Windows does not require reactivation when the image is opened in VMWare Server, Player, or Workstation. VPC images of demo configurations featuring pre-activated Windows that I get from Microsoft and attempt to run under Virtual Server require reactivation.
VMWare Workstation has too many useful features.
Therefore, I create my own demo environments in VMWare Server as my first choice and run VPC images in Virtual PC 2004 by necessity. Guess which environment is significantly faster? I have no incentive to use Virual Server 2005 R2.
If you need me to be available 9am-5pm, that's fine. Being physically in the office at 9am makes no sense. I programmed my PBX in the office to reroute calls starting at 9am to my cell phone and unprogrammed that when I was actually in the office.
They didn't like the concept, but that's what the policy is at my company. I pay for availability, not to have someone's ass in one of my office chairs.
Intel is introducing the Verified By Intel initiative. In essence, (3) ODMs (Asus, Compal, and Quanta) are now making interchangeable parts for a VBI laptop.
With cross-brand interchangeability (take an Asus screen and put it on a Quanta chassis with a Compal battery, for example) I expect upgradeability to become more prevalent.
Oh, and you can strip this thing completely in less than 15 minutes. Not available from our "friends" at Dell.
This document contains no unusual information from a security professional's perspective. Wired is correct in saying that keeping it secret for technical reasons is absurd. This document is secret solely for reasons that have nothing to do with technology.
It does not go into operational details to the point of enabling effortless duplication, but it does enumerate the tap points. It is simply a high level overview of a fiber sniffer.
I am not surprised one bit of its existence. One has to wonder what the peering providers (Abovenet, Verio, UU etc (I am not up to date on the current ownership of these entities)) will think about it.
There are plenty of precedents about the press publishing secret documents.
It is far more cost-effective for our customers to:
1. Keep all CDs and license codes in the same place. The cost of me looking for them gets high very quickly. 2. If we give you a command line to type in, please type in all the spaces and correct slashes. The amount of people who can't tell the difference between a forward slash and a backslash is staggering. 3. Keep screenshots of those errors you are receiving. Hit PrtScr, open a new Word document, and hit Ctrl-V to save the evidence. 4. When we ask questions, we have a reason to ask those questions. We don't need to know your life story, so we will interrupt you with the next question after we get the information required. This may seam rude, but otherwise your bill will have an extra two hours attached to it. We've seen these problems so many times that there is simply no need to waste time listening to every little detail. 5. Learn to report problems. "It doesn't work" doesn't help me. I need detailed steps to reproduce the problem and ideally screen captures of the errors as well. Consider it to be more like a bug report, not a post-it note. "Word will not save documents after they are opened from Outlook and attempts to do so freeze the system" will help me a lot more because I knew that there was a specific bad patch released in the week prior. 6. Stop lying to us. We honestly do not care that you watch porn, we are there to solve your problems. Not disclosing fully your activities has a direct effect on your bill. 7. Be prepared to become a legal customer. If you are missing a license for something and you require us to reinstall that something, you should be prepared to buy the product.
In short, keep your answers informative and succinct and we'll have you back online in no time. We are there to solve problems, not be distracted.
OK, that's for end users.
Now for your datacenter
1. If we tell you something needs a dedicated server, that means you need it. There are incompetent people out there who'll dedicate a server to a 50MB MSDE database, but the majority of us are not that silly. 2. If we tell you that you need to upgrade, it could be because it would lower your immediate support costs and we wouldn't have to reinvent the wheel. 3. Spend the money on training your IT staff. Studies show that happy IT people who receive training provide a higher return on your investment. 4. Spend the money to get a good monitoring environment setup. This money will be saved on emergency situations. 5. If you treat your IT department as fire fighters, you won't get much done that is of strategic importance. If your IT people are doing the jobs of developers, you may need to find out what on Earth they are developing. It is likely more cost-effective to get a vendor customization with a proper SDK. 6. If you fail to plan for disasters and skim on disk drives, your recovery bill will be astronomical very quickly.
1. I won't sell Dell servers unless not doing that will cause me to lose a deal. I'll assist my customers to order from Dell, but I don't see a point in having a channel relationship with them like I do with HP. I've talked to enough Dell resellers... 2. I I have a really hard time selling HP workstations when Dell basically gives away their equipment. Corporate hardware is overkill for most users, so it simply doesn't matter. I have to explain that there are no warranties to speak of etc, but at less than $200/box, who cares about some warranty? A 19" LCD is what they want and I don't blame them. Why is XP Home a valid point here? We enroll desktop OEM licenses into Software Assurance and usually sell a Platform CAL, so XP Home OEM actually makes sense in this comparison.
