Any magnitude >= 5 earthquake with an epicenter in the middle of a large urban area is going to cause some damage and make the news. One that is 100 miles away from the coastline and 800 miles away - less so unless it causes a tsunami (which the one two weeks ago didn't do). Why is it news for nerds - Irvine, Downtown LA (One Wilshire) and El Segundo are all within 30 miles and a decent amount of network traffic passes through those hubs or point of origination is in one of the data centers there.
Facebook is the same anomaly as AOL was -- critical mass and everyone was there that most people wanted to talk to / find. And MySpace was the same animal for a while.
Normally I'd avoid doing the feeding -- but what the hey - it's a Monday.
You'd like a satisfactory explanation -- okay. Fair enough. From 1791 to 1965, the statement "The Man is keeping me down" was actually true. It was the law of the land for things like "Separate but Equal", "No You Can't Ride Here", "No You Can't Have This Job" - etc. Second Class citizenship and all the trappings that go with it. Those that were successful in spite of things (Arthur Ashe, Bill Cosby, Diana Ross) were the exception to the rule. Since 1965, the official government rules were changed but things didn't change in the job market for another decade or so. Look up Red Lining. It is hard to get a house somewhere else if you can't get a loan for it, or if you do get a loan, the interest rate is so far above and beyond what the market rate is... And there are still places where the color of your skin will determine a multitude of thing.
Now we all know that networking helps to provide opportunity, and a lot of networking is done during the college years. If you can't get into the colleges to network in the first place it is hard to get the networking...
In any event, to match the comparison between the Vietnamese immigrants and Black Americans - the Black Americans are about a generation behind - the kids that are coming up now are being exposed to the same opportunities and are starting to be able to prosper. There is a lot of institutional backlog that is only now going away. Give it about another 3 or 4 generations.
Sadly though - the rules on left turn is the person turning left is always at fault - they are responsible for watching oncoming traffic and making a safe turn. If they are doing so, the person running the light would continue through and no accident would happen. I had this discussion with an officer friend after checking into whether or not another friend was at fault for the idiot who hit her car in Beverly Hills blithely talking on their cell phone while doing about 65 in a 30 zone.
Umm.. (eeep - I'm sticking up for Fry's - must be burning some karma somewhere) Fry's doesn't require an Ad - I use a phone app that does the price comparison for local stores and pull up alternate prices and they will match after figuring in shipping costs.
Blockbuster fell into the same myopic hole as Sears did in the 90s. At the start of the Internet boom, Sears had everything in place to be what Amazon is - they already had a full catalog service that delivered by mail and also had in-store pickup. A simple "order from" website would have been all that was needed as the rest of the infrastructure was already in place. Instead, Amazon owned that space and Sears is struggling to remain relevant.
My fellow slashdotters keep forgetting that Doctors, Lawyers, Writers (in Hollywood) and Actors are all members of unions as well. The Bar, the Medical Association, the Screen Actor's Guild - all are unions no matter the name given. There is a way to make it work so that it benefits all involved - but then again we as techies have no problems when the networks are good enough to where once something is plugged in an engineer in the Philippines can take care of the rest of it...
Quarterdeck's mail client did though if memory serves and was released for Windows 3.11 in early 1995/late 1994. I'll have to see if I still have my install disks and see what was supported...
I had this problem with my parent company - Engineering and R & D would be trying to find coding examples and the sites they would end up trying to reach were flagged by the web filters as hacking sites or game sites (which they were a lot of times). The train of thought they were following would stop because it took days to get an approval for opening up a site. They finally said to heck with it and started using their phones as hot spots, plugged their computer into the corporate network and then used local route statements to define what went where - Internet traffic vs. corporate traffic (tech savvy developers).
The key for security is having it in such a fashion that people use that security vs. trying to work around it to get what they need.
