Great logic there. It's not a quality problem, but all Gen 1 Apple systems have quality problems.
Hello?
My first MacBook died completely within 48 hours of taking it out of the box, never to boot again.
My second MacBook lost it's video and the DVD/CD drive still doesn't like most blank media, even after a 15 business day trip to Apple repair land.
On July 30th or so I talked to AppleCare about my machine and they told me this:
"On the 27th, 1300 machines in the repair depot were put in on-hold status pending arrival of parts. The part your machine is waiting for is a new motherboard. On the 30th, the shipment of motherboards arrived and the depot hasn't updated any tickets while trying to work through the back-log of machines. So while normally at this many days I would authorize you to simply get a replacement machine from the local Apple store, I can't tell if your machine shipped today because tickets aren't being updated. I would recommend waiting a day or two to see if your machine arrives."
I did wait, and the machine showed up 2 days later.
The "make an appointment for the Genius Bar" thing bothers me, as I got bitten by it. Nothing in my experience as a customer prepared me for, "You don't have an appointment. Sorry your machine that's two days old won't even turn on, make an appointment and come back tomorrow."
My G3 iMac, and my wife's G4 iBook have been virtually flawless -- this MacBook has been nothing but a pain in the ass. Definitely not what I had come to expect from Apple.
Boy, I'm so glad NPR is there to save me from myself! If they didn't do it, we'd have to put cops on streetcorners with bullhorns shouting, "Please people, calm down. Use your brains."
If you're serious about helping her out, and feel like going through the brain damage, make sure you install some sort of reasonably secure remote access software - so when she claims "it's not working" you can SEE what's going on in the GUI.
It truly sounds like your sister may just be one of those people who aren't meant for computers. There are people that shouldn't drive, people that shouldn't be in a kitchen cooking, people who shouldn't be allowed to get anywhere near houseplants, and yes...
People who shouldn't own computers.
If you're on the other side of the fence, embarrass her by saying you'd be happy to take the computer home with you where you'll happily use it without any problems, and if she needs a computer badly she can call Apple or Dell or whoever she likes. Let her decide and deal with the machine.
Computer professionals need to grow up and act like truly professional positions in other fields. That includes degrees that are relevant to the work at hand, testing and licensure.
None of these trends have really started whole-hog yet, and they may never if technology workers don't grow up.
There's a reason ROI is crap in computers -- computer "professionals" typically aren't as professional as they'd like you to believe, until they have pretty high-level jobs at very large organizations. Small companies "make due" with non-professional help, proving that computers don't save money -- they cost more money than they bring in. ESPECIALLY without a GOAL for the computer use and a DESIGN, things no professional would do for chump change.
Plenty of room in the low-end. Grab on and hope for the best, it's one of only seriously important industries left where you can. Any serious professional job would laugh you out of the office.
Engineer? Go pass the PE tests. Doctor? We all know how difficult that is. Lawyer? Yep them too.
Computer "Professional"? Did you stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night?
Saying this "isn't what a student needs" is selling a student short.
Risks/Rewards and the ratio to which one is willing to try for the Rewards by way of Risk is a very personal thing.
A college student who does understand and pays attention to what's going on in the world can certainly manage a portfolio, and later in life they'll HAVE to anyway, if they have any expectation of being an investor.
The BIG benefit from starting young is the simple "time value of money". If they can invest early and do even relatively well, the amount of time they can have their investments compounding creates gains that NO ONE who starts in their 30's, 40's, or 50's can touch.
Multiplication (if you can muster the courage and willpower to LEAVE YOUR MONEY IN THE MARKET) can make your money work for you so much more than someone who starts late or can't put in enough to "catch up" to his few thousand dollars that's been compounding for 20 more years than many "average" investors.
The key here in advice to any young person is: You can either buy assets or liabilities. Your car, in most cases your house, and everything it "costs" you to live are liabilities. Assets make you money. You put money in and get more back at the end of the day with an asset. Create a balance sheet, learn how to do basic accounting, and PAY ATTENTION to whether your income is purchasing you liabilities or assets.
The commercials, TV shows and all of the things you see daily are almost ALWAYS trying to sell you a liability -- making money for SOMEONE ELSE in the process. Don't buy in. You DON'T EVER NEED a new car. You DON'T EVER NEED a big house (until you have a family to take care of) and you DON'T NEED techno-toys. NEED is a strong word. You MUST learn early to buy things that will PAY for the things you WANT. I wish I'd learned it sooner, and I'm still paying for things I no longer own. Seriously. DO NOT SPEND MONEY YOU DO NOT HAVE -- EVER.
Housing may be the one exception to this rule -- real estate is a fickler game than the stock market in some respects. Leverage credit to buy your home, certainly -- if you're like most people -- but buy a home EVERYONE YOU KNOW would want to own in a neighborhood EVERYONE YOU KNOW would want to live in. (Okay, not everyone likes exactly the same things, but the rule in real estate is always the same, Location, Location, Location.)
Lots of people who are stuck in the rut of consumer spending, credit debt, and other supremely bad habits will argue on these points. If you find someone giving financial advice, always ask them which millionaire they're modeling their own finances after -- or find out if they're already a millionaire. A million dollars is NOT that much money, anymore -- seriously. There are LOTS of millionaires out there, and they don't drive new, fancy cars, they don't buy things they don't truly need, and they don't buy things on credit. They buy assets that pay for things they would LIKE to have or do.
It's DAMN HARD to convince young people to take this route when their friends are "out-pacing" them at first. Look, Bobby has a new car, a new house, a new wife, and seems really happy. You know what? Bobby really has a huge car payment at 5-10% interest, a giant mortgage that he's tied to for 30 years in a house that will lose 2/3's of it's value soon, and his wife spends money on clothes and shoes to look pretty for you and the neighborhood so fast, Bobby can barely make the electric bill payment.
