I am there just about everyday on Technet, reading through knowledge base articles, or downloading software / patches. It is almost always a Google search that has gotten me to that particular Microsoft page;)
Yes, in principal. But that's not pragmatic - this sounds way too small to interest VCs these days. Speaking from experience, they aren't going to give you the time of day unless you're asking for at least $3M, and ideally more like $5-10M.
Good luck to you, but I wouldn't count on VCs. There are lots of them and they all have different investment strategies, but the ones that I know are not looking to just have a percentage gain on their investment or even to double it for that matter. Most want 10 to 100 times their investment. It just takes the one to blow up to make up for all of the other failures.
... and the test was interesting (and a little sad) to me too. The one thing that I have noticed in the last 10 years is new cars now have REALLY great brakes when compared to mine and most drivers have adapted their driving habits (i.e. braking later) to them.
I don't want to be the target of an advertising (or worse yet hate) campaign just because I fell into some arbitrary category based on the stereotypes of self righteous fools in the ivory tower.
I already am. I bought a French movie on Amazon called Cote d'Azur and rated it highly - not any higher than say Battle Star Galactica - and ever since it has thought that I am gay... a gay nerd.
I run a small IT outsourcing company and we used and recommended Symantec Corporate edition for years as it has a very easy to use administrator console, alerting when there was a virus, and those features outweighed frankly not very good detection. Unfortunately when they changed the engine that they were using in Symantec Corporate Edition with the now renamed product Symantec Endpoint Protection it has become to resource intensive to use. Any machine that we have that is not a Dual Core or Core 2 Duo is very slugish even after creating 'lite' packages that don't have all of the features enabled.
We are currently in trial with Nod32 for business and Trend Client / Server with a couple of customers, but it has not been long enough for me to provide anecdotal feedback with either product.
Unfortunately, those people tend to be rare, at least in my experience.
They are! I worked for a firm that did a lot of government engineering. Our meetings lasted a maximum of 42 minutes (we had to account for all of our time in 6 minute increments) and any meeting with more than two other people required a meeting moderator. Since we only had a couple of meeting moderators for 3000 engineers we had few, but very productive meetings.
Lots of places: several startups, industry and govt, one superlarge corp, etc. I have seen a lot of people fired for basic HR violations--running a business out of one's cube, not showing up to work, etc. But nothing regarding skill.
As an employer and someone who has fired programmers before I can tell you that lack of skills or incompetence is usually the reason that we let someone go. If someone is really good an employer will often look the other way.
The reason that it seems to you that someone has been fired for reasons other than incompetence is that we do not want to end up in front of the labor board with unfair firing claim filed against us and it is easiest to document and write up employees for being late or not calling into work when they are sick, etc.
I had to Google "solar flare crystal planet" and the #1 hit was your post... #2 was Starflight...
Congratulations... You have made such an obscure reference that the first search result was you actually making the reference... I don't think there is actually a prize for that though... Please don't kill yourself...
... and the Starflight Resource is on GeoCities. His reference will only become more vague when that goes away.
Jesus people read the article. I have been in Los Angeles for 20 years and the air today is better than it ever has been so for the most part I applaud the CARB. This particular requirement may not be sound science - I truly don't know, but they are not banning colors of cars; they are requiring them to reflect back more of the suns rays. The problem that the paint manufactures are having with this requirement is when the chemicals to do so are mixed with black paint the color of the paint is actually changing to 'mud-puddle brown'.
In the freaking Los Angeles metropolitan area (Irvine)!
Irvine? You don't live in a city you live in a corporation. Irvine has one of the highest median incomes in the United States where people can easily afford to buy and drive cars - being Southern California having a nice car is a status symbol.
I live in Los Angeles - 5 miles from downtown. I take the bus to work once a week and I have to wait maximum 5 minutes during rush hour. It takes me 10 minutes to get the office and during peak times the buses are crowded. I also take the subway from my office to clients in downtown 2 or 3 times a week. I would take the subway more if the route to Pasadena was more direct from my office and if it went to the west side of Los Angeles where it is desperately needed.