NickGnome, you might want to look at the American Medical Association or the American Bar Association. Both organizations are basically "unions". They just don't call themselves such because they are "white collar" unions. If you want to practice law or medicine, you have to be a member of the "Association", pay dues (mandatory) and while the collective bargaining agreement isn't quite the same, you don't see doctors or lawyers fighting employers as much for their jobs.
I say absolutely. As long as part of the law is continuous video surveillance of all executives of the companies that install the spyware. (Bedroom, bathroom, mistress' place, hotel room, etc.) And their families. And it has to be accessible by any Canadian citizen to do with as they please at any time.
So do I - (Books and Coco) - I need to clean out the garage this week - let's see if I can get the beasty to talk to the flat screen TV... (I can see the wife now just shaking her head and mumbling)
If you allow the systems to do Wi-Fi, your internet filters are one personal smart-phone away from being bypassed - so instead of letting your staff know that you monitor internet connections and let them go about and willy-nilly do things (which means they aren't working, which is a management issue) you force them to do things that can put you in a deeper pickle (such as bridge your internal network to the Internet via their personal hot spot). They blow up their system, you wipe it and restore from image. They lost something important - they've learned not to go willy-nilly all over the internet. Of course most people are smart enough not to do that in the first place from their work machines but..
The admin access -- again depends on the apps sadly. Oh - and if you have a Dev shop where they are creating executables and unit testing... the ability to "install" is kind of important, is it not? Or do they only test on other machines instead of perhaps debugging? And the research folks may be hunting down some new tool they read about in a forum and want to see if it can be added... Again, depends on the environment. You have an office shop where it's just sales and accounting - then yeah they don't have a reason to grab anything new except the company sanctioned tools. (or do they? Neat graphing utility? some new widget for Excel that ties into the accounting database better? Nah - they can get IT to download and vet it.)
Now, access to the servers (the stuff that supports the office and keeps it running) - different animal and different discussion.
I read this "my work requires it!" claim a lot. I think it is hogwash. Work requires a stable system.
True - but "stable system" varies depending on the type of work done. If you have a typical office environment (accounting, marketing, etc) you are correct. If you have a software development shop, it changes things...
Work does not require access to xxx, download of.exe, run of.exe outside of installed apps, change of the system.
xxx <> porn -- blocking based on character strings may have unintended side effects. (I was looking for tape DLTXXX29...)
Things outside of installed apps -- so how does your Dev staff grab a copy of something to install and test out?
The admins are just hiding that they don't know how to implement measures like this.
Or they are more experienced than you think because the environments they are providing services to contraindicate what you propose - unless you like to have multiple tickets for your staff to go find and download software to make available...
It is the same breed that never updated IE6 "because we depend on it".
They will be owned. But they just don't care. I bet a lot of those companies have outsourced admin and the admin company only performs to the minimal SLA, which in a corner states that security breaches and virus outbreaks are cured on time and material basis, with no possibility for damage compensation.
The IE6 bit - was a cost issue - company didn't want to spend the amount of time/money required to make their internal app not require IE6 - failing to recognize that most companies are more willing to wait til they have no choice to upgrade their apps... But I would bet that you are correct regarding the outsourcing bit.:)
xxx - something else has that which has been allowed through the domain filters because "xxx" doesn't always designate pornography, it can also be part of the size of a t-shirt or a movie [imdb.com] perhaps.
You don't need to be shirt-shopping or checking out a Vin Diesel movie at work. Block remains in effect.
So you are providing a Internet connection for what reason at work? And your staff isn't allowed to use it for personal things during lunch or breaks?
.exe download - many larger organizations let their users download executable files from the Internet because their job requires downloading these sorts of things and having requests to let somepony else download it becomes a department road block.
HAHAHAHAHAHA. No.
Up to you whether or not you want your IT staff to download requested items. For your IT staff to do it, it becomes a support ticket and puts in the delay that your ticketing and support organization will put into the request.
downloads.exe to temp directory and tries to run it - group policy may block but legacy applications (that you can't rewrite or replace because a department or division runs on it) may require the same type of behavior.
