If the rest of the world "caught up", presumably all getting hummers to drive through McDonalds, the earth would consume 500% the current level of natural resources - and the poor old dear is starting to creak under the strain of current levels already.
Funny, but a stereotype. I don't know anybody who owns a Hummer, and in reality Hummer drivers are pretty-well universally ridiculed in this country as having a need to compensate for their extra-small penises.
What I meant was not to emulate the wasteful part of our culture, but rather the ingenuity part--dreaming up a way to make something new, or make something that already exists better.
Simply undercutting on price is a dangerous game--because you thrive up until the day when somebody else comes along that can undercut your uber-low prices--then you're out of business. But on the other hand, if they charged higher prices but offerred some unique service or perspective, they would be in a position to build some longstanding prosperity for themselves. Because when China, Russia, and Cuba (I predict Cuba will be the new India when Castro dies) get into the game, India will need a way to differentiate themselves from the "cheaper" labor in those other countries, so their new businesses don't all crash and burn.
Eventually, the people doing the outsourced work are going to get the enreprenurial bug and start their own companies to compete with the firms they used to be outsourced to. If you think about it, companies that outsource work to India and China on the cheap are, in effect, biting off their nose to spite their face. They're training the next generation of competitors. Once the good talent leaves the outsourcing agencies to start their own firms, our goose will really be cooked. Because now we'll be buying products from them with the profits flowing to India, not just hiring cheap labor and keeping the profits (and taxes) in the U.s. We will have failed to develop new technical professionals to the level where they can carry the torch into the next wave of innovation. There are a finite number of people who can do the work, and if the really good ones are chasing stock options at startups, they won't be working hourly as an "overseas employee" of a U.S. company.
From what I've seen, the US has the highest standard of living for SOME people, and a FAR FAR lower standard of living for a very large percentage of the population than most other western countries.
You are spot-on here, definitely. Outsiders see us as a monolith of wealthy, BMW Driving, leather-sofa owners wearing thousands of dollars in bling-bling and sipping Champagne in the sitting rooms of our 6,000 square foot mansions. The reality is, that image applies to maybe 1% of our population, with the rest of us being working class (or upper working class) folks who actually earn what we have and work for what comes in our pay envelopes.
that average american can't afford to take a paycut because American affluent standard of living is insanely out of touch with the rest of the world, and will make it impossible for them to survive on a lower salary.
I defy you to name a country where working class people can afford an 80% salary reduction without screwing up their "standard of living." It doesn't matter whether you live in a grass hut or a 3-bedroom ranch house, losing that much of your salary would decimate anyone's finances.
Do this experiment next month: Add up all your expenditures and money you're saving, and then chop 80% off the top. Forget about a car payment or housing, would your kids be able to eat? Would you?
Yeah, in some ways the phenomenal success of the American experiment has put us in an interesting conundrum... Our standard of living IS higher than everybody elses, but to me that is an argument for others to emulate us. Instead of demanding that we work for 80% less and lower our standard of living to be as shitty as yours, why not innovate, create some REAL value (by giving more rather than just charging less) and raise up your own standards, rather than kvetching about ours.
- Really expensive! (Ticket are $9.25 for adults! Are you kidding me?) - Really expensive snacks ($4 for a Coke? Fuck You Cineplex!) - Standing in a painfully long line to be gouged for your ticket. - Standing in a painfully long line to be gouged for snacks. - The arsehole that won't turn his cell-phone off until he "remembers" when it rings at the most tense moment in the movie. - The other arsehole whose phone is on vibrate, but who answers and talks as he walks out of the theatre. - Spoiled suburban brats dropped off at the theatre instead of the hiring a babysitter who throw things, talk, and generally distract from the picture. - That unidentifiable sticky substance on the floor that could be spilled Coke... Or any number of other unpleasant alternatives, each indistinguishable from the next in the dark....and of course, so many movies suck blatant ass these days that I can't possibly justify it.
Analysts want corporate guidance because it's a bit of a window into inside information -- e.g. inside Google, they know far more than they release, but as it is they release this information in BAM all at once suprizes on earnings report days, exposing the shares to unnecessary panic/euphoria. Guidance helps even out and manage expectations, and to give a bit more transparency into the business.
While guidance may give you a little bit of insight into a company, without any context, that information is worse than useless. Stock "analysts" demand guidance because it gives them a way to generate income for their second jobs as talking-heads for CNBC, CNN/Money, and all the other business talk shows out there. Guidance is nothing more than a guess dressed up in corporate-speak and marketing glitz. And in the long-term, guidance is a lose-lose-lose proposition for a public company.
