I had a phone interview with google around '05, I think, and was *told* by the interviewer that they had over half a million (physical) servers. I don't remember the exact number, but it was between 500k and 600k servers.
So, Dell seems to be in a mindset unchanged since the fifties.
I chose that, rather than earlier, because in '54 and '55, Lionel, then the premier maker of model trains, decided that girls might like trains, too, and so put out a trainset aimed at girls.
How was it aimed at girls? It had a pink locomotive.
Needless to say, it was an utter flop. Girls who wanted model trains wanted TRAINS.
Women who want/need a laptop want/need a computer, not an electronic supermarket women's mag.
And what do women want? Try reading the 14th Century Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The answer? What do YOU READING THIS WANT? "What you will", that is, things to go the way you want them to, not to always have to defer to parent/boss/other authority figure.
How hard is it to understand that?
mark "men are from Earth; women are from Earth; get over it"
Back here in the US, we're working at it, also (though this administration may change some things). Does anyone want to argue that mandatory drug tests for jobs, and for some, random drug tests (for someone not operating a vehicle) isn't "overly controlled"? How about this decade, when suddenly employers want credit checks, and now more and more want criminal background checks?
Tell me that the companies that own the government aren't the real Big Brother. Put that in the context of the people who've been fired, or refused jobs, based on their social networking or non-business websites. Or in the fears that companies will look at DNA or other medical records to deny jobs or fire someone, to keep their medical costs down.
Go find a large corporation that doesn't do that, is my answer to the libertarian "vote with your feet", *ESP* in the middle of a depression (four or more quarters of shrinking GDP). For that matter, find a middle-sized company that isn't starting this.
The US voted out fascism, but Big Brother is only blunted, not turned back, at least yet.
I live on the far north side, inside the city. Drive downtown in rush hour traffic (gas, aggravation, traffic jams, accidents...) Pay for parking, where I see daily "early bird specials" of $18 or $22 per day (I've heard per month rates, but they're around $100 or more, sometimes way more, depending on how far they are from the office buildings). Drive home in rush hour traffic (see above)
Or Spend $60/mo, and either drive or ride my bike the 2mi to the train, and once I'm on the train, get downtown in 20 min.
And, occasionally, look at at the "expressway", and shake my head at the idiots who drive that every day....
I *adore* the folks who think this is terrible, and then seem to think it's going to hit us.
Let's be real: is there *anyone* here who's in the top 5% of the income profile? Hell, no, no one with that much money hangs out here, commenting on/. The nearest we get are the suckers who are *sure* they're Going To Be Rich Any Day Now, If They Work Hard Enough (and have no life).
The odds are hundreds to one, or maybe thousands, that you will *NEVER* be richer than the rest of us.
Now, let's get to that famous "enlightened self-interest": in 1972, 25% of the federal revenue stream was from corporate taxes, and 16.67% from individual income taxes. It's now just over 10% from corporate taxes, and about 44% from individuals. (Numbers from the IRS's Tax Stats at a glance.) Oh, and in '72, the top tax bracket was 70%.
Meanwhile, every year, or every quarter (until the last nine months or so), we keep hearing about record profits, while the good jobs here get offshored, or go to H1-B's.
So, let's not only kill the tax havens, let's *soak* Bill Gates, and Larry Ellison, and the Waltons, and all the rest. Get rid of separate capital gains taxes, and roll it into straight income. Won't affect 401Ks, or other retirement, only the folks with *millions* of income annually from stocks.
At the behest of my manager, I've been working on implementing Spacewalk here at my current contract. It's the open-sourced version of Redhat's Satellite.
Downside: they've only recently released 0.5, and there are still lots of bugs (help doesn't, in general, work).
But you can inventory, and push, updates to rpms; ditto for configuration files, and there's kickstart support. It also supports other than RH and Fedora; I've been working with CentOS (yeah, I know, just the serial numbers filed off), but it appears to me that it should support any distro with yum.
Someone noted it requires Oracle: true, the free version of Oracle XE (10g).
I don't like it - way too many problems yet - but it does work (mostly), and is explicitly for what the poster was looking. You can put multiple systems into a group, and do the group (I think), and you define your own software channels and child channels, and subscribe systems to them. It should tell you when they need upgrades (as long as you keep your internal repository up to date).
