>>if you are waiting on the phone for someone to reboot, your productivity is zero
I used to work in PSS at Microsoft support MSMQ on pretty big systems. When you hit a total wall you'd ask for a reboot and make up some total BS answer as to why. With most of the big Compaq clusters at the time this would buy you 5 to 10 minutes where you could try and research like all hell while the customer was occupied. Yep, we used it to buy time.
You're right on with the "expensive" comment. I used to use Macs in college and really liked them, but they're pretty dang expensive for what you actually get. If the price could push down into the PC category OR (like we used to) I could build my own on the cheap, I'd definitely get back into them especially for music production.
I'm right there with you, except I've had my ringing with me since long before I discovered Zep and the rest. I've had it ever since I was a kid, probably from an ear infection at some point. Quite rooms drive me insane. I start to get nutty after about 10 minutes. I would be thrilled to find a "real" treatment besides all this stopgap stuff.
after finding that COM+ and MSMQ could not talk to each other, and this after spending time with the actual developers at Microsoft to resolve the issues
That's an interesting statement. I'd love to hear more details because I'm not sure what that means. Using MSMQ from COM+ is just like using it from anywhere else - the big caveats come when running clusters. Just a guess, but were they clustering MSMQ and also using a COM+ application on the same cluster? The reason I ask is that when I was employed at MS I used to support MSMQ and write utils for the MSMQ dev team. Part of me is still curious when I hear things like this and I can't help but to look at them.
My wife and I were once 300 miles from home when the instrument display died on here minivan. The local dealer in the small town we were in didn't have the replacement PCB in stock so we were going to have a weekend trip home with no speedo on the interstates. I grabbed my Dad's GPS unit and strapped it to the dash, set it to realtime info mode and used it as an impromptu speedometer for the 6 hour trip. It must have been pretty accurate since the State Troopers left me alone. Also, as you say motorcycle speedos are grossly inaccurate at high speeds. Most are way optimistic. The motorcycle magazines used to public actual vs indicated speeds for the bikes they were reviewing. I'm not sure if they still do it now.
It's also incorrect to reflect on Christians based on an act of the pope. The pope only represents the Catholic faith which is one brach/form of Christianity. You'll find very few Church of Christ, Baptist and other reformation based demoninations that give the pope much credence at all. The way Christian is being used here is in a very general form that doesn't reflect the various beliefs held by all the subsets. DISCLAMER: I am a member of the Church of Christ.
You've got to be careful with gravity, it's not too particular with where it drops things. If gravity is going to bring it down, we need to bring it down in a controller area. Other than that I'd say let it run until the batteries die.
All things have a beginning and and end.
>>Wow, that's great, good for you.
Thanks. It won't last forever, but it's a nice break.
>>You don't need as much money as you think you do.
How's that retirement saving coming along?
Well, Mr Mom Inc doesn't have much of a benefits plan. I'm riding on my wife's health insurance (which is better than average). I've maxed my yearly contribution to 401k for years now, so if I loose 12 months or so, it won't be that bad. That's definitely a consideration. My wife has a 401k plus a pension so we can use that when the time comes. I'm still young enough (early 30's) to get in the magic 20 years somewhere. It may be a job with the local school system as a tech (looking into that now) or it may be working at Lowe's in the electrical section. Actually, one intrigues me as much of the others. I've lost my lust for living on the bleeding edge and on the "inside" anyway. My job life will be rather mundane from here out and that's the way I like it.
This past August I quit Microsoft. Yes, that Microsoft and moved back to my hometown. I don't have a job, but that's ok with me. We bought a house and my wife works and pays the bills. That really doesn't leave anything extra, but now I take care of my kids, take them to school in the morning, take care of the house, and there's always someone there when they get home from school in the afternoon. It's not exactly a "Leave it to Beaver" world, but I'm happier without the stress of a corporate giant sucking my life away, the kids are happier and most importantly my wife is thrilled to have me around again and not coming home late and stressed out. You don't need as much money as you think you do.
