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User: mordred99

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  1. The real reason it won't pass ... on John McCain Working On Legislation For 'a La Carte' TV Channel Packages · · Score: 1

    The real reason it won't be liked by the content providers (dish, direct tv, cox, comcast, etc), and the channel providers (espn, tnt, discovery, etc.) are all tied to how they currently have their systems. The content providers won't like it much as they have to upgrade their network. They have this aging dinosaur of legacy cable in the ground, and have oil can type filters on their channels. This will require every TV to have a digital box on it to work. Yes they can amortize the cost by charging you $10 a month (or more), but that is not what the customers really want. They want to pay as least amount they can. Imagine a house that has 4 TVs (as many do), and now you are paying $20 a month for service (what is going to be required, just so you can be billed), and $40 just to watch shows on your 4 TVs. That is $60 a month before you pay for the content ... Now you are going to pay for each channel you want. Lets say you are a professional sports enthusiast, and want your channels. You need ESPN, TNT, TBS, NFL, MLBtv, plus the locals just to watch all the games and playoffs. That is probably $20 a month right there (according to cost (before markup) that is paid to each channel by the content providers). We have not even gotten into the costs that are there to watch "shows".

    Channel providers have tied their contracts to "cost per seat" style licensing. This means if a content provider has 1.2 million subscribers, they have to pay 1.2 million times the going rate monthly to the channel provider to "carry" that channel, regardless of number of people who actually subscribe to that channel. They love this model as if they can get a critical mass of people (look at AMC and when it was not carried on a cable network, and they almost had a revolt when "walking dead" came back on), they can force more money from the content providers. This is exactly what they want, and don't want to have to deal with real world market forces. In fact, many channels would go away for good if people had to pay to get them. Look at things like FX, which does not have original programming (to my knowledge, it might now, I don't have cable, and use appropriate channel for my point), but only shows re-runs. Who is going to pay for that? Not many people. But since they are now bundled, and at little cost to the content provider, they ride on the coat tails of another company. If they had to compete directly, they would be ruined in months, and disappear.

    This is what they have to address with this bill, should it be good for Americans. They need to provide a way for the content providers to have a service, and they pay for as you go, and pay for the services you use, and not screw the customers for the costs of the upgrades that have so long been needed to their decaying systems. Secondly the channel providers need to realize that they have to fight for time and eye balls now. They have to provide content and actually have decent programming. I don't know how they are going to pull this one off, as these two markets are already established, and the massive changes needed will not be in the final bill passed and we will get some bastardization which wont help anyone (like the health care bill).

  2. Re:Drive conservatively! on Why US Mileage Ratings Are So Inaccurate · · Score: 1

    This is because of the fuel system typically have vapor let off and your fuel is literally turning to vapor and leaving the car. The measurements at the fuel injector is always right (if the car has proper parts) but you loose MPG based on the fuel staying in the gas tank and floating into the world before it actually gets injected into the motor.

  3. Re:Error goes the other direction, too on Why US Mileage Ratings Are So Inaccurate · · Score: 1

    You assume they are standard. Many lights around this area are timed, and work great, except at rush hour as they are "tripped" by side streets all the time. Yes, timed should be timed, and that would be great, but around here timing them is impossible with a wad of traffic every day.

  4. You Don't on Ask Slashdot: How To Teach IT To Senior Management? · · Score: 1

    Sr. management have a limited amount of time to devote to this and they want to be trained in the system and will allow them to do their day to day tasks better. Take one of them aside (after asking for a volunteer, or who ever the project sponsor is) and run them through your training, exercises, reports, etc. and validate it is what they want. Based on their feedback, you can deploy that training (with tweaks from feedback) to the rest of management. You don't want to spend your time telling them superfluous information, just the facts as they want to know what it will do, what buttons to click, and what it will do for them. If they want more info, say you can be reached for info about this or any other IT questions.