- An accurate guess' only affect is to move the price drop (or increase) to the day they issue the guidance and away from the day they announce the actual results. - If the guess is inaccurate on the high-side your stock will still plummet when you fail to "meet expectations", and you'll probably get sued by the short-term-gains monkeys who are pissed you didn't give them the profit you "promised" in the guidance. - If the guess is low, (or, when you intentionally "Guess low,") you will see higher stock prices at end of quarter because they "exceeded expectations." For a while, anyway... But if you do this consistently, analysts will simply label you as "sandbaggers" and hold you to a higher goal than your guidance, and punish you accordingly when you don't meet THEIR expectations which are above and beyond your "sandbagged" guidance.
Look at these three scenarios: They are lose-lose-lose for the corporation, which all lead to the company losing some percentage of its share value. Of course, since the company loses, that means the shareholders are all losing too... Wasn't that who you were "protecting" with guidance in the first place?
Wouldn't it be cheaper to buy 30 new workstations at $30,000 and plan for a 10% failure rate over two years?
Unfortunately, many of our users are in the field, thousands of miles from the office, so "instant" replacement wouldn't be that "instant" and would be pretty inconvenient. But for the office users, we might just do that.
But of course, we'd probably wipe those new machines and install XP... Remember, the cost of upgrading to Vista has to include the cost of training ourselves on all of the problems that will be encountered... Contrary to what a PHB might put in his spreadsheet, my time is valuable....and it is the volume of wasted time in Windows that is motivating me to get us off the treadmill.
After reading what I've read about Vista, specifically the hardware requirements, there's no way our company will be doing it either. We've already got these super-zippy PCs that we bought 1.5 years ago. Our experience to date says the three year replacement cycle for workstations is really wasteful when you can relatively cheaply extend the warranty support on the systems. Against this backdrop, I can either "upgrade" to Vista by replacing 300 workstations at a cost of around $300,000 or I can extend those 300 warranties for around $50,000 and keep them an extra two years. For the 99% of my user community that just does MS Office, email, and web-ERP, this is a no-brainer.
And I don't think we (and IBM Europe) are the only ones thinking this way.
Bottom line: Microsoft is going to have to build a lot more value into its offerrings to maintain their install-base. They can't raise the price and add a zillion new doo-dads to the products--they're already at saturation point (and beyond, really.) The only other way to have more value is to lower the price... Or simplify licensing options for customesr so they have spend less on compliance. The problem for MS is that both of those routes lead directly to less revenue for Microsoft.
The great thing with a smaller IT shop is you get to be more of a jack-of-all-trades type where you dabble (or maybe a little more than dabble) in almost everything becoming fairly well-rounded.
Well.... It sounds like you have more people than we do. Its true I've been exposed to a lot of things, but what I know inside-out is definitely a TINY subset of those technologies. I would like it much more if I had the time to know them all really well, but I do everything except ERP development and support which is somebody else's bailiwick. I don't have time to know our phone system inside-out--I might like to because there are probably a lot of things I could do with that type of information, but I'm wearing like seven hats right now, so that just isn't in the cards.
Part of my desire to get out is my certainty that the mountain of work isn't going to get any smaller, and I won't be getting any help anytime soon either. So my choices are: 1) Work ridiculous hours and have zero desire for self-development after-hours or on weekends, and eventually my skills date themselves. OR I could 2) Leave and do my own thing, specializing in the things I like and charging people up the ass for the privelege of using my services, and as a result of the high prices I could charge, work a sane schedule and thus have energy (and interest) to work on learning new skills and keeping myself at the top of my game.
I would be irresponsible if I didn't consider doing this--because the long and the short of it all is that staying put is the biggest risk of all. If I fail, I still have the option of going back to work in a corporate setting. But if I succeed, I provide myself with the opportunity to provide for myself, and eventually, my family, in a way that lets me build first a client-base for myself, then others. In effect, my only option for wealth is to continually educate myself in the use of the most valuable technologies so I can sell that knowledge to others through project and consulting work...
Sadly, there is little satisfaction in IT jobs in large organizations these days. You'll need to go find a small company or derive work enjoyment from non-employment activities.
Its not all sunshine and roses in the small shops, though. True you definitely get to make a difference in the way things go, but to do so will require achingly long hours at relatively-low pay. In the end, you'll be just as disillusioned because your employer is getting this Class A service from you at bush-league pricing... It will only take a few years of one and two percent salary raises to realize your fortunes lie elsewhere.
And that isn't always a bad thing. I view my work in this small shop as hard-core education... I've been in this business for eight years now, but I've learned more in two years here than I did in the previous six years elsewhere. In a lot of ways, once you realize that "Mega-Corporate IT" really sucks to work in, and "bush-league" IT is rewarding but pays no money, you'll find yourself motivated to find the crossroads of those two extremes--satisfying work that pays enough that you might one day have a hope of retiring.
