I remember when I was younger and management would send out employee opinion surveys. I'd answer them, be truthful and feel like my opinion actually mattered. I felt it was proper to express exactly how happy or unhappy I was and that the survey was some mechanism for improving things.
Then I became part of management and I realized how completely wrong I was.
The employee opinion survey mostly serves as a crutch for manager's to pat themselves on the back and the do a very good job curve fitting the results to their preconceived notions of how things are. It also serves to weed out people with bad attitudes - I've overheard more than one discussion of trying to locate an employee based on the comment they made on the survey.
So, if you say you're happy with the wage you're getting, you won't be getting a raise. In fact, it's even seen as a sign that pay cuts should be happening. Likewise, if you feel like you're a valued employee, good luck getting any more benefits. It's more likely management will use that as an excuse to strip away that one little perk, like free soda or something, just because they'll decrease the amount of HR budget dedicated to keeping employees happy. Don't ever be happy on paper.
Unfortunately, it's not enough for just you to express your desire for a raise. If 40% of your colleagues think they get paid enough, that's probably enough for management to little to no wage increase. You really want less than 5 - 10% say they're happy - in other words, 90% of the employees in your department need to express displeasure with their wages in order for the survey to have any meaningful effect on wages. (There's plenty of other ways to get a raise though - an employee survey is probably one of the least likely ways for it to happen.)
PS. If you think your company is one of those awesome companies that cares, you're probably wrong. If you sat in the room with the CEO, COO, and HR Director and heard that private conversation about the survey, you'd be horrified.
Wrong. Do you buy clothes? Do laundry? Check your email from a computer at home? Do you pay electricity bills? Any of that kind of stuff can be itemized if done properly. More importantly, at the point where you itemize, the smart thing to do is start a LLC and accrue business expenses.
At the point where you can itemize your deductions, you're better off paying someone else to do you taxes. A good accountant will more than pay for themselves - you'll likely be able to recoup thousands of dollars. A normal human just can't stay on top of the US tax code enough from year to year to know how to file for every qualifying deduction.
Finding the right accountant/tax preparer is very important. I don't have a lot of tips there other than asking around - I recommend asking some small business owners who they use. I've gone through 4 different accountants over the past ten years. One got me audited, two were just so-so, and now I have one that's fantastic. You probably don't want to go to one of those tax mill places like HR Block, although there is some advantage to working with someone who sees A LOT of tax returns. You probably also don't want to go to a big CPA firm that doesn't a lot of business work.
Even more important, if you don't own your own business yet, you need to create one. Filing an LLC is fairly simple in most states. Your business should be fairly in line with one of your hobbies and the writeoffs will be well worth it.
Keep in mind, US sanctions against North Korea mean key technologies make it difficult to import computers. Although these days there's so many ways to get mobile devices that might be a moot point.
Last year we were in South Korea and we went on one of the popular "DMZ Tours". So, on the tour you go to Dorason Station, which is the jumping off point from South Korea onto the rail line into North Korea, and then after that you go up a hill and look into North Korea. From that overlook, you can see Kaesong, which I think is about 7 miles over the border or so.
My guess is that this is going to be a simple and highly restricted system. A lot of management is from South Korea, so they'll give them access. From there, the simplest way would be a straight wireless shot to South Korea, but maybe N. Korea can make a play to get their paws on the traffic.
Interesting factoid, North Korea's official GDP (not counting it's counterfeit currency, drug and arms trade) is about $12 billion. Of that, $2 billion comes from trade generated by Kaesong. So when North Korea cut off access to Kaesong, it effectively made the decision to shut down 17% of its economy overnight.
Apparently NO ONE has listened since the beta period began. I realize Timothy and Soulskill are replying above, but clearly no one has done any work on the actual site. Is there anyone who likes anything about the new beta? Put me in the *it blows fucking donkeyballs* category; for all the reasons cited above - broken comments, terrible layout, terrible waste of space.
So why not do a poll on it?
* I like the new beta * I don't like it, but it's fixable * It's terrible * It's so terrible I'll quit using the site if you keep the design * Print out the new website on dead trees and shove it up CowboyNeal's ass
The Pacific Northwest has reached it's max quota of Californians. Sorry, but we really don't want any more. Please consider reapplying after you've mounted a roof rack on your vehicle, own a kayak, mountain bike and a pair of tele skis (road bikes and snowboards are for pussies and white rappers.) Also, you'll need to complete 6 months working as a barista in order to fully appreciate the nuances of coffee. Finally, if you decide to whine about anything and/or compare it to SoCal, you'll be deported.
