In many cases, Excite resells the service through local cable companies. In my area, Excite is resold by Charter (A Wired World Company - notice they use the same font in their logo as MS). Charter saw all this coming and sent out CDs to change people over to their new, in-house service called Pipeline. So far so good.
Unfortunately, it seems they're getting hip to people hanging servers off home accounts because they've gone from static IPs to DHCP. The IP address I got had a lease of only one week. I had problems connecting with DHCP so I coded my leased IP address in and it worked. We'll see how long before I have to get a new one. Looks like I'll be going to register.com quite a bit more to change my DNS settings regularly.:-)
Pipeline's bandwidth seems as stable as Excite's was. It's always been good on my node. Averages 1.1 to sometimes 3 Mbps of steady throughput at night.
I think you're on to something here. How f*cking hard is it to subscribe to the MS security bulletin and apply patches as they come out. All the NT/2K admins who do that religiously have nothing to worry about (well...at least from worms). It is unbelievable how many of these virii exploit year-old holes that had patches readily available.
There is absolutely no excuse for nimda to even exist. It would be one thing for a virus that tapped some new hole no one knew about, but this is just admin ignorance/arrogance/ineptitude.
Do you hate MS products, or the way MS does business? There is a distinct difference. Windows 2000 is buttery smooth and rock solid, as is NT 4 after at least SP4. Perhaps "buttery" does not apply to NT 4, but the servers I lord over get abused around the clock and don't even hiccup. Office has no competition, nor does IE 5.5/6. Even the most die-hard MS-bashing sysadmins would love Visio on their *nix box.
Are you referring to Windows 98 when you say you hate MS products? I can't think of any software that I *hate* (well, maybe BackUp Exec).
I too can't wait to get my sweaty mitts on an Xbox.
I was/am the first full time IT person at my office. One of our offices in another city hired a full time person at about the same time. Together we made a good case for training and were quickly sent off to Cisco and NT (yeah, I know, but it pays the bills) school. As soon as we had certs in hand, the guy in the other office left for another job that paid 20K more a year (I stayed and got a fat raise as management was afraid I'd leave to). He just took the training and ran. The firm was new to this and had no recourse.
Soon after this debacle, our HR director asked me to sign an agreement that stated I would pay back the cost of my training if I left within 3 years. I refused to sign because the total training was about 15K and if a sweet offer came by I didn't want to be held hostage here. That was three years ago and I have had zero training since.
I'm beginning to see training as an important part of my compensation and benefits package. Now that the economy has cooled and people aren't job hopping for the quick buck, I'm working on getting my employer to at least do tuition reimbursement. I learn the most/best on my own, but there are times when having a guru to answer questions cannot be replaced.
If it's important to you, keep training in mind when negotiating/renegotiating your contract. I would actually take a little less of a raise in exchange for some good training, as I know it will pay off in the long run.
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In many cases, Excite resells the service through local cable companies. In my area, Excite is resold by Charter (A Wired World Company - notice they use the same font in their logo as MS). Charter saw all this coming and sent out CDs to change people over to their new, in-house service called Pipeline. So far so good.
Unfortunately, it seems they're getting hip to people hanging servers off home accounts because they've gone from static IPs to DHCP. The IP address I got had a lease of only one week. I had problems connecting with DHCP so I coded my leased IP address in and it worked. We'll see how long before I have to get a new one. Looks like I'll be going to register.com quite a bit more to change my DNS settings regularly.
Pipeline's bandwidth seems as stable as Excite's was. It's always been good on my node. Averages 1.1 to sometimes 3 Mbps of steady throughput at night.
I think you're on to something here. How f*cking hard is it to subscribe to the MS security bulletin and apply patches as they come out. All the NT/2K admins who do that religiously have nothing to worry about (well...at least from worms). It is unbelievable how many of these virii exploit year-old holes that had patches readily available.
There is absolutely no excuse for nimda to even exist. It would be one thing for a virus that tapped some new hole no one knew about, but this is just admin ignorance/arrogance/ineptitude.
Do you hate MS products, or the way MS does business? There is a distinct difference. Windows 2000 is buttery smooth and rock solid, as is NT 4 after at least SP4. Perhaps "buttery" does not apply to NT 4, but the servers I lord over get abused around the clock and don't even hiccup. Office has no competition, nor does IE 5.5/6. Even the most die-hard MS-bashing sysadmins would love Visio on their *nix box.
Are you referring to Windows 98 when you say you hate MS products? I can't think of any software that I *hate* (well, maybe BackUp Exec).
I too can't wait to get my sweaty mitts on an Xbox.
I was/am the first full time IT person at my office. One of our offices in another city hired a full time person at about the same time. Together we made a good case for training and were quickly sent off to Cisco and NT (yeah, I know, but it pays the bills) school. As soon as we had certs in hand, the guy in the other office left for another job that paid 20K more a year (I stayed and got a fat raise as management was afraid I'd leave to). He just took the training and ran. The firm was new to this and had no recourse. Soon after this debacle, our HR director asked me to sign an agreement that stated I would pay back the cost of my training if I left within 3 years. I refused to sign because the total training was about 15K and if a sweet offer came by I didn't want to be held hostage here. That was three years ago and I have had zero training since. I'm beginning to see training as an important part of my compensation and benefits package. Now that the economy has cooled and people aren't job hopping for the quick buck, I'm working on getting my employer to at least do tuition reimbursement. I learn the most/best on my own, but there are times when having a guru to answer questions cannot be replaced. If it's important to you, keep training in mind when negotiating/renegotiating your contract. I would actually take a little less of a raise in exchange for some good training, as I know it will pay off in the long run.