Now, I'm using the skills I'm learning here and the contacts I'm picking up so that in a year or so I can start my own consulting shop. I've already got a few clients on the side that I do things for, and I'm working steadily to build my stable of paying customers. I definitely see where being the service shop is where the real money is at in IT, and consequently, where the really smart people will end up pooling in the next few years/decades, if they aren't already in there.
My job as network engineer won't be heading to India--it requires too much on-site hands-on stuff, but I'd still like to make more than the assistant manager at McDonald's does, maybe have the opportunity to retire when I reach 65ish, instead of "semi-retiring" which means "I'm still working part-time but I take social security." I see the entreprenuership route as the only valid option to get there from here in IT at this point, aside from getting an MBA, holing up in some corporate IT shop and keeping my head down for the next three decades.
In Vista, your graphics card needs to support certain shader instructions defined in whatever shader/DX spec Vista asks for. It doesn't check to see if your card is an ATI or an nVidia, it checks to see whether it pukes when it gets hit with Vista's shaders.
With any luck there will be a way to turn this (and other) performance sapping/exclusionary function off... Similar to the way you can turn off all the "fade-ins" and other visual crap in XP. If you turn all of the useless stuff off in Windows XP it is actually performs pretty well for most office tasks.
Whatever your political beliefs are, isn't some healthy political competition a good thing? Someone has to help those clowns get their act together before America degenerates into a one-party-system despotism.
I think you might have used the wrong verb-tense. The Republicans have arranged things very effectively for themselves... The 90's campaign to essentially create big media by eliminating most caps on radio and television station ownership created the perfect corporate environment to limit news reporting and investigating. Remember when EVERY station had news on it? I do. At a minimum, every station had at least one news reporter who reported the news and gathered it himself.
Now tune up and down your dial... Many radio stations with news are simply getting a canned "newscast" from a partner in the market (which is really more accurately called "news headlines" due to lack of any meaningful depth in the reporting) or that they buy from another company. This is the result of "consolidation" of ownership--going from thousands of owners to dozens in the media business. As a result, "useless" positions like news have been trimmed to the bone. If a company owns seven radio stations in a city, why should each station have a separate news person when one person could created canned reports for three of the stations, and not even have news on the other four? The company saves six salaries, gives the person who stays a small (or no) raise for their massive workload increase, and moves on to other problems.
THIS is why the media is so useless these days... They don't have the budget to investigate things--if a source won't give it to them directly over the phone (many can't get mileage reimbursed anymore) they may end up having to kill the story....And that, of course, was the point of allowing the consolidation. The politicians knew corporate greed would lead to this result, and simply bided their time until the public was used to not having any idea what was really happening in the world, and then took advantage of it. In a way, it is genius.
We had an issue with monitoring the RAID controllers -- both on-board and PCI expansion. Their cards are LSI megaraid. I found the utility on LSI's site that did what I wanted, which is simply monitor the health of the array. I pointed their support engineers to the tool, and asked them so simply say, "Okay, use that", because it lets me bypass my company's software aquistion process. I pointed them at the tool a week ago, and they haven't responded.
On the simpler end, we had a drive go bad, and they were very quick to get us a replacement.
I assume you're running *nix of some kind on there, or is this a windows server? RAID is actually a major problem we had with the Dell enclosure we have--we run RAID-5 on one side of the cabinet and the stripe became "pierced"--although their technicians couldn't give us an exact explanation of how that actually happens, it results in an unrecoverable array when parity data cannot be used because more data and/or parity info on one disk got damaged at the same time... A weird happenstance, but it did happen to us.
Dell couldn't diagnose the problem conclusively or authoritatively for five days and seven technicians, two of them at "Level 2," which at Dell probably means you get the Super-Size Fries in your cafeteria lunch instead of medium. Actually, I don't really hate Dell that much, they're just really frustrating. The scripting of the technicians is frustrating. We're a small shop--I do everything you could possibly imagine, with everybody else full-time on ERP. The direct dial # for server support will help... BUT it would be great to have those types of numbers for every line... The server one dumps straight to a PERSON, when you hit "Tech Support." No voice-response. So, so, sweet.
Certainly, it is the worst problem I've ever had with a RAID set. In the past RAID-5 has been rock-solid for me... It has led me to question whether I might be better off with a 1+0, despite the higher overhead. With no parity info to corrupt, and more drives to spread the risk of failure among, it is hard to conceive of a similar scenario happening again. Then again, it was hard to see this coming--I've only had one rebuild fail before this scenario, and there a simple smash, recreate, and reformat after replacing the damaged disk did the trick.
Thanks for telling me your tale... It will help us.
Sun's Red Hat support is, in my experience, completely and utterly useless.