Look HARD at the real numbers, young man -- and make your decisions about how you view money early on. Money is a tool -- just like that screwdriver in your toolbox. If you live FOR it, you won't be happy, but if you learn how it's properly used, you'll go further than all your friends.
Good luck with it. I'm playing catch-up. Too many newer cars when I was young, too many purchases on credit, and not enough self-control and thought. DON'T follow my footsteps, go the other way.
Ah, then never see it well in Denver because the Coors family, the City of Golden, CO and the so-called "public" won't let the broadcasters (who went together, bought all the land around the site where ALL of the TV broadcasting has been done here since the 1950's and put together a plan for their new tower with everyone on the SAME tower, a model of cooperation and non-waste) have their tower after they agreed to take down three or four other towers as a gesture of good-will and "saving the view" of the mountain that has had broadcast towers on it for over 60 years now.
Yes, the Citizens of Jefferson County, Colorado and the money-bags behind the "anti-tower" effort are an excellent example of why pre-emptive bitchslapping needs to be legalized.
There's even talk of Eminent-Domain being invoked by the City to take away the land the networks purchased, and then probably a big hoo-hah Supreme Court battle with the FCC involved, since they're the ones mandating the digital format conversion.
Meanwhile, Denver is the last major city in the U.S. without a permanent HDTV broadcast tower already in the works or up and running, and we're all picking up our mandated HDTV signals from high atop... a downtown office building that doesn't cover half the city's population. (For those that don't know, Downtown Denver is the LOWEST spot in town. Putting stuff on buildings there just gets the RF signal over the "bowl" and barely out to the closest suburbs.
I think City government morons, backed by beer money, need to let the RF engineers do their jobs, and stay out of it... but what do I know? The city has paid a lot of people to create poorly done RF studies showing that some of the other mountain sites further West away from Denver are "just as good", but those sites are not broadcast sites, they're either mixed use with low-power broadcast and two-way, or they're two-way only, and mixing broadcast and two-way is a maintenance and design headache for everyone on the site, from an RF engineering perspective.
And mostly -- the real reason -- Steve Coors doesn't want the tower in his backyard. At least that's what I've heard anyway. Ironically, there's a tower ON Coors family property a few hundred yards away, that they happily accept the rent for. It's not a money-maker, but the Feds use it for one of their agency's radio gear. Quite the quagmire, eh?
I can't imagine how much fun this would have been if Pete Coors had made it to the U.S. Senate. Whoo-boy. Fun times there. It was fun to watch him pull down all the Coors Light billboards with hot chicks in bikinis on them while he ran for the Republican ticket from Colorado, though. All those "Family Values" folks don't really want beer being sold by hot chicks, I guess.
Very cool, but they rarely use visual sighting as the only means of finding the boosters.
There are various tracking and recovery tools, including good old fashioned radio beacons and simple Direction Finding gear... similar to military Emergency Locator Transmitters, and not very far off the standard ELT frequency of 243 MHz.
I was strident in my reply because it's nigh time our industry grew up and become professionals. And professionals support BUSINESS. Management SHOULD be involved and defining EXACTLY why there's a generic-OS PC on every desk in the company. Was and is that a sound BUSINESS decision? I think not.
Most of the problem areas you and I are talking about would go away if management would simply define the GOALS of having a general-purpose OS on the desktop, and policy for its use. It's a machine, just like the copy machine or the fax machine. Set the rules, and THEN enforce/follow them.
IT workers should not be making corporate policy, and CIO's should not be running (as they are now) American companies. They should be partners with the CEO, and they are WAY behind on this type of stuff... too busy buying stuff after they wave their wands and do some hand-wringing and say, "But we neeeeed it, boss!"
Mediocre and worse CIO's are some of the most dangerous people in the United States today, when it comes to business. Because they let their front-line techs just dictate company computer use policy and not bother to re-think how they're providing the services they are required to provide. They just keep plugging away with these complex generic-OS machines with hoardes of staff to maintain them because their "empire" is already built.
Planning and true Engineering of solutions isn't something most IT departments excel at, or even do very well at all. Someone at the front line of IT, if things were well-defined and professionally built, would never have to worry about Skype. It either wouldn't be allowed on the machines, or the upper-management staff would have decided and published guidelines for extra-curricular software uses that the company allows as a "benefit".
That's just how I see it. IT continues to act like it's your typical teenage kid, when it comes to playing ball in the real world of business. And when I say "IT", I don't mean the small numbers that work on the data center and major servers, I'm talking specifically about user desktops and this type of problem that gets lots of "airtime" like the Skype flaws, etc... big knee-jerk reaction, no one with any clue as to really why the OS UNDERNEATH Skype was ever chosen for their company's needs in the first place, other than the CIO got a nice round of golf from a Marketing person at some OS company.
That is a very good point. So why do so many bosses today do this? It seems epidemic in proportion. It may be another good root-cause analysis and something to look for in a GOOD boss, that they don't hand tools to the inept and untrained. Again, tying this all back to $$$, they're wasting it and anyone enabling that behavior is hurting the company, all the way to the top.
Truthfully there aren't many jobs that can't be done better WITHOUT a computer... seriously think back to how long it would take to get a task done like taking a customer's help request and dealing with it prior to ticket systems and "Tiered Support" driven by those systems. Or phone menus that branch forever into infininte loops.
All driven by computers, all badly designed and programmed.
The vast majority of the annoyances in "modern life" in 1st world countries come from computer applications that were mis-designed for their purpose. Or worse, that met their design goals, but the goals actually made the customer's interaction with the company they were calling worse than before, to make things easier for the company they're calling, not the other way around.
Take a very serious look at anything in your life run on computers, and find the few that really benefitted from them. (Information search without having to go to a library is a great example.) Then find the hundreds where the computer made the product or service worse. It's a really surprising analysis to do -- and one I've been actively trying to do for about a year now in my personal life.
