I thought cable was a monopoly right granted by a local government (city or county)? And that the price paid for the monopoly right is the requirement to provide the service to all residences in that government area. The phone company doesn't get to pick and choose where it puts phone lines. Isn't the cable company the same? Once you get cable, internet by the cable company uses the same infrastructure.
In a lot of ways, the life style of an interstellar ark would be best visualized by watching ant or bee colonies. No one is "special"... you're simply there to plug up a particular hole in the wall where someone else inevitably failed at the task.
What you suggest makes the entire ark thing pointless, whatever it is that arrives at the destination really wouldn't be 'human' anymore.
Well, my perspective is that they are recovering their overhead from the retainer and that they should be partnering with me for cost effective solutions to the routine matters that come up in IT, including the occassional need for a real onsite visit to solve a problem.
Now, I do agree that dispatching a tech for silly things like changing toner ought to be discouraged. We're not doing that and my expectation is that their remote helpdesk people would resolve all of the dumb end user issues remotely, without the needless dispatch of a tech. And, the users don't get to ask for onsite visits, they just get to ask for help, so any onsite's ultimately need to be approved by me.
So, while I can understand why the vendor might feel the need for 'defensive' pricing, that doesn't match up well for me when we are supposedly partnering and their services were sold under that umbrella.
That single hourly rate for any onsite work just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
i suspect they're deliberately pricing themselves out of the "sure, i'll plug in your monitor onsite" market. if it's easy enough that you could get an intern to do it, you probably should.
But that flies in the face of the basic premise of outsourcing the IT infrastructure. I want the infrastructure managed, completely. I don't want to have any IT staff at all. If what you're saying is true, then basically the vendor I've chosen is not truly offering a fully managed solution. Might be time to look for another vendor...
BTW, the 'plug your monitor in' example doesn't really fit. I would expect their remote helpdesk to have already gotten past the basics by the time an onsite visit was required. If the problem was truly that basic, the supplier deserves to eat a loss on the call.
Ideally, someone would give a tiered labor rate based on the skillset (desktop, server, network, security, etc.)
I agree. I have a firm on retainer managing our IT infrastructure. The retainer covers remote monitoring and remote helpdesk support supposedly on an unlimited basis. That part I have no problem with, but it irks me to no end that I get charged $150/hour for any onsite work, regardless of the complexity. Installing a new hard drive on a workstation shouldn't require the level of expertise that diagnosing and fixing a network issue does, they shouldn't be priced the same.
Scott
Then you have just disproved your original assertion.
the only physical life allowed must be based on carbon, just like life on Earth.
What you really meant to say is that it is highly probable that life is based on carbon. Not that it must be based on carbon.
Big difference.
No, easy enough to make one, but won't do you any good unless you are on the CVS version of POPFile. The release version (v 0.20.1) still uses BDB, the next release (CVS v 0.21.0) switches to SQL.
If you're interested, post in Bleeding Edge - Source Code once you're up on the SQL CVS version and I'll put a patch together.
I haven't tried playing with it yet, but it seems like it would be relatively straightforward to check for the number of words which are not already in its dictionary. Aftern the initial training, an email with more than a few new words is highly likely to be garbled spam (or from someone who received a new Thesaurus for Christmas.)
I did that, hacked my POPFile to track the word counts per email and the number of words that were found in the corpus. Over 5377 messages to date, there are definite characteristics for ham (heavily clustered at 80%+ of the words are in the corpus) and spam (80% of the spam has less than 80% of the words in the corpus). I also noted that virtually all spam had less than 500 words in the message, I could confidently predict that a message was ham if it contained more than 500 words, that was unexpected.
Scott
Excellent notes! For those who want to quickly find a particular speaker on one of the sesions, Oliver Schmezle put together a handy webcast timetable available here http://www.schmelzle.net/techblog/2003/01/18
Personally, I found the sessions by the following speakers well worth the listen. Interesting and informative.
John Graham-Cumming, POPFile - Session 1 at 00:52:00
Joshua Goodman, Microsoft Research - Session 3 at 01:44:30
Jon Praed, Internet Law Group - Session 4 at 00:34:00
Slashdot Mirror
I thought cable was a monopoly right granted by a local government (city or county)? And that the price paid for the monopoly right is the requirement to provide the service to all residences in that government area. The phone company doesn't get to pick and choose where it puts phone lines. Isn't the cable company the same? Once you get cable, internet by the cable company uses the same infrastructure.
What you suggest makes the entire ark thing pointless, whatever it is that arrives at the destination really wouldn't be 'human' anymore.
Scott
Well, my perspective is that they are recovering their overhead from the retainer and that they should be partnering with me for cost effective solutions to the routine matters that come up in IT, including the occassional need for a real onsite visit to solve a problem.
Now, I do agree that dispatching a tech for silly things like changing toner ought to be discouraged. We're not doing that and my expectation is that their remote helpdesk people would resolve all of the dumb end user issues remotely, without the needless dispatch of a tech. And, the users don't get to ask for onsite visits, they just get to ask for help, so any onsite's ultimately need to be approved by me.
So, while I can understand why the vendor might feel the need for 'defensive' pricing, that doesn't match up well for me when we are supposedly partnering and their services were sold under that umbrella.
That single hourly rate for any onsite work just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
But that flies in the face of the basic premise of outsourcing the IT infrastructure. I want the infrastructure managed, completely. I don't want to have any IT staff at all. If what you're saying is true, then basically the vendor I've chosen is not truly offering a fully managed solution. Might be time to look for another vendor...
BTW, the 'plug your monitor in' example doesn't really fit. I would expect their remote helpdesk to have already gotten past the basics by the time an onsite visit was required. If the problem was truly that basic, the supplier deserves to eat a loss on the call.
Then you have just disproved your original assertion. the only physical life allowed must be based on carbon, just like life on Earth. What you really meant to say is that it is highly probable that life is based on carbon. Not that it must be based on carbon. Big difference.
No, easy enough to make one, but won't do you any good unless you are on the CVS version of POPFile. The release version (v 0.20.1) still uses BDB, the next release (CVS v 0.21.0) switches to SQL. If you're interested, post in Bleeding Edge - Source Code once you're up on the SQL CVS version and I'll put a patch together.
Excellent notes! For those who want to quickly find a particular speaker on one of the sesions, Oliver Schmezle put together a handy webcast timetable available here http://www.schmelzle.net/techblog/2003/01/18
Personally, I found the sessions by the following speakers well worth the listen. Interesting and informative.