And for a fair list of issues that can cause such a program to fail or succeed less than hoped for, look at http://www.ncsu.edu/meridian/win2008/tenlessons/02.htm and read carefully. Much of this is actually common sense, which explains how it is overlooked so easily. Note also many of the recommendations here cost more money, so they easily get lost in the budget hearings, and outcomes suffer because of it.
You won't find much in the way of criticism of the MLTI. While I wanted to offer an alternative to using iBooks, this was never possible - the MLTI is a joint venture with Apple, the State of Maine, University of Maine, and even IBM (it leveraged the MSLN network). But serious criticism of the MLTI is discouraged, and is usually found in school system meeting minutes, the rare disagruntled blog, and private comments by teachers...
And I'm not sure that there is a lot of genuine data on success, though I am pointed to many sites that claim good to great results. Mostly by adminstrators so proude that they survived the NCLB testing and reporting.
I'm not convinced that laptops do that much for studnets, if you compare the effort and integration with making the same effort with more conventional tools, or even a part-time lab.
Of course, this all may be colored by my age, remembering school in the late 60s - early 70s, and my no longer being an Apple outlet. Hey, I'm human.
*I* have an online dating account, actually more than one. They are all dormant.
I keep one because it's a charter account, from when they were free - lifetime free for me, and even though I don't use it, it's stupid pride. I'll get rid of it sometime soon probably. Some of the others are actually links to this profile, as they share with a lot of other sites (no, they *run* the other sites under other commercial names).
I don't have a Facebook or MySpace account. These are just too insecure, as much anecdotal evidence proves. I have a Linkdn account, which I use so much that I'm pretty sure I can't even spell Linkdn right, and don't care.
My job site accounts worry me as much.
And having a web presence is pointless for me. My name, permutations of my name, even the middle initial, are all registered. Many of those others are actors, artists, athletes, and politicians, and I didn't register my name back when it would have been trivial. today, I'd be suprised if you could register a fairly common English name at all, squatters and all.
The real problem is of course not being able to connect an attempted registration at some site with a person's 'real' identity. Which is why normal people should not trust any online info, even a photo.
Dating services can be considered unreliable. Meet your date in a public place, and walk there. leave by another route. Have a friend call you 5 minutes after the appointed time. Share nothing significant online.
And if you do see your SO listed on a dating service, give them fair warning. Let them have a week to convince the service that the listing is illegitimate.
I know, the instantaneous response (Wait 10 seconds here please) is that you decided to play, go to the park, get suited up, report to the manager, select your bat, go to the batter's box, choose your stance, raise your bat to position, and then chose to swing it the pitch were where you expected or would accept it, etc etc etc.
Apparently this 10 second thing is for some decisions, those that require thought. Like whether to believe any of this 10 seond hooey.
Systems analysis. If you look far enough up the chain, it becomes one thing. Look too far down, and it gets all complicated and difficult, and can't be so easily understood. Makes you sleepy.
I gotta register the.msft tld and watch Windows servers worldwide flip out!
Bahahahaha! Thousands of MSCE instructors will be tarred and feathered for telling us to 'just name your domain something.msft. It won't cause any problems!'.
Hehe. I may get bacl into the LAN consulting business just to ca$h in. Easy money, fixing stuff the MCSEs do...
Hmm... So it's a copyright case that the grifters would hope for, eh?
I wonder. If you write an SNL skit based on Kleenex, and the Kimberly-Clark sues, can they win for misusing the Kleenex brand name, or do you defend yourself by claiming it's a copyright issue, that your parody isn't about the product, but the name, or the name but not the product, or perhaps you write a skit for something that was named so unfortunately that it's a true laugh, but of course the owner of the tradmark doesn't quite want it that way.
We use the term 'Spam' to denote unwanted email of many types. I wonder how Hormel felt about that at first. Now, I know they tolerate it. No one mistakes an unwanted email for a slice of heaven fried in a pan...
Precisely. Buy them, have them resolve to nothing (ok, 404 or better), and keep anyone from camping on them and usign the Disney name to drive traffic.
