Could you point to documentation of this "liberal media", as opposed to right-wing opinion?
In the late nineties, and I have the newspaper clipping somewhere around my desk at home, a reporter did an actual survey: they excluded overtly political media like Mother Jones and US News and World Report, but counted the columnists in the mainstream media. Of what I think was 62, 3 were self-proclaimed "liberal", one or two self-procaimed "moderate", and 57 were self-proclaimed "conservative".
As an exercise for the student, I suggest you go through all the self-proclaimed "news" shows (excluding, for example, Jon Stewart and Colbert), and report on the numbers. Oh, and do mention which stations - you'll need to also exclude public access channels.
For extra credit, name one self-proclaimed socialist on the air, anywhere, as a regular.
As you walk by them, pushing everything you own in a shopping cart, since you haven't been able to get a job in forever, due to the "invisible hand" of the "free market" making it much cheaper to have a robot do your job, and you didn't have $50,000,000 to invest....
I'm so old, I remember that when cable first came in, the selling point was that you would never have to watch commercials again.
Really.
And you didn't, in the eighties, into the nineties on some channels.
Fact: back in the sixties, the hard limit from the FCC was something like five minutes of commercials PER HOUR. Last time I recorded an allegedly hour long show off cable, it was 22 min of commercials.
There really is a difference. However... that difference is in the firmware, and that's where the manufacturers were scamming.
There is a thing called TLER - time to recover from errors. That is, if the drive is trying to write or read from a block, and it finds a problem, it goes to write to another block, or uses error recovery to read. For servers, they really want the time that the drive keeps trying to be under seven seconds. The consumer drives could be adjusted using software like hdparm.
Then around '09, and apparently starting with WD, they made a change to the firmware, and you could no longer change that variable. Servers scream and gag and give up, and tell you the drive's dying, when instead of spending under seven seconds, the drive keeps trying for ->over two minutes-. Everything you read says do *NOT* use those for RAID, either.
The server grade drives are very much *not* into spinning down, and they have that short TLER.
This is why, around here, we're ecstatic at the new WD Red drives, that are "targeted towards NAS"; the reality is that they've got TLER set to seven seconds. And, where the server grade drives are two to three times the price of consumer grade drives, or higher (some sources are a *lot* higher), the Reds are 1.33% of consumer grade drives.
Reliability: we have some of everything, and have not noticed a real difference in reliability. And our drives get used a *lot*.
As others have said, save all copies of email between you and your boss informing them of the flaws. Make sure all future emails are return receipt requested. Print them out. Take copies home... and then buy a safety vault in a bank, nothing less, and store them there. That way, they can't be made to disappear so easily.
Yes, I knew someone who lost their federal job, and the documentation at home disappeared.
Spend a week, and convince the others to follow suit: Document, down to quarter hours, how much time you spend doing your job, and how much is spent on help desk work. Then suggest what management is paying for a sysadmin or programmer to do help desk work.
The costs alone will push them, esp. if any or all of you are doing overtime frequently.
Add one more argument: what happens if one of you gets hit by a car, or the flu, or finds another job - how's the slack going to be picked up? Long time ago - I was working in a mainframe shop back then - the systems programmer went on vacation for a week. Tuesday of that week, they found him on the beach, and had him come back to fix a problem. A month later, one of the operators got promoted to assistant, and started training. Being irreplacable means never having a life of your own.
Last time I heard the mainframe "declared dead" was the late nineties... and at the same time, IBM was shipping more mainframes than they'd ever delivered before.
The desktop dead? Let's see, why might that not be the case? 1. People upgrading their existing systems, including hardware, rather than buying a new computer. 2. People without 20/10 vision, who can't read email on that tiny screen.
