We ran into an interesting issue. Not a MS issue per se but it kind of fits.
About four years ago one of the vendors we deal heavily with decided that they could make money by selling their customers their catalog using a bloated third-party solution written for IE5.0. After several fits and starts we got the program to run pretty well as a networked app. Then IE5.5 came out, the program was broken. No pictures of the items would display. The explaination I got from the vendor was that IE5.0 used some sort of Netscape Emulator to display the graphics in the program (unfortunately the program won't run in Netscape or Moz, believe me I tried (g)). This Emulator was removed in IE5.5. So, after a few weeks of not having pictures of what our salemen are trying to order the vendor comes up with a patch... For $50 a seat. Grrrr.
Fastforward to today. SP2 breaks the same part of the program. No graphics displaying. Of course now they're offering the patch for $60 a seat.
This is just one problem we've had. We can't roll out SP2 until our vendors catch up.
I've done this before with regular telemarketers when I had time to kill but this person is so polar-opposite of me on the issues that I would just feel sooo dirty by the time I got off the phone.
Do we know where it's coming from now? Most of the telemarketing calls I get are either "blocked", "personal", "California Call", etc.
Hell, even my local state senator came up as "Unknown" on the five, yes five, times I've been called in the last eight days by her campaign.
Telemarketers I can see hiding their identity because they are the scum of the Earth but isn't the purpose of campaigning to get your name before the masses?
Hell, I'm voting for her apponent anyway. Of course as a political campaign they don't have to honor a "don't call this number again" request. They also don't care if I have a telezapper. Every time they call my response has been "nope, still voting for the other guy, like the last (x amount) of times you called". I would hope that eventually I would get off their call list (I'm registered with the other party, by the way). I guess one way to look at it after November 2nd, I will be, until the next time.:)
A few years back I was lying in bed and I could hear a carload of idiots hitting the mailboxes while driving up the road. I guess all went well until they got to my house. I heard: bang-laugh, bang-laugh, bang-laugh, bang-laugh, thud-crack-screach, then a lot of swearing. Apparently the driver was going fast enough that the fool with the bat didn't see the 15 foot evergreen growing next to my mailbox. He got a slight hit on my box, the tree got him.:)
The same thing here. My wife was glued to the set twice a day to see the re-runs, then had to watch the new shows as well. The few times I saw the show it always seemed that the Ross and Rachel characters were either breaking up or making up. It always seemed to be a different season so I assume this was a running gag.
Personally I thought that the final episode was a complete cliche, but then from what little I've seen so was the entire series.
My first thought on this was, well, there's people out there that will pay to see just about anything.
My second thought was, what was the first/. user that actually found that site actually looking for? Maybe I just haven't been around long enough but was the first link to the site a bit of self-promotion on the part of the webmaster or did one of our own actually stumble across it? If someone found it I'd hate to see the Google search that brought up that result.:)
20 miles an hour in my area (40-odd miles north of Chicago) would be an improvement. I make a pretty regular trip to CDW from my office. It's a two-mile trip and during the day one-way is about a 15 minute drive on the parking lot that is laughingly known as Route 60. Yeah, I have to drive past a mall and I get on the side streets as soon as I can but I really have to wonder where the heck all these people are driving to in the middle of the day.:) Rush hour is enough to make you pull your hair out. The thing that's really funny is my area is still considered "out in the sticks" by my friends that live closer to the city. Go figure.
Does AMD count as one of the "niche guys"? Granted, they're not as big as Intel but I've always thought of them as the chip to buy when you don't want to buy Intel.
I'm wondering if it was the IT department. From my experience a rather large percentage of people in the computer field seem to be lefties (myself included). I've been in classes and seminars where 60% of the participants have been left-handed.
I didn't see Network Admin on the list so I'm not sure what to make of this...