Wait, what about trademark cases? Do ya suppose Disney would have a case against someone starting up www.disney.porn, and might win in court against them for infringement?
Unless, of course, www.disney.porn was a parody of Disney movies. Fair Use includes parody, doesn't it?
No way to win this one. Let's start up a few hundred TLDs so the grifters^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H ICANN can profit.
My oldest notebook is a Mitac 6120N. It's done for, sadly, first because the backlight won't come on unless I unplug the power supply and let it go on battery, and then switch the screen from LCD to CRT and back. Of course this battery, a replacement, is old enough to live for about 15 minutes. Sad. It's finally on the shelf cause it won't run Xp for more than 30 minutes without an ACPI error and BSOD, and won't run Ubuntu for more a few minutes before it traps a panic for the same thing. Strange, it used to run XP just fine, but the old ACPI bug in this BIOS is now not tolerated. I bet it's a recent patch, but it's toast. A PIII-533 with 129MB RAM seems pitiful but it surfs and does email just fine.
My current notebook is an Acer something, identical to a Dell SmartStep 250N... P4-2.8, 1G RAM. Works fine, despite a broken latch, keys wearing down, and it will overheat if you leave it on a flash animation or the screensaver kicks in after a hard session. It's an old dog, but it still bites.
Of course, at work, they just refereshed our T40s with T61s. Such a waste... All I got out of it was my Virtual PC 2004 flaking out cause Core Duos mess with the timers... Pus.
- Monitor them, after all even though they are inside a protictive proxy server, sometimes bad things get past that...
- Cut off the entire school system, if necessary, to protect the students.
- Fear among students that anything interesting will be blocked. taking the laptops home only requires their parents pay for insurance against damage/loss. At a very reasonable (for the insurer) cost.
- Effective control of the laptops, since they actually belong to the government.
Well, maybe I'm being a bit harsh. Though I wonder how much OLPCs would cost v. iBooks, and how much more/less useful they would be. The OLPC could use a big Stateside order, eh?
This will probably be seen as flamebait, but using Linux makes you no more or less susceptible to data loss. Only the time and expense of recovery differs.
And not as much as it would seem.
ps - this is why I have three copies of everything important to me and my wife, in two different locations, rarely more than 2 days out. She doesn't question me about this for a few weeks after she askes "Honey, I can't find........". She still doesn't understand about 12 years of email archives... Go figure.
Actually, my tired old 7105t does SSH, Gmail, Google Mobile Maps, 2 different RSS readers, and a pretty sucky poker game (I lose a lot of $ in that game). I d/l them all, not a bit of help from my carrier, and no interference. If only it had a better browser.
I'm thinking of a Curve, since the Bold will drive prices down. Pearl is not enough. I think of a Dash or some other WM phone, but feh. I would rather have a fold-out, half-size EEE-ish phone.
Actually i want what can't be. An iPhone that folds out a screen twice the size. Open loadig of apps. Unlocked. And a bit lighter. Better voice quality. Half the price. Not too much to ask for, is it?
If the Indian government wants to be able to spy on their own Blackberries, then run their own BES cluster. That way they have the data - problem solved.
Of course, knowing how hard it seems for RIM to let the gummint look at data, I may not give up my BB after all.
You're not being religously intolerant. You're being religiously^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H ignorant.
If you were being serious, I would be pointing out that our public schools teach the religion of global warming, popularization of alternative lifestyles, and a post-modern outlook on life. I say 'religion' here, taking the cue from you. One man's religion is another's cult, is another's philosophy.
BTW, natural disasters are either clear evidence of the End Times or a consequence of living on an active, dynamic planet... I vote for the latter. Once we were thrown out of the Garden of Eden, we got stuck with this place. Not so bad, unless you happen to get caught up in something interesting, no?
I use GMail as a forward from my own POP mail account. And I own that domain and run the servers. It's worth it both have a backup of my mail and let Gmail filter the spam even better.