2.a Websites (such as MySQL's documentation) that use fixed widths and locations, resulting in
overprinting if you don't have your browser fullscreened. 3. Gamers. 4. Anyone who actually wants to watch a video. (I "watched" Thor on a 12" screen on an airplace a couple
of years ago, with daylight in the cabin. Tell me what you're watching on your expensive phone
gives a better view.) 5. Anyone who is actually doing work, including writing something longer than a twit, spreadsheets (the
original killer app), Power Point (no, no, I don't, but managers *adore* them), or graphics, or.... 6. Anyone who does more on it than a couch potato. 7. See 3. (Who do you think drove video?) 8. Um, most of the stuff that you look up on those phones and tablets? What do you think *THAT* is running on, if not
servers or mainframes?
I mean, I occasionally read stuff from the other side,,, but a fair bit of it ranges from Michelle Bachman (R-wacko)'s la-la land pronouncements, to a guy on a mailing list I'm on, who's sure that with the Fed printing money, it's devaluating as we type, and oh, yes, we live in a soclaist America....
How does this "bubble-bursting filter" screen out the total crazies, to get *reasonable* contrasting information?
Drop the first 10 years, or stuff unrelated to what you're doing now. You can always say, at the bottom, "Additional information upon request". I did that, and never got asked.
Oh, and nearly 10 years ago, I started dying my hair. And got a job where, in the time I was there, my manager turned 30.
A friend who was having trouble getting a job (also a programmer) - she's in her mid-forties - had started getting a few gray hairs... dyed them, and got a job fairly soon after.
There is an extreme agist bias in the industry, and the way the laws in the US are written, unless you've got seven witnesses and a video of them saying, "nyah, nyah, you're to old for me to hire", there's no way to prove it.
CERTAINLY not the ones at work, since most of us have a) cubes, where we can hear a lot of what our co-workers are saying, and just try to block it out - can google deal with *that*?; b) those living in "open plan" offices, which means it would be completely unusable.
mark -- Why voice computing will never come into the workplace:
Just fired employee, walking out of HR: START! RUN! FORMAT C:, YES, YES, YES!!!!!
This is a great idea. And the results are *expected* to be:
a) vastly lower recidivism
b) people *paying* taxes, rather than us paying taxes to keep them incarcerated.*
* The US has had more people in jail since '04 than the Soviet Union did at its worst under Stalin. Enjoy paying taxes for that?
The questions are:
a) is this the actual result, or do they wind up trying a new class of crime?
b) one of the major factors that results in crime is... gosh, NOT BEING ABLE TO FIND A JOB.
c) and now that they've done that, what about all the other prisons and jails in the country - say, two-three million people?
For example, there's the county jail in Brevard, Co, FL, where Cape Canaveral resides. Many of the women there
are in for prostitution, because find a job? They can't do simple math, know how to write a letter, get an
apartment, or open a checking account. (I have inside information on this, as you might guess.)
d) what about the large number of regular criminals, who turned to crime because they were just too stupid to
be able to find a job?
And before any of you libertarians start up, telling people to leave where they're grown up, to move somewhere that they have *zero* contacts, resources, or support system is an idiotic idea - please leave that in your video games; that's not real world.option.
If you're going to beam power down... the environmental impact statement for solar power satellites was done in the early eighties.
And no, idiots, it is not a MEGAWATT BEAM TO WIPE OUT CITIES - IIRC, they were talking about something about 10? 100? watts/m^2, and a large array of receivers in desert areas.
Right, and the finance world is *so* accurate and scienterrific.... and the crash of '08 couldn't *possibly* have happened, free markets stabilize themselves, and austerity gets people out of poverty, and....
Some years ago, a friend who teaches at colleges around the country, told us of a course he taught: science for non-science majors", and went down the food chain of those that took the class. Next to the bottom were the business majors, who "didn't get it, but didn't let that worry them".
And if you're interested, the bottom of the food chain were the communications majors, who "didn't get it, and didn't know that they didn't get it". That the folks who go into journalism, and HR, and PR.....
I beat Zappa. I remember having an argument about how MBA's were ruining America... with a professor from Univ of Pa who taught those courses at a party in 1983.