Which will be given exceptions on a case-by-case basis. Not letting everything on the whole system just go nuts with permissions.
Depends on the app. Case-by-case - if everyone is running an app that requires that sort of access, your case has just been shot - of course it also means you have to know the complete behavior of every app that is run on every system in your environment so you can deal with the strange failures that come up every now and then because you do stop that sort of thing by default when apps write temp files and the like.
depending on your end-user and apps they are running, they might need admin privileges and or the ability to modify c:\windows.exe
If you actually need this kind of access, you'd best fucking know better than to get infected with this shit.
We are in agreement here. Sadly a lot of Dev staff aren't as savvy as we'd like.
It isn't a case of mediocre sysadmins
Keep telling yourself that.
I don't have to tell myself (an anonymous coward posting this? Might want to look in the mirror there)
corporate inertia and legacy stupidity that stands in the way of preventing these sorts of things
We play a support role. For most businesses, the primary objective is not IT. Make it work like the rest of us do.
Yes we do. And if you assume that every other environment has the same requirements as the one you are talking about - you might want to look closer at that mediocre sysadmin statement you mentioned earlier. We in IT provide a functioning environment that lets the end users do what they need with the minimal amount of interruption. Depends on what the business is doing as to what sort of access is needed - what you describe in the above is a typical office environment - which wouldn't suit the needs of my users as a software development house. (And doing it 'the office environment' way only generated 200 request tickets the first 3 days... which could have been avoided... )
you'll understand why the high profile (read larger) companies and gov't organizations are still behind on being able to mitigate a lot of these things.
As someone on the inside, it still looks an awful lot like technological incompetence to me.
As someone also on the inside, and doing this for a while, it isn't always incompetence...
xxx - something else has that which has been allowed through the domain filters because "xxx" doesn't always designate pornography, it can also be part of the size of a t-shirt or a movie perhaps. .exe download - many larger organizations let their users download executable files from the Internet because their job requires downloading these sorts of things and having requests to let someone else download it becomes a department road block.
downloads.exe to temp directory and tries to run it - group policy may block but legacy applications (that you can't rewrite or replace because a department or division runs on it) may require the same type of behavior.
Modify the system - while it has gotten better, depending on your end-user and apps they are running, they might need admin privileges and or the ability to modify c:\windows .exe picked up as trojan - this should be a hurdle.
It isn't a case of mediocre sysadmins so much as corporate inertia and legacy stupidity that stands in the way of preventing these sorts of things. And the bigger the company, the harder it is to get it to turn that sort of corner. Add to that the rules involved in changing procedures (not to mention the money) and you'll understand why the high profile (read larger) companies and gov't organizations are still behind on being able to mitigate a lot of these things.
Resistant - you just identified a major problem that the article also states - the lack of willingness to train new workers for the specifics of a job - or fear of the ramp-up speed of a new hire. The article itself goes into more depth about employers shooting themselves in the foot because they can't seem to find people and aren't willing to train for fear of losing them. Your commentary about risky legal environment or complex burdensome regulations has little to do with unemployment - the regulations that have been put in place are the ones that are over-correcting for the previous deregulation - but that is part of business. And the risky legal environment is going to be there no matter what - you do something that can leave you liable, someone is going to attempt to take advantage of it - sadly that's the nature of the beast.
From an employer's standpoint - if you need someone to do something you have few options - offer enough money that someone is willing to abandon wherever they are currently to come to you, teach them yourself or do without and wring your hands because your competitors are beating you. You may get lucky and find someone on the beach between spots but in technology - 90% of the top-notch staff are already working somewhere or have something lined up - they'll be able to pick and choose. 75% of the good staff (people who can probably do what you want but will take a couple of weeks to get up to speed) are also employed or have something lined up - they also get to pick and choose. The average guys (could do what you want but will take 3-6 months to get up to speed) are about 40% employed, and those that aren't will be screened out (stupidly) by hiring requirements.