Running your own mail is really not worth it. Spam filtering alone is too much bother, and the security issues are more than an amateur should tackle. My other users I encourage to forward to Gmail.
A friend of mine resisted offering mail with his web site business until very recently, when a customer made the case for it. Since then, he's been pestering me with spam questions. And SQL injection complaints, as he gets 15,000+ injection attempts daily to the contact forms he runs for clients. He just put up a simple human-verification gizmo, and it seems to have stopped that. But the spam is relentless.
My own personal email account is well over 12 years old, and I get 10,000+ spam a week with 75-140 ham messages in there. Gmail misses about 3 spams a week. My own server misses about 300. And I have about 50 false positives, all because DCC flags newsletters at an alarming rate. Is this because some lam0r forgot they had subscribed to a newsletter and report it as spam when they can't figure out how to unsubscribe? Probably. Not helpful.
I would not want to run mail for a hosting outfit. You have to go through a lot to have 99% spam detection, and even Google seems to fail this.
I just turned down a job as IT architect/net designer/whatever for a major ISP (not a major position, one of many doing this). Mostly because I didn't want to be assigned the P-to-P filtering jobs, or have to work to actually limit usage to control NAP costs and minimize user complaints. I wouldn't do Exchange or POP/IMAP mail for the same reasons. There are some mail systems I would run, but not anything terribly mainstream.
Email is pretty nearly completely broken. It's as if you drive your car through broken glass ALL THE TIME. You justify the extra-thick tires, picking shards out at every stoplight, carrying 6-10 spares in the trailer behind you that also gets flats, and even then get flats and are late for everything. The only poeple who make out in this are the tire industry (filtering and 'security', hah) and the glass scatterers (spammers). I wonder if the glass donators (spammer customers) actually get anything out of the exercise. Probably not, but this is another discussion.
In my current environment (fortune 50) no machine can be even brought into any of the datacenters (and ours are on the small side) without prior permission, full identification, and labeling for owner, business unit, name assigned, and emergency constacts (2 or more 24-7-365 no matter the actual support hours permitted). Hardware need not be new, but it cannot be anything unapproved.
This is not my first gig in a strict environment. Classified military systems are more restrictive, with one site I was on having 'bed check' daily to be sure static hardware was present and accounted for.
Stories of classified data on any Govt PCs throws me. Not long ago, I would be answering questions from armed officers if I lost a piece of hardware. Well, maybe a few years ago.
I've also done some work for universities. Not at all the same attitude. This story doesn't surprise me totally, but there are some universities that value reliability, availability, and service. They wouldn't let anyone just walk out with hardware without either challenging them, or noting it in a log
...why the department manager didn't confiscate this XBox as contraband.
Seriously, what's a game console doing in the server room? There are no other alternatives? No leftover hardware (PIII-almost-anything, P4-anythinbg at-all, Athlon-ditto) more than capable of doing the job?
The article was replete with references to the lack of respect management had for the proletariat IT staff, blahblahblahblahblah. Feh.
Labeling equipment in the server room is crucial. How about a decent label if, for no other reason, after a fire or some other event, you can contact the functional owner(s) and inform them of the survival or demise of their precious server.
-ps: this isn't one of those XBoxen that gets red rings so often, is it? Hopefully it would be really more reliable than the 'old' Dell P4 they probably snuck away to run their 'real' web server...
... would have given you your 4 weeks' pay and said good bye. Oh, and have me* cut you off asap, no login at all. He would have politely asked you to leave all your papers in your office, empty out the company car, and not contact any of *his* customers for a decent period of time, say 3 months.
One ops manager emailed the boss on a Friday evening telling him he was done, car keys were under the front steps, have a nice life. We called his clients Monday morning (excpet for a few I could call Friday night) and informed them that so-and-so was no longer employed by us, we would like to meet to discuss our relationship, blahblahblah. About half told us that they would be cancelling their contract and would work with our ex-ops mgr directly. And he had a nice business going. I convinced one key client to meet with me and explained the circumstances of his leaving, the email, the abrupt notice. Surprise, the client knew he was leaving for weeks, and had been told a long tale of abuse, threats, and then that the boss canned him Friday at 5:10pm over the phone. I assured my client that this boss would have canned him in person, at noon, in his office, with his last paycheck in his hand, straight up like a man, just business, and by the way don't let the screen door hit you in the backside. And he would have called all affected clients beforehand to tell them that so-and-so no longer was employed. Before he was no longer employed.
