Qwest is still too cheap to put in a new DSLAM to give me 1.5 Mb. Where I live in the middle of a city of about 60,000, it might as well be a giant trailer park for all the service we get here. On the other hand, Comcast has the whole place wired to as fast as possible.
Yeah, I work for money, and IT work pays more. Frankly, I can't do anything else that pays that much, so I put up with this. Of course now I just got offshored and laid off, so now I am lazing around and occasionally knocking off $4 microbrew. I try to avoid telling people I know anything about computers so I don't have to fix them. If I lived on the Big Rock Candy Mountain that would be better, but no sane person would pay us to do nothing.
Sounds like the poster has inflated notions about the importance of his data. Most of us couldn't care less about what is in the company network, and if we looked, we would probably be mentally soiled. Maybe at Microsoft where you could copy down all the latest Windows releases (woo-hoo what a thrill). On the other hand, I worked for an outfit that had us read an employee's email to see if he was talking to other employers (he was) and we were assured that snooping on employees email was legally acceptable. Can't trust anyone, huh.
I've been an IT casual laborer for about 8 years now, spanning the scale from administrating 1000 or so $5k/second servers to racking, cabling, and building data center servers to setting up ISP connections to remotely setting up replacement servers. What I have found is that if you do the work right, don't sit around waiting for orders, and kiss the right rear ends, you will do just fine. I pretty much gave up on certifications about 3 years ago in favor of outdoing others in the area of doing no harm to the bottom line of the people I work for. People around me are falling right and left because they are surly, unwilling to change their practice when they make mistakes, or just downright ornery about their way of doing things. Right now where I am working there are forces doing their best to torpedo the team I am with by finding flaws with what we do, and we are beating them back by demonstrating that they have connections but we have results. If you're good and focused on real results, it will show to those who interview you.
Maybe I have worked for too many companies. I can't conceive of putting in more than 40 hours without overtime pay. The guys I work for now pay overtime but they don't want us doing it because they don't want to pay overtime. That works fine. If for some reason I have to do something over my 40 hours I just don't come to work for 1.5 times that later when it's convenient. I can't say I work my *** off, and I couldn't care less if someone more ambitious, desperate, or hungry comes along and wants my job. They are welcome to it. I'll never get rich, but I wouldn't get rich anyway because I have no ideas. I suspect someone is making a big deal about this for the purpose of gaining political advantage. I know people who beat their brains in and get paid well, I know other people who do almost nothing and get paid well, I know people who beat their brains in and get chicken feed. I suspect those guys who stand at the freeway entrance are probably smarter than me because they do almost nothing and get paid better. But I don't mind. I really couldn't care less if the companies I work for go down the drain tomorrow (some have). What I don't like is being constrained by bonehead labor legislation that ends up fossilizing the worst situations for the political advantage of some schoolyard bullies.
I use Google as, I suspect, do half of Microsoft employees, because it is simple, the results are easy to follow, the options easy to find, and it has that unmatched "search within results" link. None of which MSN search has ever attained to. You would think that unparallelled geniuses such as Ballmer and Gates would see these obvious things, but I guess those unparallelled geniuses also produced Vista and Office 2007, which confused novelty with improvement. Even at M$ there is argument about the relative merits of Vista and XP, Vista getting the edge for games and XP getting the edge for usability. What's that got to do with Yahoo! and search? Plenty. It's the same mentality that would end up turning Yahoo! into another Vista - maybe something good under the hood, but you won't be able to find it.
Comcast knows who you are by the MAC address you set up through your cable modem. You can change it by going through some hassle, but they still know it is you. Of course the MAC address doesn't make it past the first hop. Practically speaking, Comcast keeps your IP address assigned to you, but Qwest DSL and probably other DSL providers jump IP addresses all over the place. Of course, Qwest always knows who is using what IP address, but other random people don't.
It is true that the three prong plugs are intended to prevent stuff like this. Generally you should expect no such problems using the external power supply, but it is possible that a small capacitor has been connected between the ground side of the DC output and the input AC side. An old practice that some EE could explain the rationale for. If this is happening on a docking station, make sure there really is a ground on the third prong. Half of my house (built in the middle 1950's) is ungrounded, although some outlets are 3 prong, so it is misleading. Even though the small capacitor is not an electrocution hazard (unless it short-circuits), it still is stimulating to feel, and such leakage could be a hazard to IC's. There could also be a design flaw in the power supply that is causing leakage. It might be a good idea to measure the AC voltage between the power supply DC plug and the ground of the AC. DO NOT stand on a bare concrete floor barefoot while holding the DC connector while the power supply is plugged in. Don't ask me how I know that.