What has your experience with Sun's hardware support been (if any?) Unfortunately, our DB server now runs the OS that dare not speak its name (Windows 2003,) so we'd probably be stuck with Win2k3 x64 edition... Unless my boss does a 180 on Linux in the next 30 days... Which seems unlikely.
Unfortunately, MS got its tentacles into our ERP system years before I came here... No escape at this point without starting over, and we haven't got the $1+ million to do so right now.
Thanks...I will try that next time. Every time I get into one of these frustrating fuckaroos, I ask the technician to give me whatever "special number" I need to dial to not get routed off to India and "per-incident" support... They NEVER know. All of the numbers they've given me so far have led back to the same unusable "voice-response system."
The FISA process is broken, and all it takes is a libtard judge to block a FISA warrant to get something like Zacharias Moussaoui, who's picked up for immigration violations, is strongly suspected of having terrorist ties, but our agents are blocked from looking at his computer because of civil liberties concerns.
The FISA system may be imperfect, but that is justification for changing the law, not throwing away everybody's fourth amendment rights. FISA deficiencies certainly don't justify upsetting the balance of power between the branches of our government, or justify giving the Police and the President a blank check to simply spy on any citizen they want, for any reason they want, any time they want, with no independent oversight of any kind. We're told "protections are in place" to prevent abuses in the program, but we aren't told what safeguards exist, or who is enforcing them. Without answers to these fundamental questions, Americans are simply left to "trust the government" that their rights aren't being trampled to death quietly.
My skepticism over how "broken" FISA is stems from the fact that Bush and company have had four years since 9/11 to suggest and push for reforms to the act, but have failed to do so. They have instead simply opted to sidestep judicial review, relying on the fear of the vox populi to drown out any "pesky" civil libertarians who might want to see American citizens accused of crimes protected by the Constitution.
The simple fact is they didn't push to change FISA because this spying program is only ostensibly about national security. In actuality it is about transforming the office of the executive, from being one of three equals to the supreme power of the land, able to trump any law desired during "war" (and, conveniently, we're told the current "war" could last fifty years or more.) This is a radical and dangerous redefinition of executive authority, a total departure from the traditional "limited executive" that Republicans have insisted upon for the last two centuries or so--A departure towards powers more appropriate to "El Presidente de Nicaragua" than the President of the United States.
I bet they don't want to be responsible for any sort of support. Like someone calling and asking how to get their scanner to work.
If Dell was smart they'd outsource the linux support to RedHat who already has an existing infrastructure of analysts to do phone support for Linux, and for whom a partner like dell would be big boon to the balance sheet.
Of course, its equally possible Dell will just fail to teach their voice-response system the word "linux" to keep their support costs down. They can't burn tech. resources if they never reach somebody who understands they don't use Windows.... This is similar to the current screwing its PowerEdge and PowerVault customers are enjoying.
If you call Dell Gold Support (or any line fronted by the voice-response) and don't have an "Express Servie Code" you should plan on wasting a whoooole lot of time... I needed service for my PowerVault tape robot today, (there is no express service code on it) so I had to brave the "name your product" function. Ha! I tried Power Vault twice, it didn't get it. So I tried "tape drive" and it guessed "Did you mean hard drive?" Also wrong. At this point, it picked somebody at random and transferred me. Ended up in the "per incident" bonehead department... I had to start gibbering in spanish to get him to break out of his script and ask to be transferred to the PowerVault support line...
He xfers me to somebody else, not PowerVault support, also in bonehead, per incident-land, who then refused to speak to me in anything but Spanish. Fortunately, I speak spanish, so I was able to get him to understand "Yo Quiero supporte de PowerVault!"
Ridiculous. Picked up the phone at 9:07. Hung up at 10:04. Total time with PowerVault tech? Seven minutes before he created a dispatch. So fifty minutes of transferring and hold-time to speak with a technician. Just ridiculous. Linux users would do well to expect very little from Dell, I sure have learned to adjust my expectations of them.
We're looking at a new DB server for our production environment... After all these problems, I have serious doubts about Dell support's ability to help me in a serious crisis... We're this close to buying an opteron based Sun server for our needs....And it isn't because Dell's gear is any better or worse than anybody else's (all hardware breaks eventually) but the measure of difference is in how well the Vendor protects you in these situations. We've paid for 4-hour response on all of our servers, but if it takes an hour after discovering the need for the part to get a dispatch issued, and most of that time is wasted, that means we're really closer to 5.5-6 hour response than four...
Well, I live in Chicago - we have an illustrious history in that regard...
It's amazing how many dead people vote!
Yeah, I'm also a native Cook County-an... A lot of history of electoral-malfeasance up there... Fortunately, with Daley Sr. and Stevenson and those people all dead, we've just got to wait for Daley Jr. and his ilk to drop-dead and maybe--maybe--cook county-ans might get a fair shake from their elected officials....But I wouldn't hold your breath!