Find a contractor who works in the marketing field - you know, someone who specializes in things like building websites, developing CRM programs for companies, etc. Often the smaller marketing contractors have a hell of a time finding a tech person who can help support their projects. They also don't understand the nuances of how a lot of pieces of technology fit together. However, and most importantly for you, marketing budgets are fantastic if you're on the contractor end.
I am WAY too busy to surf the web while driving. Between sending email, sending txts, reading Facebook, checking the latest scores and everything else, I don't have time to open a web browser and just "surf".
Oh, and downloading podcasts. Who could forget that..
First, I'm subscribed to multiple open source mailing lists. Ok, awesome, I filtered those into the "Forums" tab so I don't have look at those emails, like, pretty much ever. (I read them about twice a week these days since I'm not as active with those projects any more.) That works.
I get all the usual promo emails. There's a few, like Brad's List that I actually like as well as my Skymiles emails, ok, awesome, I filter those to the Promo tab so I never have to see them.
Then, I'm on my local city council. So I have a bunch of email that spills in related to that. Those just get dumped directly into my inbox because there's no easy way to filter them since I have no idea where they're coming from. Those are tough. And I have to keep them/archive them since it's official business.
My new work related emails I've attempted to apply filters to since I mostly know the domains they originate from. But the label that's applied is gray, and my normal inbox has a gray background. I don't know how to change that color and it makes it pretty useless to have a label. Now, I can click on the Label in the left nav, however it's normally hidden because Gmail insists on showing hangout information at the bottom and it clutters the labels list.
And we haven't gotten how to manage the rest of my personal email.
What sucks is all of that shows up all in one puked up blah of a Primary mailbox. Those are three radically different areas of my life and it looks like a trainwreck to my brain because when I'm thinking of work, the past thing I was to see is an email from my mother with the subject line of, "Did you get the cookies yet?" Then I'm completely distracted thinking about a) going to the post office and b) cookies.
I think the simple paradigm here is, I want my inbox to be "Everything Else" but instead it's "Everything".
There's some good hosted Exchange systems out there. I'm probably going to move to Intermedia. Will there be spam? It won't be as good as gmail, but there will be surprisingly less than you'd think. intermedia.net has worked well for people I've known in the past.
The interface F*CKING SUCKS: no news here
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The Case Against Gmail
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I've been a Gmail user since about June 21, 2004 (that's when my first sent message shows). For personal use I always thought Gmail was just sufficient. The labels were a bit annoying and I have found the tabs a big improvement. The storage is great and I haven't deleted an email since I started using it. I'm primarily a searcher not a sorter, so in many ways that's a good fit for my personal use.
BUT....
A month ago I started my own consulting business. While it's getting off the ground, I've been using the Gmail account for work related reasons. Coming from the standard Outlook world (as well as Thunderbird and other clients), I find Gmail SUCKS GIANT F*CKING DONKEY BALLS to get work done. It's impossible to manage any kind of sane workflow with it. As of this morning, I think I've officially given up.
The new tabs idea would almost work for me - to manage my workflow I figure I need 8 tabs total. In their infinite wisdom, they've limited the new tabs idea to 5. Why 5? I have no idea. I do enjoy the fact that it's reasonably intelligent, so it does figure out automatically how to filter things. However, I really need the ability to add my own tab for work reasons. You know, the one that's labeled "EVERY EMAIL FROM KEVIN BECAUSE THIS IS THE GUY THAT'S PAYING ME AND I DAMN WELL BETTER NOT MISS A MESSAGE FROM HIM".
Like I mentioned, I'm primarily a searcher, however some stuff is so important that you really need to be able to sort it. When you get hundreds of messages a day, the last thing you want is something scrolling off the first page of the browser window. Oh, and why the hell can't I have that first page show 1000 different threads rather than just, say, the 100 it has?
I hate to admit it, but I see a hosted Exchange account in my future.
Studying business is short sighted. At the end you'll find it's mostly a waste of time because you could have learned it all on the job. Blah blah, yield management, blah blah cash flow, blah blah EBITDA.
If you feel strongly about studying business, what you'll find next is the obstacle you can't get around is law. As much as you might want to understand the business dynamics, you'll run into having to deal with contracts, agreements, or copyrights and patents. That's a much harder obstacle to overcome, even if you have internal counsel.
Having said that, look at your options and figure out the path. If you go into management you'll figure out the b-side and have no need for a silly MBA. You'll still be stuck dealing with legal though. With regards to marketing: you either have that skill or you don't. You already know the answer to that question. The best at marketing use analytics and statistics; and the overwhelming majority don't. If you have the opportunity to learn from the best, do it, or don't bother.
Yup, despite everyone's criticisms over the years, I do enjoy reading Slashdot's comments. Sometimes that means it's simply for entertainment sake, although I will say over the years I've learned quite a few things from others and some useful tidbits of information. I think you'd be more hardpressed to find any online nerd collection that's larger.