To your statement about it being more complex than a simplistic answer - you're right - however, as the article says, when you take out training and learning on the job and then start screening out anyone who doesn't meet a specific criteria (so far HR screening software isn't smart enough to read between the lines on skillsets - a gal that knows how to do systems integration with solaris and windows 2003 can probably tackle linux and windows 2008 systems integration with just a couple of quick references) then you are truly on the hunt for a unicorn or purple squirrel.
Hmm. Talk to person via phone call or walk up to their desk. I'm in the Pacific Time Zone, my coworker is in the India Standard Time Zone. So which one of us stays late or comes in early to have that direct conversation you suggest? I think I'll stick with that e-mail for the time being...
I may seem extreme, but just try to make a rough estimate of the total damage that IE has done to the world economy in requiring all the wasted time and effort for having its quirks supported.
Hmm -- you must not be billing by the hour. It isn't your fault that you are transferring more of the wealth of your clients into your own pockets... (yes, I'll let you finish the rest of this whole thought)
And fuck those who don't have any other browser installed and are now stuck without the Web, we're all better off without them idiots anyways.
Unfortunately, everyone doesn't have the ability to make a choice as to their browsers -- corporate policies are fairly pedantic (and idiotic - in all senses of the word)
"Well, when you steal $600, you can just disappear. When you steal 600 million, they will find you, unless they think you're already dead." -- Hans Gruber
As others are saying - have to go with a 17 inch device. I'm using a Sony Vaio (yeah I know - evil - but the price was right) and it is fairly solid. You will have to carry around an extra pound or two, but the trade off is good.
DESQview actually was a preemptive multitasking environment. MS-Windows was a task switching/time slice environment along with Mac OS. DOS wasn't any of the above - including DOSShell.
Your Friendly Neighborhood FoliEris Emeritus (formerly bryant@qdeck.com)
Slashdot Mirror
Any magnitude >= 5 earthquake with an epicenter in the middle of a large urban area is going to cause some damage and make the news. One that is 100 miles away from the coastline and 800 miles away - less so unless it causes a tsunami (which the one two weeks ago didn't do). Why is it news for nerds - Irvine, Downtown LA (One Wilshire) and El Segundo are all within 30 miles and a decent amount of network traffic passes through those hubs or point of origination is in one of the data centers there.
Facebook is the same anomaly as AOL was -- critical mass and everyone was there that most people wanted to talk to / find. And MySpace was the same animal for a while.
Normally I'd avoid doing the feeding -- but what the hey - it's a Monday.
You'd like a satisfactory explanation -- okay. Fair enough. From 1791 to 1965, the statement "The Man is keeping me down" was actually true. It was the law of the land for things like "Separate but Equal", "No You Can't Ride Here", "No You Can't Have This Job" - etc. Second Class citizenship and all the trappings that go with it. Those that were successful in spite of things (Arthur Ashe, Bill Cosby, Diana Ross) were the exception to the rule. Since 1965, the official government rules were changed but things didn't change in the job market for another decade or so. Look up Red Lining. It is hard to get a house somewhere else if you can't get a loan for it, or if you do get a loan, the interest rate is so far above and beyond what the market rate is... And there are still places where the color of your skin will determine a multitude of thing.
Now we all know that networking helps to provide opportunity, and a lot of networking is done during the college years. If you can't get into the colleges to network in the first place it is hard to get the networking...
In any event, to match the comparison between the Vietnamese immigrants and Black Americans - the Black Americans are about a generation behind - the kids that are coming up now are being exposed to the same opportunities and are starting to be able to prosper. There is a lot of institutional backlog that is only now going away. Give it about another 3 or 4 generations.
Sadly though - the rules on left turn is the person turning left is always at fault - they are responsible for watching oncoming traffic and making a safe turn. If they are doing so, the person running the light would continue through and no accident would happen. I had this discussion with an officer friend after checking into whether or not another friend was at fault for the idiot who hit her car in Beverly Hills blithely talking on their cell phone while doing about 65 in a 30 zone.
