If those six are purely admins and heldesk, something ain't right. Too much bloat and inefficiencies going on.
Quite the opposite with my last job. Granted, there were four of us, but we all shared those duties to some degree depending on what we were best at handling. And it wasn't because there were too many of us to establish a proper set of tiers; rather, there were too few of us to do so.
The company did telemarketing. As a result, EVERYONE who was employed there, with the notable exception of the janitors, used a computer. So when including the programmers and CIO/CTO, we had an IT staff of about 9 people responsible for 100-500 users (depending on time of day), three locations (in two states), and as many desktops/laptops, and four or five dozen servers (though virtualization made that more manageable as time went on).
Because they can get even more by hurting them *and* getting their golden parachutes after the havoc?
I wonder if I'm the only person who hears or reads "golden parachute" and gets a mental image of a CEO jumping from a burning plane with his company's stock ticker on the side, holding on to a dozen overstuffed briefcases full of cash like he's a modern-day DB Cooper.:D
Younger kids will act less mature and less professional. Get a bunch of kids in their mid-twenties together and they'll do stupid shit. Give them ten years and they'll (typically) grow out of that phase.
You're generally right about that, I think, but I admit that doing stupid shit every once in a while, much to the chagrin of those who've gotten to old to instigate the stupid shit, is part of the fun of being a professional and in your twenties.
Of course, by no means is stupid shit professional itself, but "professional behavior" and "stupid shit" can come from the same person, given different sets of circumstances. Being in the latter half of my twenties myself, I find that my tolerance for shenanigans is going down, as is my desire to incite or perform them, for what it's worth.
Why would my buffer be never empty? Just because you have more buffers doesn't mean you process anything slower than you have to. It just means if you can't get around to something immediately, you can catch up later.
That's exactly the problem. TCP relies on packets being dropped in order to manage connections. When buffers are instead allowed to fill up, delaying packets instead of outright dropping them, the application relying on those packets experiences extremely high latency instead of being rate-limited to fit inside of the available bandwidth.
The problem has come to pass because of how counterintuitive this really is. It's a GOOD THING to discard data you can't transfer RIGHT NOW, rather than wait around and send it later.
I suppose one of the only analogs I can think of might be the Blackbird stealth plane. Leaks like a sieve on the ground, spitting fuel all over the place, because at altitude the seals expand so much that they'd pop if it hadn't been designed to leak on the ground. Using gigantic packet buffers would be like "fixing" a Blackbird so that it didn't leak on the runway.
No more than there is, say, the best musician or athlete - everyone has strengths, weaknesses & what-not...
Say what you will, but Russinovich is is my ultimate nerd idol. Listening to that man talk about Windows, and go into such amazing detail about how it works, all the way down to the bare metal and then back up through the processor, into the kernel, back out into user mode... it's positively fascinating.
Honest to goodness, the one thing that, not only career-wise but even down on a fundamental level of sheer personal enrichment for the thing I love most, would seemingly allow a quantum leap in what I want to learn would be an apprenticeship under him and the other technical fellows at Microsoft. Just as many here would probably say the same of themselves and Torvalds, I suspect!
Now I'm getting impatient, waiting for the next iteration of Windows Internals to show up at my door. Get moving, Microsoft!:P
To this end, I might be able to help. I occasionally fix up resumes for people (for free), so if the poster (or anyone else) would like help here, just leave a comment below with your email address
While I wouldn't like to subscribe to your newsletter, would you mind a time-shift of your offer? I'm currently under-employed, but am not just yet seeking full-time employment. I will, however, be doing so within the next six months, and could use a resume audit at that time by someone experienced in hiring in IT (Systems Administration/Infrastructure/Deployment/Windows/Some Linux. I make a great project-monkey, and am in general fanatic about tech. Also a bootloader nerd.)
My email is my slashdot ID at gmail. I do thank you for the generous offer!
I was in a cab with a bunch of drunk people about six years ago, when a phone came up out of the seat we were all asked, "Is this your phone?" Turned out that it didn't belong to any of us. I had never found a lost phone before, but I was sober, and I was also pretty sure I could locate its owner, and as I lived in the area code corresponding to the device's number, would have the easiest time returning it. I took the phone home with me.
I called a few entries in the contact list, most notably, "Mom." Got voicemail, left a message explaining what had happened. "Mom" never called back. I ended up chatting with two different women though by going through the recent calls list and calling some numbers. I came out of that ordeal with two different stories---apparently the guy who used the phone was either a player or a womanizer, I'm not really sure which. The problem I had was that I wasn't sure who the right party to return this phone to was, exactly. So I had an idea...
