My last job started out great and slowly degraded over time. Towards the end the "new" Chief Idiot Officer (CIO) had things on the brink of disaster and only through the skill that stuck around and sheer luck did things survive. I bidded my time while I looked for a job. After searching for a while and even expanding my search to neighboring states, I finally got the offer I was looking for. I was tempted to just toss my resignation to the HR lady, stop by the CIO. There I would tell him he's an idiot, that's what the "I" in his title stands for, and he can EABOD, GFY, and then ESAD. I didn't do any epic bridge burning because I didn't feel like it would have been right to do to my boss (not that he was perfect either, but he was ok) and the PFY. If my boss wasn't still there, I probably would have done that; the PFY can handle himself.
I entertained the idea of getting this as a backup internet connection for the home, but they way they auto-charge for blocks of data and the reports of the inconsistencies in data tracking has me shying away. I'm looking for a prepaid data option that lets one buy the allowance upfront, doesn't expire, won't auto-charge for additional data, and either has an ethernet interface or has driver support in FreeBSD 8.3 (pfSense 2.1) since it'll be used as a failover WAN connection.
The only option I've found so far is Internet On The Go from TruConnect & WallyWorld. The down side is they're only selling the MiFi 2200 which requires one to compile a modified driver on FreeBSD and I just don't have the time. On top of that it's on Sprint's slow EV-DO network; the speed could be ok as a backup connection.
It would. Look at how they bill. You have to provide a card upfront. If you reach your allowance, they go ahead and charge for the next block of data. I don't believe that block gets rolled over to the next month either. It would be pretty easy to have a kid or malware burn through a bunch of data and max out the card.
Pretty much yes. Buying a "meal", and I use that term loosely, from a fast food joint includes at least a 20floz cup. Going to a restaurant it's common for people to order a soda. I worked as a waiter a couple of times and over 70% of people order a soda. Though, at least 80% of those didn't get more than one refill.
This. It tastes better with real sugar and actually has OJ in the Throwback version as parent mentioned. I'd like to see what the Throwback would taste like without the added sugar or perhaps a little added sugar. Still, I do buy every 12 pack of Throwback on the shelf at the local grocery store since it costs the same as the crappy HFCS version. Once, Costco blessed us with a well priced case of MD Throwback, but they at least stock the Mexican Coke regularly.
If they're under-reporting by a large factor and keep it that way when they reintroduce caps, I may consider switching from their Business service to Residential. The reasons why I got Business are no caps, supposedly better service, supposedly faster incident resolution, and a hint that my traffic would take priority during congestion. I work from home two days a week and can't be concerned about caps. As for the rest of the supposed benefits of their Business service is a load of BS; when I've had a problem, I didn't get any better service or resolution than I would have on Residential.
I hope Comcrap will figure out their caps before my contract auto-renews. I'd like to cut my bill down a little while increasing my speed.
I'm surprised that Intel NICs are held in such high regard, yet there are some really detrimental bugs.
CSB: I just bought a three port daughterboard for a Jetway ITX mobo I am planning on using as a pfSense FW. Their Gen2 daughterboard uses this chip, but thankfully I didn't spend the extra $50 on the Gen2 compatible board and went with a Gen1 that uses 82541PI. Hopefully that one doesn't have the same issue.
This is a little OT, but it's been bugging me for a while. There are a lot of companies out there that don't want to increase a potential worker's pay by a large amount and won't hire a qualified and competent candidate because of this large increase. I've even heard that they would consider this massive increase potentially detrimental to the candidate if they hired them at this larger rate. To me it's ludicrous and can't think of anything reasonable on how their statements could be true.
I don't understand the logic of not hiring someone that's unemployed either. A good portion of a job interview is to vet whether they have the necessary skills or not. If they're capable, then what does it matter? If they're hired and they suck, it's time to review how candidates are interviewed and get better at it.
CSB: At my last job I got a few promotions in title, responsibility, and work load without any salary increases beyond the yearly 3% if I was lucky. My boss knew I was underpaid and I even put together a well worded case with referenced to DOL statistics in the area to show how far behind my salary was to his boss, the CTO, could try and increase his payroll budget. Obviously that never went through. I saw the signs that they were on the path to bankruptcy so I started looking for better opportunities.
About half of the headhunters wanted my current salary info from me, but I would only let them guess and when they got close to within $15k of my goal salary, I'd say "around that area" or "that's pretty close" and they'd just run with it. They never got close to my actual pay since I was in a senior position getting junior pay. The pay increase didn't ruin me at all. Instead it let me live more comfortably, not have to worry whether I could afford to eat a more nutritious meal, and be able to put money away into savings.
