Back in the seventies, I heard that Ma Bell employees used to "brag" about how many hours they'd worked that week.
Then, '95-'97, I worked for Ameritech, a Baby Bell, since swallowed by SBC (which then swallowed AT&T, and renamed itself to AT SBC is the true Evil Empire), and discovered what was going on: ludicrous deadlines, utterly unrealistic goals, and little sub-empires that, rather than looking for buy-in, got the authority to tell us how to make the Perfect World (tm), as Revealed by them....
Took about a year and a half, year and three quarters, before a psychologist friend gave a professional opinion that I was *this* far from clinical burnout.
All for well under $60k/yr.
And they claim they've got all these unfilled tech jobs, and can't find people to do them, so Congress, please let us bring people over who'll work for diddly-squat, and do 70 or 80 hour weeks with no complaint....
Sure... and they can change what they want before they put it out.
Y'know, like before the landsats showed that the lumber companies in the northwet of the US were clearcutting, and "replanting" by shoving seedlings in the ground and walking away, leaving, well, clearcut and a very large number of dead seedlings.
Why would I trust weathersats from, say, Faux News? They'll just show blue skies all day....
I WANT MY DAMN TAX DOLLARS SPENT ON THEM, NOT GIVING MILLIONS TO CORPORATE EXECS.
And I gather you (the OP) is getting worried; the problem is that you're not paranoid enough.
Do you, for example, validate your code using the HTML validator from w3c?
You also need to learn to run tools. I mean, online website tools are nice... as long as you're *SURE* that they've not been hacked, nor are they actually crackers trying to lure you in.
Determining what tools to use is another issue: are you writing for Windows or *Nix? There's a lot more free tools on the latter, but you will have to learn more. For example, there are older, free versions of nessus.
Get yourself a good book, maybe from the publisher O'Reilly, on security.
mark "not even getting a kickback from O'Reilly for the plug"
First thing: do NOT just teach keyboarding. My son, when he was in a really lousy high school in Chicago in the late nineties, had what the school claimed was a "computer course"; as a degreed professional, with over 30 years experience, I'd get on a witness stand and swear it was *NOT*, it was a commercial typing class, as they used to call it.
You can do better.
Around the same time, two of my daughers were in a school in a tiny town in VA, and got basic d/b and coding (I think the latter was optional), and spreadsheets, etc.
Grab some 1-2 generation old computers, 5-10 years old, so they'll be way less likely to be stolen. Put Linux on them (I like CentOS, the same as RHEL, because it's *not* cutting edge, but stable, reliable... and will need that much less admin work). If you go with any RHEL-derived distro, you may have to stay with the 5.x (still supported till '17), since they stop supporting i386 (I think that includes up to 686, but I could be wrong) in the newer kernels.
Give the the whole LibreOffice suite, and show them how to use it (and yes, let them cut and paste (something my son's "teacher" didn't allow....). Remember, you're NOT teaching them touch typing, you're teaching them how to really use a computer.
For the ones who really like the hardware, make sure you tear down and/or rebuild one or more every year, and supervise *them* doing the work. Teach *them* how to do their own basic security.
If the "enemy" hacker is trying to say, launch missles, or cause a flood from a dam, or drop planes (other than planes attacking *them*, directly), I guess.
If there's nothing comparable to "violent criminal behavior", or if it's informational or monetary, hell, no. Even Hammurabi, thousands of years ago, wasn't approving of killing someone for stealing a loaf of bread.
But diesel's reasonable... given the probable weight of the vehicle, assuming that it's armored almost as much as a Hummer in Afghanistan.
Some said something about not being able to buy diesel in the US? Clueless, are we? Ford F-350 are diesels.
But they don't *want* to sell diesels - I'd assume that the oil companies had something to do with that, as well, since diesels get better milage - since, as a friend who used to be a diesel mechanic tells me, you don't need to pull the engine to do a rebuild, and you only need that every 300,000-500,000 mi.
Now what pisses *me* off is that you cannot buy a hybrid minvan in the US. Period. There ain't none.
mark "maybe because they'd be *too* popular for the oil companies?"
At least, those of us in The Movement did. Mainstream, oh, no, they're just cranks and crazies, no, no, can't happen here, that someone would commit treason to become ruler.
