I used to work with an 'IT bully', but honestly 99% of the time the person on the receiving end of one of his tirades deserved it. It's amazing how easy it is to become hostile towards truly incompetent technicians.
Fortunately for him he was almost invariably right which made it rather difficult for the people he was rude to to take the matter further. Accusing someone of being unprofessional conduct is tricky when you know that doing so means admitting you're incompetent (And yes, some of them tried. Unfortunately making an issue of someone being rude turns out to be a not so clever idea when your inability to diagnose a simple hardware/setup issue has cost your client substantially in lost revenue).
A lot of people in IT are there because they're extremely talented and are right much more often than they're wrong A lot more people in IT are talentless hacks who couldn't find thier arses without a manual. This may be harsh, but it's an opinion based squarely on countless bad experiences.
Seriously - the number of times where end users switch off, disconnect or otherwise disable hardware and this somehow makes it past on-site technicians, first and second line support to be escalated to the development team is just mind boggling.
Server won't boot? Must be a problem with the operating system! Can't possibly be due to the site being flooded and the server having been submerged under 3 feet of water...
Can't print to the network printer? Must be the software! Except when the printer is out of toner, out of paper, switched off, disconnected (or the network hub).
When problems like these can make it past any number of people that indignantly claim to be "IT Professionals", I'm sorry, but "You're an idiot" is often the most accurate reply.
*Disclaimer: There are a lot of talented people in IT, but they're simply outnumbered by people who think that being 'A+' (or insert random meaningless certification here) certified makes them qualified sysadmins.
Don't worry, they'd never get off the ground in the first place. Weight and the endless Allow/Deny questions would see to that. Just make sure you don't fly first or business class and you won't get bugged for trying to fly with higher privileges.
A rather sad reality show that seems to revolve around the American Govt trying to limit, remove or simply trample the rights of it's citizens, while the citizens attempt to retain and exercise those same rights.
I currently get through the month with almost a 3rd of my salary unspent (more if I worked overtime or if it's quarterly commission time), even including pandering to my hobbies and recreational activities.
I like life where money is a carrot and not a stick.
What do you do if the people that you have available to train simply don't have the ability to perform your tasks, regardless of training? Having said that, I have no interest in being promoted any further since I have no interest in management, and management are the only positions higher on the ladder.
It's more like the competition between bottled water and tap water. Not at all. Nobody on the face of this planet doesn't know you can get tap water. Only the most insane don't use tap water, even if they only drink bottled water - showers, baths, dishes, gardens...
And your water utility isn't sitting there trying to win maket share - they couldn't care less if you only drink bottled water.
The only real similarity is that you have corporations taking a cheap/free resource and selling it at a huge markup, often at a lower quality.
This may sound wierd, but Windows biggest advantages are that it's not free, and that it's crap friendly.
Why? - Retailers can't sell free stuff, so you'll never see any free OS competing for shelve space in any retail environment. Not only is Windows the only OS your average Joe will see on the shelves, no business is going to offer a free alternative to a product they can make a buck on.
- Because it's so crap friendly, Windows preinstalls are often bloated with tons of crap trials and crippleware that the companies whose software it is pay for it to be installed.
So there is simply no economic pressure on any retailer to sell or preinstall anything else and as a result your average Joe will simply never know that they have a choice.
As for IBM and Word Perfect - they had to compete with other non free products that made a direct effort to be visible and to compete, and they lost. It doesn't matter how good your product is if your average Joe never sees or hears of it (and word of mouth simply doesn't compare with dedicated advertising).
Make a Linux distro as easy to install as Windows and put it on a store shelf with a minimal price tag. I'm pretty sure you'd see it's adoption rates rise dramatically compared to being free-but-invisible.
Fringe groups A,B and C are buying less CD's, so CD's must be dying. Except that not-so-fringe group D (Being the other 95% of the population that are not Audiophiles, DJ'd or Rappers) are simply never going to be interested in Vinyl ever again.
Digital Distribution may kill CD's, vinyl sure as hell won't.
Nevertheless, if ISPs didn't feel the urge to sell the same chunk of bandwidth to 20, 50 or ever 100 users this would be a non issue. If they sold that 256Mb/s to 256 users in 1Mb/s allocations, all 256 users could d/l at full line speed 24/7 without impacting each other at all. As it is, a typical ISP (at least here) will use that 256Mb/s backbone to provide 4Mb/s services to 1000 people - with the obvious consequence of poor performance for some/all should any significant number of those users choose to actually try and use thier alloted bandwidth at the same time.