Internet Explorer licence states that you must have a licence to Windows in order to run it. Meaning, you can download IE and install it on Linux, but according to the licence, it's not legal.
...Unless it says the windows license must be for an OS installed on the machine IE is on, you could simply justify it with whatever Windows OS license you own for some other PC you purchased at some point in the past... (I mean, you haven't been able to get brand-name PC devoid of that "MS Cert. of authenticity" for 10+ years now... So at this point just about everybody has paid for a Windows license at SOME point...)
...but I love the British. His dry comment that "Mozilla authorizing this distribution makes it quite impossible to enforce piracy laws" is straight out of Monty Python. "We can't very well just have people giving these things away--makes piracy obsolete then doesn't it? Then where would we piracy coppers be?"
Hilarious!
Next, they'll be arresting the makers of terrible films on the gruonds that this reduces piracy by demotivating people to watch films... "Can't have you making this tripe--we need high-quality pictures for the pirates to pirate, so we can put a stop to it by arresting them!"
This is also why many Police Officers might personally believe in decriminalizing marijuana in the US, but their unions all give heavily to preventing that from ever happening: Because if there wasn't a huge underground economy thriving around marijuana, there'd be no need for the marijuana enforcement squad, would there? This would mean fewer Police Officers, thus fewer union members paying dues from salaries.
RIM also needs to sue the government for billions of dollars for its part in passing these fraudulent patents.
Unfortunately, suing the Federal government is prohibited by the Constitution, although I suppose you could sue the government official in charge of the patent office personally...
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Dude, why not both? I mean, come on, dream big...
Funny, but a stereotype. I don't know anybody who owns a Hummer, and in reality Hummer drivers are pretty-well universally ridiculed in this country as having a need to compensate for their extra-small penises.
What I meant was not to emulate the wasteful part of our culture, but rather the ingenuity part--dreaming up a way to make something new, or make something that already exists better.
Simply undercutting on price is a dangerous game--because you thrive up until the day when somebody else comes along that can undercut your uber-low prices--then you're out of business. But on the other hand, if they charged higher prices but offerred some unique service or perspective, they would be in a position to build some longstanding prosperity for themselves. Because when China, Russia, and Cuba (I predict Cuba will be the new India when Castro dies) get into the game, India will need a way to differentiate themselves from the "cheaper" labor in those other countries, so their new businesses don't all crash and burn.
Eventually, the people doing the outsourced work are going to get the enreprenurial bug and start their own companies to compete with the firms they used to be outsourced to. If you think about it, companies that outsource work to India and China on the cheap are, in effect, biting off their nose to spite their face. They're training the next generation of competitors. Once the good talent leaves the outsourcing agencies to start their own firms, our goose will really be cooked. Because now we'll be buying products from them with the profits flowing to India, not just hiring cheap labor and keeping the profits (and taxes) in the U.s. We will have failed to develop new technical professionals to the level where they can carry the torch into the next wave of innovation. There are a finite number of people who can do the work, and if the really good ones are chasing stock options at startups, they won't be working hourly as an "overseas employee" of a U.S. company.
You are spot-on here, definitely. Outsiders see us as a monolith of wealthy, BMW Driving, leather-sofa owners wearing thousands of dollars in bling-bling and sipping Champagne in the sitting rooms of our 6,000 square foot mansions. The reality is, that image applies to maybe 1% of our population, with the rest of us being working class (or upper working class) folks who actually earn what we have and work for what comes in our pay envelopes.
I defy you to name a country where working class people can afford an 80% salary reduction without screwing up their "standard of living." It doesn't matter whether you live in a grass hut or a 3-bedroom ranch house, losing that much of your salary would decimate anyone's finances.
Do this experiment next month: Add up all your expenditures and money you're saving, and then chop 80% off the top. Forget about a car payment or housing, would your kids be able to eat? Would you?
Yeah, in some ways the phenomenal success of the American experiment has put us in an interesting conundrum... Our standard of living IS higher than everybody elses, but to me that is an argument for others to emulate us. Instead of demanding that we work for 80% less and lower our standard of living to be as shitty as yours, why not innovate, create some REAL value (by giving more rather than just charging less) and raise up your own standards, rather than kvetching about ours.
Why not both? Then follow it up with a sweep through the executive offices to burn out the heretics?
The streets shall flow with the blood of the non-believers.
...Because (no particular order):
...and of course, so many movies suck blatant ass these days that I can't possibly justify it.
- Really expensive! (Ticket are $9.25 for adults! Are you kidding me?)
- Really expensive snacks ($4 for a Coke? Fuck You Cineplex!)
- Standing in a painfully long line to be gouged for your ticket.