It's really surprising to find the areas of my life where NOT using my computer would actually make me a lot happier and take LESS time and produce an equal quality result. Or "good enough", like a handwritten letter vs an e-mail for keeping in touch with family, as a generic example. If the letter doesn't contain time-sensitive information that would benefit from electronically transferring it, carrying a pen and paper is something I already do, and having an extra envelope that's pre-stamped around in my bag is pretty easy to do, and useful for other things too.
Considering the ENTIRE block of time I'd have to have to fire up the laptop, get online (even with my mobile data service, and yes usually the machine is my MacBook which boots a helluva lot faster than my work ThinkPad), and write an e-mail is generally longer or just barely equal to the amount of time to dash off a nice note on paper that the person will appreciate more.
In other words, I think a LOT of IT people think computers are necessary for people to do their jobs... if the database crashes, can I still answer the phone and help the customer with a problem? You betcha. Would it show up in the pretty Excel graphs the bosses sit around in meetings and discuss at the end of the month? No... but... we'd still get the job done, if we know our product and aren't reading from a so-called "Knowledge Base" written by some idiot somewhere else on a product we know nothing about.
Hey, the IT person took the job KNOWING all of these things you mention, and yet most do nothing to educate their bosses about the problem or attempt to fix it.
Driving is a skill acquired by lots of people effectively through a practice period (learner's permit), and mentoring and supervision. In some cases, people are still bad drivers, but get around (barely) safely enough to operate amongst the public on the roads.
The same is true of computer users, but they're provided with zero real training, no "learning" timeframe with a mentor, no supervision at all. (Well supervision is usually done from the equivalent of a helicopter hovering above the freeway that sometimes drops a guy down to change your tire when the whole car stops working if you didn't crash it into a guard rail. If you did crunch it, the helicopter drops you a whole new car and lifts yours off the highway... or lowers a crack team of mechanics who try to work on the car beside the road.)
Seriously the analogies are pretty good but they only go so far. The real problems are: Bad OS design by companies who know those purchasing the OS won't even blink an eye at spending HUGE amounts of money on maintenance and add-ons for "the car" to make it safe to drive, and lack of any sort of training at all about how computers work, leaving most employees thinking the computers are some kind of "magic box" they're "too dumb" to figure out.
Many IT people LOVE (secretly) that their users think this, as it gives more "power" to them and makes them feel a whole lot more important than they really are that they understand the computer and the people operating them, don't. Which people should a company train on computer technology more? The people using the computers daily to do their jobs, or the IT staff who only band-aid the root-cause problems over and over for years?
I'm not trolling, although I'm sure those fully entrenched in the current mind-set will think so. I'm serious. When a desktop computer was $5k, only certain people got them, and the companies paid for training and recurrent training to make their investment in computers worthwhile. Now computers for business use run about $500 without software per workstation, and the investment is backfiring on companies who never put training or certification plans in place.
How many times have you seen a brand new application (in the disguise of an upgrade) put into place that completely and utterly disrupts the end-users doing their jobs because the UI changed completely? Would paying to actually set up that system in parallel and teaching each employee about every aspect of the UI have helped? How many companies do that anymore?
Skills that are required but people simply "don't get" but COULD easily after just an hour of training: - The difference between a double-click and a single-click (and how to set their speed preferences) - The difference between a left-click and a right-click and when to use each, as well as an overview of various context menus that might be useful in their tasks. - Basic understanding of how the "magic network" works and training on basic security and company policy. - Etc. The list goes on.
I think if IT people DID switch to the attitude you're saying they shouldn't, the users would actually recognize their value more often. Especially if they had enough training to just barely know how badly they'd foobar'ed the machine.
The key underpinning of all of my comments is: Computers are JUST machines. No more difficult to train people how to use than say a car, a photocopier, a truck, a french-fry maker, a . IT front-line support techs are simply mobile repairmen, but they always want to think they're more. The industry's insistence on not training users to even a level that they can fix simple problems themselves and describe harder ones accurately, actually holds the IT worker there.
If that worker ever wants to move up to higher level support problems and design work (well, assuming the compan
You guys are starting to get it. Could a computer do an awful lot of damage to a company in the wrong hands from inside their network? Could it be that just turning users loose on full-blown computers with no training is far more dangerous than almost anything a company ever does with any other tools that company uses?
Eventually the collective light-bulb will come on. Just because computers are prevalent, doesn't mean users shouldn't be trained, certified, and perhaps even... yeah... licensed.
However, licensing usually indicates that the chore of testing the person needs to be standardized for some public good. (Like driver's licenses.) In the case of personal computers on employee's desks, the company stands to lose a lot more than the public by not training and certifying computer users, but they're too cheap to do it, or just assume it's an "easy to aquire skill" to operate a computer properly.
Eventually, the house of cards starts to crumble and people start blaming the applications on problems that really are OS level and user training issues. It's happening all over the industry right now.
Meanwhile, properly built, properly engineered "computer" systems abound. The embedded market is a good example. Purpose-built computers operated by trained techs, work great. Almost always. Generic computing is a broken engineering model from the start.
Most people have no damn clue why they are buying a computer. Ask anyone you're doing "free" tech support for, honestly and nicely, what they really want to do with the machine, so you can help them make an appropriate purchase.
They won't know, and they'll buy a PC anyway.
People buy all sorts of shit they don't need. It's fueled the home computer industry for years.
They end up using them mostly for games, when a console machine would be better from the standpoint of reliability and ease of use.
Agreed that cocky IT people are more dangerous to a company than anything else.
A great example would be when companies operate fleet vehicles. They lay down a few basic policies, and handle ALL maintenance of the vehicles or hire only those they can trust to do the maintenance if the vehicle is in the care of the individual.
The maintenance people don't cop an attitude to the drivers, if they ever even see them, and they certainly don't question the boss for giving the driver the vehicle. They just fix the damn cars/trucks so the company can keep doing business.
