I've seen places where bigwigs routinely connected their laptops to random wireless links in airports, homes or hotel rooms, then brought back a dozen viruses and worms to their company's network. You can imagine how the bigwigs liked being told that they were the cause of the damage.
If you keep your PCs patched with current security updates, and you have a decent software firewall or IDS/IPS system installed on the laptop, along with current antivirus definitions, then there should be relatively little risk of bringing something nasty back home. There's still the possibility of sniffing, but VPN software helps there, and that is still much less likely than picking up an infection.
I do have an advantage in that the company that I work for has only just turned 2 years old this month, and I was involved in designing the network and systems from about 6 months before it opened for business. Because of that I was able to build in a lot of security and automation. Still, any company that is willing to make the effort could build similar practices into their network.
I think that it often times becomes more of an issue of knowledge and ability than anything else. Lots of small shops have management that don't know anything about PCs, so a guy who can configure a Windows 2000 peer to peer network looks impressive and ends up being hired as the network admin. Either that or they contract with someone to come out and fix problems as they occur instead of hiring someone to come out and prevent them from happening in the first place. Of course, in that case management sees an obvious return on their investment, i.e., if they pay someone to come out and fix the problem, they get the problem fixed. But the ROI on having someone good on staff seems like a harder sell (because they don't know what's possible, they don't know what value having good IT people in-house can add).
As a rule of thumb, you need one full time person per 30 Windows PCs, plus one guy to cover for vacation and such. I don't know how you can keep up with a hundred Windows machines to maintain by yourself.
Nonsense. If your system is well designed and well managed, a single PC tech or admin can cover far more than 30 PCs. Where I work we are managing about 250 PCs (all Windows XP) and 30 servers (Windows, RedHat, and AIX), plus netowrking equipment, with only 1 PC tech and 1 network admin (me). Granted, we're about to hire a second PC tech, but that's still 4 times the number of PCs that you mentioned being managed per tech.
A programmer in their 40's or 50's would have probably gotten their start in the late 1970's and early 1980's. PCs were barely in their infant stages at that point, and they weren't a whole lot of them around (relative to today). Most computers that were in use in the 1970's were mainframes and minicomputers. That's not to say that there weren't programmers, but there were far fewer of them in those days. The number of people that would have been programmers in that era is relatively small.
Some of them have no doubt died off. Others may have changed professions. Some will have worked thier way into management. Others may have started their own companies.
Still others have retired. Take a look at Microsoft. They've probably had more programmers come through their doors than almost any other company in the world. They've also made more millionaires out of employees (especially from the early days, and those people would be in their 40's and 50's today) than just about any other tech company. Many of those people (not just from MS, but other companies in similar situations) may have taken early retirement.
I wouldn't be suprised to discover that a fair number of them went on to teach. If you were there in the beginning of the tech revolution, you probably have something useful to pass on to the next generation.
Then I suspect that some are still working, but because there are relatively few of them compared to the younger people (those who got their start in the past 10 years) you probably don't encounter them as often.
My father started programming back in the 70's, working on UNIX tools at Bell Labs. He stayed with them through several different companies until he was finally forced into early retirement from Lucent last autmun at the ripe old age of 57. He's by no means rich, but by being careful with his savings, and the retirement package (usually only the old-timers have these anymore), and the severance package, he had enough money to retire to Florida.
...is the result of trying to implement 100% of user requests. Sometimes, telling the user "no, you simply can't have that" is the best way to ensure an application isn't horribly poisoned by thousands of totally irrational, non-intuitive crap "features" each piece of which makes sense only to the person who requested it.
After a quick glance through some of the other articles on Slashdot today, I suspect very strongly that you must be a Gnome developer.
I had a rude awakening after years in the bull market of 90's tech: I gave 3 months notice to a long time contractor and employer out of respect and deference.
Sadly, that was a hard lesson to learn, as the company car, expense accounts, server access, cell phone, customer list, and anything else they gave me was pulled. Then, while I was an "officed at home" road warrior engineer (who also managed to handle a good bit of IT from remote) I was told I was now an "hourly employee", had to report to the service department, and was issued a (gulp) UNIFORM.
There have been several occasions in my life where I have had occasion to leave a company (on good terms) and give several weeks or month's notice. In each case I write up a nice letter of resignation explaining that it was my intention to leave the company with my resignation taking effect "no later than" such-and-such a date. Then I had a sit-down chat with my supervisor, explained why I was leaving, told them that I would be willing to help with knowledge transfer up until my last day.
That demonstrates a willingness to help out and leaves them with a warm feeling that you're not going to totally bail on them. It also leaves you with a fairly flexible resignation date. If things go well, you work out the month or two. If they start giving you problems or making life difficult, move your resignation date up so that it's 2 weeks from the notification letter, and make it clear that you will not be willing to assist with knowledge transfer after those two weeks are up.
They key is to ensure that the company has some discernible benefit to keeping you around. If you have specialized skills or knowledge then this should be easy. If you are one member of a group who all perform the same duties, you're probably out of luck.