Now, for extra points, what about the report from the released KGB files from 10 or so years ago, that they had an agent IN THE ROOM when George HW Bush, before he and Reagan were elected in '80, offering Khomeini & co arms for hostages - the missles and weapons for them not relesing the embassy hostages until after the elections - wasn't that also treason?
We won't even *start* on Cheney outing Valerie Plame.
mark "the Republicans? Treason in pursuit of power isn't treason?"
The office Sen. Jesse Helms (who is currently rotting in the ground), when he was in the Senate then, *said* that the thousands of snail mail letters coming to the officer were running 100-1 against starting the war - that's ONE HUNDRED TO ONE AGAINST, but he voted yes.
Just yesterday, "Amy Kremer, who helped found the Atlanta Tea Party and subsequently rose to leadership positions in the Tea Party Express.", was interviewed on TV, and asked whether the American people should have believe Bush, Cheney, et al, and she said they don't have enough information, and that that should belive the President.
So, no, tweets wouldn't have done it. They'd planned it years before - go to the Project for a New American Century website, and in their base documents is a letter written in 1998 or so, urging then-President Clinton to invade Iraq... signed by, among others, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz. Note that Cheney arguably committed treason by outing CIA agent Valerie Plame, and that some of the in-field people she was running vanished, presumably killed, becuase he wanted to discredit her husband's report on the falseness of the "yellow cake uranium" issue.
They p0wned you, America, and it's the land of the cowards and the owned (disagree? really? dealt with the TSA lately?)
Now, *real* professionals, if it's not already arranged, arrange for this thing called a "regular maintenance window", which everyone up above signs off on, and you get control to do what's necessary, and everyone knows what they're supposed to do to work around it.
And don't talk to me about "mission critical" - this is the way it was done at the 911 Call Center for one of the five biggest cities in the US, 2-3 times a year, when I worked supporting them a dozen years ago. You don't get more "mission critical" than that.
I work for a federal contracttor at a US gov't non-military agency. Yeah, we get our daily dose of Chinese trying to break in with ssh... but we get as many or more from:
- the Netherlands
- Brazil and well below that, Italy, Turkey, Hungary, Kazakhstan, etc.
Do something about Brazil and the Netherlands, guys!
Excerpt: The very clever Schickele writes music in the name of P.D.Q Bach which pokes fun at the greatest classical works, but at the same time, by poking fun, he demonstrates the utmost respect for it.
Who else would make Beethoven's Fifth Symphony the subject of sports commentators? P.D.Q Bach does in New Horizon's in Music Appreciation, possibly the funniest segment of classical music ever written. And yet, without realising it, you actually learn about the music too. The ideas of themes, motifs, cadenzas, solos and even sonata form recapitulations are painlessly expressed. --- end excerpt --- http://www.good-music-guide.com/reviews/070_pdq_bach.htm
Pulling the system out of the case seems... odd. Are you that short on space that you can't have another rack?
Several reasons:
1. dust
2. static
3. a. cooling: real servers have plastic shrouds to guide the air from the fans through the heat sinks. Without that,
the cooling won't be anywhere near as good, and possibliy not good enough to keep them from shutting
down when they're being run hard.
b. DO NOT ALTERNATE directions. In data centers, in server rooms, etc, you have all in a row facing the same
way, and blow your cool air towards the front, and let it get somewhat warm behind. This is how they're designed
to be used.
UPSes on the bottom: sure. I've put some in the middle of the rack, but those are rack-mount. MAKE SURE that you leave clearance to open 'em up when you need to replace the batteries.
NOTE: when you buy replacement batteries for these UPSes, UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES BELIEVE ANY MANUFACTURER OR RESELLER. TELL THEM THAT IF THEY DON'T SEND YOU HR - HIGH RATE - BATTERIES, YOU WILL SEND THEM BACK. APC rackmounts WILL NOT ACCEPT *A*N*Y*T*H*I*N*G* but an HR battery, and continue to tell you that you need to replace if, forever.
I'm assuming you'll be running linux. I'm also assuming that you're using this for heavy duty computing, not load balancing or H/A (high availability).
For clustering, also check out torque, which is a standard clustering package, though it does need the jobs to be parallel processing aware.