Umm.. (eeep - I'm sticking up for Fry's - must be burning some karma somewhere) Fry's doesn't require an Ad - I use a phone app that does the price comparison for local stores and pull up alternate prices and they will match after figuring in shipping costs.
Blockbuster fell into the same myopic hole as Sears did in the 90s. At the start of the Internet boom, Sears had everything in place to be what Amazon is - they already had a full catalog service that delivered by mail and also had in-store pickup. A simple "order from" website would have been all that was needed as the rest of the infrastructure was already in place. Instead, Amazon owned that space and Sears is struggling to remain relevant.
My fellow slashdotters keep forgetting that Doctors, Lawyers, Writers (in Hollywood) and Actors are all members of unions as well. The Bar, the Medical Association, the Screen Actor's Guild - all are unions no matter the name given. There is a way to make it work so that it benefits all involved - but then again we as techies have no problems when the networks are good enough to where once something is plugged in an engineer in the Philippines can take care of the rest of it...
Quarterdeck's mail client did though if memory serves and was released for Windows 3.11 in early 1995/late 1994. I'll have to see if I still have my install disks and see what was supported...
I had this problem with my parent company - Engineering and R & D would be trying to find coding examples and the sites they would end up trying to reach were flagged by the web filters as hacking sites or game sites (which they were a lot of times). The train of thought they were following would stop because it took days to get an approval for opening up a site. They finally said to heck with it and started using their phones as hot spots, plugged their computer into the corporate network and then used local route statements to define what went where - Internet traffic vs. corporate traffic (tech savvy developers).
The key for security is having it in such a fashion that people use that security vs. trying to work around it to get what they need.
With all due respect, I think there are a number of cases that discount your statement. Most recently this one: http://www.sfgate.com/news/crime/article/Wrongfully-convicted-Calif-man-freed-from-prison-4301879.php
NickGnome, you might want to look at the American Medical Association or the American Bar Association. Both organizations are basically "unions". They just don't call themselves such because they are "white collar" unions. If you want to practice law or medicine, you have to be a member of the "Association", pay dues (mandatory) and while the collective bargaining agreement isn't quite the same, you don't see doctors or lawyers fighting employers as much for their jobs.
I say absolutely. As long as part of the law is continuous video surveillance of all executives of the companies that install the spyware. (Bedroom, bathroom, mistress' place, hotel room, etc.) And their families. And it has to be accessible by any Canadian citizen to do with as they please at any time.
So do I - (Books and Coco) - I need to clean out the garage this week - let's see if I can get the beasty to talk to the flat screen TV... (I can see the wife now just shaking her head and mumbling)
obligatory Weird Al reference
Gee - I didn't realize 1964 was 150 years ago, Mr/Ms AC.
If you allow the systems to do Wi-Fi, your internet filters are one personal smart-phone away from being bypassed - so instead of letting your staff know that you monitor internet connections and let them go about and willy-nilly do things (which means they aren't working, which is a management issue) you force them to do things that can put you in a deeper pickle (such as bridge your internal network to the Internet via their personal hot spot). They blow up their system, you wipe it and restore from image. They lost something important - they've learned not to go willy-nilly all over the internet. Of course most people are smart enough not to do that in the first place from their work machines but..
The admin access -- again depends on the apps sadly. Oh - and if you have a Dev shop where they are creating executables and unit testing ... the ability to "install" is kind of important, is it not? Or do they only test on other machines instead of perhaps debugging? And the research folks may be hunting down some new tool they read about in a forum and want to see if it can be added... Again, depends on the environment. You have an office shop where it's just sales and accounting - then yeah they don't have a reason to grab anything new except the company sanctioned tools. (or do they? Neat graphing utility? some new widget for Excel that ties into the accounting database better? Nah - they can get IT to download and vet it.)
Now, access to the servers (the stuff that supports the office and keeps it running) - different animal and different discussion.
I read this "my work requires it!" claim a lot.
