According to Heaven Cable News, God could be considering today to put Mankind in the Holy Court of Heavens.
"Yes, it is possible that Final Judgement is finally near!" - said St. Peter in today's press conference.
The causes for such situation were due to the recent wave of unsolicited E-Mail that has been flooding Heavens.
"This now looks like Hell! We receive every day millions of messages. Yesterday, they were usually requests for saving souls or pardon some minor sins. We try to answer to each request in the measure of our possibilities. But since the spam started it has been increasingly harder to make our own work. Besides they are not sent by the address!" - said St. Peter
Accroding to St. Peter most content of this spam would be much proper to send to Hell. They range from cheap financial pyramids, dubious products and reaching some more sinful stuff.
According to sources that requested to stay anonymous the latest, is maybe what worries most the Heavens Offices. While the large majority of angels simply ignore this spam, still, some are lightly attracted by such messages like "Free Hot Sex pics!" and alikes.
According to the Chief of Joint Commanders Staff of the Heaven's Army, St. Michael, this could be a smart plot by Hell to undermine Heavens. "We are ready to take any action to stop this spam!"
"It's pure BS. Don't give a damn to what that bastard says" - replied the press-attache of Hell, Dark Angel Belzebu. During a phone call, on which Belzebu, and Head for Propaganda Lucifer answered, they refuted any claims that Hell has something to do with this.
"Besides we are also suffering of this damn spam stuff!" said Lucifer. "Some s!#@%$#@% had the #%#^#$ idea of sending signals #%@$$ spam to the center of the Earth in hope that some #%#^# could live here. And we got all this #$%^!^!$!!!!!"
Answering to the question if the contents of this spam would not fit more a costumer profile of Hell's citizens,Lucifer replied: "Well you see, this @%##^!#!!! spam is mostly an invitation for sin. But we are already suffering Eternal Punishment... So why the Hell we need this @$@%#%$#@!!! stuff?"
According to independent analysts this is a rare occasion when Heaven and Hell seem to agree: this spam thing must stop! According to the ghost of the Flying Dutch, an expert of Purgatorius Corporation, it is probable that both foes may try a concerted action. However he thinks that St. Peter was just using a sharp tone for the press. "You see, according to Revelation, for Armageddon to happen, there is a need for the coming of the Antichrist. Certainly this is not the situation."
"According to the information we possess, St. Paul, the head of Heaven's ideological section, has been in close contact with their embassies on Earth. It is highly probable that this has to due with a special communique they have been preparing."
"Besides there have been rumours that Satan has ordered to prepare a special room to receive a lot of new sinners. It is said that this room will be equipped with tons of computers loaded exclusively with M$ Outlook. All these computrers will be connected to a mail server with an old version of sendmail and tons of trojans, viruses and spam tools. So you may guess to whom this thing is directed..."
"I think that all this will just end by the excomungation of all spammers." - he concluded.
Many people at NASA was pretty clear on this. If you run on the material about this experiment you will note that the "unknowns" were quite big:
A: probe cameras had a a very rude resolution to make a good shot over the crater.
B: The topology of the impact zone is almost unknown. Note the it is placed in the shadow region of the crater. You can only "infere" how it would look like by considering the general morphology of such craters.
C: We may suspect about the existence of water in some places. However we don't really know if it is exactly there in that crater.
D: Besides we don't really know how water, if it is there, is laying in the Moon. NASA considers a very specific theory for its existence. It considers comet impacts+permanently shadowed zones+some providence that water didn't return to Cosmos. However the data of the spectrometer suggests that not only the poles possess water. A miserable, but significative, signal of it is shown on the equator. So all this could be wrong. Either because the theory on how water exists is absolutely wrong or because the spectrometer is showing something else.
Yeah and Sagan buried on Mars. Well I highly respect all these people and I think that they deserve somehow such honour.
But on the other side it looks quite creepy and dumb. It seems that the only way humans are getting to Space is in coffins. And planets are being used like the wall of the Kremlin in Red Square. Maybe we are starting to make "elite" graveyards out of special places, founding a necromaniac vision of our future.
Some years ago I used such combination on a LAN to send and receive faxes. It was still time of the first Slackware, RedHat had just come in and everyone flamed them.
The scheme was quite simple but the realization gave some trouble. However this thing worked for nearly two years without having serious problems.
We had a telephone line only dedicated to faxes. mgetty was answering for the line 24 hours a day. Every fax that came in was converted and dispatched to a network printer. Meanwhile stations working on Windows sent faxes through a fake network printer in postscript. On Linux box a few scripts on perl converted the the stuff and sended it to mgetty.
There were some problems with realization of this scheme. First some features exist on fax format that "spoiled" its conversion on the printer. So there was some need to rewrite the stuff. Besides there was the problem for mgetty to know where to send the fax. We made it through a "hack" on the printer. In reality on the spool directory entered the postscript file and a small file with the telephone number.
Anyway after three monthes of relatively hard work (well then Linux was a headache to costumize) we managed to have an automatical system that solved a lot of problems. One remarkable thing was that "lost faxes by the staff" were almost gone.
As I said the thing worked for two years. It didn't work longer because I quit and the replacement loved other OSes;) After a few monthes the company went bankrupt:)
On any missions it's better to forget it. Russia is battling to at least save MIR. NASA's budget was axed once more and now even Earth-bound satellites were cutted down. China will probably try to send someone to orbit but it is already clear that it is a pure PR boost.
So be happy. You have lived not only in a time when Man walked over the Moon but also satellites crashed on it...
Things were clearly not going well that day over Redmond's Holy See. Supreme Cardinal Gates IX was already up since dawn. While his face kept the pale and emotionless look, anyone could note how nervously he hit the small squares on Minesweeper 4D. When Inquisitor Ballmer IV came in he ordered everyone to leave them alone.
"How did this happen?" - he asked. Even behind glasses his eyes were icy cold.
"Well it is an astronomical damn trick that is creating havoc. It seems that gravitational lenses also do have a good deal on reflecting radiowaves..."
"So?"
"Well, the deal is that we are getting back radiowaves dropped into Cosmos in the ending of the XXth century!"
"Damn! - that's the worst problem we ever had since Reno IV had banned paper for the danger of its use by criminals and terrorists... We have to do something with it."
"Well your Holy Highness we have very little time. As far as I know some people are already in current of the existence of Linux source code. Well we keep claiming that Linus was absolutely mad and the code meaningless. But the worst is about to come. You see, the data that's coming down is nearing the time when US commemorated 30 years of Moon Landing."
"No one has ever landed the Moon!" - Gates cried while his face looked like if his internal processor became overheated.
"Well you know perfectly as me that this is not exactly the case. It was your grandfather who wiped out all records about the Moon before 2100, when Surveyor I landed with Windows9999 on it. He tought it would be a great marketing move to sell the new OS with the label: "A small step for a OS a big leap for Mankind..."