Try the public microsoft newsgroups. Yep, those exact ones. A lot of the newgroups are watches by the Shanghai subsidiary amoung others with engineers here in the US checking up on on some of the threads on a regular basic. Yes Microsoft supports newsgroups because of the skilled folks (unpaid) that answer, but they also do it because it's a way to lower support costs for the lower echelon of customers and yes a fair chunk of it is done overseas.
I'm not saying this is all a bad thing, I'm just pointing out the background for Microsoft's concentration in researching the dynamics of the newsgroups. If you can identify those folks who make serious contributions, you can give them perks to keep them contributing. They already do this with the MVP program but that's still pretty spotty. Also if you can automatically identify problems/request you can come up with quicker/better ways to answer them.
BTW - how do I know? I worked in Microsoft Product Support for over 5 years. I was there when a lot of this was starting to spin up.
A big reason for this type of research in MS is to push the community support model. If MS can create a scenario where many questions get answered in a community model like newsgroups by unpaid volunteers/posters, it lowers the overall cost of product support for MS. Newsgroup support is becoming a big thing around Microsoft Product Support. There are actually engineers whose sole job is to monitor and respond to newsgroup postings. It's all about support costs. Supporting newsgroups is very cheap and also very easy to farm out overseas to folks who really do nothing but paste in answers from scripts.
Exactly. OE doesn't help to drive revenue and if you don't drive revenue, you're out. Get used to that philosophy because as MS moves more and more towards being a traditional corporation, that will be the main factor in most prodution decisions.
( Disclaimer: I work for MS in Dev support )
My experience with VB 6 is that it's the COBOL of the PC world. There's just too damn much of it out there to ever really go away. The sheer volume of code out there will keep it around for a long, long time. You'd probably also be suprised at the amount of new code still being written in VB6. Yea, it's kinda scary if you think about it too long...:-)
Re:Frustratingly typical day in the life of Micros
on
Yet Another Windows Worm
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Give it time. As Linux permeates industry and business it will start getting more attention from the virus writers. It's all a matter of ROI. Right now, attacking windows has a very high ROI.
>>In any case, in the days of cheap 200GB+ drives, I'm not sure why you'd want to use a really slow recordable optical format that holds a comparatively scant amount of data as a writeable volume
One reason comes to mind: Portability. I can put a DVD in my back pocket. Kinda hard to do with a 200M drive
Is that a hard drive in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?
When we can get less dropped calls and actually get decent cell phone coverage away from the interstates. Check out the cell maps of the major carriers, they all hug the lines created by interstates. You go to a rural area like I'm from and the coverage is crap. IMHO the feature set of cell phones is starting to creep into the "that's cool, but I don't think I'll ever need it" category. The camera phones have got to the be worst.
Never, but they do have those overhead and Chucky Cheese's, so they gotta be cheap. It's not a hard thing to do. I've seen small UV lamps under the edge of the counter at retail shops already.
I used to help run my Uncle's roller skating rink. We weren't allow to take a anything bigger than a $20 without having him or my cousin check it first.
A quick easy test in the dark is a small UV lamp. The mylar strips in the new bills glow under UV. You can tell very quickly by the position of the mylar strip what demomination a bill "really" is and if you get a 20, 50 or 100 withouth one... well throw it out.
I wonder, is the Matrix replacing Star Wars as our great "moderm" myth? There were many of the same religiously themed comparisons of the Star Wars saga during it's heyday, and we appear to be seeing much more with the Matrix. Could it be that the Matrix taps into the current generations sense of "myth" better than Star Wars did for my generation?
>>I know if I had even a thousandth of his net worth you'd never see me in an office ever again.
That's why most of us will never have that kind of worth. We don't have the drive that it takes to get that kind of worth. That's not a bad thing. I'd sure be happy with a lot less. For guys like Steve, Bill & others -- it's just what they do with their time and they would probably be just as agressive if they were in any other field.
My wife the nurse said ...
on
Build Your Own ECG
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Yea, but does it interpret the data. That's one of the big expenses according to her: have the cardiologist examine the data and give his opinion. Since it's all waveform stuff, I wonder how much of that could be automated in the future?
Slashdot Mirror
Two words for you and everyone who still serves: THANK YOU!!
Of course the problem you end up with is that one are is really well developed in comparison to the other.
