I've been amazed on more than one occasion at how quickly someone who I would have described as indispensable is quickly replaced. There are always issues and will be some lost money... but people step up and surprise you. Having seen this, I'd say very few people are _actually_ indispensable.
I have a feeling this guy thinks he's more important than he actually is. Which is fair.. most people like to think they are the main cog keeping everything running. Rarely the case. If he's not even a full time employee, chances are he could be replaced with little more than a hiccup. Management probably has a transition plan in place.
Most ISPs explicitly forbid this in their TOS for residential accounts.
For a home site, even one that gets a few thousand hits a day... they just don't care. Start running a business off it though and they might. At the very least it's a risk this guy would be taking.
And I'll say, anyone who starts off with "we're expecting millions of hits a day" is probably gonna get 10 or so a week.
Being a follower isn't the only successful way to make it through school...
I was generally known as "that computer kid".. but not in an especially negative way. I had a small circle of friends... made it through without the kind of cliche "popular kid" drama stuff you talk about... and probably never spent more than $10 on a shirt throughout school. My friends would kind of drag me out to stuff I'd never have gone to of my own volition.. and in retrospect I actually had fun. If left to my own devices I would have spent every free moment at home on my computer... and I probably would have missed out on some important experiences.
Is there a "correct" way to interact verbally with others?
Yes, yes there is! The people who didn't get it are the ones who can't hold down a job, or can't progress beyond entry level because everyone from their peers to their manager thinks they are a douche-bag. Fewer and fewer people are truly irreplaceable these days. You still get the occasional "yeah, he's an asshole, but we need him", but it's no longer as normal in the geek community. Being able to maintain an at least nominal relationship with others is generally a requirement otherwise.
Oh, wait, we live in a world where appealing to these imbeciles is an utmost necessity. That doesn't make it okay, though.
Indeed, and learning to deal with these sorts is as you said, necessary. Learning to do so without having to drop to that level is a vital skill, and school is a good place to learn it.
Yup, aside from a freaking 3 month vacation period (my god why did I not appreciate that when I had it!) snow days are one of the big things I really miss about school. You'd hear the night before that there was gonna be snow... next morning you'd wake up and immediately rush to a window hoping to see everything covered... and finally listening to all the "boring crap" on the radio until they finally announced that schools were closed.
Would probably work great for a few, terribly for most.
School is as much about education as social development. In dealing with all the various social situations that occur during school, you learn to deal with those same situations later on in life. Or that's the idea anyway. When I was in school I would have _loved_ to learn at my own comfortable pace (rather than the lathargic "do it 10 times until everyone gets it" pace) and be able to start at my own chosen time (later in afternoon would have done wonders)... but if I'm honest about it I think I would have missed a lot of social development.
In fact, telecommuting makes a whole lot of sense for a business
I've seen two problems with all out telecommuting:
The first is that while it works great for programmers and other technical minded people.. the business types _freak_ the hell out.
The second is you lose some of that team cohesiveness. This is especially problematic if not everyone telecommutes. The telecommuters and up being seen as "outsiders" and generally get the shit jobs that the people who are actually physically at the office don't want. Because of this I think the best situation is to have _everyone_ telecommute, and have annual meetups (at some rented space for instance)
I dunno... playing Super Mario Bros on an NES emulator, even with the USB NES controller I bought from thinkgeek, just somehow doesn't feel the same as dusting off my old NES.
Dunno if this really translates to computer gaming, but I can understand if it did.
If they are lucky, they will shut down for 8 months and rebuild from scratch.
This is what they need to do, but no way will the horde of angry gamers wait that long (and really you can't blame them).
As you said, nothing they can do in a few weeks is going to amount to anything more than duct tape and positive thought. There system is obviously broken at a fundemental infrastructure level. The foundation of the house is crumbling and they are working fevorishly to tilt the windows so as no one notices.
The only thing I can think of is for them to strip out credit processing. Require people to buy credits in store and use them for making purchases. At this point Sony has demonstrated they don't have the competence to handle credit card processing.. so they should have to let it be done by proxy. I almost hope someone makes them go this route.
Why would this be safer? I've always heard DC was considerably more dangerous?
This isn't a snarky reply... I really am curious. I've heard a few people mention this over the years... but never heard the actual reasoning behind it.
no advantage over a dumb firewall set to block everything
There are a few. The biggest advantage to me of NAT is it seperates out the external (ISP, out of your control) side and the internal side. What if your ISP suddenly changes that first 64bit number.. or what if you switch ISPs? Does an IPv6 have a graceful way of handling this, or do you have to re-address everything (seriously asking, I don't know the answer).