The phone was tattooed with Verizon logos (I sure as hell don't miss those days... that LG UI that got ported to EVERY PHONE THEY SOLD was so fucking awful), so I called 611 with the phone itself. After explaining the situation to a customer service rep, she very regrettably informed me that even though she had the information right in front of her on her screen, she would not tell me the name of the account holder. Go figure. So I wrack my brain trying to think of ideas when I got a pretty good one.
I asked her, "Can you make three way calls?"
"No, but I can put you on hold and make another call," she replied.
"Okay, take down this phone number," and I give her the number of the woman I most suspect that I should return the phone to. "Now put me on hold and call her, and then can you tell me whether or not that person is the owner of this phone?"
"Oh yes!" she says. "Just wait on hold."
Ten minutes later...
"That person IS the owner of this phone. You can return the phone to her and you'll be all set!"
So I call her one more time and gave her my address, and a car pulled up an hour or two later. The funny thing was that the person who came to the door to pick up the phone wasn't actually the woman I spoke with though... it was her boyfriend, the guy who actually used the phone, and also bore a striking resemblance to the fellow that took all those self-shot photos in the camera roll, modestly covering his junk while staring at a mirror.
A more positive ID might have been possible, but camera phones had such atrocious low-light performance back then....
And, for the record, I happen to be an outspoken anti-smartphone guy, likening them to Linus' security blanket. Might as well be suckin' your widdle thumbs, too.
God damn it... I went to answer a call and I just got slobber all over my iPhone again.
They surely would be a tempting thing to use before elections.
It would be particularly effective if you had a copy of the speech beforehand. That way, you could selectively mute words or phrases to take the speaker out of context in a way that only political advertisements can do now, but in real time!
I could seriously use one of these. I have a boss with a monstrous disability: he is incapable of shutting the f**k up.
Regarding your sig, I posted in a thread some years back, where someone compared the two options of "having a vast library of movies" is a realistic option by either subscribing to Netflix (this was before instant streaming) or having a massive array of hard drives.
Your sig reminds me of my reply, "I went with the hard drives. I find the seek times on Netflix unacceptable."
I don't because my embedded system that uses it, boots from a section in the same flash chip as BIOS
Pardon me, but I was recently fascinated with the idea that something like that might be possible---Stuffing an INT13-reading bootloader, like GRUB4DOS or SYSLINUX, into an archive in the BIOS and then strapping it like any other option ROM.
I was always fascinated with the idea of separating the initial boot program from the hard disk layout and into the board itself. Running a bootloader from the BIOS ROM would technically allow that to happen, I think, and I thought curiously about the idea of embedding a UEFI payload into it (that probably wouldn't fit, but I digress!)... essentially "converting" a board to UEFI by chainloading it from BIOS. Not practical, but I thought it would be pretty neat:P
Any links or info you could provide me on projects like yours?
But it's downright painful to run XP with a piddling 256MB....I can't believe they ever sold them.
It's a damn shame too, but it illustrates the greediness of computer manufacturers.
In turn I ask, "What about all of the Vista machines sold with 1 or 2GB of RAM?"
It's worth mentioning that Apple seems to think that Lion can run on 2GB as well.
My boss (sometimes working for the individual I work for can be maddening, but it pays well:P) called Apple, inevitably about his iPhone, and was recommended to upgrade to Lion. While it solved his problem, his computer became nearly unusably slow. Apple tells him that he doesn't have enough RAM. In a Mac Mini. He buys a new computer. Problem solved.
"Minimum" requirements are bullshit, but they're in place so that everyone except the consumer can maximize profits and accomodate a larger customer base. The fact that plentiful RAM amounts are affordable now has reduced this problem in the mid-range market, especially for new machines, but it's my opinion that the age-old practice of a company knowingly advising a consumer to buy a product that isn't good enough for themselves is still alive and well. And even from a company like Apple.... just not from the top down, I suppose.
Not surprising. That's how we evolved. Fear kicks in and we move.
But, as I mentioned in another post, slowly changing things like weight and lifestyle don't raise fear in and of themselves.