Too many IT people think they're more than just glorified copy-machine repairmen. Only those who actually HELP their companies make the situation better and fix the root-cause problems (get the users training, provide only "kiosk" machines for workers too untrained to use a full operating system, make or keep the company's money) are anything more than that.
Complaining about "stupid users" without providing training in the use of the complex equipment sitting in front of them is stupid. It's like pointing someone at an F-16 and saying, "She's all yours. Go do your job. We'll make sure you're shot down quickly so you don't have to do anything other than get it airborne."
Maybe the only reason they need Skype (or any other "frivolous" application) is to ward off the depression that set in years ago that they were working for a company that would hire someone as short-sighted about humans as you to run their network?
No, seriously... treat your end-users like humans, not slaves. You have such a huge "us" vs "them" mentality going already, you're probably too far gone to realize that you're overhead.
If all your users REALLY need is e-mail and web browsers, I'm sure there's an outsourcing company ready to take over your company's IT job for a fraction of what they pay you. Bank on it.
Do you spend every single minute at your job "producing" something? Do you ever stop to think about anything? (Well, I suppose that's debateable considering your knee-jerk response of "turn off the evil Internet connections".)
Humans interact. Humans do other things besides crank out the same useless shit all day long. And if wage-slaves (not humans) are what you want for end-users, eventually you and the company will get exactly what you wanted -- and your company will be lifeless and dead, and if you're not a utility, a natural monopoly, or some other giant, you'll fold.
All this crap about Skype being the security risk... Answer this one: Do you think Skype's a bigger risk on a Mac vs. on a PC? How about on a locked-down Linux box you secured and set up for the end-user?
If the answer is "yes, they're different" in any way -- you've analyzed the root-cause security problem incorrectly from a purely engineering/scientific standpoint. Root-cause of security problems isn't Skype. Or any other application that talks on Port 80 or 443, or whatever.
The fact that there's a big giant untrusted network everyone's plugged into just so they can basically send e-mail (also untrusted, hideously un-authenticated, and a much larger security problem than a stupid streaming audio application), and it's an utter mess of people so anonymous that they feel the can get away with anything -- so they do. Add in the world's worst security model (Microsoft desktop OS's that still need 3rd party apps to protect them from basic things with hourly updates), and yeah...
Skype chatters are definitely such a huge problem you should spent lots of company time and resources working on it.
Ah - now we're getting to it. You're wasting company time looking into it in the first place aren't you? If all your users need is e-mail and web-browsing, why aren't kiosk-like machines already deployed? Why give them a full-blown OS to begin with?
You just keep telling yourself that working on this particular problem is worthwhile. And you'll continue being more unproductive than those Skyper's who are talking to Aunt Tilly while they're working late to finish their real work. When IT gets off it's ass and REALLY fixes the security issues in networks and computers and companies finally realize what that REALLY costs to do... well, you probably won't have a job because a pile of paper, a pencil, and a good filing system in a filing cabinet room will start to look damn cost-effective.
Go ahead, set policy, cut 'em off. Be an ass. It won't help the underlying security problems you already have one little bit. Every over-bearing arm-chair security analyst in an IT support role who gets cocky about wanting to cut everyone off SHOULD GET THEIR WISH GRANTED INSTANTLY. They'd be out of a job, or working in the filing cabinet room with everyone else, and have a boss who thinks taking a break from the filing cabinet room should be measured with a stopwatch as you exit the room.
Treat people like people. Work WITH your co-workers who are your CUSTOMERS not people to be leered at, looked down upon, or otherwise belittled like you have here. I hope that if tomorrow I could post your message on paper for all your end-users to see, they would not say, "No surprises there. He's always been an ass." I hope you're better than that, and not just superficially when y
Anyone that knows what they're doing can spoof ANI (Caller ID) to be from any number they want it to be from.
A friend recently noticed that his VoIP carrier wasn't filtering the ANI provided from his Asterisk server, and then coupled that information with the fact that huge numbers of his friends don't turn on the "use additional password" feature in their cellular carrier's voice mail boxes for their cell phones made for some interesting "testing" and warning of his friends to turn on their damn PIN numbers on two major U.S. carriers, that DEFAULT to checking ANI to see if you're calling from your cell phone, and drop you straight into your voice mail retrieval menu. (Hint: Cingular, and NexTel)
A quick reconfiguration of Asterisk to send out THEIR phone number as the number he was calling from, and he was listening to their stored voice mails.
Seriously, ANI is NOT a good basis for security (authentication of who's calling you) by any REMOTE stretch of the imagination.
My friend regularly calls me with ANI's that are "funny" to see if I notice. The good one was the White House's switchboard number. I answered, "Good evening, Mr. President."
Should his VoIP provider be forcing him to use one of the 100 or so DID number he has assigned to his VoIP circuits? Yep. Are they? Nope.
Yeah, understand. I've followed some of the certification process for the Amateur Radio gear on board, and it's tough. I'm a big fan of the GE MP/A series of "handheld" radios, and always liked seeing the old girl on board before the Kenwood was certified.
Love to talk to those guys when one of them is excited about Ham Radio - it's so cool to show a kid or family member that with 5 watts into a modest antenna, one can be talking to an astronaut during their "free time".
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Great logic there. It's not a quality problem, but all Gen 1 Apple systems have quality problems.
Hello?
My first MacBook died completely within 48 hours of taking it out of the box, never to boot again.
My second MacBook lost it's video and the DVD/CD drive still doesn't like most blank media, even after a 15 business day trip to Apple repair land.
On July 30th or so I talked to AppleCare about my machine and they told me this:
"On the 27th, 1300 machines in the repair depot were put in on-hold status pending arrival of parts. The part your machine is waiting for is a new motherboard. On the 30th, the shipment of motherboards arrived and the depot hasn't updated any tickets while trying to work through the back-log of machines. So while normally at this many days I would authorize you to simply get a replacement machine from the local Apple store, I can't tell if your machine shipped today because tickets aren't being updated. I would recommend waiting a day or two to see if your machine arrives."