Seriously. That fucking sucks. I've been on this site a while ("Look Mom, he has a 4 digit user id"), and that is by far the crappiest design I've seen.
I want lots of news stories all accessible with a short blurb of text. I don't need videos, I don't need animated thingies swirling around, I just want news. News for nerds.
In contrast, most of the other redesigns and tweaks over the years I've enjoyed. This one sucks. It'll probably be the nail in the coffin that sends me over to Ars Technica, who's doing a much better job these days.
The things you need to worry about with regards to privacy is everything else in your life. Did you apply for the grocery card that gives you those special discounts? If so, your information got sold. Did you buy a season pass last year at a major ski resort? If so, your information got sold. Did you get one of those cards at the casino so you could rack up some gaming points? If so, your information got sold. All of this, and a whole lot more, are available to marketers or really anyone who wants to pay for it.
As a general rule, if you are filling out a form - regardless of whether its on the interwebs or printed on a dead tree - any information you provide is going to get sold. Actually, in many cases it's even worse, the information is just given away.
So, if your reasoning for changing your online accounts is to beat the marketers, credit agencies, etc then you've got many other things to worry about that have probably already got you householded and deduped from everyone's databases. Now, if your goal in life is to, say, build an encrypted email platform and promote it for worldwide privacy use, then yes - I think you should be careful how big your online presence is. If you're worried about receiving a piece of direct mail from a private golf course because it's known you reside within 50 miles from their clubhouse, have a net income of $X, and drive an Audi, well, in that case you're probably already screwed because they already know all that.
Thank you Microsoft. This makes implementing enterprise strategy so much easier. So let's see.. in the past year we've ditched Microsoft CRM completely. We got rid of 2 SQL Server instances. We will purchase SQL 2012, but with only half the CAL's. These price increases make it so much easier to consider other options.
Perhaps get them a TV with Netflix already built into it? Something like a Samsung?
I think the key is to set up the remote properly so they can access everything using a minimal number of remote controls, preferably just one. I think that's what confuses most people.. hell it even confuses me.
I have our marketing department handle all of our web stuff and they outsource it. I don't know the exact details of the inner workings of the magic used by our web company, but I know it's based on Amazon's EC2 infrastructure. I'm sure as a non-profit that you're extremely cost conscious and something like that might be a good fit for you. We're highly seasonal in our work, so during the busy times of the year they ratchet up the compute services available and we pay a few extra dollars. Then during the off season we ratchet it back down. It works WELL. In general EC2 is considered overkill for small sites, but for high traffic sites it's considered very affordable. When you say 1000 nailing the server with page requests, it makes me think it would be on the affordable side for you.
Now, we're not exactly their favorite customer for a million different reasons, and the working relationship is.. um.. strained. So I don't think I'd recommend the exact company we use, you can surely find others near you if you need help. If you want to try to roll-your-own, here's an (old) example of what you're looking at: http://www.sunsetlakesoftware.com/2008/09/13/running-drupal-website-amazon-ec2
I've worked in the IT industry for 20 years, 7 of which were in telecom.
I find it so damn amusing that all the computer geeks still struggle with basic things the telecom world figured out 30 - 50 years ago. There's a lot to be learned from the old school carriers, and this is one of them.
Most of the bigger carriers have their own stuff that'll track everything from pairs/strands to binding posts, etc. You need to know sizes of entrance protectors and all kinds of other things. Sizes of splice cases and the number of trays are nice to know. Everything needs to go into GIS, and that used to mean a second system that references locations. These days there are integrated packages. The exact system we used was purchased by NEC and no longer exists. And actually, I wouldn't recommend it, we used it primarily because the work order system was quite robust and we were willing to sacrifice some of the documentation features for that.
Cisco and most other vendors have made 10Gb ports too expensive and/or don't have a backplane that can effectively support 10Gb across all the ports. This is pretty ridiculous given how cheap processors have gotten. Even when they do support it, the licensing and maintenance costs can be crazy.
For that reason we're currently deploying several 1Gb connections to our VM servers through various switches (depending on costs per port, reliability needed and location).
I've been hoping that late 2013 is when 10Gb will finally appear for us on our campus trunks at least.
Server 2012 - anyone else frustrated by that too?
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Windows: Not Doomed Yet
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· Score: 4, Informative
So, speaking of frustrating Microsoft OS's, anyone else tried Server 2012?
It seems to be quite a bit faster than 2008 and set up to run as a VM well. HOWEVER... it has taken a giant step backward in usability. No Start menu? Ok, I can adjust to that. However, getting to all the tools to administer a system is frustrating at best. What the f*ck were they thinking? Right now our average 2012 desktop consists of 20 - 30 shortcuts to administrative tools so we can get into things as basic as a control panel or an Event Viewer.
