Mass Transit?

Post #422,948 by Andrew Grygus 3/21/18 5:56:19 PM 3/21/18 5:56:19 PM Reply	Mass Transit? Work like mine would be absolutely impossible in a mass transit environment.
Post #422,958 by mmoffitt 3/22/18 8:15:19 AM 3/22/18 8:15:19 AM Reply	How so? bcnu, Mikem It's mourning in America again.
Post #422,964 by Andrew Grygus 3/22/18 12:11:26 PM 3/22/18 12:11:26 PM Reply	Re: How so? I perform emergency service - I have to get to destinations that are not likely to be on any mass transit grid and get there fast. Many companies are paralyzed when the network is down, especially now that the phones are also on the network. When downtime puts a company completely out of business - the cost is very high, in both expenses and possible lost customers. And mass transit always involves a lot of waiting - waiting that neither I nor my clients can afford. Especially at route transition points. I have to get there with a large amount of gear - because I have no idea what the problem is I will face, and I need a full tool kit (heavy), test equipment and a lot of replacement parts. I also often have to take computers back to the office if they need extensive attention. I can't be sitting around at $100 / hour for hours and hours just waiting for updates and things. The computer I will be delivering today, to replace the dead one I brought back yesterday - the Windows updates took nearly 8 hours. Did I know I'd have to bring this computer (now in my junk pile) back to the office? No. I have to always be prepared for that.
Post #422,967 by mmoffitt 3/22/18 2:55:22 PM 3/22/18 2:55:22 PM Reply	Okay, it doesn't work for ambulances either. But those are outliers. The vast majority of people who are in their cars on the San Diego, Harbor, Santa Monica, Riverside, etc. on a twice daily basis don't really need to be there. bcnu, Mikem It's mourning in America again.
Post #422,971 by Ashton 3/22/18 4:16:12 PM 3/22/18 4:16:12 PM Reply	We also have to look at US geography espcially when comparing with the "States" of the EU, generally the best showcase of what Bitchin-mass-transit Can be. We are er, Hyarge . Still and all IMhO we bloody well Need sane modrin mass transit in all high-density/city+suburbs-wide area: such a monumental transfiguration would free the "free-"ways for folks in similar positions as Andrew's. (Yeah.. after the s-f-Vulgarian siphons off all available deficit-spending to build his safe-to-Use nukes. And 100 other insanities. As we seep daily into The Swamp that is the mind-fluff of some 40% of the inmates.) Just another day in the Land of the most odious of the Pecksniffs..
Post #423,045 by pwhysall 3/26/18 3:22:50 AM 3/26/18 3:22:50 AM Reply	There's no reason not to do it, other than infatuation with the car because reasons The vast majority of journeys are short - basically commuting or local shopping. An interesting indicator of this is that most crashes take place within a mile or two of the driver's home. No-one apart from the idiot fringe is suggesting that all personal transportation be replaced by mass transit. There are lots of people whose journeys are ad hoc, and these people need personal transportation. HOWEVER Most people could go to and from their place of work via mass transit, if only it existed. This would vastly reduce the number of vehicles on the road, especially at peak times. Look at London and NYC - these are places where sure, you could drive to work if you wanted, but that'd be stupid, because the mass transit infrastructure exists at a point where for most people, it's the better option not to. You don't have to build out a London-style underground system - just regular buses, trams and trains will do.
Post #423,046 by crazy 3/26/18 5:11:56 AM 3/26/18 5:11:56 AM Reply	Disagree We have about 80 years of contruction over vast areas that place suburbs around cities. The majority of the well paying jobs are distant from the housing. And distant in a manner that a 45 minute car commute would turn into a 3 hour multipoint public transportation nightmare. Your attempt to compare to your tiny island's reasonable solutions to our geography does not mesh.
Post #423,082 by pwhysall 3/27/18 6:31:22 AM 3/27/18 6:31:22 AM Reply	Re: Disagree Well, you're fucked then :)
Post #423,086 by pwhysall 3/27/18 6:45:10 AM 3/27/18 6:45:10 AM Reply	Also 45 minute commute? Fuck that shit right in the ear. I get grumbly when an additional 10 minutes means I spent half an hour getting to work.
Post #423,102 by malraux 3/27/18 5:18:35 PM 3/27/18 5:18:35 PM Reply	45-60 for me. Typically 40 on the way home depending on when I leave. In Detroit, which has nothing for mass transit worth talking about. In DC I had a 1.5 hour commute by bus and subway and it was great: plenty of time to read, relax, whatever. Regards, -scott Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson.
Post #423,108 by crazy 3/27/18 7:22:20 PM 3/27/18 7:22:20 PM Reply	Yeah, I enjoyed my nyc commute. Wife dropped off at train (5 min from house). 5 minute wait, then 72 minute ride. 10 minute walk through nyc. Reverse was a PACKED train though, hot and sweaty, and then maybe a bus ride home. Time on the train was spent reading and listening to music. BUT: I justified the time spent on the commute as worth it because they were paying me stupid money. And the job was fun. I doubt I'd have the same calculation now.