Sounds like your outfit is a little schizo in this. They should just send you home. Lingering is always bad, and can only lead to you either trying to do the right thing, or trying to do something else.
And you should be choosing whether to start early at the new place, resting up and painting the bedroom, or learning something new. Like COD4.
PS- does your work PC have a decent graphics card?
* When I left, it took me three days to get my replacement up to speed on how to manage the network, keep the boss happy, fix his ACT! software, and then how to keep me out of the network when I was gone. He asked me about 6 months later about some logging question, since he was suspicious that I hadn't tried to access the network. I explained that I didn't much care to, it wasn't worth a frak to me. I was busy with my life. He still doesn't believe me. I taught him well. He's still scared to death someone will break in.
Wow. I got this CD in a book back in '93 or '94. Had a program called Slackware. Really interesting. Something called 'kernel 0.91' was in it.
I wuz huked.
It was a couple of years later when I was down to the Novell branch that one of the guys shows me a web server running on his lab NetWare server. It was something he called NAMP.
I waz huked agin. Nobody else believed me. Then, they didn't care. Feh. Of course, I gave up on NetWare.
Funny the stuff we think is cool, new, or just plain fun.
SELinux Firefox ??? Security for a while Profit! Repeat as necessary.
Windows is so blown up, security is pointless.
Better website design/security doesn't help. The nasties will create their own malware sites quicker than you can say 'globals off'. And detection in Windows is pretty much like your oil light on the car dash - 'you are hosed, just letting you know it's bad.'
I'm thinking my wife's next machine is running Kubuntu. Mine at home too. All I need is a way to feed my Windows-based MP3 player, some Windows Media Player replacement, and I'm gone.
Or a Mac. They have a few years before the kids target them.
"they have now asked for direct read-only access to our Oracle database, to be able to run ad-hoc queries without consulting us"
You meant...
"they have now asked for direct read-only access to our Oracle database, to be able to run ad-hoc queries without PAYING us".
There, fixed that for ya.
Now it's all clear to me. I've had clients like this. Write them an ad-hoc report generator, bill them accordingly. This should take a year at least, to get their requirements and meet the 19th version of the requirements some time in November. Then you should get them to sign off on the final version by next March or so.
I suppose you could expand the Web gizmo to allow more than 15 fields, but where's the fun in that?
Alternatively, you could farm this out to an Elbonian consulting firm and take a cut.
I'm so glad I don't do that any more. Made me feel dirty charging clients for their own data. My former boss is in real estate now, for somewhat obvious reasons...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not at all convinced giving middle-school students their own laptops does much good. Giving them to younger students seems less useful.
Look into the Maine Laptop Initiative, http://www.mainelearns.org/, for the sugar-coated version of how wonderful it has been.
A slightly irreverent flavor of our Governor's view of it is at http://www.andycarvin.com/archives/2006/06/angus_king_a_brief_h.html.
Then again, some of the less-considered issues include student damage, as discussed at http://www.raymondmaine.org/jsms/Tech/Rules_Consequences.pdf, for example...
And for a fair list of issues that can cause such a program to fail or succeed less than hoped for, look at http://www.ncsu.edu/meridian/win2008/tenlessons/02.htm and read carefully. Much of this is actually common sense, which explains how it is overlooked so easily. Note also many of the recommendations here cost more money, so they easily get lost in the budget hearings, and outcomes suffer because of it.