I did wait, and the machine showed up 2 days later.
The "make an appointment for the Genius Bar" thing bothers me, as I got bitten by it. Nothing in my experience as a customer prepared me for, "You don't have an appointment. Sorry your machine that's two days old won't even turn on, make an appointment and come back tomorrow."
My G3 iMac, and my wife's G4 iBook have been virtually flawless -- this MacBook has been nothing but a pain in the ass. Definitely not what I had come to expect from Apple.
There are people who have signed documents that besides their clearances they are not allowed to leave the Continental United States.
Those people are the ones no one wants to see kidnapped.
I was with ya until the company car man.
You KNOW they'll just give you a used GeekSquad VW and think they're doing something cool.
Take the cash.
Boy, I'm so glad NPR is there to save me from myself! If they didn't do it, we'd have to put cops on streetcorners with bullhorns shouting, "Please people, calm down. Use your brains."
Oh wait, sometimes we do have to do that.
No surprises here... people arguing over API's and the kernel. Gee, read kernel-traffic lately?
If you're serious about helping her out, and feel like going through the brain damage, make sure you install some sort of reasonably secure remote access software - so when she claims "it's not working" you can SEE what's going on in the GUI.
It truly sounds like your sister may just be one of those people who aren't meant for computers. There are people that shouldn't drive, people that shouldn't be in a kitchen cooking, people who shouldn't be allowed to get anywhere near houseplants, and yes...
People who shouldn't own computers.
If you're on the other side of the fence, embarrass her by saying you'd be happy to take the computer home with you where you'll happily use it without any problems, and if she needs a computer badly she can call Apple or Dell or whoever she likes. Let her decide and deal with the machine.
Heh heh... I'd mod ya up if I could. :-)
Apple's not ready in the slightest for the hoards of "average" users for support.
I've had two dead MacBooks, and their idea of customer service is falling apart under the load of the crud they're releasing.
Read all about it here.
From someone who enjoys computers of all types and has had one since 1982, my MacBook was an overpriced waste of money at this point.
Computer professionals need to grow up and act like truly professional positions in other fields. That includes degrees that are relevant to the work at hand, testing and licensure.
None of these trends have really started whole-hog yet, and they may never if technology workers don't grow up.
There's a reason ROI is crap in computers -- computer "professionals" typically aren't as professional as they'd like you to believe, until they have pretty high-level jobs at very large organizations. Small companies "make due" with non-professional help, proving that computers don't save money -- they cost more money than they bring in. ESPECIALLY without a GOAL for the computer use and a DESIGN, things no professional would do for chump change.
Plenty of room in the low-end. Grab on and hope for the best, it's one of only seriously important industries left where you can. Any serious professional job would laugh you out of the office.
Engineer? Go pass the PE tests.
Doctor? We all know how difficult that is.
Lawyer? Yep them too.
Computer "Professional"? Did you stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night?
Saying this "isn't what a student needs" is selling a student short.
Risks/Rewards and the ratio to which one is willing to try for the Rewards by way of Risk is a very personal thing.
A college student who does understand and pays attention to what's going on in the world can certainly manage a portfolio, and later in life they'll HAVE to anyway, if they have any expectation of being an investor.
The BIG benefit from starting young is the simple "time value of money". If they can invest early and do even relatively well, the amount of time they can have their investments compounding creates gains that NO ONE who starts in their 30's, 40's, or 50's can touch.
Multiplication (if you can muster the courage and willpower to LEAVE YOUR MONEY IN THE MARKET) can make your money work for you so much more than someone who starts late or can't put in enough to "catch up" to his few thousand dollars that's been compounding for 20 more years than many "average" investors.
The key here in advice to any young person is: You can either buy assets or liabilities. Your car, in most cases your house, and everything it "costs" you to live are liabilities. Assets make you money. You put money in and get more back at the end of the day with an asset. Create a balance sheet, learn how to do basic accounting, and PAY ATTENTION to whether your income is purchasing you liabilities or assets.
The commercials, TV shows and all of the things you see daily are almost ALWAYS trying to sell you a liability -- making money for SOMEONE ELSE in the process. Don't buy in. You DON'T EVER NEED a new car. You DON'T EVER NEED a big house (until you have a family to take care of) and you DON'T NEED techno-toys. NEED is a strong word. You MUST learn early to buy things that will PAY for the things you WANT. I wish I'd learned it sooner, and I'm still paying for things I no longer own. Seriously. DO NOT SPEND MONEY YOU DO NOT HAVE -- EVER.
Housing may be the one exception to this rule -- real estate is a fickler game than the stock market in some respects. Leverage credit to buy your home, certainly -- if you're like most people -- but buy a home EVERYONE YOU KNOW would want to own in a neighborhood EVERYONE YOU KNOW would want to live in. (Okay, not everyone likes exactly the same things, but the rule in real estate is always the same, Location, Location, Location.)
Lots of people who are stuck in the rut of consumer spending, credit debt, and other supremely bad habits will argue on these points. If you find someone giving financial advice, always ask them which millionaire they're modeling their own finances after -- or find out if they're already a millionaire. A million dollars is NOT that much money, anymore -- seriously. There are LOTS of millionaires out there, and they don't drive new, fancy cars, they don't buy things they don't truly need, and they don't buy things on credit. They buy assets that pay for things they would LIKE to have or do.
It's DAMN HARD to convince young people to take this route when their friends are "out-pacing" them at first. Look, Bobby has a new car, a new house, a new wife, and seems really happy. You know what? Bobby really has a huge car payment at 5-10% interest, a giant mortgage that he's tied to for 30 years in a house that will lose 2/3's of it's value soon, and his wife spends money on clothes and shoes to look pretty for you and the neighborhood so fast, Bobby can barely make the electric bill payment.