If you RTFA they are given an incentive to provide this information and they even pay Equifax for the privileged! They provide a service for employment history verification. When a potential employer or creditor wants to verify that an individual is actually employed at a company, that company would use this service to handle these verification requests. The HR dept is already overworked and they don't want the liability of a lawsuit in case they accidentally say something negative. To avoid all of this, they just outsource it to Equifax and provide them with all of their HR data; Equifax still retains that data and turns around and sells it.
The funny thing is they tell the HR departments that the information will only be disclosed to the people that you say it can be disclosed to, yet a collections agency could potentially ask for this information to see if it's worth trying to collect or use it as a tool to sue for garnishments.
If enough people raise cane about it, employers will stop using the service. I doubt we can get those jokers to move at all to stop this.
To add to this, most loan applications, especially ones that are in the four digits or more, require proof through pay stubs and/or bank statements that you make what you say you make.
If I want to get a loan or a revolving line of credit and their underwriter needs my salary information, it should be up to me on whether it is disclosed.
She should demand that they provide the original document she signed in order to incur that debt. No one keeps this documentation. If the collections agency violates anything under the FCRA, they can sue for $1k for each infraction in small claims court. I've read about some people that record their conversations with collections agencies, say certain things that get them to violate the FCRA if they haven't already, and then turn around and sue; many times what they win is higher than the alleged debt
Yeah he almost sounds like he looked at prices a year ago. To add to your list, around the pre-BF sales I picked up an Intel 330 240GB for $140. It almost feels like we'll be seeing $0.10/GB or lower in a couple of years; I can't wait.
The point of it is the prices are dropping in the double digits. I picked up a 240GB SSD for $140. That's $0.583/GB and it was an Intel SSD with no rebate nonsense! Granted that's no $0.033/GB for the 3TB HDD ($100) I picked up at the same time, but it's a stark difference to the >$1/GB that was last year.
Personally I'm looking forward to the prices to keep dropping and the density to increase.
I have a few Model M keyboards from 1984 that I still use (banging away on one right now). All of them are older than my wife. The nice thing about the earlier Model Ms is one can change out the cord for PS/2. I still get asked if I'm using an adapter for this tank, but I just point to the one cord going to the docking station without any adapters.HP has yet to drop them from the docking stations for the Elitebooks and Probooks.
Which IP KVMs are you referring to? The cheap ones I'm finding still require a dedicated KVM switch or proprietary software to be licensed. I'm looking for one that's browser based and hopefully can remotely mount an ISO and do the keyboard power button command. $200+ for the ones I'm finding isn't worth the cost to me for a home server. There's an optional remote management card for my server, but the web interface sucks and it uses up a whole expansion card slot when there's only two slots total.
The customer should be informed that they need to provide a support number. If the customer assumes that because they paid some contractor to install it and they are entitled to support, they should be refereed back to the contractor or person that installed it. Any IT contractor worth their salt should have a Statement Of Work that outlines exactly what services are being provided at what cost signed by both parties so there are no questions.
Subby needs to put something clear next to the support number that the customer needs their support contract number ready for the support line, support is pay only, and a link to where they can get a support contract with preferably a schedule of pricing (eg. one time case cost, five cases, flat month to month, flat annual). Anybody that screams at me about not getting free support is a candidate for my block list.
At my last job we encountered too many links to scammers and malware from sites on their subdomains via spam and customer applications. We went ahead and blocked *.co.cc and would not approve any potential customer applications if that's where their website was.
If a company wants to do a website on the cheap, domains don't cost much and hosting can be had for $5/mo to free depending on your content.
Yes. Working on your people skills will help a bunch. The key thing to remember is that not everyone is adept at programming and one's natural skills can play in favor or against them in learning something. I am a firm believer that anyone can learn to do anything; how much effort they're willing to put into learning will determine how well they succeed.
I have high spacial reasoning with a partial photographic memory that makes me adept at being a Systems Engineer and have the capability to be successful in a number of other non-IT trades if I chose to. That being said, I have my deficiencies. Take for example, art and drawing. It took me a while as a 10yo to learn to draw a cube. My best drawings outside of that are stick figures. My spacial reasoning helps in things like an algebra formula and computer hardware, but it doesn't help me draw a 3D object from a single perspective onto a 2D piece of paper. Could I learn to do it? Sure. Could I become great at it? Possibly with enough learning and practice.
