Vonage has two plans, unlimited is $25 and 500 minutes is $14. The instant they introduced the 500 minute plan I switched down to it. This includes all of the services (voicemail in particular) that you pay through the nose for with a real phone company.
I cannot even conceive of using 500 minutes in a single month.
How is Vista in any way targeted at large enterprises? From all of the extra licensing nonsense in Vista and Office that make life more difficult for cloned deployments, to its desire for awesome video cards, to all of the extra DRM and media features that are worthless in an enterprise environment the very notion that Vista is targeted at enterprises is absurd to me.
I can tell you that my particular environment can't get Vista to work correctly with our 2k3 Active Directory server. That we have no desire to buy thousands of $400 video cards to replace GeForce 4MX's that do manage to render Excel documents correctly. And that we could care less about upgrading to Vista Ultimate and whatever else.
But, this is basically the same thing that everyone said when XP came out. 2000 works fine, we're just going to stay with that forever. Shockingly that becomes impossible; time passes and eventually you'll have to keep up with the Microsoft Joneses.
Consider that it is not the interest that one could earn on the hypothetical $500 rebate but rather the rebate itself that is in question here. If I received that money up-front in my paychecks, I could potentially avoid additional use (and accumulation of fees) with credit cards, make some purchases earlier or at all, and have a better idea of my available funds for budgeting purposes rather than receiving this windfall later on.
A lot of people have very simple taxes: one paycheck, one residence, no real property or investments, and don't itemize. If you know that your income is only coming from your paycheck, then you should be able to figure out your tax for the year ahead of time and get the withholding information right. Even if you receive a raise that skews things, it should be close.
http://www.imaging-resource.com/ACCS/BATTS/BATTS.H TM has comparisons of various brands from a year or two ago. It seems like basically PowerEx is the way to go, particularly when you take into account that they are now available in 2700 mAh versions. The highest mAh AA NiMH battery that I could find is from Accupower at 2900 mAh. However, they don't seem to perform as well as Sanyo 2700 mAh batteries, and so I would guess that they are also inferior to the PowerEx 2700 mAh ones.
The important thing to remember is that anything towards the top of a comparison list is probably going to work fine; you don't necessary need the very finest NiMH battery available on the market today. For instance, I have some Sanyo 2300 mAh batteries that work just fine.
It seems like www.thomasdistributing.com is the place to buy batteries if you're looking for a reputable online store.
No, but let me tell you, those Gateway PPro 200's were sweet machines. Way better than a measly 166MHz. In all seriousness the only problems I ever had with them were: every time I opened the case I sliced my hand up, the clock batteries all died simultaneously, and it becomes difficult to do much of anything on a machine that is practically old enough to vote.
What may disgust you is that the situation I'm describing is more 2001-2 than late 90's.
Not to mention our love of Oracle products. Or the fact that the engineering department is paying for everyone to print in Nord lab. Or the plasma screens displaying mostly static content, powered by dedicated boxes with display software that runs on top of Internet Explorer (which is thankfully in the process of being replaced).
- jxr150 Our love of Oracle is a great example of how people will just go with whoever is "the name of the week". Oracle is the big name, so we have to use every single one of their products. Nevermind that their calendaring software is basically the worst ever made. Nevermind that their portal software is completely worthless. And so on. Shockingly there is only a small contingent in central IT who lust after everything Oracle related, but as you see it has devasting repurcussions for the entire university.
More or less free printing, on the other hand, is something that I personally pushed the Nord Lab manager for. It fills a student need, so thats all I needed to hear; the money side of things is someone elses problem luckily for me.
Really? 20 Fibre ports? Did they outline the room? With the fibre connections and no RJ45? Yes, they were ceiling mounted and one per system. Thats just the way things roll at this place.
So instead, I had the great idea to cut a hole in the common wall (above the drop ceiling line), purchase additional ceiling tiles and cut up 2x4's into wooden supports. Jesus... I don't know about there, but where I work I demand a higher standard than that. I freely admit that it was stupid (see the subject of my post), but given that the lab must be pointlessly moved and that there was no money for the networking costs central IT wanted to impose, it was unfortunately the only viable option.
