Before my father retired, he was doing research into hypervelocity impacts. It's really intense and pretty scary. He showed me the results of a glass bead the size of a grain of rice that had been shot out of a magnetic rail gun at 17,000 kph (around the orbital velocity of the shuttle, etc.). The glass bead was shot into a steel plate 1 inch thick and ~1 sq foot in size. The entry hole was the size of a quarter, and the exit hole (yes it went all the way through) was the size of a baseball with frozen metal in a splash pattern heading out of the plate.

So, yea, small things can do a LOT of damage at high speeds. That's one reason that sattelites are covered in ~50 layers of mylar. Each layer takes some of the energy out of the micrometerite, so hopefully it will slow down enough before getting to the sattelite itself

I agree also. My 1st introduction to a union was at a large telecomm. I didn't understand them at all, and was wondering how friends I had made could hate me when a strike was getting ready to happen (It was because I was on the non-union employment side). I was talking with my father about the experience, and he; being a history buff; answered this way.

Unions came into being during a time when US labor was merely slave labor to the Robber Barons of the 19th century. They did really good things in getting some sanity injected into the US when 7 day/14 hour day work weeks were pretty common.

{Sound familiar to the death march software dev practices of today????}

In the 90's when Unions were just starting to be REALLY dismantled, he said that the main companies still having Unions were those that "really deserved to have them"

Think about that ... !!!!

Unions of the past might be outdated, but it may be time to think of a new kind of union to try and get some sanity put back into the IT world.

I had exactly one boss (A VP) who got a system exactly like that set up. It was wonderful from our SA group, because it made things run really smooth. There were definite expectations on both sides, and the groups actually had to think about what they really wanted ahead of time.

Unfortunately, corporate America is so trained to get all the IT support they want for free, the complaining got so loud that both the VP and our group got let go so that things could be run "cheaper" (Meaning that the groups wouldn't have to budget for IT support any more).

And in case you think that was unusual, I recently left a position where the entire IT organization has been outsourced to save money. Unfortunately, those users were also used to the "free" support they received, and are suffering huge amounts of pain since the outsourcing company requires up-front payment for anything outside of their contract. Of course, their contract is so limited; that fixing a server that is required for the contracted work (read .. making $$ for the main company) is "outside" the outsourcing contract. Turns out that 100% of the machines I used to take care of are "outside" that outsource contract. They got a 5 year contract, and in the 1st year, costs are 3-4x what it was before the outsourcing began. Of course it's been trumpeted as a success because somebody's bonus check depends on it.

Color me un-impressed

I've installed/used various commercial AV products on both OSX and Linux. The last was Symantec AV. While I was wondering why my OSX machine ground to a halt (72hrs to scan 100,000 files???), I looked at the signature file for the product. Out of 190,000 definitions, only 3 were Mac related. All or them were pre 1995 (The CD Worm, ABv, etc.). Absolutely none of the things being scanned for would run on anything later than Mac OS8, and I haven't run MS Office or other MS products for 10 years. Needless to say, that product was ripped out real fast.

The Linux version of Symantec was loading as a kernel level java process, and we were developing in java. Within 2 seconds of launching another java process, the kernel would hard-lock. The only way around that was to power off the machine. Nothing else would respond.

So, the results are:
No protection
No usage of the machine while it runs (I guess that means it's protected since NOBODY can use it)
No satisfaction
No longer used!!

Bravo......well played!!

Arrrrrrr! Ye be spyin' me flag!

Simple answer..no way in heck!!

Best evaluation I ever got was worded directly from the old Catbert Mission Statement Generator.

The reviewer even had the gall to suggest that the 1 non-random (read real) part of the review was the one bad part of my evaluation!!