This is, quite simply, greed at work. On November 23rd Microsoft admitted that some of the Xbox 360s had problems, and that if end users called the support line they would fix or replace defective units. Then on December 2nd this guy files his lawsuit. What's the point unless it is to make money? I've heard just as many comments from people who have no problems with their Xbox 360 as I have from people who do have problems with it. If you keep in mind the fact that an unsatisifed customer tends to complain a lot more than a satisfied customer praises the product, I wouldn't be suprised to discover that Microsoft's assessment that a very small percentage of total units are are defective.
What is the standard defect rate for game consoles or similar equipment? Is it 1%? 1/2%? Even lower? It looks like Microsoft is releasing around 300,000 units to Europe, and based on populations one would expect a similar number for the US. So say 600,000 units shipped in the first two weeks. If 1% were defective, that's 6000 units. Not a boatload by any means, but if you get 6000 hardcore gamers pissed off about their console, then most gaming related sites are going to see a lot of complaints. Then the people who don't even have Xbox 360s yet start talking about problems that they read about, and it snowballs from there.
I would love to see one of the gaming sites post a survey asking if their visitors had an Xbox 360 and if there was a problem with it. That might give you a beter idea of just how rare this problem is.
No kidding, what a whiny little turd. I don't know what his university's code of conduct is, but back in the day when I went to college a felony conviction would get you expelled, and lesser crimes could easily cost you any scholarship money that you may have had. Now he's looking at all of that for the sake of $350. Don't do the crime if you can't do the time.
My thinking is, if you're going to be a criminal (which I don't advise), don't do it half-assed, go all the way. Don't aim for $350, at least make it more worthwhile. Don't try to pull stunts like this at stores that you frequent, or that you would ever like to return to. Try to spread it out over several stores (preferably not in your immediate geographical area), and don't be so obvious.
For example, print up a stack of barcode labels for the $199 iPod Nano, or $99 iPod Shuffle. Go to a number of stores, putting the labels on $299 or $399 iPods. That way when they ring up, the register and box both say "iPod-" something. People will be less likely to notice. Buy one or two at each store, paying cash. Hit 10 stores over the course of a single day. Turn around and sell them on eBay. Now your initial $1000 investment can be turned into $3000+ cash, and you don't have the hardware lying around as evidence either. Then lay low for a few months before repeating, if you even do repeat it. Is it possible to get caught? Yup. But it's a little less likely than doing what this nimrod did, and the payoff is better.
As I said though, being a criminal really isn't advisable. Taking the "easy" way out via a life of crime usually gets you caught, unless you take a lot of precautions. But if you're taking all those precautions, that's real work, and unless you're into something seriously big (and seriously illegal), you can probably make as much money legitimately. Most criminals get caught for one of two reasons: they're either careless/stupid or they get too greedy and keep coming back for more.
The answer to this is, in fact YES.
The real question is, will the person survive?
Yes, and yes. The US Navy experimented with this a couple of times back in the 1940s and 1950s. I'm not sure if modern torpedo tubes are designed the same as the old ones were, but the person did get shot out of the tube, but the pressures involved caused all sorts of physical problems (ruptured eardrums, blood vessels in the eyes, etc).
MS SQL was designed and likely largely tested in a single processor system and multiprocessor or HT support is somewhat less than optimal. So MS SQL is likely best tuned to single processor.
Are you high, or are you just in the habit of randomly making up nonsensical stuff? While we're at it, which morons modded that post to +4 Insightful? Do you really think that Microsoft would design and target their database server platform for use in only single CPU servers? Database applications are alwasy processor CPU intensive, and Microsoft, Oracle, and other vendors of database software spend ridiculous amounts of time optimizing their software to be heavily multi-threaded exactly so that it will perform well on multiple CPU systems.
Every couple of months either there's a new press release from Microsoft or Oracle indicating that hardware vendor X has set a new record for the highest TPC marks on database processing by using some new multi-CPU configuration and their software. Do you really think that Microsoft could compete in those conditions if they only wrote SQL server for single CPU configurations?
IT does not generate revenue for a company, unless that company is of course an outsourcing firm. Get into a revenue generating line of work and then you'll make some bucks.
That's MBA school thinking for you. Let's take it to it's logical extension. If IT is a cost center it doesn't generate revenue, and in fact is a drain on revenue. That means that if you cut IT spending by X amount of dollars, then your profits should increase by X amount of dollars. So then you should be able to eliminate your IT department and IT spending entirely, thereby increasing your profits by that same amount. So why do so many companies have IT departments? Because without them, most large companies would probably go out of business.
The simple fact is that IT makes money for companies. It may not directly land a customer that spends millions of dollars with you, but without it you wouldn't be able to land the account anyways. It's the efficiency that technology provides that allow you to take a bid with a profit margin of 3% and make 10% on it. IT isn't a cost center, it's an enabling center. And what makes me sick is that there are countless beancounters sitting on their asses running financial simulations and complex spreadsheets to determine how much they can stick it to the IT department that lets them run those simulations to begin with.
I'm going to nitpick a bit at the article's first point: as much as we may dislike cubicles, a blanket statement like "working in cubicles is the sure sign that you're not working for a successful company" is... well, a sure sign that the article's author hasn't worked at many companies. I've worked at some very successful companies with cubicles (my current one is arguably the world's most successful network equipment manufacturer), and more than one small, dismal and unfortunate place without.
