If your company has any sort of lease/purchase lifecycle, this is where you be most effective in placing your OS upgrade. The problem is that you'll be supporting XP, Windows 7, and possibly 2000 for the next 2-3 years while you replace everyone's machines.
Corporate America resists change. Can you go to Windows 7? Sure. I just don't think businesses are going to go out and pay for 10,000 licenses to replace XP/2000 on all of their machines. The upgrades will more than likely happen with PC replacements, when the licenses are included with the purchase of the machine.
IIRC, if you use a Windows-based client OS to access AD, Exchange, Terminal Server, etc. the license you have for that client OS counts as a CAL for those services. I could be wrong on that, but
In a Windows environment, a well deployed AD solution makes life WORLDS easier in terms of granting security, maintaining/tracking user accounts, and managing/securing computers. When I say securing there, I'm referring to Group Policies being used to automate a Windows Server Update Service (WSUS) environment, as well as "lock down" computers and prevent users from using certain parts of the OS. In many cases, this isn't necessary, but Group Policies also allow you to "push" out configuration changes with little to no effort. We use it to set the proxy server and local server exceptions in Internet Explorer. Hand configuring that would be HUGE pain.
We also use it for application authentication. There's been a big push internally to move to AD authentication for all authentication. That makes life for users easy when they only need 1-2 passwords instead of one per application.
YMMV.
"There are definitely jobs as a technician that do not require a degree, but will give you experience that could lead to a systems administration job. Particularly if you're willing to do shift work."
This is probably your best "in" if you don't want to go to college. You'll make less, but if a company is willing to take you on as a technician and you do good work, it can lead to promotions to the positions you actually want. Getting the college degree is definitely the more "sure" way to get hired, and if you're going to get the degree get an internship with a good company as part of it. That's how myself and most of my co-workers got our jobs. Many companies look at internships as a "trial period". They're MUCH more willing to hire an intern they've had for 6 months to a year over someone from outside the company.
Another way to go is a contract to hire position. This is similar to the internship, but without the college sponsorship. Contact a contracting company in your area (many of the hiring companies on Monster are contracting companies) and get on a list of interested people. You can always apply and interview for a lot of jobs. If anything, the experience of learning HOW to interview well could overcome the lack of a degree.
I have to echo this comment. RAID is not a backup. It is a form of redundancy. Nothing is stopping that system from losing two drives and completely losing your data. RAID simply allows you to keep working after a SINGLE disk failure. If you're not making backups of your critical data and relying on RAID to save your behind, you're insane.
I work in the IT department for a large manufacturing company. I also have managers above me that believe that good performance leads to rewards. I can see where working for an IT company or a consulting company where you provide a solution for a customer could lead to significant overtime.
Deadlines can be tight and lead to overtime. The person scoping out the project should be providing ample time so the tasks are completed within the scoped amount of time. If he/she isn't doing that on the front end, that can lead to overtime on your end. No one wants to work overtime when they have a family they want to see. EA had that problem. Their workers walked out.
Being a salaried employee, I get no paid overtime. If I have something that needs done during off-hours (evening, night, or weekends), I just budget the amount of time it will take and then not work that during the week. If I have a 4 hour change that needs done on Saturday, I only work 4 hours on Friday or work one less hour a day during the week and then do the 4 hour change on Saturday. My company doesn't like us working more than 40 hours, and many of us appreciate that. Some work more than 40 hours (myself included) and that's rewarded at performance review time. Unless you're completely awful, my company rewards you for your extra work. I've never felt like I've been "owned" by my company. Any extra work I do is because I care about the systems and people I support. They are the people who will send an e-mail to your boss and say "Hey, he did a great job! We appreciate it!" To all the young guns out there reading this, do your job and do it well. People always appreciate hard work.
I've seen instances at other places I've worked where employees really abused the overtime system. They would sit around all day and read websites and send stupid e-mails to their friends, then when it was time to go home, they would start working and call it "overtime". That downright offended me. If you're working hard all day and then have a problem and have to keep working, then that's overtime. Sitting around waiting for your 8 hours to be up so you can rack up overtime is a slap in the face to honest hard working people everywhere.
