Hmmm,
Wondered how the friends worked so I started digging. Apparently to add a friend you must click on someone's journal entry. From there you are able to select add a friend.
I don't see a method of adding a friend unless they have made a journal entry.
As far as looking up user pages, is there any way of doing a search for users?
Ehmmm,
For those of you participating in the DOS attack against Securityfocus...
Although, they did not launch a posting to this, in the mailing list they said that they were going to discontinue taking mailings from people.
When I went to get the link for this message I found that they are having a hard time responding to HTTP requests... Perhaps caused by the slashdot community?
Actually, one of my customers received a message to this fact, he was automatically sent back a message saying that sircam had infected his system and the patch to fix it could be located at mcaffee.
A link was included and though my customer didn't understand the problem he called me and we had it fixed in a couple of minutes.
I have a rather extensive library. Of the books in my library, these are the ones that a) have lasting value as I have been using these books for years and/or b)are excellent learning and training manuals.
Most of them are practical experience books, ie no "pure" research books.
Addison-Wesley
"The Practice of Programming" Kernighan Pike
"The C programming language" Kernighan Pike
"Writing MS-DOS Device Drivers" Lai
"Compilers Principles, Techniques, and Tools" Aho Sethi Ullman
"Algorithms in C" Sedgewick
"Multithreading Applications in Win32" Beveridge Wiener
Coriolis Group Books
"Graphics Programming Black Book" Abrash
Morgan Kaufmann Publishers
"Joe Celko's SQL for Smarties: Advanced SQL Programming" Celko
SQL Puzzles by Celko as well, can't find my copy
Prentice Hall
"Internetworking with TCP/IP Volumes 1-3" Comer Stevens
"C How to Program" Deitel/Deitel
Microsoft Press
"Writing Solid Code" Maguire
"Code Complete" McConnell
Wiley
"Applied Cryptography" Schneier
O'reilly
"Encyclopedia of Graphics File Formats" Murray & Vanryper
"Practical UNIX & Internet Security" Garfinkey & Spafford
"Essential System Administration" Frisch
"Programming Perl" Wall Christiansen Schwartz
"Mastering Algorithms with Perl" Orwant Hietaniemi Macdonald
QUE
"Linux Socket Programming by Example" Gay
Sam's
"TCP/IP Blueprints" Burk, Blight, Lee, et al
"The Mythical Man Month" Lent out at the moment
Out of print books
"Peter Norton's guide to the PC" Norton
Frankly I am not impressed. Basically he is suggesting everyone donate to a project and all the money goes into escrow, until enough money is collected to fund the project.
Then, the programmer goes to the bank and gets a loan against the money in escrow. Okay, this already works this way on cosource... Seems to me that he is just rewording what the site already does, this isn't a proposal for anything new...
I also notice that he mentions sourcexchange in the article. Since the article was published 6/4/01 and sourcexchange was shut down 4/6/01, this article was sorely out of date before it every went out. Now if we figure 90 days from submital to publishing, ie print publishing. This would have been written and submitted 3/4/01, so sourcexchange wasn't down yet, but they had already announced that they were going down...
So let me paraphase the article,
reporter: I need money, let me reword the cosource/sourcexchange business model and submit it as original work...
Hmmmm,
Just had to chip in my two cents on the matter. You've pointed out software that OSS built on other projects or commercial software that has been emulated.
Some projects that I can think of off the top of my head.
1) grandaddy apache of course the original software was open source, can't remember the name right now.
Other's Perl, truely it's just another programming language, but it was a revolutionary design in programming. It borrows a lot from C, shell scripting etc, but I would definately not say that it is attempting to emulate anything on the market.
PHP, another programming language... It's a set of tools that never sought to emulate anything else, it was developed to fit a need and it's been opensource the entire time.
Slashdot, slashdot is leading the way, I don't see it trying to emulate anyone. But I have seen a lot of proprietary venders trying to emulate it.
These are tools that I work with every day... Granted we all know and accept that Linux and other open source project are behind on the user interface/application side of the house and the open source community is playing catchup, but on the developement side of the house there are a lot of tools that have no counterpart, tools that are designed to fit a need.
One of the projects that I didn't list is Quantas, I figure it probably started off trying to emulate some of the other ides out there, but I think it's probably gone beyond that now. I use quanta a lot in my development work. I haven't seen anything on the proprietary side of the market that is as flexible and has the features I want. If you know of one, let me know I'm always looking for better tools.
There are a lot of little tools that I use that have no equivalent on the commercial side of the house.