For the person who mentioned "time" as a cost: I'd assume that the OP was asked to do this "as time permitted", and is certainly something to do that's useful, as opposed to playing solitaire, waiting for something to need work....
Yep. John Carter knew 'em as "White Martians", who preyed on the rest of the Martians for millenia....
And to the idiot who commented about the "red planet" being commies, may I point out that for the last 13 years in the US, for some mind-bogglingly stupid reason, the right wing has been labeled "red state". Now, unless they're claiming to be Stalinists, I'd say the color's wrong....
But with climate change deniers there, why not send all the Republicans to the place they want to make Earth for us: Venus.... (check out the climate there....)
Folks, pull out your Swiss Army knife, and open the only or largest blade, and measure it with a ruler.
I was just in a thread on a mailing list yesterday, and suddenly thought of doing this. Measure from the tip to the hilt, *NOT* to the end of the sharp edge.
Mine's 2.5", and it's not one of the big ones. In fact, I think the only ones that would have a blade that short are the "executive" models, suitable for trimming your cuticles....
Like the TSA: sounds good, all security theater in practice.
A number of years ago, Robert Reich had a great comment: the president of a company, or whoever passes for the CEO's right-hand person, gets *maybe* paid a tenth of what the CEO does...what does the CEO *do* that's worth ten times that?
Then there's the *fact* that, after inflation, unless you're just ramping up, our salaries have been mostly static, while theirs have gotten insane. See , and argue with that.
But I *really* don't understand, if you're posting on slashdot, meaning you're not a millionaire slumming, why anyone here is arguing against capping those - don't you *want* more money? As long as they can keep raising their own, you'll NEVER get more.
Oddly enough, the 90% of us in the US had the highest purchasing power in the seventies, when the top tax bracket had been "lowered" to 70%... so there was an incentive to put money back into the company, instead of taking it out to make a few people so rich they could buy the US gov't....
In reality, the controllers - if any, if they're not autonomous 'bots - will be so busy trying to get the enemy drones that they'll slaughter the people who they're allegedly protecting - y'know, the folks whose country it is? - without even noticing.
Come *on*, when a drone, or a cruise missle, targets in the middle of a village or city, you really think that the explosion, the shrapnel, and the falling bits and pieces of buildings and/or vehicles won't kill and maim innocents standing by?
Really? Care to give me control of a drone, and tell me where you are right now?
All you kiddies that *want* to be online 24x7 never had to work that way (says the guy who spent two years wearing one, or two, pagers 24x7x365.25).
And all that texting, like the cartoons of two folks at a table texting each other, just shows that you haven't grown up, and are *terrified* of actually talking to another human being. You'd rather imagine that they were all simulations, so that you didn't have to consider getting hurt, or hurting them.
Think you're meat*, you do.
mark "got a life in the RW"
* Check out the cyberpunk usage of the word "meat"
When I'm at home, I don't want to be working. And why should I save money for the company - will they pay me at least part of the difference to work at home, that they're not paying for office space?
Now, I vehemently object to the assininity of "open plan" office space - that's for managers who want to watch you at all times, to make sure you're typing (I actually had a VP once that did that, on occasion), ignoring one of the first things you learn on your college orientation: find somewhere *quiet* to work.
That said, I want it all taken care of for me - they provide me a place to do work for them, anyway.
And I read in the trade press, over 20 years ago, when I didn't think many companies allowed telecommuting, that most of those that had the most experience with it really, really wanted the employees in, in person, at least one-two days a week, not just for meetings, but for the water cooler conversations that turned out to be *very* important, and would never have occured if you weren't there to hear a conversation going on....
Slashdot Mirror
Back in the seventies, I heard that Ma Bell employees used to "brag" about how many hours they'd worked that week.
Then, '95-'97, I worked for Ameritech, a Baby Bell, since swallowed by SBC (which then swallowed AT&T, and renamed itself to AT SBC is the true Evil Empire), and discovered what was going on: ludicrous deadlines, utterly unrealistic goals, and little sub-empires that, rather than looking for buy-in, got the authority to tell us how to make the Perfect World (tm), as Revealed by them....
Took about a year and a half, year and three quarters, before a psychologist friend gave a professional opinion that I was *this* far from clinical burnout.
All for well under $60k/yr.
