"If you can't do the job, I'll find somebody else who can"
Response: "I just worked 80 hours this week covering your idiotic timeline, and you have have the audacity to come to me and threaten me?!?!? You are one really stupid twit of a manager. I'll be at my house until you grow a brain. When you call me to ask for help completing your clusterfuck project, you should know that from now on I will only work as an independent contractor and my hourly rate just multiplied by ten.
And just in case you still don't understand what I'm telling you, just do me one little tiny favor please......... go fuck yourself."
Bosses who try the "if u can't x, I'll find y who can" on me might as well say, "Hi, verbally abuse me for the next 5 minutes please."
"If it comes across as sloppy, with no attention to detail, then that often (not always, but it's a matter of the odds here) indicates a sloppy person who pays no attention to detail."
Which can be a positive factor if you're hiring a technical person (sloppy because thinking about tech stuff all the time), or a natural leader (doesn't care about detail, excels at strategy and leaves the details to middle management). Judging somebody based off the formatting of a resume just isn't a smart thing to do. The content of a resume is another matter entirely.
science is a study, a tool, a means, an observation, and an analysis. believing that the only true scientist is the one who uses the tool of science to gain knowledge and then not monetize that knowledge makes you a fucking nutjob.
as for the greedy student who makes a million dollars... do you really think he's going to sit on that money and do nothing with it? Or do you think he's going to spend it on a house, a car, some new clothes, a few expensive whores, and invest a large portion of the leftover money in equities? See, that's what we call productivity and it makes the economy work... go make a million dollar idea and then spend and invest about 90% of it, please... everybody... now...
or give it to some charitable non-profit so they have cashflow to cover salary for the next year so some lazy hippie fucks can sit around and get paid for doing something a trained monkey and/or 12 year old could do.
I find it sad that there is only one comment with a score of 5 that mentions sphere.
That was probably his best philosophically-driven novel, with just enough science and technical data to "keep it real" as they say. Plus the whole plot is filled with puzzles, and even though its next to impossible to solve them before their solution is revealed as a plot mechanism, they provide a nice alternative method of telling a "whodunit" story without invoking mr. watson.
Also, no one is mentioning the terminal man, which I found spooky, disheartening, and futurist all at the same time. Considering he wrote it in 1972, it holds up surprisingly well today even with all the technical mumbo-jumbo that's 35+ years old.
Yes andromeda strain and jurassic park will probably be his legacy, but terminal man and sphere are the less-recognized gems for which I will remember mr. crichton.
Stop screwing around by trying to land a job with your resume and projects. The only thing a resume gets you is an interview. By the end of the first interview, they should know they want to hire you and you should know they're going to call. If the company is so big that your first interview isn't with the hiring authority, you should be aiming for a smaller company who will give you a chance.
And when companies say they want "recent college grads", they really mean people who graduated in the past 3-5 years and learned the ropes from some other poor company.
And when they tell you that it was because of your background in tech support, they're lying to you. The truth is they found someone else who was more qualified and probably wouldn't cost them much more, if anymore at all.
I recommend 2 choices: Quit your job now, forcing you to go get a job that you want or risk ruining your credit, sleeping in your car, or starving. OR, find an internship with a company where you get paid peanuts for 3 months and create your own opportunity to show them they should hire you full-time since you've already graduated.
There's also the typical crap about going back to your college and getting recommendations or employment search help or whatever... they'll probably just pat you on the head and ask for an alumni donation, but it's worth a shot.
If you thought programming had an easy barrier to entry, no.
xenapp / presentation server linux client would work rather well, assuming you have one setup with outlook loaded on it and ready to go. paste shortcut to desktop, go go go.
anecdotal exchange 2007 failures are excuses that uneducated people use to declare their mental supremacy. unified messaging is recommended to be on a separate OSE from your mailbox server specifically because of the extra horsepower it needs, and the separate IO it needs when you install an Office Communication Server with Exchange in tandem.
$50k hardware is overkill for a simple fail-over cluster for 1000 or fewer mailboxes, but $20k sounds about right for 2 separate physical servers running with 6+ spindles in each one.
quite frankly, exchange 2007 is probably the nicest MS product ever produced for a linux admin, web programmer, xml scripter, and/or CLI guru. But since it only runs on windows server and requires windows clients for full functionality, you just bring the same old whiny arguments about how OWA lite sucks and there aren't any good non-windows clients (duh?)