Post #423,107 by boxley 3/27/18 6:54:56 PM 3/27/18 6:54:56 PM Reply	54 miles 40-45 minutes 3.5 hours 1 way public transpo the a 2.5 mile hike. no thanks "Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts" – Richard Feynman
Post #422,980 by a6l6e6x 3/22/18 4:54:05 PM 3/22/18 4:54:05 PM Reply	Perhaps they need a permanent techie employee! Alex "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge." -- Isaac Asimov
Post #422,987 by Andrew Grygus 3/22/18 9:16:54 PM 3/22/18 9:16:54 PM Reply	Only one of my clients is big enough for that. For the rest of them, hiring me at $100 / hour when needed is still one hell of a lot cheaper than having a techie on payroll. Fortunately, the main reason for smaller companies to have a permanent techie went away some years back. For a while Microsoft was graduating a lot of hot shot techies who went into small businesses and sold them the whole Microsoft business suit, including Microsoft Exchange Server and Active Directory. Fortunately, all those Exchange Servers have died off long ago. I have only one client now using Exchange Server, and he outsources it to a company that does have full time techies 24 hours a day. I can't recall any of my clients having active directory any more.
Post #422,997 by mmoffitt 3/23/18 8:00:07 AM 3/23/18 8:00:07 AM Reply	Suit instead of suite? Was that intentional? If so, I like it. :0) I was a Microsoftie in those days and occasionally made a little money un-fscking some of those very "Small Business Server" installations you're referring to myself. bcnu, Mikem It's mourning in America again.
Post #423,002 by Andrew Grygus 3/23/18 12:33:15 PM 3/23/18 12:33:15 PM Reply	A fun thing about Microsoft Exchange Server. At least back when I had to deal with it, Exchange Server generated huge amounts of .tmp files, so many it saturated the hard disks of the day. Simple - you just go into that directory and delete all the .tmp files. Ha! Ha! gotchya! One of those .tmp files is essential, and if removed Exchange Server will never run again! All your email is inaccessible (IMAP was little used back then). When this happened to one of my clients, I turned the problem over to an exchange specialist. They didn't even try, they just set him up with a regular hosted POP account. This partially explains why most of those Exchange Servers in small businesses disappeared.
Post #423,004 by mmoffitt 3/23/18 1:31:03 PM 3/23/18 1:31:03 PM Reply	Another fun thing. I had a client (this was a long time ago) who'd first installed Exchange 4.x or 5.0 as part of one of those Small Business Server suites. They wanted to upgrade to a full Exchange 5.5 (IIRC) stand alone server. I quoted 4 hours to do the job (chiefly because I never quoted anything less than 4 hours and all my work then was always NTE). The client balked. I told him that if he was going to have his help desk tech do it, make sure he's careful because, for instance, the default for the upgrade is to set the server up as an open relay and they had their exchange server outside the firewall. I was told it wouldn't be a problem because "we're just a little company. No one will know we're on the Internet." Then, two weeks later, the same guy called me in a panic. He said he'd been "interviewed by FBI agents who were interested in all the child porn that was arriving in Australia or somewhere" that had bounced off their exchange server. That mess took me and my partner a while to clean up. bcnu, Mikem It's mourning in America again.
Post #423,005 by Andrew Grygus 3/23/18 1:39:39 PM 3/23/18 1:39:39 PM Reply	Yeah, I ran into the open relay problem myself. Fortunately, not much damage was done - just their Internet service provider cut them off. More fortunately, I didn't install that Exchange Server so they couldn't blame me. It was a hassle to fix. Later their Exchange Server bombed and had to be re-installed. Unfortunately, they didn't remember their company code, which means none of their email could be accessed. After some study, I found a severe security flaw in Exchange Server that allowed me to extract the company code. I published that on the Internet and got a few emails of thanks for all the time I'd saved for administrators.
Post #423,007 by drook 3/23/18 1:54:41 PM 3/23/18 1:54:41 PM Reply	Systems guys at the law firm I worked at turned off the firewall They were Windows guys through-and-through. Our ISP had provided a Solaris box that sat in our server room between our network and the world. Or it sat there until they decided that since they didn't know what it was doing it must not be needed so when upgrading some switches they left the yellow box out of the loop. Shortly thereafter our clients started reporting that they weren't getting email that our attorneys said they had sent. A little investigation showed their systems were bouncing it because our domain had been blacklisted for spam. We were an open relay. -- Drew
Post #423,006 by Andrew Grygus 3/23/18 1:51:11 PM 3/23/18 1:51:11 PM Reply	The flaw in "safety by obscurity" The bad guys can presume that a small company using that strategy doesn't have skilled enough support staff to understand the vulnerabilities and fix them. This makes them prime targets. I've had a couple of clients asking me why their server hard disks were full. I had one client telling me all the computers I'd supplied were way too slow and needed a serious upgrade. Problem was, those computers were working very hard - but they were working for someone other than the owners. Yeah, obscurity is an open invitation.
Post #423,023 by crazy 3/24/18 2:53:03 AM 3/24/18 2:53:03 AM Reply	Permanent? You mean 2 per site 24x7? If truly mission critical and no on-demand transportation. So at least 6 people full time plus vacation and sick coverage.

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