Dont know ya, never met ya, but Slashdot helped to shape the career and geek that I am today.
I am forever indebted and grateful for what you did man.
GodSpeed.
You are the first person who made a distinction between general and corporate IM. In most places that I have worked the exact held true: Employees on public IM systems do get interrupted and it does screw with productivity. Employees on internally hosted corporate (closed) IM systems (I recommend Jabber) do get more done. Especially in information industries, the ability to share small pieces of information very quickly without leaving your chair, code, scripts - availability - there is alot to be gained imho if your environment is controlled.
Thank you. I was getting depressed at what I was reading. Hot patching production kernels = amateur.
Never take a *needless* risk. Ever.
Hot Patching a running non-production kernel "because-you-can", well then that's a pretty neat thing, high on the geek scale. But don't even come near my prod cluster neophyte or I'll have your limbs removed.
You're missing the point the original poster made. To efficiently run an IT org you have to standardize - on software *and* hardware. Lots of reasons - lower initial costs (volume licensing, vendor discounts) - smaller learning curve for IT staff (support cycles are smaller) - predictability - quickly reproducible environments (i.e. imaging etc)
I'd come up with a few more but I have work to do...
IT manager A says: "We support IMAP to any device!" IT manager B says: "We support Blackberries!"
I guarantee IT manager B is burning less support cycles than A. Salaries are one of the biggest expsenses to your org, making efficient use of your orgs time is the number one way to cut costs without having beheadings.
I have been a engineer/sysadmin/it manager for something on the order of 13 years and this question has never occurred to me. Why? I don't ever bite the hand that feeds me. A corrupt sysadmin is much like a corrupt police officer, you've been given this huge responsibility and for whatever reason (lack of sanity, common sense, immaturity) you've chosen to abuse it. In all this time, I have never read an execs email unless asked to by them or by at least two other members of the executive team together. It's simply none of my business until they make it so. Tracking the rogue admin is another matter unfortunately - if you've only got one to begin with, good luck with that. If not, then you just need one that is trustworthy, pretty old fashioned concept it seems but a valid one still. I feel very privileged to own the trust that my company has placed in me and I never intend on taking advantage of that.
"evidence is growing that great service is essential for long-term customer retention."
To me this is a remarkable indicator of the high cluelessness level of a very large number of businesses. This is such a basic truth, it's like "Please open mouth to breathe".
Happy Customers/Happy Employees can make a successful business even if the product is just 'adequate'. People resist change more when they are happy than not. F---ing duh.
Re:ENLIGHTENMENT E17 WILL WIPE THE FLOOR!
on
KDE 4 Screenshots
·
· Score: 1
Agreed! Dev time has been so um...'gradual' that I think alot of people lost interest in it. I have been running 16.999 for a few weeks while the final tweaks are being worked out and I love it. Gnome and KDE never afforded me the level of sophistication + performance that Enlightenment does. Yes it takes longer to learn, configure and understand (for me) but if that is someones problem they should use Windows or Mac.
From what Ive seen so far KDE4 brings nothing new to the table that would make me leave pre-E17 and certainly not E17 in its final glory.
Every company is going to different in how IT is treated. I've worked for a pretty wide variety of organizations, dotcom startups to IBM/Unisys/etc. and have met many in my field through the years. Here's my theory and I'm sticking to it.
Corps that were around long before computing, I'm talking about energy, construction, banking - brick and mortar institutions that are just as comfy with paper and filing cabinets as anything - from my experience the tendency is to take IT for granted, a necessary evil that you only want around when things go wrong. In these environments budgets are often really restrictive, training is usually non-existent and yes, Virginia, if this is who you work for and you don't have the tools to quickly scan and analyze your network (btw - there are plenty of good tools out there that will do that for an AD network) then extra hours may be the only way to get things under control. In one situation I asked my manager if I could schedule 3 hours of my time a week for education - learning the systems and procedures. I didn't ask for money or class, just time - and he could hardly deny me. In about a month I had learned what I needed to, but no thanks to this particular company - I had to make my own time but I made sure it was during that 8 to 5. After 14 years playing with computers, I really value my "time away from tech"
I have to say that the best environments I have worked in are those whose primary value stems from technology. There are still brick and mortars (IBM's etc) but even those companies can offer more challenging and rewarding work environments for those in IT. Now I am working for a small internet security firm and there is lots of training-teaching-helping-innovating going on all the time. For my first year I was thrust into an entirely new environment, like you I was already pretty well versed in the technology - but there was tons to learn. In this situation time was made to help to understand any of the subsystems I had questions or needed to know about. I believe that has alot to do with the fact that this companies entire business depends on networking and the hardware and people that do it. RTFM has real value to these companies - the more you know about what you do, the better you do it. Rocket Science!