"Go to the next tier where you need automated load-balancing, automated availability solutions, and automated backup, and VMware is the only game in town. (Short of IBM mainframes.)"
xenserver5 platinum does everything you listed other than automated backup, but between automated metadata snapshot backups of VMs and automated central SAN backup solutions, vmware's ability to do automated backup isn't a value proposition for anybody other than the largest enterprises.
with all the money the government has been printing out of thin air to cover populous expenses that we didn't have the cash to purchase, I don't even understand why we owe anybody else in the first place, or even ourselves.
they should just print a trillion dollars and give it to whoever the hell we own. inflation will normalize after that nuclear weapon... eventually.
Because I doubt that the business is going to be able to come up with a cost-of-living raise that approaches 10%, and I doubt even more that they will be able to come up with a merit increase that goes above cost-of-living.
Randy should stop supporting new Yahoo addresses immediately, provide a way for existing users of his list to switch to another email address (no shortage of those) without incurring additional costs, and basically block yahoo.com as an inbound or outbound MTA from his host. Then write a brief explanation of the story and have it pop-up as part of the error anybody receives when they try to subscribe to his list with a yahoo.com email address.
At that point, Yahoo either fixes it or Randy goes on with life never having to deal with this problem again.
I have all Yahoo messages blocked at work, and have Sales and CS educated enough to know when someone says they sent an email and they never received to to ask "is it from a Yahoo address, because we block all of those."
The occassional ticked off customer is much easier to deal with than the cluster-F that is trying to determine whether or not a message from Yahoo is legit.
Personally, I'd drop DomainKeys and go SPF if I was Yahoo, but then what do I know...
Your inbox should have NEVER been used as a permanent store for your important email that you want to keep permanently or for longer than the company storage policy dictates. People just decided they would get lazy and do it that way since it usually works about 95% of the time.
I always cherry-pick important email from my personal accounts and print them and file them. A more technically savvy way of doing the same thing is exactly what the company is recommending; that is, save them as a.doc (print) and put them in a folder (file them). It is exactly the same thing you do with your important mail that you get from the postal service... I hear no whining about having to hold onto your tax returns instead of just reading them and chucking them in the bin.
Another alternative, depending on company firewall policy, is to setup a pop3 account from your personal ISP (separate from your main ISP email account), add it to your outlook profile at work in addition to your exchange user mailbox, and forward important email to that pop3 account where you will get near real-time confirmation that it arrived and is in an account that you control even if you are terminated.
Like many others have posted, I'm tired of having to deal with the problems from maintaining 2gb user mailbox quotas because employees are too incompetent to realize that when management tells me that *I* have to do more with less, that means I'm going to be passing all those efficiency creating decisions off on the largest scale possible, which is usually the entire company. If I'm forced to tighten my belt, the people using the systems I administer will be doing their part to assist, whining be damned.
It's been a few years now since I've experienced the outspokeness of uni professors firsthand, but thank you so much for reinforcing my observation that just because they know what they're talking about in their subject of choice, doesn't mean they aren't just as moronic as the average construction worker once they start yapping about other subjects.
Please stay in your cocoon and leave the real-world decisions to those of us who actually live in it.
Its the best form factor for people who want to pocket business phones. side-sliders or side-flips work okay, but they're bulkier and less "biz-designer friendly."
The person who wants to buy an E71 is not interested in watching movies on their phone, as they can watch movies on their 60 inch HDTV at the house or their widescreen laptop if they're stuck on the road. If you want huge touchscreens, you don't want Nokia E-series phones. They're for business people and compete with RIM and the WM-based handsets, not the iPhone.
for those who actually enjoy RTFA'ing and want a bit more comprehensive info than a BBC fluff piece, nvidia's marketing page, and some pretty vids on engadget:
It's really just a pending break-up, so it's whoever's decision makes it first. If you give them 2 weeks notice and they keep you around for 2 weeks, you both decided on 2 weeks. If you give them 2 weeks and they walk you out the door, it's their decision that you leave immediately. If you go in and tell them you're quitting, it's your decision.