It's funny looking at it that way. I recently started exercising regularly; and by recently, I started "exercising" by taking daily walks with my girlfriend in October, about a mile or so, but they got longer as time went on. As it gradually grew Too Fucking Cold(TM) to walk outside at any time of day (yay, Ohio!), we began following exercise videos. I'm between 3-4 days a week, but I'm trying to bring myself to 6. My goal is to be in good enough shape to start P90X by March. It's a shitty realization that you're too out of shape for an at-home exercise regimen:D
Nonetheless, while I don't appear to look anywhere near athletic, it really is amazing how much more empowered you feel on a daily basis. Something has metaphorically pricked the back of my neck now that I'm 26. I know that I can still "look good" when I clean myself up, but that really only has do with qualities I know are directly attributable to my age---I won't have a youthful face and dark, thick, curly hair forever. If I don't lose weight, I'll just eventually be the fat guy in a nice suit... that probably needs a haircut.
Sure, it might be insanely trite to sit here and essentially say that my fear is that I'm finally realizing that I could very easily end up with absolutely nothing to give myself a small sense of vanity, but with that comes self-esteem, and with that comes confidence in what you do and how you present yourself. And that, I think, is about as poignant as it probably gets.
You may be technically correct, but "living on credit," has the connotation of accruing interest on debt. The GP is using the same tools and methods as those who do, but netting the opposite effect, much to his own benefit.
Why are you even using credit cards to pay bills? In Europe bank transfers are used for such and are entirely free for consumers.
Bank transfers (ACH payments) are free, in general, in the US. The problem is that they're not "instantaneous," and are less convenient.
The only well established platform for sending ACH payments online instantly is PayPal, and their fees make merchant account providers look like saints.
Here's hoping Dwolla catches on as a payments platform:P
Slashdot Mirror
Humans need to do some personal things inside work hours just as they are needed to do work things outside of work hours. Tit for tat.
Things like reading Slashdot!
If those six are purely admins and heldesk, something ain't right. Too much bloat and inefficiencies going on.
Quite the opposite with my last job. Granted, there were four of us, but we all shared those duties to some degree depending on what we were best at handling. And it wasn't because there were too many of us to establish a proper set of tiers; rather, there were too few of us to do so.
The company did telemarketing. As a result, EVERYONE who was employed there, with the notable exception of the janitors, used a computer. So when including the programmers and CIO/CTO, we had an IT staff of about 9 people responsible for 100-500 users (depending on time of day), three locations (in two states), and as many desktops/laptops, and four or five dozen servers (though virtualization made that more manageable as time went on).
Working there gave me shingles, once.
Because they can get even more by hurting them *and* getting their golden parachutes after the havoc?
I wonder if I'm the only person who hears or reads "golden parachute" and gets a mental image of a CEO jumping from a burning plane with his company's stock ticker on the side, holding on to a dozen overstuffed briefcases full of cash like he's a modern-day DB Cooper. :D
Younger kids will act less mature and less professional. Get a bunch of kids in their mid-twenties together and they'll do stupid shit. Give them ten years and they'll (typically) grow out of that phase.
You're generally right about that, I think, but I admit that doing stupid shit every once in a while, much to the chagrin of those who've gotten to old to instigate the stupid shit, is part of the fun of being a professional and in your twenties.
Of course, by no means is stupid shit professional itself, but "professional behavior" and "stupid shit" can come from the same person, given different sets of circumstances. Being in the latter half of my twenties myself, I find that my tolerance for shenanigans is going down, as is my desire to incite or perform them, for what it's worth.
Is it sad that I think about my Slashdot comments in the shower?
Only if they don't make +5.... which is the majority of Slashdot comments. :-\
those scada systems should not be directly connected to internet anyways though.
Tell that to Iran.
Bottom line: "Cutting the cord" for potentially vulnerable systems is a good philosophy in theory, but it simply doesn't work in practice.
Why would my buffer be never empty? Just because you have more buffers doesn't mean you process anything slower than you have to. It just means if you can't get around to something immediately, you can catch up later.
That's exactly the problem. TCP relies on packets being dropped in order to manage connections. When buffers are instead allowed to fill up, delaying packets instead of outright dropping them, the application relying on those packets experiences extremely high latency instead of being rate-limited to fit inside of the available bandwidth.
The problem has come to pass because of how counterintuitive this really is. It's a GOOD THING to discard data you can't transfer RIGHT NOW, rather than wait around and send it later.
I suppose one of the only analogs I can think of might be the Blackbird stealth plane. Leaks like a sieve on the ground, spitting fuel all over the place, because at altitude the seals expand so much that they'd pop if it hadn't been designed to leak on the ground. Using gigantic packet buffers would be like "fixing" a Blackbird so that it didn't leak on the runway.