The steelworkers are still alive and well in the US. Not all of the work has gone to China and other places that have loose or no unions. With fuel costs and a weak dollar, steelmakers are putting up record profits in the US. AK Steel was on the verge of bankruptcy and being purchased, their stock recently hit a 52 week high of 73.07. US Steel also recently hit a 5 year high of 193. They were trading at $9 per share in 2003. The steelworkers at US Steel are also in the process of signing an "expensive" new contract that has been in the news.
Importing steel is no longer the cheap way to do it. Consolidation and a competitive market can raise or lower the prices to a market equilibrium. The Chinese have to import the iron ore and other raw materials, whereas US companies can mine and make the materials locally with MUCH lower shipping costs. The costs of shipping the materials from Australia or South America to China are astronomical compared to the costs to ship from the Midwest to the South or East coast.
We have two schools of thought. One is the group naming standard. All the Linux servers will be bands. All the Windows servers will be car manufacturers. By doing this, the purpose is masked and the server can be reused for various functions without a server name change. In addition to this, making a DNS alias that is more purpose based like sqlserver1.company.com keeps people from screwing up or using the real name of the server.
The other school of thought is an inital based standard. Location, Type, OS - four letter/number abbreviation for the purpose. It makes sense in practice, but then if you repurpose the server, you rename it, which is fairly trivial anyway if you're repurposing the server. For example, if you had a production Windows 2003 server in Chicago for accounting, it would be CP3-ACCT. The name is short enough to remember and can be pieced together if you happen to forget it.
It's all up to you though. You could have a silly server name like D2003PT4GHOST-5674. Or you could have a server like ZZTOP. Or you could have COCOPUFFS. Pick something though that you can have a lot of. At an old job, we had a toss up between naming everything after Sesame Street characters or Star Trek ship names (I know, that's a gap). We chose Star Trek ship names, and after 20 servers, I realized I don't even know that many Sesame Street characters. I got to 10.
As always, YMMV.
Bigfoot Networks and Anandtech both say that one of the ways it improves performance is by bypassing the Windows (or other OS) TCP/IP stack. How does it do this? How does the OS know where to route the incoming and outgoing packets if the stack has been bypassed?
Where the hell were you guys in my microeconomics class? This is a whole lot easier to understand than say...a Perovian lady who speaks English as her THIRD language. She kept saying stuff about guns vs. butter and the GTA player in me thought, buy the guns, shoot the guys with the butter, take the butter.
After reading this, it reminds me of the late 90's when people were handing out "free" internet access in exchange for showing ads on your screen. This is how NetZero got their start. I think the offer of free wireless internet is more appealing than free dial-up simply for the speed increase. Also, screen resolution has gotten higher, allowing for more usable space than with the ads from before. Anyone who actually used the free dial-up services knows what I'm talking about. The ads took up close to 25% of the screen. It was a little ridiculous.
If Google does what they did with GMail and have small, text-based ads that are relevant to what's being viewed, then I think it would be a viable option. Google doesn't like flashy banner ads, so I think this would be a better service. Only time will tell.
Everybody is going on and on about remote access, which is fine and should be a topic to be disucssed and not a policy handed down from on high. Unlike VNC, LANDesk is a remote MANAGEMENT package. Yes it has remote control software built-in, but it is also an inventory system (which is an absolute godsend when you can't find a PC) and a software distribution system. I work for a very very large company and LANDesk allows us to deploy software in hours in what would take days to do by hand. Instead of doing all installations by hand, we can push a "package" with the installation options preset. It's very helpful in upgrade situations and the packages can still be run by hand later if the machine wasn't connected to the network doing the push (e.g. laptops).
Yes VNC is a free (as in beer) and very good piece of software, but in the grand scheme of things a remote management package is much better, especially for a medium to large network. As for the current "gurus" who manage the individual departments, I would say don't just cut them off and leave them for dead. They are still helpful and many people still trust them. I would say that this is more of a consolidation of resources and will allow for better service. To ease the pain, I would probably give access to the LANDesk console and allow the "gurus" to play a part in the support world. Nothing beats having someone in the field that knows the lay of the land and the people in it. I would say go forth with LANDesk, but don't immediately cut off the previous "gurus"
Goldeneye was a classic and more than deserves to be on the Revo, but come on...you have the ENTIRE NES and SNES libraries to choose from as well. I'd love to see a tiered download system. Obviously the more popular games (the Megaman franchise and some others) will cost more, but you could have other lesser known games in there for cheap, like Adventures in Disney World (classic...I was like 6 when that game came out). I'd like to see packs of games as well. Something like Ninja Gaiden 1-3 for a certain price. That would be kind of cool.