Anybody with high-level rights should have absolutely ZERO problem with giving their employer no prior notice, and their employer should be ecstatic that they don't have to make any decisions about whether to keep them around with limited access, no access, or kick them out. It certainly doesn't "burn bridges" (whatever the fuck that means in a world with almost 7 billion people). You just do it like any other business decision, professionally and with due respect.
In addition, let them know you are available for consulting work for the next 2 weeks before you start your new job, but you won't be available at all times as you have other responsibilities, etc etc etc, blah blah blah.
In fact, I already told my employer that I won't be giving them any notice if I decide to leave precisely for the security and liability reasons that sr. management is always stressing about. He has no problem whatsoever with this, and is gracious to have expectations of what to do if I leave already set ahead of time.
Use at least a 2-tier system, 3-tier if you include end-user filters. I use a CSC-SSM (with a plus license for anti-spam and some web content blocks) that uses Trend Micro tech in an ASA 5510 to block a large chunk of malware at the firewall level. Spam that passes through that then has to travel through a Symantec SMTP gateway which includes my content violation rules, such as any subject line ending with an exclamation point is rejected, a few dictionaries for various sexual words, some 3rd party DNSBL and DNSWL sites, and a user directory sync that rejects all external mail that doesn't include an existing user in the to/cc/bcc fields instead of forwarding all that crap to my catch-all address.
Then if users miss any critical mail, I have them submit a ticket about the address in question, and either whitelist the specific address at both tiers if its a personal address, or whitelist the domain at both tiers if its a legit business contact. The rare spam that gets past and people complain about I usually just have them block the address from their client, though sometimes the spam jumps out at me as an easy rule to create on the content scanner smtp gateway level.
And of course, I send myself daily reports about spam trends from both systems to check on trends instead of logging into my MTAs every day. This is for a company about 80 employees strong.
They can already get their mail from anywhere using BB or EAS for mobile phones, OWA for webmail, and Outlook anywhere for laptop users who want a full client. None of which require IMAP or POP3 enabled. And since I'm their only sysadmin, netadmin, PBX guy, linux guy, helpdesk tech, mobile phone guy, and security guy, I actively propose that they should fire me if they don't like my decisions, usually repeated weekly.
So far, I'm still here. The advantages of being good at what you do. Enabling the IMAP service on Exchange 2007 just for 1 or 2 users... I'd have to quit out of principle.
"It's all very integrated, and actually works very well with not too much knowledge. Seriously, I think 99% of the people on this site could setup the system above I just outlined in a day."...
I do believe you give the purveyors of this site too much credit, sir.
Since the NYTimes seems to be making a very large jump in its final thesis of "RIM is skurred of Apple" while missing a few critical pieces, I thought I'd fill them in for everybody else who wants a more complete high-level picture of the current smartphone scenario.
I follow the smartphone market on a daily basis as a personal hobby, and configure/administer MS exchange mailbox access on the various smartphones in use at my current job where I'm the primary sysadmin. This includes a BB 8700, Curves, and Pearls; WinMo BJs, BJIIs, Q9s, a Treo 750, a Shadow, a Dash, an 8125 (wizard), 8525 (hermes), and Tilts (8925, kaiser, TyTN II, whatever); Nokia E61i, E51, and my personal N95-4. I'm sure people will want me to configure mobile mailbox on their iPhone once Apple releases the ability, but up until now I've successfully declined every request to enable IMAP on a user mailbox just to support the iPhone just because it sets a bad precedent and increases environment complexity.
First point. RIM is the only real player in large american enterprises due to all the enterprise tools available to remotely administer and secure thousands of devices spread over multiple sites and even continents. If you're lucky enough to be a BES administrator as a full-time job, life is sweet because maintenance is so easy. The phones never freeze, any LOB apps are distributed OTA and have been tested enough that any issues that occur with them are well-known and can be fixed remotely, and any new initiatives or directives from "the powers" can be implemented quickly, easily, and centrally. Obviously, remote wipes and password resets are obvious selling points, but not exclusive to BB. Too bad this is a full-time job that will soon go the way of the webmaster, or I'd be trying to find one right now.