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Qwest is still too cheap to put in a new DSLAM to give me 1.5 Mb. Where I live in the middle of a city of about 60,000, it might as well be a giant trailer park for all the service we get here. On the other hand, Comcast has the whole place wired to as fast as possible.
Yeah, I work for money, and IT work pays more. Frankly, I can't do anything else that pays that much, so I put up with this. Of course now I just got offshored and laid off, so now I am lazing around and occasionally knocking off $4 microbrew. I try to avoid telling people I know anything about computers so I don't have to fix them. If I lived on the Big Rock Candy Mountain that would be better, but no sane person would pay us to do nothing.
Sounds like the poster has inflated notions about the importance of his data. Most of us couldn't care less about what is in the company network, and if we looked, we would probably be mentally soiled. Maybe at Microsoft where you could copy down all the latest Windows releases (woo-hoo what a thrill). On the other hand, I worked for an outfit that had us read an employee's email to see if he was talking to other employers (he was) and we were assured that snooping on employees email was legally acceptable. Can't trust anyone, huh.
I've been an IT casual laborer for about 8 years now, spanning the scale from administrating 1000 or so $5k/second servers to racking, cabling, and building data center servers to setting up ISP connections to remotely setting up replacement servers. What I have found is that if you do the work right, don't sit around waiting for orders, and kiss the right rear ends, you will do just fine. I pretty much gave up on certifications about 3 years ago in favor of outdoing others in the area of doing no harm to the bottom line of the people I work for. People around me are falling right and left because they are surly, unwilling to change their practice when they make mistakes, or just downright ornery about their way of doing things. Right now where I am working there are forces doing their best to torpedo the team I am with by finding flaws with what we do, and we are beating them back by demonstrating that they have connections but we have results. If you're good and focused on real results, it will show to those who interview you.
Maybe I have worked for too many companies. I can't conceive of putting in more than 40 hours without overtime pay. The guys I work for now pay overtime but they don't want us doing it because they don't want to pay overtime. That works fine. If for some reason I have to do something over my 40 hours I just don't come to work for 1.5 times that later when it's convenient. I can't say I work my *** off, and I couldn't care less if someone more ambitious, desperate, or hungry comes along and wants my job. They are welcome to it. I'll never get rich, but I wouldn't get rich anyway because I have no ideas. I suspect someone is making a big deal about this for the purpose of gaining political advantage. I know people who beat their brains in and get paid well, I know other people who do almost nothing and get paid well, I know people who beat their brains in and get chicken feed. I suspect those guys who stand at the freeway entrance are probably smarter than me because they do almost nothing and get paid better. But I don't mind. I really couldn't care less if the companies I work for go down the drain tomorrow (some have). What I don't like is being constrained by bonehead labor legislation that ends up fossilizing the worst situations for the political advantage of some schoolyard bullies.
I use Google as, I suspect, do half of Microsoft employees, because it is simple, the results are easy to follow, the options easy to find, and it has that unmatched "search within results" link. None of which MSN search has ever attained to. You would think that unparallelled geniuses such as Ballmer and Gates would see these obvious things, but I guess those unparallelled geniuses also produced Vista and Office 2007, which confused novelty with improvement. Even at M$ there is argument about the relative merits of Vista and XP, Vista getting the edge for games and XP getting the edge for usability. What's that got to do with Yahoo! and search? Plenty. It's the same mentality that would end up turning Yahoo! into another Vista - maybe something good under the hood, but you won't be able to find it.
Comcast knows who you are by the MAC address you set up through your cable modem. You can change it by going through some hassle, but they still know it is you. Of course the MAC address doesn't make it past the first hop. Practically speaking, Comcast keeps your IP address assigned to you, but Qwest DSL and probably other DSL providers jump IP addresses all over the place. Of course, Qwest always knows who is using what IP address, but other random people don't.
It is true that the three prong plugs are intended to prevent stuff like this. Generally you should expect no such problems using the external power supply, but it is possible that a small capacitor has been connected between the ground side of the DC output and the input AC side. An old practice that some EE could explain the rationale for. If this is happening on a docking station, make sure there really is a ground on the third prong. Half of my house (built in the middle 1950's) is ungrounded, although some outlets are 3 prong, so it is misleading. Even though the small capacitor is not an electrocution hazard (unless it short-circuits), it still is stimulating to feel, and such leakage could be a hazard to IC's. There could also be a design flaw in the power supply that is causing leakage. It might be a good idea to measure the AC voltage between the power supply DC plug and the ground of the AC. DO NOT stand on a bare concrete floor barefoot while holding the DC connector while the power supply is plugged in. Don't ask me how I know that.