They are hiring either up to two warm bodies per school to deal with P2P rules enforcement? This is assuming a school that pays one guy $100k/year, or two guys for $50k/year. Hell, make it three, the manager for $50K, two worker bees for $25K.
I graduated more than a decade ago, and my campus had about 10,000 students. Even back then two people would not be able to do jack squat. Two guys could maybe handle this kind of gig at a faculty level, but campus wide?
Branch it, then the branch is a different project, still under BSD.
Do whatever you want with it, the BSD license allows the members of your old project to pick up your changes. You are no longer contributing to the original project, which allows you to claim that you are respecting the NDA. The community benefits from the BSD license exactly as your employer is.
My old command had the tendency to place their regional facilities hidden under plain sight. If you look around Meade long enough you'll find at least one of "ours," which isn't what it seems to be, and its funny bits either blurred or blanked out.
The ones at my training barracks in Georgia were interesting. You can clearly see the sidewalks, yet the tops of the buildings are white rectangles. and our training building has the exact kind of blurring/white-ing out as the live facilities elsewhere.
Same here, there's a training period of a few minutes while you learn how to hold it without hitting the page turner buttons by accident but that's about it. The rest is pure joy.
I had secretly planned to wait until v2 to buy our second Kindle and come up with some kind of lame excuse to take over the new device and give the old one to my wife, but it looks like it is going to be the other way around, if v2 is the one available when we purchase the second unit, it goes to her and I'll keep the v1 device.
I like to check out through google maps places I used to be stationed at while in the US Army over a decade ago, and I can clearly see how most roofs are showed as white rectangles, and antenna pads are whited out so you can't see in which direction they point. This is on both training facilities and in active duty stations.
In the case of a medevac heliport all you can see is whited out taxi areas and pads, while at the same level of detail in a civilian facility you can easily follow the lines painted on the surface.
A few things I learned from my colorful career as a programmer:
1. Attention to detail is a life or death skill.
2. If you ever get stuck figuring something out, once you do fix it, write yourself a small blog entry about it.
3. Regardless of how weird the error looks, it happened to somebody else before you. Google it, I can assure you plenty of people before you wrote about it.
4. Don't rush. You are s new programmer, it is expected that you will need a little more time to get things done. Play that to your advantage.
5. Every successful programmer I know has very solid fundamentals. The fundamentals are critical, one of the most prized skills of a really good senior programmer is the ability to pick up new languages with not too much effort. Over the years I have noticed that every single shitty programmer I have run across had weak fundamentals and was instead focused in knowing just one language/platform/whatever.
6. Learn the code macro capabilities of your platform's most common IDE or editor. Almost every major IDE, and all of the legendary "programmer" text editors, have this functionality. BBEdit allows you to write very powerful scriptlets in many scripting languages, VS.net has a feature called code snippets that is a fantastic time saver. EMACS has so much stuff that many see it as almost an operating system.
7. Learn regular expressions now, it is a skill that pays off immediately.
8. Learn proper ANSI SQL, it will make it much easier to switch between major RDBMS platforms.
9. Don't worry if your "lead" apparently knows less about programming than you do. Sometimes your lead knows more but is drowning on non-programming work, some other times it's going to be a programmer that wasn't good enough as a programmer but it is somewhat usable as a first line supervisor. Or somebody's cousin.
10. People love to pin problems on the programmer. Learn the politics of the game, there are subtle ways to protect yourself and deflect that kind of thing.
11. Embrace Goddess Caffeine.
12. Try to understand your customer. Mot all customers are dumbasses, and once they like you, they keep asking for you which is nice. When the customer is at ease with the programmer, the project manager can relax a little bit.
13. Every time you are about to say "it can't be done," give it another minute, see if you can turn that around into "that won't work, but there's a way around it..."
Yup, and as early as 2002 Siemens was demonstrating a bus in Arlington, Virginia that uses the same principle. It was basically a track-less tram with a driver override. The vehicle (which btw, was amazing) drove by itself and auto-detected its stops, red lights, hazards, but it had a driver. If the driver touched the controls it would override the automatic operationg.
I have also been buying from mwave.com for about ten years. Very consistent buying experience, the prices are always good and they don't play games with shipping.
I get them for my own domains, for domains I handle for granny types that get scared at the slightest mention of anything technical, then I have to hear the complaints from my paranoid customers wondering how is it possible for some third party to find their mailing address.
Then on top of that, the ones that complain that I am the one scamming them, trying to up their renewal pricing.
By the way, we also get sales calls, and catalogs addressed to "domain holder, whatever.com" all the time.
The privacy protection for WHOIS is a necessary evil. I am tired of getting letters from the "Domain Registry of America" telling me that I need to renew my domains, usually at triple of what I actually charge my own customers. With privacy protection in place, this kind of scam dies.
I have zero knowledge of what any spammers may or not have done while customers of DirectI, but my personal, first hand experience is that this is a company that has never let me down in over four years, have always been prompt with their technical and billing support and have been nothing but pure joy to deal with.
and I really enjoyed Jules Verne. The Asimov short stories are really good and not as convoluted as Foundation.
