Usability in this case is based on the user interface, not usefulness of the device overall. Welcome to English, where ambiguity in word usage is our middle name.
Exactly correct. I work for a large financial corporation. We're all running XP on our desktops. When support for XP goes away, we'll have to upgrade or switch. No way for a corp of this size to run an unsupported OS. Now, what would be great is if the suppliers of our workstations (HP) were to offer XP support for us. Something like that would really slow our adoption of a new OS. The upgrade from NT 4.0 to XP cost a lot of money, and if we could delay that, I bet lots of people in upper management would be very happy.
Barring any display of balls by PC makers, it might take longer for Vista to get the penetration that XP has, but I bet 5 years from now, 90% of desktops running an MS OS will be running Vista.
Hmm, I think this is the first time I've ever responded to an AC. But OK, I'll bite.
When I turn my PC on, it goes through the normal POST process, I get the BIOS screen, then I get a login screen. I have to put in a user name and password. Without this, the computer goes no further. Try too many times with a bad password and it locks up. Gotta call the help desk and they have to unlock it, after verifying who you are.
Is that enough info? There's lots of different products on the market and I'm not going to reveal which product we use, as that may be construed as giving out proprietary information. No, we didn't develop the product in-house, it's commercial, and I'm sure we pay out the butt for it.
... every one of our hard drives is encrypted. That's for over 150,000 employees. Every one, as far as I know. Could be that they missed one somewhere.
There's still the problem with bad employees copying things off on CDs, floppies, emailing sensitive stuff out, but as far as theft of PCs/laptops, we're covered.
Anyone familiar with the 'Osborne effect'? (Somewhat debunked these days, but they did lose sales.) Osborne pre-announced their next-generation computer, sales dried up for their current model, and they went under because they lost too much money between the announcement and the rollout. Why do you think Steve Jobs made sure that people thought there'd be no Intel-Macs until the summer? If everyone had known there'd be some in January he wouldn't have sold nearly as many Macs over the holiday season.
Looks like Wizards has someone on the inside leaking information. Why would they not want to ferret out this piece-of-crap and fire him? As an employee, you have an obligation not to reveal information your company doesn't want revealed. Once you've proven yourself to be untrustworthy, well, what's your limit? Why wouldn't you sell trade secrets to Wizard's competitors? Why wouldn't you sabotage a database or server or printing machine? Integrity has to still mean something.
And I would posit that someone who gets offered the job of "Main Technical Contact at a Fortune 10 Company" will not find it difficult to find another job.
I work for a Fortune 100 company. Been here for over 5 years. Nobody is being laid off. We're hiring all the time. We've outgrown the building we're in and are looking for more space. We've (my division, anyway) had double-digit (i.e. >= 10.0%) growth in revenue for every one of the past 11 quarters. Not all big companies are downsizing. Some of the people have been here more than 10 years. One woman (yes, a programmer) has been here for 17 years. There have been no layoffs in that time. Big companies don't necessarily get smaller. We were at 120,000 employees when I started. We're over 150,000 now. No sign of a letup.
I would say if you're wondering whether you want to go back to college to work then you don't really have a good enough reason to turn down the Fortune 10 job.
Has anyone ever considered that spam may actually help keep us all 'freer'? There's billions of spam messages everyday that add to the legitimate traffic. If all spam email magically disappeared, all that would be left is 'legitimate' correspondence.
Which would make the NSA's new job of spying on us much easier.
I used to know a guy who always went to the limit on doing his taxes - exploited every loophole, deducted everything that could even vaguely be deductible, said he gave more to charity than he actually did. He mailed his forms in on April 13th. Said that he figured it was right in the middle of the heaviest flow - kind of like pissing into the Amazon. Figured that one of the reasons they never caught him was that everything 'seemed' right (and he always made sure there were no technical errors) and without a good reason to flag it, they just processed his return and gave him his money because, you know, they had about 30 million more returns to go through.
Wonder if he's still doing that? Jim, you out there?
I bet ant sci-fi has the same sort of plot - a human that actually finds ants interesting and dumbs himself down to the point where he can communicate with them and teach them and help them and... I don't know, I would assume sex is involved at some point. Perhaps the ant censors are more lenient on what they allow on ant TV.
Jerry Pournelle's been doing this for years. Get a fire-proof safe. Get a Post Office Box. Make CDs of all your important data as often as you feel necessary. Daily. Weekly. Bi-weekly. Whatever. Make like 5 at any given time. Put one in your safe. One in your PO Box. Keep one at your office. Keep some in a trusted friend's garage. Bury some in a chest in your backyard. Keep some at your mom's place. Or your kid's place.
The odds of all the CDs going bad or all the places blowing up at the same time are pretty small.
If you've got more data than CDs can reasonably hold, switch to DVDs. If it's more than that, use tape.