"Well, well, well - ok. I probably got a little bit over my nerves. Anyway that's not too critical. We can explain all that as another blockbuster Holywood made in those times. Anyway people would hardly believe that anyone can rise up from a Microsoft(TM) ChairMouse to take even three steps to the fridge... So what's really worrying you?"
"Well... uh... Ritchie..."
"WHAT!!!?"
"You see the founder of C had published the underlying code he used to create UNIX, somewhere near this time. This can have terrible consequences for us. People will know that there were other languages beyond QuickBasic. They will know about UNIX. They may then link all that with the cryptic meaning of Linux source code. And then they will know that Linus Torvalds was not mad at all..."
"We are in deadly danger..."
"What shall we do?"
"Well pick up the M$ Windows Central MegaServer and blow it up with a GPF. Meanwhile we will explain people that this is due to the CdC and "Richard Stallman" Front guerrillas trying to undermine our society once again. Besides gather every GUI's of those who managed to see Linux code and track them. We need to isolate them from everyone else. As for me I'll try to divert the public from this by making the announcement of the new M$ HyperOffice Application Server."
Some years later, the M$ MegaServer downtime was noted on M$ Encarta2000 as : "It was not a bug, just a feature"
:) Ok can you tell me where's the nearest dealer? Besides are there any rules on how to drive them? As far as I know someone has been selling Moon lots for quite a sometime now. What if I trespass private property while driving my li'll LegOS/Linux HeavyStorm Moon Rover? Really I don't want to be fined for such thing. So it would be cool to get a roadmap of the Moon also...;)
Yeah that's it. 30 years from the first landing. Almost 25 since anything there we are back! By crushing a spacecraft in to the surface...
It looks like we passed all these years of Space exploration to return to the years of Surveyor's and Luna probes. A typical "back to the trees" mood.
Sincerly isn't any other way to explore the Moon? Can anyone take the care of sending at least a Pathfinder-like robot to explore those same craters? Let us note that there is some good probability that this "experiment" will be unsuccessful. A boulder will be enough for its failure.
So we maybe we will still not know anything about water on the Moon for the next 30 years. When another Surveyor/Luna probe is sent to crash on the surface. Great way to study our neighbor!
For some reason I can't reach the site. Is it/. effect making its tricks again?
Anyway the move is fundamental. We have been quite careless on keeping bits of code and source for the future. I do keep some ol'stuff around and probably many people do it. But it looks much like the stuff I forget in the attic.
It is fundamentally important to keep these things for future generations. Well, it were such things that gave birth to the world we have now. Frankly our frenetic mood of "go forward" and the backward incompatibility games M$ plays, may lead us to loosing the roots where we all stand. What will my granchildren face when they will try to see my life? A few broken pieces of a CD with "Windows 95" labelled? Who was Torvalds? A mad finnish hacker making UNIX to fit in 3 inches?
I wonder if anyone notes this problem. We are loosing some good pieces of History. Software is highly volatile in terms of preservation. We might have lost already 80% of it. Maybe it is mostly worthless stuff but we all have to keep in mind that no one has a Future without knowing its Past.
I think it is time to call for such things. To give rebirth to old software. To build museums where one can be able to look at the ol'days. To someone smile on thinking that 15 years ago "I used THAT thing".
Let's greet Ritchie's move. And also Borland. As/. remarked they have also have done such thing.
It is barely probable that Reno is willing to become a dictator. However her position has been typically a place where History shows a lot f abuses based on mixing Law with caustic soda.
The problem Reno faces is quite understandable. She has to hold up a Department and she has a budget to fulfill. Considering the nature of her activities she has the luck of having the "strong arm of Justice" on her side. However this is also an handicap. Justice is dubious has it depends on truths, moral rules of the society. She can do her job on controlling encryption if we consider the present conditions. However this is relative (up to what point you really control it?), it costs a lot of resources (anyway she has a budget to accomplish) and the future is foggy (today encrytion, tomorrow steganography, after tomorrow what?)
So what she does. She "alters" a little bit the moral rules of society. So she affords a cheaper budget and a broader control. And determines the future.
Really this cannot be considered as dictatorship. It is a typical mind of a damn bureaucrat official in America. It is a pragmatism well reflected in the letter. Practical, cynical, and simple with a good materilistic taste of shinning coins running into the cash register.
The problem is that by taking this steps Janet Reno is giving a good precedent for a real and fearful dictatorship. Such seamingless moves of deturping the moral norms may lead to terrible consequences considering that the DOJ deals with the observation of these rules by its citizens.
It's like the burning of the flag. Day before yesterday it was 1st Ammendment. Yesterday it was morally disgusting. Today it is a moral offense to American institutes. Tommorrow anyone can be fined or arrested for not hailing the flag. Day after tomorrow USA starts a war against a poor country for its citizens disrespecting the flag. It wins and every "sinner" is turned into public barbecue... Being hosted by the Holy Sanctissimus Secretary of Justice in red clothings.
Well there is one point that the author is not correct. Yeah it would be pretty cool for SETI@Home to be more open for the community. But if anyone remembers the last pitfalls in distributed.net and specially that hacker breaking all records in RC5 then there could be some ground for not being so open.
However I don't like how SETI@Home presently goes. Apart of being quite critical on the usefulness of such venture, I also tried to overcome my acidity and give a hand to these guys. However...
Yes the client is a terrible dumbiness. Sometimes I get the terrible feeling that I inserted some piece of Visual Basic in my hardware (Nooooo God! Nooooo! Oh it was just a nightmare...) No matter that you can control its niceties and some other stuff the thing is clearly raw. And it is quite weird that they hold such way for so long. Well let's face the facts. This thing may not happen in our lifetimes. But it is stupid to keep it running 5km/h when we can get it a little bit faster. Specially if we consider the amount of info we need to analyse.
I wonder why SETI@Home does not take an attitude neighboring BSD licensing styles. Something like this: you get some specifications, bla-bla-bla and send us any code you think useful on it. However We determine what goes and does not. It would really improve things a lot. Anyway even if the keep this enclosement this will not avoid them to face serious cracks in the future.
Meanwhile the author revolves some ideas about the possible "disconfort" SETI@Home has for having so many people on it. Well that could be quite true. In fact SETI on the whole has shown such behaviour in several places. It has grown from an elitist view of the project when it started. Some protocols of meeting "alien civilizations" transpire a behaviour that was quite typical on the 60's. Champagne, elite, jet-sets and a few dodos with enough money in their pockets to pay the first seats. Funny to see their faces in front of some mastodon half-brained being with tentacles in his face and only capable of saying the words: "tasty!". Just a joke sent by our friends from the other side of the Galaxy.