Yoshi's Island for the SNES would be cool. It's surprising how hard that game can be, especially when you're trying to get every last thing in the level. Man...now I want a Revolution...COME ON NINTENDO!
If you allow root access to your knowledgeable users (ie developers with Linux experience), what do you do to keep them 'in line'?"
You put a stipulation in the Acceptable Use Policy (assuming your company or business has one) that any abuse of resources they have will result in termination. If you have a good logging system, any abuse will be quite evident and allow you to back up that person's boss in the termination.
Am I the only one looking at the top 5 going "USA! USA! USA! USA!" with the Hulk Hogan theme song "I am a real American!" playing in my head?
Probably.
Think the Japanese aren't planning a new super-duper computer that will accurately predict the precise location Godzilla will destroy?
As a Management Information Systems major going into my senior year, and a Master's degree, it's good news to hear that there will be a shortage. That means more jobs than prospective employees. More money and better jobs for us. And just when everyone was saying the IT job market was all dried up, we get this wonderful piece of news!
I go to school at Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh, PA. I'm an MIS (Management Information Systems) major and if I want any type of tech job in Pittsburgh, I have to compete with Carnegie Mellon and the University Of Pittsburgh, schools with more money and resources than my university could ever hope to have. One of the biggest internships in the area is the US Steel internship. It's a incredibly well paying (pay of any form is really rare anymore) internship and has a ton of credibility to go along with it. During my freshman year, there were 54 openings and my school filled 38 of them.
The point is where you go to school has little to no bearing and basically gets you in the door to a job. Your degree doesn't do your job for you, you do the job yourself. I know a lot of people in the industry who went to small "unknown" schools or community colleges and are doing fine right now because they showed what they could do once they got the job. If you like where you are and you feel you're learning a lot, stay there. Businesses like to see enthusiasm about the job and if you have that, you won't be stuck in a long line of crappy jobs.
In episode 1ACX10 "There's Something About Paulie", Peter plays around with his car's navigation system, and turns it to Russian. The navigation system says, "In Soviet Russia, car drives You!". Later in that episode, it says, "Turn right at fork in road. In Soviet Russia, road forks you!
Yes it was mentioned in the Simpsons, but I just got done watching that episode. The original creator of the "In Soviet Russia" joke was Yakov Smirnoff.
I don't think this donation will change the culture towards Microsoft at CMU at all. As has already been mentioned, there are a TON of CMU grads that work at Microsoft. CMU grads know Microsoft wants them and many of them do go to work for them. Avie Tevanian, CTO for Apple, is a CMU grad and has done great things with them. CMU is a Linux and open source hotbed. "The Microsoft Way" is the last thing many of them want to learn. This [apple.com, QTVR required] is an example of why CMU isn't going to all of sudden jump to "The Microsoft Way." They have a significant interest in UNIX and Apple, and that's been there since 1983.
I went to Carnegie Mellon 2 years ago for a seminar on integrating OS X into a college campus. I got to take a tour of the lab pictured in the link and imagined the 120 PCs and CRT monitors in there and it wasn't a pretty sight. The 15" iMacs they replaced them with are much nicer in terms of size and flow in the room, especially when the room is full. It's a nice donation by Bill, so don't take it as his way of converting CMU to Microsoft. Of all the schools in the world, CMU would probably be one of the last to go.
Slashdot Mirror
If your company has any sort of lease/purchase lifecycle, this is where you be most effective in placing your OS upgrade. The problem is that you'll be supporting XP, Windows 7, and possibly 2000 for the next 2-3 years while you replace everyone's machines.
