First off, best to be innocent. Second, get a lawyer. Real attorneys are required to play this game properly.
Correct items, incorrect order.
First off, best to get a lawyer. Involving a lawyer early, before you say anything other than your name, could and often does nip this sort of thing in the bud.
Second, best to be innocent. This is not a requirement if the first item is sufficeintly skilled.
Company says it has valid intellectual property claims against a major corporation that will generate revenue, when in fact the execs know it is false (SCO incident)
Company says it has valid billing claims from partners that are major corporations that will generate revenue, when in fact the execs no it's false (WorldCom)
Apples and oranges comparison. In the SCO case, the issue is currently before the courts and therefore nothing is "known" at this point. As the matter has not yet ajudicated, it is impossible to make any factual statement regarding the intellectual property in question or the actions of SCO's management. It is possible SCO may win the case (as much as I would hate see it). SCO has stated in their SEC filings that this particular case is very risky and no matter what the outcome of the case, it will significantly impact SCO's revenue and profitablity.
Now onto Worldcomm. Worldcomm had produced signed and audited documentation stating the partnership revenue stream was virtually guaranteed.
Now let's look at these two cases in another light. Hypothetically, two different people go to bank to get a loan. Person one states they have a reasonably well paying job. Person Ones employer is on the verge of closing a deal that would result in a quadrupling of the size of the company and with that their salary would also quadruple. Person one states that the "deal" has at best a 25% chance of completion. If the deal does not close their salary would be cut in half. The second person goes to the same bank and produces forged documents indicating their salary is 10 times what it actually is. Who, in this scenario did something wrong?
You are basically saying if a company lies to investors it's up to the investor to know they are lying...
No I did not say anything like that. Please allow me to restate my point. Because someone tells you something, that does not make the "something" true. I said, based on the circumstances surrounding the SCO case, I, personally, find it hard to understand how anyone could take the company (SCO) seriously enough to invest money in them.
Another analogy to simplify the matter would be that of the street-corner watch vendor. You may think it wise to accept the word of the vendor that the watch you are purchasing for $100.00 is in fact a $10,000 Rolex. I, being the cynical prick that I am, would question that statement.
So if I say I have a secret patent claim against microsoft and start selling stock to people in company xyz that is supposed to benifit from my patent claim, even though I know the claim is utterly and completely false, it's all ok?
No it's not OK. If you said you have a patent and you don't, that is fraud. If you said you have applied for a patent and that patent could generate significant revenue if it is granted, then yes it would be OK. As to how "secret" you wish to keep the patent, that would directly influence my finacial commitment.
If you somehow prove that kind of behavior is perfectly legal you're not beating me in arguement your just helping to show how retarded American capitalism is, so either way, I don't really care...
It is not up to me to say if the behaviour of a particular individual or corporation is legal. The Americans have a system of courts that interpret laws to determine what is legal and what is not. Much to my chagrin, you seem to think Slashdot is about winning and losing arguements. In areas where I am factually wrong I welcome being corrected. In areas where I have expressed an opinion, I welcome a well stated counter opinion. I do not expect you or anyone else to agree with my opinions or to be swayed to my way of thinking nor should you expect me to agree with all of your opinions.
Since when is there a direct connection between lawsuits and stock prices? A bogus lawsuit, of this magnitude, and the executives dumping stock should be seen by the investors (stock owners) for what it is; a really good indication that it's time to run, run far and run fast.
As much as I don't like what SCO is doing and would love to see them all die a horrible flaming death, what, other than possibly baritry (SP?) have they done that is illegal? Before the flames are unleased, please read the question again, it say ILLEGAL not immoral or stupid.
If the SCO execs all got together in, oh let's say November, and started buying large (insert abritrary SEC defined number) quantities of stock prior to announcing the suit, that could and to my untrained eyes would, be insider trading and/or fraud.
Now just to let you in on another little secret, somebody has to be willing to buy what you are selling. So the real question now becomes who are the morons buying good money for a portion of a company that may or may not have a revenue stream? At the present time, anyone who considers SCO stock any better than an other-the-counter, very junior mining stock should start learning a little about investment. The old adage "A fool and his money are soon parted" applies quite well to this situation.
Absolutely true and that's a good point. But the reverse is true as well. A lot of the complexity of the default directory structure in linux is unnecessary and does not aid anyone. It's simply cruft.