Why not? Clinton said we would go to Mars to "get them before us" in a "jokingly" reference to Independence Day film. If really there was someone in Mars (speculate about it) that would be a very disgusting joke... Martians could feel themselves offended enough to take some retribution.
Funny but now in Russia there goes a all country campaign to gather funds for MIR. Just day before yesterday I noted a van with a poster sayin "Let's save MIR!".
I don't know how successful this thing will be. Well MIR is old but that thing has shown a damn will to survive. It survived its planned 5 years of activity. It survived USSR and all the crisis that followed it. It survived a major crash not long ago. Will it make it this time? Well the Borg, I mean NASA is damn willing to see the thing down under the Ocean. But if it goes Open Source it might well become the next killer app...
Trouble is not among Americans but the Massive Meditators. On my work with Mars I have found a pretty good number of Americans to be quite interested not only on the search of li'll green men but also in several scientific fields related to Mars. Also they try to be adventure on fields of theology and philosophy. Well considering some nature of the American Society the last is quite amazing.
American citizens are quite active people on this field. However this doesn't go for their Mass Media. Their behaviour is even quite amazing here. Some of their channels present such material in a very one-sided way. Something like "how great we are" and basta. Besides it seems that some people on some popular channels suffer of depressive melancoly when writing their material. It is pure boredom and sometimes the top of stupidity.
Unfortunately the problem does not end here. In fact sometimes are the scietific organizations that create such environment. Their own material seems to be filled more with words like "excited", "amazing", "surprised", "fantastic" with some superficial and dry descriptions of what's really going on.
For most people who live 8/8/8 a day it may seem that such things as encryption can give a chance for terrorists, criminals and spies to roam freely over the Internet. That's not the case.
Some years ago I had the good/bad chance to have some face-to-face with some mob elements. From that I can say one thing. No one in its good mind would massively use any special means of communication to pass information from one place to the other. It would immediately call the attention of enforcing organs. Meanwhile it is amazing that these people talk quite freely about their doings. However they are quite attained to use specific variations in slang to hold up critical information. On what concerns such things as bank accounts and some numeric/financial stuff they remark more their hidding efforts on the meaningless presentation of this data. Yes they use encryption and such stuff. But in most cases you may get the hidden information through several technological and practical means. It has to be noted that while one could care about encrypting an E-Mail, he may well forget to _wipe_ it from his own HDD. Besides there is a point that in some point in time either the receiver or the sender would have to possess the information open for themselves. A good observation process may give a lot of results in retrieving this information.
But there is also another point that makes DOJ pointless. Does anyone know how 48 years of dictature ended in Portugal? Well April 25th ~1 in the morning (excuse me he dumb translation) on one radiostation the following verses sounded:
Grandola (a protuguese village) "brunette" town Land of fraternity The people are those who overrule!
This verses came from a popular half-censored dissident song of the time. However when they were said at that moment of that day, several divisions of the Portuguese Army were set on the road to step down a crappy regime of 48 years and a colonial war of 13 years.
Besides one of these divisions had "set arrows" with another with a dumb telegram that sounded something like this:
I'm sorry I couldn't call you yesterday. My aunt got sick but now it's ok. Anyway, tomorrow I'll fly to Lisbon
So will DOJ also teach us how to express ourselves??
Ok here we go once again: "It is a fake! No it is Eternal Truth!"
Please before stating such things give some argumentation and analysis.
Yes it is probable that the letter is a fake. But do we have any grounds to consider it this way? Well there is one point. The letter is relatively superficial about its subject. It may be called a letter not meaning too much above general considerations.
However the last paragraph remarks that this is only a letter of intent. The author just tries to recall its intention to continue a discussion that was left somewhere...
Besides the letter is rich in specific terms and presents an internal logic. Note that usually fakes intend to be quite silly on the whole context of the text. Most authors of the fake worry much more about "hot phrases" and $50 dollar words among cheap statemants and disregard how the whole thing would look like. Here we don't have such case. However this does not demonstrate that this is a fake.
There is one thing that may prove/deny a fake at certain extent. How public is the content of this text? By nearly 100% everyone knows about this. In one way or the other all this information has been mostly public. Some facts may be not so well known but that's a problem of the audience not the sources. So someone could have made a smart fake that would run very near DOJ activities. Only some salt makes it "hot" by the wording around "public domain". Well considering some later "backstage games", there is some data remarking DOJ's attempts to make a "last and final" landing exactly in that field. So the letter, by timing, context and external data fits well here.
So it is quite probable that this letter is not a fake at all. It is just a polite call over a powerful interlocutor to continue what DOJ has been doing recently: Try to put everyone in its bandwagon.
Ya know. There is some sort of silly science that uses such tricks to filter the "intent" of the letter. Somehow one replaces the main terms with some words out-of-context. It allows to "emboss" the state of mind of the author. It is a rather silly game but sometimes quite effective.
But it is interesting to see this letter in this new "remake". First it shows that if this letter is a falsification, then it is a damn good one. All context looks relatively logic with the words replaced. Besides it shows the real concern of the author. It seems that is not worried too much about the dessimination of encryption itself. The author is damn worried about controlling the market of opaque.. uh encryption.
Everyone who knows the inners of networks knows perfectly how easy is to eavesdrop any unsecured communication. Every *NIX that respects himself have at least one tool that permits such thing. Some have even a whole artillery inside. Take trinux (www.trinux.org) for example.
However it seems that US DOJ is completely blind to such things. Their will for power is so big that they simply ignore technical specifities, customer interests, public opinion and now diplomatic relations. It is simply amazing how a government body, caring for the justice of its citizens, not only violates their rights but also interferes in the rights of citizens of other countries. DOJ is becoming a danger not only to the national interests of the United States of America but also the whole World.
Apart of this there are two points that turn DOJ activities into a danger of a much broader sense. First is the field they intend to dominate. Encryption is not only an activity but also a scientific and technological field. No one knows what may become tomorrow if they go with this one. They may not only turn Encryption and Signals Encoding scientific fields into a theoretical and technological swamp. Tomorrow someone may well try to shrink the information contained in other fields, turning all Science and Technology into a stalinist dogma. Let us remember that all the crazyness that happenned in USSR during Stalin had started almost the same way. First Economics suffered the first blow. The reasons were quite parallel, in some sense, to DOJ's type of argumentation. Public dessimation of wrong theories about Economy could undermine the hard effort of building the new socialist relationships in the production fields. People would be teached "capitalist" selfish ideas on how to grab others.
All this ended with a weird world where even Darwin was considered a demagogue. Even the founder of modern rocketry in Russia, Korolev had to pass some years in the GULAG. While all these Stalin crazy years didn't last enough to destroy Russian scientific institutes, a lot of its madness echoes even today. Besides, this steel fist on Science fueled a whole set of paranormal extortionists, religious sectants, and criminals of the boo-boo Science, who made their life out of the ignorance of the masses. This was particularly seen on the end of USSR.