It is *NOT* an "action-filled story about the effect of time dilation on the troops returning from the war", it's about something even worse than Vietnam, an endless war, started for no reason anyone understands, and going on for no reason anyone understands, and that includes those running it.
Oh, that's right, like Iraq, except centuries longer.
If python is like Rand, then it's no wonder a lot of the times I've tried to install packages in python wouldn't install, what with conflicting libraries, and conflicts with libraries *other* packages use, and on and on.
No, Rand was a hypocrite (married to get to the US, not "on her own merits", then dropped the guy), irrational (anyone who's not rich, for example, is violating her principles by accepting a public school education, or using publicly-funded roads, etc), and dirty (Greenspan & co, with their libertarian belief system, now *prove* to lead to mass theft). She also, in effect, is against human society....
mark "not fantastically enthused with python, either"
Obviously, the "enlightened self-interest" of companies doesn't work, given the constant reports of breakins.
And for those who don't realize (like Jane Q. Public), utilities like the electric grid, and municipal water and gas supplies, are computer controlled (no! duh!), and in some cases, Dilbert managers have had the controls made accessible via the 'Net, rather than an air gap between their control systems and the 'Net.
A year or two ago, over in the UK, there was a train accident - don't remember if it was a derailment, or a passenger train running into a freight train - because some idiot teenage cracker had gotten into the rail line's control system and screwed with the actual switches on the tracks.
Decades ago, a polygraph expert wired tomatoes, and found significant reaction on being cut, implying tomatoes feel pain.
Vegans, it's rocks and water for you!
On the *other* hand, I *do* feel a responsibility to minimize pain. If I could afford kosher or halal (the Islamic equivalent) meat only, I would, since they don't just say that someone's prayed over the critters, but rather that they were killed quickly and cleanly, with minimal pain, as opposed to much of the meat packing industry, some of which still use methods that were written about, and caused widespread outrage, a century ago by the "yellow journalists".
If you want to get her to Linux, a few things: first, turn off all services that get started on bootup she'll never use, such as apache (if it's installed), or a d/b (ditto).
Next, and everyone will have their own favs here, I use IceWM as a window manager. Unlike the 12M or whatever of KDE, it's 600k, and comes up *far* faster, since it also doesn't start half a dozen heavyweight processes. Has a few little nicities, like the system monitor on the toolbar. My only irritation with it is that it does *not* return your windows to the position they were in when you shut down.
Third: thunderbird. On her existing XP, I *hope* she's not using virusspreaderExpress, er, Lookout Express.... But even so, at work, I've got Office 2007, and Outlook is a *dog*; in addition, it's clear to me that M$ did it *again*: wrote slow bloatware, and so to speed it up, they're making direct hardware calls, *not* system calls (I get that from the fact that the system hangs while it's coming up and trying to connect to the Exchange server). T-bird, for its faults (I *loathe* that they're trying to make it look like Outlook), is reasonably fast.
Firefox, of course.
Oh, and if, for some reason, she needs a console, screw Konsole: use rxvt, which is *way* faster on coming up, and a normal x window.
No one hiring someone right out of school expects an "expert" in a language. Back in the mid-nineties, I was working for Ameritech (a Baby Bell), and did the technical part of the interview for programmers for all five teams under my director. One of my std. questions for right-out-of-school was to ask them what the largest program they'd worked on was. My range was 500, 1000, 5000 lines.... Consider that my manager there asked me how many lines our systems were, and a dumb linecount - wc -l - told us a quarter *million* lines.
If your manager's any good, you'll be doing maintenance and then enhancement of existing code.
On the other hand... I love the folks saying that C's good. I have over 10 years of it, and have been looking since last Sept (I'm currently on a three-month contract as an admin), and have seen almost *zero* C (unless you're either a kernel hacker or write embedded) (and I've been looking in Chicago, DC, Philly, the Bay Area, Portland, and Seattle). I'm wondering where all the maintenance and enhancement on all the code we wrote in the nineties is....
And for those who are critical of Harlan's lawsuit, how do you feel about the RIAA, and all the money the actual *artists* DON'T get, while the record companies make out like bandits? Hell, I've heard Arlo Guthrie say it took 30 *years* before he got one penny of royalties from his record company for Alice's Restaurant.
You think there's a difference between Harlan, and other writers, and musicians?