When a customer flashes an ad at you with a $399 (after rebate) system complete with XP Home and a 19" LCD, what can you do?
My experience with Dell servers is not positive. Call it anecdotal, but I see amber lights on Dell equipment more often than on every other piece of equipment in the datacenter. This is true for Dell shops and mixed shops. This is also true where there are only maybe 2 or 3 servers from Dell in the mix of other stuff.
Motherboard failures, PERC failures etc...
When I sell an HP server, I sell something that I can trust. The truth is, however, that corporate desktops are throwaway boxes. I don't care if one of them dies and keep a spare at hand.
If they portrayed using a Razor or an HTC Universal as a car phone interacting wirelessly with the vehicle through Bluetooth - would you have believed them?
Corded car phones were believable.
Same would be with data reels. A modern datacenter is a sea of green LEDs with either standard 3U 14-disk enclosures or even having all that green goodness hidden behind Tier1 manufacturer logos on large bezels. The arrays take up far less space than the data reel machines did and don't look anywhere near as impressive, especially when enclosed in typical Sun or EMC cabinets. We are used to this to the point of taking it for granted, but explaining the concept of a RAID enclosure to moviegoers would be an interesting thing to try.;-)
Datareels were believable. They got this point right with Terminator 3 - the charecter realized that they are not in a real datacenter.
My response to this was indeed "I understood that this was to be a technical interview. I passed your phone screening already and this is a waste of my time. I can come back when your technical person is available. Would you like to make it a conference call right now? If not, I fail to see how you can help me until a person who can understand my resume is available."
In 2 cases, an immediate conference call was made and I got the position in one of them. In 4 cases I had to leave and had a phone all next day for the real technical interview. In quite a few cases, this was the end of it.
I also loved the resume consulting companies that would attempt to tell me that my resume needed modification. "Yes, you have 10+ years of experience but it needs to fit on one or two pages...". Now if I get a 2-pager from an applicant, I ask them to send me the unabridged version that really spells out what they do and to forget about the "you only have 5 seconds" myth.
It's all enterprise technologies, which is the part of the point of this message.
We serve the under 75 employees market with SBS, larger companies with mid-size infrastructure business pack, and have a few enterprise clients as well. The number of users doesn't really matter from our perspective.
I can configure an Exchange box for 50 people or 500 people and the techniques for high availability will be the same. I'll use the same software that costs around $20,000, but different disk hardware. The hourly rate will be the same, and the setup time will also be quite similar.
We see the exact same errors in both small and larger companies that we inherit from other consultants who did not have enterprise expertise.
One one hand we have rapid education growth globally, on the other we have rapidly growing complexity of technology.
My prediction is that as we get out of the Bush dark ages, corrective measures will be passed to stop certain forms of offshore activity. Additionally, consumer backlash is very real these days and as the requirement for high level technology rises in general so will the demand for those who can make it work correctly.
A lot of companies are in fact abandoning or at least reconsidering their offshore initiatives. I have several clients who have offshore operations and they are scaling them back and bringing some of that work back home.
Why is this important? I support a product called Microsoft Small Business Server 2003. I am one of the leading experts on this product today. It is something you can literally buy off the shelf and setup easily. One would think that is the end.:-) SBS2003 is comprised on Windows Server 2003, Exchange Server 2003, SQL Server 2000, Windows Sharepoint Servers pre-installed, ISA 2004 Server, and a few sophisticated web applications. Some clients also add other stack components such as Small Business Financials and MS CRM 3.0 Small Business Edition.
In translation, that means that we sell a $4700 application suite for $1500. These are full products that require enterprise expertise to use them. Small Business Financials is a friendly name for Great Plains (yes, THAT, Great Plains), and MS CRM 3.0 Small Business has no feature limitations on itself either besides the maximum number of users.
If you take a typical small business owner who uses Quickbooks and throw them into this environment, they are lost. Make no mistake, they demand these applications from us and they do love them when they are customized.