I'd say it was a lot better than throwing my hands up and saying it can't be done, but the fundamental problem is that the solution had to be sought at all. Why move a lab from a room designed to house a lab to a broom closet? Why does central IT just throw out random ridiculous figures and expect departments to cough it up on demand (no ones budget has an extra $20,000 just for asking!)? Why do lab managers claim they need things that they don't really need? Why does everyone have to be such a separatist and refuse to work together, despite all working at the same company?
He may have been misled by all of the "soft mounts will corrupt your data" information that gets passed around. I know that I was initially. What the man page doesn't tell you is exactly what you describe, that all of the systems become entirely dependent on the file server -- even if they don't need to access it to perform a given operation.
That in a nutshell is why systems administration will always be 10% learning and 90% experience, you have to know the way things work and not just what the documentation says.
I regret to inform you that I have not escaped, and still work there to this day. Its been over 6 years of constantly telling myself that its only going to be a few more months of this and then off to the real world to at the very least be tormented in different ways.
I can't really say what the problem is; I've applied to jobs that were literally word-for-word the sort of work that I've done for nearly ten years and without exaggeration I'm capable of doing it. At this point the only thing that I can figure is the distaste industry has for those with educational work histories (and vice versa). I know that when people apply at my university there is a definite bias towards those who have worked at universities before -- they know what to expect, don't require as much time to get acclimated, don't have very high expections, whatever.
Best of luck though. Having worked in the real world prior to this job, I can say that it sucks too, but at least theres the invisible hand of the bottom line -- if someone fucks up badly enough in industry they get fired; not so in academia.
I'm not too worried. When the day comes that I'm not able to speak my mind positively or negatively about work or anything else, then I guess I'll just get fucked over.
Yes, CWRU was one of the largest ATM deployments in the world. In fairness, this was in the days of 10Mbit Ethernet, so I guess it made sense at the time. I do know that I took great joy in throwing piles of (totally worthless) $1000+ FORE ATM cards into the garbage when the network was converted to gigabit Ethernet. That certainly was not a blunder. Its still problematic that we use fiber instead of copper, but who knew that you'd be able to run gigabit Ethernet over basically the same cabling. I remember back in 1997 or whenenver, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Ethernet#100BASE -T4 was the wave of the future.
I totally forgot one of the best things. We used to call this "Ozsoyogluing" a machine, based on the person responsible's name.
Take 5 workstations spread in various offices. Each one has a 5-10GB drive (this was 5-6 years ago) and runs Solaris. Each one has a few gigs of space left over after the OS install, and since you can't possibly let that go to waste, you have the other four NFS mount from it. Repeat for each workstation.
You cannot boot a Solaris system (of this vintage) with NFS mounts if those mounts are unavailable. If a Solaris system with NFS mounts is online and one of those mounts goes away, it becomes very unhappy. So you see, this method means that none of those five workstations can ever be rebooted without an incredible headache. Any networking problem on any one of them becomes a problem on all of them. A total disaster, and all to get at that sweet 1-2GB of extra space.
I have a bunch of stupid cobbled together setups to talk about. It all comes from a combination of poor IT staff at university wages, infintessimal budgets and the overbearing institutional and faculty pressures.
1. A "server room" that was essentially the most worthless room in the entire building, a long skinny room with four windows (perfect for keeping an uneven temperature!). Rather than buy 19" racks or even wire racks, they found a bunch of tables and put one server on each all the way around the edge of the room. 1.a. All of the servers were in fact desktop systems; an Ultra 1 was the mail server, a SPARCstation 5 the print server, a Gateway Pentium Pro 200 desktop the web server, etc.
2. A lab had to be moved one room over, because its current location was deemed too valuable. The original room was designed for a lab, it had 20+ fiber optic networking ports, twist-lock power connections in the ceiling, that sort of thing. The new room had two electrical outlets, no dropped ceiling, and one fiber optic networking port. It had previously been used as a copy room/storage closet. The cost to move the fiber optic wiring (just one room over mind you!) was over $25,000.