Agreed. I've worked for some truly craptastic companies where everyone had their own office. I've also worked for several Fortune 500 companies where everyone except directors on up had cubicles. It has nothing to do with the success of the company whatsoever.
It's a hoax, guys. I know that there's about a million of you who would like to trumpet this ss one of the ultimate stupidities from Microsoft, but it just ain't so.
Yeah, there's a little rabbit dialogue, some country selection, blah blah blah. You pass their test for entry then you have to register, at which point you discover that if you're not from a European country you can't register.
Coversly, if you are buying an Novell servers at all you get eDirectory as part of the OS. That's right, eDirectory is included in Netware 6.5 which allows you to install either the Netware kernel or the Linux kernel.
But the reality is that most companies will end up buying at least one Windows server for some application or other that requires Windows. Once you've taken that step, from a cost perspective there's no point in even looking at Netware.
Plus (according to Novell) 69% less downtime than Exchange, and over 50% of Groupwise servers go 6+ months without reboot.
Interesting numbers. I have three Exchange 2000 servers at my present company. In the 2 1/2 years that we've had them, we had one of the three go down (due to a bad third-party Antivirus scan engine update that caused STORE.EXE to eat up all available CPU cycles). Technically it wasn't actually down, it was just extremely slow and nearly unusable. The only time that the servers are rebooted are when a security update to the OS requires a reboot. Before MS was on a monthly patch schedule that was only a couple times a year. Now because of the OS it is every couple of months. But with regards to stability, Exchange 2000 on Windows 2000 (or Exchange 2003 on Windows 2003) is extremely stable, and can easily go months without needing a reboot. I have never needed to reboot a server for Exchange's sake (once it was installed, anyways).
A lot of people seem to base their opinions of Windows server products on the NT4 days where regular reboots were advisable. I don't know if that means that they've never used the newer stuff, but that would be my guess.
While going the W2K3 route would be easy and very functional, one has to take into account the cost of the eventual [forced] upgrades.A company of 100 folks probably isn't turning a wild profit in terms of real money, and what money there is will undoubtedly get funneled into R&D or advertising or SomethingOtherThanITInfrastructure. This is where the long-term cost savings on a "cobbled" solution will pay off handsomely.
There are not forced upgrades with Windows. If you choose to buy into Software Assurance that's a different story, but I have yet to see a company that actually does go with SA. When you're dealing with a small company that "probably isn't turning a wild profit it terms of real money", what are the chances that they will choose to pay annual rental fees on their software instead of just buying the licenses outright at the time the hardware is purchased? Pretty slim I suspect.
I also think it's ridiculous to think that the "cobbled" solution will be significantly cheaper (if any) in the long-run than an off-the-shelf solution. By it's very nature it is going to involve significant work integrating (cobbling) the different products together, and that will cost time and money. And assuming that it is built on an OSS or Linux platform, what are the chances that they will have qualified administrators on hand to keep the cobbled together system together? Outside training and consulting is expensive.
I guess that person never heard of the "Software Assurance" program from Microsoft that forces upgrades every two years
Software Assurance is not mandatory. There are quite a few companies (probably the majority) who don't use SA. Mine doesn't. Upgrades are still cheaper than buying new, but most companies aren't all that keen on constantly upgrading, and the ones that are will go with SA. Most companies buy new hardware, and buy it with and OS and applications they will need. The hardware runs and does it's job for 3-5 years, and when it's ready to be replaced the next version of the OS and applications are purchased.
I dare that coward asshat who modded me troll to come out from under his/her rock and prove the honesty of that mod.
You can't mod and post in the same topic. But assuming that the coward asshat did come out under their rock what would you do? Kick their ass? Grow up. Bad moderation is usually corrected by othe mods and is somewhat lessened by metamoderation. Get over it.
Netware (or whatever they are calling it now that it runs on Linux) and Groupwise should be all you need.
Groupwise is a pig and should be taken out back and shot. I can't believe that Netware would still be peddling it, but even if they are it is not comparable to Exchange/Outlook. And I'm not sure how you can say that "Groupwise should be all you need" without knowing detailed requirements of the project.
Novell is my choice hands down. It isn't the nightmare product it used to be. Quite flexable, scalable and for all intents and purposes "open". This product actually follows standards! In my experience it also prices cheaper for clients than Active Directory, although you never know because I'm sure it has changed.
The problem there is that you cannot directly compare the two. Active Directory is part of the server OS and isn't licensed separately, so I'm not sure how you can quantify "cheaper". If you're buying any Windows servers at all AD would be cheaper than licensing eDirectory.
Actually I can say I worked on one of the largest directories in the world... over 52 million user objects and hundreds of millions of objects.
AD does not scale well.
This was certainly true with Windows 2000 AD. I was involved in a similar project for a large insurance company a couple years ago that ended up going the same route. Have any of the changes to AD with Server 2003 helped alleviate this?
At any rate, the company he is discussing is only 100 users or so, so the likelihood that they will be hitting th eupper limits of AD supportability anytime soon is small.