Add new users; delete old ones; reset passwords when people forget; Manage disk space; read several sysadmin newsgroups and mailing lists to discover new exploits, viruses, worms, etc. that could affect your system; patch your system to fix these problems and install new versions; run backup software. Shit, the list is endless.
Who's going to run your mail server? Gonna do any spam filtering?
Being a sysadmin for 30 people is at least a 50% job, at a minimum. Depending on how much you rely on your network, both inter and intra, will determine whether sysadmin the other 50% of the time.
And if you have internet access and the usual clueless users (note: they're all clueless), you'll spend the other 50% of your time removing spyware, adware, viruses, worms, and all other sorts of nasty things from your users' PCs and your server(s).
You need to be proactive here. Tell them 'No!'. If you want to program, tell them to hire a sysadmin, otherwise you'll get sucked over to the sysadmin side and eventually they'll have to hire a new programmer to do your old job because you won't have had time to do it.
There's important civil liberty stuff in cases like these.
I was in the Navy in the '80s. We occasionally got tested for drugs via urinalysis. We had a guy (can't remember his name) who tested positive. He swore up and down that he had never done drugs. Had numerous people testify in his defense. His parents called congresspeople. All to no avail. He was convicted, reduced in ranks, de-nuked (we were nuclear power plant operators) and sent to some janitorial-like job somewhere else.
A year or two later, the technician who had done all the urinalysis at the lab testified (in some other case) that most of the time he didn't bother to do any tests. He just picked some samples at random, marked them positive, marked the rest negative. (This was the late '80s, so he wasn't surfing porn. I don't know if it came out what he was actually doing when he was supposed to be working.)
Anyway, they re-instated my buddy's rank, had to give him all his back pay. There were a bunch of people they had to do that to, I bet. He spent the rest of his enlistment just quietly doing his job. Of course, he didn't re-enlist. He was vindicated, but he still had his life screwed with, big time.
Having the process not be transparent is a bad thing. There's all kinds of chains-of-evidence documentation that the civilian justice system has to go through because of shit-bags like that technician. Having some magical 'black box' that can tell whether you're drunk or not... it seems like there should be some way to make sure the machine works. If they can't prove it in court, doesn't it seem obvious that they have no case against you?
That was one of my personal all time classic movie moments.
I still get weirded out by Leia kissing Luke in the first one, now that we know the real relation.
And my favorite all-time classic movie moment comes from 'Jaws'. The police chief (Roy Scheider) is chumming, while Quint and Hooper are arguing inside the boat. The shark surfaces, and then Scheider's character backs into the room, cigarette dangling from the bottom lip, he says, "You're gonna need a bigger boat."
God, I love that scene. Quintessentially perfect. The cigarette. The delivery. The expression. They should have given him an oscar just for that one scene.
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Usability in this case is based on the user interface, not usefulness of the device overall. Welcome to English, where ambiguity in word usage is our middle name.
Barring any display of balls by PC makers, it might take longer for Vista to get the penetration that XP has, but I bet 5 years from now, 90% of desktops running an MS OS will be running Vista.
When I turn my PC on, it goes through the normal POST process, I get the BIOS screen, then I get a login screen. I have to put in a user name and password. Without this, the computer goes no further. Try too many times with a bad password and it locks up. Gotta call the help desk and they have to unlock it, after verifying who you are.
Is that enough info? There's lots of different products on the market and I'm not going to reveal which product we use, as that may be construed as giving out proprietary information. No, we didn't develop the product in-house, it's commercial, and I'm sure we pay out the butt for it.
There's still the problem with bad employees copying things off on CDs, floppies, emailing sensitive stuff out, but as far as theft of PCs/laptops, we're covered.
I guess I've been reading too many webcomics lately. Need to cut down.
Methinks someone is looking for a tax writeoff.
Looks like Wizards has someone on the inside leaking information. Why would they not want to ferret out this piece-of-crap and fire him? As an employee, you have an obligation not to reveal information your company doesn't want revealed. Once you've proven yourself to be untrustworthy, well, what's your limit? Why wouldn't you sell trade secrets to Wizard's competitors? Why wouldn't you sabotage a database or server or printing machine? Integrity has to still mean something.
If it won't accept that, use the User Agent Firefox module to pretend you're actually running IE.
What is he actually doing that's causing him problems? Downloading spyware apps? Not sure there's a fix for that.
From Inventgeek. Seems like it would do the trick.
I work for a Fortune 100 company. Been here for over 5 years. Nobody is being laid off. We're hiring all the time. We've outgrown the building we're in and are looking for more space. We've (my division, anyway) had double-digit (i.e. >= 10.0%) growth in revenue for every one of the past 11 quarters. Not all big companies are downsizing. Some of the people have been here more than 10 years. One woman (yes, a programmer) has been here for 17 years. There have been no layoffs in that time. Big companies don't necessarily get smaller. We were at 120,000 employees when I started. We're over 150,000 now. No sign of a letup.