Asimov's robot series are also pretty simple unless you try to make them fit into the big picture, then it turns into a huge headache. I still remember throwing Prelude to Foundation across the room when I realized that it connected to some other Asimov books I always assumed to be isolated.
The litmus test for when a kid is ready for Asimov is to let him read "The Last Question" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Question).
If the kid goes "uh, whoa" at the end of the story, then he is ready for Asimov.
If he can't figure it out, then he isn't ready.
If he goes "this is bullshit, what a bullshit ending!" then there's nothing for you to worry about, hand him some Philip K. Dick and see what happens.
We use roles for almost everything (machine.dev.company.com, machine.staging.company.com, etc.), but that doesn't stop us from giving the machines additional entries with easier to remember names. My colleague that runs IT here likes Winnie the Pooh, so all of the servers have at least one entry that names it as a Winnie the Pooh character.
It was annoying when I started working here (at my previous job the servers were named after Dilbert characters), but since I don't run IT I don't really care what he names them.
Apple doesn't forbid you from providing your own upgrades. Anyone that has been around Macs for more than a few months knows where to order the exact memory sticks that they use for each model, at a fraction of the cost.
The 3GB upgrade for my Mac Book Pro was $99 including shipping, Apple wanted $300 or so for the upgrade. This is not an equivalent upgrade, this is the exact memory stick model that Apple was trying to sell me. And it is a customer allowed upgrade, so it does not affect my warranty coverage.
In the past it was not possible to upgrade the hard drives for Apple laptops, nowadays the cases are designed so the hard disk is easy to remove.
It is not a ripoff, Apple is not in the business of selling at cut throat margins by selling volume. They are in the business of selling premium items at a steep markup. It is just one of thousands of businesses in this country that operates the same way.
Go to your local Target and see how some 19" HDTVs are $400 while others cost twice as much. Price can't be the only criteria. There's a reason why a Sony HDTV costs a hell of a lot more than an Olevia.
You have a reselling account with a wholesaler that is fully accredited by ICANN. Their system allows you to run your own version of their site with your branding and domain name. What they charge you for a domain is a hell of a lot less than what you would get from NetSol, GoDaddy usually advertises domains under cost but with hooks to other products to make up the difference (hint: anyone selling you a.com for under $7, and letting you pay with a credit card, is probably losing money on every domain).
The restrictions vary with each TLD,.com and.net are usually a free for all, and I have never seen any kind of enforcement for.org. They do have rules about who gets to register a.us domain. Each TLD has its own pricing, so for example right now.info domains are $3.99 retail, while.com/.net/.org only change prices when the wholesaler's price is increased (usually once a year, less than 10% increase).
Another restriction I know of is whenever a new TLD is launched. They run a pre-registration campaign, then a quiet period where they figure out who had unique requests (instant sale) and who has to compete because more than one person asked for the same domain. This all happens before the TLD launches, once it is up and running then it is just one more TLD available for you to pick when buying a domain.
If you have a question, just email me, today there were about a dozen that read this thread and were asking me the same questions.
Well, yeah. This was an arrangement between that employee and our boss. I still ended up grabbing two KVM switches to redo the server room as soon as I got the budget for it.
I think it was three 14" monitors, plus the clunker that became the Smoothwall. Sometimes we would freak out because we forgot the Smoothwall was there, it takes the brain a split second to realize that had the damn thing died, the whole company (15) would have been whining about how "the internets were broken."
You sir are the perfect candidate to own a micro domain registrar.
I got mine about four years ago. I was frustrated with both NetSol ($$$$), GoDaddy (liked to play cat and mouse games with their customers) and the many hosts that included free domain names with terrible strings attached. A reseller web hosting account was $15/month (after four years they just raised it to $20), and a registrar account with an Indian domain wholesaler was free.
On day one I was able to sell domains for under $10 and still make money in every transaction. My then boss immediately stopped using NeSol, so as each of his 20+ domains needed a renewal, he transferred them to me. My friends took notice, so every single one moved his domains with me.
As I kept selling domains, the registrar moved me up in their sales tier, every time shaving a few cents off the wholesale price for each domain. I did not get greedy, every time I got a cut, I shaved my prices a little bit.
I call it my micro registrar company because we are talking just a few hundred domains scattered across 30 or so customers. But they love me because whenever something goes wrong, all they have to do is either IM, email me or even call me, and they get much better support than what they would get from NetSol or GoDaddy. In the rare case that I actually need the help of the wholesalers, their turnaround is pretty decent, and they are extremely polite and professional.
I am not saying that everything is perfect, or that it is a piece of cake, but it does not take a lot of work to make it happen. At least two of my friends liked it enough that they made their own micro registrars too, and as far as I know they are happy with it.