No more than there is, say, the best musician or athlete - everyone has strengths, weaknesses & what-not...
Say what you will, but Russinovich is is my ultimate nerd idol. Listening to that man talk about Windows, and go into such amazing detail about how it works, all the way down to the bare metal and then back up through the processor, into the kernel, back out into user mode... it's positively fascinating.
:P
Honest to goodness, the one thing that, not only career-wise but even down on a fundamental level of sheer personal enrichment for the thing I love most, would seemingly allow a quantum leap in what I want to learn would be an apprenticeship under him and the other technical fellows at Microsoft. Just as many here would probably say the same of themselves and Torvalds, I suspect!
Now I'm getting impatient, waiting for the next iteration of Windows Internals to show up at my door. Get moving, Microsoft!
That, and Russinovich is a God among gods.
That'd be fantastic to see an anonymized version of.... if you're checking on your anonymous posts :P
To this end, I might be able to help. I occasionally fix up resumes for people (for free), so if the poster (or anyone else) would like help here, just leave a comment below with your email address
While I wouldn't like to subscribe to your newsletter, would you mind a time-shift of your offer? I'm currently under-employed, but am not just yet seeking full-time employment. I will, however, be doing so within the next six months, and could use a resume audit at that time by someone experienced in hiring in IT (Systems Administration/Infrastructure/Deployment/Windows/Some Linux. I make a great project-monkey, and am in general fanatic about tech. Also a bootloader nerd.)
My email is my slashdot ID at gmail. I do thank you for the generous offer!
I was in a cab with a bunch of drunk people about six years ago, when a phone came up out of the seat we were all asked, "Is this your phone?" Turned out that it didn't belong to any of us. I had never found a lost phone before, but I was sober, and I was also pretty sure I could locate its owner, and as I lived in the area code corresponding to the device's number, would have the easiest time returning it. I took the phone home with me.
I called a few entries in the contact list, most notably, "Mom." Got voicemail, left a message explaining what had happened. "Mom" never called back. I ended up chatting with two different women though by going through the recent calls list and calling some numbers. I came out of that ordeal with two different stories---apparently the guy who used the phone was either a player or a womanizer, I'm not really sure which. The problem I had was that I wasn't sure who the right party to return this phone to was, exactly. So I had an idea...
The phone was tattooed with Verizon logos (I sure as hell don't miss those days... that LG UI that got ported to EVERY PHONE THEY SOLD was so fucking awful), so I called 611 with the phone itself. After explaining the situation to a customer service rep, she very regrettably informed me that even though she had the information right in front of her on her screen, she would not tell me the name of the account holder. Go figure. So I wrack my brain trying to think of ideas when I got a pretty good one.
I asked her, "Can you make three way calls?"
"No, but I can put you on hold and make another call," she replied.
"Okay, take down this phone number," and I give her the number of the woman I most suspect that I should return the phone to. "Now put me on hold and call her, and then can you tell me whether or not that person is the owner of this phone?"
"Oh yes!" she says. "Just wait on hold."
Ten minutes later...
"That person IS the owner of this phone. You can return the phone to her and you'll be all set!"
So I call her one more time and gave her my address, and a car pulled up an hour or two later. The funny thing was that the person who came to the door to pick up the phone wasn't actually the woman I spoke with though... it was her boyfriend, the guy who actually used the phone, and also bore a striking resemblance to the fellow that took all those self-shot photos in the camera roll, modestly covering his junk while staring at a mirror.
A more positive ID might have been possible, but camera phones had such atrocious low-light performance back then....
And, for the record, I happen to be an outspoken anti-smartphone guy, likening them to Linus' security blanket. Might as well be suckin' your widdle thumbs, too.
God damn it... I went to answer a call and I just got slobber all over my iPhone again.
How does one destroy a bitcoin?
Delete your wallet.dat file.
Sure, you *could* go from there and attempt to brute force those coins' private keys back.... but good luck with that one.
They surely would be a tempting thing to use before elections.
It would be particularly effective if you had a copy of the speech beforehand. That way, you could selectively mute words or phrases to take the speaker out of context in a way that only political advertisements can do now, but in real time!
I could seriously use one of these. I have a boss with a monstrous disability: he is incapable of shutting the f**k up.
The most common example it the traveling salesman problem.
Every time I think I've got my head wrapped around the P/NP thing, I get an example that I sort of understand... sort of.
Could you perhaps rephrase an example that matches nerdier things, like brute-forcing a hash or something?