But DOJ does not end here. They are starting to act as much as the organs of internal affairs of some totalitarian countries. They now determine what is good or bad for their people. It seems that they are not satisfied to have just The Law behind them. They are excited to get The Truth also.
I consider that even sendmail may not fit your requirements. Anyway you have to plan very carefully the topology of your servers to avoid serious hangups. We have a quite active network with 5000+ accounts and even some servers with a few hundred accounts may give some headaches. Make some expectations on how dynamic will be your network to avoid these situations.
Besides don't focus on IMAP _OR_ POP3. Sometimes it is better to have both. There were some situations when we realize that it would be much beneficial to have ppp accounts on POP2 rather than IMAP. Meanwhile the LANs are mostly based on IMAP.
Anyway don't ever dream on Windows stuff. I didn't have the bad luck of dealing with E-Mail on Windows but I had almost my job in ashes due to managing accounts on it. It might look easy with a few tens or even hundreds. But when you have 2000 people on a wide profile of activities and professions, Windows administration is HELL! Thanks God He had already shown me what is there...
Let me point one thing. I hate AOL. I can't digere in any way their network. But in this particular point AOL is probably playing relatively fair.
Let's point the difference between a UNIX AIM client and M$ one. The *NIX clients are not bound to one platform. They are not promoting a particular product. Besides it seems that AOL is less interested on client support in this world. So AOL is making a good job letting the protocols free. I don't need any Windows crap to look at someone at AOL. Frankly it looks to me as a good agreement between my freedom to choose and AOL's interests.
But this does not go with M$. First they are promoting MSN, at least indirectly, through the "feature" of their client. It looks too much as hypocrisy to lay behind "open protocols", a feature that promotes a direct concurrent to AOL. In fact has anyone noted if any MSN or HotMail features are easily accessible by AOL users? Are any "open protocols" in the services M$ provides? Can AOL use them?
Besides it seems that this feature looks quite "on the side" of some rules AOL determines for its AIM client, in this case is completely the inverse of what OSS has done. Yes we do hack things. We overcome limits, barriers, bugs and tons of features. But we don't go against the stream of the creator. If someone claims OSS is playing against its desires, we usually let him die slowly and lonely. But M$ is not hacking. It is CRACKING!
AOL has told M$ to stand outside of their system. What they did? They broke the blockings. They didn't say a word, they didn't come to the public to state any opinions about this. They just picked their client and implanted a new crack. This is not OSS. This is the typical script kiddie MazzDie world with its codebreakers, serial numbers and cracks. This is not open standards. They even didn't tried to be diplomatic. At least in public. What they did is just the same crackers do.
Frankly, anyone can pick CdC press release and replace "BO2K" by "M$ client". The philosophy is the same. Now we know the spring that feeds all this world...
Everytime I go to a toy shop I look at Lego with a huge feel of nostalgia. It is a great toy system. However one must grow up and look for other "toys" in his life. Childhood was something left in a foggy past. Farewell Lego you have helped me grow up...
But now this LegOS is changing my mind... Suddenly I started thinking that in my age I could make some interesting toys out of Lego. This idea would never come to my mind without such system. At least in a prototype level this combination of Lego + LegOS could give some interesting food of discovery and exploration. The combination is perfect for making perliminary small and cheap experiments. Maybe I would even risk to make some weird practical stuff out of it.
Well strange as it seems, but I'm reckoning of that feeling of willing to run over the nearest toy shop...
Hope that Lego understands what it has nearby. They can't do such thing no matter how they look at it. Their minds are mainly locked on kids. LegOS is a door that no Lego manager would ever imagine to open. It opens Lego into a new world between toys and serious stuff. In a good development rythm LegOS may give a chance for many people to "play" robotics and start feeding a new world in electronics.
Your description is chilling. It clearly reminds the middle of the 80's in Soviet Union when a crazy wave of "work discipline" roamed all over. One of the most clear pictures of this was connected with cinemas also. During work hours, raids were made over cinemas and theaters. They catched every person and checked if he should be in his workplace. Those who had to were fined or got administrative punishment.
It was quite interesting that this particularly happened during the appearence of a soviet "blockbuster" that was not seen too well by some high ranking buddies. But people did everything to get into the film. Even if that meant taking a walk out of work.
Some weeks ago I saw a TV program about this. Very interesting. There was the rather funny (well after so much time) of a mother arresting her own daughter for being on the cinema at work hours. Is that the way things going to in the US. Will a policewoman arrest her daughter for seeing "improper" films? Will States change for Soviets?
While seeing some comments around here I noted a general mood that's hard to agree with. Well the author has made some good errors. He does look quite bad. But people, mission critical jobs do exist. And beware of them. They are no kiddy's toy. And I don't use phones to fell important. The best I can get from them is the chance to have some good free time on myself.
In reality 90% of problems concerning an average sized ISP are either "dumb" problems or false alarms. A phone or a pager allows a mission critical admin to send to Hell these things in a polite manner. Well here just holding a phone does not help you much. In fact the thing is quite complex and concerns some levels of "filtering" calls and problems. Frankly if everyone knew my work phone then I would surely be hanged on it 24/7/365.
But not having a secondary or tertiary means of communication is being stupid if your work is mission critical. If you don't have a well planned system of communication (that does not concern just your workplace) then wait for very serious trouble. You will end with a queue of problems rising up like a snowball. And besides you are not creating only problems for yourself but overcharging everyone dependent on you. In one section around here we do have such situation because the teamleader there is not careful to plan a good communication environment. Things hang up for days or weeks due to this. Thanks God his section is not mission critical. But it looks much like that due to all those delays there...
I may agree that being ISP does not mean that you're mission critical. In fact mission critical is mostly a task and not a job. However, depending on the structure of the ISP it is highly possible that some places are mission critical and there's nothing strange with this.
What is strange and dangerous is to mess mission critical tasks with regular work. In fact maintenance is a critical point of the organization. But if maintenance is constantly done at mission critical rythm then there is something wrong with it. Well in fact we had this situation that lead to wiping out all NT workstations and replacing them with Linux:). The level of calls dropped by 400-500%.
Well in any case I may tell you one thing. During all these years I passed a Hell of situations. Yes I do have some grey hair on my early 30's but that's due to a problem not directly related to my worktime. I don't have ulcers and I only blame two things in my health: a small spine trauma I got from falling six meters head down and some headaches when I push the line of worktime. And this only happens when I run over two days eyes open.
1. Comments are moderated. Why submitted stories aren't? 2. Someone played too much Half-Life... 3. Strangely enough but in one point this story has a tiny grain of logic inside:) 4. Don't play with matches;)
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According to Heaven Cable News, God could be considering today to put Mankind in the Holy Court of Heavens.
"Yes, it is possible that Final Judgement is finally near!" - said St. Peter in today's press conference.