This is definitely true. I've found it much easier, if instead of thinking of people as Windows techs, or Linux techs, you simply think of them as techs.
I don't think that the distinction is that the techs are only capable of learning one or the other. I think that the distinction is that they've chosen a specific path (Windows or Linux), and for both systems there is such a great deal of detail to learn that it usually makes learning and mastering both, and then keeping up to date with both, difficult. You can certainly be a jack of all trades, but you'll be a master of none.
So can we please get equal time share for *nix vulnerabilities, or, better yet, provide a way to filter out vulnerability announcements for software we don't use?
Your post is commendable for being one of the few that doesn't try to pass off as witty any of the cliche comments like "IE is insecure?", or "Microsoft sucks", or "They should never have integrated IE and Windows so tightly to begin with." On the other hand, if you're actually looking to Slashdot for bug and vulnerability announcements, then I feel sorry for your network.
Or outsource the whole damn thing. There are dozens of providers out there that could drop a rack worth of gear into your datacenter and maintain the whole thing with plenty more experience in handling mail systems of that size. And at that level, I'm sure you'd have no problem getting it branded however you like.
Nonsense. How many companies do you think are actually out there that have experience with email systems that support over a million users? I used to work for a Fortune 50 company and we only had about 100,000 users to support. The number of mailsystems in the world that currently support 1 million or more is probably quite small (outside of the AOL/Hotmail/Yahoomail group).
Secondly, do you really think that they're going to design a system and drop a rack into their datacenter to support all of these users? It's not like all 1 million users will be working on the same campus (parking alone would be a nightmare...also the fact that that would make it as large as many cities). Those remote site users are gonna have a headache over slow WAN links.
Any system of that scale is going to be large. There will be probably a hundred or more servers distributed at company sites around the world. Those would require multiple WAN links between sites. There will probably be multiple SMTP gateways/DMZs for inbound and outbound email. There will have to be lots of redundancy. And putting it all together will require coordinating the efforts of an email team, a sysadmin team, and a networking team.
If the OP wasn't just yanking someone's chain by asking the question, then I truly feel sorry for his company. He seems to have no idea of the scope of the project that he's tasked with, and posting to Ask Slashdot just underlines the point. He should do himeself a favor and do three things:
1. Contact the Microsoft TAM that is assigned to your current installation. You do have one, right? Because if I had an Exchange installation of that size I would want a TAM that I could go to for assistance. At any rate, explain to the TAM what it is you want to accomplish. Make sure that they understand where Exchange is failing you. See if there are ways that they could address the issues. If they think that you system or architecture is hosed/could be improved, have them put together a project proposal to fix it. Microsoft has consultants for just such an occasion.
2. Start contacting other consultants with experience in this area. Explain to them what you have, explain the problems, what you want, etc. Have them put together a project proposal to fix it (including migrating you to another mail system).
3. Sit down, compare notes, and try to decide which solution is the best (considering cost, features, time to implement, etc). It may be that your Exchange installation can be remediated to meet your needs with a few architectural changes (you didn't say why your company was sick of it). It may require an upgrade. It may have to be pitched and rebuilt as something else. But either way you will at least have good options.
I would be extremely leery of anyone proposing that you pitch the entire Exchange installation without trying to fix it first. If you have 1 million Exchange users, you have already made an investment in the range of $30,000,000 for software licensing. Anyone that cavalierly tells you to throw that away before trying to salvage the situation may not have your best interests in mind.
It's been a long time since I bought an MMOG, but back in the day when I started playing Ultima Online you got a couple months subscription free when you purchased the boxed game. That's not quite what you're asking about, but it's closer.
Come to think of it, I think that UO also allows you to download the client (not the latest version with all the bells and whistles) and just play with a subscription. You would still need to buy the box to get the features of the latest add-on.
Of course, there's the real point of the boxed games. EQ and UO came out with a new add-on every year to add new content and play areas. If you don't have 4 million subscribers you probably rely on those (relatively easy to create, compared to the initial game) add-ons to generate revenue.
From my perspective, people need to take vacations. It's important for productivity and also good mental health. It's also important that sick people don't come to work, as that has a negative impact on productivity, as well as the possibility of spreading illness. If you give people a bank of time that they can use as either sick time or vacation time, most of them will want to use it as vacation time and therefore show up to work sick more often.
Another possible side effect that I have seen is an employee burning all of their PTO early in the year and then not having any available when they are actually sick. In those cases they end up coming in to work sick, making other people sick as well. We used to have a woman in my department that we nicknamed Typhoid Mary because she did that several years in a row.
As you mentioned, someone who is really sick (or normally healthy, but happens to have a bad health year) might burn all of their PTO time as sick days and be left with nothing for vacation. This is bad for productivity and mental health as noted above.
Finally, most employers do not offer the same number of PTO days as they would have offerred as separate sick and vacation time days (because inevitably some healthy first-year employee will take a month's vacation). Also, in many companies the number of vacation days allowed increases with years of service, where in PTO-only companies I have noticed that the increases come more slowly.
I suppose if it was well done a PTO plan could work to everyone's advantage, but in my experience it's just another way to shuffle things around and short-change the employees.