That my 2 cents - good luck whoever you might work for!
Some in the industry believe that part of the problem with security gaps in MS operating systems stems from the fact that each new OS release has been entirely built on existing technology. The recent WMF scare seems to amplify the truth in that statement. Apple seems to have had a great deal of success rearchitecting OSX - will Microsoft ever be willing to start from the ground up on a new OS with security being a primary strategy from the outset?
Ditto on this idea - Dreamweaver also includes a nifty "Clean Up Word HTML" tool that really kicks ass. It will nicely and completely sterilize all the redundancy and nested bs --- as well as Word-specific tags to leave you with nice, clean HTML afterwards. Apply style sheets to format and voila! - yer done:)
I must say that emotional ranbling about Windows without any nods to the subversive business practices and thievery that is the REASON people love to hate MicroScrote is really annoying. I'm sorry, my job does not depend on how I "feel" about autodetection notification bubbles. It depends on UPTIME, AVAILABILITY, SECURITY. I don't usually lower myself to insults - but whoever wrote this article should be writing for People magazine or US! - not tech articles.
This is just another example of a really messed up society. Through the years, things that are considered 'bad for kids' has constantly evolved and changed. There was a time that saying 'damn' on TV was completely taboo. Today I routinely hear much worse on broadcast (let's not even talk about cable!). Every generation has had it's gripes about what the kids during that time were watching, doing, playing and saying.
Unfortunately, there has yet to be a generation where the parents take reponsibility for educating and censoring (if necessary)the content available in their own homes. Parents that do take the time to take care of their own are not the ones screaming their heads off. People argue 'What about when my kids are not at home?!'. To that I say, educate your kids! I believe kids can be taught right from wrong. Nothing will keep children from doing 'bad' or seeing 'bad' things once in a while. This is a part of growing up and part of the learning process.
The spreading of fear, uncertainty and doubt -- an age old Microsoft tradition. This is what happens every single time Microsoft gets scared that things might not go their way, or whenever certain sectors of their business become threatened in some way. Between Google (+Gates paranoia that they are secretly building an operating system), FireFox, Apple - Microsoft is getting gently hammered at from all sides. Ballmer is Microsoft's propagandist "Elmer F.U.D"...and uh, yes, he is completely full of shit as usual. Add that to the growing spectre of the decline of the x86 architecture in the next 5-8 years - IBM is behind CELL - and they are in a near panic. They are like angry, petulant children when their ducks get knocked out of line - angry, petulant little children with billions and billions of dollars...
...we had to walk 13 miles through the snow just to get to the DM's house. Actually he didn't even have a house, it was a large refrigerator carton in the dirt. And we couldn't afford no special dice, neither. We used to make them with dirt clods and white-out until they fell apart, which was like every other round. Maps? Books? Miniatures? I wish!! Nope. We just made it up. All of it. Man, those were the days....
Not actually, no. But I'll walk you through it. "Vaporware" is sarcasm. Microsoft has quite a marked history of big claims and late deliveries. No surprises here, really:)
Slashdot Mirror
Dont know ya, never met ya, but Slashdot helped to shape the career and geek that I am today. I am forever indebted and grateful for what you did man. GodSpeed.
That was my feeling too - I got a geeky little tear in my eye...