The causes for such situation were due to the recent wave of unsolicited E-Mail that has been flooding Heavens.
"This now looks like Hell! We receive every day millions of messages. Yesterday, they were usually requests for saving souls or pardon some minor sins. We try to answer to each request in the measure of our possibilities. But since the spam started it has been increasingly harder to make our own work. Besides they are not sent by the address!" - said St. Peter
Accroding to St. Peter most content of this spam would be much proper to send to Hell. They range from cheap financial pyramids, dubious products and reaching some more sinful stuff.
According to sources that requested to stay anonymous the latest, is maybe what worries most the Heavens Offices. While the large majority of angels simply ignore this spam, still, some are lightly attracted by such messages like "Free Hot Sex pics!" and alikes.
According to the Chief of Joint Commanders Staff of the Heaven's Army, St. Michael, this could be a smart plot by Hell to undermine Heavens. "We are ready to take any action to stop this spam!"
"It's pure BS. Don't give a damn to what that bastard says" - replied the press-attache of Hell, Dark Angel Belzebu. During a phone call, on which Belzebu, and Head for Propaganda Lucifer answered, they refuted any claims that Hell has something to do with this.
"Besides we are also suffering of this damn spam stuff!" said Lucifer. "Some s!#@%$#@% had the #%#^#$ idea of sending signals #%@$$ spam to the center of the Earth in hope that some #%#^# could live here. And we got all this #$%^!^!$!!!!!"
Answering to the question if the contents of this spam would not fit more a costumer profile of Hell's citizens,Lucifer replied: "Well you see, this @%##^!#!!! spam is mostly an invitation for sin. But we are already suffering Eternal Punishment... So why the Hell we need this @$@%#%$#@!!! stuff?"
According to independent analysts this is a rare occasion when Heaven and Hell seem to agree: this spam thing must stop! According to the ghost of the Flying Dutch, an expert of Purgatorius Corporation, it is probable that both foes may try a concerted action. However he thinks that St. Peter was just using a sharp tone for the press. "You see, according to Revelation, for Armageddon to happen, there is a need for the coming of the Antichrist. Certainly this is not the situation."
"According to the information we possess, St. Paul, the head of Heaven's ideological section, has been in close contact with their embassies on Earth. It is highly probable that this has to due with a special communique they have been preparing."
"Besides there have been rumours that Satan has ordered to prepare a special room to receive a lot of new sinners. It is said that this room will be equipped with tons of computers loaded exclusively with M$ Outlook. All these computrers will be connected to a mail server with an old version of sendmail and tons of trojans, viruses and spam tools. So you may guess to whom this thing is directed..."
"I think that all this will just end by the excomungation of all spammers." - he concluded.
Many people at NASA was pretty clear on this. If you run on the material about this experiment you will note that the "unknowns" were quite big:
A: probe cameras had a a very rude resolution to make a good shot over the crater.
B: The topology of the impact zone is almost unknown. Note the it is placed in the shadow region of the crater. You can only "infere" how it would look like by considering the general morphology of such craters.
C: We may suspect about the existence of water in some places. However we don't really know if it is exactly there in that crater.
D: Besides we don't really know how water, if it is there, is laying in the Moon. NASA considers a very specific theory for its existence. It considers comet impacts+permanently shadowed zones+some providence that water didn't return to Cosmos. However the data of the spectrometer suggests that not only the poles possess water. A miserable, but significative, signal of it is shown on the equator. So all this could be wrong. Either because the theory on how water exists is absolutely wrong or because the spectrometer is showing something else.
Yeah and Sagan buried on Mars.
Well I highly respect all these people and I think that they deserve somehow such honour.
But on the other side it looks quite creepy and dumb. It seems that the only way humans are getting to Space is in coffins. And planets are being used like the wall of the Kremlin in Red Square. Maybe we are starting to make "elite" graveyards out of special places, founding a necromaniac vision of our future.
Some years ago I used such combination on a LAN to send and receive faxes. It was still time of the first Slackware, RedHat had just come in and everyone flamed them.
;) After a few monthes the company went bankrupt :)
The scheme was quite simple but the realization gave some trouble. However this thing worked for nearly two years without having serious problems.
We had a telephone line only dedicated to faxes. mgetty was answering for the line 24 hours a day. Every fax that came in was converted and dispatched to a network printer. Meanwhile stations working on Windows sent faxes through a fake network printer in postscript. On Linux box a few scripts on perl converted the the stuff and sended it to mgetty.
There were some problems with realization of this scheme. First some features exist on fax format that "spoiled" its conversion on the printer. So there was some need to rewrite the stuff. Besides there was the problem for mgetty to know where to send the fax. We made it through a "hack" on the printer. In reality on the spool directory entered the postscript file and a small file with the telephone number.
Anyway after three monthes of relatively hard work (well then Linux was a headache to costumize) we managed to have an automatical system that solved a lot of problems. One remarkable thing was that "lost faxes by the staff" were almost gone.
As I said the thing worked for two years. It didn't work longer because I quit and the replacement loved other OSes
On any missions it's better to forget it. Russia is battling to at least save MIR. NASA's budget was axed once more and now even Earth-bound satellites were cutted down. China will probably try to send someone to orbit but it is already clear that it is a pure PR boost.
So be happy. You have lived not only in a time when Man walked over the Moon but also satellites crashed on it...
Things were clearly not going well that day over Redmond's Holy See. Supreme Cardinal Gates IX was already up since dawn. While his face kept the pale and emotionless look, anyone could note how nervously he hit the small squares on Minesweeper 4D. When Inquisitor Ballmer IV came in he ordered everyone to leave them alone.
"How did this happen?" - he asked. Even behind glasses his eyes were icy cold.
"Well it is an astronomical damn trick that is creating havoc. It seems that gravitational lenses also do have a good deal on reflecting radiowaves..."
"So?"
"Well, the deal is that we are getting back radiowaves dropped into Cosmos in the ending of the XXth century!"
"Damn! - that's the worst problem we ever had since Reno IV had banned paper for the danger of its use by criminals and terrorists... We have to do something with it."
"Well your Holy Highness we have very little time. As far as I know some people are already in current of the existence of Linux source code. Well we keep claiming that Linus was absolutely mad and the code meaningless. But the worst is about to come. You see, the data that's coming down is nearing the time when US commemorated 30 years of Moon Landing."
"No one has ever landed the Moon!" - Gates cried while his face looked like if his internal processor became overheated.
"Well you know perfectly as me that this is not exactly the case. It was your grandfather who wiped out all records about the Moon before 2100, when Surveyor I landed with Windows9999 on it. He tought it would be a great marketing move to sell the new OS with the label: "A small step for a OS a big leap for Mankind..."