Second point. Apple's marketing of the iPhone has not only inspired the fanboys and wealthy suckers. It has also brought an awareness of smartphones to the technical influencers. People like myself, who are tasked with finding solutions and influence which one is chosen after they are presented to the people with their fingers on the purse-strings. Yes, there are execs who buy an iPhone and want everyone else to standardize on iPhones. I don't work for one, and wouldn't for very long if I did. Most are reasonable and want multiple options, with reasons why they are viable and reasons why standardizing on iPhones aren't. This improving awareness of the smartphone market in the US spreads from us to other people who always start off asking, "so how is the iPhone?"
Third point. As people are influenced to buy other smartphones for various reasons and Apple influences more purchases of the iPhone, these people invariably meet. This is usually born out by someone with an iPhone showing what it can do (to a young attractive female, as if the phone gives them power over the vag) since its much more impressive to show the bells and whistles instead of explaining them. The user of the other smartphone, incensed that the young woman is paying attention to the male with the less-capable smartphone (in THEIR opinion), must show the fertile vag how much more potent his smartphone is. The wee lass must then decide which is more attractive to her... the large multi-touch screen and easy to use UI, or the other phone which invariably has more features and software. Neither bones the girl, but they both learn something about each others' phones. Multiplied in subways, buses, cubicle intersections, water coolers, and bars (ya rly), other 3rd parties take note of which phones they prefer while watching the epic struggle between two stags for one tail. They make their decisions based off this information and go to their nearest carrier-authorized store to buy their phone. They look at the upgrade prices for the smartphones, realize they don't need email and internet on their phone, and find the nicest dumb phone in the store that they can get for free (with 2yr contract, of course). Sometimes they are sold on a dumb featu
Network Admin: My job is hard; I want a raise. PHB: Why? Your job is so easy, an 11-year old can handle it! Network Admin: Then hire an 11 year old and I'll go work for someone who needs a Network Admin and not a Helpdesk Tech. My hourly rate is $100/hr including drive time so when you end up paying me more as a contractor than you paid me as a salaried employee, don't say I didn't warn you... retard.
Slashdot Mirror
what he said.
2 realistic choices, 1 quasi-choice if you want ultimate and know why you want and go find it.
for a site that likes to whine about fud, you guys sure have a ton of doubt on this thread.
"If you can't do the job, I'll find somebody else who can"
Response:
"I just worked 80 hours this week covering your idiotic timeline, and you have have the audacity to come to me and threaten me?!?!? You are one really stupid twit of a manager. I'll be at my house until you grow a brain. When you call me to ask for help completing your clusterfuck project, you should know that from now on I will only work as an independent contractor and my hourly rate just multiplied by ten.
And just in case you still don't understand what I'm telling you, just do me one little tiny favor please... ... ... go fuck yourself."
Bosses who try the "if u can't x, I'll find y who can" on me might as well say, "Hi, verbally abuse me for the next 5 minutes please."
"If it comes across as sloppy, with no attention to detail, then that often (not always, but it's a matter of the odds here) indicates a sloppy person who pays no attention to detail."
Which can be a positive factor if you're hiring a technical person (sloppy because thinking about tech stuff all the time), or a natural leader (doesn't care about detail, excels at strategy and leaves the details to middle management). Judging somebody based off the formatting of a resume just isn't a smart thing to do. The content of a resume is another matter entirely.
science is a study, a tool, a means, an observation, and an analysis. believing that the only true scientist is the one who uses the tool of science to gain knowledge and then not monetize that knowledge makes you a fucking nutjob.
as for the greedy student who makes a million dollars... do you really think he's going to sit on that money and do nothing with it? Or do you think he's going to spend it on a house, a car, some new clothes, a few expensive whores, and invest a large portion of the leftover money in equities? See, that's what we call productivity and it makes the economy work... go make a million dollar idea and then spend and invest about 90% of it, please... everybody... now...
or give it to some charitable non-profit so they have cashflow to cover salary for the next year so some lazy hippie fucks can sit around and get paid for doing something a trained monkey and/or 12 year old could do.
I find it sad that there is only one comment with a score of 5 that mentions sphere.
That was probably his best philosophically-driven novel, with just enough science and technical data to "keep it real" as they say. Plus the whole plot is filled with puzzles, and even though its next to impossible to solve them before their solution is revealed as a plot mechanism, they provide a nice alternative method of telling a "whodunit" story without invoking mr. watson.