You won't find much in the way of criticism of the MLTI. While I wanted to offer an alternative to using iBooks, this was never possible - the MLTI is a joint venture with Apple, the State of Maine, University of Maine, and even IBM (it leveraged the MSLN network). But serious criticism of the MLTI is discouraged, and is usually found in school system meeting minutes, the rare disagruntled blog, and private comments by teachers...
And I'm not sure that there is a lot of genuine data on success, though I am pointed to many sites that claim good to great results. Mostly by adminstrators so proude that they survived the NCLB testing and reporting.
I'm not convinced that laptops do that much for studnets, if you compare the effort and integration with making the same effort with more conventional tools, or even a part-time lab.
Of course, this all may be colored by my age, remembering school in the late 60s - early 70s, and my no longer being an Apple outlet. Hey, I'm human.
*I* have an online dating account, actually more than one. They are all dormant.
I keep one because it's a charter account, from when they were free - lifetime free for me, and even though I don't use it, it's stupid pride. I'll get rid of it sometime soon probably. Some of the others are actually links to this profile, as they share with a lot of other sites (no, they *run* the other sites under other commercial names).
I don't have a Facebook or MySpace account. These are just too insecure, as much anecdotal evidence proves. I have a Linkdn account, which I use so much that I'm pretty sure I can't even spell Linkdn right, and don't care.
My job site accounts worry me as much.
And having a web presence is pointless for me. My name, permutations of my name, even the middle initial, are all registered. Many of those others are actors, artists, athletes, and politicians, and I didn't register my name back when it would have been trivial. today, I'd be suprised if you could register a fairly common English name at all, squatters and all.
The real problem is of course not being able to connect an attempted registration at some site with a person's 'real' identity. Which is why normal people should not trust any online info, even a photo.
Dating services can be considered unreliable. Meet your date in a public place, and walk there. leave by another route. Have a friend call you 5 minutes after the appointed time. Share nothing significant online.
And if you do see your SO listed on a dating service, give them fair warning. Let them have a week to convince the service that the listing is illegitimate.
Then go after them with the frying pan.
What are you talking about? I never see less than 10 users, and as many as 24.
Try zavatar. Good version. Look for ilu or Spray'nPray, I'll show you a good time...
And ask for a second logon... woot!
Clearly, you meant Kylie Minogue.
Darn spell checkers are pretty much pus nowadays...
This explains hitting a 90mph fastball.
I know, the instantaneous response (Wait 10 seconds here please) is that you decided to play, go to the park, get suited up, report to the manager, select your bat, go to the batter's box, choose your stance, raise your bat to position, and then chose to swing it the pitch were where you expected or would accept it, etc etc etc.
Apparently this 10 second thing is for some decisions, those that require thought. Like whether to believe any of this 10 seond hooey.
Systems analysis. If you look far enough up the chain, it becomes one thing. Look too far down, and it gets all complicated and difficult, and can't be so easily understood. Makes you sleepy.
I gotta register the .msft tld and watch Windows servers worldwide flip out!
Bahahahaha! Thousands of MSCE instructors will be tarred and feathered for telling us to 'just name your domain something .msft. It won't cause any problems!'.
Hehe. I may get bacl into the LAN consulting business just to ca$h in. Easy money, fixing stuff the MCSEs do...
Perhaps Justice Stevens should read up on the Tenth Amendment?
Actually, many in our governemnt should bone up on that chapter. Good stuff in there.
Hmm... So it's a copyright case that the grifters would hope for, eh?
I wonder. If you write an SNL skit based on Kleenex, and the Kimberly-Clark sues, can they win for misusing the Kleenex brand name, or do you defend yourself by claiming it's a copyright issue, that your parody isn't about the product, but the name, or the name but not the product, or perhaps you write a skit for something that was named so unfortunately that it's a true laugh, but of course the owner of the tradmark doesn't quite want it that way.
We use the term 'Spam' to denote unwanted email of many types. I wonder how Hormel felt about that at first. Now, I know they tolerate it. No one mistakes an unwanted email for a slice of heaven fried in a pan...
Precisely. Buy them, have them resolve to nothing (ok, 404 or better), and keep anyone from camping on them and usign the Disney name to drive traffic.