Look HARD at the real numbers, young man -- and make your decisions about how you view money early on. Money is a tool -- just like that screwdriver in your toolbox. If you live FOR it, you won't be happy, but if you learn how it's properly used, you'll go further than all your friends.
Good luck with it. I'm playing catch-up. Too many newer cars when I was young, too many purchases on credit, and not enough self-control and thought. DON'T follow my footsteps, go the other way.
Welcome to FCC Part 15 unlicensed spectrum. You chose to use it. Buyer beware.
Want managed/coordinated "all to yourself" spectrum? Pony up some bucks, get a commercial microwave license and run with the big dogs.
Don't buy RF toy-quality routing devices for less than $100 and you won't have these problems ever again.
The test results were inconclusive.
Ah, then never see it well in Denver because the Coors family, the City of Golden, CO and the so-called "public" won't let the broadcasters (who went together, bought all the land around the site where ALL of the TV broadcasting has been done here since the 1950's and put together a plan for their new tower with everyone on the SAME tower, a model of cooperation and non-waste) have their tower after they agreed to take down three or four other towers as a gesture of good-will and "saving the view" of the mountain that has had broadcast towers on it for over 60 years now.
Yes, the Citizens of Jefferson County, Colorado and the money-bags behind the "anti-tower" effort are an excellent example of why pre-emptive bitchslapping needs to be legalized.
There's even talk of Eminent-Domain being invoked by the City to take away the land the networks purchased, and then probably a big hoo-hah Supreme Court battle with the FCC involved, since they're the ones mandating the digital format conversion.
Meanwhile, Denver is the last major city in the U.S. without a permanent HDTV broadcast tower already in the works or up and running, and we're all picking up our mandated HDTV signals from high atop... a downtown office building that doesn't cover half the city's population. (For those that don't know, Downtown Denver is the LOWEST spot in town. Putting stuff on buildings there just gets the RF signal over the "bowl" and barely out to the closest suburbs.
I think City government morons, backed by beer money, need to let the RF engineers do their jobs, and stay out of it... but what do I know? The city has paid a lot of people to create poorly done RF studies showing that some of the other mountain sites further West away from Denver are "just as good", but those sites are not broadcast sites, they're either mixed use with low-power broadcast and two-way, or they're two-way only, and mixing broadcast and two-way is a maintenance and design headache for everyone on the site, from an RF engineering perspective.
And mostly -- the real reason -- Steve Coors doesn't want the tower in his backyard. At least that's what I've heard anyway. Ironically, there's a tower ON Coors family property a few hundred yards away, that they happily accept the rent for. It's not a money-maker, but the Feds use it for one of their agency's radio gear. Quite the quagmire, eh?
I can't imagine how much fun this would have been if Pete Coors had made it to the U.S. Senate. Whoo-boy. Fun times there. It was fun to watch him pull down all the Coors Light billboards with hot chicks in bikinis on them while he ran for the Republican ticket from Colorado, though. All those "Family Values" folks don't really want beer being sold by hot chicks, I guess.
Yes, they're usually ex-Air Force officers. ESPECIALLY if they went the Academy. Zoomies love telling other people to clean up things.
Very cool, but they rarely use visual sighting as the only means of finding the boosters.
There are various tracking and recovery tools, including good old fashioned radio beacons and simple Direction Finding gear... similar to military Emergency Locator Transmitters, and not very far off the standard ELT frequency of 243 MHz.
I was strident in my reply because it's nigh time our industry grew up and become professionals. And professionals support BUSINESS. Management SHOULD be involved and defining EXACTLY why there's a generic-OS PC on every desk in the company. Was and is that a sound BUSINESS decision? I think not.
Most of the problem areas you and I are talking about would go away if management would simply define the GOALS of having a general-purpose OS on the desktop, and policy for its use. It's a machine, just like the copy machine or the fax machine. Set the rules, and THEN enforce/follow them.
IT workers should not be making corporate policy, and CIO's should not be running (as they are now) American companies. They should be partners with the CEO, and they are WAY behind on this type of stuff... too busy buying stuff after they wave their wands and do some hand-wringing and say, "But we neeeeed it, boss!"
Mediocre and worse CIO's are some of the most dangerous people in the United States today, when it comes to business. Because they let their front-line techs just dictate company computer use policy and not bother to re-think how they're providing the services they are required to provide. They just keep plugging away with these complex generic-OS machines with hoardes of staff to maintain them because their "empire" is already built.
Planning and true Engineering of solutions isn't something most IT departments excel at, or even do very well at all. Someone at the front line of IT, if things were well-defined and professionally built, would never have to worry about Skype. It either wouldn't be allowed on the machines, or the upper-management staff would have decided and published guidelines for extra-curricular software uses that the company allows as a "benefit".
That's just how I see it. IT continues to act like it's your typical teenage kid, when it comes to playing ball in the real world of business. And when I say "IT", I don't mean the small numbers that work on the data center and major servers, I'm talking specifically about user desktops and this type of problem that gets lots of "airtime" like the Skype flaws, etc... big knee-jerk reaction, no one with any clue as to really why the OS UNDERNEATH Skype was ever chosen for their company's needs in the first place, other than the CIO got a nice round of golf from a Marketing person at some OS company.
That is a very good point. So why do so many bosses today do this? It seems epidemic in proportion. It may be another good root-cause analysis and something to look for in a GOOD boss, that they don't hand tools to the inept and untrained. Again, tying this all back to $$$, they're wasting it and anyone enabling that behavior is hurting the company, all the way to the top.
Truthfully there aren't many jobs that can't be done better WITHOUT a computer... seriously think back to how long it would take to get a task done like taking a customer's help request and dealing with it prior to ticket systems and "Tiered Support" driven by those systems. Or phone menus that branch forever into infininte loops.