So instead, I had the great idea to cut a hole in the common wall (above the drop ceiling line), purchase additional ceiling tiles and cut up 2x4's into wooden supports. The original ceiling boxes containing the networking were put on top of the blocks above the new tiles, and extension cables run through the wall into the new room. In the original room, which was turned into a lounge, you couldn't tell that there was anything funny going on.
The best part is that the lab manager, who insisted they needed every single network port, never used a single one of them in the new room. All of those cables now reside in a box marked "Giant waste of money".
3. The main Windows file server was purchased in 2002 and has an internal RAID (bad idea in my opinion). What was huge then is worthless now; 5 disks that total 135GB. To get more space, the administration begged for a single external 250GB USB drive to host all user data. Nevermind that there is no redundancy, that an external drive is more suspectible to theft or failure, and that USB is unnecessarily slowing things down.
4. A system administrator got it into his head that rackmounting was the way to go (I agree). So he begged for a 19" rack to be ordered, and placed all of his servers into it. Except he doesn't have a single rack mountable server, and he didn't get the rails for any of the cases either. So now he has one $500 rack, and 8 $100 shelves to go in it. Same guy also switched the KVM monitor to a 15" LCD that doesn't support the resolutions of 9 out of 10 systems connected to it.
5. A consultant was brought in to tell us what needed to be done with the computing infrastructure (what DOESN'T need to be done is more the question). His main suggestion was to set up a central backup service just for this college, so as to avoid paying the central university IT group fees to use their central service. OK, thats an idea I guess... except that he wanted us to buy this: http://www.sun.com/storagetek/tape_storage/tape_li braries/sl8500/ (its $200,000). Luckily this one didn't actually come to pass.
Basically every day is a new adventure in ridiculous IT methodology.
I'm not arguing for anything, I'm explaining the reasoning (as I understand it) of this policy. Personally I think subjecting scientists to polygraph tests and random drug tests is pretty unsettling, but I'm not in the business of ensuring security either.
I don't think this is about work performance at all, rather its about ferreting out people who are more susceptible to being forced into stealing government secrets or who might do so on their own without coercion.
If I have a serious heroin problem, I may get myself into so much debt and other trouble that I wind up being used by some foreign spy group or something (if I worked at Los Alamos of course). Or maybe I don't want my habit getting out and therefore can be blackmailed. That sort of thing. This is similar to how homosexual people have been targetted in prior decades; not because a gay person can't do the work, but because having this secret you really want to keep means you can be blackmailed with it.
You can convert HDMI to DVI with a simple $5 cable from monoprice.com. It is disappointing that the Wii only supports up to component, but who knows what will develop later on. Someone could come out with a VGA cable eventually.
Everything they picked seems to be absurdly expensive, although I just gave up around the third page from the absurdity.
They diss Shun knives as inferior to ceramic and Hattori "damascus" knives, whereas they are much more reasonable (still a little much) for someone who doesn't live to cook. If you aren't interesting in cooking, why buy the fanciest knives the world has ever seen just to say you have them?
As far as flashlights go, how about a MagLite LED for $50 rather than a $300 flashlight?
Everything on the list seems to be the most expensive thing readily available in each category; considering that the list isn't geared towards knife, flashlight, cooking, or any other kind of connoisseur, then whats the point? Most expensive doesn't mean best for everyone.
Perhaps the submitter saw that Magnolia has a.info domain and immediately presumed it was worthless. I know that I instantly disregard anything from a company with.info/.biz.
For instance I never would have bought from Papercut (papercut.biz), it took one of my co-workers to find out that it was actually a sweet product.
Since when do CIOs know about this kind of stuff? I have yet to encounter someone in an upper position like that who is aware of this sort of thing, although they do all have opinions regardless of actual experience.
My manager loves Best Buy for Business and Tiger Direct for instance; even though we get superior service and pricing through GovConnection forget that! Too convenient.