  5. Doesn't bother me .. on Fedora 19 To Stop Masking Passwords · · Score: 1

    If you are following standard security protocols. Most people are up in arms about this in the work place, but if you are following standard protocols at a work place, then it would not matter. An OS is always installed in a non-production network, with a different root password (typically the development network root password as it is distinct from production). Then the new OS is patched, configured with check lists, connected to LDAP servers (or what ever connections you need). The last three steps are to change the static IP to the new production network, Change root password to production root, and shut down the server. Then it is re-patched on the production network and when it comes up, it is secure, and only the admins know the root password.

  6. Re:Proper procedures on Ex-Employee Busted For Tampering With ERP System · · Score: 1

    You disable all but base corporate access to systems. You have the person who is leaving begin the knowledge transfer (or if you are a decent company, you were doing it already) and have all the information put on team shares, etc. So the person still does not have access to any mission critical systems, only has email and basic network share access, and then they can do nothing but damage their PC (which will be ghosted anyways) and maybe some file share or email servers. None are mission critical (yes, email is not mission critical, however much management think it is).

    That is if the person is on good terms, and you want them to help you through the transition. Many companies just walk them to the door the second the two weeks is given and pay them for that two weeks immediately. No reason to risk anything.

  7. Re:Because "IT People" are not "Professionals" on Ex-Employee Busted For Tampering With ERP System · · Score: 2

    I don't know where to begin in response to this, so lets take this by point/paragraph.

    1) An IT degree is not "worthless" because it teaches you certain technologies. You lean about specific technologies, and yes they change. However learning how a technology works (not just learning how to click a button and wow it works) is the true knowledge you are learning. I learned LDAP and Netware in college, and those technologies are fundamental to how I can look at all authorization technologies today, even though people rarely deploy true virgin implementations of those technologies today. The same can be said about modem technology. I learned how a modem worked and today, very few people still use modems. However knowing frequency multiplexing, understanding bandwidth, encoding methodologies, etc. I can know how most any telecom signal works.

    2) IT degrees are not standardized. Yes, and nor should they. Universities are a bevy of politics, greed, money changing hands, etc. Curriculum are determined by committees made up from companies which are giving money to the universities to make sure they get the kinds of employees they want. Any company that wants a person can spend 30 minutes and determine if the person has the skills they want. This is called an interview.

    3) IT has focused on certs. While yes, this is true, it again tells you if a person has a certain knowledge in certain areas. A company that implements certs can determine the level of knowledge required to pass them and this is no big deal either. Industry knows which are the crap certs and which are the good ones. Again, an interview can determine really quick if a person knows their stuff.

    I think you are looking about this the whole way. There are IT workers, and there are IT professionals. An IT worker is an individual who only has the skills to do one specific type of task, and cannot branch out into other areas or line of work. An example of this is a desktop admin (Not all, don't flame me, just read the specifics as I state them) at a large company. If the person has only just joined, and all the know how to do is load a boot CD and ghost images, then guess what, they are an IT worker. They might expand further into creating images and doing other things on that team, but they are still an IT worker. Until they understand full system integration, app design, architecture, etc. then they know how to one specific task (or set of tasks).

    A true IT professional is an individual who can work on almost any given technology, knows and has experience with most of the underlying technologies, and can quickly come up to speed with anything that is given to them. These people are rare, and people like this rarely are desired in the traditional hiring process and most the time work as consultants. Why is this? Simple, companies want IT workers. Give them a task, they do only that task. People who can see the bigger picture are not needed often, and when they are, cheaper to hire a consultant for the few weeks they are needed.

    I am proud to say I am an IT professional. I have two masters degrees and several certifications after my name. I make a great living, and will be retired by the time I am 45. I can tell you that being an IT professional has not harmed me one bit. I would like to know how this has harmed me? The only way I can see it harming you to be an IT professional is if you want to do the same IT job for the rest of your life, at the same company. Not me, I want to use the knowledge, skills, and god given inquisitiveness I have to learn.

  8. Re:how to NOT give everyone passwords? on Ex-Employee Busted For Tampering With ERP System · · Score: 3, Informative

    Password Management is not the same as access management. In terms of password management, yes, you can standardize all systems to authenticate and authorize from a central system (LDAP, AD, RADIUS, RSA Tokens, etc.) The issue becomes when a person leaves, turn it off and all their access goes away. The issue is for proprietary systems that use things like digital certs, or that do not play well with centralized auth systems (ie. lazy programming in my book for enterprise apps).