As for what the GoDaddy asshat did, it is at the very least a breach of trust. If one of my customers asks me to check a few domains for her and she tells me she wants to think about it, I am not going to buy them for myself and then ask her for more money, that's just wrong.
"Old crappy hardware" is not an exaggeration. At my previous job one of the employees was cleaning his basement and found a handful of old monitors, so he sold them to the boss/owner for $100, to use them in the server room. He also threw in his very first PC, an old clunker piece of crap he considered worthless.
We burned a Smoothwall CD, booted it up and 15 minutes later we had a basic firewall that for all I know it is still up and running. It still took us a few days to go over some weird nuisances (for example, the freebie version was a bit harder to setup with multiple external IPs) but the basic functionality was a no brainer, and you couldn't tell that it was running pn a very old PC.
I have had mine for about four years, and I started mostly because of the same reason. I needed a way to not spend too much of my personal time helping my friends deal with crappy web hosts and horrible domain registrars.
$15/month got me a reseller account with a very very nice host. When I was just their customer they treated me like royalty, I love their service. The $15 bought me space, bandwidth and access to WHM, the admin side of Cpanel. I was free to slice it up any way I wanted, and each of my customers would have their own cpanel.
The smart ones knew how to install whatever they wanted without the cpanel automation.
The rest were self reliant enough so cpanel was actually useful.
One of two idiots just couldn't pay attention if their lives depended on it, so it wouldn't matter which method they chose.
The second problem was domain names. Almost everyone was sick of the Netsol prices, but most got burned buying discounted domains elsewhere. Almost by accident I ran into a small domain wholesaler based in India, the reseller account was free so I decided to give them a try.
They are fantastic, four years later and hundreds of domain names purchased and NEVER a problem that could be blamed on them. Every single problem we have had could be traced back to a bad discount registrar trying to screw a customer out of transferring out.
The main problem with doing this is that customer support does take time. I made a point of always being available to anyone that used my services. I was always willing to IM or talk on the phone regardless of how stupid the issue was. Because of it my attrition rate is literally nonexistent.
By "accident" my previous boss overheard that I had my own domain registrar, and that my domains were less than $10 instead of the $35 he was paying.
Overnight I had nailed a 30+ domain customer.
The funny thing is that my hosting provider kept increasing the quotas for my plan, but kept the price frozen. That means I still pay my $15, but now I have 10x the disk space and at least 100x the bandwidth I started with 4 years ago. This allows me to be generous when a customer runs over bandwidth and I let it go "just this time."
They feel like I did them a favor, when all I did was use up a tiny bit of the extra capacity that was not drawing revenue.
Do I make money out of this? It pays itself, and I get some extra cash left. Many times friends ask me about cheap hosting for a family member, so I usually sell them the domain name and give them a small hosting account for free. If I botch something, I give them extra hosting, if it was a BIG screw up I give them a free domain (I don't remember giving away more than 2-3 domains in the past 4 years).
I also play with the allowances just to see how people react to it. For example, I may set a basic account so it has up to 5 parked domains (these point to the root of the account), 5 add-on domains (these are stand-alone within the account), etc. This costs me nothing but when they ask nice I say "just because you are a good customer..." and bump it up to 10.
Then there are the miscreants. I had one customer overseas, I have no idea where he came from but he immediately bought the biggest plan I had, which was expensive and ate 25% of my resources (and I was not overselling, he DID get 25%). A week later his site auto-shut down due to bandwidth use.
He came back to complain, I explained to him what he had done. He asked how much. I honestly wanted him to go away, so I offered him to temporarily bump him by 1GB for the rest of the month for $100.
He said yes, and paid on the spot.
Less than a week later he was back. Same deal. Another $100.
$300 later he moved his site elsewhere and I never heard from him.
Another customer, also overseas, was good for about 5 domains per year and maybe $200/year worth of websites. The problem is that she IM'ed constantly, and for stupid crap. Every week she would reinstall what
I actually ordered two Mac Book Pros 15" with the glossy option and both arrived with the matte screen. I was mad as hell for about a week since I did not want to go through the trouble of exchanging them.
Now? Now I am glad the mistake was made. It has to be aggravating to try to get any work done that involves color matching while using one of those glossy screens. The coworker that was assigned the second MBP is yet to complain about the matte screen and it's been exactly one year since we have been using these two new laptops.
A real engineer would not be an asset to a terror-seeking team. If it is terror driven by religion, I can guarantee you that the engineer will always be the odd man out that won't want to stick to the rules, be it scheduling of prayers or that pork rinds are not acceptable, etc.
What you want is a sleeper. You find the right kind of young recruit that will make a good engineering student. Indoctrinate first, engineering education later. If you try to indoctrinate an engineer you will probably end up losing your own religion over the ordeal. --
The easiest way is to break your users into four groups:
1. The hopeless. The nice ones are actually thrilled when you can take some of your very busy time to deal with their problem.
2. The middle of the road. Many of these people are more than capable to turn into power users, they simply are too busy or just not interested. They are usually good about cooperating with IT because they see these problems as a distraction from whatever their job happens to be.