Where is the "hosts" file in NT/2K/XP? Now that, sir, IS cruft!
NB: For those unfamiliar with Canadian culture, "two-four" is a case of beer containing 24 cans or bottles.
Even More Pointless Corrections
on
dB Drag Racing
·
· Score: 1
Evel never jumped the Grand Canyon. The jump to which you are refering was over the Snake River Canyon. His son, Robbie, jumped the Grand Canyon (well part of it) on a real motorcycle in the late 90's. Sorry I am not sure of the date.
I currently use Cisco Systems VPN Client Version 3.5.2 for connecting to the office. During installation, the client explicitly disables user switching. I asked the same question about user switching in XP of the VPN guys and had it explained this way:
Three people share the XP system, each with their own user profile. I logon and connect to the office. With fast switching enabled, the kids come along and decide to do some nasty things on the corporate network (maybe by accident, maybe not). If I was willing to personally accept all responsiblity (in other words, pay the bills for any fallout) for all the other users of the system, they would provide a patched version of the client to allow fast switching.
As much as I hate bureaucracy, I have to side with the VPN guys on this one.
Otherwise you're just causing your disk heads to thrash as they move from one partition to another.
I am sure there is the distinct possiblity you are correct, however, I have not seen any quantified data to back this claim up. Head movement is more a function of I/O load and caching algorithms (drive, controller, OS and application).
A single honking big partition is WAY better than lots of tiny partitions
This is a very debatable point. Typically, the most fatal data losses occur when filesystem metadata is corrupted (obviously excluding hardware failure). It would seem reasonable then to have less data controlled by this metadata. In the event of corrupted metadata, the amount of data to restore would be smaller when using multiple partitions and therefore recovery time will be faster.
Additionally, your statement does not take into account requirements such as raw partitions. Nor does it address the issue of inadvertantly filling a filesystem. Typically a full filesystem will have an adverse impact on the applications using files on the filesystem. With one filesystem, all running applications will be impacted.
Not true. There can commonly be as little as1000' separation with a combined horizontal velocity of 1400mph or higher.
This is a little misleading. The 1000 feet you refer to is VERTICAL seperation not horizontal. As another poster has pointed out, the most likely scenario for having a problem would center around take-off, landing and taxiing (sp?) while in reduced visiblity.
Moderators should check out the definition of sarcasm and maybe try to purchase a sense humour.
The ONLY trollish part of this post is the moderation.
Lawsuits, Stupidity And Damages
on
SCO DOS'ed
·
· Score: 1
Anyone remember the USFL vs NFL fight? Hopefully whatever judge/judges presides over this case, he/she/they will be wise enough to determine an appropriate damage amount.
Let's hope for a finding in favour of SCO and damages be set at $1.00. After such an award, IBM should happily buy-out SCO for pennies on the dollar and do whatever with the morons that initiated the suit.
Why can't you use multiple power supplies for the drives themselves? As far as I know, there is no requirement for the power supply to supply both disks and system. This would eliminate the need to have a "Spin-up" option in BIOS as the drives to be tested would already be powered up.
For example, you could easily have two additional, external power supplies and plug four drives into each. Simply power the drives up first (count to ten or whatever), then the system.
Sorry but I strongly disagree with your conjectures.
The numbers don't bear this out.
Whose numbers? Care to share the source of these "numbers"?.
Even if two machines are just sitting idle, they both download patches, query DNS, etc
Guess they aren't idle now are they. Why would an idle machine ever perform a DNS lookup? Patches are usually downloaded with some forethought. I nor any reasonable techie I know constantly downloads patches. This is typically a scheduled process, usually at a time when there is little or no contention for limited residential bandwidth.
Further to your DNS contention, a caching local DNS server reduces bandwitdh requirements while providing end users with the perception of more responsive surfing.
Canadian reply but the concepts are pretty similar.
Each municipal government (city) comes up with a plan of how certain land areas are to used. Specific areas of the city are zoned residential, (people live there), commercial (usually retail/office), industrial (manufacturing). There are MANY more sub-catagorie such as high-density, low-density, heavy, light and so forth. The idea serves two purposes. First it allows the municipal government to plan for infrastructure such as sewers, mass transit and the like. Next, it ensures those who live/conduct business in an area that there will not be any drastic changes in the type of neighbour you have. After all, you wouldn't want to buy/build your dream home and in six months be surrounded by heavy industries.