As far as picking at open source for not coming up with their own ideas, I'd like some examples of commercial companies that developed a lot of innovative "new" ideas and brought them to the market. I can name a couple, but those companies don't exist for the most part anymore. I think that you will find that most of the "new" ideas are from small firms rather than the major firms.
I will say that I have very little information about.net... heck checking out cobra is still on my to do list.
As a futher note, in the main article it says..
"The Register has an interesting article about reverse-engineering Microsoft's.NET. Apparently ESR, Bruce Perens and Miguel de Icaza have all dropped hints that the project's already underway.
I'd like to point out that Bruce's comments lead me not to think that it's a clone of.NET or C#, I could make conjectures as to what it is going to be... but frankly I don't care. I'll deal with it when it gets here and if it fits into my plans/work I'll use it otherwise I will ignore it.
In my opinion The Register is just trying to piece a couple of hints together and scoop other websites. Heck, that's their job, it drives circulation. I just think that they are wrong. Whether they are or not doesn't really matter much to me, we'll know when it's announced if I'm wrong it'll take me about.2 seconds to admit it and move on with my life...
Blah,
Anyway, sorry to talk about the register's article in a reply to you Dan, I just didn't feel like writing another comment.
Let me know what you think on the Perl, PHP, etc comments and a couple of examples from the commercial side of the house.
As long as we are rehashing old news... Siliconvalley.com's roundtable should just about be over. They've been discussing the GPL/shared source/Microsoft/etc.
Hmmmm,
I haven't seen a reference to GAC, which is interesting since I follow several AI discussion groups. Anyone have a link? I haven't found one... Perhaps this is just advertising for AI...
Since I run my own company, I guess I should answer this. The training budget is actually small and is allocated on a department level with a common fund the the department manager can authorize. However I am a little more flexible on time. Typically we allocate 8 weeks/yearly for training time. Most of this training is spent in review, self-taught, or in-house training.
I've come up as a hat-wearing tech. DBA, Sys Admin, networking, etc, etc, etc. And one of the things that always frustrated me was the constant 80 hours a week with little downtime to learn technology. I learned as I went, but am unhappy with that as you never know what holes are missing in your education.
So I offer a lot of education, or at least try to. Of course some out there are thinking, WTF you'll train your people and then lose them. Actually, this happens a lot less than you might expect. I try to hire hackers that are primarily interested in playing with their toys. If I can make sure that they are fed, have time to work on their own projects, and have money to pay their bills most are happy enough to stick around. What I don't pay in cash, I try to make up for in benefits. I look at the education as a retention tool rather than as a loss. If everyone else offered the same training that I do, I wouldn't be able to retain the staff I have.
For the past 6 months the company has had a rough spot, I've had to lay off a lot of the people working for me and they went on to get higher paying jobs then they did while working for me. The interesting thing is, that most of them call or email at least once a month asking if the company can afford to hire them back at their old salaries. Since my primary goal is creating company loyalty, I take this to mean that my efforts in this area are succeeding.
To wrap up,
Training is used at my company as a retention method.
A limited training budget is available, but most training is done by peer support and book learning.
No, I don't think so. Maybe 10-15 minutes. I jumped over to k5 to check out the article there and by the time I returned it had been changed.
Why does it have to be a "she" thing. Utterly rediculous if you ask me. Sounded to me like Rob was just pissed that
Didn't show up promptly
Couldn't give an explaination of the problem
Couldn't fix the problem
Quit
Having worked in a high stress environment, I know that screaming and cussing have no room in this type of environment.
Keep in mind that this is an unusual situation and it's very likely that Rob/Jeff did not handle the situation properly.
If "she" was a contractor, she should be used to dealing with customers. It's a high stress situation and the contractor has to be able to take a certain amount of grip. The company that she was contracting should have had a account executive on the phone to take that grief so that she could do her job properly. And with the bills slashdot/OSDN generates in connection fees they should have had a service guarentee (sp?).
If she was an employee the fault really lies with whoever employed her, training should be a key component of any technical employee, and without enough training time nothing can be done. If she couldn't be trained then the employer should have realized this a long time ago and moved her out of a critical position.
I didn't think the first post was that bad, personally. Just a statement of facts. It also might not have been changed intentionally, I notice that a lot of messages that were put into the system just after it came up are missing as well. Perhaps they reloaded the database and had to type in the explaination again...
Anyway, I don't think this was gender related at all, just a statements of facts, that was possibly changed to not place blame on someone when the situation was not "standard".