3. The ones that think that they are power users. These are more dangerous than a real computer illiterate moron. They know everything and will not hesitate to wipe their asses with your IT procedures under general principles. They also work behind your back, giving your users contradicting advice that creates confusion and resentment later. You'll spend an afternoon carefully crafting your business case for buying four brand new whatevers, for example, Mac Book Pros. At the same time, these idiots go behind your back and whisper into the right ear that Mac Book Pros are overpriced, that Mac Books will do fine. The purchase goes for the cheaper item, and when bad things happen, they will blame you regardless, while the weasela keep a low profile.
4. The real power users. These are the only ones that you can trust to do most of the management, more because not only they display the knowledge and experience, but also a healthy level of restraint. This is the kind of guy that knows what he is doing but won't mess with the equipment simply because he is bored. After all, he is busy enough doing his own job, no time to do yours unless he understands it to be a honest emergency.
The best combination I have seen so far was at a previous job during the dot com years. They didn't trust anyone, but once they figured out if you were not dangerous, they would yield control little by little. I was running all of the programmers in the company, and from early programmers and IT got along like thieves. As each new programmer got hired, we pretty much threatened to kick their asses if they did anything to antagonize the IT folks. It worked, as a norm my team's IT requests were handled faster and with less hassle than some other group full of prima donnas that treated the IT folks as if they were scum.
Engineering school was hell (U. of PR. Mayaguez for me). Most of my Circadian rhythm got shot to hell while studying there. Most of our professors spoke English as a second language, which was a hoot because so did we.
There was only one guy teaching intro to engineering materials, he was Indian, educated in England and had been teaching in Puerto Rico for over 20 years. The result? Handouts were written in british english (we were taught American English as a second language) yet he taught all of his classes in very broken Spanish with an Indian accent.
The computer labs were more or less modern, but we only had dot matrix printers (this is 1987-1992) so the only way to be sure we would have a clean printout was to carry our own ribbon. Plotters were in short supply unless you knew the right people, I got lucky because my work-study job was to run one of the two CAD labs.
Scheduling was a mess. On top of the very precious few hours of sleep, there was always one critical engineering course that only started very early in the morning, usually before 8 AM. Tests were always in the evening, usually without a time limit.
Those were some of the best years of my life, but I am glad that is over.
1. Do you want to be a manager or a technical lead? If you are in true management you won't be able to put as much time into the nitty gritty, some geeks will find this distressing. A technical lead position has a leadership component but you would still have to get your hands dirty. If you play it right, you can take your pick of the most challenging or interesting work as a way to lead by example.
2. Can you handle stress well? If you can't, don't bother because management is not for you.
3. How are your political skills? As a manager you are doing many things: directing a group of people, exchanging resources with other departments, little turf wars, big turf wars, etc.
4. Are you able to look a person in the eye and order him/her to do something you know he/she won't like? What about asking the person to work unpaid overtime when you know that your employee would rather be at his precious snowflake's thanksgiving play? Managers get to make these decisions, many times knowing well that there is an obvious disruption of the employee's personal life.
5. Are you able to work a 9:00 AM - 5:30 PM work day with a 1.5 hour (working) lunch, knowing half your team is pulling 15 hours day for its third week in a row, weekends included?
6. What would you do if you get pulled into your division VP's office and asked to reduce your workforce by one warm body every 90 days over a 9-month period? Laying off employees, many of which used to be your own coworkers, is extremely hard.
7. Would you be able to draw the line and move on with firing an employee that doesn't measure up to your standards? Laying off people is really hard, but nowhere as hard as firing a person for cause.
8. Are you a problem solver? If you are a real problem solver, you will be sucked into "fire fighting" drills (at a previous job each of us managers actually had a toy fireman's helmet). This is an easy way to get fast tracked even higher, but it also means you lose time you should have spent taking care of your own people and dealing with your own deliverables.
9. Are you a territorial person? Each manager has his own little turf to share with friends and defend from intruders. Some managers are easier to deal in regards to this than others.
10. Are you willing to act as a shit shield for your team? One of the most important jobs of a manager is to protect his/her team so they can get their jobs done with as little external disruption as possible. Think of your past bosses and try to remember which ones were more respected, the ones that protected their people (within reason) or the ones that fed them to the wolves at the first chance?
11. Can you play golf? Regardless of sex, golf is a great way to get together with your team or other managers at your level. If the weather is nice you can schedule your meeting late in the afternoon and run it while playing 9 holes. There's bound to be a cheap course at a reasonable distance. We used to sneak out of Bethesda to play at River Road, a municipal course in Potomac. It was very nice and dirt cheap.
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Where do I send my resume to?
They are hiring either up to two warm bodies per school to deal with P2P rules enforcement? This is assuming a school that pays one guy $100k/year, or two guys for $50k/year. Hell, make it three, the manager for $50K, two worker bees for $25K.