Clearly, I was right. But since I don't have millions of dollars, and am not a "celebrity", I don't have "traction"....
mark "remember, it was MBAs that crashed the economy"
Well, you know the name of the company. Just ignore the man in the black suit and shades in the nondescript car following you....
And for those too dense for satire, the threats - such as the pic of the woman's pet bird with crosshairs on it is, in fact, a criminal charge, and I don't think you'd like the computers in prison, if they let you use any....
What do the folks who were on the board that chose CGI Federal, anyway... and who appointed them to their jobs?
I mean, seeing a story about the QSSI, who was contracted to test the system... and apparently did *NOTHING*, and, oh, by the way, was bought in '12 by United Healthcare, whose campaign contributions were heavily to Republicans, oh, that wouldn't affect their job performance, no, no, ignore the man behind the curtain....
To assert that *all* federal workers are as bad as, well, the OP (whose work *I* wouldn't trust), is the claim of someone who's never worked for a big company, and believes Dilbert is all fantasy.
And by the way, I work for a US federal contractor. The folks I work with are good... and if you want to say something about *MY* *PERSONAL* *WORK* as a sr. Linux systems administror in a research group, I'd like you to clean out my toilet.... head first, asshole.
Slashdot Mirror
... why a project like X.org would provide support for a project whose entire existance is intended to put an end to X.org?
mark "that would be like me supporting Rush Limberger"
Could you point to documentation of this "liberal media", as opposed to right-wing opinion?
In the late nineties, and I have the newspaper clipping somewhere around my desk at home, a reporter did an actual survey: they excluded overtly political media like Mother Jones and US News and World Report, but counted the columnists in the mainstream media. Of what I think was 62, 3 were self-proclaimed "liberal", one or two self-procaimed "moderate", and 57 were self-proclaimed "conservative".
As an exercise for the student, I suggest you go through all the self-proclaimed "news" shows (excluding, for example, Jon Stewart and Colbert), and report on the numbers. Oh, and do mention which stations - you'll need to also exclude public access channels.
For extra credit, name one self-proclaimed socialist on the air, anywhere, as a regular.
mark
As you walk by them, pushing everything you own in a shopping cart, since you haven't been able to get a job in forever, due to the "invisible hand" of the "free market" making it much cheaper to have a robot do your job, and you didn't have $50,000,000 to invest....
mark
I'm so old, I remember that when cable first came in, the selling point was that you would never have to watch commercials again.
Really.
And you didn't, in the eighties, into the nineties on some channels.
Fact: back in the sixties, the hard limit from the FCC was something like five minutes of commercials PER HOUR. Last time I recorded an allegedly hour long show off cable, it was 22 min of commercials.
mark
Right, forgot slashdot edits URLs... Notice spaces before www....
http:/ /www.kleinbottle.com/index.htm
and the mug, er, "Klein Stein"
http:/// www.kleinbottle.com/drinking_mug_klein_bottle.htm
This is.
From Cliff Stoll's Acme Klein Bottles
mark "wish it wasn't quite that expensive...."
So, are they considering putting up solar power satellites, and beaming really cheap power down?
mark
PS The environmental impact study on SPS was done in the US... in the late seventies. No one's willing to front the money....
There really is a difference. However... that difference is in the firmware, and that's where the manufacturers were scamming.
There is a thing called TLER - time to recover from errors. That is, if the drive is trying to write or read from a block, and it finds a problem, it goes to write to another block, or uses error recovery to read. For servers, they really want the time that the drive keeps trying to be under seven seconds. The consumer drives could be adjusted using software like hdparm.
Then around '09, and apparently starting with WD, they made a change to the firmware, and you could no longer change that variable. Servers scream and gag and give up, and tell you the drive's dying, when instead of spending under seven seconds, the drive keeps trying for ->over two minutes-. Everything you read says do *NOT* use those for RAID, either.