    As for the other piece, access management, this has to do with the knowledge (and proof) that a person was given access to (and what level of permissions) as well as who approved, and who implemented the account creation/deletion. There are systems which costs millions of dollars to manage access and the subsequent audit requirements around it.

  9. Re:We hate success! on Ubuntu Releases 13.04, Sticks To 6-Month Release Rhythm · · Score: 4, Informative

    While I agree with several of your points, I think it is not a "We Hate Success" problem, but more of a "We hate what success has done to you!" problem. Yes many people are quick on and off the bandwagon, and those people were not to be considered true fans to begin with. Yes Ubuntu has done a lot, by giving us a standard platform, and originally giving us a good repository, and a good start for many forks (Mint, etc.) which can be created.

    The main issue was, their decision to push Unity. In the Linux community, if something comes as a drastic change, you fork the development and someone can pick up the abandoned fork (the GNOME 2.X developed interface) within their community. Ubuntu did not do that. They gave us a universally panned GUI, designed for cell phones and tablets, to be used on servers and desktops. Worse yet, they gave us no option but to make this major switch with them if we wanted the latest patches, etc. Bad move.

    So my point is that they grew so successful, they forgot their roots, and decided to make changes, regardless of what they were "supposed" to do based on the community they were in. The OS communities version of "Too Big to Fail." The Linux User Community got them where they were, and they abandoned them by making this one time, decision. This has caused the hatred for Ubuntu, not that they are successful.

  10. Re:Tightening reins on developers? on Businesses Moving From Amazon's Cloud To Build Their Own · · Score: 1

    Yes and no. There are many reasons for that. Information Security Laws, and control over costs would be two of the biggest things. Without control over the API, development, etc. of applications, how do you know you are running efficiently? How do you know you don't need only 2 server but are paying for 5 because of some coding mistake? Most professional IT organizations have architecture and capacity planning people who do this stuff and when a dev can do something unilaterally, irrespective of costs to the company, that makes IT managers not happy. Also who gets in trouble when private information is stolen, hacked, etc. from something that is not managed by them. My former company got fines of up $1 million an incident for not having audit-able proof (not that it did not occur, did not have screen shots or what not) for an account being turned off. When you don't manage a service, how do you do background checks on all AWS employees, etc? I am just saying there are more and more regulations coming down the pipe, and this is how they look. Cloud services while cool for some social media app or some basic apps, if you want to follow any modicum of strict control over costs, or security, will never fly.

  11. I normally don't respond to AC posts, but I have to ask. How is pulling off the road, into a gas station, or onto a median more dangerous than fiddling with buttons on a phone/GPS/whatever application you are playing with while barreling down the highway at 50 MPH?

  12. Re:Yes and No on Should California Have Banned Checking Smartphone Maps While Driving? · · Score: 1

    There is no free market fairy. The discouragement should come from the law that is already on the books for willful destruction of another's property, and all the bevy of injury (and manslaughter if it were a bad accident) laws on the books. Technically it should not matter if one if one t-bones me because he does not like my silver car, is distracted picking their nose, or texting their spouse - at the end of the day, they were at fault, and caused damage and injury. The discouragement should come from the punishment of that crime, not the slap on the wrist we give criminals typically in this country.

  13. Yes and No on Should California Have Banned Checking Smartphone Maps While Driving? · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "Should California Have Banned Checking Smartphone Maps While Driving?"

    This is not a simple question. There is a preponderance of evidence that checking a cell phone, playing with a dash mounted (or cheesy suction cup mounted) GPS, eating, talking, doing makeup, shaving, or anything that takes the drivers eyes off the road is a distraction. Anything that makes for more distracted drivers in my opinion should be banned.

    However I am also a Libertarian, and I agree that the government should not be getting into these nitpicky arguments, and should be left to the people and free market to decide. I personally will never pay for the option of having an in dash navigation in a car. Nor will I purchase an external GPS. I pull off to the side of the road, and use my street atlas and figure how to get anywhere. Why is this the case? Simple, I don't want to be distracted from driving.