Many exist purely to claim business in the country and filter money for tax purposes. They do no business there at all but save taxes.
Of course, this isn't every office or company. But many.
I am afraid that it is a public companies responsibility first to it's shareholders and everyone else including the workers and countries in which they actually operate are second.
We all know this happens, but it is really up to the US government to crack down with regulations specifically targeting this practice. In much the same way that the mortgage interest savings on your taxes has encouraged home ownership - not requiring corporations that are headquartered outside of the US pay taxes on their US profits has encouraged this practice.
While it is not a bad idea in and of itself, changing work schedules to some bizarre non-standard system is usually a sign that the company management is trying to squeeze more work out of you.
Really? This was give to me as an option for being a hard worker at my last employer. It worked out well for me because I was already putting in more than 8 hours a day (because I liked what I was doing - not because they demanded it), but every two weeks I got a three day weekend.
A reduction of *zero* would be negative. That means I would get back money in the form of a tax rebate of taxes I did not pay. This money necessarily comes from someone else. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. Argue that this is acceptable, but don't argue that it isn't Marxist or Socialist. It is at the core of Marx' philosophy.
In government tax speak this is referred to as the Earned Income Tax Credit. This is in fact a tax break for you as it is a credit for taxes paid by you and your employer as payroll taxes. The EITC was started by president Nixon (Obviously a closet Marxist or how would he ever have been allowed into China) in 1975 and it was supposed to be a temporary measure.
Even though I support the EITC in some form I do find it appalling that government programs are never 'temporary'
Here is a link to a PDF (sorry) that has more information on the EITC than you could ever want to know
I worked for a company in Hollywood and was a member of the Electrical Workers Union as their Network Administrator.
If I was asked to come in during the weekend to upgrade a server guess what happened and I had already worked my 40 hour week? I got overtime! When it was my turn to be on call (which means that they can interrupt what ever are do 24 hours a day) I got paid additionally for that. To avoid overtime the company hired an additional network administrator to our team and the four of us rotated our work weeks so one person was always working on Saturdays to do upgrades, maintenance, etc.
I do not think it is too much to ask for overtime when working over 40 hours a week and for being on call, but the only time I ever got it was when I was in a union.
You work to live --- not live to work.
>His argument still stands as yours fails to take into account that 99% of the time when a user buys >a new PC, they're getting it with Windows, whether they want it or not thanks to Microsoft's >anti-competitive behavior.
I am sure that there are newer figures on this, but the in 3rd Quarter of 2007 Apple had 8.1% market share which was up from a 6.1% market share in 2006. With the smidgen of Linux purchases I would say it is at closer to 90%.
Totally off the main topic.... I have lived on the East Side of Los Angeles for 10 years and I am seeing a wide AND widening gap between the rich and the poor. A house here is literally 3 times as expensive as it was 6 years ago... and that is TODAY after the real estate market has crashed 20%. The manufacturing jobs like everywhere have disappeared and I don't think most Americans realized that Los Angeles has the most manufacturing jobs of anywhere in the country in sheer number and we have been hit just as hard as anywhere in the country to outsourcing to China. We have the largest homeless population, but at the same time have more households earning over $135,000.00 than anywhere in the US. If you are part of the middle class here it is like standing at the edge of a cliff as it starts to collapse.
I think the Los Angeles Times writes a lot on this story because it is compelling and it effects their readership (the poor are reading La Opinion and the rich are reading the New York Times).
If you also think like many Angelinos that California is harbinger of trends throughout the United States (for better or for worse) then these stories are cautionary tales of what not to do./p?
We are Microsoft partners and one of the the things that we are starting to see from some of our clients is a migration towards Microsoft Open License agreements so that they can insure that they have downgrade rights for their PCs in the future. I would say close to 90% of the machines we will deploy in the next 3 months will still have XP on them.