What I don't understand are Home Owner Associations. From what I gather, they have the power/right to determine what you property must look like and how it can be used and these powers seem to extend far beyond any legislation.
OK time to show my ignorance of the current state of FoxPro. I am making a BIG assumption here that FoxPro is some kind of development environment that offers, amongst other things, SQL like database access, screen control and report writing. I have NO idea what the scalablity of FoxPro is nor do I have any idea what its networking capablites are. So based on this woefully uninformed background, my guesses would be:
As I am not fully versed in the finer points of FoxPro, I am quite sure many readers will highlight why FoxPro is a better DB than the four listed above and why the language/development interface is better than the four listed above.
Pronunciation: im-'pyüt
Function: transitive verb Inflected Form(s): imputed; imputing Etymology: Middle English inputen, from Latin imputare, from in- + putare to consider Date: 14th century 1 : to lay the responsibility or blame for often falsely or unjustly 2 : to credit to a person or a cause
While it was not used correctly in the original sentence, it IS a word.
Yeah, I know, shameless Karma Whore but what the hell.
I have tested it today and it's *the greatest Mandrake release ever*.
I must say, I am very impressed. To be able to install and test a complete OS in one day. Maybe it's just me but "testing" usually implies performing some tasks beyond d:\setup or the equivalent.
Testing an OS/distro cannot be done in a day and any claims to the contrary only illustrate how much faith one should put in conclusions of the testing.
Why? Because 1) most system-level scripts are written in sh, and 2) when major programming languages perform a "shell" call, e.g., system(), it uses sh to do the work.
This is not always true. For example, with AIX,/bin is a symbolic link to/usr/bin./usr/bin/sh is linked to/usr/bin/ksh, the i-nodes are the same. So any of the following result in a Korn shell: #!/bin/ksh #!/bin/sh #!/usr/bin/ksh #!/ usr/bin/sh
And before anyone jumps on me, I know AIX really stands for "Ain't Unix" but I figured the pot needed a little stirring.
Actually DASD were not solid state (3350's and 3380's sorry I cannot remember any other models). Typically, they came in one of two flavours, mountable and non-mountable (mountable meant you could change the media/diskpack). The non-mountable group was broken down into two sub-catagories. The first was fixed-head and the second mobile-head (sorry I cannot remember extacly what the IBMism was).
The non-mountable devices were/are very similar to todays harddrives. A stack of magnetically coated platters accessed via electronic heads. The fixed-head group offered remarkable performance as there was NO armature required to move the head to the correct track. Instead the device was built with one head per track. This resulted in only rotational latency. Even as 3600RPM devices, they offered concurrent access that is only approached today by RAID configurations. One the down side, they were VERY pricey and most likely consumed the same energy as a clothes dryer.
So this brings up the question, what would cost to produce a low-RPM, fixed-head harddrive for todays PC's? Given todays storage densities, it would seem the cost of the control mechanism required to correctly position the head must be a significant portion of the cost of the drive.
So you know what that does? That makes everyone do the tasks that _should_ be change controlled cowboy-style. Nobody wants to submit the forms to replace a failed disk drive, because you're going to get beaten up for it. So everyone just DOES IT and hope for the best. Application teams roll out new code and bugfixes all the time without change controls -- they don't want to sit on the phone with the VP's yelling at them for being over their emergency change numbers.......
That sort of management style "zero defect" does nothing but drive the business processes underground.
Absolutely BRILLIANT summary of what is wrong in the IT world. I am a sysadmin working for a large Canadain financial institution (yeah I know, kind of an oxymoron). The change process here is insane.
The systems I work with are mostly AIX. One of the great things about AIX is the "chfs" command, change a filesystem. It allows dynamic increases of filesystems. What this means is if a filesystem needs to be increased, the command is "chfs -a size=XXXXXX/fs_name". Wonderfull isn't it one simple, non-intrusive command to get the job done. Unfortunately, change management kicks in.
1) Provide detailed justification and procedures for implementing the change.
2) Provide detailed back-out procedures on how to recover from the change.
3) Schedule the change so as not to conflict with other changes. Note: change window for ALL systems is Sunday 03:00 to 07:00 and our group is responsible for 300 systems. Note 2: You cannot have two changes on one system nor on multiple systems providing the same function for the same line of business.