    At the end of the day, because California is so socialist, and anyone who chooses to live there wants to live in the Nanny state, then let them live in their own spoils. I just keep being being reminded of the quote, "You cannot legislate stupidity, as there will always be a more stupid idiot created tomorrow."

  14. Re:Texas today on Texas Rangers Use Internet To Breathe New Life Into Cold Case Homicides · · Score: 1

    Huh? How can this "automatically" be a hate crime? First off a hate crime is defined as being the motive of the crime being derived by hate of a protected class. How can you determine motive if you do not have a suspect in custody? Just because someone happened to be gay, and was murdered, does not mean it was a hate crime. Where are you getting your information? The media? Since we know how reliable that information is.

    Let me turn this around on you. Me being white, and someone breaks into my house, and they are not white (don't care, anything else), and kill me in my sleep, is that a hate crime? No the motive was burglary and race had nothing to do with it. Just because there is the possibility of a hate crime, does not mean one occurred.

    However, this being Texas, if enough evidence was found to substantiate a hate crime charge, and it goes through the courts properly and the person is convicted, of any state in the union, Texas has my utmost confidence they will fry their ass. And I don't have a problem with going through due process. Justice takes time, and once it is done right, executed (no pun intended) swiftly.

  15. The main reason on Stay Home When You're Sick! · · Score: 1

    People here keep saying that it is financial, but that is only part of it. How many times have you woken up sick as a dog and then through the miracle of medicate feel 1/2 way alright by 10am? I know I go to work sick when that is the case as it is not worth the hassle to catch up from what I missed the day I am off. This is the reason why many Americans don't take all their vacation (if they are white collar workers - don't have the links to the numbers at my finger tips).

    There is no redundancy built into the system at work that one person's job, they are responsible for tasks, and if they are not done "THAT DAY" then things go wrong for them. Deadlines are missed, backroom promises are broken, etc. I cannot tell you the number of times I went to work sick as I had a change to do, that I waited a month for approval for just to get implemented and if I missed my "window" I would have to redo all the change effort and approvals.

    Bad policies, bad redundancy, bad management are all the reason why people come to work sick.

  16. IN - The land of the supreme court case on U.S. Election Day In Progress: What's Been Your Experience? · · Score: 1

    Indiana - land of supreme court tested voter ID act. I will stop by the polls at 4:30 and usually am out in less than 10 minutes, voting on a the same electronic machine that has been there for 15 years. Cheap and reliable and we usually have our complete county count by 7:30 on election night (polls close at 6:00). My son is there now (and texting me) and like 15 people are there but high school kids just got out of school.

  17. To each their own on Ask Slashdot: Extreme Cable Management? · · Score: 1

    Every person is different, but I bought a 12 port 4' power strip (15 bucks a frys) that mounted behind the desk. I have one small 4 port one that comes off and is mounted on the corner of my desk for "when I need to quickly plug something in". Everything else plugs in the big one in the back. I have one 8 port USB 3.0 hub with a 4 foot connection mounted on my desk plugged into a USB port in the back of the PC. Everything goes into there. I have a 4 port KVM, which has extra KVM for extra PCs (but I only use 3) so only one mouse and keyboard (and 3 monitors). I have all of my networking and printing on a separate desk so the only stuff on my work space desk is my monitor stand, keyboard and mouse, and the USB hub and small power strip in one corner (and my speakers, forgot about them). The office is in a 90 degree angle, so the PCs and stuff are in the area between the two desks.

  18. I am not sure I understand on Hyundai Overstated MPG On Over 1 Million Cars · · Score: 1

    I read the article (yes, I know fop-aux) but how can they "overstate" mileage? They submit the car to the EPA and the EPA tells them the numbers. There is no testing at the car manufacturers site. The EPA farms this out, but that is still the rule of law by the EPA. Were they not listing the numbers provided by the EPA? Then fine Hyundai's ass into oblivion. If they marked on the window stickers what the EPA told them, even if Hyundai knew the numbers were wrong, then there is no issues in my mind and people should sue the hell out of the EPA.