I was at the Chicago Maritime Festival yesterday, and had dinner with a bunch of folks I know, mostly musicians. One member of a the group was very outspoken about how the DMCA and all had *seriously* screwed her group, and all indie musicians. From what she was saying, you have to pay the record companies... and if you're not signed, there is *no* *way* to sell, other than individually, via the online sources that sell by the track.
In addition, the recent screwing by the RIAA & buddies to increase the fees paid by streaming media stations drove *many* under... and a lot of musicians, such as those who are on the renfaire circuit, lost their outlets....
Then, of course, there's the clip I hear of Arlo Guthrie saying that it took him THIRTY YEARS to get the first dime of royalties from Alice's Restaurant.
But the RIAA is *so* about musicians getting paid for their art....
How 'bout giving them a) a raise, b) a percentage of the profits based on what it does for the bottom line, or c) a promotion and a raise?
Or is it too much to be given what they *DESERVE*?
In the early nineties, I worked for a company in Austin, TX. I got put on thie project, where they handed me a literal shoebox of floppies, and was told I'd be loading them. I asked what I was going to do next week, and was told not to worry. THREE MONTHS LATER, I understood: they had me use a database loader that came with the d/b (Empress, back then, a second-tier relational d/b). If something failed, it kicked everything out, and I had to figure out what was wrong, and where.
Next time I got one, I had a different manager (so-called matrix management), and I asked her if she'd let me *write* a validating d/b loader program, I figured it would take no longer, if not less time, than the last bunch. She figured she had the budget, and let me. A few months later, I was loading the *entire* shoebox of floppies, *and* scanning each for viruses, in a couple hours.
My "reward"? Lessee, I think that was the year "we're not doing well", and I got a $400/yr raise. AND THEN, within a year, they took maintenance and enhancement of it away from me (I didn't have a 4-yr degree at the time,and they gave it to someone who'd *just* gotten one... never mind I have been programming for a living since before some of them were in high school).
So nice little plaques are cute... and tell you that you're worth exactly the cost of the plaque, wholesale.
I'm happy to say, btw, that the company went down, and was bought out and taken over by a national company.
When I was first studying programming, back when we had to use magnets to write 1's and 0's (ok, punch cards), we heard about the unnamed bank, somewhere in the sixties or early seventies, where a programmer had coded so that fractions of a penny were rounded down, always, and the difference showed up in an account he'd set up. He made many tens of thousands of dollars (and back then, that was real money) before he was caught. Now with orders of magnitude more transactions, there is no way any company would use this kind of probability.
And if you want to argue this, I suggest you go talk to the bean counters where you work.
A couple of years ago, with none of us where I was working having worked with it, and figuring ldap was the wave of the future (our other options were NIS and NIS+), I volunteered and implemented openLDAP. I even did an upgrade (2.2 to 2.3).
It was a nightmare. The documentation was *NOT* adequate, the openldap "communities", when I joined them, mostly gave me one of the three responses: a) no answer; b) "it's been discussed before", and c) this isn't the right forum for that question". They were *utterly* unhelpful.
openLDAP's tools and error handling are also inadequate. IMO, it ain't ready for prime time.
Between many days of googling, and responses from a techie mailing list I'm on, and from the Redhat general discussion list, I managed it.
However, I would *not* recommend the openLDAP project, per se. I trust *any* of the others that have been mentioned are better.
Some of us are old enough to remember the mid-nineties, when, for example, *every* *single* ISP in Chicago dumped all their brand-new early Seagate Barracudas due to hardware failures. I, personally, was working for a major telecom, and was administering a Sun server with a box of external drives - four Seagate Barracudas, and had *five* hardware failures - three drives giving hardware error messages in/var/adm/messages, and Sun replaced them... and one they replaced *twice*.
I, personally, haven't bought Seagate since. Seems like Seagate's more interested in "get them out the door" than quality, when their flagship product has so many problems.
I mean, what possible ecological imperative would cause parrots to evolve so as to want to eat crackers and rum, and cause them to be attractive to pirates?
How about have such documents sent to one person, or a small team, who encrypt them and generate the keys. The document is then provided by *that* team's site, and all access to the files is recorded, *and* that a request to that team must be made for the appropriate key, and who what key was provided to, of course, would be logged.
Would that cover it?