You are the first person who made a distinction between general and corporate IM. In most places that I have worked the exact held true: Employees on public IM systems do get interrupted and it does screw with productivity. Employees on internally hosted corporate (closed) IM systems (I recommend Jabber) do get more done. Especially in information industries, the ability to share small pieces of information very quickly without leaving your chair, code, scripts - availability - there is alot to be gained imho if your environment is controlled.
Thank you. I was getting depressed at what I was reading. Hot patching production kernels = amateur. Never take a *needless* risk. Ever. Hot Patching a running non-production kernel "because-you-can", well then that's a pretty neat thing, high on the geek scale. But don't even come near my prod cluster neophyte or I'll have your limbs removed.
You're missing the point the original poster made.
To efficiently run an IT org you have to standardize - on software *and* hardware.
Lots of reasons
- lower initial costs (volume licensing, vendor discounts)
- smaller learning curve for IT staff (support cycles are smaller)
- predictability
- quickly reproducible environments (i.e. imaging etc)
I'd come up with a few more but I have work to do...
IT manager A says: "We support IMAP to any device!"
IT manager B says: "We support Blackberries!"
I guarantee IT manager B is burning less support cycles than A.
Salaries are one of the biggest expsenses to your org, making efficient use of your orgs time is the number one way to cut costs without having beheadings.
...on the "cholic-y baby" ban
... Electromagnetic pulse closets. don't forget to leave your iphone on the nightstand!
You can't fool us by posting anonymously, MR. COLBERT...
I have been a engineer/sysadmin/it manager for something on the order of 13 years and this question has never occurred to me. Why? I don't ever bite the hand that feeds me. A corrupt sysadmin is much like a corrupt police officer, you've been given this huge responsibility and for whatever reason (lack of sanity, common sense, immaturity) you've chosen to abuse it. In all this time, I have never read an execs email unless asked to by them or by at least two other members of the executive team together. It's simply none of my business until they make it so. Tracking the rogue admin is another matter unfortunately - if you've only got one to begin with, good luck with that. If not, then you just need one that is trustworthy, pretty old fashioned concept it seems but a valid one still. I feel very privileged to own the trust that my company has placed in me and I never intend on taking advantage of that.
"evidence is growing that great service is essential for long-term customer retention."
To me this is a remarkable indicator of the high cluelessness level of a very large number of businesses. This is such a basic truth, it's like "Please open mouth to breathe".
Happy Customers/Happy Employees can make a successful business even if the product is just 'adequate'. People resist change more when they are happy than not. F---ing duh.
Agreed! Dev time has been so um...'gradual' that I think alot of people lost interest in it. I have been running 16.999 for a few weeks while the final tweaks are being worked out and I love it. Gnome and KDE never afforded me the level of sophistication + performance that Enlightenment does. Yes it takes longer to learn, configure and understand (for me) but if that is someones problem they should use Windows or Mac.
From what Ive seen so far KDE4 brings nothing new to the table that would make me leave pre-E17 and certainly not E17 in its final glory.
Every company is going to different in how IT is treated. I've worked for a pretty wide variety of organizations, dotcom startups to IBM/Unisys/etc. and have met many in my field through the years. Here's my theory and I'm sticking to it.
Corps that were around long before computing, I'm talking about energy, construction, banking - brick and mortar institutions that are just as comfy with paper and filing cabinets as anything - from my experience the tendency is to take IT for granted, a necessary evil that you only want around when things go wrong. In these environments budgets are often really restrictive, training is usually non-existent and yes, Virginia, if this is who you work for and you don't have the tools to quickly scan and analyze your network (btw - there are plenty of good tools out there that will do that for an AD network) then extra hours may be the only way to get things under control. In one situation I asked my manager if I could schedule 3 hours of my time a week for education - learning the systems and procedures. I didn't ask for money or class, just time - and he could hardly deny me. In about a month I had learned what I needed to, but no thanks to this particular company - I had to make my own time but I made sure it was during that 8 to 5. After 14 years playing with computers, I really value my "time away from tech"
I have to say that the best environments I have worked in are those whose primary value stems from technology. There are still brick and mortars (IBM's etc) but even those companies can offer more challenging and rewarding work environments for those in IT. Now I am working for a small internet security firm and there is lots of training-teaching-helping-innovating going on all the time. For my first year I was thrust into an entirely new environment, like you I was already pretty well versed in the technology - but there was tons to learn. In this situation time was made to help to understand any of the subsystems I had questions or needed to know about. I believe that has alot to do with the fact that this companies entire business depends on networking and the hardware and people that do it. RTFM has real value to these companies - the more you know about what you do, the better you do it. Rocket Science!