I think the next era of highly complex networks is about to begin. A competent software developer specializing in making this process easier will make a killing. I know how much money my company is set to make this year and I am truly amazed at just how many untapped markets there are.:-)
There is a lot of opportunity in IT, but I think you have to own a business to truly succeed. Working for someone else will not make it happen. That means, take some basic business courses in addition to IT when you have the opportunity.
My wanted ads look a little different than you standard job description.:-)
I have few realistic requirements based on the particular practice area I am posting this opening for and I am prepared to train someone trainable to the level at which that person will eventually be expected to perform. We have a decent training budget with the help of CBT Nuggets. We start people at 52K. We also offer a sales incentive to everyone, not just sales people.
Some may call it overpaying since that particular person may not necessarily have all the skills I want, but I find it to be the minimum amount ncessary to keep that person from job hopping once they are actually qualified to do what we require. It's fairly simple to train someone to expert level provided they are the right candidate capable of doing this in the first place. It's relatively easy to hit 80K in base compensation or so for the right individual in less than 2 years. Telecommuting is an option we offer to everyone, but we refuse to outsource out of our local area. Call it doing our part against further eroding this profession. Our offices are located next to BART to eliminate the need for using a vehicle.
We are not flush with cash, but we do have a healthy cashflow pattern.
It's not easy to hire people even under these conditions.:-)
TS CALs are less than $100/user if without software assurance, and about $141/user with software assurance.
Win XP Pro licenses you'd need would have to e purchased as a retail package, at $299/user. Neither OEM nor any volume license would work.
On the other hand, Windows Server can be licensed through volume channel for significant savings.
As an example: Open Value - (1) Win 2003 Std Server, (5) CALs, (5) TS CALs, (3) year software assurance: $2238 Same scenario but with Open Business, no software assurance: $1264 Same scenario but with Open Business, no extra CALs (already covered with other servers?), no SA: $1119
So with (5) users you would pay $299*5+cost of software ($100/user, hence $500) from Thinsoft = $2000 vs. $1119 to 1264 for the terminal services solution.
Make your own conclusion, but if the user is compliant with the Microsoft EULA for Windows XP Professional, which stipulates that new fully licensed copies of Windows can only be retail packages, the thinsoft solution does not make sense to me financially.
I sell a lot of volume licenses for Microsoft, and the prices I quoted are the ERP prices. My reseller price is actually lower.
It's really very simple provided this nightmare is managed by us.
1. Users log on through VPN 2. Users' machines are domain members configured with local print queues 3. VPN Machines auto-register in DNS 4. We provide the remote printers and refuse to support anything else - an HP mono or color laser device 5. We create server-based print queues pointing to those remote printers as \\Machine\PrinterX with appropriate security settings to restrict access 6. Users choose to print to their assigned printers from their remote applications
1st raise - $8hr -> $24hr (off the street placement with a major law firm...) 2nd raise - $28hr -> $70hr (recruiter calls me in 1999 from out of state... I am tired of recruiters, so I quote $70/hr to get rid of her...she asks when I can start!)
It is ridiculous what happens when you raise rates.
I bill $120hr now. I get clients who can afford it and who truly value their IT strategy, which I happen to write. Rates are going up again pretty soon with my larger customers. "So what do you charge?" "I bill $120/hr. No 2hr minimums:-)" "Oh, OK, let's start with a 10hr/month support contract".
Look at it this way... if I cost some company $14,400 per year for 120 hours (generally 10 hours per month is sufficient), but but I am as productive as a full-time employee, they are paying me $7.20/hr on annualized basis.
What do I do? Same thing some people do for $8/hr, except in a matter of seconds.
Raise your rates and make it easier. It's just as difficult to close a $40/hr customer as it is to close a $120/hr customer. The amount of effort is the same, so get paid fairly. If you are needed for less than 40 hours per month, attorney's or doctor's pay scale is actually very appropriate.
We have extremely high speed networks today, extremely cheap storage, and very high resolution CCD sensors with face recognition technology. We have this today. Shoot in gray scale vs. color for higher contrast and greater image compression.
I can deliver a prototype of what you are talking about today. GPS-guided UAVs can enable Enemy of the State today already.
We have the transponder tags for frequent bridge travelers. Integrate that, and I can catch you at the toll gates and follow you home. Vehicles are sold with OnStar. Integrate with OnStar with a warrant from a secret court, and I can track you wherever. We have traffic analysis cameras. Replace them with hi-res units and equip with OCR technology (plates are easy stuff), and I can track you anywhere on a monitored interstate and pick up further with a UAV. You carry a cell-phone with a GPS for e911. Court order, link that signal to the UAV. Better yet, combine that signal with FLIR:-).