I would use GPG, since other encryption software might be illegal to allow someone traveling out of the country to carry.
Well, I had some comments to him, concerning jobs and education - specifically, that the feds, along with an awful lot of companies, put out as requirements a laundry list that no one who hasn't worked in that office before can possibly meet, and that on-the-job training is off the table. I suggested that the government offer incentives, and lead the way by example, to promote this, and maybe get some of us back to work (including me).
I also pointed out that usajobs.gov is a *dreadful* site, and even after a search, you have to dig through two or three tabs to find out what they want, and even *then* it frequently doesn't say. (M$? Linux? Red Flag Linux? who the hell knows?)
Oh, yes, then I hit and as the House doesn't give you a preview, it was only *afterwards* that I was reminded that you either *have* to put it in as HTML, or it... otherwise, a nicely formatted letter turns into one large block of text.
I just *love* how the libertarians babble on and on about "enlightened self-interest". If such a thing existed, there'd already be a national computer professionals' union, or more than one.
But I guess folks self-image is that they must be REALLY IMPORTANT, and that's why they've spent weeks and months working 10, 12 and more hour days. That's why so many are hot on contracts... never mind that they can be cancelled at any time (like I, and a number of my co-workers at AT&T recently - thanks to corporate HR's *incredible* lack of professionalism). And so many consulting firms don't offer benefits.
Oh, yes, and when you're between positions, you have to put up with abysmally ignorant asshole recruiters and HR types who tell you that you've been out of work too long, and so you're not "fresh" (as though we're some kind of fruit that spoils).
Yes, I *have* had a few tell me that. One, I got mad at, and asked her if she were to take a year off to have a kid, if she would never be hirable again, since she then wouldn't be "fresh'. I kid you not, she responded by saying that she'd "never thought of it that way".
Give me a union card, and a hiring hall, so that I *DO* get the next job I'm qualified for, not passed over as a rotten vegetable.
Slashdot Mirror
I had a phone interview with google around '05, I think, and was *told* by the interviewer that they had over half a million (physical) servers. I don't remember the exact number, but it was between 500k and 600k servers.
mark
So, Dell seems to be in a mindset unchanged since the fifties.
I chose that, rather than earlier, because in '54 and '55, Lionel, then the premier maker of model trains, decided that girls might like trains, too, and so put out a trainset aimed at girls.
How was it aimed at girls? It had a pink locomotive.
Needless to say, it was an utter flop. Girls who wanted model trains wanted TRAINS.
Women who want/need a laptop want/need a computer, not an electronic supermarket women's mag.
And what do women want? Try reading the 14th Century Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The answer? What do YOU READING THIS WANT? "What you will", that is, things to go the way you want them to, not to always have to defer to parent/boss/other authority figure.
How hard is it to understand that?
mark "men are from Earth; women are from Earth; get over it"
No.
Back here in the US, we're working at it, also (though this administration may change some things). Does anyone want to argue that mandatory drug tests for jobs, and for some, random drug tests (for someone not operating a vehicle) isn't "overly controlled"? How about this decade, when suddenly employers want credit checks, and now more and more want criminal background checks?
Tell me that the companies that own the government aren't the real Big Brother. Put that in the context of the people who've been fired, or refused jobs, based on their social networking or non-business websites. Or in the fears that companies will look at DNA or other medical records to deny jobs or fire someone, to keep their medical costs down.
Go find a large corporation that doesn't do that, is my answer to the libertarian "vote with your feet", *ESP* in the middle of a depression (four or more quarters of shrinking GDP). For that matter, find a middle-sized company that isn't starting this.
The US voted out fascism, but Big Brother is only blunted, not turned back, at least yet.
mark
I live on the far north side, inside the city.
Drive downtown in rush hour traffic (gas, aggravation, traffic jams, accidents...)
Pay for parking, where I see daily "early bird specials" of $18 or $22 per day (I've heard per month rates, but they're around $100 or more, sometimes way more, depending on how far they are from the office buildings).
Drive home in rush hour traffic (see above)
Or
Spend $60/mo, and either drive or ride my bike the 2mi to the train, and once I'm on the
train, get downtown in 20 min.
And, occasionally, look at at the "expressway", and shake my head at the idiots who drive that every day....
msrk
I *adore* the folks who think this is terrible, and then seem to think it's going to hit us.