4) Get the change record approved. Guess what, it's not as easy as it sounds. For web servers the list includes seven groups, application servers eight, database 11, other infrastructure systems up to 16. Oh and don't forget the person approving the record cannot read so you must repeat the justification, procedures and back out plan for each group. Repeat this step up to 16 times.
5) The change MUST be presented to a least one and usually two "Change Review Groups".
6) If the record is not fully approved by the end of day Tuesday, the week BEFORE the change, special excemption must be obtained (2 VP's must approve). This is a wonderfull rule since most client requests are received on the Thursday before they want the change implemented.
So guess what, changes are implemented on the fly. The process could EASILY be streamlined to have TWO groups approve the change, the requestor and the implementor. All that is needed for documentation is a copy of the e-mail pasted into the change record. 5 minutes of work instead of at least 6 hours and you dont have employees whing about internal bullshit on/.
Definitely one of the more insightfull comments in a while. Exploits like this really speak volumes about the current state of software development, both at the application and O/S levels.
I am very synpatheticto the persons unfortuante accident.
Admittedly, I am not intimately acquainted with the facts of this case, however I do have a few observations (yeah I know another./er just burning up bandwidth).
1) The coffee was not used in a way normal everyday manner. Not being an expert on coffee, I do have some first experience with the beverage and it has been my experience that coffee should be taken INTERNALLY and not applied topically to the skin.
2) Further to point 1, assuming some external forced, not induced by McDonalds, acted upon the person, causing resulting in the coffee being applied topically, how has McDonalds been negligent? Let's take a hypothetical case: 1) I run down the closet Home Depot and purchase a 32 foot extension ladder. 2) On the way home, a sudden ice storm hits my area. 3) As I am carrying the ladder from my vehicle to the garage, I slip and fall. 4) The ladder strikes in the head and I receive a large gash requiring several stitches. Should I sue the ladder manufacturer/Home Depot?
Your comment about "molten metal" being served instead of coffee, this is non-sensical. The person ORDERED coffee, they did not ORDER molten metal. Ask any reasonable person if freshly served coffee is hot and I am very sure they will respond YES. Therefore the person got what they asked for and what would be expected by a reasoanble person.
Typically coffee is made with VERY hot water. Coffee in McDonalds is make using the DRIP method. If I remember basic chemistry/physics, you cannot heat water above its boiling unless it is held under pressure. This would imply that the coffee could not have exceeded a temperature of 100C (212F). So unless the lawyers for the plaintiff were able to prove that the temperature of the coffee exceeded the normal boiling point of water, what did McDonalds do that warrented "punative" damages?
So yes, a poor unfortunate person suffered however, this suffering was not caused by McDonalds. The person was not STUPID for the spilling the coffee. The person was STUPID for litigating, the plaintiffs lawyers were STUPID for taking this to court, the defandants lawyers were STUPID for not successfully defending the case and the judge was stupid for making such an award.
Slashdot Mirror
Correct items, incorrect order.
First off, best to get a lawyer. Involving a lawyer early, before you say anything other than your name, could and often does nip this sort of thing in the bud.
Second, best to be innocent. This is not a requirement if the first item is sufficeintly skilled.
Apples and oranges comparison. In the SCO case, the issue is currently before the courts and therefore nothing is "known" at this point. As the matter has not yet ajudicated, it is impossible to make any factual statement regarding the intellectual property in question or the actions of SCO's management. It is possible SCO may win the case (as much as I would hate see it). SCO has stated in their SEC filings that this particular case is very risky and no matter what the outcome of the case, it will significantly impact SCO's revenue and profitablity.
Now onto Worldcomm. Worldcomm had produced signed and audited documentation stating the partnership revenue stream was virtually guaranteed.
Now let's look at these two cases in another light. Hypothetically, two different people go to bank to get a loan. Person one states they have a reasonably well paying job. Person Ones employer is on the verge of closing a deal that would result in a quadrupling of the size of the company and with that their salary would also quadruple. Person one states that the "deal" has at best a 25% chance of completion. If the deal does not close their salary would be cut in half. The second person goes to the same bank and produces forged documents indicating their salary is 10 times what it actually is. Who, in this scenario did something wrong?