>>if you are waiting on the phone for someone to reboot, your productivity is zero I used to work in PSS at Microsoft support MSMQ on pretty big systems. When you hit a total wall you'd ask for a reboot and make up some total BS answer as to why. With most of the big Compaq clusters at the time this would buy you 5 to 10 minutes where you could try and research like all hell while the customer was occupied. Yep, we used it to buy time.
You're right on with the "expensive" comment. I used to use Macs in college and really liked them, but they're pretty dang expensive for what you actually get. If the price could push down into the PC category OR (like we used to) I could build my own on the cheap, I'd definitely get back into them especially for music production.
I'm right there with you, except I've had my ringing with me since long before I discovered Zep and the rest. I've had it ever since I was a kid, probably from an ear infection at some point. Quite rooms drive me insane. I start to get nutty after about 10 minutes. I would be thrilled to find a "real" treatment besides all this stopgap stuff.
after finding that COM+ and MSMQ could not talk to each other, and this after spending time with the actual developers at Microsoft to resolve the issues
That's an interesting statement. I'd love to hear more details because I'm not sure what that means. Using MSMQ from COM+ is just like using it from anywhere else - the big caveats come when running clusters. Just a guess, but were they clustering MSMQ and also using a COM+ application on the same cluster?
The reason I ask is that when I was employed at MS I used to support MSMQ and write utils for the MSMQ dev team. Part of me is still curious when I hear things like this and I can't help but to look at them.
Good article on building racks. It's musical equipment oriented, but all the same principles apply:Shavano music - constructing a rack
My wife and I were once 300 miles from home when the instrument display died on here minivan. The local dealer in the small town we were in didn't have the replacement PCB in stock so we were going to have a weekend trip home with no speedo on the interstates. I grabbed my Dad's GPS unit and strapped it to the dash, set it to realtime info mode and used it as an impromptu speedometer for the 6 hour trip. It must have been pretty accurate since the State Troopers left me alone.
Also, as you say motorcycle speedos are grossly inaccurate at high speeds. Most are way optimistic. The motorcycle magazines used to public actual vs indicated speeds for the bikes they were reviewing. I'm not sure if they still do it now.
It's also incorrect to reflect on Christians based on an act of the pope. The pope only represents the Catholic faith which is one brach/form of Christianity. You'll find very few Church of Christ, Baptist and other reformation based demoninations that give the pope much credence at all. The way Christian is being used here is in a very general form that doesn't reflect the various beliefs held by all the subsets.
DISCLAMER: I am a member of the Church of Christ.
You've got to be careful with gravity, it's not too particular with where it drops things. If gravity is going to bring it down, we need to bring it down in a controller area. Other than that I'd say let it run until the batteries die.
All things have a beginning and and end.
>>Wow, that's great, good for you.
Thanks. It won't last forever, but it's a nice break.
>>You don't need as much money as you think you do.
How's that retirement saving coming along?
Well, Mr Mom Inc doesn't have much of a benefits plan. I'm riding on my wife's health insurance (which is better than average). I've maxed my yearly contribution to 401k for years now, so if I loose 12 months or so, it won't be that bad. That's definitely a consideration. My wife has a 401k plus a pension so we can use that when the time comes. I'm still young enough (early 30's) to get in the magic 20 years somewhere. It may be a job with the local school system as a tech (looking into that now) or it may be working at Lowe's in the electrical section. Actually, one intrigues me as much of the others. I've lost my lust for living on the bleeding edge and on the "inside" anyway. My job life will be rather mundane from here out and that's the way I like it.
This past August I quit Microsoft. Yes, that Microsoft and moved back to my hometown. I don't have a job, but that's ok with me. We bought a house and my wife works and pays the bills. That really doesn't leave anything extra, but now I take care of my kids, take them to school in the morning, take care of the house, and there's always someone there when they get home from school in the afternoon. It's not exactly a "Leave it to Beaver" world, but I'm happier without the stress of a corporate giant sucking my life away, the kids are happier and most importantly my wife is thrilled to have me around again and not coming home late and stressed out.
You don't need as much money as you think you do.