Does this start to sound familiar?
The databases are accessible with standard interfaces these days and it's fairly intuitive to combine data from multiple databases. The days of incomptatible closed mainframes are either gone or very rapidly headed in that direction as data becomes easier to migrate and analyse. Combine that with something like Sun Grid and you can track this stuff fairly inexpensively. Some of the things I do combine data from multiple SQL Server instances to enable greater depth of customer relationship management. We are not evil, but the same technology can be used for evil purposes pretty quickly.
The technology is here today, not 20 years from now.
I tell my clients to run a Google Groups search for my last name and technology of their choice.
1000+ articles posted in my area of expertise.
Google itself links me to some seriously fun stuff. First link just happens to point to my Amazon profile. I consider that as VERY lucky as that's a page I can modify as I see fit.
Here is you will see when you search for "Knyshov" on Google:
Amazon.com: Profile For Leonid Knyshov: ReviewsLeonid Knyshov "World-class computer expert" (Fremont, CA USA) (REAL NAME)... I wish you good health and much prosperity,. Leonid S. Knyshov... www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/ A3P7EVPCSMPGI6?_encoding=UTF8 - 66k - Cached - Similar pages
Amazon.com: Profile for Leonid KnyshovLeonid S. Knyshov is a computer genius who is typically employed as a Sr. Network Systems Security... Mr. Knyshov appreciates your time spent reading this.... www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A3P7EVPCSMPGI6 - 43k - Cached - Similar pages [ More results from www.amazon.com ]
A few links below that, however, I am linked to insecure.org which shows my HP-UX exploit from 1997. That can be good or bad. Good - shows that I knew how to find original exploits 9 years ago. Bad - I don't actively advertise that. Overall, I consider that as a good link.
Then there is a link that connects me to the SF Raves community. That again can be good or bad. Good - I can modify that page as I see fit and it shows that I am not a bookworm. Bad - it links me with nightlife of San Francisco, which may provoke questions about possible recreational drug usage, which I do not do.
Overall, that's basically the key. If the information you post is good, it definitely enhances credibility. I tell my clients to look for me on the Internet. For some reason, my 1994-2000 newsgroups history is not visible, which is not necessarily a bad thing:-).
Notice: I sell EPM solutions based on MS Project Server 2003.
With that said, it's easily the most cost-effective and most flexible project management solution on the market right now. Most of your users won't need Project Professional, but just a Project Web CAL. It'll take about 2-6 months to implement, depending on the complexity of your organization. It can also take less than a week.:-)
I disagree with comments that Office 2003 is not worth its price.
Granted, some of the more advanced editing features of Word are not intuitive. I can always make a document look precisely how I want it to look.
Simply put, Outlook drives business productivity. We integrate everything into Outlook - CRM, EPM, Accounting - not even mentioning standard Exchange features.
For those comparing to Office 97 - don't you remember anymore how often that thing crashed?! I have not crashed once in Office 2003 that was not the fault of an add-on application. Even though, my Word never crashed and neither did Excel. My Outlook is so full of add-ons, that yes it does fail to respond sometimes, but the failure is always in add-on components.
Native XML support in Office 2003 is huge in its target markets. Excel is an unsurpassed business analysis tool that only competes with itself. Visio - enough said. I don't particularly care about Access, but it should be noted that it no longer uses JET as its DB engine by default and switched to MSDE.
Further integration with Sharepoint creates further value. OpenOffice is great for simple needs. The needs that we have to support are a lot more complex. I spend two to three weeks training appropriate users on advanced features of Office. Ultimately, it all boils down to training and once the users are proficient, we see a sharp drop in tickets related to these technologies.
Slashdot Mirror
VMWare is easier to use.
Windows does not require reactivation when the image is opened in VMWare Server, Player, or Workstation. VPC images of demo configurations featuring pre-activated Windows that I get from Microsoft and attempt to run under Virtual Server require reactivation.
VMWare Workstation has too many useful features.
Therefore, I create my own demo environments in VMWare Server as my first choice and run VPC images in Virtual PC 2004 by necessity. Guess which environment is significantly faster? I have no incentive to use Virual Server 2005 R2.