This is a very different attitude than what we saw towards Office 2003 when a lot of customers were making sure that they had software assurance (upgrade) for their Office 2000 purchases.
I worked for them for many years and remember when their "water monopoly" got broken up by the French govt because they owned Perrier, Vital, and Evian.
BTW: I really like their Perugina chocolates that you can find more and more frequently here in the United States.
more choco monopoly stuff:
http://www.nestleeuropeanchocolate.com/
Towards the end of last month I was asked by two clients of mine to an independent security audit and get a 3rd party scan of their internet facing eCommerce web servers. One was running Windows 2003 and the other Red Hat 9. I was surprised that when I got the scan backs for each company that the Windows 2003 box passed with flying colors and the Red Hat 9 was flagged as failing because of running an older version of Apache.
Since the scanning service just checks against a database of known vulnerabilities based for particular software I don't necessarily think that Windows is more secure. It just happened to completely up to date when the scan ran. It could be next month if the regular administrator of the box doesn't run the patches when (yeap when... not if) they come out it could get flagged as failing.
This is something that I have always just ignored, but occasionally when I am sniffing a network to troubleshoot a problem I will see DECnet protocol come up in the trace. For the most part it is usually coming from the router and in an hour or two of tracing it may only be two or three packets.
This is usually at really small offices with zero Digital Equipment machines. Any ideas on why I see these on a suprisingly (1 out 8 maybe) regular basis?
Thanks for bringing this up! I consider myself somewhat of green nerd (solar panels, recycling, composting), but I still drive my lovely 1969 Impala Convertible. Which always shocks my fellow greenies here in LA and I have to explain to them about how much energy and waste it takes just to make the materials that go into most cars. I call it car recycling.
I am still concerned about how polution my car emits compared to newer more efficient cars:(
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I am there just about everyday on Technet, reading through knowledge base articles, or downloading software / patches. It is almost always a Google search that has gotten me to that particular Microsoft page ;)
Yes, in principal. But that's not pragmatic - this sounds way too small to interest VCs these days. Speaking from experience, they aren't going to give you the time of day unless you're asking for at least $3M, and ideally more like $5-10M.
Good luck to you, but I wouldn't count on VCs. There are lots of them and they all have different investment strategies, but the ones that I know are not looking to just have a percentage gain on their investment or even to double it for that matter. Most want 10 to 100 times their investment. It just takes the one to blow up to make up for all of the other failures.
... and the test was interesting (and a little sad) to me too. The one thing that I have noticed in the last 10 years is new cars now have REALLY great brakes when compared to mine and most drivers have adapted their driving habits (i.e. braking later) to them.
I don't want to be the target of an advertising (or worse yet hate) campaign just because I fell into some arbitrary category based on the stereotypes of self righteous fools in the ivory tower.
I already am. I bought a French movie on Amazon called Cote d'Azur and rated it highly - not any higher than say Battle Star Galactica - and ever since it has thought that I am gay... a gay nerd.
I run a small IT outsourcing company and we used and recommended Symantec Corporate edition for years as it has a very easy to use administrator console, alerting when there was a virus, and those features outweighed frankly not very good detection. Unfortunately when they changed the engine that they were using in Symantec Corporate Edition with the now renamed product Symantec Endpoint Protection it has become to resource intensive to use. Any machine that we have that is not a Dual Core or Core 2 Duo is very slugish even after creating 'lite' packages that don't have all of the features enabled.
We are currently in trial with Nod32 for business and Trend Client / Server with a couple of customers, but it has not been long enough for me to provide anecdotal feedback with either product.
Reading the top part of the story summary gave a completely different meaning to the "read more 734 more bytes" link.
Unfortunately, those people tend to be rare, at least in my experience.
They are! I worked for a firm that did a lot of government engineering. Our meetings lasted a maximum of 42 minutes (we had to account for all of our time in 6 minute increments) and any meeting with more than two other people required a meeting moderator. Since we only had a couple of meeting moderators for 3000 engineers we had few, but very productive meetings.