- Standing in a painfully long line to be gouged for snacks.
- The arsehole that won't turn his cell-phone off until he "remembers" when it rings at the most tense moment in the movie.
- The other arsehole whose phone is on vibrate, but who answers and talks as he walks out of the theatre.
- Spoiled suburban brats dropped off at the theatre instead of the hiring a babysitter who throw things, talk, and generally distract from the picture.
- That unidentifiable sticky substance on the floor that could be spilled Coke... Or any number of other unpleasant alternatives, each indistinguishable from the next in the dark.
While guidance may give you a little bit of insight into a company, without any context, that information is worse than useless. Stock "analysts" demand guidance because it gives them a way to generate income for their second jobs as talking-heads for CNBC, CNN/Money, and all the other business talk shows out there. Guidance is nothing more than a guess dressed up in corporate-speak and marketing glitz. And in the long-term, guidance is a lose-lose-lose proposition for a public company.
- An accurate guess' only affect is to move the price drop (or increase) to the day they issue the guidance and away from the day they announce the actual results.
- If the guess is inaccurate on the high-side your stock will still plummet when you fail to "meet expectations", and you'll probably get sued by the short-term-gains monkeys who are pissed you didn't give them the profit you "promised" in the guidance.
- If the guess is low, (or, when you intentionally "Guess low,") you will see higher stock prices at end of quarter because they "exceeded expectations." For a while, anyway... But if you do this consistently, analysts will simply label you as "sandbaggers" and hold you to a higher goal than your guidance, and punish you accordingly when you don't meet THEIR expectations which are above and beyond your "sandbagged" guidance.
Look at these three scenarios: They are lose-lose-lose for the corporation, which all lead to the company losing some percentage of its share value. Of course, since the company loses, that means the shareholders are all losing too... Wasn't that who you were "protecting" with guidance in the first place?
Unfortunately, many of our users are in the field, thousands of miles from the office, so "instant" replacement wouldn't be that "instant" and would be pretty inconvenient. But for the office users, we might just do that.
But of course, we'd probably wipe those new machines and install XP... Remember, the cost of upgrading to Vista has to include the cost of training ourselves on all of the problems that will be encountered... Contrary to what a PHB might put in his spreadsheet, my time is valuable.
After reading what I've read about Vista, specifically the hardware requirements, there's no way our company will be doing it either. We've already got these super-zippy PCs that we bought 1.5 years ago. Our experience to date says the three year replacement cycle for workstations is really wasteful when you can relatively cheaply extend the warranty support on the systems. Against this backdrop, I can either "upgrade" to Vista by replacing 300 workstations at a cost of around $300,000 or I can extend those 300 warranties for around $50,000 and keep them an extra two years. For the 99% of my user community that just does MS Office, email, and web-ERP, this is a no-brainer.
And I don't think we (and IBM Europe) are the only ones thinking this way.
Bottom line: Microsoft is going to have to build a lot more value into its offerrings to maintain their install-base. They can't raise the price and add a zillion new doo-dads to the products--they're already at saturation point (and beyond, really.) The only other way to have more value is to lower the price... Or simplify licensing options for customesr so they have spend less on compliance. The problem for MS is that both of those routes lead directly to less revenue for Microsoft.
Well.... It sounds like you have more people than we do. Its true I've been exposed to a lot of things, but what I know inside-out is definitely a TINY subset of those technologies. I would like it much more if I had the time to know them all really well, but I do everything except ERP development and support which is somebody else's bailiwick. I don't have time to know our phone system inside-out--I might like to because there are probably a lot of things I could do with that type of information, but I'm wearing like seven hats right now, so that just isn't in the cards.
Part of my desire to get out is my certainty that the mountain of work isn't going to get any smaller, and I won't be getting any help anytime soon either. So my choices are: 1) Work ridiculous hours and have zero desire for self-development after-hours or on weekends, and eventually my skills date themselves. OR I could 2) Leave and do my own thing, specializing in the things I like and charging people up the ass for the privelege of using my services, and as a result of the high prices I could charge, work a sane schedule and thus have energy (and interest) to work on learning new skills and keeping myself at the top of my game.
I would be irresponsible if I didn't consider doing this--because the long and the short of it all is that staying put is the biggest risk of all. If I fail, I still have the option of going back to work in a corporate setting. But if I succeed, I provide myself with the opportunity to provide for myself, and eventually, my family, in a way that lets me build first a client-base for myself, then others. In effect, my only option for wealth is to continually educate myself in the use of the most valuable technologies so I can sell that knowledge to others through project and consulting work...
Its not all sunshine and roses in the small shops, though. True you definitely get to make a difference in the way things go, but to do so will require achingly long hours at relatively-low pay. In the end, you'll be just as disillusioned because your employer is getting this Class A service from you at bush-league pricing... It will only take a few years of one and two percent salary raises to realize your fortunes lie elsewhere.