Lando
PS. One of the biggest problems I ever encountered was a Cisco problem, where they were suprized by something their hardware did. The company president where I was working sent customer reps to most of the major customers and those reps slept in the customers offices. Which is why you hire professional operation centers for critical services. Our down time on that problem was 22 hours. Rob/Jeff don't have that experience and I believe they are due a little leniency, as should the tech. But trying to turn this into a gender issue is just clouding the issue.
Nod,
It was pointed out to me a couple of years ago that bind doesn't really implement the RFC for dns. There are a lot of problems with the bind implementation, but since bind is the default, it's hard to get a "proper" dns working since the standard is bind's implementation.
File a complaint with your state communications authority. Being a monopoly most local phone companies are to some degree regulated by state and federal agencies.
Filing a complaint with the FCC is also important, but in my experience doesn't make much of an impression.
Another thing to keep in mind, is that you are not just losing your phone service, but you are losing your 911 emergency dialing. This is a FCC regulation and if a phone company can be shown to be negligent in this matter they can face some major fines.
As always, this should not be considered legal advice, ie consult a lawyer. Hopefully, it points you in the correct direction though.
Lando
Re:All the wonderful things Quake gave us:
on
Five Years of Quake
·
· Score: 1
Not to mention,
Revolution on graphics, 3dfx
Improved stability for Windows, DirectX Improvements
A major gaming developer saying Linux is important
Improvements for some Linux drivers, John's envolvement
Release of complete gaming engine source code to GPL
Actually the 21 million addresses email was kinda interesting for me. I monitor and run websites for a large number of customers and am hooked into most of the webmaster and postmaster messages for each site.
The other day, I saw waves being sent out on this 21 Million Addresses scheme. Scary thought though is that they hit at least 70% of the servers I monitor.
Another interesting thing though, was that the systems that weren't hit, weren't registered through network solutions. So I think I can guess where the list came from, and judging from the spam I get from network solutions, I'd also hazard a guess that the spammers "are" network solutions.
Interestingly enought I was a member of the CWA during my employment at ATT. I also was a tech employee working basically as a systems administrator.
So I am sitting here and thinking back over the time and asking myself if I benefited from the CWA's envolvement with ATT overall I think that I did.
When I went to work for ATT my salary was better than I would have expected, part of this was because of Union oversite of the hiring process, basically making the company have fair hiring practices which in turn allowed me to get my foot in the door.
I had medical/dental benefits which have been fought for by the union and made my life a lot easier.
When there was a disagreement with my boss, the union got involved and was willing to offer advice and council.
I had a minimum of 15-20 days of training per year which was a great incubator and helped me learn a lot. So that when my position did start to "evaporate" I had the skills to leave and find a new position quickly.
So it sounds pretty rosy, ehhh... Well, there definately were downsides.
ATT, in my opinion, has been trying to bust the union for the last 10 years, the problem being that other phone companies have to a certain degree limited union envolvement and thus ATT has higher costs, which hurts ATT in the market place.
One of the methods that ATT has used to bust the union is to give union representatives perks, they are buying off the reps with high paying jobs. It's a lot of power and ATT is attacking at the power center. Since CWA@ATT represents a lot of the non-technical positions as well as a small technical group, the techs a lot of times had their rights and positions traded away to get concessions for non-technical workers.
We also had the people that were incapable of doing their jobs, several times I saw these people promoted, because the company could not get rid of them, ie the union protection maintained them in their positions. So in order to protect company interests, they would be promoted, the old line being promoted because of incompetence is/was alive.
When I left, management did not have union representation and a lot of union positions were slowly moved into management in order to reduce the union's control on technical jobs. Seeing how most of my managers made less that 60% of what I made, I would guess that there were advantages being in the union.
I did at times see people promoted to management and then fired within 2 weeks of having lost union protection.
One of the reasons the ATT center that I worked at is located in Georgia, is because it is a right to work state, the union cannot have a closed shop. There is no doubt in my mind, that I would never have gotten the position that I did at ATT if it were a closed shop.
So good and bad:
Pro:
Manditory Training
Medical/Dental
Good/reasonable salary
Protection from abuses from management
Third party oversight of hiring practices
Con:
Incompetence rewarded with promotions
Power concentrated and easier to corrupt
Made less than people who had more tenure and less skill.
Overall, I would say that the union was good for me. I was able to take advantage of education opportunities. I received medical and dental care. I wasn't expected to work 80 hour weeks without compensation.
