The best piece of advice I can offer is understand as best you can how the business will be using the system. How large will it need to be, will it be growing? What kind of availability is required? What extra features are you looking for, voice mail, conference bridges, ivr, acd, etc?
We have 5 phone systems, 3 of which are replicated accross 3 local call centers for load balancing and redumdancy. We have 3 Avaya systems, 3 Aspect systems, 3 Periphonics IVR's, a Concerto Unison and Concerto Contact Pro product. Reliability and redudancy are huge for us, a big piece of our business is a 24x7 call center that handles 3 million inbound calls plus another million or two outbound calls a month.
Unix systems were a must!!! They simply don't have problems. They are the most reliable systems I have ever seen. Period.
However, this may be overkill for you. If you understand what you are looking for and do your homework you will be ok.
BTW -- Telecom is one of the easiest ways to cut costs and impress your boss.
I could care less about number porting, what I do care is AT&T Wireless charges me $1.25 a month so my number can be ported. What crap, I already have to pay enough in taxes.
I find it very impressive that my PDA is running pretty much the exact same OS that my desktop is, and its not bloated. You can't find that with PocketPC. From a development standpoint it truely shows how versatile Linux really is.
Linux also means Open Source. You now can do whatever you want with your PDA and your not bound by some overweight MS product. Sharp has also been very good with providing docs and supporting the open Linux enviroment.
I just bought mine last week at Best Buy, only $250 bucks!!!! They were on clearance and I got their demo model. Not a shabby deal. I absolutly love it.
I am planning on flashing OpenZaurus this weekend.
Its good to see the Linux PDA marekt getting a little pub!
peace...
I have XP on my PII 333 laptop w/ 288 MB Ram and it runs way better than 98SE did. I play with apache, mysql, tomcat, vs 6, and this thing works fairly good.
I did have to turn off many XP graphics enhancements to get good performance though. But who needs those anyway?
I once had a little cracker program for cracking winzip passwords, even this had the ability to shutdown a brute force attack and resume it at a later date assuming the log file was kept. I would think any software that required long periods of time to run should build this in.
Even if the OS had some capability to suspend, there is still no gurantee that the program itself would come back up without a glitch.
[Why Default Outlook Reply is Good] > I can archive a single mail and have saved the whole discussion.
I would have to disagree with your point #2. Our whole office uses the Outlook and the majority of them use the default reply method ( 99.9 % ). The biggest complaint I have is when I am forwarded or copied on an email discussion after several emails have been sent. I am forced to scroll through 5 to 10 pages of pure crap and headers trying to figure what the heck the whole thing is about.
For lengthy emails I generally use many of the practices outlined in the article, but I do have to confess for short communications between only one person I use the default the method. I can also say that I have been complimented on a reply that I took the time edit and breakdown in a very concise manner. So people do pay attention to this point.
FireWire and USB were supposed to take care of some of these problems. Why can't we have 1 high speed cable ( like scsi ) that delivered power, that all devices could be linked to? I am talking about replaceing PCI, AGP, IDE, SCSI, FireWire, and USB to one nice highspeed standard. This could change the way internal drives are plugged in, as well as make hot swappable components very easy.
USB is nice, I have no FireWire devices so I haven't played with yet, but neither can compete with the data transfers of SCSI. Why Not?
If you want to talk about revolutioning the PC this would be a great step.
I will never - NEVER - be able to fully respect any system administrator, developer, or other technical-type IT worker who is not at least semi-proficient in some variety of UNIX
I would have to agree here. I am not network admin, just a DBA and I also do some APP DEV, but I am shocked at our IT group at my company. Many of them are MS Certified which is absolute crap. They know how to walk through a gui wizard but have no idea what they are actually doing. If you ever asked them to look at anything like *nix that just might cry.
I am not saying that I am pro when it comes to other systems ( at work I primarily use MS ) but I take pride in learning and expirementing with other systems and options. For some of my projects I have found that it is easier to write a perl script than fudge through some VB over weight piece of crap. I never would have found perl if it were not for my playing with Unix / Linux.
I would also have to agree with the fact that any professional should be able to do something on the *nix platform. The documentation, how-to's, tutorials, and help files available for *nix is astounding. All you have to do is read little and use your head.
I apologize if this sounds abusize towards the IT crowd out there that it is not my intent. I would just have to agree that any professional, certified or not, should be informed and versed in a wide range of systems. Every platform has its stengths and weaknesses and I think only those that take the time to understand the platforms can really realize how to exploit those.
I would have to agree. I have been running a PII 333 288 MB of ram Asus F7400 laptop. XP seems faster than my old Win 98SE OS. I did turn off all the fancy eye candy and I am only running at 16 bit color, but it crusises.
I use netbeans java ide and it starts and runs very fast, compared to 98.
And the stability for a M$ product is pretty good. I have crashed it once and was due to driver updates. No problem just did an easy rollback and things work great!
peace,
abombss
My advice, do what you want to do. Take courses in area that interests you most, take it seriously, do well, and have fun. Employers just want to see the degree. Granted if you want to be a NASA engineer do not major in Music, but the majority of people are working in a field different than what their major was college.