Wait, what about trademark cases? Do ya suppose Disney would have a case against someone starting up www.disney.porn, and might win in court against them for infringement?
Unless, of course, www.disney.porn was a parody of Disney movies. Fair Use includes parody, doesn't it?
No way to win this one. Let's start up a few hundred TLDs so the grifters^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H ICANN can profit.
bah!
Save it for 5 years, 4 times in succession. Convert when necessary.
No Way Out. Nothing on this world lasts forever.
My oldest notebook is a Mitac 6120N. It's done for, sadly, first because the backlight won't come on unless I unplug the power supply and let it go on battery, and then switch the screen from LCD to CRT and back. Of course this battery, a replacement, is old enough to live for about 15 minutes. Sad. It's finally on the shelf cause it won't run Xp for more than 30 minutes without an ACPI error and BSOD, and won't run Ubuntu for more a few minutes before it traps a panic for the same thing. Strange, it used to run XP just fine, but the old ACPI bug in this BIOS is now not tolerated. I bet it's a recent patch, but it's toast. A PIII-533 with 129MB RAM seems pitiful but it surfs and does email just fine.
My current notebook is an Acer something, identical to a Dell SmartStep 250N... P4-2.8, 1G RAM. Works fine, despite a broken latch, keys wearing down, and it will overheat if you leave it on a flash animation or the screensaver kicks in after a hard session. It's an old dog, but it still bites.
Of course, at work, they just refereshed our T40s with T61s. Such a waste... All I got out of it was my Virtual PC 2004 flaking out cause Core Duos mess with the timers... Pus.
...if this is a 'problem'.
You all need to stop using stupid stuff.
There, fixed THAT for ya.
- Government gives out laptops to schoolchildren
- Laptops can be 'controlled' by government
- fear that bad behaviour (in the eyes of the government) will result in laptops being disabled, and schoolchildren punished.
Wow. Sounds a little like Maine's http://www.mainelearns.org/ MLTI initiative...
- Hand out laptops
- Monitor them, after all even though they are inside a protictive proxy server, sometimes bad things get past that...
- Cut off the entire school system, if necessary, to protect the students.
- Fear among students that anything interesting will be blocked. taking the laptops home only requires their parents pay for insurance against damage/loss. At a very reasonable (for the insurer) cost.
- Effective control of the laptops, since they actually belong to the government.
Well, maybe I'm being a bit harsh. Though I wonder how much OLPCs would cost v. iBooks, and how much more/less useful they would be. The OLPC could use a big Stateside order, eh?
Don't hold yer breath, chummy...
This will probably be seen as flamebait, but using Linux makes you no more or less susceptible to data loss. Only the time and expense of recovery differs.
And not as much as it would seem.
ps - this is why I have three copies of everything important to me and my wife, in two different locations, rarely more than 2 days out. She doesn't question me about this for a few weeks after she askes "Honey, I can't find........". She still doesn't understand about 12 years of email archives... Go figure.
Actually, my tired old 7105t does SSH, Gmail, Google Mobile Maps, 2 different RSS readers, and a pretty sucky poker game (I lose a lot of $ in that game). I d/l them all, not a bit of help from my carrier, and no interference. If only it had a better browser.
I'm thinking of a Curve, since the Bold will drive prices down. Pearl is not enough. I think of a Dash or some other WM phone, but feh. I would rather have a fold-out, half-size EEE-ish phone.
Actually i want what can't be. An iPhone that folds out a screen twice the size. Open loadig of apps. Unlocked. And a bit lighter. Better voice quality. Half the price. Not too much to ask for, is it?
If the Indian government wants to be able to spy on their own Blackberries, then run their own BES cluster. That way they have the data - problem solved.
Of course, knowing how hard it seems for RIM to let the gummint look at data, I may not give up my BB after all.
You're not being religously intolerant. You're being religiously^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H ignorant.