I'm currently split as to my opinion of the union, it did give a lot of protection that I would not have otherwise had, there was corruption and I wasn't able to advance due to low tenure.
My major problem with the union was the corruption of union officials and union practices, I have my doubts as to whether or not the union stuffed ballets... Most people when asked their opinion of one of the union votes said that they had voted negative, yet once the ballets were received by the national level interestly our area had a 80% approval rating.
Shrug, I look back on my ATT experience fondly, it was a major step up for me and I was able to learn a lot about not just technology, but how the system works. I can't say that I am 100% in favor of the union, but I do see that there were major benefits working for the union.
My company took a slump in sales in November while people were preparing for the holidays, December was so-so and most of the contracts had to wait for the January budget. January came and the tech stocks crashed, which in turn meant that the contracts we signed in December all went away.
Okay, so sh** happens. I figured I would go out and work at a real job for a while and suppliment the company's income. I posted my resume' and waited for the offers to flood in.
Over the past 5 years anytime I have actually posted my resume' I have been flooded with inquiries and offers. Most of which I turn down, ie I know what environments I like to work in and money I like to make... Call me a prima-donna if you want...
What suprised me was that I only received 3 inquiries in the last couple of months. Normally my resume pulls 60-80 requests a week. So something is obviously going on here.
In the last month or so, my business has been pulling in new work, so it appears that things might be turning around.
I think most people just got scared of putting money into tech and were holding back. Things are starting to loosen up now and I expect things to be back on target by the end of the year.
I agree that the degree is no substitute for experience. Heck, people hire me and I hire based on experience. A degree should never be used to judge competence.
However, the MBA is a source of knowledge. I eventually will be going back to college and getting one, just so that I can see where I still have holes in my knowledge.
Getting the MBA is like a study guide, it tries to prepare you, but you understand that it isn't going to give you the "real" questions that you will be asked. When I started, I had very little understanding about what was on the test.
Still the more education you get the more prepared you can be.
If you spend a couple of years preparing, ie not getting a degree but actually examining the course material and planning, you are definately going to have an easier time than the guy that jumps in with both feet.
So I agree with you that a degree is no guarentee, it's just tipping things into your favor so that you have a reference when you start getting experience.
For what it's worth. I've been running my own businesses off and on over the last 10 years. I've been learning business through the school of hard knocks. A couple of months ago I had to lay off a majority of my staff, relocate the business and dump some problem customers. So I am definately still learning. We are back in the black again, but have a debt load that has to be repaid before expanding again.
Many times along the road I have had problems that I did not forsee, that in retrospect were pretty obvious. A MBA may not teach you everything you need to know about running a business, managing, etc. But it should help you to see where the gaps in your knowledge are before you hit them rather than in retrospect...
My first business went out of business because I made a simple mistake on a contract. I screwed up because I simply didn't realize some basic business principles. With my current business, I have jumped into the water blind again, though I have learned a great deal.
Anyway, my point is that with a MBA in order to reach the point I am now probably would have taken 2-4 years rather than the 10 years that I have so far invested. You will be exposed to a larger divercity of problems and resolutions, which will help you avoid costly mistakes in advance rather than having to deal with them retro-actively.
My advice if you plan on pursuing a management job, thinking about starting your own business, or something similiar, is to get the MBA.
Another point to your response. Sir Distic (sp?) recently gave a talk about how to crack SMB using a man in the middle attack. If a malicious person is able to access your network, SMB provides little to no protection.
Basically what happens is that if you set up a box to broadcast as another box windows systems will pass their encrypted login information. The malicious box then does an authorization request against the domain and can act as that user.
Please not that if your system admin on a windows box uses a browser... isn't integrated browsers nice... you can point it at the malicious system and automatically have it try to access the system, thus not even requiring you to broadcast the malicious box as a resource on the network.
Cute little toy to use with web bugs and another reason to block all port 137 and 139 traffic to the internet for those of you with internet connections.
I know that Sir Distic (sp? again) released his code into the wild and while I haven't had a chance to look through the code, I have seen the program in action and can verify it works even in a "hardened" Windows environment.
The problem isn't a bug in the system, but a design flaw within SMB, so the question is how secure do you want to be?
Lando
Re:Different brodcaster licenses...
on
Launchcast Sued
·
· Score: 1
A good reference for the different licenses and what has to be done in order to webcast when them was written by Jamie Zawinski a while ago and was featured on slashdot.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm,
Wondered how the friends worked so I started digging. Apparently to add a friend you must click on someone's journal entry. From there you are able to select add a friend.