Also, no one is mentioning the terminal man, which I found spooky, disheartening, and futurist all at the same time. Considering he wrote it in 1972, it holds up surprisingly well today even with all the technical mumbo-jumbo that's 35+ years old.
Yes andromeda strain and jurassic park will probably be his legacy, but terminal man and sphere are the less-recognized gems for which I will remember mr. crichton.
Stop screwing around by trying to land a job with your resume and projects. The only thing a resume gets you is an interview. By the end of the first interview, they should know they want to hire you and you should know they're going to call. If the company is so big that your first interview isn't with the hiring authority, you should be aiming for a smaller company who will give you a chance.
And when companies say they want "recent college grads", they really mean people who graduated in the past 3-5 years and learned the ropes from some other poor company.
And when they tell you that it was because of your background in tech support, they're lying to you. The truth is they found someone else who was more qualified and probably wouldn't cost them much more, if anymore at all.
I recommend 2 choices: Quit your job now, forcing you to go get a job that you want or risk ruining your credit, sleeping in your car, or starving. OR, find an internship with a company where you get paid peanuts for 3 months and create your own opportunity to show them they should hire you full-time since you've already graduated.
There's also the typical crap about going back to your college and getting recommendations or employment search help or whatever... they'll probably just pat you on the head and ask for an alumni donation, but it's worth a shot.
If you thought programming had an easy barrier to entry, no.
xenapp / presentation server linux client would work rather well, assuming you have one setup with outlook loaded on it and ready to go. paste shortcut to desktop, go go go.
anecdotal exchange 2007 failures are excuses that uneducated people use to declare their mental supremacy. unified messaging is recommended to be on a separate OSE from your mailbox server specifically because of the extra horsepower it needs, and the separate IO it needs when you install an Office Communication Server with Exchange in tandem.
$50k hardware is overkill for a simple fail-over cluster for 1000 or fewer mailboxes, but $20k sounds about right for 2 separate physical servers running with 6+ spindles in each one.
quite frankly, exchange 2007 is probably the nicest MS product ever produced for a linux admin, web programmer, xml scripter, and/or CLI guru. But since it only runs on windows server and requires windows clients for full functionality, you just bring the same old whiny arguments about how OWA lite sucks and there aren't any good non-windows clients (duh?)
RPC over https and "outlook anywhere" are the same feature. the marketing guys got their hands on it in outlook 2007, apparently.
"Go to the next tier where you need automated load-balancing, automated availability solutions, and automated backup, and VMware is the only game in town. (Short of IBM mainframes.)"
xenserver5 platinum does everything you listed other than automated backup, but between automated metadata snapshot backups of VMs and automated central SAN backup solutions, vmware's ability to do automated backup isn't a value proposition for anybody other than the largest enterprises.
with all the money the government has been printing out of thin air to cover populous expenses that we didn't have the cash to purchase, I don't even understand why we owe anybody else in the first place, or even ourselves.
they should just print a trillion dollars and give it to whoever the hell we own. inflation will normalize after that nuclear weapon... eventually.
"Why do you care that business is wasting money?"
Because I doubt that the business is going to be able to come up with a cost-of-living raise that approaches 10%, and I doubt even more that they will be able to come up with a merit increase that goes above cost-of-living.
Randy should stop supporting new Yahoo addresses immediately, provide a way for existing users of his list to switch to another email address (no shortage of those) without incurring additional costs, and basically block yahoo.com as an inbound or outbound MTA from his host. Then write a brief explanation of the story and have it pop-up as part of the error anybody receives when they try to subscribe to his list with a yahoo.com email address.
At that point, Yahoo either fixes it or Randy goes on with life never having to deal with this problem again.
I have all Yahoo messages blocked at work, and have Sales and CS educated enough to know when someone says they sent an email and they never received to to ask "is it from a Yahoo address, because we block all of those."
The occassional ticked off customer is much easier to deal with than the cluster-F that is trying to determine whether or not a message from Yahoo is legit.
Personally, I'd drop DomainKeys and go SPF if I was Yahoo, but then what do I know...
purchasing power does not care about exchange rates.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power
Your inbox should have NEVER been used as a permanent store for your important email that you want to keep permanently or for longer than the company storage policy dictates. People just decided they would get lazy and do it that way since it usually works about 95% of the time.