Lots of places: several startups, industry and govt, one superlarge corp, etc. I have seen a lot of people fired for basic HR violations--running a business out of one's cube, not showing up to work, etc. But nothing regarding skill.
As an employer and someone who has fired programmers before I can tell you that lack of skills or incompetence is usually the reason that we let someone go. If someone is really good an employer will often look the other way.
The reason that it seems to you that someone has been fired for reasons other than incompetence is that we do not want to end up in front of the labor board with unfair firing claim filed against us and it is easiest to document and write up employees for being late or not calling into work when they are sick, etc.
I had to Google "solar flare crystal planet" and the #1 hit was your post... #2 was Starflight... Congratulations... You have made such an obscure reference that the first search result was you actually making the reference... I don't think there is actually a prize for that though... Please don't kill yourself...
... and the Starflight Resource is on GeoCities. His reference will only become more vague when that goes away.
Jesus people read the article. I have been in Los Angeles for 20 years and the air today is better than it ever has been so for the most part I applaud the CARB. This particular requirement may not be sound science - I truly don't know, but they are not banning colors of cars; they are requiring them to reflect back more of the suns rays. The problem that the paint manufactures are having with this requirement is when the chemicals to do so are mixed with black paint the color of the paint is actually changing to 'mud-puddle brown'.
In the freaking Los Angeles metropolitan area (Irvine)!
Irvine? You don't live in a city you live in a corporation. Irvine has one of the highest median incomes in the United States where people can easily afford to buy and drive cars - being Southern California having a nice car is a status symbol.
I live in Los Angeles - 5 miles from downtown. I take the bus to work once a week and I have to wait maximum 5 minutes during rush hour. It takes me 10 minutes to get the office and during peak times the buses are crowded. I also take the subway from my office to clients in downtown 2 or 3 times a week. I would take the subway more if the route to Pasadena was more direct from my office and if it went to the west side of Los Angeles where it is desperately needed.
Many exist purely to claim business in the country and filter money for tax purposes. They do no business there at all but save taxes.
Of course, this isn't every office or company. But many.
I am afraid that it is a public companies responsibility first to it's shareholders and everyone else including the workers and countries in which they actually operate are second.
We all know this happens, but it is really up to the US government to crack down with regulations specifically targeting this practice. In much the same way that the mortgage interest savings on your taxes has encouraged home ownership - not requiring corporations that are headquartered outside of the US pay taxes on their US profits has encouraged this practice.
While it is not a bad idea in and of itself, changing work schedules to some bizarre non-standard system is usually a sign that the company management is trying to squeeze more work out of you.
Really? This was give to me as an option for being a hard worker at my last employer. It worked out well for me because I was already putting in more than 8 hours a day (because I liked what I was doing - not because they demanded it), but every two weeks I got a three day weekend.
Llamas?
We apologise for the fault in the message. Those responsible have been sacked.
The current bailouts would be impossible with gold coins.
And how is this a bad thing?
A reduction of *zero* would be negative. That means I would get back money in the form of a tax rebate of taxes I did not pay. This money necessarily comes from someone else. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. Argue that this is acceptable, but don't argue that it isn't Marxist or Socialist. It is at the core of Marx' philosophy.
In government tax speak this is referred to as the Earned Income Tax Credit. This is in fact a tax break for you as it is a credit for taxes paid by you and your employer as payroll taxes. The EITC was started by president Nixon (Obviously a closet Marxist or how would he ever have been allowed into China) in 1975 and it was supposed to be a temporary measure.