I don't see a method of adding a friend unless they have made a journal entry.
As far as looking up user pages, is there any way of doing a search for users?
Lando
Ehmmm,
For those of you participating in the DOS attack against Securityfocus...
Although, they did not launch a posting to this, in the mailing list they said that they were going to discontinue taking mailings from people.
When I went to get the link for this message I found that they are having a hard time responding to HTTP requests... Perhaps caused by the slashdot community?
Lando
Actually, one of my customers received a message to this fact, he was automatically sent back a message saying that sircam had infected his system and the patch to fix it could be located at mcaffee.
A link was included and though my customer didn't understand the problem he called me and we had it fixed in a couple of minutes.
Lando
Nice list, looks like I'll head to the book store soon... Don't have UNIX network Programming in my collection... nor Modern Operating systems
I have a rather extensive library. Of the books in my library, these are the ones that a) have lasting value as I have been using these books for years and/or b)are excellent learning and training manuals.
Most of them are practical experience books, ie no "pure" research books.
Addison-Wesley
"The Practice of Programming" Kernighan Pike
"The C programming language" Kernighan Pike
"Writing MS-DOS Device Drivers" Lai
"Compilers Principles, Techniques, and Tools" Aho Sethi Ullman
"Algorithms in C" Sedgewick
"Multithreading Applications in Win32" Beveridge Wiener
Coriolis Group Books
"Graphics Programming Black Book" Abrash
Morgan Kaufmann Publishers
"Joe Celko's SQL for Smarties: Advanced SQL Programming" Celko
SQL Puzzles by Celko as well, can't find my copy
Prentice Hall
"Internetworking with TCP/IP Volumes 1-3" Comer Stevens
"C How to Program" Deitel/Deitel
Microsoft Press
"Writing Solid Code" Maguire
"Code Complete" McConnell
Wiley
"Applied Cryptography" Schneier
O'reilly
"Encyclopedia of Graphics File Formats" Murray & Vanryper
"Practical UNIX & Internet Security" Garfinkey & Spafford
"Essential System Administration" Frisch
"Programming Perl" Wall Christiansen Schwartz
"Mastering Algorithms with Perl" Orwant Hietaniemi Macdonald
QUE
"Linux Socket Programming by Example" Gay
Sam's
"TCP/IP Blueprints" Burk, Blight, Lee, et al
"The Mythical Man Month" Lent out at the moment
Out of print books
"Peter Norton's guide to the PC" Norton
Frankly I am not impressed. Basically he is suggesting everyone donate to a project and all the money goes into escrow, until enough money is collected to fund the project.
Then, the programmer goes to the bank and gets a loan against the money in escrow. Okay, this already works this way on cosource... Seems to me that he is just rewording what the site already does, this isn't a proposal for anything new...
I also notice that he mentions sourcexchange in the article. Since the article was published 6/4/01 and sourcexchange was shut down 4/6/01, this article was sorely out of date before it every went out. Now if we figure 90 days from submital to publishing, ie print publishing. This would have been written and submitted 3/4/01, so sourcexchange wasn't down yet, but they had already announced that they were going down...
So let me paraphase the article,
reporter: I need money, let me reword the cosource/sourcexchange business model and submit it as original work...
Lando
Hmmmm,
.net... heck checking out cobra is still on my to do list.
.NET. Apparently ESR, Bruce Perens and Miguel de Icaza have all dropped hints that the project's already underway.
.NET or C#, I could make conjectures as to what it is going to be... but frankly I don't care. I'll deal with it when it gets here and if it fits into my plans/work I'll use it otherwise I will ignore it.
.2 seconds to admit it and move on with my life...
Just had to chip in my two cents on the matter. You've pointed out software that OSS built on other projects or commercial software that has been emulated.
Some projects that I can think of off the top of my head.
1) grandaddy apache of course the original software was open source, can't remember the name right now.
Other's Perl, truely it's just another programming language, but it was a revolutionary design in programming. It borrows a lot from C, shell scripting etc, but I would definately not say that it is attempting to emulate anything on the market.
PHP, another programming language... It's a set of tools that never sought to emulate anything else, it was developed to fit a need and it's been opensource the entire time.
Slashdot, slashdot is leading the way, I don't see it trying to emulate anyone. But I have seen a lot of proprietary venders trying to emulate it.