Regarding your sig, I posted in a thread some years back, where someone compared the two options of "having a vast library of movies" is a realistic option by either subscribing to Netflix (this was before instant streaming) or having a massive array of hard drives.
Your sig reminds me of my reply, "I went with the hard drives. I find the seek times on Netflix unacceptable."
Well, to start with you can make an SSD as big as you want by taking smaller SSD's and chaining them together with an intelligent front-end.
I could do the same thing with a bunch of 80 GB hard disks, but I'd rather just buy a 2 TB one and run that instead.
I don't because my embedded system that uses it, boots from a section in the same flash chip as BIOS
Pardon me, but I was recently fascinated with the idea that something like that might be possible---Stuffing an INT13-reading bootloader, like GRUB4DOS or SYSLINUX, into an archive in the BIOS and then strapping it like any other option ROM.
:P
I was always fascinated with the idea of separating the initial boot program from the hard disk layout and into the board itself. Running a bootloader from the BIOS ROM would technically allow that to happen, I think, and I thought curiously about the idea of embedding a UEFI payload into it (that probably wouldn't fit, but I digress!)... essentially "converting" a board to UEFI by chainloading it from BIOS. Not practical, but I thought it would be pretty neat
Any links or info you could provide me on projects like yours?
But it's downright painful to run XP with a piddling 256MB....I can't believe they ever sold them.
It's a damn shame too, but it illustrates the greediness of computer manufacturers.
:P) called Apple, inevitably about his iPhone, and was recommended to upgrade to Lion. While it solved his problem, his computer became nearly unusably slow. Apple tells him that he doesn't have enough RAM. In a Mac Mini. He buys a new computer. Problem solved.
In turn I ask, "What about all of the Vista machines sold with 1 or 2GB of RAM?"
It's worth mentioning that Apple seems to think that Lion can run on 2GB as well.
My boss (sometimes working for the individual I work for can be maddening, but it pays well
"Minimum" requirements are bullshit, but they're in place so that everyone except the consumer can maximize profits and accomodate a larger customer base. The fact that plentiful RAM amounts are affordable now has reduced this problem in the mid-range market, especially for new machines, but it's my opinion that the age-old practice of a company knowingly advising a consumer to buy a product that isn't good enough for themselves is still alive and well. And even from a company like Apple.... just not from the top down, I suppose.
Not surprising. That's how we evolved. Fear kicks in and we move.
But, as I mentioned in another post, slowly changing things like weight and lifestyle don't raise fear in and of themselves.
It's funny looking at it that way. I recently started exercising regularly; and by recently, I started "exercising" by taking daily walks with my girlfriend in October, about a mile or so, but they got longer as time went on. As it gradually grew Too Fucking Cold(TM) to walk outside at any time of day (yay, Ohio!), we began following exercise videos. I'm between 3-4 days a week, but I'm trying to bring myself to 6. My goal is to be in good enough shape to start P90X by March. It's a shitty realization that you're too out of shape for an at-home exercise regimen :D
Nonetheless, while I don't appear to look anywhere near athletic, it really is amazing how much more empowered you feel on a daily basis. Something has metaphorically pricked the back of my neck now that I'm 26. I know that I can still "look good" when I clean myself up, but that really only has do with qualities I know are directly attributable to my age---I won't have a youthful face and dark, thick, curly hair forever. If I don't lose weight, I'll just eventually be the fat guy in a nice suit... that probably needs a haircut.
Sure, it might be insanely trite to sit here and essentially say that my fear is that I'm finally realizing that I could very easily end up with absolutely nothing to give myself a small sense of vanity, but with that comes self-esteem, and with that comes confidence in what you do and how you present yourself. And that, I think, is about as poignant as it probably gets.
And Siskel & Ebert while you're at it
Um... dude.... Siskel's been dead for around a decade.
That said, I asked him, and he said he agrees with you, and finds your argument both salient and decidedly poignant! Bravo, good sir!
Nope, nope, sorry.
In Soviet Russia, battery replace YOU!
You may be technically correct, but "living on credit," has the connotation of accruing interest on debt. The GP is using the same tools and methods as those who do, but netting the opposite effect, much to his own benefit.
Why are you even using credit cards to pay bills? In Europe bank transfers are used for such and are entirely free for consumers.
Bank transfers (ACH payments) are free, in general, in the US. The problem is that they're not "instantaneous," and are less convenient.
:P
The only well established platform for sending ACH payments online instantly is PayPal, and their fees make merchant account providers look like saints.
Here's hoping Dwolla catches on as a payments platform