I'd quite happily pay double, or even triple my current ISP charges for that uncontested 1Mb/s if it meant that it was truly 'unlimited' usage. Heck, I'd even accept cutting my 4Mb/s line down to 1Mb/s if that's what it took.
Unfortunately, overselling bandwidth makes (or at least used to make) much more business sense and with line speeds (and demand for bandwidth) increasing it's likely to get a lot worse before it gets better.
Some of the ideas in the article are just silly. I would never, ever accept a free umbrella that whispers ads to me; especially if my free hat was whispering different ads. The alert for incoming rain is sort of cool, but not at the price of whispered ads. Not on topic, but it will be interesting to see just how far the notion of ad-supported services and goods can go. I mean, at some stage someone actually has to sell something right? If everything becomes ad supported, who pays for the ads?
All yall other countries need to just play catchup on this issue and stop those douchebags from selling unlimited plans and then acting all surprised when people actually expect them to have no limits. People that use 200gb a month shouldn't be paying the same as people that use 5gb a month, and that should be reflected by ISP pricing Unlimited plans are not the issue, contested bandwidth is. Bandwidth 'Caps' (Which we also have here in South Africa) are simply a means of trying to get users to 'play nice' by self rationing to stretch thier available cap over a full month. ISP charges should reflect bandwidth and contention ratios, not traffic over an arbitrary period. If 100 users, each with a supposed 4Mb/s connection, are on a 256Mb/s backbone and all of them try and use it at once - some, or all of them, are going to lose out, regardless of how much traffic they may individually use over time. Bandwidth capping does nothing to solve this, and this is the entirety of the problem.
I'd rather pay more for uncontested (or less contested) bandwidth than be penalised for using bandwidth at times that others are not using it.
4. Layoffs effect the moral of those who are hired. Causeing them to spend more time and effort in either A. Politicking themselfs to not get laied off. B. Spenind time to find a new job. Niether of these means they are working harder at their actually jobs. You know, I honestly cannot decide whether you meant 'morals' or 'morale' based on the context of the sentence. I am in awe.
I fail to see how the fact that some onboard sound solutions suck equates into all onboard sound solutions sucking? I've never had any problems, driver or quality wise, with the onboard sound on any of my PC's.
Unless you're an audiophile, you normally get what you pay for. If you pay for cheap sound, you get cheap sound.
I'm also an introvert - yet I don't use IM, IRC and ignore my cellphone often simply because I don't want to be easily contacted. Why? Because I don't want people bugging me unless they really need me - as opposed to just being too damn lazy to do/investigate/research something themselves.
This applies more when I'm off the clock - if you're not a friend or family member and you try and contact me by any means, be prepared to be ignored or wait a while for me to reply. It's also a lot easier simply not to give up contact information to start with - people that matter are more likely to know how.
It seems telling that the letter was sent to the third party and not to the state - do they really expect the third party to care about the licencing agreement to which they are not bound?
Add in the vague wording and this looks purely like an attempt to intimidate the 'softer' of thier two targets, since they realise they probably can't take any meaningfull action against the state.
No one has the legal right to monitor ISP traffic except ISPs Whut? That's not true unless you're using a very narrow definition of monitoring (volume and type of traffic), and even then it's not a 'legal right' rather than the fact that noone cares.
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I used to work with an 'IT bully', but honestly 99% of the time the person on the receiving end of one of his tirades deserved it. It's amazing how easy it is to become hostile towards truly incompetent technicians.
Fortunately for him he was almost invariably right which made it rather difficult for the people he was rude to to take the matter further. Accusing someone of being unprofessional conduct is tricky when you know that doing so means admitting you're incompetent (And yes, some of them tried. Unfortunately making an issue of someone being rude turns out to be a not so clever idea when your inability to diagnose a simple hardware/setup issue has cost your client substantially in lost revenue).
Seriously - the number of times where end users switch off, disconnect or otherwise disable hardware and this somehow makes it past on-site technicians, first and second line support to be escalated to the development team is just mind boggling.
Server won't boot? Must be a problem with the operating system! Can't possibly be due to the site being flooded and the server having been submerged under 3 feet of water...
Can't print to the network printer? Must be the software! Except when the printer is out of toner, out of paper, switched off, disconnected (or the network hub).
When problems like these can make it past any number of people that indignantly claim to be "IT Professionals", I'm sorry, but "You're an idiot" is often the most accurate reply.
*Disclaimer: There are a lot of talented people in IT, but they're simply outnumbered by people who think that being 'A+' (or insert random meaningless certification here) certified makes them qualified sysadmins.
