If you ever do decide to open up ssh, fail2ban's on debian boxes is nice for autoblocking knuckleheads who try ssh pings. The are other profiles you can turn on so it behaves like an IDS/IPS for your machine.

I very much agree with you that flash should have died a long time ago, but how do you propose to transition ?

Video is not the only thing that flash does well, chat clients and such are also exclusively written in
flash if they have anywhere near decent performance.

 

the time and resources they spend on personal items while getting paid by me is no less than stealing

If they're assembly-line workers, then probably yes. If they fall in the "knowledge" category, then I disagree in principle. To expect a human to mentally function at top efficiency without breaks and diversions is not reasonable. So, if you are the kind of employer who has hourly-wage employees with scheduled breaks, then you have a right to complain if your workers are slacking off on the clock. If not, then I think you are shooting yourself in the foot with a policy that equates employees taking a necessary 10-minute break every 2 hours with "stealing."

Obviously, if their personal activities are interfering with their productivity then that is another matter. I think you should evaluate your employees on productivity and overall quality of work, not on whether they keep their noses to the grindstone all day, every day.

Sorry, late to the party.

I work for an electric cooperative. We have automated meter reading. Each night, each meter sends in the reading for the day. We're thinking about going hourly. We're actually part of a pilot project for demand response. As someone brought up in a previous post, these meters works wonders for outage management. We can now "ping" meters. A member calls in an outage, we ping the feeder he's off of and within minutes we pinpoint the piece of equipment that has failed.

I'm actually excited about a lot of this new technology because I can see where it's going and it's not all that big brotherish. I think the largest benefit to everyone involved is the increased ability to monitor consumption. As it is now, you use a bunch of power and only find out what you're getting billed for at the end of the month. Some people get surprised. Wouldn't it be neat to have an in-home display (maybe your thermostat) that shows your current (heh) usage by the hour? You can now identify which times of day you're using the most juice, things like that. And no surprises when you get the bill.

Demand response is going to be huge. As we run out of places to build dams of power plants we need to do better with what we have. The silliest thing is some unreal proportion of generation sits there idle until 5 pm when everyone gets home and turns the heat up and their TV on. That demand spike requires us to generate huge amounts of energy for just an hour or two and then the generators sit there are spin at idle until the next peak. So if you can make that peak not so sharp or not so high, everyone wins when it comes to the bottom lines. The utility is otherwise forced to buy peak power at a premium and forced to pass that cost on.

So now we're piloting a project where people's electric heat and water heater are hooked up via the "smart" grid and during a peak event, for 45 minutes, we set back their thermostat 3 degrees and shut their water heater off. So, for that barely noticeable impact on a person's life, everyone gets savings. It's also a ton better than rolling blackouts or brownouts.

I honestly think the project as it is is a pretty hard sell but I envision hourly pricing data sent down the wire to a consumer's smart appliances. You want to do a load of laundry and when you push the start button on your drier is says "Currently $0.16/kwh. If you wait 2 hrs, power will be $0.12. Start now or wait?" Leave it in the hands of the consumers. Give them the correct up to date knowledge to make good choices.

But you can't get from here to there without the baby steps. You need to start collecting a ton of data on people's usage. You need to know where and when your peaks are. You need to be able to predict them. You need to be able to interact with the consumer. Gone are the days of your dumb meter, and thank God for that. I realize some of the growing pains aren't that great but I think it will pay off in the long run.

Yep, if you are only in it for the money you will not be in it for long no matter what the pay is.

The rest of this is for the folks talking about the abuse that is so often heaped on programmers.

The truth is that people who love to program are the best programmers. These are the folks who can tell a boss to go fuck himself when he demands 40 hours a week of free work over and above the 40 hours of paid work you are already doing. They can do that because, as study after study has shown, good programmers generate 10 to 20 times the usable product that the rest of the crew generates. The good programmers can get paid what they want to get paid even without switching companies. But, you have to be ready to say "Fuck You" to your boss and mean it. Which means you can't be living pay check to pay check...

Good programmers learn new systems on their own time because they love to learn new stuff. The read technical books because they are curious. They may just be crazy enough to do things like code up a mini-interpretor for a language just so they can figure out how it really works. Or code up an algorithm just to see if they can do better than what they saw in a book. A good programmer has programmed in many languages, not just one. A good programmer is the one that the other programmers go to when they can't figure something out. It takes talent, passion, and persistence to become a good programmer. A degree or three helps, but really is not required.

If you are actually valuable to the company they will compensate you based on your value. But, that means you have to be directly involved in developing revenue generating products. Not, doing standard IT crap. You need to be generating stuff that they want to keep as trade secrets or stuff they want to patent. Not just coding updates to the CRM package. You have to be visible and be seen as an asset to the company. You can not just hide in your cube. You have to be able to communicate with people who are not programmers.