I understand Microsoft wanting to move everyone to using Powershell, I get how powerful the commandline is - I've been using Unix/Linux for 20 years. However, using bash and other commandline tools makes sense. It seems sane and has always been intuitive to pick up. A quick man page look up usually fills in any details that are out of the ordinary. Powershell and Microsoft's objects? Wow.. no idea who designed it but intuitive is not a word I would use to describe it. I suppose the command names themselves are ok, a lot of times you can guess them with a "Set" or "Get" prefix, but the way you pass the object references and the various command parameters are a complete pain the ass. Powershell is a nice feature, but completely ripping out nice graphical tools to do complex and infrequent tasks makes no sense.
The Office-Exchange combo is definitely powerful as others have noted. However, I think we're at a point where it's getting more and more feasible to consider replacing it and there are reasonable alternatives.
What we really need is a complete AD killer. Samba can do it - the nuts and bolts are there. However, it's really rough around the edges. What we really need is a complete drop-in replacement for AD that also includes all of the integration with enterprise tools and has an interface like Microsoft's interface. We want to manage group policy objects, passwords, security groups, etc in the same manner we do now. We want Exchange to think the user accounts are all sitting on a Microsoft DC. Sure, this can all be done with Samba, but it needs to be as braindead simple as it is with Microsoft.
Yes, Linux has had various tries at directory tools for years, but they don't integrate well with Windows desktops. They're also clunky and it seems like the tools change from with no consistency.
Also, here's a plug for the Samba guys - great work guys. I don't think most people realize just how little manpower that project has. There's really less than a dozen core developers and they manage to pull off some amazing stuff.
I managed to go 16 years in the IT world, first as a sys admin and now up through an awesome mid-level management position, without any serious data management scares. (And by 'awesome', I mean I work for demoralizing leadership and I've hit a glass ceiling which will force me to go find another company to work for if I want any shot at career advancement.) I've always made sure there's many, many layers of redundancy and good processes in place.
That was until three weeks ago.
We use Microsoft DFS to sync data between two sites. Because of some other things going on, we had to turn DFS off for 3 weeks. We thought we had everyone transitioned to using the "master" file repository, the one that gets backed up every night, etc, etc. The day we turned on DFS back on, all hell broke loose.
Oh - and this is fairly important stuff: 10 years worth of CAD, design, and legal paperwork. It's a few terabytes worth. For our medium-size company, this is basically everything that we hold near and dear.
The first thing that happened is DFS completely puked and completely trashed BOTH filesystems. Fantastic, Microsoft - what a wonderful piece of shit DFS is. Fairly quickly we had to face some data integrity issues. First, we discovered apparently there was a fella at the remote site that was using the copy of files there. Great.. through a fairly manual process we were able to retrieve most of his changes to the dataset. Next, we fairly quickly gave up on trying to fix the DFS - on the advice of Microsoft it seemed to be fairly hopeless.
This is where shit gets real.
Our head sys admin had been troubleshooting an issue with a drive in a RAID'ed NAS backup device had failed. All the other backups had been shifted to other NAS devices, but that backup was so large that it apparently had just been failing. While looking for that, we also discovered the quarterly backup from December had failed (that's the point where I wanted to put on my manager hat and go rip someone a new one, but decided that probably wouldn't be the most productive thing at the moment and could save that little teachable moment asskicking until after we were out of the woods.) Now, the sys admin hadn't been completely foolish, before turning DFS back on he had run some full backups using a different NAS device.
In a f*cking brilliant stroke of disastrous luck, when we went to perform the recovery we discovered that RAID array on the backup NAS device also had corruption.
Now, how bad the corruption was and what exactly that meant remained to be seen. The backups had completed without error, it was the NAS filesystem itself that was throwing the errors. The NAS was still running and our backup software seemed to recognize the backup catalogs on it. Ok, other than what seemed to one potentially corrupt backup, it was seeming like the next best case scenario was a quarterly backup from September, and I was also staring a complete set of disks from 2010 dreading the thought of bringing them back online. Well, with nothing to do other than try a restore, we pressed the button.
That's when I went home mid-morning, chainsmoked four cigarettes on my porch and wondered what would happened if everything went south. In other words, I was contemplating my next job.
'Lo and behold, and restore worked. We had to merge all kinds of things back together to get a complete copy reassembled, then we still had to get DFS working (which took four days of syncing over the WAN.) When it was all said and done, it looked like there were just two files from one set of changes that we couldn't recover.