If you were being serious, I would be pointing out that our public schools teach the religion of global warming, popularization of alternative lifestyles, and a post-modern outlook on life. I say 'religion' here, taking the cue from you. One man's religion is another's cult, is another's philosophy.
BTW, natural disasters are either clear evidence of the End Times or a consequence of living on an active, dynamic planet... I vote for the latter. Once we were thrown out of the Garden of Eden, we got stuck with this place. Not so bad, unless you happen to get caught up in something interesting, no?
Sheesh. Your bus is a pretty wacky ride, dude.
I use GMail as a forward from my own POP mail account. And I own that domain and run the servers. It's worth it both have a backup of my mail and let Gmail filter the spam even better.
Running your own mail is really not worth it. Spam filtering alone is too much bother, and the security issues are more than an amateur should tackle. My other users I encourage to forward to Gmail.
A friend of mine resisted offering mail with his web site business until very recently, when a customer made the case for it. Since then, he's been pestering me with spam questions. And SQL injection complaints, as he gets 15,000+ injection attempts daily to the contact forms he runs for clients. He just put up a simple human-verification gizmo, and it seems to have stopped that. But the spam is relentless.
My own personal email account is well over 12 years old, and I get 10,000+ spam a week with 75-140 ham messages in there. Gmail misses about 3 spams a week. My own server misses about 300. And I have about 50 false positives, all because DCC flags newsletters at an alarming rate. Is this because some lam0r forgot they had subscribed to a newsletter and report it as spam when they can't figure out how to unsubscribe? Probably. Not helpful.
I would not want to run mail for a hosting outfit. You have to go through a lot to have 99% spam detection, and even Google seems to fail this.
I just turned down a job as IT architect/net designer/whatever for a major ISP (not a major position, one of many doing this). Mostly because I didn't want to be assigned the P-to-P filtering jobs, or have to work to actually limit usage to control NAP costs and minimize user complaints. I wouldn't do Exchange or POP/IMAP mail for the same reasons. There are some mail systems I would run, but not anything terribly mainstream.
Email is pretty nearly completely broken. It's as if you drive your car through broken glass ALL THE TIME. You justify the extra-thick tires, picking shards out at every stoplight, carrying 6-10 spares in the trailer behind you that also gets flats, and even then get flats and are late for everything. The only poeple who make out in this are the tire industry (filtering and 'security', hah) and the glass scatterers (spammers). I wonder if the glass donators (spammer customers) actually get anything out of the exercise. Probably not, but this is another discussion.
grrr....
In my current environment (fortune 50) no machine can be even brought into any of the datacenters (and ours are on the small side) without prior permission, full identification, and labeling for owner, business unit, name assigned, and emergency constacts (2 or more 24-7-365 no matter the actual support hours permitted). Hardware need not be new, but it cannot be anything unapproved.
This is not my first gig in a strict environment. Classified military systems are more restrictive, with one site I was on having 'bed check' daily to be sure static hardware was present and accounted for.
Stories of classified data on any Govt PCs throws me. Not long ago, I would be answering questions from armed officers if I lost a piece of hardware. Well, maybe a few years ago.
I've also done some work for universities. Not at all the same attitude. This story doesn't surprise me totally, but there are some universities that value reliability, availability, and service. They wouldn't let anyone just walk out with hardware without either challenging them, or noting it in a log
Still pretty dumb, this incident.
...why the department manager didn't confiscate this XBox as contraband.
Seriously, what's a game console doing in the server room? There are no other alternatives? No leftover hardware (PIII-almost-anything, P4-anythinbg at-all, Athlon-ditto) more than capable of doing the job?
The article was replete with references to the lack of respect management had for the proletariat IT staff, blahblahblahblahblah. Feh.
Labeling equipment in the server room is crucial. How about a decent label if, for no other reason, after a fire or some other event, you can contact the functional owner(s) and inform them of the survival or demise of their precious server.
-ps: this isn't one of those XBoxen that gets red rings so often, is it? Hopefully it would be really more reliable than the 'old' Dell P4 they probably snuck away to run their 'real' web server...
There is more than one thing wrong in this story.