Netgear ProSafe SmartSwitch GS724T does what you want I believe. Some intelligence, but cheap. All gigabit ports, and you can buy SFP's to uplink to a fiber gigabit network (which I do).
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Vonage has two plans, unlimited is $25 and 500 minutes is $14. The instant they introduced the 500 minute plan I switched down to it. This includes all of the services (voicemail in particular) that you pay through the nose for with a real phone company.
I cannot even conceive of using 500 minutes in a single month.
How is Vista in any way targeted at large enterprises? From all of the extra licensing nonsense in Vista and Office that make life more difficult for cloned deployments, to its desire for awesome video cards, to all of the extra DRM and media features that are worthless in an enterprise environment the very notion that Vista is targeted at enterprises is absurd to me.
I can tell you that my particular environment can't get Vista to work correctly with our 2k3 Active Directory server. That we have no desire to buy thousands of $400 video cards to replace GeForce 4MX's that do manage to render Excel documents correctly. And that we could care less about upgrading to Vista Ultimate and whatever else.
But, this is basically the same thing that everyone said when XP came out. 2000 works fine, we're just going to stay with that forever. Shockingly that becomes impossible; time passes and eventually you'll have to keep up with the Microsoft Joneses.
Consider that it is not the interest that one could earn on the hypothetical $500 rebate but rather the rebate itself that is in question here. If I received that money up-front in my paychecks, I could potentially avoid additional use (and accumulation of fees) with credit cards, make some purchases earlier or at all, and have a better idea of my available funds for budgeting purposes rather than receiving this windfall later on.
A lot of people have very simple taxes: one paycheck, one residence, no real property or investments, and don't itemize. If you know that your income is only coming from your paycheck, then you should be able to figure out your tax for the year ahead of time and get the withholding information right. Even if you receive a raise that skews things, it should be close.
http://www.imaging-resource.com/ACCS/BATTS/BATTS.H TM has comparisons of various brands from a year or two ago. It seems like basically PowerEx is the way to go, particularly when you take into account that they are now available in 2700 mAh versions. The highest mAh AA NiMH battery that I could find is from Accupower at 2900 mAh. However, they don't seem to perform as well as Sanyo 2700 mAh batteries, and so I would guess that they are also inferior to the PowerEx 2700 mAh ones.
The important thing to remember is that anything towards the top of a comparison list is probably going to work fine; you don't necessary need the very finest NiMH battery available on the market today. For instance, I have some Sanyo 2300 mAh batteries that work just fine.
It seems like www.thomasdistributing.com is the place to buy batteries if you're looking for a reputable online store.
Some dude with a three or four digit uid sold his years ago. I've been waiting for the value of mine to improve with age.
No, but let me tell you, those Gateway PPro 200's were sweet machines. Way better than a measly 166MHz. In all seriousness the only problems I ever had with them were: every time I opened the case I sliced my hand up, the clock batteries all died simultaneously, and it becomes difficult to do much of anything on a machine that is practically old enough to vote.
What may disgust you is that the situation I'm describing is more 2001-2 than late 90's.
- jxr150 Our love of Oracle is a great example of how people will just go with whoever is "the name of the week". Oracle is the big name, so we have to use every single one of their products. Nevermind that their calendaring software is basically the worst ever made. Nevermind that their portal software is completely worthless. And so on. Shockingly there is only a small contingent in central IT who lust after everything Oracle related, but as you see it has devasting repurcussions for the entire university.
More or less free printing, on the other hand, is something that I personally pushed the Nord Lab manager for. It fills a student need, so thats all I needed to hear; the money side of things is someone elses problem luckily for me.
Plasma screens: waste of money.
I'd say it was a lot better than throwing my hands up and saying it can't be done, but the fundamental problem is that the solution had to be sought at all. Why move a lab from a room designed to house a lab to a broom closet? Why does central IT just throw out random ridiculous figures and expect departments to cough it up on demand (no ones budget has an extra $20,000 just for asking!)? Why do lab managers claim they need things that they don't really need? Why does everyone have to be such a separatist and refuse to work together, despite all working at the same company?