"Well, well, well - ok. I probably got a little bit over my nerves. Anyway that's not too critical. We can explain all that as another blockbuster Holywood made in those times. Anyway people would hardly believe that anyone can rise up from a Microsoft(TM) ChairMouse to take even three steps to the fridge... So what's really worrying you?"
"Well... uh... Ritchie..."
"WHAT!!!?"
"You see the founder of C had published the underlying code he used to create UNIX, somewhere near this time. This can have terrible consequences for us. People will know that there were other languages beyond QuickBasic. They will know about UNIX. They may then link all that with the cryptic meaning of Linux source code. And then they will know that Linus Torvalds was not mad at all..."
"We are in deadly danger..."
"What shall we do?"
"Well pick up the M$ Windows Central MegaServer and blow it up with a GPF. Meanwhile we will explain people that this is due to the CdC and "Richard Stallman" Front guerrillas trying to undermine our society once again. Besides gather every GUI's of those who managed to see Linux code and track them. We need to isolate them from everyone else. As for me I'll try to divert the public from this by making the announcement of the new M$ HyperOffice Application Server."
Some years later, the M$ MegaServer downtime was noted on M$ Encarta2000 as : "It was not a bug, just a feature"
:) ;)
Ok can you tell me where's the nearest dealer? Besides are there any rules on how to drive them? As far as I know someone has been selling Moon lots for quite a sometime now. What if I trespass private property while driving my li'll LegOS/Linux HeavyStorm Moon Rover? Really I don't want to be fined for such thing. So it would be cool to get a roadmap of the Moon also...
Yeah that's it. 30 years from the first landing. Almost 25 since anything there we are back! By crushing a spacecraft in to the surface...
It looks like we passed all these years of Space exploration to return to the years of Surveyor's and Luna probes. A typical "back to the trees" mood.
Sincerly isn't any other way to explore the Moon? Can anyone take the care of sending at least a Pathfinder-like robot to explore those same craters? Let us note that there is some good probability that this "experiment" will be unsuccessful. A boulder will be enough for its failure.
So we maybe we will still not know anything about water on the Moon for the next 30 years. When another Surveyor/Luna probe is sent to crash on the surface. Great way to study our neighbor!
For some reason I can't reach the site. Is it /. effect making its tricks again?
/. remarked they have also have done such thing.
Anyway the move is fundamental. We have been quite careless on keeping bits of code and source for the future. I do keep some ol'stuff around and probably many people do it. But it looks much like the stuff I forget in the attic.
It is fundamentally important to keep these things for future generations. Well, it were such things that gave birth to the world we have now. Frankly our frenetic mood of "go forward" and the backward incompatibility games M$ plays, may lead us to loosing the roots where we all stand. What will my granchildren face when they will try to see my life? A few broken pieces of a CD with "Windows 95" labelled? Who was Torvalds? A mad finnish hacker making UNIX to fit in 3 inches?
I wonder if anyone notes this problem. We are loosing some good pieces of History. Software is highly volatile in terms of preservation. We might have lost already 80% of it. Maybe it is mostly worthless stuff but we all have to keep in mind that no one has a Future without knowing its Past.
I think it is time to call for such things. To give rebirth to old software. To build museums where one can be able to look at the ol'days. To someone smile on thinking that 15 years ago "I used THAT thing".
Let's greet Ritchie's move. And also Borland. As
It is barely probable that Reno is willing to become a dictator. However her position has been typically a place where History shows a lot f abuses based on mixing Law with caustic soda.
The problem Reno faces is quite understandable. She has to hold up a Department and she has a budget to fulfill. Considering the nature of her activities she has the luck of having the "strong arm of Justice" on her side. However this is also an handicap. Justice is dubious has it depends on truths, moral rules of the society. She can do her job on controlling encryption if we consider the present conditions. However this is relative (up to what point you really control it?), it costs a lot of resources (anyway she has a budget to accomplish) and the future is foggy (today encrytion, tomorrow steganography, after tomorrow what?)
So what she does. She "alters" a little bit the moral rules of society. So she affords a cheaper budget and a broader control. And determines the future.
Really this cannot be considered as dictatorship. It is a typical mind of a damn bureaucrat official in America. It is a pragmatism well reflected in the letter. Practical, cynical, and simple with a good materilistic taste of shinning coins running into the cash register.
The problem is that by taking this steps Janet Reno is giving a good precedent for a real and fearful dictatorship. Such seamingless moves of deturping the moral norms may lead to terrible consequences considering that the DOJ deals with the observation of these rules by its citizens.
It's like the burning of the flag. Day before yesterday it was 1st Ammendment. Yesterday it was morally disgusting. Today it is a moral offense to American institutes. Tommorrow anyone can be fined or arrested for not hailing the flag. Day after tomorrow USA starts a war against a poor country for its citizens disrespecting the flag. It wins and every "sinner" is turned into public barbecue... Being hosted by the Holy Sanctissimus Secretary of Justice in red clothings.
Well there is one point that the author is not correct. Yeah it would be pretty cool for SETI@Home to be more open for the community. But if anyone remembers the last pitfalls in distributed.net and specially that hacker breaking all records in RC5 then there could be some ground for not being so open.
However I don't like how SETI@Home presently goes. Apart of being quite critical on the usefulness of such venture, I also tried to overcome my acidity and give a hand to these guys. However...
Yes the client is a terrible dumbiness. Sometimes I get the terrible feeling that I inserted some piece of Visual Basic in my hardware (Nooooo God! Nooooo! Oh it was just a nightmare...) No matter that you can control its niceties and some other stuff the thing is clearly raw. And it is quite weird that they hold such way for so long. Well let's face the facts. This thing may not happen in our lifetimes. But it is stupid to keep it running 5km/h when we can get it a little bit faster. Specially if we consider the amount of info we need to analyse.
I wonder why SETI@Home does not take an attitude neighboring BSD licensing styles. Something like this: you get some specifications, bla-bla-bla and send us any code you think useful on it. However We determine what goes and does not. It would really improve things a lot. Anyway even if the keep this enclosement this will not avoid them to face serious cracks in the future.
Meanwhile the author revolves some ideas about the possible "disconfort" SETI@Home has for having so many people on it. Well that could be quite true. In fact SETI on the whole has shown such behaviour in several places. It has grown from an elitist view of the project when it started. Some protocols of meeting "alien civilizations" transpire a behaviour that was quite typical on the 60's. Champagne, elite, jet-sets and a few dodos with enough money in their pockets to pay the first seats. Funny to see their faces in front of some mastodon half-brained being with tentacles in his face and only capable of saying the words: "tasty!". Just a joke sent by our friends from the other side of the Galaxy.
Why not? Clinton said we would go to Mars to "get them before us" in a "jokingly" reference to Independence Day film. If really there was someone in Mars (speculate about it) that would be a very disgusting joke... Martians could feel themselves offended enough to take some retribution.