And that isn't always a bad thing. I view my work in this small shop as hard-core education... I've been in this business for eight years now, but I've learned more in two years here than I did in the previous six years elsewhere. In a lot of ways, once you realize that "Mega-Corporate IT" really sucks to work in, and "bush-league" IT is rewarding but pays no money, you'll find yourself motivated to find the crossroads of those two extremes--satisfying work that pays enough that you might one day have a hope of retiring.
Now, I'm using the skills I'm learning here and the contacts I'm picking up so that in a year or so I can start my own consulting shop. I've already got a few clients on the side that I do things for, and I'm working steadily to build my stable of paying customers. I definitely see where being the service shop is where the real money is at in IT, and consequently, where the really smart people will end up pooling in the next few years/decades, if they aren't already in there.
My job as network engineer won't be heading to India--it requires too much on-site hands-on stuff, but I'd still like to make more than the assistant manager at McDonald's does, maybe have the opportunity to retire when I reach 65ish, instead of "semi-retiring" which means "I'm still working part-time but I take social security." I see the entreprenuership route as the only valid option to get there from here in IT at this point, aside from getting an MBA, holing up in some corporate IT shop and keeping my head down for the next three decades.
Bender: "I don't think you realize just how rich Frye is... In fact, I better put on a monocle."
With any luck there will be a way to turn this (and other) performance sapping/exclusionary function off... Similar to the way you can turn off all the "fade-ins" and other visual crap in XP. If you turn all of the useless stuff off in Windows XP it is actually performs pretty well for most office tasks.
I think you might have used the wrong verb-tense. The Republicans have arranged things very effectively for themselves... The 90's campaign to essentially create big media by eliminating most caps on radio and television station ownership created the perfect corporate environment to limit news reporting and investigating. Remember when EVERY station had news on it? I do. At a minimum, every station had at least one news reporter who reported the news and gathered it himself.
Now tune up and down your dial... Many radio stations with news are simply getting a canned "newscast" from a partner in the market (which is really more accurately called "news headlines" due to lack of any meaningful depth in the reporting) or that they buy from another company. This is the result of "consolidation" of ownership--going from thousands of owners to dozens in the media business. As a result, "useless" positions like news have been trimmed to the bone. If a company owns seven radio stations in a city, why should each station have a separate news person when one person could created canned reports for three of the stations, and not even have news on the other four? The company saves six salaries, gives the person who stays a small (or no) raise for their massive workload increase, and moves on to other problems.
THIS is why the media is so useless these days... They don't have the budget to investigate things--if a source won't give it to them directly over the phone (many can't get mileage reimbursed anymore) they may end up having to kill the story.
Of course, cartoonishly evil and convoluted too.
...is it April 1 already? Man, I hate April Fool's Day on Slashdot...
I assume you're running *nix of some kind on there, or is this a windows server? RAID is actually a major problem we had with the Dell enclosure we have--we run RAID-5 on one side of the cabinet and the stripe became "pierced"--although their technicians couldn't give us an exact explanation of how that actually happens, it results in an unrecoverable array when parity data cannot be used because more data and/or parity info on one disk got damaged at the same time... A weird happenstance, but it did happen to us.
Dell couldn't diagnose the problem conclusively or authoritatively for five days and seven technicians, two of them at "Level 2," which at Dell probably means you get the Super-Size Fries in your cafeteria lunch instead of medium. Actually, I don't really hate Dell that much, they're just really frustrating. The scripting of the technicians is frustrating. We're a small shop--I do everything you could possibly imagine, with everybody else full-time on ERP. The direct dial # for server support will help... BUT it would be great to have those types of numbers for every line... The server one dumps straight to a PERSON, when you hit "Tech Support." No voice-response. So, so, sweet.
Certainly, it is the worst problem I've ever had with a RAID set. In the past RAID-5 has been rock-solid for me... It has led me to question whether I might be better off with a 1+0, despite the higher overhead. With no parity info to corrupt, and more drives to spread the risk of failure among, it is hard to conceive of a similar scenario happening again. Then again, it was hard to see this coming--I've only had one rebuild fail before this scenario, and there a simple smash, recreate, and reformat after replacing the damaged disk did the trick.
Thanks for telling me your tale... It will help us.
What has your experience with Sun's hardware support been (if any?) Unfortunately, our DB server now runs the OS that dare not speak its name (Windows 2003,) so we'd probably be stuck with Win2k3 x64 edition... Unless my boss does a 180 on Linux in the next 30 days... Which seems unlikely.
Unfortunately, MS got its tentacles into our ERP system years before I came here... No escape at this point without starting over, and we haven't got the $1+ million to do so right now.