He may have been misled by all of the "soft mounts will corrupt your data" information that gets passed around. I know that I was initially. What the man page doesn't tell you is exactly what you describe, that all of the systems become entirely dependent on the file server -- even if they don't need to access it to perform a given operation.
That in a nutshell is why systems administration will always be 10% learning and 90% experience, you have to know the way things work and not just what the documentation says.
I regret to inform you that I have not escaped, and still work there to this day. Its been over 6 years of constantly telling myself that its only going to be a few more months of this and then off to the real world to at the very least be tormented in different ways.
I can't really say what the problem is; I've applied to jobs that were literally word-for-word the sort of work that I've done for nearly ten years and without exaggeration I'm capable of doing it. At this point the only thing that I can figure is the distaste industry has for those with educational work histories (and vice versa). I know that when people apply at my university there is a definite bias towards those who have worked at universities before -- they know what to expect, don't require as much time to get acclimated, don't have very high expections, whatever.
Best of luck though. Having worked in the real world prior to this job, I can say that it sucks too, but at least theres the invisible hand of the bottom line -- if someone fucks up badly enough in industry they get fired; not so in academia.
I'm not too worried. When the day comes that I'm not able to speak my mind positively or negatively about work or anything else, then I guess I'll just get fucked over.
E -T4 was the wave of the future.
Yes, CWRU was one of the largest ATM deployments in the world. In fairness, this was in the days of 10Mbit Ethernet, so I guess it made sense at the time. I do know that I took great joy in throwing piles of (totally worthless) $1000+ FORE ATM cards into the garbage when the network was converted to gigabit Ethernet. That certainly was not a blunder. Its still problematic that we use fiber instead of copper, but who knew that you'd be able to run gigabit Ethernet over basically the same cabling. I remember back in 1997 or whenenver, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Ethernet#100BAS
I totally forgot one of the best things. We used to call this "Ozsoyogluing" a machine, based on the person responsible's name.
Take 5 workstations spread in various offices. Each one has a 5-10GB drive (this was 5-6 years ago) and runs Solaris. Each one has a few gigs of space left over after the OS install, and since you can't possibly let that go to waste, you have the other four NFS mount from it. Repeat for each workstation.
You cannot boot a Solaris system (of this vintage) with NFS mounts if those mounts are unavailable. If a Solaris system with NFS mounts is online and one of those mounts goes away, it becomes very unhappy. So you see, this method means that none of those five workstations can ever be rebooted without an incredible headache. Any networking problem on any one of them becomes a problem on all of them. A total disaster, and all to get at that sweet 1-2GB of extra space.
I have a bunch of stupid cobbled together setups to talk about. It all comes from a combination of poor IT staff at university wages, infintessimal budgets and the overbearing institutional and faculty pressures.
i braries/sl8500/ (its $200,000). Luckily this one didn't actually come to pass.
1. A "server room" that was essentially the most worthless room in the entire building, a long skinny room with four windows (perfect for keeping an uneven temperature!). Rather than buy 19" racks or even wire racks, they found a bunch of tables and put one server on each all the way around the edge of the room.
1.a. All of the servers were in fact desktop systems; an Ultra 1 was the mail server, a SPARCstation 5 the print server, a Gateway Pentium Pro 200 desktop the web server, etc.
2. A lab had to be moved one room over, because its current location was deemed too valuable. The original room was designed for a lab, it had 20+ fiber optic networking ports, twist-lock power connections in the ceiling, that sort of thing. The new room had two electrical outlets, no dropped ceiling, and one fiber optic networking port. It had previously been used as a copy room/storage closet. The cost to move the fiber optic wiring (just one room over mind you!) was over $25,000.
So instead, I had the great idea to cut a hole in the common wall (above the drop ceiling line), purchase additional ceiling tiles and cut up 2x4's into wooden supports. The original ceiling boxes containing the networking were put on top of the blocks above the new tiles, and extension cables run through the wall into the new room. In the original room, which was turned into a lounge, you couldn't tell that there was anything funny going on.