I graduated more than a decade ago, and my campus had about 10,000 students. Even back then two people would not be able to do jack squat. Two guys could maybe handle this kind of gig at a faculty level, but campus wide?
I just did the same experiment. It really is as if I trained myself to lift the left finger a tiny little bit. Weird.
Branch it, then the branch is a different project, still under BSD.
Do whatever you want with it, the BSD license allows the members of your old project to pick up your changes. You are no longer contributing to the original project, which allows you to claim that you are respecting the NDA. The community benefits from the BSD license exactly as your employer is.
My old command had the tendency to place their regional facilities hidden under plain sight. If you look around Meade long enough you'll find at least one of "ours," which isn't what it seems to be, and its funny bits either blurred or blanked out.
The ones at my training barracks in Georgia were interesting. You can clearly see the sidewalks, yet the tops of the buildings are white rectangles. and our training building has the exact kind of blurring/white-ing out as the live facilities elsewhere.
Same here, there's a training period of a few minutes while you learn how to hold it without hitting the page turner buttons by accident but that's about it. The rest is pure joy.
I had secretly planned to wait until v2 to buy our second Kindle and come up with some kind of lame excuse to take over the new device and give the old one to my wife, but it looks like it is going to be the other way around, if v2 is the one available when we purchase the second unit, it goes to her and I'll keep the v1 device.
Exactly.
I like to check out through google maps places I used to be stationed at while in the US Army over a decade ago, and I can clearly see how most roofs are showed as white rectangles, and antenna pads are whited out so you can't see in which direction they point. This is on both training facilities and in active duty stations.
In the case of a medevac heliport all you can see is whited out taxi areas and pads, while at the same level of detail in a civilian facility you can easily follow the lines painted on the surface.
This has been going on for years, nothing new.
A few things I learned from my colorful career as a programmer:
1. Attention to detail is a life or death skill.
2. If you ever get stuck figuring something out, once you do fix it, write yourself a small blog entry about it.
3. Regardless of how weird the error looks, it happened to somebody else before you. Google it, I can assure you plenty of people before you wrote about it.
4. Don't rush. You are s new programmer, it is expected that you will need a little more time to get things done. Play that to your advantage.
5. Every successful programmer I know has very solid fundamentals. The fundamentals are critical, one of the most prized skills of a really good senior programmer is the ability to pick up new languages with not too much effort. Over the years I have noticed that every single shitty programmer I have run across had weak fundamentals and was instead focused in knowing just one language/platform/whatever.
6. Learn the code macro capabilities of your platform's most common IDE or editor. Almost every major IDE, and all of the legendary "programmer" text editors, have this functionality. BBEdit allows you to write very powerful scriptlets in many scripting languages, VS.net has a feature called code snippets that is a fantastic time saver. EMACS has so much stuff that many see it as almost an operating system.
7. Learn regular expressions now, it is a skill that pays off immediately.
8. Learn proper ANSI SQL, it will make it much easier to switch between major RDBMS platforms.
9. Don't worry if your "lead" apparently knows less about programming than you do. Sometimes your lead knows more but is drowning on non-programming work, some other times it's going to be a programmer that wasn't good enough as a programmer but it is somewhat usable as a first line supervisor. Or somebody's cousin.
10. People love to pin problems on the programmer. Learn the politics of the game, there are subtle ways to protect yourself and deflect that kind of thing.
11. Embrace Goddess Caffeine.
12. Try to understand your customer. Mot all customers are dumbasses, and once they like you, they keep asking for you which is nice. When the customer is at ease with the programmer, the project manager can relax a little bit.
13. Every time you are about to say "it can't be done," give it another minute, see if you can turn that around into "that won't work, but there's a way around it ..."
Yup, and as early as 2002 Siemens was demonstrating a bus in Arlington, Virginia that uses the same principle. It was basically a track-less tram with a driver override. The vehicle (which btw, was amazing) drove by itself and auto-detected its stops, red lights, hazards, but it had a driver. If the driver touched the controls it would override the automatic operationg.
I have also been buying from mwave.com for about ten years. Very consistent buying experience, the prices are always good and they don't play games with shipping.
I get them for my own domains, for domains I handle for granny types that get scared at the slightest mention of anything technical, then I have to hear the complaints from my paranoid customers wondering how is it possible for some third party to find their mailing address.
Then on top of that, the ones that complain that I am the one scamming them, trying to up their renewal pricing.
By the way, we also get sales calls, and catalogs addressed to "domain holder, whatever.com" all the time.
It *is* a pain in the ass.
Disclaimer: DirectI is the wholesaler for my micro registrar company, http://gopedro.net/ , which I have discussed here in Slashdot in the past.
Yesterday DirectI issued a rebuttal to these accusations:
http://blog.resellerclub.com/2008/09/04/our-official-response-to-malicious-reports-which-falsely-implicate-the-directi-group/
The privacy protection for WHOIS is a necessary evil. I am tired of getting letters from the "Domain Registry of America" telling me that I need to renew my domains, usually at triple of what I actually charge my own customers. With privacy protection in place, this kind of scam dies.