The server grade drives are very much *not* into spinning down, and they have that short TLER.
This is why, around here, we're ecstatic at the new WD Red drives, that are "targeted towards NAS"; the reality is that they've got TLER set to seven seconds. And, where the server grade drives are two to three times the price of consumer grade drives, or higher (some sources are a *lot* higher), the Reds are 1.33% of consumer grade drives.
Reliability: we have some of everything, and have not noticed a real difference in reliability. And our drives get used a *lot*.
mark
As others have said, save all copies of email between you and your boss informing them of the flaws. Make sure all future emails are return receipt requested. Print them out. Take copies home... and then buy a safety vault in a bank, nothing less, and store them there. That way, they can't be made to disappear so easily.
Yes, I knew someone who lost their federal job, and the documentation at home disappeared.
mark
I mean, there's one of the eight copies of that manuscript by Abdul Alhazrad there....
mark
Spend a week, and convince the others to follow suit: Document, down to quarter hours, how much time you spend doing your job, and how much is spent on help desk work. Then suggest what management is paying for a sysadmin or programmer to do help desk work.
The costs alone will push them, esp. if any or all of you are doing overtime frequently.
Add one more argument: what happens if one of you gets hit by a car, or the flu, or finds another job - how's the slack going to be picked up? Long time ago - I was working in a mainframe shop back then - the systems programmer went on vacation for a week. Tuesday of that week, they found him on the beach, and had him come back to fix a problem. A month later, one of the operators got promoted to assistant, and started training. Being irreplacable means never having a life of your own.
mark
Last time I heard the mainframe "declared dead" was the late nineties... and at the same time, IBM was shipping more mainframes than they'd ever delivered before.
The desktop dead? Let's see, why might that not be the case?
1. People upgrading their existing systems, including hardware, rather than buying a new computer.
2. People without 20/10 vision, who can't read email on that tiny screen.
2.a Websites (such as MySQL's documentation) that use fixed widths and locations, resulting in
overprinting if you don't have your browser fullscreened.
3. Gamers.
4. Anyone who actually wants to watch a video. (I "watched" Thor on a 12" screen on an airplace a couple
of years ago, with daylight in the cabin. Tell me what you're watching on your expensive phone
gives a better view.)
5. Anyone who is actually doing work, including writing something longer than a twit, spreadsheets (the
original killer app), Power Point (no, no, I don't, but managers *adore* them), or graphics, or....
6. Anyone who does more on it than a couch potato.
7. See 3. (Who do you think drove video?)
8. Um, most of the stuff that you look up on those phones and tablets? What do you think *THAT* is running on, if not
servers or mainframes?
mark
I mean, I occasionally read stuff from the other side,,, but a fair bit of it ranges from Michelle Bachman (R-wacko)'s la-la land pronouncements, to a guy on a mailing list I'm on, who's sure that with the Fed printing money, it's devaluating as we type, and oh, yes, we live in a soclaist America....
How does this "bubble-bursting filter" screen out the total crazies, to get *reasonable* contrasting information?
mark
...a target. As in, paintball, anyone?
Or, for that matter, oops, I stumbled and spilled my coffee/soup/fries with ketchup all *over* that 'droid....
mark
That the usual slashdot turkeys don't even seem to be noticing: how did US DHS get copies of those records?
mark
Drop the first 10 years, or stuff unrelated to what you're doing now. You can always say, at the bottom, "Additional information upon request". I did that, and never got asked.
Oh, and nearly 10 years ago, I started dying my hair. And got a job where, in the time I was there, my manager turned 30.
A friend who was having trouble getting a job (also a programmer) - she's in her mid-forties - had started getting a few gray hairs... dyed them, and got a job fairly soon after.
