Posts by Tom 13

Re: The real question is

Training sites aren't chosen on the basis of empty real estate. They are chosen to duplicate conditions similar to an expected combat environment. Training on a site in the middle of the great desert doesn't prep you well for a bombing run against an island atoll.

Re: still no definitive reason for the US designation.

No idea why this thread is in this topic but...

The US route system emerged before the Interstate system. To that point States built their own road systems with their own numbering schemes. Typically these days people will put the two digit zip code designation for the state in front of the state route to identify location. The US route system was implemented to help people navigate across the country. Basic concept is to keep the road name the same the whole was across. Nominally three digit east-west routes and two digit north south routes. Then along came Ike and the Interstate system, which was billed as a national defense project. The interstates were the first roads with standardized lane sizes (originally to allow the transport of Sherman tanks on carrier vehicles IIRC) and other construction features like divided lanes. These are the "I" routes and are specifically federally funded. Other routes might get money from federal appropriations, might get funded from the state, or maybe some of both (rarely more than 50% from feds). To some extent the other systems have adopted the I- standards and the naming conventions just differentiate the roads.

Re: Who really owns these?

Salvage laws as we popularly know them have basically been shredded in the last 50 years. Either it is government property, owned by an insurance company that paid a claim for it, or if it's old enough to be worth something it's an "antiquity" and the the government to which it "belongs" can demand you turn it back over to them or face theft charges. So you shouldn't launch a major salvage operation without first knowing it is either money down the tubes or who and how they are going to pay you if you find something.

Re: What they should do is make

Actually what they should do is the same thing the crooks do with a twist: Follow the money and bag the bad guys.

Somebody is reselling them. That's the weak point. Find them and bag them. Maybe with a few of their suppliers too.

Not that I necessarily object to them looking for better ways of securing the devices. But that should be their SECONDARY objective, not their PRIMARY one.

Re: rename Office 365 to office 420

I think you need to add a character:

4:20

Now where is the eyeglasses icon?

Re: these are generally eaten by the merchant.

These are NEVER eaten by the merchant. The merchant ALWAYS passes them along because he doesn't have any choice about it. Because of the restrictive laws about processing them that means yes they spread them to everybody including customers who pay cash.

This isn't me talking out my ass. This is me telling you I've been the person recommending how we were going to pass the cost along to our customers when our organization implemented our credit card processing system. And the 25 other people in the room (because we were a little d democratic organization at the time) agreeing with me. It isn't rocket science.

Re: Actually

Smart Greedy bankers tell you that because they are raking in the fees from the vendors on all those purchases you make. Fees the vendors have to charge you in the form of higher prices. Plus of course higher taxes because they are "adding more value" to the product when they sell it.

I did support for a smallish local bank many years ago. One gentleman who was in the lending department had a cartoon prominently displayed on the wall. I don't recall the start of it anymore (probably something like "cash is temporary), but the punchline was "but a mortgage is forever." Bankers all know where they collect their fees. Sounding like they are giving good advice is even more important to fleecing the sheep.

Re: aren't realizing the full purchasing power of your money.

I'm not scared of them. Still use them for some things while I'm paying off the rest.

But I'm not shaking down people who can't afford the bill by asking for more than what I'm paying for on my credit cards. You may not visibly see the cost, but the cost is still there. This is what turns me off most about liberals and progressives: they lord their "moral superiority of caring about others" over conservatives while screwing them over and claiming they aren't. Pay your own bills including the costs for all those people moving the bits around that represent your money.

@garden-snail

It's not just the protection for items not shipped. It's also the protection for compromised account numbers. If they get to your bank account, your cash is gone. If they get your credit card they can trash it and your score, but you can get those cleaned up. It's a PITA, but you can clean it up. And while you are cleaning it up, you still have accounts from which you can function.

Re: aren't realizing the full purchasing power of your money.

That's a load of crap and you know it. There's no such thing as a free lunch, so you're paying for those points somewhere. Maybe you're benefiting from cost shifting to the poor who get stuck with 47% rates. More likely you're paying for it in the form of higher prices on the goods you purchase.

There's only one good reason to use a credit card for an internet purchase: fraud protection. Everything else is a rationalization about to justify overspending.

Full disclosure: I've done more rationalizing than most about this in my younger days. I'm spent the last three years trying to clean up the mess I made and am likely to spend the next three years before I'm finished. And I spent the ten years before that pretending I was trying to clean up the mess.

@Zmodem

With financial thinking so deep, it's obvious you will never be wealthy. Neither will anybody who takes your advice.

@dogged

You can doubt that all you want to. I haven't warn a watch since my employer started routinely providing me with a cell phone more than 12 years ago. A while back we did a spot check on gaming night - only 1 watch amongst the 4 men in the room and 1 for the woman.

Re: check in crap that clearly has not been tested

More to the point, in the grand scheme of things I expect that someone will occasionally check in the wrong segment of code. (Oops, I sent the code dated 6/30 instead of 7/30.) At which point the manager of the code base should be the one noticing and taking the corrective action with the coder. In this instance not only did the coder check in untested code, the manager (whose job it is to check for that so Torvalds doesn't have to) just forwarded the untested code for inclusion as part of the final build.