And they claim they've got all these unfilled tech jobs, and can't find people to do them, so Congress, please let us bring people over who'll work for diddly-squat, and do 70 or 80 hour weeks with no complaint....
mark
Sure... and they can change what they want before they put it out.
Y'know, like before the landsats showed that the lumber companies in the northwet of the US were clearcutting, and "replanting" by shoving seedlings in the ground and walking away, leaving, well, clearcut and a very large number of dead seedlings.
Why would I trust weathersats from, say, Faux News? They'll just show blue skies all day....
I WANT MY DAMN TAX DOLLARS SPENT ON THEM, NOT GIVING MILLIONS TO CORPORATE EXECS.
mark
And I gather you (the OP) is getting worried; the problem is that you're not paranoid enough.
Do you, for example, validate your code using the HTML validator from w3c?
You also need to learn to run tools. I mean, online website tools are nice... as long as you're *SURE* that they've not been hacked, nor are they actually crackers trying to lure you in.
Determining what tools to use is another issue: are you writing for Windows or *Nix? There's a lot more free tools on the latter, but you will have to learn more. For example, there are older, free versions of nessus.
Get yourself a good book, maybe from the publisher O'Reilly, on security.
mark "not even getting a kickback from O'Reilly for the plug"
First thing: do NOT just teach keyboarding. My son, when he was in a really lousy high school in Chicago in the late nineties, had what the school claimed was a "computer course"; as a degreed professional, with over 30 years experience, I'd get on a witness stand and swear it was *NOT*, it was a commercial typing class, as they used to call it.
You can do better.
Around the same time, two of my daughers were in a school in a tiny town in VA, and got basic d/b and coding (I think the latter was optional), and spreadsheets, etc.
Grab some 1-2 generation old computers, 5-10 years old, so they'll be way less likely to be stolen. Put Linux on them (I like CentOS, the same as RHEL, because it's *not* cutting edge, but stable, reliable... and will need that much less admin work). If you go with any RHEL-derived distro, you may have to stay with the 5.x (still supported till '17), since they stop supporting i386 (I think that includes up to 686, but I could be wrong) in the newer kernels.
Give the the whole LibreOffice suite, and show them how to use it (and yes, let them cut and paste (something my son's "teacher" didn't allow....). Remember, you're NOT teaching them touch typing, you're teaching them how to really use a computer.
For the ones who really like the hardware, make sure you tear down and/or rebuild one or more every year, and supervise *them* doing the work. Teach *them* how to do their own basic security.
I think you'll be happy with the results.
mark
If the "enemy" hacker is trying to say, launch missles, or cause a flood from a dam, or drop planes (other than planes attacking *them*, directly), I guess.
If there's nothing comparable to "violent criminal behavior", or if it's informational or monetary, hell, no. Even Hammurabi, thousands of years ago, wasn't approving of killing someone for stealing a loaf of bread.
mark
Gee, all the reports *I* read yesterday said 80M, not 100M. You could lose homo sap evolving in that gap, y'know.
mark
(http colon //24.5-cent.us/egoless_documentation.doc), published in SysAdmin mag.
Try writing recipes that way.... Note that I saw *DRAFT* when I give it to users, *before* publishing....
mark
Too bad it's not set up to use biodiesel.
But diesel's reasonable... given the probable weight of the vehicle, assuming that it's armored almost as much as a Hummer in Afghanistan.
Some said something about not being able to buy diesel in the US? Clueless, are we? Ford F-350 are diesels.
But they don't *want* to sell diesels - I'd assume that the oil companies had something to do with that, as well, since diesels get better milage - since, as a friend who used to be a diesel mechanic tells me, you don't need to pull the engine to do a rebuild, and you only need that every 300,000-500,000 mi.
Now what pisses *me* off is that you cannot buy a hybrid minvan in the US. Period. There ain't none.
mark "maybe because they'd be *too* popular for the oil companies?"
At least, those of us in The Movement did. Mainstream, oh, no, they're just cranks and crazies, no, no, can't happen here, that someone would commit treason to become ruler.
Now, for extra points, what about the report from the released KGB files from 10 or so years ago, that they had an agent IN THE ROOM when George HW Bush, before he and Reagan were elected in '80, offering Khomeini & co arms for hostages - the missles and weapons for them not relesing the embassy hostages until after the elections - wasn't that also treason?