The other advantage I see is that while NAT isn't a firewall, it does act as a layer of protection. If your firewall mucks up or is configured incorrectly, those addresses are now not being blocked. As some consumer routing hardware actually has these functions as seperate chips, in some situations you can actually have a router lose it's firewall capability while still keep working.
In IPv4 with traditional NAT, this is no issue, because being non publically routed addresses they won't make it out of your segment.. with IPv6 it's suddenly public. As originally stated, NAT in this case acts as a second layer.
generally put the control at the point of the switch
This actually makes the most sense to me. You are gonna want the physical switch to be in sync with the light fixture, and want to have the physical point of shut off for safety (changing a light bulb comes to mind). You can't use a traditional switch because if the traditional switch is turned off, your fixture isn't getting power and can't toggle itself on.. so you are going to need a special switch anyway. Having no inline switch (that is, the fixture always has power and the "switch" just communicates to the fixture via network) sounds unsafe and probably illegal.
One IP per fixture/bulb sounds ridiculous though. Have a protocol that lets a device enumerate the number of bulbs.. and toggle those individually. In other words, if you have 4 lights connected to a switch.. that switch has an IP and it's protocol lets you say "dim light 3 by 20%".
Also, this is just more fuel for the upcoming IPv6 NAT phenomenon.
Like most academics, I think they have put way too much thought into this.
Outside of Korea I imagine people for the most part watch this stuff because it’s awe-inspiring to see someone playing who has literally dedicated a huge chunk of his life to the game and as a result is mind blowing skilled at it. Inside of Korea they watch it for the same reason everyone else watches hockey, soccer, football, etc
These guys really do treat it as a professional sport in Korea... with training camps, massive salaries, licensing and a _draft_. Spectators are just a part of that. Whether or not you take the “esport” seriously, it’s still something to see at least once, even as just a novelty.
As for playing vs watching, I assume it’s the same as any other “sport”. I can play hockey with the guys at work, and still enjoy watching professional hockey players who dedicate way more time to the game and are better at it then I’ll ever be. One can play starcraft with their friends while still having an appreciation for people who take it seriously.
The idea being that everyone gives a little by submitting patches and software they write for their own purposes such that everyone benifits, and everyone gets a full blown OS with a huge collection of software.
Don't see why the association is a bad thing. It may not work as a government, but seems to work ok as a software model.
I suspect Debian has a decent install base on servers, but probably not too much on desktop machines
I hate Debian on a desktop, but yeah, on a server it's golden! A debian install without graphics is pretty damn solid. All that spaghetti of scripts and symlinks works great if you don't play with it...
Ubuntu is one of the most bleeding-edge and unstable Linux distributions
I think I'd give than honour to gentoo (which is what I use on my desktop).
All they did is give geographic-ish names to the various distros and randomly place them on a world map. Very little about the placement, and really not much about the names, is specific to the distros, and there are no distro specific features added and as is said in the summary this isn’t showing popularity or any other statistic. Ok, so Fedora is touching Red Hat,. the noobs are in ubuntu.. haha?
Am I just being thick and missing the point/humour here, or is this really just a dud?
my personal info is now probably being sold on the black market because of Sony
This really is the key here. They can compensate people for the down time... but there is very little they can really do about the personal information thing, which to me is a much bigger deal. They can't compensate everyone adequately, they'd go bankrupt. What they _could_ do is offer the token compensation they are proposing, and have a much bigger compensation package for anyone who can prove they got screwed due to their info leaking out. Maybe free hardware and access for life or something. Not really much benifit to them though, and would probably be abused somehow.
I've already ranted that our system in general is screwed up, and while there are (some) legal protections, the kind of data Sony had to be stolen should in a perfect world be of no concern. Relying on any piece of information that can't readily be changed as a credential (and in too many cases the only credential) is insane. And before I get flamed, no, I don't have a solution at hand... but surely we can come up with something better than "yup, the address matches, here's a credit card!".
As a close second option, I'd love a system where Sony doesn't need any of that data. All they need is a _public_ credit card number and some kind of auth code that's generated via keyfob/SMS message/whatever and is tied to company/amount/date. If we didn't have to give all our personal info to every company we do business to, this would mitigate these kind of issues.