Everyone, including us nerds, need to remember that we're not awesome at everything and there are things we just aren't adept at. Don't get on that high horse just because one is better at something than the other. Understand that other people aren't going to understand something that one understands, but they probably have the capability to understand it if they're willing to learn and it can be taught to them in a way that they will understand.
Everyone also needs to understand that there are different learning styles as well. I am a tactile learner; I learn by doing. I am not a visual learner so If someone is showing me how to do something, I will pick up 10%-80% of what they showed me depending on the subject material and how focused I am. I am even worse at auditory learning as an example.
Have a good attitude, understand that one is not better than anyone else, one has a skill they trained in and someone else's skills and training may be different, and don't be a pushover and one can go pretty far.
Process it as a credit instead. Sure the merchant has to pay a higher transaction fee, but the card holder has all the power. The card issuing bank must honor any chargeback requests from the card holder and it is on the merchant to prove that the transaction is legit.
Opting out doesn't mean anything to me. Ok so I opt-out of them selling my information; unless I missed it, nothing on that opt-out page said anything about stopping all of their data collection. What guarantee do I have that they're not going to sell my information anyways? So I move a few radio buttons around and they stay there when I refresh the page; what stops them from distributing that information anyways? They don't have any ethics to begin with. They'll happily change someone's plan mid-contract and tell them too-bad.
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My last job started out great and slowly degraded over time. Towards the end the "new" Chief Idiot Officer (CIO) had things on the brink of disaster and only through the skill that stuck around and sheer luck did things survive. I bidded my time while I looked for a job. After searching for a while and even expanding my search to neighboring states, I finally got the offer I was looking for. I was tempted to just toss my resignation to the HR lady, stop by the CIO. There I would tell him he's an idiot, that's what the "I" in his title stands for, and he can EABOD, GFY, and then ESAD. I didn't do any epic bridge burning because I didn't feel like it would have been right to do to my boss (not that he was perfect either, but he was ok) and the PFY. If my boss wasn't still there, I probably would have done that; the PFY can handle himself.
Came here to recommend that story. You beat me to it.
Slight SPOILER hint:
It doesn't end the way you want it to. It ends in the typical fassion it would at any corporation and it drives me crazy.
Sounds like it's AT&T.
I think I may do this. What a simple, smart idea.
I entertained the idea of getting this as a backup internet connection for the home, but they way they auto-charge for blocks of data and the reports of the inconsistencies in data tracking has me shying away. I'm looking for a prepaid data option that lets one buy the allowance upfront, doesn't expire, won't auto-charge for additional data, and either has an ethernet interface or has driver support in FreeBSD 8.3 (pfSense 2.1) since it'll be used as a failover WAN connection.
The only option I've found so far is Internet On The Go from TruConnect & WallyWorld. The down side is they're only selling the MiFi 2200 which requires one to compile a modified driver on FreeBSD and I just don't have the time. On top of that it's on Sprint's slow EV-DO network; the speed could be ok as a backup connection.
It would. Look at how they bill. You have to provide a card upfront. If you reach your allowance, they go ahead and charge for the next block of data. I don't believe that block gets rolled over to the next month either. It would be pretty easy to have a kid or malware burn through a bunch of data and max out the card.
Is it served with every meal or something?
Pretty much yes. Buying a "meal", and I use that term loosely, from a fast food joint includes at least a 20floz cup. Going to a restaurant it's common for people to order a soda. I worked as a waiter a couple of times and over 70% of people order a soda. Though, at least 80% of those didn't get more than one refill.
People wonder why they're fat.
This. It tastes better with real sugar and actually has OJ in the Throwback version as parent mentioned. I'd like to see what the Throwback would taste like without the added sugar or perhaps a little added sugar. Still, I do buy every 12 pack of Throwback on the shelf at the local grocery store since it costs the same as the crappy HFCS version. Once, Costco blessed us with a well priced case of MD Throwback, but they at least stock the Mexican Coke regularly.
If they're under-reporting by a large factor and keep it that way when they reintroduce caps, I may consider switching from their Business service to Residential. The reasons why I got Business are no caps, supposedly better service, supposedly faster incident resolution, and a hint that my traffic would take priority during congestion. I work from home two days a week and can't be concerned about caps. As for the rest of the supposed benefits of their Business service is a load of BS; when I've had a problem, I didn't get any better service or resolution than I would have on Residential.