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen places where bigwigs routinely connected their laptops to random wireless links in airports, homes or hotel rooms, then brought back a dozen viruses and worms to their company's network. You can imagine how the bigwigs liked being told that they were the cause of the damage.
If you keep your PCs patched with current security updates, and you have a decent software firewall or IDS/IPS system installed on the laptop, along with current antivirus definitions, then there should be relatively little risk of bringing something nasty back home. There's still the possibility of sniffing, but VPN software helps there, and that is still much less likely than picking up an infection.
I do have an advantage in that the company that I work for has only just turned 2 years old this month, and I was involved in designing the network and systems from about 6 months before it opened for business. Because of that I was able to build in a lot of security and automation. Still, any company that is willing to make the effort could build similar practices into their network.
I think that it often times becomes more of an issue of knowledge and ability than anything else. Lots of small shops have management that don't know anything about PCs, so a guy who can configure a Windows 2000 peer to peer network looks impressive and ends up being hired as the network admin. Either that or they contract with someone to come out and fix problems as they occur instead of hiring someone to come out and prevent them from happening in the first place. Of course, in that case management sees an obvious return on their investment, i.e., if they pay someone to come out and fix the problem, they get the problem fixed. But the ROI on having someone good on staff seems like a harder sell (because they don't know what's possible, they don't know what value having good IT people in-house can add).
As a rule of thumb, you need one full time person per 30 Windows PCs, plus one guy to cover for vacation and such. I don't know how you can keep up with a hundred Windows machines to maintain by yourself.
Nonsense. If your system is well designed and well managed, a single PC tech or admin can cover far more than 30 PCs. Where I work we are managing about 250 PCs (all Windows XP) and 30 servers (Windows, RedHat, and AIX), plus netowrking equipment, with only 1 PC tech and 1 network admin (me). Granted, we're about to hire a second PC tech, but that's still 4 times the number of PCs that you mentioned being managed per tech.
A programmer in their 40's or 50's would have probably gotten their start in the late 1970's and early 1980's. PCs were barely in their infant stages at that point, and they weren't a whole lot of them around (relative to today). Most computers that were in use in the 1970's were mainframes and minicomputers. That's not to say that there weren't programmers, but there were far fewer of them in those days. The number of people that would have been programmers in that era is relatively small.
Some of them have no doubt died off. Others may have changed professions. Some will have worked thier way into management. Others may have started their own companies.
Still others have retired. Take a look at Microsoft. They've probably had more programmers come through their doors than almost any other company in the world. They've also made more millionaires out of employees (especially from the early days, and those people would be in their 40's and 50's today) than just about any other tech company. Many of those people (not just from MS, but other companies in similar situations) may have taken early retirement.
I wouldn't be suprised to discover that a fair number of them went on to teach. If you were there in the beginning of the tech revolution, you probably have something useful to pass on to the next generation.
Then I suspect that some are still working, but because there are relatively few of them compared to the younger people (those who got their start in the past 10 years) you probably don't encounter them as often.
My father started programming back in the 70's, working on UNIX tools at Bell Labs. He stayed with them through several different companies until he was finally forced into early retirement from Lucent last autmun at the ripe old age of 57. He's by no means rich, but by being careful with his savings, and the retirement package (usually only the old-timers have these anymore), and the severance package, he had enough money to retire to Florida.
...is the result of trying to implement 100% of user requests. Sometimes, telling the user "no, you simply can't have that" is the best way to ensure an application isn't horribly poisoned by thousands of totally irrational, non-intuitive crap "features" each piece of which makes sense only to the person who requested it.
After a quick glance through some of the other articles on Slashdot today, I suspect very strongly that you must be a Gnome developer.
I had a rude awakening after years in the bull market of 90's tech: I gave 3 months notice to a long time contractor and employer out of respect and deference.
Sadly, that was a hard lesson to learn, as the company car, expense accounts, server access, cell phone, customer list, and anything else they gave me was pulled. Then, while I was an "officed at home" road warrior engineer (who also managed to handle a good bit of IT from remote) I was told I was now an "hourly employee", had to report to the service department, and was issued a (gulp) UNIFORM.
There have been several occasions in my life where I have had occasion to leave a company (on good terms) and give several weeks or month's notice. In each case I write up a nice letter of resignation explaining that it was my intention to leave the company with my resignation taking effect "no later than" such-and-such a date. Then I had a sit-down chat with my supervisor, explained why I was leaving, told them that I would be willing to help with knowledge transfer up until my last day.
That demonstrates a willingness to help out and leaves them with a warm feeling that you're not going to totally bail on them. It also leaves you with a fairly flexible resignation date. If things go well, you work out the month or two. If they start giving you problems or making life difficult, move your resignation date up so that it's 2 weeks from the notification letter, and make it clear that you will not be willing to assist with knowledge transfer after those two weeks are up.
They key is to ensure that the company has some discernible benefit to keeping you around. If you have specialized skills or knowledge then this should be easy. If you are one member of a group who all perform the same duties, you're probably out of luck.