I'm a Network Admin who listens to and plays bass in a heavy metal band but doesn't do development. I also listen to Mozart, Beethoven, Vivaldi, and other classical music but can't imagine myself in management. I love 60's and 70's rock but am not a security professional. I also work with Linux on my own time but can't stand electronica. I do some database work but don't listen to much of what they call "indie". Finally I've had an MCP in the past but would never be caught dead listening to pop.
Yeah, I know, not a scientific survey and all.
Maybe that's why I'm an Admin, a little of this, a little of that.
I'd have to agree with you here. Especially since according to the article there's two other Saturn V's on display at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and Marshall Space Center in Alabama. If it were the only one left in existance I might be able to see spending the cash. Since this would be the third museum piece I think that the money would be better spent elsewhere.
That sort of reminds me of a problem we had back when I worked at the big M making cellphones. The plant I worked in built the transceiver for bag phones (yes, this was quite some time ago). A position that I worked for about a year was to drive seven screws that held the circuit board into the chassis. Someone figured that they could save money by buying a big honking robot to put at the position that would have seven torque-drivers and do all seven screws at the same time. They installed the 'bots on two lines with two 'bots each without ever testing the concept. On paper it looked good. In real life it never really worked. On a good day the things scrapped about 25% of the boards that went through. It was a "dumb" bot that just drove the screws, no matter if it wasn't lined up properly. Their fix to that was to have a person standing next to the machine to make sure that everything was lined up before the board went in. Then they found that boards were failing because three screws had to be screwed down first to make sure that a certian piece of the board was flush. Their fix to that was to have the person checking the boards screw in the first three screws and then let the 'bot do the other four. Eventually it was found that a person with any time at that position could do the job in a third of the time it took the machine. Eventually the machines were disconnected but they were never taken out until that line was scrapped to make room for a new production line.
I had a point when I started this message. Somthing about testing before putting something into a production environment.:)
That's what I was going to bring up. I don't know a lot of people who go to the Cubs games to actually watch the game. Wrigley Field is just one big bar/social event that happens to have a game going on. White Sox fans, on the other hand are a whole other breed. I work in my company's Chicago office. A bunch of the damn fools are driving up to Minnesota this weekend because we also have an office in "Twinkie territory" as they're calling it. I've never seen a group of Cub fans making a road trip, at least not since college.
I actually had this as a question on an exam in my college astronomy class about 12 years or so ago. The question was worded something along the lines of "Since the more powerful a telescope is the farther into the past is sees, it should be theoretically possible to build a telecope that can view the big bang.
Pretty much everyone in the class said True. The instructor marked it wrong. His explaination was that there would have been so much heat generated during the big bang that the energy wouldn't be in the visible spectrum for quite some time after the event. His idea of a trick question I guess.
I got half credit for the question only because I was taking Intro to Logic at the time and was able to "prove" that the way he worded the question was a valid logical argument (Modus Ponense I think, it's been a long time).
It doesn't suprise me. My first real tech job was at a hospital. I had more than one doctor ask me on the sly if we monitored web usage. They were usually disappointed when the answer turned out to be yes. One of my final call-outs was to fix a computer that "stopped working". The problem turned out to be the motherboard so I made a quick fix by swapping the harddrive with another unit. When I booted the system to make sure that everything was ok I found a ton of pr0n in Start\Documents. When I returned the computer the doctor happened to be in his office. He had the classic "deer in the headlights" look when he asked if I saw anything I "shouldn't have".:)
I've heard that lawyers and other professionals are up there with the worst of them but doctors? You'd think that they would be sick of looking at naked bodies all day.
In my case I live in the Chicago area, my in-laws live in Las Vegas and are on a fixed income (retired). My wife and I are expecting our first baby in a couple of months. I'm planning on doing quite a bit of taping. I'll then be editing out the boring stuff, dumping the good stuff to DVD and ship that to the in-laws. Yes, my wife and I will remember stuff but this gives her parents a chance to see the baby's important (and not so important) events that they can't always be here for.
"They also come with a great warranty, wherein I had a server replaced free of charge even though its warrant was expired (as mentioned in above post)."