I think I'll go double check on the backup jobs now.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember when I was younger and management would send out employee opinion surveys. I'd answer them, be truthful and feel like my opinion actually mattered. I felt it was proper to express exactly how happy or unhappy I was and that the survey was some mechanism for improving things.
Then I became part of management and I realized how completely wrong I was.
The employee opinion survey mostly serves as a crutch for manager's to pat themselves on the back and the do a very good job curve fitting the results to their preconceived notions of how things are. It also serves to weed out people with bad attitudes - I've overheard more than one discussion of trying to locate an employee based on the comment they made on the survey.
So, if you say you're happy with the wage you're getting, you won't be getting a raise. In fact, it's even seen as a sign that pay cuts should be happening. Likewise, if you feel like you're a valued employee, good luck getting any more benefits. It's more likely management will use that as an excuse to strip away that one little perk, like free soda or something, just because they'll decrease the amount of HR budget dedicated to keeping employees happy. Don't ever be happy on paper.
Unfortunately, it's not enough for just you to express your desire for a raise. If 40% of your colleagues think they get paid enough, that's probably enough for management to little to no wage increase. You really want less than 5 - 10% say they're happy - in other words, 90% of the employees in your department need to express displeasure with their wages in order for the survey to have any meaningful effect on wages. (There's plenty of other ways to get a raise though - an employee survey is probably one of the least likely ways for it to happen.)
PS. If you think your company is one of those awesome companies that cares, you're probably wrong. If you sat in the room with the CEO, COO, and HR Director and heard that private conversation about the survey, you'd be horrified.
Wrong. Do you buy clothes? Do laundry? Check your email from a computer at home? Do you pay electricity bills? Any of that kind of stuff can be itemized if done properly. More importantly, at the point where you itemize, the smart thing to do is start a LLC and accrue business expenses.
At the point where you can itemize your deductions, you're better off paying someone else to do you taxes. A good accountant will more than pay for themselves - you'll likely be able to recoup thousands of dollars. A normal human just can't stay on top of the US tax code enough from year to year to know how to file for every qualifying deduction.
Finding the right accountant/tax preparer is very important. I don't have a lot of tips there other than asking around - I recommend asking some small business owners who they use. I've gone through 4 different accountants over the past ten years. One got me audited, two were just so-so, and now I have one that's fantastic. You probably don't want to go to one of those tax mill places like HR Block, although there is some advantage to working with someone who sees A LOT of tax returns. You probably also don't want to go to a big CPA firm that doesn't a lot of business work.
Even more important, if you don't own your own business yet, you need to create one. Filing an LLC is fairly simple in most states. Your business should be fairly in line with one of your hobbies and the writeoffs will be well worth it.
Keep in mind, US sanctions against North Korea mean key technologies make it difficult to import computers. Although these days there's so many ways to get mobile devices that might be a moot point.
Last year we were in South Korea and we went on one of the popular "DMZ Tours". So, on the tour you go to Dorason Station, which is the jumping off point from South Korea onto the rail line into North Korea, and then after that you go up a hill and look into North Korea. From that overlook, you can see Kaesong, which I think is about 7 miles over the border or so.
My guess is that this is going to be a simple and highly restricted system. A lot of management is from South Korea, so they'll give them access. From there, the simplest way would be a straight wireless shot to South Korea, but maybe N. Korea can make a play to get their paws on the traffic.
Interesting factoid, North Korea's official GDP (not counting it's counterfeit currency, drug and arms trade) is about $12 billion. Of that, $2 billion comes from trade generated by Kaesong. So when North Korea cut off access to Kaesong, it effectively made the decision to shut down 17% of its economy overnight.
Apparently NO ONE has listened since the beta period began. I realize Timothy and Soulskill are replying above, but clearly no one has done any work on the actual site. Is there anyone who likes anything about the new beta? Put me in the *it blows fucking donkeyballs* category; for all the reasons cited above - broken comments, terrible layout, terrible waste of space.
So why not do a poll on it?
* I like the new beta
* I don't like it, but it's fixable
* It's terrible
* It's so terrible I'll quit using the site if you keep the design
* Print out the new website on dead trees and shove it up CowboyNeal's ass
The Pacific Northwest has reached it's max quota of Californians. Sorry, but we really don't want any more. Please consider reapplying after you've mounted a roof rack on your vehicle, own a kayak, mountain bike and a pair of tele skis (road bikes and snowboards are for pussies and white rappers.) Also, you'll need to complete 6 months working as a barista in order to fully appreciate the nuances of coffee. Finally, if you decide to whine about anything and/or compare it to SoCal, you'll be deported.
Find a contractor who works in the marketing field - you know, someone who specializes in things like building websites, developing CRM programs for companies, etc. Often the smaller marketing contractors have a hell of a time finding a tech person who can help support their projects. They also don't understand the nuances of how a lot of pieces of technology fit together. However, and most importantly for you, marketing budgets are fantastic if you're on the contractor end.
