Damn, that doesn't sound like much fun. Sorry you had to go through that.
No, definitely wasn't.
Thankfully I'm okay and I don't think I'm worse for wear. For a time I was worried that I might have gotten brain damage from it (I know a couple of people that got brain damage from high fevers), but after this happened I went back to college and was able to complete a masters degree in electrical engineering with a high GPA, so I think I'm fine.
Thanks for the warning. I don't take it often enough to probably hit that. The ibuprofen dose is only 200mg, which is one OTC pill.
I pretty much take maybe 1 or 2 a week at most as needed, but they keep me out of the hospital or urgent care place so it's worth it.
(Annoys me that pain pills are hard to get for people who really need them because some people abuse them...)
I believe I was taking 2 200 mg pills every 6 hours for a full week straight. (Even if I had to get up in the middle of the night if necessary to take another 2 pills.) Unfortunately that's what it required to make the unbearable headache pain subside. I tried only taking 1 pill, that wouldn't cut it. I've never experienced a headache like that before or since.
Heat stroke also messes up your electrolytes too, so I had to eat bananas nuts and sports drinks for several days, during which everything tasted like metal until I got the electrolytes back. And during that time my face was still drooping from palsy, so drinking without spilling it out of my mouth onto my shirt was a challenge. I can look back on it now and laugh a bit, but at the time it was frightening. Also couldn't whistle, drinking from a straw was extremely difficult too because one side of my mouth couldn't close.
If you're only taking an Ibuprofin here and there I'm sure you won't run into what I did.
I take Vicoprofen (for migraine pain). It's mixed with Ibuprofen instead of Tylenol. It still makes me sick all day after taking it. No idea why people abuse it.
For me it comes down to a choice between being in horrible agony all day or having no pain but stuck in bed feeling dizzy and like shit all day. I'll take that over the pain.
Now there may be some anti-nausea I can take to counteract some of the negative affects, but I haven't asked my doctor about that because the effects now ensure I won't abuse it and I don't want to know otherwise I guess.
I ended up having temporary facial palsy (i.e. half my face drooped and didn't work) after taking Ibuprofin for a week for severe headache pain related to heat stroke. I also felt dizzy and sick while taking the Ibuprofin, but the headache pain without meds was unbearable. After the headache pain from effects of heat stroke passed I was able to stop taking Ibuprofin, and a week later the facal palsy went away. I can't know for sure that the Ibuprofin caused the palsy, but some number of people that take Ibuprofin report having palsy from it.
The nastiest thing about the facial palsy was that on the side of my face that had the palsy the eyelid didn't "auto-blink" anymore, so the eye would get dry. It was especially noticable on long drives. To wet the eye I would have to consciously close both eyes at once -- for whatever reason that still worked. It's a bit mentally draining to have to constantly remember to close both eyes to wet them.
Hopefully you'll never run into this problem.
...
I personally have run Arch+KDE4 for the past few years and have loved it. Why? Because it works for ME, and I can customize, adjust, etc. things just the way I want them, which is very likely unique to my needs and probably wouldn't be great for someone else to use. But that's the beauty of running Linux on the desktop, you can configure the 'appliance' for your specific need rather than be confined to what someone else thinks is the best way to run a GUI.
I'm mainly a Debian user, I'm also running Arch (in a VM, for Desktop use, with LUKS/cryptfs) and I'm very pleased with what I find with it so far. However one thing I do notice is that for Daemons, Arch upgrades seem to create ".pacnew" configuration files that sit alongside the original configuration files and outputting a warning, somewhat similar to how RPMs upgrade with ".rpmnew" files. I don't particularly like that -- I much prefer the prompts for administrator input that the APT/dpkg system brings up when
The ZDNet reivew looks like it's of Ubuntu (i.e. with the Unity/Gnome interface) and doesn't seem to include KUbuntu (with the KDE4 interface).
Oh well.
I've yet to deal with an organization that has a GPG/PGP key for encrypting email to the organization. I don't think there's anything wrong with asking if they have one for encrypted email use, and so I think it's fine if you go ahead and do so, but I also don't expect that they have one.
What is more common is for the email MTA to support SMTP over TLS encrypted transfers. This can be verified using 'swaks' by testing each of the company's email servers listed in DNS one by one.
Finding the mail servers that cover a domain, for instance "nonsense.com":
$dig nonsense.com mx +short
10 nullmx.nonsense.com.
$swaks --ehlo testing.example.com --server nullmx.nonsense.com --tls -q TLS
=== Trying nullmx.nonsense.com:25...
=== Connected to nullmx.nonsense.com.
220 mx ESMTP
EHLO testing.example.com
250-mx
250-PIPELINING
250-SIZE
250 8BITMIME
*** Host did not advertise STARTTLS
QUIT
221 mx
=== Connection closed with remote host.
If the company email MTAs all DO support SMTPS, then perhaps that will be good enough. Even if the company did support GPG, there are certain things such as the Subject for the email which don't get encrypted, so SMTPS is important for those reasons anyway.