Wow, I had the complete opposite experience. I had a SNAP go belly-up with three weeks left on the warranty (bad HD controller, killed two disks on the RAID5, TG for backups). I called that day to get the ball rolling. They first sent two disks out thinking that maybe two disks just happened to die at the same time. Well, that didn't work so they told me to ship the unit back for a replacement. I shipped the unit back and UPS delivered it to their receiving dock within three days (which gave me about a week left on the warranty). It was signed for by their receiving guy and everything. They promptly lost it somewhere on the dock, before entering into their system as returned. It took them about two weeks to find it. Then they tried to tell me that I had to pay for the replacement because the failed unit was delivered outside of the warranty period. I had to get UPS involved to prove that the unit was in fact delivered inside the warranty period which shouldn't have mattered anyway because the initial call was within the period (sigh). Of course they wouldn't send a replacement until they found the bad unit. Luckily I was able to restore from tape to a computer with a big drive and run from that until I had the replacement unit. I've had a couple of their units go bad and never had much luck with their tech support.
Oh, and as for "install and forget", keep your patches up to date or tech support will not talk to you. The first thing they ask is your release level. If you are not on the current release they will tell you to get up to date and then call back. Not too big of a deal because we all should know to keep up to date but not exactly "zero administration".:)
That reminds me of something that happened when I worked at Wal-Mart (yeah, yeah, I was young and they paid better than the other businesses in town willing to hire an 18 year old student so sue me).
Anyway, once a week the local "retirement home" would bring a busload of their residents in to buy odds and ends. I happened to be working the register when an old lady came through the line with nothing in her basket but the biggest tube of K-Y that we sold. I didn't think too much of it. Maybe that's something that women need when they get old. However, the very next person in line was an old guy with nothing but a 144 pack of Trojans. I was able to keep a straight face until he left, then I went in the back room and lost it.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Are you sure? All I see is a squatter...
payfornothing.com
This domain is for sale, blah. blah.
Ok, now I'm convinced. There *is* a website for everything.
We ran into an interesting issue. Not a MS issue per se but it kind of fits.
About four years ago one of the vendors we deal heavily with decided that they could make money by selling their customers their catalog using a bloated third-party solution written for IE5.0. After several fits and starts we got the program to run pretty well as a networked app. Then IE5.5 came out, the program was broken. No pictures of the items would display. The explaination I got from the vendor was that IE5.0 used some sort of Netscape Emulator to display the graphics in the program (unfortunately the program won't run in Netscape or Moz, believe me I tried (g)). This Emulator was removed in IE5.5. So, after a few weeks of not having pictures of what our salemen are trying to order the vendor comes up with a patch... For $50 a seat. Grrrr.
Fastforward to today. SP2 breaks the same part of the program. No graphics displaying. Of course now they're offering the patch for $60 a seat.
This is just one problem we've had. We can't roll out SP2 until our vendors catch up.
Running Man, the short story or the horrid movie that they made of it?
I've done this before with regular telemarketers when I had time to kill but this person is so polar-opposite of me on the issues that I would just feel sooo dirty by the time I got off the phone.
Do we know where it's coming from now? Most of the telemarketing calls I get are either "blocked", "personal", "California Call", etc.
:)
Hell, even my local state senator came up as "Unknown" on the five, yes five, times I've been called in the last eight days by her campaign.
Telemarketers I can see hiding their identity because they are the scum of the Earth but isn't the purpose of campaigning to get your name before the masses?
Hell, I'm voting for her apponent anyway. Of course as a political campaign they don't have to honor a "don't call this number again" request. They also don't care if I have a telezapper. Every time they call my response has been "nope, still voting for the other guy, like the last (x amount) of times you called". I would hope that eventually I would get off their call list (I'm registered with the other party, by the way). I guess one way to look at it after November 2nd, I will be, until the next time.