Maybe try a smaller company. Find a nice 5 to 7 person operation, bonus points if software isn't the main objective. When you are programmer 1 of 1, you find very little process, and what process there is, you define.
It's from the agile crowd. Basically the idea is you have periods where you do just dev.. and periods where you look at processes and make changes to your use cases and such. Sounds weird to me (if I find something wrong in week 1 of dev, I want to fix it now, not plow through and go back later)... but my understanding of it is foggy and even the most messed up approaches can claim a success story _somewhere_.
Obviously the amount of process is going to be proportional to the number of metric ass-tonnes of shit that hit the fan if something goes wrong, but I still think there is room to at least choose processes that don't overlap too much or interfere with each other. In the aerospace, defense and medical industries, it's all about more and more process to make everyone feel better (and produce better software and such..). Bug gets caught in one phase of testing.. add more process so it would have been caught earlier!
I would add however that excessive process, or more destructively, processes that fight each other, can not only hamper creative solutions, but can prevent people from making enhancements due to the excessive amount of "other stuff" that has to change in addition to the code. I would certainly say that a lot of process gets tacked onto stuff that's non critical, mostly for buzzword purposes, which is I think mainly what this article is speaking to. Having a process in place so management can say "we do agile cloudsource coffeecup modeling!" or whatever is always bad for the guys who have to work in that environment.
Automated coffee maker... need that. I'm one of those guys with the IQ of a house plant up until about 10am. If I tried to make coffee in the morning, assuming I somehow mustered the ambition, I'd probably boil my keys and put the coffee grounds in my pocket or something.
I have my lights set up to gradually fade on about 10 minutes before my alarm goes off. Beyond this and possibly having lights go on/off for home security... there really isn't much point. Having motion sensors turn lights on when you walk in/out is cool for about 10 minutes.. when it even works (and doesn't require you wave an arm around every once in a while while in the room).
Slashdot Mirror
Too consistent...
Linux Pro or Linux XP or Linux Cloud .. and then after go to Linux 7.
For bonus points alternate between traditional numbering, catchy names, and acronyms. Confuse the hell outa everyone!
I've been amazed on more than one occasion at how quickly someone who I would have described as indispensable is quickly replaced. There are always issues and will be some lost money... but people step up and surprise you. Having seen this, I'd say very few people are _actually_ indispensable.
I have a feeling this guy thinks he's more important than he actually is. Which is fair.. most people like to think they are the main cog keeping everything running. Rarely the case. If he's not even a full time employee, chances are he could be replaced with little more than a hiccup. Management probably has a transition plan in place.
Most ISPs explicitly forbid this in their TOS for residential accounts.
For a home site, even one that gets a few thousand hits a day... they just don't care. Start running a business off it though and they might. At the very least it's a risk this guy would be taking.
And I'll say, anyone who starts off with "we're expecting millions of hits a day" is probably gonna get 10 or so a week.
Being a follower isn't the only successful way to make it through school...
I was generally known as "that computer kid" .. but not in an especially negative way. I had a small circle of friends... made it through without the kind of cliche "popular kid" drama stuff you talk about... and probably never spent more than $10 on a shirt throughout school. My friends would kind of drag me out to stuff I'd never have gone to of my own volition.. and in retrospect I actually had fun. If left to my own devices I would have spent every free moment at home on my computer... and I probably would have missed out on some important experiences.
Is there a "correct" way to interact verbally with others?
Yes, yes there is! The people who didn't get it are the ones who can't hold down a job, or can't progress beyond entry level because everyone from their peers to their manager thinks they are a douche-bag. Fewer and fewer people are truly irreplaceable these days. You still get the occasional "yeah, he's an asshole, but we need him", but it's no longer as normal in the geek community. Being able to maintain an at least nominal relationship with others is generally a requirement otherwise.
Oh, wait, we live in a world where appealing to these imbeciles is an utmost necessity. That doesn't make it okay, though.
Indeed, and learning to deal with these sorts is as you said, necessary. Learning to do so without having to drop to that level is a vital skill, and school is a good place to learn it.
Yup, aside from a freaking 3 month vacation period (my god why did I not appreciate that when I had it!) snow days are one of the big things I really miss about school. You'd hear the night before that there was gonna be snow... next morning you'd wake up and immediately rush to a window hoping to see everything covered... and finally listening to all the "boring crap" on the radio until they finally announced that schools were closed.
Would probably work great for a few, terribly for most.