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The best piece of advice I can offer is understand as best you can how the business will be using the system. How large will it need to be, will it be growing? What kind of availability is required? What extra features are you looking for, voice mail, conference bridges, ivr, acd, etc?
We have 5 phone systems, 3 of which are replicated accross 3 local call centers for load balancing and redumdancy. We have 3 Avaya systems, 3 Aspect systems, 3 Periphonics IVR's, a Concerto Unison and Concerto Contact Pro product. Reliability and redudancy are huge for us, a big piece of our business is a 24x7 call center that handles 3 million inbound calls plus another million or two outbound calls a month.
Unix systems were a must!!! They simply don't have problems. They are the most reliable systems I have ever seen. Period.
However, this may be overkill for you. If you understand what you are looking for and do your homework you will be ok.
BTW -- Telecom is one of the easiest ways to cut costs and impress your boss.
good luckI could care less about number porting, what I do care is AT&T Wireless charges me $1.25 a month so my number can be ported. What crap, I already have to pay enough in taxes.
Why Not?
I find it very impressive that my PDA is running pretty much the exact same OS that my desktop is, and its not bloated. You can't find that with PocketPC. From a development standpoint it truely shows how versatile Linux really is.
Linux also means Open Source. You now can do whatever you want with your PDA and your not bound by some overweight MS product. Sharp has also been very good with providing docs and supporting the open Linux enviroment.
peace...
abombss
I just bought mine last week at Best Buy, only $250 bucks!!!! They were on clearance and I got their demo model. Not a shabby deal. I absolutly love it. I am planning on flashing OpenZaurus this weekend. Its good to see the Linux PDA marekt getting a little pub!
peace...
I have XP on my PII 333 laptop w/ 288 MB Ram and it runs way better than 98SE did. I play with apache, mysql, tomcat, vs 6, and this thing works fairly good.
I did have to turn off many XP graphics enhancements to get good performance though. But who needs those anyway?
This sounds like common sense to me.
I once had a little cracker program for cracking winzip passwords, even this had the ability to shutdown a brute force attack and resume it at a later date assuming the log file was kept. I would think any software that required long periods of time to run should build this in.
Even if the OS had some capability to suspend, there is still no gurantee that the program itself would come back up without a glitch.
[Why Default Outlook Reply is Good]
> I can archive a single mail and have saved the whole discussion.
I would have to disagree with your point #2. Our whole office uses the Outlook and the majority of them use the default reply method ( 99.9 % ). The biggest complaint I have is when I am forwarded or copied on an email discussion after several emails have been sent. I am forced to scroll through 5 to 10 pages of pure crap and headers trying to figure what the heck the whole thing is about.
For lengthy emails I generally use many of the practices outlined in the article, but I do have to confess for short communications between only one person I use the default the method. I can also say that I have been complimented on a reply that I took the time edit and breakdown in a very concise manner. So people do pay attention to this point.
Where is the universal cable?
FireWire and USB were supposed to take care of some of these problems. Why can't we have 1 high speed cable ( like scsi ) that delivered power, that all devices could be linked to? I am talking about replaceing PCI, AGP, IDE, SCSI, FireWire, and USB to one nice highspeed standard. This could change the way internal drives are plugged in, as well as make hot swappable components very easy.
USB is nice, I have no FireWire devices so I haven't played with yet, but neither can compete with the data transfers of SCSI. Why Not?
If you want to talk about revolutioning the PC this would be a great step.
I will never - NEVER - be able to fully respect any system administrator, developer, or other technical-type IT worker who is not at least semi-proficient in some variety of UNIX
I would have to agree here. I am not network admin, just a DBA and I also do some APP DEV, but I am shocked at our IT group at my company. Many of them are MS Certified which is absolute crap. They know how to walk through a gui wizard but have no idea what they are actually doing. If you ever asked them to look at anything like *nix that just might cry.
I am not saying that I am pro when it comes to other systems ( at work I primarily use MS ) but I take pride in learning and expirementing with other systems and options. For some of my projects I have found that it is easier to write a perl script than fudge through some VB over weight piece of crap. I never would have found perl if it were not for my playing with Unix / Linux.
I would also have to agree with the fact that any professional should be able to do something on the *nix platform. The documentation, how-to's, tutorials, and help files available for *nix is astounding. All you have to do is read little and use your head.
I apologize if this sounds abusize towards the IT crowd out there that it is not my intent. I would just have to agree that any professional, certified or not, should be informed and versed in a wide range of systems. Every platform has its stengths and weaknesses and I think only those that take the time to understand the platforms can really realize how to exploit those.
I would have to agree. I have been running a PII 333 288 MB of ram Asus F7400 laptop. XP seems faster than my old Win 98SE OS. I did turn off all the fancy eye candy and I am only running at 16 bit color, but it crusises. I use netbeans java ide and it starts and runs very fast, compared to 98. And the stability for a M$ product is pretty good. I have crashed it once and was due to driver updates. No problem just did an easy rollback and things work great! peace, abombss
Touche...
My advice, do what you want to do. Take courses in area that interests you most, take it seriously, do well, and have fun. Employers just want to see the degree. Granted if you want to be a NASA engineer do not major in Music, but the majority of people are working in a field different than what their major was college.