Let's be real: is there *anyone* here who's in the top 5% of the income profile? Hell, no, no one with that much money hangs out here, commenting on /. The nearest we get are the suckers who are *sure* they're Going To Be Rich Any Day Now, If They Work Hard Enough (and have no life).
The odds are hundreds to one, or maybe thousands, that you will *NEVER* be richer than the rest of us.
Now, let's get to that famous "enlightened self-interest": in 1972, 25% of the federal revenue stream was from corporate taxes, and 16.67% from individual income taxes. It's now just over 10% from corporate taxes, and about 44% from individuals. (Numbers from the IRS's Tax Stats at a glance.) Oh, and in '72, the top tax bracket was 70%.
Meanwhile, every year, or every quarter (until the last nine months or so), we keep hearing about record profits, while the good jobs here get offshored, or go to H1-B's.
So, let's not only kill the tax havens, let's *soak* Bill Gates, and Larry Ellison, and the Waltons, and all the rest. Get rid of separate capital gains taxes, and roll it into straight income. Won't affect 401Ks, or other retirement, only the folks with *millions* of income annually from stocks.
mark
At the behest of my manager, I've been working on implementing Spacewalk here at my current contract. It's the open-sourced version of Redhat's Satellite.
Downside: they've only recently released 0.5, and there are still lots of bugs (help doesn't, in general, work).
But you can inventory, and push, updates to rpms; ditto for configuration files, and there's kickstart support. It also supports other than RH and Fedora; I've been working with CentOS (yeah, I know, just the serial numbers filed off), but it appears to me that it should support any distro with yum.
Someone noted it requires Oracle: true, the free version of Oracle XE (10g).
I don't like it - way too many problems yet - but it does work (mostly), and is explicitly for what the poster was looking. You can put multiple systems into a group, and do the group (I think), and you define your own software channels and child channels, and subscribe systems to them. It should tell you when they need upgrades (as long as you keep your internal repository up to date).
mark
It is *NOT* an "action-filled story about the effect of time dilation on the troops returning from the war", it's about something even worse than Vietnam, an endless war, started for no reason anyone understands, and going on for no reason anyone understands, and that includes those running it.
Oh, that's right, like Iraq, except centuries longer.
mark
If python is like Rand, then it's no wonder a lot of the times I've tried to install packages in python wouldn't install, what with conflicting libraries, and conflicts with libraries *other* packages use, and on and on.
No, Rand was a hypocrite (married to get to the US, not "on her own merits", then dropped the guy), irrational (anyone who's not rich, for example, is violating her principles by accepting a public school education, or using publicly-funded roads, etc), and dirty (Greenspan & co, with their libertarian belief system, now *prove* to lead to mass theft). She also, in effect, is against human society....
mark "not fantastically enthused with python, either"
I can quit playing solitaire any time.
mark "verbiage carefully chosen"
Haven't done any ripping, mostly recording, and copying music, but k3b works very nicely, and is ridiculously easy to use. I'm happy with it.
mark
Obviously, the "enlightened self-interest" of companies doesn't work, given the constant reports of breakins.
And for those who don't realize (like Jane Q. Public), utilities like the electric grid, and municipal water and gas supplies, are computer controlled (no! duh!), and in some cases, Dilbert managers have had the controls made accessible via the 'Net, rather than an air gap between their control systems and the 'Net.
A year or two ago, over in the UK, there was a train accident - don't remember if it was a derailment, or a passenger train running into a freight train - because some idiot teenage cracker had gotten into the rail line's control system and screwed with the actual switches on the tracks.
So, yeah, it *is* what we need.
mark
Decades ago, a polygraph expert wired tomatoes, and found significant reaction on being cut, implying tomatoes feel pain.
Vegans, it's rocks and water for you!
On the *other* hand, I *do* feel a responsibility to minimize pain. If I could afford kosher or halal (the Islamic equivalent) meat only, I would, since they don't just say that someone's prayed over the critters, but rather that they were killed quickly and cleanly, with minimal pain, as opposed to much of the meat packing industry, some of which still use methods that were written about, and caused widespread outrage, a century ago by the "yellow journalists".
mark
If you want to get her to Linux, a few things:
first, turn off all services that get started on bootup she'll never use, such as apache (if it's installed), or a d/b (ditto).