School is as much about education as social development. In dealing with all the various social situations that occur during school, you learn to deal with those same situations later on in life. Or that's the idea anyway. When I was in school I would have _loved_ to learn at my own comfortable pace (rather than the lathargic "do it 10 times until everyone gets it" pace) and be able to start at my own chosen time (later in afternoon would have done wonders) ... but if I'm honest about it I think I would have missed a lot of social development.
In fact, telecommuting makes a whole lot of sense for a business
I've seen two problems with all out telecommuting:
The first is that while it works great for programmers and other technical minded people.. the business types _freak_ the hell out.
The second is you lose some of that team cohesiveness. This is especially problematic if not everyone telecommutes. The telecommuters and up being seen as "outsiders" and generally get the shit jobs that the people who are actually physically at the office don't want. Because of this I think the best situation is to have _everyone_ telecommute, and have annual meetups (at some rented space for instance)
I dunno... playing Super Mario Bros on an NES emulator, even with the USB NES controller I bought from thinkgeek, just somehow doesn't feel the same as dusting off my old NES.
Dunno if this really translates to computer gaming, but I can understand if it did.
* their ... good grief, sorry about that folks :(
If they are lucky, they will shut down for 8 months and rebuild from scratch.
This is what they need to do, but no way will the horde of angry gamers wait that long (and really you can't blame them).
As you said, nothing they can do in a few weeks is going to amount to anything more than duct tape and positive thought. There system is obviously broken at a fundemental infrastructure level. The foundation of the house is crumbling and they are working fevorishly to tilt the windows so as no one notices.
The only thing I can think of is for them to strip out credit processing. Require people to buy credits in store and use them for making purchases. At this point Sony has demonstrated they don't have the competence to handle credit card processing.. so they should have to let it be done by proxy. I almost hope someone makes them go this route.
Why would this be safer? I've always heard DC was considerably more dangerous?
This isn't a snarky reply... I really am curious. I've heard a few people mention this over the years... but never heard the actual reasoning behind it.
no advantage over a dumb firewall set to block everything
There are a few. The biggest advantage to me of NAT is it seperates out the external (ISP, out of your control) side and the internal side. What if your ISP suddenly changes that first 64bit number .. or what if you switch ISPs? Does an IPv6 have a graceful way of handling this, or do you have to re-address everything (seriously asking, I don't know the answer).
The other advantage I see is that while NAT isn't a firewall, it does act as a layer of protection. If your firewall mucks up or is configured incorrectly, those addresses are now not being blocked. As some consumer routing hardware actually has these functions as seperate chips, in some situations you can actually have a router lose it's firewall capability while still keep working.
In IPv4 with traditional NAT, this is no issue, because being non publically routed addresses they won't make it out of your segment .. with IPv6 it's suddenly public. As originally stated, NAT in this case acts as a second layer.
generally put the control at the point of the switch
This actually makes the most sense to me. You are gonna want the physical switch to be in sync with the light fixture, and want to have the physical point of shut off for safety (changing a light bulb comes to mind). You can't use a traditional switch because if the traditional switch is turned off, your fixture isn't getting power and can't toggle itself on.. so you are going to need a special switch anyway. Having no inline switch (that is, the fixture always has power and the "switch" just communicates to the fixture via network) sounds unsafe and probably illegal.
One IP per fixture/bulb sounds ridiculous though. Have a protocol that lets a device enumerate the number of bulbs .. and toggle those individually. In other words, if you have 4 lights connected to a switch.. that switch has an IP and it's protocol lets you say "dim light 3 by 20%".
Also, this is just more fuel for the upcoming IPv6 NAT phenomenon.
Like most academics, I think they have put way too much thought into this.
Outside of Korea I imagine people for the most part watch this stuff because it’s awe-inspiring to see someone playing who has literally dedicated a huge chunk of his life to the game and as a result is mind blowing skilled at it. Inside of Korea they watch it for the same reason everyone else watches hockey, soccer, football, etc
These guys really do treat it as a professional sport in Korea... with training camps, massive salaries, licensing and a _draft_. Spectators are just a part of that. Whether or not you take the “esport” seriously, it’s still something to see at least once, even as just a novelty.
As for playing vs watching, I assume it’s the same as any other “sport”. I can play hockey with the guys at work, and still enjoy watching professional hockey players who dedicate way more time to the game and are better at it then I’ll ever be. One can play starcraft with their friends while still having an appreciation for people who take it seriously.
Tell you the truth, I think it kind of is...