The best part is that the lab manager, who insisted they needed every single network port, never used a single one of them in the new room. All of those cables now reside in a box marked "Giant waste of money".
3. The main Windows file server was purchased in 2002 and has an internal RAID (bad idea in my opinion). What was huge then is worthless now; 5 disks that total 135GB. To get more space, the administration begged for a single external 250GB USB drive to host all user data. Nevermind that there is no redundancy, that an external drive is more suspectible to theft or failure, and that USB is unnecessarily slowing things down.
4. A system administrator got it into his head that rackmounting was the way to go (I agree). So he begged for a 19" rack to be ordered, and placed all of his servers into it. Except he doesn't have a single rack mountable server, and he didn't get the rails for any of the cases either. So now he has one $500 rack, and 8 $100 shelves to go in it. Same guy also switched the KVM monitor to a 15" LCD that doesn't support the resolutions of 9 out of 10 systems connected to it.
5. A consultant was brought in to tell us what needed to be done with the computing infrastructure (what DOESN'T need to be done is more the question). His main suggestion was to set up a central backup service just for this college, so as to avoid paying the central university IT group fees to use their central service. OK, thats an idea I guess... except that he wanted us to buy this: http://www.sun.com/storagetek/tape_storage/tape_l
Basically every day is a new adventure in ridiculous IT methodology.
I'm not arguing for anything, I'm explaining the reasoning (as I understand it) of this policy. Personally I think subjecting scientists to polygraph tests and random drug tests is pretty unsettling, but I'm not in the business of ensuring security either.
I don't think this is about work performance at all, rather its about ferreting out people who are more susceptible to being forced into stealing government secrets or who might do so on their own without coercion.
If I have a serious heroin problem, I may get myself into so much debt and other trouble that I wind up being used by some foreign spy group or something (if I worked at Los Alamos of course). Or maybe I don't want my habit getting out and therefore can be blackmailed. That sort of thing. This is similar to how homosexual people have been targetted in prior decades; not because a gay person can't do the work, but because having this secret you really want to keep means you can be blackmailed with it.
Yeah, but does some stereotypical nerd who could care less about cooking need the very sharpest knives in the world?
You can convert HDMI to DVI with a simple $5 cable from monoprice.com. It is disappointing that the Wii only supports up to component, but who knows what will develop later on. Someone could come out with a VGA cable eventually.
Everything they picked seems to be absurdly expensive, although I just gave up around the third page from the absurdity.
They diss Shun knives as inferior to ceramic and Hattori "damascus" knives, whereas they are much more reasonable (still a little much) for someone who doesn't live to cook. If you aren't interesting in cooking, why buy the fanciest knives the world has ever seen just to say you have them?
As far as flashlights go, how about a MagLite LED for $50 rather than a $300 flashlight?
Everything on the list seems to be the most expensive thing readily available in each category; considering that the list isn't geared towards knife, flashlight, cooking, or any other kind of connoisseur, then whats the point? Most expensive doesn't mean best for everyone.
I wish it was though, it would really add to my resume.
Perhaps the submitter saw that Magnolia has a .info domain and immediately presumed it was worthless. I know that I instantly disregard anything from a company with .info/.biz.
For instance I never would have bought from Papercut (papercut.biz), it took one of my co-workers to find out that it was actually a sweet product.
Since when do CIOs know about this kind of stuff? I have yet to encounter someone in an upper position like that who is aware of this sort of thing, although they do all have opinions regardless of actual experience.
My manager loves Best Buy for Business and Tiger Direct for instance; even though we get superior service and pricing through GovConnection forget that! Too convenient.
Can't keep Belkin and Belden straight either.
How about literacy tests?
Netgear ProSafe SmartSwitch GS724T does what you want I believe. Some intelligence, but cheap. All gigabit ports, and you can buy SFP's to uplink to a fiber gigabit network (which I do).
Cuyahoga county is predominantly Democrat, and it did in fact favor Kerry according to http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/sta tes/OH/P/00/county.000.html
However, I do think that it was expect to be more 75-25 than 67-33
I got it, don't worry.