I have zero knowledge of what any spammers may or not have done while customers of DirectI, but my personal, first hand experience is that this is a company that has never let me down in over four years, have always been prompt with their technical and billing support and have been nothing but pure joy to deal with.
and I really enjoyed Jules Verne. The Asimov short stories are really good and not as convoluted as Foundation.
Asimov's robot series are also pretty simple unless you try to make them fit into the big picture, then it turns into a huge headache. I still remember throwing Prelude to Foundation across the room when I realized that it connected to some other Asimov books I always assumed to be isolated.
The litmus test for when a kid is ready for Asimov is to let him read "The Last Question" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Question).
If the kid goes "uh, whoa" at the end of the story, then he is ready for Asimov.
If he can't figure it out, then he isn't ready.
If he goes "this is bullshit, what a bullshit ending!" then there's nothing for you to worry about, hand him some Philip K. Dick and see what happens.
We use roles for almost everything (machine.dev.company.com, machine.staging.company.com, etc.), but that doesn't stop us from giving the machines additional entries with easier to remember names. My colleague that runs IT here likes Winnie the Pooh, so all of the servers have at least one entry that names it as a Winnie the Pooh character.
It was annoying when I started working here (at my previous job the servers were named after Dilbert characters), but since I don't run IT I don't really care what he names them.
Apple doesn't forbid you from providing your own upgrades. Anyone that has been around Macs for more than a few months knows where to order the exact memory sticks that they use for each model, at a fraction of the cost.
The 3GB upgrade for my Mac Book Pro was $99 including shipping, Apple wanted $300 or so for the upgrade. This is not an equivalent upgrade, this is the exact memory stick model that Apple was trying to sell me. And it is a customer allowed upgrade, so it does not affect my warranty coverage.
In the past it was not possible to upgrade the hard drives for Apple laptops, nowadays the cases are designed so the hard disk is easy to remove.
It is not a ripoff, Apple is not in the business of selling at cut throat margins by selling volume. They are in the business of selling premium items at a steep markup. It is just one of thousands of businesses in this country that operates the same way.
Go to your local Target and see how some 19" HDTVs are $400 while others cost twice as much. Price can't be the only criteria. There's a reason why a Sony HDTV costs a hell of a lot more than an Olevia.
You have a reselling account with a wholesaler that is fully accredited by ICANN. Their system allows you to run your own version of their site with your branding and domain name. What they charge you for a domain is a hell of a lot less than what you would get from NetSol, GoDaddy usually advertises domains under cost but with hooks to other products to make up the difference (hint: anyone selling you a .com for under $7, and letting you pay with a credit card, is probably losing money on every domain).
The restrictions vary with each TLD, .com and .net are usually a free for all, and I have never seen any kind of enforcement for .org. They do have rules about who gets to register a .us domain. Each TLD has its own pricing, so for example right now .info domains are $3.99 retail, while .com/.net/.org only change prices when the wholesaler's price is increased (usually once a year, less than 10% increase).
Another restriction I know of is whenever a new TLD is launched. They run a pre-registration campaign, then a quiet period where they figure out who had unique requests (instant sale) and who has to compete because more than one person asked for the same domain. This all happens before the TLD launches, once it is up and running then it is just one more TLD available for you to pick when buying a domain.
If you have a question, just email me, today there were about a dozen that read this thread and were asking me the same questions.
Well, yeah. This was an arrangement between that employee and our boss. I still ended up grabbing two KVM switches to redo the server room as soon as I got the budget for it.
I think it was three 14" monitors, plus the clunker that became the Smoothwall. Sometimes we would freak out because we forgot the Smoothwall was there, it takes the brain a split second to realize that had the damn thing died, the whole company (15) would have been whining about how "the internets were broken."
You sir are the perfect candidate to own a micro domain registrar.
I got mine about four years ago. I was frustrated with both NetSol ($$$$), GoDaddy (liked to play cat and mouse games with their customers) and the many hosts that included free domain names with terrible strings attached. A reseller web hosting account was $15/month (after four years they just raised it to $20), and a registrar account with an Indian domain wholesaler was free.
On day one I was able to sell domains for under $10 and still make money in every transaction. My then boss immediately stopped using NeSol, so as each of his 20+ domains needed a renewal, he transferred them to me. My friends took notice, so every single one moved his domains with me.
As I kept selling domains, the registrar moved me up in their sales tier, every time shaving a few cents off the wholesale price for each domain. I did not get greedy, every time I got a cut, I shaved my prices a little bit.
I call it my micro registrar company because we are talking just a few hundred domains scattered across 30 or so customers. But they love me because whenever something goes wrong, all they have to do is either IM, email me or even call me, and they get much better support than what they would get from NetSol or GoDaddy. In the rare case that I actually need the help of the wholesalers, their turnaround is pretty decent, and they are extremely polite and professional.