Yeah and the message will be:
"Hello my name is Linus Torvalds and I pronounce Linux as Linux"
Funny but now in Russia there goes a all country campaign to gather funds for MIR. Just day before yesterday I noted a van with a poster sayin "Let's save MIR!".
I don't know how successful this thing will be. Well MIR is old but that thing has shown a damn will to survive. It survived its planned 5 years of activity. It survived USSR and all the crisis that followed it. It survived a major crash not long ago. Will it make it this time? Well the Borg, I mean NASA is damn willing to see the thing down under the Ocean. But if it goes Open Source it might well become the next killer app...
Trouble is not among Americans but the Massive Meditators. On my work with Mars I have found a pretty good number of Americans to be quite interested not only on the search of li'll green men but also in several scientific fields related to Mars. Also they try to be adventure on fields of theology and philosophy. Well considering some nature of the American Society the last is quite amazing.
American citizens are quite active people on this field. However this doesn't go for their Mass Media. Their behaviour is even quite amazing here. Some of their channels present such material in a very one-sided way. Something like "how great we are" and basta. Besides it seems that some people on some popular channels suffer of depressive melancoly when writing their material. It is pure boredom and sometimes the top of stupidity.
Unfortunately the problem does not end here. In fact sometimes are the scietific organizations that create such environment. Their own material seems to be filled more with words like "excited", "amazing", "surprised", "fantastic" with some superficial and dry descriptions of what's really going on.
For most people who live 8/8/8 a day it may seem that such things as encryption can give a chance for terrorists, criminals and spies to roam freely over the Internet. That's not the case.
Some years ago I had the good/bad chance to have some face-to-face with some mob elements. From that I can say one thing. No one in its good mind would massively use any special means of communication to pass information from one place to the other. It would immediately call the attention of enforcing organs. Meanwhile it is amazing that these people talk quite freely about their doings. However they are quite attained to use specific variations in slang to hold up critical information. On what concerns such things as bank accounts and some numeric/financial stuff they remark more their hidding efforts on the meaningless presentation of this data. Yes they use encryption and such stuff. But in most cases you may get the hidden information through several technological and practical means. It has to be noted that while one could care about encrypting an E-Mail, he may well forget to _wipe_ it from his own HDD. Besides there is a point that in some point in time either the receiver or the sender would have to possess the information open for themselves. A good observation process may give a lot of results in retrieving this information.
But there is also another point that makes DOJ pointless. Does anyone know how 48 years of dictature ended in Portugal? Well April 25th ~1 in the morning (excuse me he dumb translation) on one radiostation the following verses sounded:
Grandola (a protuguese village) "brunette" town
Land of fraternity
The people are those who overrule!
This verses came from a popular half-censored dissident song of the time. However when they were said at that moment of that day, several divisions of the Portuguese Army were set on the road to step down a crappy regime of 48 years and a colonial war of 13 years.
Besides one of these divisions had "set arrows" with another with a dumb telegram that sounded something like this:
I'm sorry I couldn't call you yesterday. My aunt got sick but now it's ok. Anyway, tomorrow I'll fly to Lisbon
So will DOJ also teach us how to express ourselves??
Desion arvanstai? Geeon oorgen siet der America ioos aksen lokh orgonstai. Deiv iiksion arvan dei DOJ ven den oosgantai sekvanaa eeis giion sunt...
Ok here we go once again: "It is a fake! No it is Eternal Truth!"
Please before stating such things give some argumentation and analysis.
Yes it is probable that the letter is a fake. But do we have any grounds to consider it this way? Well there is one point. The letter is relatively superficial about its subject. It may be called a letter not meaning too much above general considerations.
However the last paragraph remarks that this is only a letter of intent. The author just tries to recall its intention to continue a discussion that was left somewhere...
Besides the letter is rich in specific terms and presents an internal logic. Note that usually fakes intend to be quite silly on the whole context of the text. Most authors of the fake worry much more about "hot phrases" and $50 dollar words among cheap statemants and disregard how the whole thing would look like. Here we don't have such case. However this does not demonstrate that this is a fake.
There is one thing that may prove/deny a fake at certain extent. How public is the content of this text? By nearly 100% everyone knows about this. In one way or the other all this information has been mostly public. Some facts may be not so well known but that's a problem of the audience not the sources. So someone could have made a smart fake that would run very near DOJ activities. Only some salt makes it "hot" by the wording around "public domain". Well considering some later "backstage games", there is some data remarking DOJ's attempts to make a "last and final" landing exactly in that field. So the letter, by timing, context and external data fits well here.
So it is quite probable that this letter is not a fake at all. It is just a polite call over a powerful interlocutor to continue what DOJ has been doing recently: Try to put everyone in its bandwagon.
Ya know. There is some sort of silly science that uses such tricks to filter the "intent" of the letter. Somehow one replaces the main terms with some words out-of-context. It allows to "emboss" the state of mind of the author. It is a rather silly game but sometimes quite effective.
But it is interesting to see this letter in this new "remake". First it shows that if this letter is a falsification, then it is a damn good one. All context looks relatively logic with the words replaced. Besides it shows the real concern of the author. It seems that is not worried too much about the dessimination of encryption itself. The author is damn worried about controlling the market of opaque.. uh encryption.
Good shot you've done
Everyone who knows the inners of networks knows perfectly how easy is to eavesdrop any unsecured communication. Every *NIX that respects himself have at least one tool that permits such thing. Some have even a whole artillery inside. Take trinux (www.trinux.org) for example.
However it seems that US DOJ is completely blind to such things. Their will for power is so big that they simply ignore technical specifities, customer interests, public opinion and now diplomatic relations. It is simply amazing how a government body, caring for the justice of its citizens, not only violates their rights but also interferes in the rights of citizens of other countries. DOJ is becoming a danger not only to the national interests of the United States of America but also the whole World.
Apart of this there are two points that turn DOJ activities into a danger of a much broader sense. First is the field they intend to dominate. Encryption is not only an activity but also a scientific and technological field. No one knows what may become tomorrow if they go with this one. They may not only turn Encryption and Signals Encoding scientific fields into a theoretical and technological swamp. Tomorrow someone may well try to shrink the information contained in other fields, turning all Science and Technology into a stalinist dogma. Let us remember that all the crazyness that happenned in USSR during Stalin had started almost the same way. First Economics suffered the first blow. The reasons were quite parallel, in some sense, to DOJ's type of argumentation. Public dessimation of wrong theories about Economy could undermine the hard effort of building the new socialist relationships in the production fields. People would be teached "capitalist" selfish ideas on how to grab others.
All this ended with a weird world where even Darwin was considered a demagogue. Even the founder of modern rocketry in Russia, Korolev had to pass some years in the GULAG. While all these Stalin crazy years didn't last enough to destroy Russian scientific institutes, a lot of its madness echoes even today. Besides, this steel fist on Science fueled a whole set of paranormal extortionists, religious sectants, and criminals of the boo-boo Science, who made their life out of the ignorance of the masses. This was particularly seen on the end of USSR.