Corporate America resists change. Can you go to Windows 7? Sure. I just don't think businesses are going to go out and pay for 10,000 licenses to replace XP/2000 on all of their machines. The upgrades will more than likely happen with PC replacements, when the licenses are included with the purchase of the machine.
IIRC, if you use a Windows-based client OS to access AD, Exchange, Terminal Server, etc. the license you have for that client OS counts as a CAL for those services. I could be wrong on that, but In a Windows environment, a well deployed AD solution makes life WORLDS easier in terms of granting security, maintaining/tracking user accounts, and managing/securing computers. When I say securing there, I'm referring to Group Policies being used to automate a Windows Server Update Service (WSUS) environment, as well as "lock down" computers and prevent users from using certain parts of the OS. In many cases, this isn't necessary, but Group Policies also allow you to "push" out configuration changes with little to no effort. We use it to set the proxy server and local server exceptions in Internet Explorer. Hand configuring that would be HUGE pain. We also use it for application authentication. There's been a big push internally to move to AD authentication for all authentication. That makes life for users easy when they only need 1-2 passwords instead of one per application. YMMV.
Is that a terabyte in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?
I'll be here all week! Try the veal!
"There are definitely jobs as a technician that do not require a degree, but will give you experience that could lead to a systems administration job. Particularly if you're willing to do shift work."
This is probably your best "in" if you don't want to go to college. You'll make less, but if a company is willing to take you on as a technician and you do good work, it can lead to promotions to the positions you actually want. Getting the college degree is definitely the more "sure" way to get hired, and if you're going to get the degree get an internship with a good company as part of it. That's how myself and most of my co-workers got our jobs. Many companies look at internships as a "trial period". They're MUCH more willing to hire an intern they've had for 6 months to a year over someone from outside the company.
Another way to go is a contract to hire position. This is similar to the internship, but without the college sponsorship. Contact a contracting company in your area (many of the hiring companies on Monster are contracting companies) and get on a list of interested people. You can always apply and interview for a lot of jobs. If anything, the experience of learning HOW to interview well could overcome the lack of a degree.
I have to echo this comment. RAID is not a backup. It is a form of redundancy. Nothing is stopping that system from losing two drives and completely losing your data. RAID simply allows you to keep working after a SINGLE disk failure. If you're not making backups of your critical data and relying on RAID to save your behind, you're insane.
I work in the IT department for a large manufacturing company. I also have managers above me that believe that good performance leads to rewards. I can see where working for an IT company or a consulting company where you provide a solution for a customer could lead to significant overtime.
Deadlines can be tight and lead to overtime. The person scoping out the project should be providing ample time so the tasks are completed within the scoped amount of time. If he/she isn't doing that on the front end, that can lead to overtime on your end. No one wants to work overtime when they have a family they want to see. EA had that problem. Their workers walked out.
Being a salaried employee, I get no paid overtime. If I have something that needs done during off-hours (evening, night, or weekends), I just budget the amount of time it will take and then not work that during the week. If I have a 4 hour change that needs done on Saturday, I only work 4 hours on Friday or work one less hour a day during the week and then do the 4 hour change on Saturday. My company doesn't like us working more than 40 hours, and many of us appreciate that. Some work more than 40 hours (myself included) and that's rewarded at performance review time. Unless you're completely awful, my company rewards you for your extra work. I've never felt like I've been "owned" by my company. Any extra work I do is because I care about the systems and people I support. They are the people who will send an e-mail to your boss and say "Hey, he did a great job! We appreciate it!" To all the young guns out there reading this, do your job and do it well. People always appreciate hard work.
I've seen instances at other places I've worked where employees really abused the overtime system. They would sit around all day and read websites and send stupid e-mails to their friends, then when it was time to go home, they would start working and call it "overtime". That downright offended me. If you're working hard all day and then have a problem and have to keep working, then that's overtime. Sitting around waiting for your 8 hours to be up so you can rack up overtime is a slap in the face to honest hard working people everywhere.
The steelworkers are still alive and well in the US. Not all of the work has gone to China and other places that have loose or no unions. With fuel costs and a weak dollar, steelmakers are putting up record profits in the US. AK Steel was on the verge of bankruptcy and being purchased, their stock recently hit a 52 week high of 73.07. US Steel also recently hit a 5 year high of 193. They were trading at $9 per share in 2003. The steelworkers at US Steel are also in the process of signing an "expensive" new contract that has been in the news.