I am not saying that everything is perfect, or that it is a piece of cake, but it does not take a lot of work to make it happen. At least two of my friends liked it enough that they made their own micro registrars too, and as far as I know they are happy with it.
As for what the GoDaddy asshat did, it is at the very least a breach of trust. If one of my customers asks me to check a few domains for her and she tells me she wants to think about it, I am not going to buy them for myself and then ask her for more money, that's just wrong.
"Old crappy hardware" is not an exaggeration. At my previous job one of the employees was cleaning his basement and found a handful of old monitors, so he sold them to the boss/owner for $100, to use them in the server room. He also threw in his very first PC, an old clunker piece of crap he considered worthless.
We burned a Smoothwall CD, booted it up and 15 minutes later we had a basic firewall that for all I know it is still up and running. It still took us a few days to go over some weird nuisances (for example, the freebie version was a bit harder to setup with multiple external IPs) but the basic functionality was a no brainer, and you couldn't tell that it was running pn a very old PC.
I have had mine for about four years, and I started mostly because of the same reason. I needed a way to not spend too much of my personal time helping my friends deal with crappy web hosts and horrible domain registrars.
..." and bump it up to 10.
$15/month got me a reseller account with a very very nice host. When I was just their customer they treated me like royalty, I love their service. The $15 bought me space, bandwidth and access to WHM, the admin side of Cpanel. I was free to slice it up any way I wanted, and each of my customers would have their own cpanel.
The smart ones knew how to install whatever they wanted without the cpanel automation.
The rest were self reliant enough so cpanel was actually useful.
One of two idiots just couldn't pay attention if their lives depended on it, so it wouldn't matter which method they chose.
The second problem was domain names. Almost everyone was sick of the Netsol prices, but most got burned buying discounted domains elsewhere. Almost by accident I ran into a small domain wholesaler based in India, the reseller account was free so I decided to give them a try.
They are fantastic, four years later and hundreds of domain names purchased and NEVER a problem that could be blamed on them. Every single problem we have had could be traced back to a bad discount registrar trying to screw a customer out of transferring out.
The main problem with doing this is that customer support does take time. I made a point of always being available to anyone that used my services. I was always willing to IM or talk on the phone regardless of how stupid the issue was. Because of it my attrition rate is literally nonexistent.
By "accident" my previous boss overheard that I had my own domain registrar, and that my domains were less than $10 instead of the $35 he was paying.
Overnight I had nailed a 30+ domain customer.
The funny thing is that my hosting provider kept increasing the quotas for my plan, but kept the price frozen. That means I still pay my $15, but now I have 10x the disk space and at least 100x the bandwidth I started with 4 years ago. This allows me to be generous when a customer runs over bandwidth and I let it go "just this time."
They feel like I did them a favor, when all I did was use up a tiny bit of the extra capacity that was not drawing revenue.
Do I make money out of this? It pays itself, and I get some extra cash left. Many times friends ask me about cheap hosting for a family member, so I usually sell them the domain name and give them a small hosting account for free. If I botch something, I give them extra hosting, if it was a BIG screw up I give them a free domain (I don't remember giving away more than 2-3 domains in the past 4 years).
I also play with the allowances just to see how people react to it. For example, I may set a basic account so it has up to 5 parked domains (these point to the root of the account), 5 add-on domains (these are stand-alone within the account), etc. This costs me nothing but when they ask nice I say "just because you are a good customer
Then there are the miscreants. I had one customer overseas, I have no idea where he came from but he immediately bought the biggest plan I had, which was expensive and ate 25% of my resources (and I was not overselling, he DID get 25%). A week later his site auto-shut down due to bandwidth use.
He came back to complain, I explained to him what he had done. He asked how much. I honestly wanted him to go away, so I offered him to temporarily bump him by 1GB for the rest of the month for $100.
He said yes, and paid on the spot.
Less than a week later he was back. Same deal. Another $100.
$300 later he moved his site elsewhere and I never heard from him.
Another customer, also overseas, was good for about 5 domains per year and maybe $200/year worth of websites. The problem is that she IM'ed constantly, and for stupid crap. Every week she would reinstall what
I actually ordered two Mac Book Pros 15" with the glossy option and both arrived with the matte screen. I was mad as hell for about a week since I did not want to go through the trouble of exchanging them.
Now? Now I am glad the mistake was made. It has to be aggravating to try to get any work done that involves color matching while using one of those glossy screens. The coworker that was assigned the second MBP is yet to complain about the matte screen and it's been exactly one year since we have been using these two new laptops.
A real engineer would not be an asset to a terror-seeking team. If it is terror driven by religion, I can guarantee you that the engineer will always be the odd man out that won't want to stick to the rules, be it scheduling of prayers or that pork rinds are not acceptable, etc.
What you want is a sleeper. You find the right kind of young recruit that will make a good engineering student. Indoctrinate first, engineering education later. If you try to indoctrinate an engineer you will probably end up losing your own religion over the ordeal.