Even though I support the EITC in some form I do find it appalling that government programs are never 'temporary'
Here is a link to a PDF (sorry) that has more information on the EITC than you could ever want to know
http://www.caseygrants.org/documents/reports/MCF_EITC_Paper.pdf
I worked for a company in Hollywood and was a member of the Electrical Workers Union as their Network Administrator. If I was asked to come in during the weekend to upgrade a server guess what happened and I had already worked my 40 hour week? I got overtime! When it was my turn to be on call (which means that they can interrupt what ever are do 24 hours a day) I got paid additionally for that. To avoid overtime the company hired an additional network administrator to our team and the four of us rotated our work weeks so one person was always working on Saturdays to do upgrades, maintenance, etc. I do not think it is too much to ask for overtime when working over 40 hours a week and for being on call, but the only time I ever got it was when I was in a union. You work to live --- not live to work.
Keeping the heat at 60 in the winter?
Actually I have had obese co-workers who want the air conditioning on in the winter!>His argument still stands as yours fails to take into account that 99% of the time when a user buys >a new PC, they're getting it with Windows, whether they want it or not thanks to Microsoft's >anti-competitive behavior. I am sure that there are newer figures on this, but the in 3rd Quarter of 2007 Apple had 8.1% market share which was up from a 6.1% market share in 2006. With the smidgen of Linux purchases I would say it is at closer to 90%.
Totally off the main topic.... I have lived on the East Side of Los Angeles for 10 years and I am seeing a wide AND widening gap between the rich and the poor. A house here is literally 3 times as expensive as it was 6 years ago... and that is TODAY after the real estate market has crashed 20%. The manufacturing jobs like everywhere have disappeared and I don't think most Americans realized that Los Angeles has the most manufacturing jobs of anywhere in the country in sheer number and we have been hit just as hard as anywhere in the country to outsourcing to China. We have the largest homeless population, but at the same time have more households earning over $135,000.00 than anywhere in the US. If you are part of the middle class here it is like standing at the edge of a cliff as it starts to collapse.
I think the Los Angeles Times writes a lot on this story because it is compelling and it effects their readership (the poor are reading La Opinion and the rich are reading the New York Times). If you also think like many Angelinos that California is harbinger of trends throughout the United States (for better or for worse) then these stories are cautionary tales of what not to do./p?
We are Microsoft partners and one of the the things that we are starting to see from some of our clients is a migration towards Microsoft Open License agreements so that they can insure that they have downgrade rights for their PCs in the future. I would say close to 90% of the machines we will deploy in the next 3 months will still have XP on them. This is a very different attitude than what we saw towards Office 2003 when a lot of customers were making sure that they had software assurance (upgrade) for their Office 2000 purchases.
I worked for them for many years and remember when their "water monopoly" got broken up by the French govt because they owned Perrier, Vital, and Evian. BTW: I really like their Perugina chocolates that you can find more and more frequently here in the United States. more choco monopoly stuff: http://www.nestleeuropeanchocolate.com/
Towards the end of last month I was asked by two clients of mine to an independent security audit and get a 3rd party scan of their internet facing eCommerce web servers. One was running Windows 2003 and the other Red Hat 9. I was surprised that when I got the scan backs for each company that the Windows 2003 box passed with flying colors and the Red Hat 9 was flagged as failing because of running an older version of Apache. Since the scanning service just checks against a database of known vulnerabilities based for particular software I don't necessarily think that Windows is more secure. It just happened to completely up to date when the scan ran. It could be next month if the regular administrator of the box doesn't run the patches when (yeap when... not if) they come out it could get flagged as failing.
This is something that I have always just ignored, but occasionally when I am sniffing a network to troubleshoot a problem I will see DECnet protocol come up in the trace. For the most part it is usually coming from the router and in an hour or two of tracing it may only be two or three packets. This is usually at really small offices with zero Digital Equipment machines. Any ideas on why I see these on a suprisingly (1 out 8 maybe) regular basis?
Thanks for bringing this up! I consider myself somewhat of green nerd (solar panels, recycling, composting), but I still drive my lovely 1969 Impala Convertible. Which always shocks my fellow greenies here in LA and I have to explain to them about how much energy and waste it takes just to make the materials that go into most cars. I call it car recycling.
:(
I am still concerned about how polution my car emits compared to newer more efficient cars