A few years back I was lying in bed and I could hear a carload of idiots hitting the mailboxes while driving up the road. I guess all went well until they got to my house. I heard: bang-laugh, bang-laugh, bang-laugh, bang-laugh, thud-crack-screach, then a lot of swearing. Apparently the driver was going fast enough that the fool with the bat didn't see the 15 foot evergreen growing next to my mailbox. He got a slight hit on my box, the tree got him. :)
The same thing here. My wife was glued to the set twice a day to see the re-runs, then had to watch the new shows as well. The few times I saw the show it always seemed that the Ross and Rachel characters were either breaking up or making up. It always seemed to be a different season so I assume this was a running gag.
Personally I thought that the final episode was a complete cliche, but then from what little I've seen so was the entire series.
Must be a female thing...
Ouch, coffee through the nose. That's the funniest thing I've read all day.
Friends had international appeal? [shudder]
My first thought on this was, well, there's people out there that will pay to see just about anything.
/. user that actually found that site actually looking for? Maybe I just haven't been around long enough but was the first link to the site a bit of self-promotion on the part of the webmaster or did one of our own actually stumble across it? If someone found it I'd hate to see the Google search that brought up that result. :)
My second thought was, what was the first
20 miles an hour in my area (40-odd miles north of Chicago) would be an improvement. I make a pretty regular trip to CDW from my office. It's a two-mile trip and during the day one-way is about a 15 minute drive on the parking lot that is laughingly known as Route 60. Yeah, I have to drive past a mall and I get on the side streets as soon as I can but I really have to wonder where the heck all these people are driving to in the middle of the day. :) Rush hour is enough to make you pull your hair out. The thing that's really funny is my area is still considered "out in the sticks" by my friends that live closer to the city. Go figure.
Does AMD count as one of the "niche guys"? Granted, they're not as big as Intel but I've always thought of them as the chip to buy when you don't want to buy Intel.
Married eh? :)
I'm wondering if it was the IT department. From my experience a rather large percentage of people in the computer field seem to be lefties (myself included). I've been in classes and seminars where 60% of the participants have been left-handed.
Just an observation.
I didn't see Network Admin on the list so I'm not sure what to make of this...
I'm a Network Admin who listens to and plays bass in a heavy metal band but doesn't do development. I also listen to Mozart, Beethoven, Vivaldi, and other classical music but can't imagine myself in management. I love 60's and 70's rock but am not a security professional. I also work with Linux on my own time but can't stand electronica. I do some database work but don't listen to much of what they call "indie". Finally I've had an MCP in the past but would never be caught dead listening to pop.
Yeah, I know, not a scientific survey and all.
Maybe that's why I'm an Admin, a little of this, a little of that.
I'd have to agree with you here. Especially since according to the article there's two other Saturn V's on display at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and Marshall Space Center in Alabama. If it were the only one left in existance I might be able to see spending the cash. Since this would be the third museum piece I think that the money would be better spent elsewhere.
"It's a small world after all..."
That sort of reminds me of a problem we had back when I worked at the big M making cellphones. The plant I worked in built the transceiver for bag phones (yes, this was quite some time ago). A position that I worked for about a year was to drive seven screws that held the circuit board into the chassis. Someone figured that they could save money by buying a big honking robot to put at the position that would have seven torque-drivers and do all seven screws at the same time. They installed the 'bots on two lines with two 'bots each without ever testing the concept. On paper it looked good. In real life it never really worked. On a good day the things scrapped about 25% of the boards that went through. It was a "dumb" bot that just drove the screws, no matter if it wasn't lined up properly. Their fix to that was to have a person standing next to the machine to make sure that everything was lined up before the board went in. Then they found that boards were failing because three screws had to be screwed down first to make sure that a certian piece of the board was flush. Their fix to that was to have the person checking the boards screw in the first three screws and then let the 'bot do the other four. Eventually it was found that a person with any time at that position could do the job in a third of the time it took the machine. Eventually the machines were disconnected but they were never taken out until that line was scrapped to make room for a new production line.
:)
I had a point when I started this message. Somthing about testing before putting something into a production environment.