But DOJ does not end here. They are starting to act as much as the organs of internal affairs of some totalitarian countries. They now determine what is good or bad for their people. It seems that they are not satisfied to have just The Law behind them. They are excited to get The Truth also.
I consider that even sendmail may not fit your requirements. Anyway you have to plan very carefully the topology of your servers to avoid serious hangups. We have a quite active network with 5000+ accounts and even some servers with a few hundred accounts may give some headaches. Make some expectations on how dynamic will be your network to avoid these situations.
Besides don't focus on IMAP _OR_ POP3. Sometimes it is better to have both. There were some situations when we realize that it would be much beneficial to have ppp accounts on POP2 rather than IMAP. Meanwhile the LANs are mostly based on IMAP.
Anyway don't ever dream on Windows stuff. I didn't have the bad luck of dealing with E-Mail on Windows but I had almost my job in ashes due to managing accounts on it. It might look easy with a few tens or even hundreds. But when you have 2000 people on a wide profile of activities and professions, Windows administration is HELL! Thanks God He had already shown me what is there...
Let me point one thing. I hate AOL. I can't digere in any way their network. But in this particular point AOL is probably playing relatively fair.
Let's point the difference between a UNIX AIM client and M$ one. The *NIX clients are not bound to one platform. They are not promoting a particular product. Besides it seems that AOL is less interested on client support in this world. So AOL is making a good job letting the protocols free. I don't need any Windows crap to look at someone at AOL. Frankly it looks to me as a good agreement between my freedom to choose and AOL's interests.
But this does not go with M$. First they are promoting MSN, at least indirectly, through the "feature" of their client. It looks too much as hypocrisy to lay behind "open protocols", a feature that promotes a direct concurrent to AOL. In fact has anyone noted if any MSN or HotMail features are easily accessible by AOL users? Are any "open protocols" in the services M$ provides? Can AOL use them?
Besides it seems that this feature looks quite "on the side" of some rules AOL determines for its AIM client, in this case is completely the inverse of what OSS has done. Yes we do hack things. We overcome limits, barriers, bugs and tons of features. But we don't go against the stream of the creator. If someone claims OSS is playing against its desires, we usually let him die slowly and lonely. But M$ is not hacking. It is CRACKING!
AOL has told M$ to stand outside of their system. What they did? They broke the blockings. They didn't say a word, they didn't come to the public to state any opinions about this. They just picked their client and implanted a new crack. This is not OSS. This is the typical script kiddie MazzDie world with its codebreakers, serial numbers and cracks. This is not open standards. They even didn't tried to be diplomatic. At least in public. What they did is just the same crackers do.
Frankly, anyone can pick CdC press release and replace "BO2K" by "M$ client". The philosophy is the same. Now we know the spring that feeds all this world...
Everytime I go to a toy shop I look at Lego with a huge feel of nostalgia. It is a great toy system. However one must grow up and look for other "toys" in his life. Childhood was something left in a foggy past. Farewell Lego you have helped me grow up...
But now this LegOS is changing my mind... Suddenly I started thinking that in my age I could make some interesting toys out of Lego. This idea would never come to my mind without such system. At least in a prototype level this combination of Lego + LegOS could give some interesting food of discovery and exploration. The combination is perfect for making perliminary small and cheap experiments. Maybe I would even risk to make some weird practical stuff out of it.
Well strange as it seems, but I'm reckoning of that feeling of willing to run over the nearest toy shop...
Hope that Lego understands what it has nearby. They can't do such thing no matter how they look at it. Their minds are mainly locked on kids. LegOS is a door that no Lego manager would ever imagine to open. It opens Lego into a new world between toys and serious stuff. In a good development rythm LegOS may give a chance for many people to "play" robotics and start feeding a new world in electronics.
Your description is chilling. It clearly reminds the middle of the 80's in Soviet Union when a crazy wave of "work discipline" roamed all over. One of the most clear pictures of this was connected with cinemas also. During work hours, raids were made over cinemas and theaters. They catched every person and checked if he should be in his workplace. Those who had to were fined or got administrative punishment.
It was quite interesting that this particularly happened during the appearence of a soviet "blockbuster" that was not seen too well by some high ranking buddies. But people did everything to get into the film. Even if that meant taking a walk out of work.
Some weeks ago I saw a TV program about this. Very interesting. There was the rather funny (well after so much time) of a mother arresting her own daughter for being on the cinema at work hours. Is that the way things going to in the US. Will a policewoman arrest her daughter for seeing "improper" films? Will States change for Soviets?
While seeing some comments around here I noted a general mood that's hard to agree with. Well the author has made some good errors. He does look quite bad. But people, mission critical jobs do exist. And beware of them. They are no kiddy's toy. And I don't use phones to fell important. The best I can get from them is the chance to have some good free time on myself.
:). The level of calls dropped by 400-500%.
In reality 90% of problems concerning an average sized ISP are either "dumb" problems or false alarms. A phone or a pager allows a mission critical admin to send to Hell these things in a polite manner. Well here just holding a phone does not help you much. In fact the thing is quite complex and concerns some levels of "filtering" calls and problems. Frankly if everyone knew my work phone then I would surely be hanged on it 24/7/365.
But not having a secondary or tertiary means of communication is being stupid if your work is mission critical. If you don't have a well planned system of communication (that does not concern just your workplace) then wait for very serious trouble. You will end with a queue of problems rising up like a snowball. And besides you are not creating only problems for yourself but overcharging everyone dependent on you. In one section around here we do have such situation because the teamleader there is not careful to plan a good communication environment. Things hang up for days or weeks due to this. Thanks God his section is not mission critical. But it looks much like that due to all those delays there...
I may agree that being ISP does not mean that you're mission critical. In fact mission critical is mostly a task and not a job. However, depending on the structure of the ISP it is highly possible that some places are mission critical and there's nothing strange with this.
What is strange and dangerous is to mess mission critical tasks with regular work. In fact maintenance is a critical point of the organization. But if maintenance is constantly done at mission critical rythm then there is something wrong with it. Well in fact we had this situation that lead to wiping out all NT workstations and replacing them with Linux
Well in any case I may tell you one thing. During all these years I passed a Hell of situations. Yes I do have some grey hair on my early 30's but that's due to a problem not directly related to my worktime. I don't have ulcers and I only blame two things in my health: a small spine trauma I got from falling six meters head down and some headaches when I push the line of worktime. And this only happens when I run over two days eyes open.
1. Comments are moderated. Why submitted stories aren't? :) ;)
2. Someone played too much Half-Life...
3. Strangely enough but in one point this story has a tiny grain of logic inside
4. Don't play with matches