Try the public microsoft newsgroups. Yep, those exact ones. A lot of the newgroups are watches by the Shanghai subsidiary amoung others with engineers here in the US checking up on on some of the threads on a regular basic. Yes Microsoft supports newsgroups because of the skilled folks (unpaid) that answer, but they also do it because it's a way to lower support costs for the lower echelon of customers and yes a fair chunk of it is done overseas.
I'm not saying this is all a bad thing, I'm just pointing out the background for Microsoft's concentration in researching the dynamics of the newsgroups. If you can identify those folks who make serious contributions, you can give them perks to keep them contributing. They already do this with the MVP program but that's still pretty spotty. Also if you can automatically identify problems/request you can come up with quicker/better ways to answer them.
BTW - how do I know? I worked in Microsoft Product Support for over 5 years. I was there when a lot of this was starting to spin up.
A big reason for this type of research in MS is to push the community support model. If MS can create a scenario where many questions get answered in a community model like newsgroups by unpaid volunteers/posters, it lowers the overall cost of product support for MS. Newsgroup support is becoming a big thing around Microsoft Product Support. There are actually engineers whose sole job is to monitor and respond to newsgroup postings.
It's all about support costs. Supporting newsgroups is very cheap and also very easy to farm out overseas to folks who really do nothing but paste in answers from scripts.
Exactly. OE doesn't help to drive revenue and if you don't drive revenue, you're out. Get used to that philosophy because as MS moves more and more towards being a traditional corporation, that will be the main factor in most prodution decisions.
( Disclaimer: I work for MS in Dev support ) ... :-)
My experience with VB 6 is that it's the COBOL of the PC world. There's just too damn much of it out there to ever really go away. The sheer volume of code out there will keep it around for a long, long time. You'd probably also be suprised at the amount of new code still being written in VB6. Yea, it's kinda scary if you think about it too long
Give it time. As Linux permeates industry and business it will start getting more attention from the virus writers. It's all a matter of ROI. Right now, attacking windows has a very high ROI.
>>In any case, in the days of cheap 200GB+ drives, I'm not sure why you'd want to use a really slow recordable optical format that holds a comparatively scant amount of data as a writeable volume
One reason comes to mind: Portability. I can put a DVD in my back pocket. Kinda hard to do with a 200M drive
Is that a hard drive in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?
When we can get less dropped calls and actually get decent cell phone coverage away from the interstates. Check out the cell maps of the major carriers, they all hug the lines created by interstates. You go to a rural area like I'm from and the coverage is crap. IMHO the feature set of cell phones is starting to creep into the "that's cool, but I don't think I'll ever need it" category. The camera phones have got to the be worst.
Never, but they do have those overhead and Chucky Cheese's, so they gotta be cheap. It's not a hard thing to do. I've seen small UV lamps under the edge of the counter at retail shops already.
I used to help run my Uncle's roller skating rink. We weren't allow to take a anything bigger than a $20 without having him or my cousin check it first.
A quick easy test in the dark is a small UV lamp. The mylar strips in the new bills glow under UV. You can tell very quickly by the position of the mylar strip what demomination a bill "really" is and if you get a 20, 50 or 100 withouth one ... well throw it out.
I wonder, is the Matrix replacing Star Wars as our great "moderm" myth? There were many of the same religiously themed comparisons of the Star Wars saga during it's heyday, and we appear to be seeing much more with the Matrix. Could it be that the Matrix taps into the current generations sense of "myth" better than Star Wars did for my generation?
Didn't expect to see a doc on /. I'll be sure to ask my next doctor if he knows who Cowboy Neal is. I'll pump up his Karma if he does. :-)
>>I know if I had even a thousandth of his net worth you'd never see me in an office ever again.
That's why most of us will never have that kind of worth. We don't have the drive that it takes to get that kind of worth. That's not a bad thing. I'd sure be happy with a lot less. For guys like Steve, Bill & others -- it's just what they do with their time and they would probably be just as agressive if they were in any other field.
Yea, but does it interpret the data. That's one of the big expenses according to her: have the cardiologist examine the data and give his opinion. Since it's all waveform stuff, I wonder how much of that could be automated in the future?