All driven by computers, all badly designed and programmed.
The vast majority of the annoyances in "modern life" in 1st world countries come from computer applications that were mis-designed for their purpose. Or worse, that met their design goals, but the goals actually made the customer's interaction with the company they were calling worse than before, to make things easier for the company they're calling, not the other way around.
Take a very serious look at anything in your life run on computers, and find the few that really benefitted from them. (Information search without having to go to a library is a great example.) Then find the hundreds where the computer made the product or service worse. It's a really surprising analysis to do -- and one I've been actively trying to do for about a year now in my personal life.
It's really surprising to find the areas of my life where NOT using my computer would actually make me a lot happier and take LESS time and produce an equal quality result. Or "good enough", like a handwritten letter vs an e-mail for keeping in touch with family, as a generic example. If the letter doesn't contain time-sensitive information that would benefit from electronically transferring it, carrying a pen and paper is something I already do, and having an extra envelope that's pre-stamped around in my bag is pretty easy to do, and useful for other things too.
Considering the ENTIRE block of time I'd have to have to fire up the laptop, get online (even with my mobile data service, and yes usually the machine is my MacBook which boots a helluva lot faster than my work ThinkPad), and write an e-mail is generally longer or just barely equal to the amount of time to dash off a nice note on paper that the person will appreciate more.
In other words, I think a LOT of IT people think computers are necessary for people to do their jobs... if the database crashes, can I still answer the phone and help the customer with a problem? You betcha. Would it show up in the pretty Excel graphs the bosses sit around in meetings and discuss at the end of the month? No... but... we'd still get the job done, if we know our product and aren't reading from a so-called "Knowledge Base" written by some idiot somewhere else on a product we know nothing about.
Hey, the IT person took the job KNOWING all of these things you mention, and yet most do nothing to educate their bosses about the problem or attempt to fix it.
Driving is a skill acquired by lots of people effectively through a practice period (learner's permit), and mentoring and supervision. In some cases, people are still bad drivers, but get around (barely) safely enough to operate amongst the public on the roads.
The same is true of computer users, but they're provided with zero real training, no "learning" timeframe with a mentor, no supervision at all. (Well supervision is usually done from the equivalent of a helicopter hovering above the freeway that sometimes drops a guy down to change your tire when the whole car stops working if you didn't crash it into a guard rail. If you did crunch it, the helicopter drops you a whole new car and lifts yours off the highway... or lowers a crack team of mechanics who try to work on the car beside the road.)
Seriously the analogies are pretty good but they only go so far. The real problems are: Bad OS design by companies who know those purchasing the OS won't even blink an eye at spending HUGE amounts of money on maintenance and add-ons for "the car" to make it safe to drive, and lack of any sort of training at all about how computers work, leaving most employees thinking the computers are some kind of "magic box" they're "too dumb" to figure out.
Many IT people LOVE (secretly) that their users think this, as it gives more "power" to them and makes them feel a whole lot more important than they really are that they understand the computer and the people operating them, don't. Which people should a company train on computer technology more? The people using the computers daily to do their jobs, or the IT staff who only band-aid the root-cause problems over and over for years?
I'm not trolling, although I'm sure those fully entrenched in the current mind-set will think so. I'm serious. When a desktop computer was $5k, only certain people got them, and the companies paid for training and recurrent training to make their investment in computers worthwhile. Now computers for business use run about $500 without software per workstation, and the investment is backfiring on companies who never put training or certification plans in place.
How many times have you seen a brand new application (in the disguise of an upgrade) put into place that completely and utterly disrupts the end-users doing their jobs because the UI changed completely? Would paying to actually set up that system in parallel and teaching each employee about every aspect of the UI have helped? How many companies do that anymore?
Skills that are required but people simply "don't get" but COULD easily after just an hour of training:
- The difference between a double-click and a single-click (and how to set their speed preferences)
- The difference between a left-click and a right-click and when to use each, as well as an overview of various context menus that might be useful in their tasks.
- Basic understanding of how the "magic network" works and training on basic security and company policy.
- Etc. The list goes on.
I think if IT people DID switch to the attitude you're saying they shouldn't, the users would actually recognize their value more often. Especially if they had enough training to just barely know how badly they'd foobar'ed the machine.
The key underpinning of all of my comments is: Computers are JUST machines. No more difficult to train people how to use than say a car, a photocopier, a truck, a french-fry maker, a . IT front-line support techs are simply mobile repairmen, but they always want to think they're more. The industry's insistence on not training users to even a level that they can fix simple problems themselves and describe harder ones accurately, actually holds the IT worker there.
If that worker ever wants to move up to higher level support problems and design work (well, assuming the compan
You guys are starting to get it. Could a computer do an awful lot of damage to a company in the wrong hands from inside their network? Could it be that just turning users loose on full-blown computers with no training is far more dangerous than almost anything a company ever does with any other tools that company uses?
Eventually the collective light-bulb will come on. Just because computers are prevalent, doesn't mean users shouldn't be trained, certified, and perhaps even... yeah... licensed.
However, licensing usually indicates that the chore of testing the person needs to be standardized for some public good. (Like driver's licenses.) In the case of personal computers on employee's desks, the company stands to lose a lot more than the public by not training and certifying computer users, but they're too cheap to do it, or just assume it's an "easy to aquire skill" to operate a computer properly.
Eventually, the house of cards starts to crumble and people start blaming the applications on problems that really are OS level and user training issues. It's happening all over the industry right now.
Meanwhile, properly built, properly engineered "computer" systems abound. The embedded market is a good example. Purpose-built computers operated by trained techs, work great. Almost always. Generic computing is a broken engineering model from the start.
Most people have no damn clue why they are buying a computer. Ask anyone you're doing "free" tech support for, honestly and nicely, what they really want to do with the machine, so you can help them make an appropriate purchase.