The idea being that everyone gives a little by submitting patches and software they write for their own purposes such that everyone benifits, and everyone gets a full blown OS with a huge collection of software.
Don't see why the association is a bad thing. It may not work as a government, but seems to work ok as a software model.
I suspect Debian has a decent install base on servers, but probably not too much on desktop machines
I hate Debian on a desktop, but yeah, on a server it's golden! A debian install without graphics is pretty damn solid. All that spaghetti of scripts and symlinks works great if you don't play with it...
Ubuntu is one of the most bleeding-edge and unstable Linux distributions
I think I'd give than honour to gentoo (which is what I use on my desktop).
I'd love to see that in an animated form .. like maybe have the points represented as bubbles... and split/merge back together as appropriate.
Maybe add some animations in there based on the nature of the split/merge
All they did is give geographic-ish names to the various distros and randomly place them on a world map. Very little about the placement, and really not much about the names, is specific to the distros, and there are no distro specific features added and as is said in the summary this isn’t showing popularity or any other statistic. Ok, so Fedora is touching Red Hat,. the noobs are in ubuntu.. haha?
Am I just being thick and missing the point/humour here, or is this really just a dud?
Hopefully they are only extending credit protection to US customers because the risk to non-US users is minimal.
Hopefully....
- a somewhat worried Canadian
my personal info is now probably being sold on the black market because of Sony
This really is the key here. They can compensate people for the down time... but there is very little they can really do about the personal information thing, which to me is a much bigger deal. They can't compensate everyone adequately, they'd go bankrupt. What they _could_ do is offer the token compensation they are proposing, and have a much bigger compensation package for anyone who can prove they got screwed due to their info leaking out. Maybe free hardware and access for life or something. Not really much benifit to them though, and would probably be abused somehow.
I've already ranted that our system in general is screwed up, and while there are (some) legal protections, the kind of data Sony had to be stolen should in a perfect world be of no concern. Relying on any piece of information that can't readily be changed as a credential (and in too many cases the only credential) is insane. And before I get flamed, no, I don't have a solution at hand... but surely we can come up with something better than "yup, the address matches, here's a credit card!".
As a close second option, I'd love a system where Sony doesn't need any of that data. All they need is a _public_ credit card number and some kind of auth code that's generated via keyfob/SMS message/whatever and is tied to company/amount/date. If we didn't have to give all our personal info to every company we do business to, this would mitigate these kind of issues.
Maybe try a smaller company. Find a nice 5 to 7 person operation, bonus points if software isn't the main objective. When you are programmer 1 of 1, you find very little process, and what process there is, you define.
I have no idea what "pre-sprint grooming" is
It's from the agile crowd. Basically the idea is you have periods where you do just dev.. and periods where you look at processes and make changes to your use cases and such. Sounds weird to me (if I find something wrong in week 1 of dev, I want to fix it now, not plow through and go back later) ... but my understanding of it is foggy and even the most messed up approaches can claim a success story _somewhere_.
Obviously the amount of process is going to be proportional to the number of metric ass-tonnes of shit that hit the fan if something goes wrong, but I still think there is room to at least choose processes that don't overlap too much or interfere with each other. In the aerospace, defense and medical industries, it's all about more and more process to make everyone feel better (and produce better software and such..). Bug gets caught in one phase of testing.. add more process so it would have been caught earlier!
I would add however that excessive process, or more destructively, processes that fight each other, can not only hamper creative solutions, but can prevent people from making enhancements due to the excessive amount of "other stuff" that has to change in addition to the code. I would certainly say that a lot of process gets tacked onto stuff that's non critical, mostly for buzzword purposes, which is I think mainly what this article is speaking to. Having a process in place so management can say "we do agile cloudsource coffeecup modeling!" or whatever is always bad for the guys who have to work in that environment.
Better to have a bit bigger suitcase and some leeway.
Yup. If I can't russle around in there for something and still close the case afterwards, I either pack less stuff or get a bigger case.
Forgot to add:
Automated coffee maker... need that. I'm one of those guys with the IQ of a house plant up until about 10am. If I tried to make coffee in the morning, assuming I somehow mustered the ambition, I'd probably boil my keys and put the coffee grounds in my pocket or something.
I have my lights set up to gradually fade on about 10 minutes before my alarm goes off. Beyond this and possibly having lights go on/off for home security ... there really isn't much point. Having motion sensors turn lights on when you walk in/out is cool for about 10 minutes .. when it even works (and doesn't require you wave an arm around every once in a while while in the room).