Disasters are rarely the result of single mistake and almost always the result of a chain of mistakes.

Re: I'm torn

Thank-you for considering my point above.

Your analysis of Torvalds is similar to what I hear in other forums where I explain organizational problems.

I'd like you to consider the following:

1) Is Torvalds really trying to get rid of the coder who made the bad commit?

2) Or is he more pissed off about the manager who didn't run a cursory check to make sure the commit was good?

3) Or is Torvalds telling the manager who screwed up that he's getting on his last nerve?

If it's #1, yes Torvalds is probably following a bad strategy.

If it's #3, we've got a 50/50 split and would need more information about past interactions.

If it's number 2, he's probably using the only option available to him.

Taking the kind of abuse Torvalds is dishing is tough, but I've been through worse in a volunteer structure. Torvalds is only going for the coarse language and an industrial grade humiliation. In my case both of those were combined with charges of embezzlement (funneling money to friends in a profit sense from a non-profit org) and wound up having the group meet several times with a lawyer because they were sent via email to the entire support organization. After the dust settled I'm still reasonably good friends with the guy who made the charges (he agreed the person was providing non-group purpose professional services at a huge discount to the group and was uniquely qualified to do so). Oh, and on a later occasion I had to take a similar tongue lashing from the vendor described in this exchange because I had to wake him at 7 in the morning on a nite when he'd gotten to bed around 3 with a simple question to which I didn't know the answer. (I do helpdesk, not databases).

Re: He's right but ...

Perhaps there are people out there who can. But obviously neither Linus nor you are one of them.

Re: Nice guys come second

There are two problems in volunteer organizations.

The first is that you can't go out and hire somebody to do the tough jobs or work on the crap ones that still need to be done. This is the problem everybody is aware of and on which most of us focus. It's the fuel behind the sweet talk argument.

The second is that you can't fire the incompetent people. These are the ones you have to drive away from the organization by whatever means necessary. This problem is generally ignored because of the first problem and exacerbated by certain people who think they can find a job for anybody.

It just might be that Torvalds has been bitten by this second problem in the past. His technique is tuned to this problem.

Re: As I see it

Bullshit.

IT people, even the service desk grunts like me, got into IT work because we like solving problems but don't necessarily like or are good at interfacing with other people. So if your IT department isn't solving problems for you, it ain't the techs. It's either upper management or the bean counters.

Re: entire company could VPN in, from the beach

in fact, with the exception of the occasional hardware upgrade, most of the IT department would probably prefer to be on one of those beaches using a vpn to do most of their work. OK, doesn't work out so well for service desk grunts like me, but 60-70% of the systems admin stuff can be done remotely.

Re: complaining about IT managers,

I wouldn't even say IT managers, much as the rest of your statement is true.

He's talking about Security Managers who have somehow gotten lumped into IT. Probably because instead of focusing on where the real security problems are (users doing risky things) they try to buy an IT device to force the users to do what they don't want to pay to train them to do.

Re: more of a stamp collecting & trading club.

Not even that. Stamp collecting is relatively popular so I suspect you could trade them more readily. And they are certainly easier to convert into a more recognized currency. I think you're looking for something on the order of depression glass collecting or maybe pachinko machines.

Re: if you really care about your clients

If you really care about your clients you'll sit down with them and explain the current situation. Yes the switch to a non-MS product will probably be difficult for them and maybe you. But if MS wants to treat them through you like red-headed step children it is probably better for both of you to deal with that issue up front. Because support for you and your client isn't going to get any better if they opt to follow the MS cloudy route.

And you'll be the one the customer berates because MS isn't supporting you the vendor in the manner required.

Re: No surprise that MS want to force everything possible

Agreed. From the bean counter perspective it makes sense. From the customer standpoint it doesn't and for the same reason the bean counters want to change the model.

The thing is, somewhere in the company there's supposed to be someone with the sense to say "We can make X dollars at this lower price or between zero and .5X with a higher priced offering, because people won't buy the higher priced product."

Faced with the current MS roadmap, if I were actively supporting SMEs, I wouldn't be stocking up on disappearing copies of a product MS can kill the support on, I'd be beavering away on alternative solutions.

@AC 11 Jul 2013 10:45

Blanket statements are usually wrong.

Cloudy services are probably not a good solution form most companies. But there are some for which it is the ONLY thing that makes sense. For several years I helped a company that had a permanent staff of about 50 people who worked from home, a busy month in which temp staff ballooned to about 300, a customer base of 25,000 to 30,000 people and annual that grew from $1 million to $2 million dollars. Their most important business function took place in the cloud, except we didn't call it the cloud then just an outsourced IT function. The company had an official mail drop for legal correspondence and a different one for business correspondence. Once every other month they'd rent meeting rooms in a hotel to conduct business that required face to face meetings, but otherwise it was conducted by email, phone, and bulletin boards.

Yes, it was a volunteer non-profit, but it was still a business and most certainly an "anyone."