I think it is hogwash.
Work requires a stable system.
True - but "stable system" varies depending on the type of work done. If you have a typical office environment (accounting, marketing, etc) you are correct. If you have a software development shop, it changes things...
Work does not require access to xxx, download of .exe, run of .exe outside of installed apps, change of the system.
xxx <> porn -- blocking based on character strings may have unintended side effects. (I was looking for tape DLTXXX29...)
Things outside of installed apps -- so how does your Dev staff grab a copy of something to install and test out?
The admins are just hiding that they don't know how to implement measures like this.
Or they are more experienced than you think because the environments they are providing services to contraindicate what you propose - unless you like to have multiple tickets for your staff to go find and download software to make available...
It is the same breed that never updated IE6 "because we depend on it".
They will be owned. But they just don't care.
I bet a lot of those companies have outsourced admin and the admin company only performs to the minimal SLA, which in a corner states that security breaches and virus outbreaks are cured on time and material basis, with no possibility for damage compensation.
The IE6 bit - was a cost issue - company didn't want to spend the amount of time/money required to make their internal app not require IE6 - failing to recognize that most companies are more willing to wait til they have no choice to upgrade their apps... But I would bet that you are correct regarding the outsourcing bit. :)
xxx - something else has that which has been allowed through the domain filters because "xxx" doesn't always designate pornography, it can also be part of the size of a t-shirt or a movie [imdb.com] perhaps.
You don't need to be shirt-shopping or checking out a Vin Diesel movie at work. Block remains in effect.
So you are providing a Internet connection for what reason at work? And your staff isn't allowed to use it for personal things during lunch or breaks?
.exe download - many larger organizations let their users download executable files from the Internet because their job requires downloading these sorts of things and having requests to let somepony else download it becomes a department road block.
HAHAHAHAHAHA. No.
Up to you whether or not you want your IT staff to download requested items. For your IT staff to do it, it becomes a support ticket and puts in the delay that your ticketing and support organization will put into the request.
downloads .exe to temp directory and tries to run it - group policy may block but legacy applications (that you can't rewrite or replace because a department or division runs on it) may require the same type of behavior.
Which will be given exceptions on a case-by-case basis. Not letting everything on the whole system just go nuts with permissions.
Depends on the app. Case-by-case - if everyone is running an app that requires that sort of access, your case has just been shot - of course it also means you have to know the complete behavior of every app that is run on every system in your environment so you can deal with the strange failures that come up every now and then because you do stop that sort of thing by default when apps write temp files and the like.
depending on your end-user and apps they are running, they might need admin privileges and or the ability to modify c:\windows .exe
If you actually need this kind of access, you'd best fucking know better than to get infected with this shit.
We are in agreement here. Sadly a lot of Dev staff aren't as savvy as we'd like.
It isn't a case of mediocre sysadmins
Keep telling yourself that.
I don't have to tell myself (an anonymous coward posting this? Might want to look in the mirror there)
corporate inertia and legacy stupidity that stands in the way of preventing these sorts of things
We play a support role. For most businesses, the primary objective is not IT. Make it work like the rest of us do.
Yes we do. And if you assume that every other environment has the same requirements as the one you are talking about - you might want to look closer at that mediocre sysadmin statement you mentioned earlier. We in IT provide a functioning environment that lets the end users do what they need with the minimal amount of interruption. Depends on what the business is doing as to what sort of access is needed - what you describe in the above is a typical office environment - which wouldn't suit the needs of my users as a software development house. (And doing it 'the office environment' way only generated 200 request tickets the first 3 days... which could have been avoided... )
you'll understand why the high profile (read larger) companies and gov't organizations are still behind on being able to mitigate a lot of these things.
As someone on the inside, it still looks an awful lot like technological incompetence to me.
As someone also on the inside, and doing this for a while, it isn't always incompetence...
Or what. :)
xxx - something else has that which has been allowed through the domain filters because "xxx" doesn't always designate pornography, it can also be part of the size of a t-shirt or a movie perhaps.