I would say if you're wondering whether you want to go back to college to work then you don't really have a good enough reason to turn down the Fortune 10 job.
Has anyone ever considered that spam may actually help keep us all 'freer'? There's billions of spam messages everyday that add to the legitimate traffic. If all spam email magically disappeared, all that would be left is 'legitimate' correspondence.
Which would make the NSA's new job of spying on us much easier.
I used to know a guy who always went to the limit on doing his taxes - exploited every loophole, deducted everything that could even vaguely be deductible, said he gave more to charity than he actually did. He mailed his forms in on April 13th. Said that he figured it was right in the middle of the heaviest flow - kind of like pissing into the Amazon. Figured that one of the reasons they never caught him was that everything 'seemed' right (and he always made sure there were no technical errors) and without a good reason to flag it, they just processed his return and gave him his money because, you know, they had about 30 million more returns to go through.
Wonder if he's still doing that? Jim, you out there?
I bet ant sci-fi has the same sort of plot - a human that actually finds ants interesting and dumbs himself down to the point where he can communicate with them and teach them and help them and... I don't know, I would assume sex is involved at some point. Perhaps the ant censors are more lenient on what they allow on ant TV.
You too, eh? God I miss those days.
Cosmic Encounters. (Not an RPG, but a boardgame. We played that when we had non-RPGers in the group. Man that game was fun. Filch!)
People can say the weirdest things in English... and yet I still understand them.
Password Safe. Works great. You could just install on your USB fob, I imagine.
Staying away from the April/May/June herd.
The odds of all the CDs going bad or all the places blowing up at the same time are pretty small.
If you've got more data than CDs can reasonably hold, switch to DVDs. If it's more than that, use tape.
Add new users; delete old ones; reset passwords when people forget; Manage disk space; read several sysadmin newsgroups and mailing lists to discover new exploits, viruses, worms, etc. that could affect your system; patch your system to fix these problems and install new versions; run backup software. Shit, the list is endless.
Who's going to run your mail server? Gonna do any spam filtering?
Being a sysadmin for 30 people is at least a 50% job, at a minimum. Depending on how much you rely on your network, both inter and intra, will determine whether sysadmin the other 50% of the time.
And if you have internet access and the usual clueless users (note: they're all clueless), you'll spend the other 50% of your time removing spyware, adware, viruses, worms, and all other sorts of nasty things from your users' PCs and your server(s).
You need to be proactive here. Tell them 'No!'. If you want to program, tell them to hire a sysadmin, otherwise you'll get sucked over to the sysadmin side and eventually they'll have to hire a new programmer to do your old job because you won't have had time to do it.
Yes, been there, done that.
I was in the Navy in the '80s. We occasionally got tested for drugs via urinalysis. We had a guy (can't remember his name) who tested positive. He swore up and down that he had never done drugs. Had numerous people testify in his defense. His parents called congresspeople. All to no avail. He was convicted, reduced in ranks, de-nuked (we were nuclear power plant operators) and sent to some janitorial-like job somewhere else.
A year or two later, the technician who had done all the urinalysis at the lab testified (in some other case) that most of the time he didn't bother to do any tests. He just picked some samples at random, marked them positive, marked the rest negative. (This was the late '80s, so he wasn't surfing porn. I don't know if it came out what he was actually doing when he was supposed to be working.)
Anyway, they re-instated my buddy's rank, had to give him all his back pay. There were a bunch of people they had to do that to, I bet. He spent the rest of his enlistment just quietly doing his job. Of course, he didn't re-enlist. He was vindicated, but he still had his life screwed with, big time.
Having the process not be transparent is a bad thing. There's all kinds of chains-of-evidence documentation that the civilian justice system has to go through because of shit-bags like that technician. Having some magical 'black box' that can tell whether you're drunk or not... it seems like there should be some way to make sure the machine works. If they can't prove it in court, doesn't it seem obvious that they have no case against you?
I still get weirded out by Leia kissing Luke in the first one, now that we know the real relation.
And my favorite all-time classic movie moment comes from 'Jaws'. The police chief (Roy Scheider) is chumming, while Quint and Hooper are arguing inside the boat. The shark surfaces, and then Scheider's character backs into the room, cigarette dangling from the bottom lip, he says, "You're gonna need a bigger boat."
God, I love that scene. Quintessentially perfect. The cigarette. The delivery. The expression. They should have given him an oscar just for that one scene.
It's comments like these that ensure KFG stays on my 'Friends' list. Always good for a chuckle. And sometimes he's insightful, too. :)
See, that's what I get for parroting stuff I'd read somewhere else. Didn't fact-check it. I stand corrected.
Bush isn't from Texas. He's as New England as John Kerry. Went to Yale. He bought that ranch in Crawford in 1998.
I had this long diatribe written out where I basically said, "Ditto"; I decided I didn't really need to say all that. God, I love that movie.