This is, quite simply, greed at work. On November 23rd Microsoft admitted that some of the Xbox 360s had problems, and that if end users called the support line they would fix or replace defective units. Then on December 2nd this guy files his lawsuit. What's the point unless it is to make money? I've heard just as many comments from people who have no problems with their Xbox 360 as I have from people who do have problems with it. If you keep in mind the fact that an unsatisifed customer tends to complain a lot more than a satisfied customer praises the product, I wouldn't be suprised to discover that Microsoft's assessment that a very small percentage of total units are are defective.
What is the standard defect rate for game consoles or similar equipment? Is it 1%? 1/2%? Even lower? It looks like Microsoft is releasing around 300,000 units to Europe, and based on populations one would expect a similar number for the US. So say 600,000 units shipped in the first two weeks. If 1% were defective, that's 6000 units. Not a boatload by any means, but if you get 6000 hardcore gamers pissed off about their console, then most gaming related sites are going to see a lot of complaints. Then the people who don't even have Xbox 360s yet start talking about problems that they read about, and it snowballs from there.
I would love to see one of the gaming sites post a survey asking if their visitors had an Xbox 360 and if there was a problem with it. That might give you a beter idea of just how rare this problem is.
No kidding, what a whiny little turd. I don't know what his university's code of conduct is, but back in the day when I went to college a felony conviction would get you expelled, and lesser crimes could easily cost you any scholarship money that you may have had. Now he's looking at all of that for the sake of $350. Don't do the crime if you can't do the time.
My thinking is, if you're going to be a criminal (which I don't advise), don't do it half-assed, go all the way. Don't aim for $350, at least make it more worthwhile. Don't try to pull stunts like this at stores that you frequent, or that you would ever like to return to. Try to spread it out over several stores (preferably not in your immediate geographical area), and don't be so obvious.
For example, print up a stack of barcode labels for the $199 iPod Nano, or $99 iPod Shuffle. Go to a number of stores, putting the labels on $299 or $399 iPods. That way when they ring up, the register and box both say "iPod-" something. People will be less likely to notice. Buy one or two at each store, paying cash. Hit 10 stores over the course of a single day. Turn around and sell them on eBay. Now your initial $1000 investment can be turned into $3000+ cash, and you don't have the hardware lying around as evidence either. Then lay low for a few months before repeating, if you even do repeat it. Is it possible to get caught? Yup. But it's a little less likely than doing what this nimrod did, and the payoff is better.
As I said though, being a criminal really isn't advisable. Taking the "easy" way out via a life of crime usually gets you caught, unless you take a lot of precautions. But if you're taking all those precautions, that's real work, and unless you're into something seriously big (and seriously illegal), you can probably make as much money legitimately. Most criminals get caught for one of two reasons: they're either careless/stupid or they get too greedy and keep coming back for more.
The answer to this is, in fact YES. The real question is, will the person survive?
Yes, and yes. The US Navy experimented with this a couple of times back in the 1940s and 1950s. I'm not sure if modern torpedo tubes are designed the same as the old ones were, but the person did get shot out of the tube, but the pressures involved caused all sorts of physical problems (ruptured eardrums, blood vessels in the eyes, etc).
MS SQL was designed and likely largely tested in a single processor system and multiprocessor or HT support is somewhat less than optimal. So MS SQL is likely best tuned to single processor.
Are you high, or are you just in the habit of randomly making up nonsensical stuff? While we're at it, which morons modded that post to +4 Insightful? Do you really think that Microsoft would design and target their database server platform for use in only single CPU servers? Database applications are alwasy processor CPU intensive, and Microsoft, Oracle, and other vendors of database software spend ridiculous amounts of time optimizing their software to be heavily multi-threaded exactly so that it will perform well on multiple CPU systems.
Every couple of months either there's a new press release from Microsoft or Oracle indicating that hardware vendor X has set a new record for the highest TPC marks on database processing by using some new multi-CPU configuration and their software. Do you really think that Microsoft could compete in those conditions if they only wrote SQL server for single CPU configurations?
IT does not generate revenue for a company, unless that company is of course an outsourcing firm. Get into a revenue generating line of work and then you'll make some bucks.
That's MBA school thinking for you. Let's take it to it's logical extension. If IT is a cost center it doesn't generate revenue, and in fact is a drain on revenue. That means that if you cut IT spending by X amount of dollars, then your profits should increase by X amount of dollars. So then you should be able to eliminate your IT department and IT spending entirely, thereby increasing your profits by that same amount. So why do so many companies have IT departments? Because without them, most large companies would probably go out of business.
The simple fact is that IT makes money for companies. It may not directly land a customer that spends millions of dollars with you, but without it you wouldn't be able to land the account anyways. It's the efficiency that technology provides that allow you to take a bid with a profit margin of 3% and make 10% on it. IT isn't a cost center, it's an enabling center. And what makes me sick is that there are countless beancounters sitting on their asses running financial simulations and complex spreadsheets to determine how much they can stick it to the IT department that lets them run those simulations to begin with.
But then obviously I'm biased.
I'm going to nitpick a bit at the article's first point: as much as we may dislike cubicles, a blanket statement like "working in cubicles is the sure sign that you're not working for a successful company" is... well, a sure sign that the article's author hasn't worked at many companies. I've worked at some very successful companies with cubicles (my current one is arguably the world's most successful network equipment manufacturer), and more than one small, dismal and unfortunate place without.