We won't even *start* on Cheney outing Valerie Plame.
mark "the Republicans? Treason in pursuit of power isn't treason?"
The office Sen. Jesse Helms (who is currently rotting in the ground), when he was in the Senate then, *said* that the thousands of snail mail letters coming to the officer were running 100-1 against starting the war - that's ONE HUNDRED TO ONE AGAINST, but he voted yes.
Just yesterday, "Amy Kremer, who helped found the Atlanta Tea Party and subsequently rose to leadership positions in the Tea Party Express.", was interviewed on TV, and asked whether the American people should have believe Bush, Cheney, et al, and she said they don't have enough information, and that that should belive the President.
So, no, tweets wouldn't have done it. They'd planned it years before - go to the Project for a New American Century website, and in their base documents is a letter written in 1998 or so, urging then-President Clinton to invade Iraq... signed by, among others, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz. Note that Cheney arguably committed treason by outing CIA agent Valerie Plame, and that some of the in-field people she was running vanished, presumably killed, becuase he wanted to discredit her husband's report on the falseness of the "yellow cake uranium" issue.
They p0wned you, America, and it's the land of the cowards and the owned (disagree? really? dealt with the TSA lately?)
mark
If it were me, I'd be talking to the FBI, since this probably falls under a) wire fraud, and b) interstate commerce.
mark "my 'social media' are email lists"
I skimmed through a number of comments.
Now, *real* professionals, if it's not already arranged, arrange for this thing called a "regular maintenance window", which everyone up above signs off on, and you get control to do what's necessary, and everyone knows what they're supposed to do to work around it.
And don't talk to me about "mission critical" - this is the way it was done at the 911 Call Center for one of the five biggest cities in the US, 2-3 times a year, when I worked supporting them a dozen years ago. You don't get more "mission critical" than that.
mark
I am *so* tired of China! China! China!
I work for a federal contracttor at a US gov't non-military agency. Yeah, we get our daily dose of Chinese trying to break in with ssh... but we get as many or more from:
- the Netherlands
- Brazil
and well below that, Italy, Turkey, Hungary, Kazakhstan, etc.
Do something about Brazil and the Netherlands, guys!
Excerpt:
The very clever Schickele writes music in the name of P.D.Q Bach which pokes fun at the greatest classical works, but at the same time, by poking fun, he demonstrates the utmost respect for it.
Who else would make Beethoven's Fifth Symphony the subject of sports commentators? P.D.Q Bach does in New Horizon's in Music Appreciation, possibly the funniest segment of classical music ever written. And yet, without realising it, you actually learn about the music too. The ideas of themes, motifs, cadenzas, solos and even sonata form recapitulations are painlessly expressed. ://www.good-music-guide.com/reviews/070_pdq_bach.htm
--- end excerpt ---
http
mark
And the summary of the Times article suggests that.
And the Times, "left wing"? What Americans know of socialism is identical to what "good Germans" knew of Jews in the late thirties.
mark
Pulling the system out of the case seems... odd. Are you that short on space that you can't have another rack?
Several reasons:
1. dust
2. static
3. a. cooling: real servers have plastic shrouds to guide the air from the fans through the heat sinks. Without that,
the cooling won't be anywhere near as good, and possibliy not good enough to keep them from shutting
down when they're being run hard.
b. DO NOT ALTERNATE directions. In data centers, in server rooms, etc, you have all in a row facing the same
way, and blow your cool air towards the front, and let it get somewhat warm behind. This is how they're designed
to be used.
UPSes on the bottom: sure. I've put some in the middle of the rack, but those are rack-mount. MAKE SURE that you leave clearance to open 'em up when you need to replace the batteries.
NOTE: when you buy replacement batteries for these UPSes, UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES BELIEVE ANY MANUFACTURER OR RESELLER. TELL THEM THAT IF THEY DON'T SEND YOU HR - HIGH RATE - BATTERIES, YOU WILL SEND THEM BACK. APC rackmounts WILL NOT ACCEPT *A*N*Y*T*H*I*N*G* but an HR battery, and continue to tell you that you need to replace if, forever.