  19. I am free to be an independent and impartial technology expert.

  20. Skills vs. Intelligence vs. Trades on Are We Getting Smarter? Rising IQ Scores In the Twenty-First Century · · Score: 1

    Are you good at taking tests? Are you well read? Can you memorize facts? Can you read patterns in the English language? Do you understand subtext? Can you speak comprehensible sentences to get a salient point across? Can you write efficiently? Can you research facts and figures? These are all skills. These are all skills which are taught in American schools.

    Can you do basic accounting? Can you install an OS on a computer? Can you balance an checkbook? Can you build a home from scratch? Can you paint an oil painting? These are all Trades, and this is also what American schools teach.

    Do you want to know what intelligence is? Stringing those individual skills together to do something with it. I can memorize facts, speak, write and research. Does that make me good at my job? No. Being able to put those together in a way which you can interpret, extrapolate, and create new and unique ideas is intelligence. This is not what is taught in many American schools.

    The funny thing is that the highest IQ score I have ever got is 90. I have two masters degrees and work in Cyber Security as an IT Architect. I am not below average, just not good at test taking and what ever skills that I was tested on the supposed IQ test. I never cared that I have a below average IQ, I and everyone around me knows I am smarter than average.

  21. Re:You cannot fine that which does not have a numb on FTC Offers $50,000 For Best Way To Stop Robocalls · · Score: 1

    And your point is? Yes I did not advocate that it had to be implemented, I just said that the solution would work, if fully implemented. International regulations, interfaces, etc. all do funky things to trying to create a homogeneous environment for things to work. I am just pointing out that it would have worked, just like if caller ID were required at the phone company (ie. who is paying the bill) on every phone number sent around the world (just like SPF). It is not .. thus the point is moot.

  22. simple on FTC Offers $50,000 For Best Way To Stop Robocalls · · Score: 1

    The government monitors all the phone calls anyways, start flagging the ones that sound like robo calls (ones where no one is there to answer the phone until you say hello 10 times to get someone's attention) and other behavioral type attributes that can be identified. Look at call duration. If there were 1000 calls an hour, each lasting under 30 seconds, then you know that is a robo caller as they don't leave messages. You can train IT systems to do that, and the monitoring infrastructure in the DHS and FBI are already there.

  23. Re:Death Penalty on FTC Offers $50,000 For Best Way To Stop Robocalls · · Score: 1

    Wrong. First off investigations would cost millions of dollars to get one arrest. Secondly, no CEO knows 100% of the policies/practices being done within their organization. Some do know if they are doing this practice, and it was approved, but that number is low. All the CEO knows is they do some phone marketing and it is handled by the telecom and marketing folks, and they get XYZ results from it. Third, punishing CEOs would also just raise the cost of being a CEO, making their salaries even higher. The reason CEO salaries are so high now, is because they are taking all the risks by just being there. One asshole in their company fudges a number and they go to jail. You cannot run a business like that.

  24. Re:You cannot fine that which does not have a numb on FTC Offers $50,000 For Best Way To Stop Robocalls · · Score: 1

    That is only because people don't fully implement the solution. If you blocked when SPF was not validated correctly, or if they don't have an SPF record, you could catch a lot more. This is the problem, it is a solution, but not fully implemented.

  25. Re:Power steering isn't a safety feature. on $3,000 Tata Nano Car Coming To US · · Score: 1

    Then complain to congress. They are the ones that passed the laws in the 1990's (I think went into effect in 1998) that every car must have traction control, power steering, steel reinforced doors, dual stage air bags, dual airbags (driver and passenger), 5mph crumple zones, and some emissions standards. They even went so far as to state the color of the damn low fuel indicator light (orange). If your car is after 1998 and does not meet one of these standards, it is fined, and the cost is passed right onto the consumer. Ever wonder why imported cars in 1998 to about 2002 jumped in prices? They had thousands of dollars of fines on them until they met those standards. The good old Toyota corolla that got 50+ mpg and was a tin can on wheels would have had $8k in fines thus they had to quit selling it as they could not justify selling that car for $20k when it was worth $12k.