No I did not say anything like that. Please allow me to restate my point. Because someone tells you something, that does not make the "something" true. I said, based on the circumstances surrounding the SCO case, I, personally, find it hard to understand how anyone could take the company (SCO) seriously enough to invest money in them.
Another analogy to simplify the matter would be that of the street-corner watch vendor. You may think it wise to accept the word of the vendor that the watch you are purchasing for $100.00 is in fact a $10,000 Rolex. I, being the cynical prick that I am, would question that statement.
No it's not OK. If you said you have a patent and you don't, that is fraud. If you said you have applied for a patent and that patent could generate significant revenue if it is granted, then yes it would be OK. As to how "secret" you wish to keep the patent, that would directly influence my finacial commitment.
It is not up to me to say if the behaviour of a particular individual or corporation is legal. The Americans have a system of courts that interpret laws to determine what is legal and what is not. Much to my chagrin, you seem to think Slashdot is about winning and losing arguements. In areas where I am factually wrong I welcome being corrected. In areas where I have expressed an opinion, I welcome a well stated counter opinion. I do not expect you or anyone else to agree with my opinions or to be swayed to my way of thinking nor should you expect me to agree with all of your opinions.
Since when is there a direct connection between lawsuits and stock prices? A bogus lawsuit, of this magnitude, and the executives dumping stock should be seen by the investors (stock owners) for what it is; a really good indication that it's time to run, run far and run fast.
As much as I don't like what SCO is doing and would love to see them all die a horrible flaming death, what, other than possibly baritry (SP?) have they done that is illegal? Before the flames are unleased, please read the question again, it say ILLEGAL not immoral or stupid.
If the SCO execs all got together in, oh let's say November, and started buying large (insert abritrary SEC defined number) quantities of stock prior to announcing the suit, that could and to my untrained eyes would, be insider trading and/or fraud.
Now just to let you in on another little secret, somebody has to be willing to buy what you are selling. So the real question now becomes who are the morons buying good money for a portion of a company that may or may not have a revenue stream? At the present time, anyone who considers SCO stock any better than an other-the-counter, very junior mining stock should start learning a little about investment. The old adage "A fool and his money are soon parted" applies quite well to this situation.
Where is the "hosts" file in NT/2K/XP? Now that, sir, IS cruft!
and the two-four is always available on-site!
NB: For those unfamiliar with Canadian culture, "two-four" is a case of beer containing 24 cans or bottles.
Evel never jumped the Grand Canyon. The jump to which you are refering was over the Snake River Canyon. His son, Robbie, jumped the Grand Canyon (well part of it) on a real motorcycle in the late 90's. Sorry I am not sure of the date.
I currently use Cisco Systems VPN Client Version 3.5.2 for connecting to the office. During installation, the client explicitly disables user switching. I asked the same question about user switching in XP of the VPN guys and had it explained this way:
Three people share the XP system, each with their own user profile. I logon and connect to the office. With fast switching enabled, the kids come along and decide to do some nasty things on the corporate network (maybe by accident, maybe not). If I was willing to personally accept all responsiblity (in other words, pay the bills for any fallout) for all the other users of the system, they would provide a patched version of the client to allow fast switching.
As much as I hate bureaucracy, I have to side with the VPN guys on this one.
Otherwise you're just causing your disk heads to thrash as they move from one partition to another.
I am sure there is the distinct possiblity you are correct, however, I have not seen any quantified data to back this claim up. Head movement is more a function of I/O load and caching algorithms (drive, controller, OS and application).
A single honking big partition is WAY better than lots of tiny partitions
This is a very debatable point. Typically, the most fatal data losses occur when filesystem metadata is corrupted (obviously excluding hardware failure). It would seem reasonable then to have less data controlled by this metadata. In the event of corrupted metadata, the amount of data to restore would be smaller when using multiple partitions and therefore recovery time will be faster.
Additionally, your statement does not take into account requirements such as raw partitions. Nor does it address the issue of inadvertantly filling a filesystem. Typically a full filesystem will have an adverse impact on the applications using files on the filesystem. With one filesystem, all running applications will be impacted.
BRILLIANT! I am a parent of three teenage boys and I couldn't agree more.
Not true. There can commonly be as little as1000' separation with a combined horizontal velocity of 1400mph or higher.