There is an extreme agist bias in the industry, and the way the laws in the US are written, unless you've got seven witnesses and a video of them saying, "nyah, nyah, you're to old for me to hire", there's no way to prove it.
mark
CERTAINLY not the ones at work, since most of us have a) cubes, where we can hear a lot of what our co-workers are saying, and just try to block it out - can google deal with *that*?; b) those living in "open plan" offices, which means it would be completely unusable.
mark
--
Why voice computing will never come into the workplace:
Just fired employee, walking out of HR: START! RUN! FORMAT C:, YES, YES, YES!!!!!
Call the operator. Then ask for the company's Fraud and Abuse division. Trust me on this, the phone companies do NOT find this amusing.
mark "why, yes, I did used to work for telecoms...."
This is a great idea. And the results are *expected* to be:
a) vastly lower recidivism
b) people *paying* taxes, rather than us paying taxes to keep them incarcerated.*
* The US has had more people in jail since '04 than the Soviet Union did at its worst under Stalin. Enjoy paying taxes for that?
The questions are:
a) is this the actual result, or do they wind up trying a new class of crime?
b) one of the major factors that results in crime is... gosh, NOT BEING ABLE TO FIND A JOB.
c) and now that they've done that, what about all the other prisons and jails in the country - say, two-three million people?
For example, there's the county jail in Brevard, Co, FL, where Cape Canaveral resides. Many of the women there
are in for prostitution, because find a job? They can't do simple math, know how to write a letter, get an
apartment, or open a checking account. (I have inside information on this, as you might guess.)
d) what about the large number of regular criminals, who turned to crime because they were just too stupid to
be able to find a job?
And before any of you libertarians start up, telling people to leave where they're grown up, to move somewhere that they have *zero* contacts, resources, or support system is an idiotic idea - please leave that in your video games; that's not real world.option.
mark
If you're going to beam power down... the environmental impact statement for solar power satellites was done in the early eighties.
And no, idiots, it is not a MEGAWATT BEAM TO WIPE OUT CITIES - IIRC, they were talking about something about 10? 100? watts/m^2, and a large array of receivers in desert areas.
mark
Right, and the finance world is *so* accurate and scienterrific.... and the crash of '08 couldn't *possibly* have happened, free markets stabilize themselves, and austerity gets people out of poverty, and....
Some years ago, a friend who teaches at colleges around the country, told us of a course he taught: science for non-science majors", and went down the food chain of those that took the class. Next to the bottom were the business majors, who "didn't get it, but didn't let that worry them".
And if you're interested, the bottom of the food chain were the communications majors, who "didn't get it, and didn't know that they didn't get it". That the folks who go into journalism, and HR, and PR.....
mark
I beat Zappa. I remember having an argument about how MBA's were ruining America... with a professor from Univ of Pa who taught those courses at a party in 1983.
Clearly, I was right. But since I don't have millions of dollars, and am not a "celebrity", I don't have "traction"....
mark "remember, it was MBAs that crashed the economy"
Well, you know the name of the company. Just ignore the man in the black suit and shades in the nondescript car following you....
And for those too dense for satire, the threats - such as the pic of the woman's pet bird with crosshairs on it is, in fact, a criminal charge, and I don't think you'd like the computers in prison, if they let you use any....
mark
What do the folks who were on the board that chose CGI Federal, anyway... and who appointed them to their jobs?
I mean, seeing a story about the QSSI, who was contracted to test the system... and apparently did *NOTHING*, and, oh, by the way, was bought in '12 by United Healthcare, whose campaign contributions were heavily to Republicans, oh, that wouldn't affect their job performance, no, no, ignore the man behind the curtain....
mark "would they stoop to sabatoge?"
To assert that *all* federal workers are as bad as, well, the OP (whose work *I* wouldn't trust), is the claim of someone who's never worked for a big company, and believes Dilbert is all fantasy.
And by the way, I work for a US federal contractor. The folks I work with are good... and if you want to say something about *MY* *PERSONAL* *WORK* as a sr. Linux systems administror in a research group, I'd like you to clean out my toilet.... head first, asshole.
mark