These are tools that I work with every day... Granted we all know and accept that Linux and other open source project are behind on the user interface/application side of the house and the open source community is playing catchup, but on the developement side of the house there are a lot of tools that have no counterpart, tools that are designed to fit a need.
One of the projects that I didn't list is Quantas, I figure it probably started off trying to emulate some of the other ides out there, but I think it's probably gone beyond that now. I use quanta a lot in my development work. I haven't seen anything on the proprietary side of the market that is as flexible and has the features I want. If you know of one, let me know I'm always looking for better tools.
There are a lot of little tools that I use that have no equivalent on the commercial side of the house.
As far as picking at open source for not coming up with their own ideas, I'd like some examples of commercial companies that developed a lot of innovative "new" ideas and brought them to the market. I can name a couple, but those companies don't exist for the most part anymore. I think that you will find that most of the "new" ideas are from small firms rather than the major firms.
I will say that I have very little information about
As a futher note, in the main article it says..
"The Register has an interesting article about reverse-engineering Microsoft's
I'd like to point out that Bruce's comments lead me not to think that it's a clone of
In my opinion The Register is just trying to piece a couple of hints together and scoop other websites. Heck, that's their job, it drives circulation. I just think that they are wrong. Whether they are or not doesn't really matter much to me, we'll know when it's announced if I'm wrong it'll take me about
Blah,
Anyway, sorry to talk about the register's article in a reply to you Dan, I just didn't feel like writing another comment.
Let me know what you think on the Perl, PHP, etc comments and a couple of examples from the commercial side of the house.
Thanks,
Lando
It strikes me that this new project is
http://www.siliconvalley.com/roundtable/
Lando
Hmmmm,
I haven't seen a reference to GAC, which is interesting since I follow several AI discussion groups. Anyone have a link? I haven't found one... Perhaps this is just advertising for AI...
Lando
Since I run my own company, I guess I should answer this. The training budget is actually small and is allocated on a department level with a common fund the the department manager can authorize. However I am a little more flexible on time. Typically we allocate 8 weeks/yearly for training time. Most of this training is spent in review, self-taught, or in-house training.
I've come up as a hat-wearing tech. DBA, Sys Admin, networking, etc, etc, etc. And one of the things that always frustrated me was the constant 80 hours a week with little downtime to learn technology. I learned as I went, but am unhappy with that as you never know what holes are missing in your education.
So I offer a lot of education, or at least try to. Of course some out there are thinking, WTF you'll train your people and then lose them. Actually, this happens a lot less than you might expect. I try to hire hackers that are primarily interested in playing with their toys. If I can make sure that they are fed, have time to work on their own projects, and have money to pay their bills most are happy enough to stick around. What I don't pay in cash, I try to make up for in benefits. I look at the education as a retention tool rather than as a loss. If everyone else offered the same training that I do, I wouldn't be able to retain the staff I have.
For the past 6 months the company has had a rough spot, I've had to lay off a lot of the people working for me and they went on to get higher paying jobs then they did while working for me. The interesting thing is, that most of them call or email at least once a month asking if the company can afford to hire them back at their old salaries. Since my primary goal is creating company loyalty, I take this to mean that my efforts in this area are succeeding.
To wrap up,
Training is used at my company as a retention method.
A limited training budget is available, but most training is done by peer support and book learning.
Lando
Thanks,
Will check it out.
Lando
No, I don't think so. Maybe 10-15 minutes. I jumped over to k5 to check out the article there and by the time I returned it had been changed.
Why does it have to be a "she" thing. Utterly rediculous if you ask me. Sounded to me like Rob was just pissed that
Having worked in a high stress environment, I know that screaming and cussing have no room in this type of environment.
Keep in mind that this is an unusual situation and it's very likely that Rob/Jeff did not handle the situation properly.
If "she" was a contractor, she should be used to dealing with customers. It's a high stress situation and the contractor has to be able to take a certain amount of grip. The company that she was contracting should have had a account executive on the phone to take that grief so that she could do her job properly. And with the bills slashdot/OSDN generates in connection fees they should have had a service guarentee (sp?).
If she was an employee the fault really lies with whoever employed her, training should be a key component of any technical employee, and without enough training time nothing can be done. If she couldn't be trained then the employer should have realized this a long time ago and moved her out of a critical position.
I didn't think the first post was that bad, personally. Just a statement of facts. It also might not have been changed intentionally, I notice that a lot of messages that were put into the system just after it came up are missing as well. Perhaps they reloaded the database and had to type in the explaination again...