I'm assuming you'll be running linux. I'm also assuming that you're using this for heavy duty computing, not load balancing or H/A (high availability).
For clustering, also check out torque, which is a standard clustering package, though it does need the jobs to be parallel processing aware.
For the person who mentioned "time" as a cost: I'd assume that the OP was asked to do this "as time permitted", and is certainly something to do that's useful, as opposed to playing solitaire, waiting for something to need work....
mark
Yep. John Carter knew 'em as "White Martians", who preyed on the rest of the Martians for millenia....
And to the idiot who commented about the "red planet" being commies, may I point out that for the last 13 years in the US, for some mind-bogglingly stupid reason, the right wing has been labeled "red state". Now, unless they're claiming to be Stalinists, I'd say the color's wrong....
But with climate change deniers there, why not send all the Republicans to the place they want to make Earth for us: Venus.... (check out the climate there....)
mark
Folks, pull out your Swiss Army knife, and open the only or largest blade, and measure it with a ruler.
I was just in a thread on a mailing list yesterday, and suddenly thought of doing this. Measure from the tip to the hilt, *NOT* to the end of the sharp edge.
Mine's 2.5", and it's not one of the big ones. In fact, I think the only ones that would have a blade that short are the "executive" models, suitable for trimming your cuticles....
Like the TSA: sounds good, all security theater in practice.
mark
Whoops, forgot slashdot's auto-editing. The article I was pointing to when I said "see" was http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/03/corporate-profits-are-eating-the-economy/273687/
Yup.
A number of years ago, Robert Reich had a great comment: the president of a company, or whoever passes for the CEO's right-hand person, gets *maybe* paid a tenth of what the CEO does...what does the CEO *do* that's worth ten times that?
Then there's the *fact* that, after inflation, unless you're just ramping up, our salaries have been mostly static, while theirs have gotten insane. See , and argue with that.
But I *really* don't understand, if you're posting on slashdot, meaning you're not a millionaire slumming, why anyone here is arguing against capping those - don't you *want* more money? As long as they can keep raising their own, you'll NEVER get more.
Oddly enough, the 90% of us in the US had the highest purchasing power in the seventies, when the top tax bracket had been "lowered" to 70%... so there was an incentive to put money back into the company, instead of taking it out to make a few people so rich they could buy the US gov't....
mark
You're living in a videogame world.
In reality, the controllers - if any, if they're not autonomous 'bots - will be so busy trying to get the enemy drones that they'll slaughter the people who they're allegedly protecting - y'know, the folks whose country it is? - without even noticing.
Come *on*, when a drone, or a cruise missle, targets in the middle of a village or city, you really think that the explosion, the shrapnel, and the falling bits and pieces of buildings and/or vehicles won't kill and maim innocents standing by?
Really? Care to give me control of a drone, and tell me where you are right now?
mark
All you kiddies that *want* to be online 24x7 never had to work that way (says the guy who spent two years wearing one, or two, pagers 24x7x365.25).
And all that texting, like the cartoons of two folks at a table texting each other, just shows that you haven't grown up, and are *terrified* of actually talking to another human being. You'd rather imagine that they were all simulations, so that you didn't have to consider getting hurt, or hurting them.
Think you're meat*, you do.
mark "got a life in the RW"
* Check out the cyberpunk usage of the word "meat"
The windowing operating system masquerading as a text editor? Please, take it to alt.religion.editors....
mark
So, what do you think, slashdotters - should I start a kickstart for a project to build a self-moving, steerable iceberg?
mark "the ship sank; get over it"
When I'm at home, I don't want to be working. And why should I save money for the company - will they pay me at least part of the difference to work at home, that they're not paying for office space?
Now, I vehemently object to the assininity of "open plan" office space - that's for managers who want to watch you at all times, to make sure you're typing (I actually had a VP once that did that, on occasion), ignoring one of the first things you learn on your college orientation: find somewhere *quiet* to work.
That said, I want it all taken care of for me - they provide me a place to do work for them, anyway.
And I read in the trade press, over 20 years ago, when I didn't think many companies allowed telecommuting, that most of those that had the most experience with it really, really wanted the employees in, in person, at least one-two days a week, not just for meetings, but for the water cooler conversations that turned out to be *very* important, and would never have occured if you weren't there to hear a conversation going on....
mark