.exe download - many larger organizations let their users download executable files from the Internet because their job requires downloading these sorts of things and having requests to let someone else download it becomes a department road block.
downloads .exe to temp directory and tries to run it - group policy may block but legacy applications (that you can't rewrite or replace because a department or division runs on it) may require the same type of behavior.
Modify the system - while it has gotten better, depending on your end-user and apps they are running, they might need admin privileges and or the ability to modify c:\windows
.exe picked up as trojan - this should be a hurdle.
It isn't a case of mediocre sysadmins so much as corporate inertia and legacy stupidity that stands in the way of preventing these sorts of things. And the bigger the company, the harder it is to get it to turn that sort of corner. Add to that the rules involved in changing procedures (not to mention the money) and you'll understand why the high profile (read larger) companies and gov't organizations are still behind on being able to mitigate a lot of these things.
Resistant - you just identified a major problem that the article also states - the lack of willingness to train new workers for the specifics of a job - or fear of the ramp-up speed of a new hire. The article itself goes into more depth about employers shooting themselves in the foot because they can't seem to find people and aren't willing to train for fear of losing them. Your commentary about risky legal environment or complex burdensome regulations has little to do with unemployment - the regulations that have been put in place are the ones that are over-correcting for the previous deregulation - but that is part of business. And the risky legal environment is going to be there no matter what - you do something that can leave you liable, someone is going to attempt to take advantage of it - sadly that's the nature of the beast.
From an employer's standpoint - if you need someone to do something you have few options - offer enough money that someone is willing to abandon wherever they are currently to come to you, teach them yourself or do without and wring your hands because your competitors are beating you. You may get lucky and find someone on the beach between spots but in technology - 90% of the top-notch staff are already working somewhere or have something lined up - they'll be able to pick and choose. 75% of the good staff (people who can probably do what you want but will take a couple of weeks to get up to speed) are also employed or have something lined up - they also get to pick and choose. The average guys (could do what you want but will take 3-6 months to get up to speed) are about 40% employed, and those that aren't will be screened out (stupidly) by hiring requirements.
To your statement about it being more complex than a simplistic answer - you're right - however, as the article says, when you take out training and learning on the job and then start screening out anyone who doesn't meet a specific criteria (so far HR screening software isn't smart enough to read between the lines on skillsets - a gal that knows how to do systems integration with solaris and windows 2003 can probably tackle linux and windows 2008 systems integration with just a couple of quick references) then you are truly on the hunt for a unicorn or purple squirrel.
Hmm. Talk to person via phone call or walk up to their desk. I'm in the Pacific Time Zone, my coworker is in the India Standard Time Zone. So which one of us stays late or comes in early to have that direct conversation you suggest? I think I'll stick with that e-mail for the time being...
I may seem extreme, but just try to make a rough estimate of the total damage that IE has done to the world economy in requiring all the wasted time and effort for having its quirks supported.
Hmm -- you must not be billing by the hour. It isn't your fault that you are transferring more of the wealth of your clients into your own pockets... (yes, I'll let you finish the rest of this whole thought)
And fuck those who don't have any other browser installed and are now stuck without the Web, we're all better off without them idiots anyways.
Unfortunately, everyone doesn't have the ability to make a choice as to their browsers -- corporate policies are fairly pedantic (and idiotic - in all senses of the word)
"Well, when you steal $600, you can just disappear. When you steal 600 million, they will find you, unless they think you're already dead." -- Hans Gruber
As others are saying - have to go with a 17 inch device. I'm using a Sony Vaio (yeah I know - evil - but the price was right) and it is fairly solid. You will have to carry around an extra pound or two, but the trade off is good.
DESQview actually was a preemptive multitasking environment. MS-Windows was a task switching/time slice environment along with Mac OS. DOS wasn't any of the above - including DOSShell.
Your Friendly Neighborhood FoliEris Emeritus (formerly bryant@qdeck.com)