Next, and everyone will have their own favs here, I use IceWM as a window manager. Unlike the 12M or whatever of KDE, it's 600k, and comes up *far* faster, since it also doesn't start half a dozen heavyweight processes. Has a few little nicities, like the system monitor on the toolbar. My only irritation with it is that it does *not* return your windows to the position they were in when you shut down.
Third: thunderbird. On her existing XP, I *hope* she's not using virusspreaderExpress, er, Lookout Express.... But even so, at work, I've got Office 2007, and Outlook is a *dog*; in addition, it's clear to me that M$ did it *again*: wrote slow bloatware, and so to speed it up, they're making direct hardware calls, *not* system calls (I get that from the fact that the system hangs while it's coming up and trying to connect to the Exchange server). T-bird, for its faults (I *loathe* that they're trying to make it look like Outlook), is reasonably fast.
Firefox, of course.
Oh, and if, for some reason, she needs a console, screw Konsole: use rxvt, which is *way* faster on coming up, and a normal x window.
mark
No one hiring someone right out of school expects an "expert" in a language. Back in the mid-nineties, I was working for Ameritech (a Baby Bell), and did the technical part of the interview for programmers for all five teams under my director. One of my std. questions for right-out-of-school was to ask them what the largest program they'd worked on was. My range was 500, 1000, 5000 lines.... Consider that my manager there asked me how many lines our systems were, and a dumb linecount - wc -l - told us a quarter *million* lines.
If your manager's any good, you'll be doing maintenance and then enhancement of existing code.
On the other hand... I love the folks saying that C's good. I have over 10 years of it, and have been looking since last Sept (I'm currently on a three-month contract as an admin), and have seen almost *zero* C (unless you're either a kernel hacker or write embedded) (and I've been looking in Chicago, DC, Philly, the Bay Area, Portland, and Seattle). I'm wondering where all the maintenance and enhancement on all the code we wrote in the nineties is....
mark
And for those who are critical of Harlan's lawsuit, how do you feel about the RIAA, and all the money the actual *artists* DON'T get, while the record companies make out like bandits? Hell, I've heard Arlo Guthrie say it took 30 *years* before he got one penny of royalties from his record company for Alice's Restaurant.
You think there's a difference between Harlan, and other writers, and musicians?
mark
Unless you feel like living in the Untied Snakes of Aremica
mark
I was at the Chicago Maritime Festival yesterday, and had dinner with a bunch of folks I know, mostly musicians. One member of a the group was very outspoken about how the DMCA and all had *seriously* screwed her group, and all indie musicians. From what she was saying, you have to pay the record companies... and if you're not signed, there is *no* *way* to sell, other than individually, via the online sources that sell by the track.
In addition, the recent screwing by the RIAA & buddies to increase the fees paid by streaming media stations drove *many* under... and a lot of musicians, such as those who are on the renfaire circuit, lost their outlets....
Then, of course, there's the clip I hear of Arlo Guthrie saying that it took him THIRTY YEARS to get the first dime of royalties from Alice's Restaurant.
But the RIAA is *so* about musicians getting paid for their art....
mark
How 'bout giving them a) a raise, b) a percentage of the profits based on what it does for the bottom line, or c) a promotion and a raise?
Or is it too much to be given what they *DESERVE*?
In the early nineties, I worked for a company in Austin, TX. I got put on thie project, where they handed me a literal shoebox of floppies, and was told I'd be loading them. I asked what I was going to do next week, and was told not to worry. THREE MONTHS LATER, I understood: they had me use a database loader that came with the d/b (Empress, back then, a second-tier relational d/b). If something failed, it kicked everything out, and I had to figure out what was wrong, and where.
Next time I got one, I had a different manager (so-called matrix management), and I asked her if she'd let me *write* a validating d/b loader program, I figured it would take no longer, if not less time, than the last bunch. She figured she had the budget, and let me. A few months later, I was loading the *entire* shoebox of floppies, *and* scanning each for viruses, in a couple hours.
My "reward"? Lessee, I think that was the year "we're not doing well", and I got a $400/yr raise. AND THEN, within a year, they took maintenance and enhancement of it away from me (I didn't have a 4-yr degree at the time,and they gave it to someone who'd *just* gotten one... never mind I have been programming for a living since before some of them were in high school).
So nice little plaques are cute... and tell you that you're worth exactly the cost of the plaque, wholesale.