I am WAY too busy to surf the web while driving. Between sending email, sending txts, reading Facebook, checking the latest scores and everything else, I don't have time to open a web browser and just "surf".
Oh, and downloading podcasts. Who could forget that..
So here's more detail on the work flow I need.
First, I'm subscribed to multiple open source mailing lists. Ok, awesome, I filtered those into the "Forums" tab so I don't have look at those emails, like, pretty much ever. (I read them about twice a week these days since I'm not as active with those projects any more.) That works.
I get all the usual promo emails. There's a few, like Brad's List that I actually like as well as my Skymiles emails, ok, awesome, I filter those to the Promo tab so I never have to see them.
Then, I'm on my local city council. So I have a bunch of email that spills in related to that. Those just get dumped directly into my inbox because there's no easy way to filter them since I have no idea where they're coming from. Those are tough. And I have to keep them/archive them since it's official business.
My new work related emails I've attempted to apply filters to since I mostly know the domains they originate from. But the label that's applied is gray, and my normal inbox has a gray background. I don't know how to change that color and it makes it pretty useless to have a label. Now, I can click on the Label in the left nav, however it's normally hidden because Gmail insists on showing hangout information at the bottom and it clutters the labels list.
And we haven't gotten how to manage the rest of my personal email.
What sucks is all of that shows up all in one puked up blah of a Primary mailbox. Those are three radically different areas of my life and it looks like a trainwreck to my brain because when I'm thinking of work, the past thing I was to see is an email from my mother with the subject line of, "Did you get the cookies yet?" Then I'm completely distracted thinking about a) going to the post office and b) cookies.
I think the simple paradigm here is, I want my inbox to be "Everything Else" but instead it's "Everything".
There's some good hosted Exchange systems out there. I'm probably going to move to Intermedia. Will there be spam? It won't be as good as gmail, but there will be surprisingly less than you'd think. intermedia.net has worked well for people I've known in the past.
I've been a Gmail user since about June 21, 2004 (that's when my first sent message shows). For personal use I always thought Gmail was just sufficient. The labels were a bit annoying and I have found the tabs a big improvement. The storage is great and I haven't deleted an email since I started using it. I'm primarily a searcher not a sorter, so in many ways that's a good fit for my personal use.
BUT....
A month ago I started my own consulting business. While it's getting off the ground, I've been using the Gmail account for work related reasons. Coming from the standard Outlook world (as well as Thunderbird and other clients), I find Gmail SUCKS GIANT F*CKING DONKEY BALLS to get work done. It's impossible to manage any kind of sane workflow with it. As of this morning, I think I've officially given up.
The new tabs idea would almost work for me - to manage my workflow I figure I need 8 tabs total. In their infinite wisdom, they've limited the new tabs idea to 5. Why 5? I have no idea. I do enjoy the fact that it's reasonably intelligent, so it does figure out automatically how to filter things. However, I really need the ability to add my own tab for work reasons. You know, the one that's labeled "EVERY EMAIL FROM KEVIN BECAUSE THIS IS THE GUY THAT'S PAYING ME AND I DAMN WELL BETTER NOT MISS A MESSAGE FROM HIM".
Like I mentioned, I'm primarily a searcher, however some stuff is so important that you really need to be able to sort it. When you get hundreds of messages a day, the last thing you want is something scrolling off the first page of the browser window. Oh, and why the hell can't I have that first page show 1000 different threads rather than just, say, the 100 it has?
I hate to admit it, but I see a hosted Exchange account in my future.
Studying business is short sighted. At the end you'll find it's mostly a waste of time because you could have learned it all on the job. Blah blah, yield management, blah blah cash flow, blah blah EBITDA.
If you feel strongly about studying business, what you'll find next is the obstacle you can't get around is law. As much as you might want to understand the business dynamics, you'll run into having to deal with contracts, agreements, or copyrights and patents. That's a much harder obstacle to overcome, even if you have internal counsel.
Having said that, look at your options and figure out the path. If you go into management you'll figure out the b-side and have no need for a silly MBA. You'll still be stuck dealing with legal though. With regards to marketing: you either have that skill or you don't. You already know the answer to that question. The best at marketing use analytics and statistics; and the overwhelming majority don't. If you have the opportunity to learn from the best, do it, or don't bother.
Yup, despite everyone's criticisms over the years, I do enjoy reading Slashdot's comments. Sometimes that means it's simply for entertainment sake, although I will say over the years I've learned quite a few things from others and some useful tidbits of information. I think you'd be more hardpressed to find any online nerd collection that's larger.