Buy a property.
If someone explained to me that owning a property is basically renting for free, I would have done that in 1999.
Microsoft will set users to msn.com by default.
If they are capable of competing with the usual suspects, users will have no reason to switch. I anticipate A9-like tactics.
Rigid schedules are obsolete.
If you need me to be available 9am-5pm, that's fine. Being physically in the office at 9am makes no sense. I programmed my PBX in the office to reroute calls starting at 9am to my cell phone and unprogrammed that when I was actually in the office.
They didn't like the concept, but that's what the policy is at my company. I pay for availability, not to have someone's ass in one of my office chairs.
Intel is introducing the Verified By Intel initiative. In essence, (3) ODMs (Asus, Compal, and Quanta) are now making interchangeable parts for a VBI laptop.
With cross-brand interchangeability (take an Asus screen and put it on a Quanta chassis with a Compal battery, for example) I expect upgradeability to become more prevalent.
Oh, and you can strip this thing completely in less than 15 minutes. Not available from our "friends" at Dell.
This document contains no unusual information from a security professional's perspective. Wired is correct in saying that keeping it secret for technical reasons is absurd. This document is secret solely for reasons that have nothing to do with technology.
It does not go into operational details to the point of enabling effortless duplication, but it does enumerate the tap points. It is simply a high level overview of a fiber sniffer.
I am not surprised one bit of its existence. One has to wonder what the peering providers (Abovenet, Verio, UU etc (I am not up to date on the current ownership of these entities)) will think about it.
There are plenty of precedents about the press publishing secret documents.
A Klingon Captain's chair.
:-)
I think it'll work marvelously in my office.
It is far more cost-effective for our customers to:
:-)
1. Keep all CDs and license codes in the same place. The cost of me looking for them gets high very quickly.
2. If we give you a command line to type in, please type in all the spaces and correct slashes. The amount of people who can't tell the difference between a forward slash and a backslash is staggering.
3. Keep screenshots of those errors you are receiving. Hit PrtScr, open a new Word document, and hit Ctrl-V to save the evidence.
4. When we ask questions, we have a reason to ask those questions. We don't need to know your life story, so we will interrupt you with the next question after we get the information required. This may seam rude, but otherwise your bill will have an extra two hours attached to it. We've seen these problems so many times that there is simply no need to waste time listening to every little detail.
5. Learn to report problems. "It doesn't work" doesn't help me. I need detailed steps to reproduce the problem and ideally screen captures of the errors as well. Consider it to be more like a bug report, not a post-it note. "Word will not save documents after they are opened from Outlook and attempts to do so freeze the system" will help me a lot more because I knew that there was a specific bad patch released in the week prior.
6. Stop lying to us. We honestly do not care that you watch porn, we are there to solve your problems. Not disclosing fully your activities has a direct effect on your bill.
7. Be prepared to become a legal customer. If you are missing a license for something and you require us to reinstall that something, you should be prepared to buy the product.
In short, keep your answers informative and succinct and we'll have you back online in no time. We are there to solve problems, not be distracted.
OK, that's for end users.
Now for your datacenter
1. If we tell you something needs a dedicated server, that means you need it. There are incompetent people out there who'll dedicate a server to a 50MB MSDE database, but the majority of us are not that silly.
2. If we tell you that you need to upgrade, it could be because it would lower your immediate support costs and we wouldn't have to reinvent the wheel.
3. Spend the money on training your IT staff. Studies show that happy IT people who receive training provide a higher return on your investment.
4. Spend the money to get a good monitoring environment setup. This money will be saved on emergency situations.
5. If you treat your IT department as fire fighters, you won't get much done that is of strategic importance. If your IT people are doing the jobs of developers, you may need to find out what on Earth they are developing. It is likely more cost-effective to get a vendor customization with a proper SDK.
6. If you fail to plan for disasters and skim on disk drives, your recovery bill will be astronomical very quickly.
Just a few tips off top of my head.
You are not confused.
Two issues are discussed.
1. I won't sell Dell servers unless not doing that will cause me to lose a deal. I'll assist my customers to order from Dell, but I don't see a point in having a channel relationship with them like I do with HP. I've talked to enough Dell resellers...
