state of our economy, the return might be even lower if you won 10M these days. Not to talk about the lifestyle you'll get used to the first years of your payout, you won't be able to afford that lifestyle anymore over those 20 years because the money devaluates so fast (and there is no decent investment (unless you gamble on the stock markets) I know off that matches up to the devaluation of money).