Importing steel is no longer the cheap way to do it. Consolidation and a competitive market can raise or lower the prices to a market equilibrium. The Chinese have to import the iron ore and other raw materials, whereas US companies can mine and make the materials locally with MUCH lower shipping costs. The costs of shipping the materials from Australia or South America to China are astronomical compared to the costs to ship from the Midwest to the South or East coast.
We have two schools of thought. One is the group naming standard. All the Linux servers will be bands. All the Windows servers will be car manufacturers. By doing this, the purpose is masked and the server can be reused for various functions without a server name change. In addition to this, making a DNS alias that is more purpose based like sqlserver1.company.com keeps people from screwing up or using the real name of the server.
The other school of thought is an inital based standard. Location, Type, OS - four letter/number abbreviation for the purpose. It makes sense in practice, but then if you repurpose the server, you rename it, which is fairly trivial anyway if you're repurposing the server. For example, if you had a production Windows 2003 server in Chicago for accounting, it would be CP3-ACCT. The name is short enough to remember and can be pieced together if you happen to forget it.
It's all up to you though. You could have a silly server name like D2003PT4GHOST-5674. Or you could have a server like ZZTOP. Or you could have COCOPUFFS. Pick something though that you can have a lot of. At an old job, we had a toss up between naming everything after Sesame Street characters or Star Trek ship names (I know, that's a gap). We chose Star Trek ship names, and after 20 servers, I realized I don't even know that many Sesame Street characters. I got to 10. As always, YMMV.
Bigfoot Networks and Anandtech both say that one of the ways it improves performance is by bypassing the Windows (or other OS) TCP/IP stack. How does it do this? How does the OS know where to route the incoming and outgoing packets if the stack has been bypassed?
Where the hell were you guys in my microeconomics class? This is a whole lot easier to understand than say...a Perovian lady who speaks English as her THIRD language. She kept saying stuff about guns vs. butter and the GTA player in me thought, buy the guns, shoot the guys with the butter, take the butter.
Maybe that's just me.
After reading this, it reminds me of the late 90's when people were handing out "free" internet access in exchange for showing ads on your screen. This is how NetZero got their start. I think the offer of free wireless internet is more appealing than free dial-up simply for the speed increase. Also, screen resolution has gotten higher, allowing for more usable space than with the ads from before. Anyone who actually used the free dial-up services knows what I'm talking about. The ads took up close to 25% of the screen. It was a little ridiculous.
If Google does what they did with GMail and have small, text-based ads that are relevant to what's being viewed, then I think it would be a viable option. Google doesn't like flashy banner ads, so I think this would be a better service. Only time will tell.
Everybody is going on and on about remote access, which is fine and should be a topic to be disucssed and not a policy handed down from on high. Unlike VNC, LANDesk is a remote MANAGEMENT package. Yes it has remote control software built-in, but it is also an inventory system (which is an absolute godsend when you can't find a PC) and a software distribution system. I work for a very very large company and LANDesk allows us to deploy software in hours in what would take days to do by hand. Instead of doing all installations by hand, we can push a "package" with the installation options preset. It's very helpful in upgrade situations and the packages can still be run by hand later if the machine wasn't connected to the network doing the push (e.g. laptops).
Yes VNC is a free (as in beer) and very good piece of software, but in the grand scheme of things a remote management package is much better, especially for a medium to large network. As for the current "gurus" who manage the individual departments, I would say don't just cut them off and leave them for dead. They are still helpful and many people still trust them. I would say that this is more of a consolidation of resources and will allow for better service. To ease the pain, I would probably give access to the LANDesk console and allow the "gurus" to play a part in the support world. Nothing beats having someone in the field that knows the lay of the land and the people in it. I would say go forth with LANDesk, but don't immediately cut off the previous "gurus"
Goldeneye was a classic and more than deserves to be on the Revo, but come on...you have the ENTIRE NES and SNES libraries to choose from as well. I'd love to see a tiered download system. Obviously the more popular games (the Megaman franchise and some others) will cost more, but you could have other lesser known games in there for cheap, like Adventures in Disney World (classic...I was like 6 when that game came out). I'd like to see packs of games as well. Something like Ninja Gaiden 1-3 for a certain price. That would be kind of cool.