2. I I have a really hard time selling HP workstations when Dell basically gives away their equipment. Corporate hardware is overkill for most users, so it simply doesn't matter. I have to explain that there are no warranties to speak of etc, but at less than $200/box, who cares about some warranty? A 19" LCD is what they want and I don't blame them. Why is XP Home a valid point here? We enroll desktop OEM licenses into Software Assurance and usually sell a Platform CAL, so XP Home OEM actually makes sense in this comparison.
When a customer flashes an ad at you with a $399 (after rebate) system complete with XP Home and a 19" LCD, what can you do?
My experience with Dell servers is not positive. Call it anecdotal, but I see amber lights on Dell equipment more often than on every other piece of equipment in the datacenter. This is true for Dell shops and mixed shops. This is also true where there are only maybe 2 or 3 servers from Dell in the mix of other stuff.
Motherboard failures, PERC failures etc...
When I sell an HP server, I sell something that I can trust. The truth is, however, that corporate desktops are throwaway boxes. I don't care if one of them dies and keep a spare at hand.
My rep opposed a similar prior legislation, so I had 20 people call his office to put this on the radar.
On the other hand...
;-)
If they portrayed using a Razor or an HTC Universal as a car phone interacting wirelessly with the vehicle through Bluetooth - would you have believed them?
Corded car phones were believable.
Same would be with data reels. A modern datacenter is a sea of green LEDs with either standard 3U 14-disk enclosures or even having all that green goodness hidden behind Tier1 manufacturer logos on large bezels. The arrays take up far less space than the data reel machines did and don't look anywhere near as impressive, especially when enclosed in typical Sun or EMC cabinets. We are used to this to the point of taking it for granted, but explaining the concept of a RAID enclosure to moviegoers would be an interesting thing to try.
Datareels were believable. They got this point right with Terminator 3 - the charecter realized that they are not in a real datacenter.
Been there years ago.
My response to this was indeed "I understood that this was to be a technical interview. I passed your phone screening already and this is a waste of my time. I can come back when your technical person is available. Would you like to make it a conference call right now? If not, I fail to see how you can help me until a person who can understand my resume is available."
In 2 cases, an immediate conference call was made and I got the position in one of them. In 4 cases I had to leave and had a phone all next day for the real technical interview. In quite a few cases, this was the end of it.
I also loved the resume consulting companies that would attempt to tell me that my resume needed modification. "Yes, you have 10+ years of experience but it needs to fit on one or two pages...". Now if I get a 2-pager from an applicant, I ask them to send me the unabridged version that really spells out what they do and to forget about the "you only have 5 seconds" myth.
It's all enterprise technologies, which is the part of the point of this message.
We serve the under 75 employees market with SBS, larger companies with mid-size infrastructure business pack, and have a few enterprise clients as well. The number of users doesn't really matter from our perspective.
I can configure an Exchange box for 50 people or 500 people and the techniques for high availability will be the same. I'll use the same software that costs around $20,000, but different disk hardware. The hourly rate will be the same, and the setup time will also be quite similar.
We see the exact same errors in both small and larger companies that we inherit from other consultants who did not have enterprise expertise.
One one hand we have rapid education growth globally, on the other we have rapidly growing complexity of technology.
:-) SBS2003 is comprised on Windows Server 2003, Exchange Server 2003, SQL Server 2000, Windows Sharepoint Servers pre-installed, ISA 2004 Server, and a few sophisticated web applications. Some clients also add other stack components such as Small Business Financials and MS CRM 3.0 Small Business Edition.
:-)
My prediction is that as we get out of the Bush dark ages, corrective measures will be passed to stop certain forms of offshore activity. Additionally, consumer backlash is very real these days and as the requirement for high level technology rises in general so will the demand for those who can make it work correctly.
A lot of companies are in fact abandoning or at least reconsidering their offshore initiatives. I have several clients who have offshore operations and they are scaling them back and bringing some of that work back home.
Why is this important? I support a product called Microsoft Small Business Server 2003. I am one of the leading experts on this product today. It is something you can literally buy off the shelf and setup easily. One would think that is the end.
In translation, that means that we sell a $4700 application suite for $1500. These are full products that require enterprise expertise to use them. Small Business Financials is a friendly name for Great Plains (yes, THAT, Great Plains), and MS CRM 3.0 Small Business has no feature limitations on itself either besides the maximum number of users.
If you take a typical small business owner who uses Quickbooks and throw them into this environment, they are lost. Make no mistake, they demand these applications from us and they do love them when they are customized.