... would have given you your 4 weeks' pay and said good bye. Oh, and have me* cut you off asap, no login at all. He would have politely asked you to leave all your papers in your office, empty out the company car, and not contact any of *his* customers for a decent period of time, say 3 months.
One ops manager emailed the boss on a Friday evening telling him he was done, car keys were under the front steps, have a nice life. We called his clients Monday morning (excpet for a few I could call Friday night) and informed them that so-and-so was no longer employed by us, we would like to meet to discuss our relationship, blahblahblah. About half told us that they would be cancelling their contract and would work with our ex-ops mgr directly. And he had a nice business going. I convinced one key client to meet with me and explained the circumstances of his leaving, the email, the abrupt notice. Surprise, the client knew he was leaving for weeks, and had been told a long tale of abuse, threats, and then that the boss canned him Friday at 5:10pm over the phone. I assured my client that this boss would have canned him in person, at noon, in his office, with his last paycheck in his hand, straight up like a man, just business, and by the way don't let the screen door hit you in the backside. And he would have called all affected clients beforehand to tell them that so-and-so no longer was employed. Before he was no longer employed.
Sounds like your outfit is a little schizo in this. They should just send you home. Lingering is always bad, and can only lead to you either trying to do the right thing, or trying to do something else.
And you should be choosing whether to start early at the new place, resting up and painting the bedroom, or learning something new. Like COD4.
PS- does your work PC have a decent graphics card?
* When I left, it took me three days to get my replacement up to speed on how to manage the network, keep the boss happy, fix his ACT! software, and then how to keep me out of the network when I was gone. He asked me about 6 months later about some logging question, since he was suspicious that I hadn't tried to access the network. I explained that I didn't much care to, it wasn't worth a frak to me. I was busy with my life. He still doesn't believe me. I taught him well. He's still scared to death someone will break in.
..."if you have to ask how, you probably shouldn't be using this. Or a computer. Go back to your Xbox" distribution.
What's new about this? I already got a couple of those. And I've got them running, Thank you very much^h^h^h^hlittle.
feh. Wake me up when you got something that runs on my Mitac 6120N, ACPI bug and all.
Wow. I got this CD in a book back in '93 or '94. Had a program called Slackware. Really interesting. Something called 'kernel 0.91' was in it.
I wuz huked.
It was a couple of years later when I was down to the Novell branch that one of the guys shows me a web server running on his lab NetWare server. It was something he called NAMP.
I waz huked agin. Nobody else believed me. Then, they didn't care. Feh. Of course, I gave up on NetWare.
Funny the stuff we think is cool, new, or just plain fun.
...this is the first step towards a 'solution':
SELinux
Firefox
???
Security for a while
Profit!
Repeat as necessary.
Windows is so blown up, security is pointless.
Better website design/security doesn't help. The nasties will create their own malware sites quicker than you can say 'globals off'. And detection in Windows is pretty much like your oil light on the car dash - 'you are hosed, just letting you know it's bad.'
I'm thinking my wife's next machine is running Kubuntu. Mine at home too. All I need is a way to feed my Windows-based MP3 player, some Windows Media Player replacement, and I'm gone.
Or a Mac. They have a few years before the kids target them.
"they have now asked for direct read-only access to our Oracle database, to be able to run ad-hoc queries without consulting us"
You meant...
"they have now asked for direct read-only access to our Oracle database, to be able to run ad-hoc queries without PAYING us".
There, fixed that for ya.
Now it's all clear to me. I've had clients like this. Write them an ad-hoc report generator, bill them accordingly. This should take a year at least, to get their requirements and meet the 19th version of the requirements some time in November. Then you should get them to sign off on the final version by next March or so.
I suppose you could expand the Web gizmo to allow more than 15 fields, but where's the fun in that?
Alternatively, you could farm this out to an Elbonian consulting firm and take a cut.
I'm so glad I don't do that any more. Made me feel dirty charging clients for their own data. My former boss is in real estate now, for somewhat obvious reasons...