This is a little misleading. The 1000 feet you refer to is VERTICAL seperation not horizontal. As another poster has pointed out, the most likely scenario for having a problem would center around take-off, landing and taxiing (sp?) while in reduced visiblity.
And that same 1KG block would have to be travelling at 632MPH to have the same kinetic energy!
K = 1/2m*v^2
K = 0.5 * 1g * 20000mph^2
K = 200000000
Therefore:
200000000=0.5 * 1000 * mph^2
40000 = mph^2
mph = sqrt(40000)
mph = 632.4555
Momentum increases artithmetically with velocity where as kinetic energy increase geometrically with velocity.
Moderators should check out the definition of sarcasm and maybe try to purchase a sense humour.
The ONLY trollish part of this post is the moderation.
Anyone remember the USFL vs NFL fight? Hopefully whatever judge/judges presides over this case, he/she/they will be wise enough to determine an appropriate damage amount.
Let's hope for a finding in favour of SCO and damages be set at $1.00. After such an award, IBM should happily buy-out SCO for pennies on the dollar and do whatever with the morons that initiated the suit.
Sorry if this sounds really dumb but....
Why can't you use multiple power supplies for the drives themselves? As far as I know, there is no requirement for the power supply to supply both disks and system. This would eliminate the need to have a "Spin-up" option in BIOS as the drives to be tested would already be powered up.
For example, you could easily have two additional, external power supplies and plug four drives into each. Simply power the drives up first (count to ten or whatever), then the system.
Sorry but I strongly disagree with your conjectures.
The numbers don't bear this out.
Whose numbers? Care to share the source of these "numbers"?.
Even if two machines are just sitting idle, they both download patches, query DNS, etc
Guess they aren't idle now are they. Why would an idle machine ever perform a DNS lookup? Patches are usually downloaded with some forethought. I nor any reasonable techie I know constantly downloads patches. This is typically a scheduled process, usually at a time when there is little or no contention for limited residential bandwidth.
Further to your DNS contention, a caching local DNS server reduces bandwitdh requirements while providing end users with the perception of more responsive surfing.
Canadian reply but the concepts are pretty similar.
Each municipal government (city) comes up with a plan of how certain land areas are to used. Specific areas of the city are zoned residential, (people live there), commercial (usually retail/office), industrial (manufacturing). There are MANY more sub-catagorie such as high-density, low-density, heavy, light and so forth. The idea serves two purposes. First it allows the municipal government to plan for infrastructure such as sewers, mass transit and the like. Next, it ensures those who live/conduct business in an area that there will not be any drastic changes in the type of neighbour you have. After all, you wouldn't want to buy/build your dream home and in six months be surrounded by heavy industries.
What I don't understand are Home Owner Associations. From what I gather, they have the power/right to determine what you property must look like and how it can be used and these powers seem to extend far beyond any legislation.
OK time to show my ignorance of the current state of FoxPro. I am making a BIG assumption here that FoxPro is some kind of development environment that offers, amongst other things, SQL like database access, screen control and report writing. I have NO idea what the scalablity of FoxPro is nor do I have any idea what its networking capablites are. So based on this woefully uninformed background, my guesses would be:
1) Python
2) Java
3) Perl
4) C/C++
5) Oracle
6) DB2
7) PostgreSQL
8) MySQL
As I am not fully versed in the finer points of FoxPro, I am quite sure many readers will highlight why FoxPro is a better DB than the four listed above and why the language/development interface is better than the four listed above.
While it was not used correctly in the original sentence, it IS a word.
Yeah, I know, shameless Karma Whore but what the hell.
I have tested it today and it's *the greatest Mandrake release ever*.
I must say, I am very impressed. To be able to install and test a complete OS in one day. Maybe it's just me but "testing" usually implies performing some tasks beyond d:\setup or the equivalent.
Testing an OS/distro cannot be done in a day and any claims to the contrary only illustrate how much faith one should put in conclusions of the testing.
This is not always true. For example, with AIX,
#!/bin/ksh
#!/bin/sh
#!/usr/bin/ksh
#!
And before anyone jumps on me, I know AIX really stands for "Ain't Unix" but I figured the pot needed a little stirring.
I have only ONE system accessing thr Internet via my cable connection, the NAT box. End of story.