I think the next era of highly complex networks is about to begin. A competent software developer specializing in making this process easier will make a killing. I know how much money my company is set to make this year and I am truly amazed at just how many untapped markets there are.
There is a lot of opportunity in IT, but I think you have to own a business to truly succeed. Working for someone else will not make it happen. That means, take some basic business courses in addition to IT when you have the opportunity.
Good luck!
My wanted ads look a little different than you standard job description. :-)
:-)
I have few realistic requirements based on the particular practice area I am posting this opening for and I am prepared to train someone trainable to the level at which that person will eventually be expected to perform. We have a decent training budget with the help of CBT Nuggets. We start people at 52K. We also offer a sales incentive to everyone, not just sales people.
Some may call it overpaying since that particular person may not necessarily have all the skills I want, but I find it to be the minimum amount ncessary to keep that person from job hopping once they are actually qualified to do what we require. It's fairly simple to train someone to expert level provided they are the right candidate capable of doing this in the first place. It's relatively easy to hit 80K in base compensation or so for the right individual in less than 2 years. Telecommuting is an option we offer to everyone, but we refuse to outsource out of our local area. Call it doing our part against further eroding this profession. Our offices are located next to BART to eliminate the need for using a vehicle.
We are not flush with cash, but we do have a healthy cashflow pattern.
It's not easy to hire people even under these conditions.
For the record.
TS CALs are less than $100/user if without software assurance, and about $141/user with software assurance.
Win XP Pro licenses you'd need would have to e purchased as a retail package, at $299/user. Neither OEM nor any volume license would work.
On the other hand, Windows Server can be licensed through volume channel for significant savings.
As an example:
Open Value - (1) Win 2003 Std Server, (5) CALs, (5) TS CALs, (3) year software assurance: $2238
Same scenario but with Open Business, no software assurance: $1264
Same scenario but with Open Business, no extra CALs (already covered with other servers?), no SA: $1119
So with (5) users you would pay $299*5+cost of software ($100/user, hence $500) from Thinsoft = $2000 vs. $1119 to 1264 for the terminal services solution.
Make your own conclusion, but if the user is compliant with the Microsoft EULA for Windows XP Professional, which stipulates that new fully licensed copies of Windows can only be retail packages, the thinsoft solution does not make sense to me financially.
I sell a lot of volume licenses for Microsoft, and the prices I quoted are the ERP prices. My reseller price is actually lower.
It's really very simple provided this nightmare is managed by us.
1. Users log on through VPN
2. Users' machines are domain members configured with local print queues
3. VPN Machines auto-register in DNS
4. We provide the remote printers and refuse to support anything else - an HP mono or color laser device
5. We create server-based print queues pointing to those remote printers as \\Machine\PrinterX with appropriate security settings to restrict access
6. Users choose to print to their assigned printers from their remote applications
I have this implemented for 7 companies.
Confirm this way:
:-)" "Oh, OK, let's start with a 10hr/month support contract".
1st raise - $8hr -> $24hr (off the street placement with a major law firm...)
2nd raise - $28hr -> $70hr (recruiter calls me in 1999 from out of state... I am tired of recruiters, so I quote $70/hr to get rid of her...she asks when I can start!)
It is ridiculous what happens when you raise rates.
I bill $120hr now. I get clients who can afford it and who truly value their IT strategy, which I happen to write. Rates are going up again pretty soon with my larger customers. "So what do you charge?" "I bill $120/hr. No 2hr minimums
Look at it this way... if I cost some company $14,400 per year for 120 hours (generally 10 hours per month is sufficient), but but I am as productive as a full-time employee, they are paying me $7.20/hr on annualized basis.
What do I do? Same thing some people do for $8/hr, except in a matter of seconds.
Raise your rates and make it easier. It's just as difficult to close a $40/hr customer as it is to close a $120/hr customer. The amount of effort is the same, so get paid fairly. If you are needed for less than 40 hours per month, attorney's or doctor's pay scale is actually very appropriate.
20 years?
:-).
We have extremely high speed networks today, extremely cheap storage, and very high resolution CCD sensors with face recognition technology. We have this today. Shoot in gray scale vs. color for higher contrast and greater image compression.
I can deliver a prototype of what you are talking about today. GPS-guided UAVs can enable Enemy of the State today already.