Yoshi's Island for the SNES would be cool. It's surprising how hard that game can be, especially when you're trying to get every last thing in the level. Man...now I want a Revolution...COME ON NINTENDO!
If you allow root access to your knowledgeable users (ie developers with Linux experience), what do you do to keep them 'in line'?"
You put a stipulation in the Acceptable Use Policy (assuming your company or business has one) that any abuse of resources they have will result in termination. If you have a good logging system, any abuse will be quite evident and allow you to back up that person's boss in the termination.
Am I the only one looking at the top 5 going "USA! USA! USA! USA!" with the Hulk Hogan theme song "I am a real American!" playing in my head? Probably. Think the Japanese aren't planning a new super-duper computer that will accurately predict the precise location Godzilla will destroy?
"Many Bothans died to bring us this information" Surprised no one said that one yet....
But the coach did signal for the Statue of Liberty play. The quarterback then decided to go for the play action...
As a Management Information Systems major going into my senior year, and a Master's degree, it's good news to hear that there will be a shortage. That means more jobs than prospective employees. More money and better jobs for us. And just when everyone was saying the IT job market was all dried up, we get this wonderful piece of news!
Did anyone look at the IP Map and immediately think, "Boy that looks a lot like a Skittles commerical." ?
I go to school at Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh, PA. I'm an MIS (Management Information Systems) major and if I want any type of tech job in Pittsburgh, I have to compete with Carnegie Mellon and the University Of Pittsburgh, schools with more money and resources than my university could ever hope to have. One of the biggest internships in the area is the US Steel internship. It's a incredibly well paying (pay of any form is really rare anymore) internship and has a ton of credibility to go along with it. During my freshman year, there were 54 openings and my school filled 38 of them.
The point is where you go to school has little to no bearing and basically gets you in the door to a job. Your degree doesn't do your job for you, you do the job yourself. I know a lot of people in the industry who went to small "unknown" schools or community colleges and are doing fine right now because they showed what they could do once they got the job. If you like where you are and you feel you're learning a lot, stay there. Businesses like to see enthusiasm about the job and if you have that, you won't be stuck in a long line of crappy jobs.
In episode 1ACX10 "There's Something About Paulie", Peter plays around with his car's navigation system, and turns it to Russian. The navigation system says, "In Soviet Russia, car drives You!". Later in that episode, it says, "Turn right at fork in road. In Soviet Russia, road forks you! Yes it was mentioned in the Simpsons, but I just got done watching that episode. The original creator of the "In Soviet Russia" joke was Yakov Smirnoff.
"In Soviet Russia, car drives you!"
I don't think this donation will change the culture towards Microsoft at CMU at all. As has already been mentioned, there are a TON of CMU grads that work at Microsoft. CMU grads know Microsoft wants them and many of them do go to work for them. Avie Tevanian, CTO for Apple, is a CMU grad and has done great things with them. CMU is a Linux and open source hotbed. "The Microsoft Way" is the last thing many of them want to learn. This [apple.com, QTVR required] is an example of why CMU isn't going to all of sudden jump to "The Microsoft Way." They have a significant interest in UNIX and Apple, and that's been there since 1983.
I went to Carnegie Mellon 2 years ago for a seminar on integrating OS X into a college campus. I got to take a tour of the lab pictured in the link and imagined the 120 PCs and CRT monitors in there and it wasn't a pretty sight. The 15" iMacs they replaced them with are much nicer in terms of size and flow in the room, especially when the room is full. It's a nice donation by Bill, so don't take it as his way of converting CMU to Microsoft. Of all the schools in the world, CMU would probably be one of the last to go.
Krusty: OK, memorize these funny place names: Walla Walla. Keokuk. Cucamonga. Seattle --
Homer: [laughs] Stop it, you're killing me! [laughs more] Seattle.
Krusty: [groans]
-- The trials of teaching Homer, "Homer the Clown"