That's what I was going to bring up. I don't know a lot of people who go to the Cubs games to actually watch the game. Wrigley Field is just one big bar/social event that happens to have a game going on. White Sox fans, on the other hand are a whole other breed. I work in my company's Chicago office. A bunch of the damn fools are driving up to Minnesota this weekend because we also have an office in "Twinkie territory" as they're calling it. I've never seen a group of Cub fans making a road trip, at least not since college.
I actually had this as a question on an exam in my college astronomy class about 12 years or so ago. The question was worded something along the lines of "Since the more powerful a telescope is the farther into the past is sees, it should be theoretically possible to build a telecope that can view the big bang.
Pretty much everyone in the class said True. The instructor marked it wrong. His explaination was that there would have been so much heat generated during the big bang that the energy wouldn't be in the visible spectrum for quite some time after the event. His idea of a trick question I guess.
I got half credit for the question only because I was taking Intro to Logic at the time and was able to "prove" that the way he worded the question was a valid logical argument (Modus Ponense I think, it's been a long time).
It doesn't suprise me. My first real tech job was at a hospital. I had more than one doctor ask me on the sly if we monitored web usage. They were usually disappointed when the answer turned out to be yes. One of my final call-outs was to fix a computer that "stopped working". The problem turned out to be the motherboard so I made a quick fix by swapping the harddrive with another unit. When I booted the system to make sure that everything was ok I found a ton of pr0n in Start\Documents. When I returned the computer the doctor happened to be in his office. He had the classic "deer in the headlights" look when he asked if I saw anything I "shouldn't have". :)
I've heard that lawyers and other professionals are up there with the worst of them but doctors? You'd think that they would be sick of looking at naked bodies all day.
In my case I live in the Chicago area, my in-laws live in Las Vegas and are on a fixed income (retired). My wife and I are expecting our first baby in a couple of months. I'm planning on doing quite a bit of taping. I'll then be editing out the boring stuff, dumping the good stuff to DVD and ship that to the in-laws. Yes, my wife and I will remember stuff but this gives her parents a chance to see the baby's important (and not so important) events that they can't always be here for.
"They also come with a great warranty, wherein I had a server replaced free of charge even though its warrant was expired (as mentioned in above post)."
:)
Wow, I had the complete opposite experience. I had a SNAP go belly-up with three weeks left on the warranty (bad HD controller, killed two disks on the RAID5, TG for backups). I called that day to get the ball rolling. They first sent two disks out thinking that maybe two disks just happened to die at the same time. Well, that didn't work so they told me to ship the unit back for a replacement. I shipped the unit back and UPS delivered it to their receiving dock within three days (which gave me about a week left on the warranty). It was signed for by their receiving guy and everything. They promptly lost it somewhere on the dock, before entering into their system as returned. It took them about two weeks to find it. Then they tried to tell me that I had to pay for the replacement because the failed unit was delivered outside of the warranty period. I had to get UPS involved to prove that the unit was in fact delivered inside the warranty period which shouldn't have mattered anyway because the initial call was within the period (sigh). Of course they wouldn't send a replacement until they found the bad unit. Luckily I was able to restore from tape to a computer with a big drive and run from that until I had the replacement unit. I've had a couple of their units go bad and never had much luck with their tech support.
Oh, and as for "install and forget", keep your patches up to date or tech support will not talk to you. The first thing they ask is your release level. If you are not on the current release they will tell you to get up to date and then call back. Not too big of a deal because we all should know to keep up to date but not exactly "zero administration".
That reminds me of something that happened when I worked at Wal-Mart (yeah, yeah, I was young and they paid better than the other businesses in town willing to hire an 18 year old student so sue me).
:)
Anyway, once a week the local "retirement home" would bring a busload of their residents in to buy odds and ends. I happened to be working the register when an old lady came through the line with nothing in her basket but the biggest tube of K-Y that we sold. I didn't think too much of it. Maybe that's something that women need when they get old. However, the very next person in line was an old guy with nothing but a 144 pack of Trojans. I was able to keep a straight face until he left, then I went in the back room and lost it.