I always cherry-pick important email from my personal accounts and print them and file them. A more technically savvy way of doing the same thing is exactly what the company is recommending; that is, save them as a .doc (print) and put them in a folder (file them). It is exactly the same thing you do with your important mail that you get from the postal service... I hear no whining about having to hold onto your tax returns instead of just reading them and chucking them in the bin.
Another alternative, depending on company firewall policy, is to setup a pop3 account from your personal ISP (separate from your main ISP email account), add it to your outlook profile at work in addition to your exchange user mailbox, and forward important email to that pop3 account where you will get near real-time confirmation that it arrived and is in an account that you control even if you are terminated.
Like many others have posted, I'm tired of having to deal with the problems from maintaining 2gb user mailbox quotas because employees are too incompetent to realize that when management tells me that *I* have to do more with less, that means I'm going to be passing all those efficiency creating decisions off on the largest scale possible, which is usually the entire company. If I'm forced to tighten my belt, the people using the systems I administer will be doing their part to assist, whining be damned.
It's been a few years now since I've experienced the outspokeness of uni professors firsthand, but thank you so much for reinforcing my observation that just because they know what they're talking about in their subject of choice, doesn't mean they aren't just as moronic as the average construction worker once they start yapping about other subjects.
Please stay in your cocoon and leave the real-world decisions to those of us who actually live in it.
No wonder college grads are such idiots nowadays.
Its the best form factor for people who want to pocket business phones. side-sliders or side-flips work okay, but they're bulkier and less "biz-designer friendly."
The person who wants to buy an E71 is not interested in watching movies on their phone, as they can watch movies on their 60 inch HDTV at the house or their widescreen laptop if they're stuck on the road. If you want huge touchscreens, you don't want Nokia E-series phones. They're for business people and compete with RIM and the WM-based handsets, not the iPhone.
for those who actually enjoy RTFA'ing and want a bit more comprehensive info than a BBC fluff piece, nvidia's marketing page, and some pretty vids on engadget:
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/37729/135
The APX 2500 is far more interesting to me than the 600/650. Qualcomm and Broadcom better watch their backs.
It's really just a pending break-up, so it's whoever's decision makes it first. If you give them 2 weeks notice and they keep you around for 2 weeks, you both decided on 2 weeks. If you give them 2 weeks and they walk you out the door, it's their decision that you leave immediately. If you go in and tell them you're quitting, it's your decision.
Anybody with high-level rights should have absolutely ZERO problem with giving their employer no prior notice, and their employer should be ecstatic that they don't have to make any decisions about whether to keep them around with limited access, no access, or kick them out. It certainly doesn't "burn bridges" (whatever the fuck that means in a world with almost 7 billion people). You just do it like any other business decision, professionally and with due respect.
In addition, let them know you are available for consulting work for the next 2 weeks before you start your new job, but you won't be available at all times as you have other responsibilities, etc etc etc, blah blah blah.
In fact, I already told my employer that I won't be giving them any notice if I decide to leave precisely for the security and liability reasons that sr. management is always stressing about. He has no problem whatsoever with this, and is gracious to have expectations of what to do if I leave already set ahead of time.
Use at least a 2-tier system, 3-tier if you include end-user filters. I use a CSC-SSM (with a plus license for anti-spam and some web content blocks) that uses Trend Micro tech in an ASA 5510 to block a large chunk of malware at the firewall level. Spam that passes through that then has to travel through a Symantec SMTP gateway which includes my content violation rules, such as any subject line ending with an exclamation point is rejected, a few dictionaries for various sexual words, some 3rd party DNSBL and DNSWL sites, and a user directory sync that rejects all external mail that doesn't include an existing user in the to/cc/bcc fields instead of forwarding all that crap to my catch-all address.
Then if users miss any critical mail, I have them submit a ticket about the address in question, and either whitelist the specific address at both tiers if its a personal address, or whitelist the domain at both tiers if its a legit business contact. The rare spam that gets past and people complain about I usually just have them block the address from their client, though sometimes the spam jumps out at me as an easy rule to create on the content scanner smtp gateway level.