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Absolutely not.
The easiest way is to break your users into four groups:
1. The hopeless. The nice ones are actually thrilled when you can take some of your very busy time to deal with their problem.
2. The middle of the road. Many of these people are more than capable to turn into power users, they simply are too busy or just not interested. They are usually good about cooperating with IT because they see these problems as a distraction from whatever their job happens to be.
3. The ones that think that they are power users. These are more dangerous than a real computer illiterate moron. They know everything and will not hesitate to wipe their asses with your IT procedures under general principles. They also work behind your back, giving your users contradicting advice that creates confusion and resentment later. You'll spend an afternoon carefully crafting your business case for buying four brand new whatevers, for example, Mac Book Pros. At the same time, these idiots go behind your back and whisper into the right ear that Mac Book Pros are overpriced, that Mac Books will do fine. The purchase goes for the cheaper item, and when bad things happen, they will blame you regardless, while the weasela keep a low profile.
4. The real power users. These are the only ones that you can trust to do most of the management, more because not only they display the knowledge and experience, but also a healthy level of restraint. This is the kind of guy that knows what he is doing but won't mess with the equipment simply because he is bored. After all, he is busy enough doing his own job, no time to do yours unless he understands it to be a honest emergency.
The best combination I have seen so far was at a previous job during the dot com years. They didn't trust anyone, but once they figured out if you were not dangerous, they would yield control little by little. I was running all of the programmers in the company, and from early programmers and IT got along like thieves. As each new programmer got hired, we pretty much threatened to kick their asses if they did anything to antagonize the IT folks. It worked, as a norm my team's IT requests were handled faster and with less hassle than some other group full of prima donnas that treated the IT folks as if they were scum.
Engineering school was hell (U. of PR. Mayaguez for me). Most of my Circadian rhythm got shot to hell while studying there. Most of our professors spoke English as a second language, which was a hoot because so did we.
There was only one guy teaching intro to engineering materials, he was Indian, educated in England and had been teaching in Puerto Rico for over 20 years. The result? Handouts were written in british english (we were taught American English as a second language) yet he taught all of his classes in very broken Spanish with an Indian accent.
The computer labs were more or less modern, but we only had dot matrix printers (this is 1987-1992) so the only way to be sure we would have a clean printout was to carry our own ribbon. Plotters were in short supply unless you knew the right people, I got lucky because my work-study job was to run one of the two CAD labs.
Scheduling was a mess. On top of the very precious few hours of sleep, there was always one critical engineering course that only started very early in the morning, usually before 8 AM. Tests were always in the evening, usually without a time limit.
Those were some of the best years of my life, but I am glad that is over.
1. Do you want to be a manager or a technical lead? If you are in true management you won't be able to put as much time into the nitty gritty, some geeks will find this distressing. A technical lead position has a leadership component but you would still have to get your hands dirty. If you play it right, you can take your pick of the most challenging or interesting work as a way to lead by example.
2. Can you handle stress well? If you can't, don't bother because management is not for you.
3. How are your political skills? As a manager you are doing many things: directing a group of people, exchanging resources with other departments, little turf wars, big turf wars, etc.
4. Are you able to look a person in the eye and order him/her to do something you know he/she won't like? What about asking the person to work unpaid overtime when you know that your employee would rather be at his precious snowflake's thanksgiving play? Managers get to make these decisions, many times knowing well that there is an obvious disruption of the employee's personal life.
5. Are you able to work a 9:00 AM - 5:30 PM work day with a 1.5 hour (working) lunch, knowing half your team is pulling 15 hours day for its third week in a row, weekends included?
6. What would you do if you get pulled into your division VP's office and asked to reduce your workforce by one warm body every 90 days over a 9-month period? Laying off employees, many of which used to be your own coworkers, is extremely hard.
7. Would you be able to draw the line and move on with firing an employee that doesn't measure up to your standards? Laying off people is really hard, but nowhere as hard as firing a person for cause.
8. Are you a problem solver? If you are a real problem solver, you will be sucked into "fire fighting" drills (at a previous job each of us managers actually had a toy fireman's helmet). This is an easy way to get fast tracked even higher, but it also means you lose time you should have spent taking care of your own people and dealing with your own deliverables.
9. Are you a territorial person? Each manager has his own little turf to share with friends and defend from intruders. Some managers are easier to deal in regards to this than others.
10. Are you willing to act as a shit shield for your team? One of the most important jobs of a manager is to protect his/her team so they can get their jobs done with as little external disruption as possible. Think of your past bosses and try to remember which ones were more respected, the ones that protected their people (within reason) or the ones that fed them to the wolves at the first chance?
11. Can you play golf? Regardless of sex, golf is a great way to get together with your team or other managers at your level. If the weather is nice you can schedule your meeting late in the afternoon and run it while playing 9 holes. There's bound to be a cheap course at a reasonable distance. We used to sneak out of Bethesda to play at River Road, a municipal course in Potomac. It was very nice and dirt cheap.