Seriously. That fucking sucks. I've been on this site a while ("Look Mom, he has a 4 digit user id"), and that is by far the crappiest design I've seen.
I want lots of news stories all accessible with a short blurb of text. I don't need videos, I don't need animated thingies swirling around, I just want news. News for nerds.
In contrast, most of the other redesigns and tweaks over the years I've enjoyed. This one sucks. It'll probably be the nail in the coffin that sends me over to Ars Technica, who's doing a much better job these days.
The things you need to worry about with regards to privacy is everything else in your life. Did you apply for the grocery card that gives you those special discounts? If so, your information got sold. Did you buy a season pass last year at a major ski resort? If so, your information got sold. Did you get one of those cards at the casino so you could rack up some gaming points? If so, your information got sold. All of this, and a whole lot more, are available to marketers or really anyone who wants to pay for it.
As a general rule, if you are filling out a form - regardless of whether its on the interwebs or printed on a dead tree - any information you provide is going to get sold. Actually, in many cases it's even worse, the information is just given away.
So, if your reasoning for changing your online accounts is to beat the marketers, credit agencies, etc then you've got many other things to worry about that have probably already got you householded and deduped from everyone's databases. Now, if your goal in life is to, say, build an encrypted email platform and promote it for worldwide privacy use, then yes - I think you should be careful how big your online presence is. If you're worried about receiving a piece of direct mail from a private golf course because it's known you reside within 50 miles from their clubhouse, have a net income of $X, and drive an Audi, well, in that case you're probably already screwed because they already know all that.
Thank you Microsoft. This makes implementing enterprise strategy so much easier. So let's see.. in the past year we've ditched Microsoft CRM completely. We got rid of 2 SQL Server instances. We will purchase SQL 2012, but with only half the CAL's. These price increases make it so much easier to consider other options.
Perhaps get them a TV with Netflix already built into it? Something like a Samsung?
I think the key is to set up the remote properly so they can access everything using a minimal number of remote controls, preferably just one. I think that's what confuses most people.. hell it even confuses me.
"...it tells you what you need to know even when you're not touching the screen..." And it tells the NSA everything else?
I have our marketing department handle all of our web stuff and they outsource it. I don't know the exact details of the inner workings of the magic used by our web company, but I know it's based on Amazon's EC2 infrastructure. I'm sure as a non-profit that you're extremely cost conscious and something like that might be a good fit for you. We're highly seasonal in our work, so during the busy times of the year they ratchet up the compute services available and we pay a few extra dollars. Then during the off season we ratchet it back down. It works WELL. In general EC2 is considered overkill for small sites, but for high traffic sites it's considered very affordable. When you say 1000 nailing the server with page requests, it makes me think it would be on the affordable side for you.
Now, we're not exactly their favorite customer for a million different reasons, and the working relationship is.. um.. strained. So I don't think I'd recommend the exact company we use, you can surely find others near you if you need help. If you want to try to roll-your-own, here's an (old) example of what you're looking at: http://www.sunsetlakesoftware.com/2008/09/13/running-drupal-website-amazon-ec2
I've worked in the IT industry for 20 years, 7 of which were in telecom.
I find it so damn amusing that all the computer geeks still struggle with basic things the telecom world figured out 30 - 50 years ago. There's a lot to be learned from the old school carriers, and this is one of them.
Most of the bigger carriers have their own stuff that'll track everything from pairs/strands to binding posts, etc. You need to know sizes of entrance protectors and all kinds of other things. Sizes of splice cases and the number of trays are nice to know. Everything needs to go into GIS, and that used to mean a second system that references locations. These days there are integrated packages. The exact system we used was purchased by NEC and no longer exists. And actually, I wouldn't recommend it, we used it primarily because the work order system was quite robust and we were willing to sacrifice some of the documentation features for that.
Would something like this work?
http://www.bentley.com/en-US/Products/Bentley+Fiber
Cisco and most other vendors have made 10Gb ports too expensive and/or don't have a backplane that can effectively support 10Gb across all the ports. This is pretty ridiculous given how cheap processors have gotten. Even when they do support it, the licensing and maintenance costs can be crazy.
For that reason we're currently deploying several 1Gb connections to our VM servers through various switches (depending on costs per port, reliability needed and location).
I've been hoping that late 2013 is when 10Gb will finally appear for us on our campus trunks at least.
So, speaking of frustrating Microsoft OS's, anyone else tried Server 2012?
It seems to be quite a bit faster than 2008 and set up to run as a VM well. HOWEVER... it has taken a giant step backward in usability. No Start menu? Ok, I can adjust to that. However, getting to all the tools to administer a system is frustrating at best. What the f*ck were they thinking? Right now our average 2012 desktop consists of 20 - 30 shortcuts to administrative tools so we can get into things as basic as a control panel or an Event Viewer.