Anyway, I don't think this was gender related at all, just a statements of facts, that was possibly changed to not place blame on someone when the situation was not "standard".
Lando
PS. One of the biggest problems I ever encountered was a Cisco problem, where they were suprized by something their hardware did. The company president where I was working sent customer reps to most of the major customers and those reps slept in the customers offices. Which is why you hire professional operation centers for critical services. Our down time on that problem was 22 hours. Rob/Jeff don't have that experience and I believe they are due a little leniency, as should the tech. But trying to turn this into a gender issue is just clouding the issue.
Same person, mostly same words and phrases, just a brief mention that they lifted something heavier.
Lando
Nod,
It was pointed out to me a couple of years ago that bind doesn't really implement the RFC for dns. There are a lot of problems with the bind implementation, but since bind is the default, it's hard to get a "proper" dns working since the standard is bind's implementation.
Lando
Welcome back Cmdr... We missed you...
Lando
File a complaint with your state communications authority. Being a monopoly most local phone companies are to some degree regulated by state and federal agencies.
Filing a complaint with the FCC is also important, but in my experience doesn't make much of an impression.
Another thing to keep in mind, is that you are not just losing your phone service, but you are losing your 911 emergency dialing. This is a FCC regulation and if a phone company can be shown to be negligent in this matter they can face some major fines.
As always, this should not be considered legal advice, ie consult a lawyer. Hopefully, it points you in the correct direction though.
Lando
- Revolution on graphics, 3dfx
- Improved stability for Windows, DirectX Improvements
- A major gaming developer saying Linux is important
- Improvements for some Linux drivers, John's envolvement
- Release of complete gaming engine source code to GPL
- Racing stats of the cars id employees drive
LandoActually the 21 million addresses email was kinda interesting for me. I monitor and run websites for a large number of customers and am hooked into most of the webmaster and postmaster messages for each site.
The other day, I saw waves being sent out on this 21 Million Addresses scheme. Scary thought though is that they hit at least 70% of the servers I monitor.
Another interesting thing though, was that the systems that weren't hit, weren't registered through network solutions. So I think I can guess where the list came from, and judging from the spam I get from network solutions, I'd also hazard a guess that the spammers "are" network solutions.
Lando
Lando
Interestingly enought I was a member of the CWA during my employment at ATT. I also was a tech employee working basically as a systems administrator.
So I am sitting here and thinking back over the time and asking myself if I benefited from the CWA's envolvement with ATT overall I think that I did.
When I went to work for ATT my salary was better than I would have expected, part of this was because of Union oversite of the hiring process, basically making the company have fair hiring practices which in turn allowed me to get my foot in the door.
I had medical/dental benefits which have been fought for by the union and made my life a lot easier.
When there was a disagreement with my boss, the union got involved and was willing to offer advice and council.
I had a minimum of 15-20 days of training per year which was a great incubator and helped me learn a lot. So that when my position did start to "evaporate" I had the skills to leave and find a new position quickly.
So it sounds pretty rosy, ehhh... Well, there definately were downsides.
ATT, in my opinion, has been trying to bust the union for the last 10 years, the problem being that other phone companies have to a certain degree limited union envolvement and thus ATT has higher costs, which hurts ATT in the market place.
One of the methods that ATT has used to bust the union is to give union representatives perks, they are buying off the reps with high paying jobs. It's a lot of power and ATT is attacking at the power center. Since CWA@ATT represents a lot of the non-technical positions as well as a small technical group, the techs a lot of times had their rights and positions traded away to get concessions for non-technical workers.
We also had the people that were incapable of doing their jobs, several times I saw these people promoted, because the company could not get rid of them, ie the union protection maintained them in their positions. So in order to protect company interests, they would be promoted, the old line being promoted because of incompetence is/was alive.
When I left, management did not have union representation and a lot of union positions were slowly moved into management in order to reduce the union's control on technical jobs. Seeing how most of my managers made less that 60% of what I made, I would guess that there were advantages being in the union.
I did at times see people promoted to management and then fired within 2 weeks of having lost union protection.
One of the reasons the ATT center that I worked at is located in Georgia, is because it is a right to work state, the union cannot have a closed shop. There is no doubt in my mind, that I would never have gotten the position that I did at ATT if it were a closed shop.
So good and bad:
Pro:
Manditory Training
Medical/Dental
Good/reasonable salary
Protection from abuses from management
Third party oversight of hiring practices
Con:
Incompetence rewarded with promotions
Power concentrated and easier to corrupt
Made less than people who had more tenure and less skill.