But, most importantly, you have to be able to stand up for your self. You have to be able to walk into your bosses office and tell him why you are worth paying more. And, yeah, that means you may have to make a point of ignoring the rule based review process. When you pull of major accomplishment be it a new product or a major save, you need to walk into your bosses office and tell him the dollar value of what you just did. He most likely doesn't care about the technical side, but he sure as hell cares about how much you just made for the company or how much you saved the company.

When you've delivered value significantly higher that your costs you will either get paid very well or you should find another job, After you have another offer that you are happy with tell you boss that you have found another job because your compensation does not match your contribution. Document that my sending your boss a list of the dollars you have made or saved for the company. Offer to stay (if you want to) if they match your pay to your value. (For God's sake never tell them what the other guys have offered! The other guy doesn't really know what you are worth. You are likely worth more to your current company.) If they do not give you the raise you want, you must leave. If you don't you are now, as they say around here, "their bitch".

You can't do this very often. I'd say no more than once ever 4 or 5 years. OTOH, if your compensation starts sliding and your contribution keeps going up (and it will if you are good programmer) then try it again but know they will probably let you take the other job.

So, what did I just say? A good programmer will be paid based on his actual value to the company. But, that will only happen if you grow a pair and demand it. Sometimes you have to make veiled threats and if you do, you have to be willing to follow through.

Here is the last thing, don't be stupid or greedy. If the economy sucks you aren't going to get what you want. Don't ever even hint at doing something illegal. I don't care if you have pictures of the president of the company fucking a sponge in the janitors closet (How did I come up with that image... eeeyuuupchuck) you can post them on the net but don't try to use them. If you wind up quiting don't get mad about it. I once passed up a great offer to stay with a company just because they had pissed me off so badly leading up to it. It wasn't even about salary I was being paid very well and I had received a couple of out of cycle raises. But, I wanted to go back to school so I wanted some flexibility in my schedule so I could take one or two classes a quarter. I tried to negotiate that every way I could and went through three or four iterations of options to meet their objections. When I quite they wound up offering me a lot more that just a flexible schedule to get me to stay. But, By then I was too pissed off to listen to what they were saying. It took me a couple of years, and hearing from folks I knew who still worked their, to figure out that losing me just when they did caused them to miss a couple of major product deliveries. The result was that my whole management chain lost some of their bonus that year and the company lost a lot of money. They really didn't want me to leave or to have anything that would keep me from being completely focused on the product because I knew certain parts of the project better than anyone else and they knew it would cost them if I left.

If they had told me that, and offered me a little extra, I would have happily put off going back to school until the next semester. No problem. But, they preferred to take the chance of pissing me of rather than being honest with me. Dumb asses. OTOH, I traded a part time job as an RA for a full time job as a product developer. The difference in salary over the years I was in college, adjusted for inflation was about $150,000. Who was the dumb ass? The fact is I've never made up the money I lost by going back and getting a MS degree. But, it did get me jobs that were a lot more fun than those open to folks with only a BS. That made it more than worth the cost.

Stonewolf

There actually are places out there where you can get paid a premium on your donation if you fulfill certain characteristics. While SAT scores don't typically fetch higher prices, a man's profession can fetch them higher values particularly if they are a doctor or lawyer. Racial or ethnic background can add to the value as the price paid for the specimen depends on what has a high demand at the bank.

no doubt they mean that someone successfully hacked the PS3s hypervisor. What a great way to fix that problem.

What about nude photos of children.. that are kept in a box until the children turn 18 and then those now-adults decide to release the photos? My heads asplode

agreed, but it can also be safely assumed that in general, an adult is an idiot too. what do you think an idiot teen grows up to become?

No argument on the hypocrisy. It's an annoyingly stubborn leftover from our puritanical roots, and many of us (fundies, mostly) are all about pretending that our "founding fathers" were possessed of superior "moral fiber". The result is the staggering collection of hangups that make a naked boob a national disaster but someone's bullet-riddled naked spleen just good, clean fun.
On the other hand, I take issue with the notion that 14-16 year olds are capable of understanding sex. In this country they are demonstrably unprepared to engage in sex in any manner approaching responsible, to which the depressing statistics will attest. Maybe, if we had the maturity and intelligence to treat the subject in an open and responsible manner, that would change, but for now (and as a sweeping generalization, I'll admit) it ain't happening. Christ, we still have a large number of idiots who believe that "abstinence only" education works.

so the bandwith vs theora doesn't make any sense?!!!