We have the transponder tags for frequent bridge travelers. Integrate that, and I can catch you at the toll gates and follow you home. Vehicles are sold with OnStar. Integrate with OnStar with a warrant from a secret court, and I can track you wherever. We have traffic analysis cameras. Replace them with hi-res units and equip with OCR technology (plates are easy stuff), and I can track you anywhere on a monitored interstate and pick up further with a UAV. You carry a cell-phone with a GPS for e911. Court order, link that signal to the UAV. Better yet, combine that signal with FLIR
Does this start to sound familiar?
The databases are accessible with standard interfaces these days and it's fairly intuitive to combine data from multiple databases. The days of incomptatible closed mainframes are either gone or very rapidly headed in that direction as data becomes easier to migrate and analyse. Combine that with something like Sun Grid and you can track this stuff fairly inexpensively. Some of the things I do combine data from multiple SQL Server instances to enable greater depth of customer relationship management. We are not evil, but the same technology can be used for evil purposes pretty quickly.
The technology is here today, not 20 years from now.
If the lease was literally torn up in front of witnesses, contact an attorney. That's a clear case of discrimination.
I tell my clients to run a Google Groups search for my last name and technology of their choice.
... I wish you good health and much prosperity,. Leonid S. Knyshov ...
... Mr. Knyshov appreciates your time spent reading this. ...
:-).
1000+ articles posted in my area of expertise.
Google itself links me to some seriously fun stuff. First link just happens to point to my Amazon profile. I consider that as VERY lucky as that's a page I can modify as I see fit.
Here is you will see when you search for "Knyshov" on Google:
Amazon.com: Profile For Leonid Knyshov: ReviewsLeonid Knyshov "World-class computer expert" (Fremont, CA USA) (REAL NAME)
www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/ A3P7EVPCSMPGI6?_encoding=UTF8 - 66k - Cached - Similar pages
Amazon.com: Profile for Leonid KnyshovLeonid S. Knyshov is a computer genius who is typically employed as a Sr. Network Systems Security
www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A3P7EVPCSMPGI6 - 43k - Cached - Similar pages
[ More results from www.amazon.com ]
A few links below that, however, I am linked to insecure.org which shows my HP-UX exploit from 1997. That can be good or bad. Good - shows that I knew how to find original exploits 9 years ago. Bad - I don't actively advertise that. Overall, I consider that as a good link.
Then there is a link that connects me to the SF Raves community. That again can be good or bad. Good - I can modify that page as I see fit and it shows that I am not a bookworm. Bad - it links me with nightlife of San Francisco, which may provoke questions about possible recreational drug usage, which I do not do.
Overall, that's basically the key. If the information you post is good, it definitely enhances credibility. I tell my clients to look for me on the Internet. For some reason, my 1994-2000 newsgroups history is not visible, which is not necessarily a bad thing
Uh... you only backup priv.edb and priv.stm. Two monstrous files.
A single AIT-4 tape has enough capacity for a 200GB mailstore.
Notice: I sell EPM solutions based on MS Project Server 2003.
:-)
With that said, it's easily the most cost-effective and most flexible project management solution on the market right now. Most of your users won't need Project Professional, but just a Project Web CAL. It'll take about 2-6 months to implement, depending on the complexity of your organization. It can also take less than a week.
I disagree with comments that Office 2003 is not worth its price.
Granted, some of the more advanced editing features of Word are not intuitive. I can always make a document look precisely how I want it to look.
Simply put, Outlook drives business productivity. We integrate everything into Outlook - CRM, EPM, Accounting - not even mentioning standard Exchange features.
For those comparing to Office 97 - don't you remember anymore how often that thing crashed?! I have not crashed once in Office 2003 that was not the fault of an add-on application. Even though, my Word never crashed and neither did Excel. My Outlook is so full of add-ons, that yes it does fail to respond sometimes, but the failure is always in add-on components.
Native XML support in Office 2003 is huge in its target markets. Excel is an unsurpassed business analysis tool that only competes with itself. Visio - enough said. I don't particularly care about Access, but it should be noted that it no longer uses JET as its DB engine by default and switched to MSDE.
Further integration with Sharepoint creates further value. OpenOffice is great for simple needs. The needs that we have to support are a lot more complex. I spend two to three weeks training appropriate users on advanced features of Office. Ultimately, it all boils down to training and once the users are proficient, we see a sharp drop in tickets related to these technologies.