Thanks...I will try that next time. Every time I get into one of these frustrating fuckaroos, I ask the technician to give me whatever "special number" I need to dial to not get routed off to India and "per-incident" support... They NEVER know. All of the numbers they've given me so far have led back to the same unusable "voice-response system."
The FISA system may be imperfect, but that is justification for changing the law, not throwing away everybody's fourth amendment rights. FISA deficiencies certainly don't justify upsetting the balance of power between the branches of our government, or justify giving the Police and the President a blank check to simply spy on any citizen they want, for any reason they want, any time they want, with no independent oversight of any kind. We're told "protections are in place" to prevent abuses in the program, but we aren't told what safeguards exist, or who is enforcing them. Without answers to these fundamental questions, Americans are simply left to "trust the government" that their rights aren't being trampled to death quietly.
My skepticism over how "broken" FISA is stems from the fact that Bush and company have had four years since 9/11 to suggest and push for reforms to the act, but have failed to do so. They have instead simply opted to sidestep judicial review, relying on the fear of the vox populi to drown out any "pesky" civil libertarians who might want to see American citizens accused of crimes protected by the Constitution.
The simple fact is they didn't push to change FISA because this spying program is only ostensibly about national security. In actuality it is about transforming the office of the executive, from being one of three equals to the supreme power of the land, able to trump any law desired during "war" (and, conveniently, we're told the current "war" could last fifty years or more.) This is a radical and dangerous redefinition of executive authority, a total departure from the traditional "limited executive" that Republicans have insisted upon for the last two centuries or so--A departure towards powers more appropriate to "El Presidente de Nicaragua" than the President of the United States.
If Dell was smart they'd outsource the linux support to RedHat who already has an existing infrastructure of analysts to do phone support for Linux, and for whom a partner like dell would be big boon to the balance sheet.
Of course, its equally possible Dell will just fail to teach their voice-response system the word "linux" to keep their support costs down. They can't burn tech. resources if they never reach somebody who understands they don't use Windows.... This is similar to the current screwing its PowerEdge and PowerVault customers are enjoying.
If you call Dell Gold Support (or any line fronted by the voice-response) and don't have an "Express Servie Code" you should plan on wasting a whoooole lot of time... I needed service for my PowerVault tape robot today, (there is no express service code on it) so I had to brave the "name your product" function. Ha! I tried Power Vault twice, it didn't get it. So I tried "tape drive" and it guessed "Did you mean hard drive?" Also wrong. At this point, it picked somebody at random and transferred me. Ended up in the "per incident" bonehead department... I had to start gibbering in spanish to get him to break out of his script and ask to be transferred to the PowerVault support line...
He xfers me to somebody else, not PowerVault support, also in bonehead, per incident-land, who then refused to speak to me in anything but Spanish. Fortunately, I speak spanish, so I was able to get him to understand "Yo Quiero supporte de PowerVault!"
Ridiculous. Picked up the phone at 9:07. Hung up at 10:04. Total time with PowerVault tech? Seven minutes before he created a dispatch. So fifty minutes of transferring and hold-time to speak with a technician. Just ridiculous. Linux users would do well to expect very little from Dell, I sure have learned to adjust my expectations of them.
We're looking at a new DB server for our production environment... After all these problems, I have serious doubts about Dell support's ability to help me in a serious crisis... We're this close to buying an opteron based Sun server for our needs.
Yeah, I'm also a native Cook County-an... A lot of history of electoral-malfeasance up there... Fortunately, with Daley Sr. and Stevenson and those people all dead, we've just got to wait for Daley Jr. and his ilk to drop-dead and maybe--maybe--cook county-ans might get a fair shake from their elected officials.
If that were really the case, do you really think they would have lost two consecutive rigged Presidential-elections?
...but I love the British. His dry comment that "Mozilla authorizing this distribution makes it quite impossible to enforce piracy laws" is straight out of Monty Python. "We can't very well just have people giving these things away--makes piracy obsolete then doesn't it? Then where would we piracy coppers be?"
Hilarious!
Next, they'll be arresting the makers of terrible films on the gruonds that this reduces piracy by demotivating people to watch films... "Can't have you making this tripe--we need high-quality pictures for the pirates to pirate, so we can put a stop to it by arresting them!"
This is also why many Police Officers might personally believe in decriminalizing marijuana in the US, but their unions all give heavily to preventing that from ever happening: Because if there wasn't a huge underground economy thriving around marijuana, there'd be no need for the marijuana enforcement squad, would there? This would mean fewer Police Officers, thus fewer union members paying dues from salaries.
Unfortunately, suing the Federal government is prohibited by the Constitution, although I suppose you could sue the government official in charge of the patent office personally...