I'm happy to say, btw, that the company went down, and was bought out and taken over by a national company.
mark
When I was first studying programming, back when we had to use magnets to write 1's and 0's (ok, punch cards), we heard about the unnamed bank, somewhere in the sixties or early seventies, where a programmer had coded so that fractions of a penny were rounded down, always, and the difference showed up in an account he'd set up. He made many tens of thousands of dollars (and back then, that was real money) before he was caught. Now with orders of magnitude more transactions, there is no way any company would use this kind of probability.
And if you want to argue this, I suggest you go talk to the bean counters where you work.
mark
A couple of years ago, with none of us where I was working having worked with it, and figuring ldap was the wave of the future (our other options were NIS and NIS+), I volunteered and implemented openLDAP. I even did an upgrade (2.2 to 2.3).
It was a nightmare. The documentation was *NOT* adequate, the openldap "communities", when I joined them, mostly gave me one of the three responses: a) no answer; b) "it's been discussed before", and c) this isn't the right forum for that question". They were *utterly* unhelpful.
openLDAP's tools and error handling are also inadequate. IMO, it ain't ready for prime time.
Between many days of googling, and responses from a techie mailing list I'm on, and from the Redhat general discussion list, I managed it.
However, I would *not* recommend the openLDAP project, per se. I trust *any* of the others that have been mentioned are better.
mark
Some of us are old enough to remember the mid-nineties, when, for example, *every* *single* ISP in Chicago dumped all their brand-new early Seagate Barracudas due to hardware failures. I, personally, was working for a major telecom, and was administering a Sun server with a box of external drives - four Seagate Barracudas, and had *five* hardware failures - three drives giving hardware error messages in /var/adm/messages, and Sun replaced them... and one they replaced *twice*.
I, personally, haven't bought Seagate since. Seems like Seagate's more interested in "get them out the door" than quality, when their flagship product has so many problems.
mark
I mean, what possible ecological imperative would cause parrots to evolve so as to want to eat crackers and rum, and cause them to be attractive to pirates?
mark, arrrhhhh, matey
How about have such documents sent to one person, or a small team, who encrypt them and generate the keys. The document is then provided by *that* team's site, and all access to the files is recorded, *and* that a request to that team must be made for the appropriate key, and who what key was provided to, of course, would be logged.
Would that cover it?
I would use GPG, since other encryption software might be illegal to allow someone traveling out of the country to carry.
mark
Well, I had some comments to him, concerning jobs and education - specifically, that the feds, along with an awful lot of companies, put out as requirements a laundry list that no one who hasn't worked in that office before can possibly meet, and that on-the-job training is off the table. I suggested that the government offer incentives, and lead the way by example, to promote this, and maybe get some of us back to work (including me).
I also pointed out that usajobs.gov is a *dreadful* site, and even after a search, you have to dig through two or three tabs to find out what they want, and even *then* it frequently doesn't say. (M$? Linux? Red Flag Linux? who the hell knows?)
Oh, yes, then I hit and as the House doesn't give you a preview, it was only *afterwards* that I was reminded that you either *have* to put it in as HTML, or it... otherwise, a nicely formatted letter turns into one large block of text.
mark
And most folks here probably aren't for unions.
I just *love* how the libertarians babble on and on about "enlightened self-interest". If such a thing existed, there'd already be a national computer professionals' union, or more than one.
But I guess folks self-image is that they must be REALLY IMPORTANT, and that's why they've spent weeks and months working 10, 12 and more hour days. That's why so many are hot on contracts... never mind that they can be cancelled at any time (like I, and a number of my co-workers at AT&T recently - thanks to corporate HR's *incredible* lack of professionalism). And so many consulting firms don't offer benefits.
Oh, yes, and when you're between positions, you have to put up with abysmally ignorant asshole recruiters and HR types who tell you that you've been out of work too long, and so you're not "fresh" (as though we're some kind of fruit that spoils).
Yes, I *have* had a few tell me that. One, I got mad at, and asked her if she were to take a year off to have a kid, if she would never be hirable again, since she then wouldn't be "fresh'. I kid you not, she responded by saying that she'd "never thought of it that way".
Give me a union card, and a hiring hall, so that I *DO* get the next job I'm qualified for, not passed over as a rotten vegetable.
mark