Agreed. I've worked for some truly craptastic companies where everyone had their own office. I've also worked for several Fortune 500 companies where everyone except directors on up had cubicles. It has nothing to do with the success of the company whatsoever.
It's a hoax, guys. I know that there's about a million of you who would like to trumpet this ss one of the ultimate stupidities from Microsoft, but it just ain't so.
Yeah, there's a little rabbit dialogue, some country selection, blah blah blah. You pass their test for entry then you have to register, at which point you discover that if you're not from a European country you can't register.
Coversly, if you are buying an Novell servers at all you get eDirectory as part of the OS. That's right, eDirectory is included in Netware 6.5 which allows you to install either the Netware kernel or the Linux kernel.
But the reality is that most companies will end up buying at least one Windows server for some application or other that requires Windows. Once you've taken that step, from a cost perspective there's no point in even looking at Netware.
Plus (according to Novell) 69% less downtime than Exchange, and over 50% of Groupwise servers go 6+ months without reboot.
Interesting numbers. I have three Exchange 2000 servers at my present company. In the 2 1/2 years that we've had them, we had one of the three go down (due to a bad third-party Antivirus scan engine update that caused STORE.EXE to eat up all available CPU cycles). Technically it wasn't actually down, it was just extremely slow and nearly unusable. The only time that the servers are rebooted are when a security update to the OS requires a reboot. Before MS was on a monthly patch schedule that was only a couple times a year. Now because of the OS it is every couple of months. But with regards to stability, Exchange 2000 on Windows 2000 (or Exchange 2003 on Windows 2003) is extremely stable, and can easily go months without needing a reboot. I have never needed to reboot a server for Exchange's sake (once it was installed, anyways).
A lot of people seem to base their opinions of Windows server products on the NT4 days where regular reboots were advisable. I don't know if that means that they've never used the newer stuff, but that would be my guess.
While going the W2K3 route would be easy and very functional, one has to take into account the cost of the eventual [forced] upgrades.A company of 100 folks probably isn't turning a wild profit in terms of real money, and what money there is will undoubtedly get funneled into R&D or advertising or SomethingOtherThanITInfrastructure. This is where the long-term cost savings on a "cobbled" solution will pay off handsomely.
There are not forced upgrades with Windows. If you choose to buy into Software Assurance that's a different story, but I have yet to see a company that actually does go with SA. When you're dealing with a small company that "probably isn't turning a wild profit it terms of real money", what are the chances that they will choose to pay annual rental fees on their software instead of just buying the licenses outright at the time the hardware is purchased? Pretty slim I suspect.
I also think it's ridiculous to think that the "cobbled" solution will be significantly cheaper (if any) in the long-run than an off-the-shelf solution. By it's very nature it is going to involve significant work integrating (cobbling) the different products together, and that will cost time and money. And assuming that it is built on an OSS or Linux platform, what are the chances that they will have qualified administrators on hand to keep the cobbled together system together? Outside training and consulting is expensive.
I guess that person never heard of the "Software Assurance" program from Microsoft that forces upgrades every two years
Software Assurance is not mandatory. There are quite a few companies (probably the majority) who don't use SA. Mine doesn't. Upgrades are still cheaper than buying new, but most companies aren't all that keen on constantly upgrading, and the ones that are will go with SA. Most companies buy new hardware, and buy it with and OS and applications they will need. The hardware runs and does it's job for 3-5 years, and when it's ready to be replaced the next version of the OS and applications are purchased.
I dare that coward asshat who modded me troll to come out from under his/her rock and prove the honesty of that mod.
You can't mod and post in the same topic. But assuming that the coward asshat did come out under their rock what would you do? Kick their ass? Grow up. Bad moderation is usually corrected by othe mods and is somewhat lessened by metamoderation. Get over it.
Netware (or whatever they are calling it now that it runs on Linux) and Groupwise should be all you need.
Groupwise is a pig and should be taken out back and shot. I can't believe that Netware would still be peddling it, but even if they are it is not comparable to Exchange/Outlook. And I'm not sure how you can say that "Groupwise should be all you need" without knowing detailed requirements of the project.
Novell is my choice hands down. It isn't the nightmare product it used to be. Quite flexable, scalable and for all intents and purposes "open". This product actually follows standards! In my experience it also prices cheaper for clients than Active Directory, although you never know because I'm sure it has changed.
The problem there is that you cannot directly compare the two. Active Directory is part of the server OS and isn't licensed separately, so I'm not sure how you can quantify "cheaper". If you're buying any Windows servers at all AD would be cheaper than licensing eDirectory.
Actually I can say I worked on one of the largest directories in the world... over 52 million user objects and hundreds of millions of objects. AD does not scale well.
This was certainly true with Windows 2000 AD. I was involved in a similar project for a large insurance company a couple years ago that ended up going the same route. Have any of the changes to AD with Server 2003 helped alleviate this?
At any rate, the company he is discussing is only 100 users or so, so the likelihood that they will be hitting th eupper limits of AD supportability anytime soon is small.