Like everyone else, I have no idea what they're doing, but no, it doesn't rule out focused surveillance.
What's being acquired as evidence is very wide, and the NSA is famous for both large data storage and building a database of interpersonal connections. Regardless if the particular reason this information is being gathered, I'm working under the assumption that they're going to be using the information in whatever way they can, rather than for the original reason they're taking the data.
I find it really concerning that a secret court can order such wide data transfer to the NSA, and also order that the order be kept secret.
I think you've got the right idea.
Performance reviews are a good feedback mechanism for both the worker and the manager. It sounds to me like this particular programmer is feeling disconnected and as such doesn't seem to be taking account of the reporcussions for the way in which he's doing his work. Likewise this is bad for morale for everybody else, because they're having to clean up the mess. Nobody wins in this scenario -- the lone programmer is unhappy and the people he works with that want to work collaboratively are unhappy.
So the recommendation I have is to at least try to have a conversation with the programmer about these things and try to help him reconnect with his fellow employees. This is not a "blame session", it's an attempt to get the team reconnected so that they can work as a team. It sounds like the programmer isn't able to say "I don't understand this" and as such can't learn from his fellow employees because of perceived judgment or a sense of insecurity. This is common, and can lead to all kinds of bullying behavior -- but it's the underlying disconnection that's the biggest part of the problem, IMHO.
Hopefully this works. If not, hopefully the effort wil bring to light what needs to be done.
I have quite a lot of Debian workstations that I also want to just work, otherwise the users using them won't be very productive that day.
Agreed. Debian workstations work fairly well. [Occasionally I have to build a newer kernel for new hardware, but I can deal with that.] I like that things are stable during the release cycle.
... since the default desktop for Wheezy is the unutterably awful GNOME 3.
And in Debian Gnome3 now has a dependency on NetworkManager.
Users of the Wicd networking manager should be aware of this, because NetworkManager conflicts with Wicd. Neither Wicd no NetworkManager work when they're both active, and at the moment there's no warning about this nor instructions on what to do about it.
Standing in a Utility boiler (Coal plant) I get full 3g signal (dont have 4g where I live). Fully enclosed and welded air tight, I get better signal inside than out.
That's interesting, and certainly possible.
"Instead of "passively blocking", I think you mean "shielding". As in a " Faraday cage". This doesn't hamper signals outside of the structure."
It's mostly due to bad reflections, interference, and simple attenuation. Unless a building is entirely steel clad, modern buildings make terrible Faraday cages.
Even with steel studs at 18" centers, that's more than 3 times the wavelength of 2GHz signals. Aside from studs, beams and girders and the like, even in a building with a lot of them, are nowhere near close enough to make a Faraday cage at those wavelengths.
You're probably right. "Real" shielded structures (such as anechoic chambers to test antennas) usually have conductive "fingers" in the doors, filters on incoming power lines, screens covering the air ducts... etc. Dispersion, intersymbol interference/distortion, multipath interference... those are more likely.
I didn't want to get into all of that; sometimes I just want to give a more "simple" kind of answer.
...however many are very likely "passively blocking" phone signals due to the commonly used construction materials in commercial buildings.
Instead of "passively blocking", I think you mean "shielding". As in a " Faraday cage". This doesn't hamper signals outside of the structure.
Asking Slashdot, you'll get vastly differing opinions but you'll likely get some interesting information which will likely be useful.
However... the only way to really know which distro is "right" for you is to try several and pick one.
So I would suggest geting out your favorite Virtualization software (VirtualBox, KVM, etc) and try several distros at once. Find out what you like.
I recently did this back in August 2012. Here are the distros I liked:
*Mint Debian 201204
Fedora 17 (18 has a yucky installer)
OpenSuSE 12.1
*Debian (Squeeze, Wheezy, Sid)
Arch (fastest package installs by far, no sound in a VirtualBox VM)
*Pear Linux 5 (looks just like a Mac, except a Pear in place of an Apple. Fun to play with.)
Slackware 13
Vector Linux7.0 (based on Slackware, has package management. Fun, snappy.)
Least recommended: Gentoo. Attempting a base install + KDE4 was a THREE FULL DAY compile, after which X refused to start. Very frustrating.
2nd least recommended: FreeBSD, only because there's no GUI by default, and I couldn't find instructions to install one.
Regardless of which you choose in the end, best of luck to you.
I have never heard Slackware called: "The simple easy to use Linux distro".
Not that I really have not much experience, but I would only disagree with you on one point.
I started with Slackare in 1995, used it up to 1999 -- I found it easy to use, but it wasn't easy to upgrade because upgrading meant reinstalling because it didn't have package management at that time. In 1999 I went to Debian because it allowed upgrading in place. I've since tested Slackare 13 and found it easy to use.
Mint (et all), is a better starting point than Ubuntu right now.
I don't like the Unity GUI in Ubuntu either (it's awful), but Mint has very few developers and I've been hearing complaints about the timeliness of downloading updates due to the small number of servers in their infrastructure. So I guess I'm saying that I agree, but that there are some other things to consider.
I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning. -- Plato