I understand Microsoft wanting to move everyone to using Powershell, I get how powerful the commandline is - I've been using Unix/Linux for 20 years. However, using bash and other commandline tools makes sense. It seems sane and has always been intuitive to pick up. A quick man page look up usually fills in any details that are out of the ordinary. Powershell and Microsoft's objects? Wow.. no idea who designed it but intuitive is not a word I would use to describe it. I suppose the command names themselves are ok, a lot of times you can guess them with a "Set" or "Get" prefix, but the way you pass the object references and the various command parameters are a complete pain the ass. Powershell is a nice feature, but completely ripping out nice graphical tools to do complex and infrequent tasks makes no sense.
The Office-Exchange combo is definitely powerful as others have noted. However, I think we're at a point where it's getting more and more feasible to consider replacing it and there are reasonable alternatives.
What we really need is a complete AD killer. Samba can do it - the nuts and bolts are there. However, it's really rough around the edges. What we really need is a complete drop-in replacement for AD that also includes all of the integration with enterprise tools and has an interface like Microsoft's interface. We want to manage group policy objects, passwords, security groups, etc in the same manner we do now. We want Exchange to think the user accounts are all sitting on a Microsoft DC. Sure, this can all be done with Samba, but it needs to be as braindead simple as it is with Microsoft.
Yes, Linux has had various tries at directory tools for years, but they don't integrate well with Windows desktops. They're also clunky and it seems like the tools change from with no consistency.
Also, here's a plug for the Samba guys - great work guys. I don't think most people realize just how little manpower that project has. There's really less than a dozen core developers and they manage to pull off some amazing stuff.
Yup. Same here. I think there's a bunch of retards running this site now.
I managed to go 16 years in the IT world, first as a sys admin and now up through an awesome mid-level management position, without any serious data management scares. (And by 'awesome', I mean I work for demoralizing leadership and I've hit a glass ceiling which will force me to go find another company to work for if I want any shot at career advancement.) I've always made sure there's many, many layers of redundancy and good processes in place.
That was until three weeks ago.
We use Microsoft DFS to sync data between two sites. Because of some other things going on, we had to turn DFS off for 3 weeks. We thought we had everyone transitioned to using the "master" file repository, the one that gets backed up every night, etc, etc. The day we turned on DFS back on, all hell broke loose.
Oh - and this is fairly important stuff: 10 years worth of CAD, design, and legal paperwork. It's a few terabytes worth. For our medium-size company, this is basically everything that we hold near and dear.
The first thing that happened is DFS completely puked and completely trashed BOTH filesystems. Fantastic, Microsoft - what a wonderful piece of shit DFS is. Fairly quickly we had to face some data integrity issues. First, we discovered apparently there was a fella at the remote site that was using the copy of files there. Great.. through a fairly manual process we were able to retrieve most of his changes to the dataset. Next, we fairly quickly gave up on trying to fix the DFS - on the advice of Microsoft it seemed to be fairly hopeless.
This is where shit gets real.
Our head sys admin had been troubleshooting an issue with a drive in a RAID'ed NAS backup device had failed. All the other backups had been shifted to other NAS devices, but that backup was so large that it apparently had just been failing. While looking for that, we also discovered the quarterly backup from December had failed (that's the point where I wanted to put on my manager hat and go rip someone a new one, but decided that probably wouldn't be the most productive thing at the moment and could save that little teachable moment asskicking until after we were out of the woods.) Now, the sys admin hadn't been completely foolish, before turning DFS back on he had run some full backups using a different NAS device.
In a f*cking brilliant stroke of disastrous luck, when we went to perform the recovery we discovered that RAID array on the backup NAS device also had corruption.
Now, how bad the corruption was and what exactly that meant remained to be seen. The backups had completed without error, it was the NAS filesystem itself that was throwing the errors. The NAS was still running and our backup software seemed to recognize the backup catalogs on it. Ok, other than what seemed to one potentially corrupt backup, it was seeming like the next best case scenario was a quarterly backup from September, and I was also staring a complete set of disks from 2010 dreading the thought of bringing them back online. Well, with nothing to do other than try a restore, we pressed the button.
That's when I went home mid-morning, chainsmoked four cigarettes on my porch and wondered what would happened if everything went south. In other words, I was contemplating my next job.
'Lo and behold, and restore worked. We had to merge all kinds of things back together to get a complete copy reassembled, then we still had to get DFS working (which took four days of syncing over the WAN.) When it was all said and done, it looked like there were just two files from one set of changes that we couldn't recover.
I think I'll go double check on the backup jobs now.