Overall, I would say that the union was good for me. I was able to take advantage of education opportunities. I received medical and dental care. I wasn't expected to work 80 hour weeks without compensation.
I'm currently split as to my opinion of the union, it did give a lot of protection that I would not have otherwise had, there was corruption and I wasn't able to advance due to low tenure.
My major problem with the union was the corruption of union officials and union practices, I have my doubts as to whether or not the union stuffed ballets... Most people when asked their opinion of one of the union votes said that they had voted negative, yet once the ballets were received by the national level interestly our area had a 80% approval rating.
Shrug, I look back on my ATT experience fondly, it was a major step up for me and I was able to learn a lot about not just technology, but how the system works. I can't say that I am 100% in favor of the union, but I do see that there were major benefits working for the union.
Lando
This is true people.
My company took a slump in sales in November while people were preparing for the holidays, December was so-so and most of the contracts had to wait for the January budget. January came and the tech stocks crashed, which in turn meant that the contracts we signed in December all went away.
Okay, so sh** happens. I figured I would go out and work at a real job for a while and suppliment the company's income. I posted my resume' and waited for the offers to flood in.
Over the past 5 years anytime I have actually posted my resume' I have been flooded with inquiries and offers. Most of which I turn down, ie I know what environments I like to work in and money I like to make... Call me a prima-donna if you want...
What suprised me was that I only received 3 inquiries in the last couple of months. Normally my resume pulls 60-80 requests a week. So something is obviously going on here.
In the last month or so, my business has been pulling in new work, so it appears that things might be turning around.
I think most people just got scared of putting money into tech and were holding back. Things are starting to loosen up now and I expect things to be back on target by the end of the year.
Lando
I agree that the degree is no substitute for experience. Heck, people hire me and I hire based on experience. A degree should never be used to judge competence.
However, the MBA is a source of knowledge. I eventually will be going back to college and getting one, just so that I can see where I still have holes in my knowledge.
Getting the MBA is like a study guide, it tries to prepare you, but you understand that it isn't going to give you the "real" questions that you will be asked. When I started, I had very little understanding about what was on the test.
Still the more education you get the more prepared you can be.
If you spend a couple of years preparing, ie not getting a degree but actually examining the course material and planning, you are definately going to have an easier time than the guy that jumps in with both feet.
So I agree with you that a degree is no guarentee, it's just tipping things into your favor so that you have a reference when you start getting experience.
Lando
For what it's worth. I've been running my own businesses off and on over the last 10 years. I've been learning business through the school of hard knocks. A couple of months ago I had to lay off a majority of my staff, relocate the business and dump some problem customers. So I am definately still learning. We are back in the black again, but have a debt load that has to be repaid before expanding again.
Many times along the road I have had problems that I did not forsee, that in retrospect were pretty obvious. A MBA may not teach you everything you need to know about running a business, managing, etc. But it should help you to see where the gaps in your knowledge are before you hit them rather than in retrospect...
My first business went out of business because I made a simple mistake on a contract. I screwed up because I simply didn't realize some basic business principles. With my current business, I have jumped into the water blind again, though I have learned a great deal.
Anyway, my point is that with a MBA in order to reach the point I am now probably would have taken 2-4 years rather than the 10 years that I have so far invested. You will be exposed to a larger divercity of problems and resolutions, which will help you avoid costly mistakes in advance rather than having to deal with them retro-actively.
My advice if you plan on pursuing a management job, thinking about starting your own business, or something similiar, is to get the MBA.
Lando
Another point to your response. Sir Distic (sp?) recently gave a talk about how to crack SMB using a man in the middle attack. If a malicious person is able to access your network, SMB provides little to no protection.
Basically what happens is that if you set up a box to broadcast as another box windows systems will pass their encrypted login information. The malicious box then does an authorization request against the domain and can act as that user.
Please not that if your system admin on a windows box uses a browser... isn't integrated browsers nice... you can point it at the malicious system and automatically have it try to access the system, thus not even requiring you to broadcast the malicious box as a resource on the network.
Cute little toy to use with web bugs and another reason to block all port 137 and 139 traffic to the internet for those of you with internet connections.
I know that Sir Distic (sp? again) released his code into the wild and while I haven't had a chance to look through the code, I have seen the program in action and can verify it works even in a "hardened" Windows environment.
The problem isn't a bug in the system, but a design flaw within SMB, so the question is how secure do you want to be?
Lando
The article can be found here.
Lando