Actually DASD were not solid state (3350's and 3380's sorry I cannot remember any other models). Typically, they came in one of two flavours, mountable and non-mountable (mountable meant you could change the media/diskpack). The non-mountable group was broken down into two sub-catagories. The first was fixed-head and the second mobile-head (sorry I cannot remember extacly what the IBMism was).
The non-mountable devices were/are very similar to todays harddrives. A stack of magnetically coated platters accessed via electronic heads. The fixed-head group offered remarkable performance as there was NO armature required to move the head to the correct track. Instead the device was built with one head per track. This resulted in only rotational latency. Even as 3600RPM devices, they offered concurrent access that is only approached today by RAID configurations. One the down side, they were VERY pricey and most likely consumed the same energy as a clothes dryer.
So this brings up the question, what would cost to produce a low-RPM, fixed-head harddrive for todays PC's? Given todays storage densities, it would seem the cost of the control mechanism required to correctly position the head must be a significant portion of the cost of the drive.
The systems I work with are mostly AIX. One of the great things about AIX is the "chfs" command, change a filesystem. It allows dynamic increases of filesystems. What this means is if a filesystem needs to be increased, the command is "chfs -a size=XXXXXX
1) Provide detailed justification and procedures for implementing the change.
2) Provide detailed back-out procedures on how to recover from the change.
3) Schedule the change so as not to conflict with other changes. Note: change window for ALL systems is Sunday 03:00 to 07:00 and our group is responsible for 300 systems. Note 2: You cannot have two changes on one system nor on multiple systems providing the same function for the same line of business.
4) Get the change record approved. Guess what, it's not as easy as it sounds. For web servers the list includes seven groups, application servers eight, database 11, other infrastructure systems up to 16. Oh and don't forget the person approving the record cannot read so you must repeat the justification, procedures and back out plan for each group. Repeat this step up to 16 times.
5) The change MUST be presented to a least one and usually two "Change Review Groups".
6) If the record is not fully approved by the end of day Tuesday, the week BEFORE the change, special excemption must be obtained (2 VP's must approve). This is a wonderfull rule since most client requests are received on the Thursday before they want the change implemented.
So guess what, changes are implemented on the fly. The process could EASILY be streamlined to have TWO groups approve the change, the requestor and the implementor. All that is needed for documentation is a copy of the e-mail pasted into the change record. 5 minutes of work instead of at least 6 hours and you dont have employees whing about internal bullshit on
Definitely one of the more insightfull comments in a while. Exploits like this really speak volumes about the current state of software development, both at the application and O/S levels.
I am very synpatheticto the persons unfortuante accident.
./er just burning up bandwidth).
Admittedly, I am not intimately acquainted with the facts of this case, however I do have a few observations (yeah I know another
1) The coffee was not used in a way normal everyday manner. Not being an expert on coffee, I do have some first experience with the beverage and it has been my experience that coffee should be taken INTERNALLY and not applied topically to the skin.
2) Further to point 1, assuming some external forced, not induced by McDonalds, acted upon the person, causing resulting in the coffee being applied topically, how has McDonalds been negligent? Let's take a hypothetical case:
1) I run down the closet Home Depot and purchase a 32 foot extension ladder.
2) On the way home, a sudden ice storm hits my area.
3) As I am carrying the ladder from my vehicle to the garage, I slip and fall.
4) The ladder strikes in the head and I receive a large gash requiring several stitches.
Should I sue the ladder manufacturer/Home Depot?
Your comment about "molten metal" being served instead of coffee, this is non-sensical. The person ORDERED coffee, they did not ORDER molten metal. Ask any reasonable person if freshly served coffee is hot and I am very sure they will respond YES. Therefore the person got what they asked for and what would be expected by a reasoanble person.
Typically coffee is made with VERY hot water. Coffee in McDonalds is make using the DRIP method. If I remember basic chemistry/physics, you cannot heat water above its boiling unless it is held under pressure. This would imply that the coffee could not have exceeded a temperature of 100C (212F). So unless the lawyers for the plaintiff were able to prove that the temperature of the coffee exceeded the normal boiling point of water, what did McDonalds do that warrented "punative" damages?
So yes, a poor unfortunate person suffered however, this suffering was not caused by McDonalds. The person was not STUPID for the spilling the coffee. The person was STUPID for litigating, the plaintiffs lawyers were STUPID for taking this to court, the defandants lawyers were STUPID for not successfully defending the case and the judge was stupid for making such an award.