That my 2 cents - good luck whoever you might work for!
Some in the industry believe that part of the problem with security gaps in MS operating systems stems from the fact that each new OS release has been entirely built on existing technology. The recent WMF scare seems to amplify the truth in that statement. Apple seems to have had a great deal of success rearchitecting OSX - will Microsoft ever be willing to start from the ground up on a new OS with security being a primary strategy from the outset?
This particular attempt at secure messaging will be circumvented in 5...4....3...2...1...
...someone with such vast technical knowledge that there is no room left in his magnificent cranium for grammar checking.
That was a damned challenging read.
I always thought the default was: that a movie based on a game must always suck.
Anybody see Mortal Kombat?
One Word: BOTS
Ditto on this idea - Dreamweaver also includes a nifty "Clean Up Word HTML" tool that really kicks ass. It will nicely and completely sterilize all the redundancy and nested bs --- as well as Word-specific tags to leave you with nice, clean HTML afterwards. :)
Apply style sheets to format and voila! - yer done
Note to self, 8-5-2005:
CoolTechzone neither "Cool" nor "Tech".
I must say that emotional ranbling about Windows without any nods to the subversive business practices and thievery that is the REASON people love to hate MicroScrote is really annoying. I'm sorry, my job does not depend on how I "feel" about autodetection notification bubbles. It depends on UPTIME, AVAILABILITY, SECURITY. I don't usually lower myself to insults - but whoever wrote this article should be writing for People magazine or US! - not tech articles.
This is just another example of a really messed up society. Through the years, things that are considered 'bad for kids' has constantly evolved and changed. There was a time that saying 'damn' on TV was completely taboo. Today I routinely hear much worse on broadcast (let's not even talk about cable!). Every generation has had it's gripes about what the kids during that time were watching, doing, playing and saying.
Unfortunately, there has yet to be a generation where the parents take reponsibility for educating and censoring (if necessary)the content available in their own homes. Parents that do take the time to take care of their own are not the ones screaming their heads off. People argue 'What about when my kids are not at home?!'. To that I say, educate your kids! I believe kids can be taught right from wrong. Nothing will keep children from doing 'bad' or seeing 'bad' things once in a while. This is a part of growing up and part of the learning process.
The spreading of fear, uncertainty and doubt -- an age old Microsoft tradition. This is what happens every single time Microsoft gets scared that things might not go their way, or whenever certain sectors of their business become threatened in some way. Between Google (+Gates paranoia that they are secretly building an operating system), FireFox, Apple - Microsoft is getting gently hammered at from all sides. Ballmer is Microsoft's propagandist "Elmer F.U.D"...and uh, yes, he is completely full of shit as usual.
Add that to the growing spectre of the decline of the x86 architecture in the next 5-8 years - IBM is behind CELL - and they are in a near panic.
They are like angry, petulant children when their ducks get knocked out of line - angry, petulant little children with billions and billions of dollars...
Hmmmm...wonder if they could be convinced to move their labs closer to Redmond.....
...we had to walk 13 miles through the snow just to get to the DM's house. Actually he didn't even have a house, it was a large refrigerator carton in the dirt. And we couldn't afford no special dice, neither. We used to make them with dirt clods and white-out until they fell apart, which was like every other round. Maps? Books? Miniatures? I wish!! Nope. We just made it up. All of it. Man, those were the days....
WHOA, DenDave - that is really funny. Thanks for making my day :)
Not actually, no. But I'll walk you through it. :)
"Vaporware" is sarcasm. Microsoft has quite a marked history of big claims and late deliveries.
No surprises here, really