A rather sad reality show that seems to revolve around the American Govt trying to limit, remove or simply trample the rights of it's citizens, while the citizens attempt to retain and exercise those same rights.
Current scoring has the Govt way ahead on points.
I currently get through the month with almost a 3rd of my salary unspent (more if I worked overtime or if it's quarterly commission time), even including pandering to my hobbies and recreational activities. I like life where money is a carrot and not a stick.
What do you do if the people that you have available to train simply don't have the ability to perform your tasks, regardless of training? Having said that, I have no interest in being promoted any further since I have no interest in management, and management are the only positions higher on the ladder.
This may sound wierd, but Windows biggest advantages are that it's not free, and that it's crap friendly.
Why?
- Retailers can't sell free stuff, so you'll never see any free OS competing for shelve space in any retail environment. Not only is Windows the only OS your average Joe will see on the shelves, no business is going to offer a free alternative to a product they can make a buck on.
- Because it's so crap friendly, Windows preinstalls are often bloated with tons of crap trials and crippleware that the companies whose software it is pay for it to be installed.
So there is simply no economic pressure on any retailer to sell or preinstall anything else and as a result your average Joe will simply never know that they have a choice.
As for IBM and Word Perfect - they had to compete with other non free products that made a direct effort to be visible and to compete, and they lost. It doesn't matter how good your product is if your average Joe never sees or hears of it (and word of mouth simply doesn't compare with dedicated advertising).
Make a Linux distro as easy to install as Windows and put it on a store shelf with a minimal price tag. I'm pretty sure you'd see it's adoption rates rise dramatically compared to being free-but-invisible.
So Europeans are human too. Who'da thunk it?
Fringe groups A,B and C are buying less CD's, so CD's must be dying. Except that not-so-fringe group D (Being the other 95% of the population that are not Audiophiles, DJ'd or Rappers) are simply never going to be interested in Vinyl ever again.
Digital Distribution may kill CD's, vinyl sure as hell won't.
Nevertheless, if ISPs didn't feel the urge to sell the same chunk of bandwidth to 20, 50 or ever 100 users this would be a non issue. If they sold that 256Mb/s to 256 users in 1Mb/s allocations, all 256 users could d/l at full line speed 24/7 without impacting each other at all. As it is, a typical ISP (at least here) will use that 256Mb/s backbone to provide 4Mb/s services to 1000 people - with the obvious consequence of poor performance for some/all should any significant number of those users choose to actually try and use thier alloted bandwidth at the same time.
I'd quite happily pay double, or even triple my current ISP charges for that uncontested 1Mb/s if it meant that it was truly 'unlimited' usage. Heck, I'd even accept cutting my 4Mb/s line down to 1Mb/s if that's what it took.
Unfortunately, overselling bandwidth makes (or at least used to make) much more business sense and with line speeds (and demand for bandwidth) increasing it's likely to get a lot worse before it gets better.
I'd rather pay more for uncontested (or less contested) bandwidth than be penalised for using bandwidth at times that others are not using it.
Yes. Let's back up the internet - you offering to host?
It's just you.
I fail to see how the fact that some onboard sound solutions suck equates into all onboard sound solutions sucking? I've never had any problems, driver or quality wise, with the onboard sound on any of my PC's.
Unless you're an audiophile, you normally get what you pay for. If you pay for cheap sound, you get cheap sound.
I'm confused. If you have someone's address that you want to spam, why not just spam it directly?
On second thought, I guess the point would be that the spammee won't be able to easily track the spam back to the source.
Wouldn't firing this laser underwater make the water uncomfortably hot? Please people, think of the sharks!
ICANN and Network Solutions = both. Possibly, don't care.
I'm also an introvert - yet I don't use IM, IRC and ignore my cellphone often simply because I don't want to be easily contacted. Why? Because I don't want people bugging me unless they really need me - as opposed to just being too damn lazy to do/investigate/research something themselves.
This applies more when I'm off the clock - if you're not a friend or family member and you try and contact me by any means, be prepared to be ignored or wait a while for me to reply. It's also a lot easier simply not to give up contact information to start with - people that matter are more likely to know how.
Whoops - work just finished, bye bye.
...more like thinking for them and wonder why they can't later in life.
... he meant making out with the couch
It seems telling that the letter was sent to the third party and not to the state - do they really expect the third party to care about the licencing agreement to which they are not bound?
Add in the vague wording and this looks purely like an attempt to intimidate the 'softer' of thier two targets, since they realise they probably can't take any meaningfull action against the state.