This is definitely true. I've found it much easier, if instead of thinking of people as Windows techs, or Linux techs, you simply think of them as techs.
I don't think that the distinction is that the techs are only capable of learning one or the other. I think that the distinction is that they've chosen a specific path (Windows or Linux), and for both systems there is such a great deal of detail to learn that it usually makes learning and mastering both, and then keeping up to date with both, difficult. You can certainly be a jack of all trades, but you'll be a master of none.
So can we please get equal time share for *nix vulnerabilities, or, better yet, provide a way to filter out vulnerability announcements for software we don't use?
Your post is commendable for being one of the few that doesn't try to pass off as witty any of the cliche comments like "IE is insecure?", or "Microsoft sucks", or "They should never have integrated IE and Windows so tightly to begin with." On the other hand, if you're actually looking to Slashdot for bug and vulnerability announcements, then I feel sorry for your network.
Or outsource the whole damn thing. There are dozens of providers out there that could drop a rack worth of gear into your datacenter and maintain the whole thing with plenty more experience in handling mail systems of that size. And at that level, I'm sure you'd have no problem getting it branded however you like.
Nonsense. How many companies do you think are actually out there that have experience with email systems that support over a million users? I used to work for a Fortune 50 company and we only had about 100,000 users to support. The number of mailsystems in the world that currently support 1 million or more is probably quite small (outside of the AOL/Hotmail/Yahoomail group).
Secondly, do you really think that they're going to design a system and drop a rack into their datacenter to support all of these users? It's not like all 1 million users will be working on the same campus (parking alone would be a nightmare...also the fact that that would make it as large as many cities). Those remote site users are gonna have a headache over slow WAN links.
Any system of that scale is going to be large. There will be probably a hundred or more servers distributed at company sites around the world. Those would require multiple WAN links between sites. There will probably be multiple SMTP gateways/DMZs for inbound and outbound email. There will have to be lots of redundancy. And putting it all together will require coordinating the efforts of an email team, a sysadmin team, and a networking team.
If the OP wasn't just yanking someone's chain by asking the question, then I truly feel sorry for his company. He seems to have no idea of the scope of the project that he's tasked with, and posting to Ask Slashdot just underlines the point. He should do himeself a favor and do three things:
1. Contact the Microsoft TAM that is assigned to your current installation. You do have one, right? Because if I had an Exchange installation of that size I would want a TAM that I could go to for assistance. At any rate, explain to the TAM what it is you want to accomplish. Make sure that they understand where Exchange is failing you. See if there are ways that they could address the issues. If they think that you system or architecture is hosed/could be improved, have them put together a project proposal to fix it. Microsoft has consultants for just such an occasion.
2. Start contacting other consultants with experience in this area. Explain to them what you have, explain the problems, what you want, etc. Have them put together a project proposal to fix it (including migrating you to another mail system).
3. Sit down, compare notes, and try to decide which solution is the best (considering cost, features, time to implement, etc). It may be that your Exchange installation can be remediated to meet your needs with a few architectural changes (you didn't say why your company was sick of it). It may require an upgrade. It may have to be pitched and rebuilt as something else. But either way you will at least have good options.
I would be extremely leery of anyone proposing that you pitch the entire Exchange installation without trying to fix it first. If you have 1 million Exchange users, you have already made an investment in the range of $30,000,000 for software licensing. Anyone that cavalierly tells you to throw that away before trying to salvage the situation may not have your best interests in mind.
It's been a long time since I bought an MMOG, but back in the day when I started playing Ultima Online you got a couple months subscription free when you purchased the boxed game. That's not quite what you're asking about, but it's closer.
Come to think of it, I think that UO also allows you to download the client (not the latest version with all the bells and whistles) and just play with a subscription. You would still need to buy the box to get the features of the latest add-on.
Of course, there's the real point of the boxed games. EQ and UO came out with a new add-on every year to add new content and play areas. If you don't have 4 million subscribers you probably rely on those (relatively easy to create, compared to the initial game) add-ons to generate revenue.
From my perspective, people need to take vacations. It's important for productivity and also good mental health. It's also important that sick people don't come to work, as that has a negative impact on productivity, as well as the possibility of spreading illness. If you give people a bank of time that they can use as either sick time or vacation time, most of them will want to use it as vacation time and therefore show up to work sick more often.
Another possible side effect that I have seen is an employee burning all of their PTO early in the year and then not having any available when they are actually sick. In those cases they end up coming in to work sick, making other people sick as well. We used to have a woman in my department that we nicknamed Typhoid Mary because she did that several years in a row.
As you mentioned, someone who is really sick (or normally healthy, but happens to have a bad health year) might burn all of their PTO time as sick days and be left with nothing for vacation. This is bad for productivity and mental health as noted above.
Finally, most employers do not offer the same number of PTO days as they would have offerred as separate sick and vacation time days (because inevitably some healthy first-year employee will take a month's vacation). Also, in many companies the number of vacation days allowed increases with years of service, where in PTO-only companies I have noticed that the increases come more slowly.
I suppose if it was well done a PTO plan could work to everyone's advantage, but in my experience it's just another way to shuffle things around and short-change the employees.