They won't know, and they'll buy a PC anyway.
People buy all sorts of shit they don't need. It's fueled the home computer industry for years.
They end up using them mostly for games, when a console machine would be better from the standpoint of reliability and ease of use.
Agreed that cocky IT people are more dangerous to a company than anything else.
A great example would be when companies operate fleet vehicles. They lay down a few basic policies, and handle ALL maintenance of the vehicles or hire only those they can trust to do the maintenance if the vehicle is in the care of the individual.
The maintenance people don't cop an attitude to the drivers, if they ever even see them, and they certainly don't question the boss for giving the driver the vehicle. They just fix the damn cars/trucks so the company can keep doing business.
Too many IT people think they're more than just glorified copy-machine repairmen. Only those who actually HELP their companies make the situation better and fix the root-cause problems (get the users training, provide only "kiosk" machines for workers too untrained to use a full operating system, make or keep the company's money) are anything more than that.
Complaining about "stupid users" without providing training in the use of the complex equipment sitting in front of them is stupid. It's like pointing someone at an F-16 and saying, "She's all yours. Go do your job. We'll make sure you're shot down quickly so you don't have to do anything other than get it airborne."
Maybe the only reason they need Skype (or any other "frivolous" application) is to ward off the depression that set in years ago that they were working for a company that would hire someone as short-sighted about humans as you to run their network?
No, seriously... treat your end-users like humans, not slaves. You have such a huge "us" vs "them" mentality going already, you're probably too far gone to realize that you're overhead.
If all your users REALLY need is e-mail and web browsers, I'm sure there's an outsourcing company ready to take over your company's IT job for a fraction of what they pay you. Bank on it.
Do you spend every single minute at your job "producing" something? Do you ever stop to think about anything? (Well, I suppose that's debateable considering your knee-jerk response of "turn off the evil Internet connections".)
Humans interact. Humans do other things besides crank out the same useless shit all day long. And if wage-slaves (not humans) are what you want for end-users, eventually you and the company will get exactly what you wanted -- and your company will be lifeless and dead, and if you're not a utility, a natural monopoly, or some other giant, you'll fold.
All this crap about Skype being the security risk... Answer this one: Do you think Skype's a bigger risk on a Mac vs. on a PC? How about on a locked-down Linux box you secured and set up for the end-user?
If the answer is "yes, they're different" in any way -- you've analyzed the root-cause security problem incorrectly from a purely engineering/scientific standpoint. Root-cause of security problems isn't Skype. Or any other application that talks on Port 80 or 443, or whatever.
The fact that there's a big giant untrusted network everyone's plugged into just so they can basically send e-mail (also untrusted, hideously un-authenticated, and a much larger security problem than a stupid streaming audio application), and it's an utter mess of people so anonymous that they feel the can get away with anything -- so they do. Add in the world's worst security model (Microsoft desktop OS's that still need 3rd party apps to protect them from basic things with hourly updates), and yeah...
Skype chatters are definitely such a huge problem you should spent lots of company time and resources working on it.
Ah - now we're getting to it. You're wasting company time looking into it in the first place aren't you? If all your users need is e-mail and web-browsing, why aren't kiosk-like machines already deployed? Why give them a full-blown OS to begin with?
You just keep telling yourself that working on this particular problem is worthwhile. And you'll continue being more unproductive than those Skyper's who are talking to Aunt Tilly while they're working late to finish their real work. When IT gets off it's ass and REALLY fixes the security issues in networks and computers and companies finally realize what that REALLY costs to do... well, you probably won't have a job because a pile of paper, a pencil, and a good filing system in a filing cabinet room will start to look damn cost-effective.
Go ahead, set policy, cut 'em off. Be an ass. It won't help the underlying security problems you already have one little bit. Every over-bearing arm-chair security analyst in an IT support role who gets cocky about wanting to cut everyone off SHOULD GET THEIR WISH GRANTED INSTANTLY. They'd be out of a job, or working in the filing cabinet room with everyone else, and have a boss who thinks taking a break from the filing cabinet room should be measured with a stopwatch as you exit the room.
Treat people like people. Work WITH your co-workers who are your CUSTOMERS not people to be leered at, looked down upon, or otherwise belittled like you have here. I hope that if tomorrow I could post your message on paper for all your end-users to see, they would not say, "No surprises there. He's always been an ass." I hope you're better than that, and not just superficially when y
Anyone that knows what they're doing can spoof ANI (Caller ID) to be from any number they want it to be from.
A friend recently noticed that his VoIP carrier wasn't filtering the ANI provided from his Asterisk server, and then coupled that information with the fact that huge numbers of his friends don't turn on the "use additional password" feature in their cellular carrier's voice mail boxes for their cell phones made for some interesting "testing" and warning of his friends to turn on their damn PIN numbers on two major U.S. carriers, that DEFAULT to checking ANI to see if you're calling from your cell phone, and drop you straight into your voice mail retrieval menu. (Hint: Cingular, and NexTel)
A quick reconfiguration of Asterisk to send out THEIR phone number as the number he was calling from, and he was listening to their stored voice mails.
Seriously, ANI is NOT a good basis for security (authentication of who's calling you) by any REMOTE stretch of the imagination.
My friend regularly calls me with ANI's that are "funny" to see if I notice. The good one was the White House's switchboard number. I answered, "Good evening, Mr. President."
Should his VoIP provider be forcing him to use one of the 100 or so DID number he has assigned to his VoIP circuits? Yep. Are they? Nope.
Yeah, understand. I've followed some of the certification process for the Amateur Radio gear on board, and it's tough. I'm a big fan of the GE MP/A series of "handheld" radios, and always liked seeing the old girl on board before the Kenwood was certified.
Love to talk to those guys when one of them is excited about Ham Radio - it's so cool to show a kid or family member that with 5 watts into a modest antenna, one can be talking to an astronaut during their "free time".
Great stuff.