And of course, I send myself daily reports about spam trends from both systems to check on trends instead of logging into my MTAs every day. This is for a company about 80 employees strong.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/odf-converter
They can already get their mail from anywhere using BB or EAS for mobile phones, OWA for webmail, and Outlook anywhere for laptop users who want a full client. None of which require IMAP or POP3 enabled. And since I'm their only sysadmin, netadmin, PBX guy, linux guy, helpdesk tech, mobile phone guy, and security guy, I actively propose that they should fire me if they don't like my decisions, usually repeated weekly.
So far, I'm still here. The advantages of being good at what you do. Enabling the IMAP service on Exchange 2007 just for 1 or 2 users... I'd have to quit out of principle.
"It's all very integrated, and actually works very well with not too much knowledge. Seriously, I think 99% of the people on this site could setup the system above I just outlined in a day." ...
I do believe you give the purveyors of this site too much credit, sir.
Since the NYTimes seems to be making a very large jump in its final thesis of "RIM is skurred of Apple" while missing a few critical pieces, I thought I'd fill them in for everybody else who wants a more complete high-level picture of the current smartphone scenario.
I follow the smartphone market on a daily basis as a personal hobby, and configure/administer MS exchange mailbox access on the various smartphones in use at my current job where I'm the primary sysadmin. This includes a BB 8700, Curves, and Pearls; WinMo BJs, BJIIs, Q9s, a Treo 750, a Shadow, a Dash, an 8125 (wizard), 8525 (hermes), and Tilts (8925, kaiser, TyTN II, whatever); Nokia E61i, E51, and my personal N95-4. I'm sure people will want me to configure mobile mailbox on their iPhone once Apple releases the ability, but up until now I've successfully declined every request to enable IMAP on a user mailbox just to support the iPhone just because it sets a bad precedent and increases environment complexity.
First point. RIM is the only real player in large american enterprises due to all the enterprise tools available to remotely administer and secure thousands of devices spread over multiple sites and even continents. If you're lucky enough to be a BES administrator as a full-time job, life is sweet because maintenance is so easy. The phones never freeze, any LOB apps are distributed OTA and have been tested enough that any issues that occur with them are well-known and can be fixed remotely, and any new initiatives or directives from "the powers" can be implemented quickly, easily, and centrally. Obviously, remote wipes and password resets are obvious selling points, but not exclusive to BB. Too bad this is a full-time job that will soon go the way of the webmaster, or I'd be trying to find one right now.
Second point. Apple's marketing of the iPhone has not only inspired the fanboys and wealthy suckers. It has also brought an awareness of smartphones to the technical influencers. People like myself, who are tasked with finding solutions and influence which one is chosen after they are presented to the people with their fingers on the purse-strings. Yes, there are execs who buy an iPhone and want everyone else to standardize on iPhones. I don't work for one, and wouldn't for very long if I did. Most are reasonable and want multiple options, with reasons why they are viable and reasons why standardizing on iPhones aren't. This improving awareness of the smartphone market in the US spreads from us to other people who always start off asking, "so how is the iPhone?"
Third point. As people are influenced to buy other smartphones for various reasons and Apple influences more purchases of the iPhone, these people invariably meet. This is usually born out by someone with an iPhone showing what it can do (to a young attractive female, as if the phone gives them power over the vag) since its much more impressive to show the bells and whistles instead of explaining them. The user of the other smartphone, incensed that the young woman is paying attention to the male with the less-capable smartphone (in THEIR opinion), must show the fertile vag how much more potent his smartphone is. The wee lass must then decide which is more attractive to her... the large multi-touch screen and easy to use UI, or the other phone which invariably has more features and software. Neither bones the girl, but they both learn something about each others' phones. Multiplied in subways, buses, cubicle intersections, water coolers, and bars (ya rly), other 3rd parties take note of which phones they prefer while watching the epic struggle between two stags for one tail. They make their decisions based off this information and go to their nearest carrier-authorized store to buy their phone. They look at the upgrade prices for the smartphones, realize they don't need email and internet on their phone, and find the nicest dumb phone in the store that they can get for free (with 2yr contract, of course). Sometimes they are sold on a dumb featu
Network Admin: My job is hard; I want a raise.
PHB: Why? Your job is so easy, an 11-year old can handle it!
Network Admin: Then hire an 11 year old and I'll go work for someone who needs a Network Admin and not a Helpdesk Tech. My hourly rate is $100/hr including drive time so when you end up paying me more as a contractor than you paid me as a salaried employee, don't say I didn't warn you... retard.