I hope Comcrap will figure out their caps before my contract auto-renews. I'd like to cut my bill down a little while increasing my speed.
82574L was the Intel NIC.
I'm surprised that Intel NICs are held in such high regard, yet there are some really detrimental bugs.
CSB:
I just bought a three port daughterboard for a Jetway ITX mobo I am planning on using as a pfSense FW. Their Gen2 daughterboard uses this chip, but thankfully I didn't spend the extra $50 on the Gen2 compatible board and went with a Gen1 that uses 82541PI. Hopefully that one doesn't have the same issue.
Thanks. Too many acronyms to keep track of.
This is a little OT, but it's been bugging me for a while. There are a lot of companies out there that don't want to increase a potential worker's pay by a large amount and won't hire a qualified and competent candidate because of this large increase. I've even heard that they would consider this massive increase potentially detrimental to the candidate if they hired them at this larger rate. To me it's ludicrous and can't think of anything reasonable on how their statements could be true.
I don't understand the logic of not hiring someone that's unemployed either. A good portion of a job interview is to vet whether they have the necessary skills or not. If they're capable, then what does it matter? If they're hired and they suck, it's time to review how candidates are interviewed and get better at it.
CSB:
At my last job I got a few promotions in title, responsibility, and work load without any salary increases beyond the yearly 3% if I was lucky. My boss knew I was underpaid and I even put together a well worded case with referenced to DOL statistics in the area to show how far behind my salary was to his boss, the CTO, could try and increase his payroll budget. Obviously that never went through. I saw the signs that they were on the path to bankruptcy so I started looking for better opportunities.
About half of the headhunters wanted my current salary info from me, but I would only let them guess and when they got close to within $15k of my goal salary, I'd say "around that area" or "that's pretty close" and they'd just run with it. They never got close to my actual pay since I was in a senior position getting junior pay. The pay increase didn't ruin me at all. Instead it let me live more comfortably, not have to worry whether I could afford to eat a more nutritious meal, and be able to put money away into savings.
If you RTFA they are given an incentive to provide this information and they even pay Equifax for the privileged! They provide a service for employment history verification. When a potential employer or creditor wants to verify that an individual is actually employed at a company, that company would use this service to handle these verification requests. The HR dept is already overworked and they don't want the liability of a lawsuit in case they accidentally say something negative. To avoid all of this, they just outsource it to Equifax and provide them with all of their HR data; Equifax still retains that data and turns around and sells it.
The funny thing is they tell the HR departments that the information will only be disclosed to the people that you say it can be disclosed to, yet a collections agency could potentially ask for this information to see if it's worth trying to collect or use it as a tool to sue for garnishments.
If enough people raise cane about it, employers will stop using the service. I doubt we can get those jokers to move at all to stop this.
To add to this, most loan applications, especially ones that are in the four digits or more, require proof through pay stubs and/or bank statements that you make what you say you make.
If I want to get a loan or a revolving line of credit and their underwriter needs my salary information, it should be up to me on whether it is disclosed.
She should demand that they provide the original document she signed in order to incur that debt. No one keeps this documentation. If the collections agency violates anything under the FCRA, they can sue for $1k for each infraction in small claims court. I've read about some people that record their conversations with collections agencies, say certain things that get them to violate the FCRA if they haven't already, and then turn around and sue; many times what they win is higher than the alleged debt
Yeah he almost sounds like he looked at prices a year ago. To add to your list, around the pre-BF sales I picked up an Intel 330 240GB for $140. It almost feels like we'll be seeing $0.10/GB or lower in a couple of years; I can't wait.
The point of it is the prices are dropping in the double digits. I picked up a 240GB SSD for $140. That's $0.583/GB and it was an Intel SSD with no rebate nonsense! Granted that's no $0.033/GB for the 3TB HDD ($100) I picked up at the same time, but it's a stark difference to the >$1/GB that was last year.
Personally I'm looking forward to the prices to keep dropping and the density to increase.
I have a few Model M keyboards from 1984 that I still use (banging away on one right now). All of them are older than my wife. The nice thing about the earlier Model Ms is one can change out the cord for PS/2. I still get asked if I'm using an adapter for this tank, but I just point to the one cord going to the docking station without any adapters.HP has yet to drop them from the docking stations for the Elitebooks and Probooks.
Which IP KVMs are you referring to? The cheap ones I'm finding still require a dedicated KVM switch or proprietary software to be licensed. I'm looking for one that's browser based and hopefully can remotely mount an ISO and do the keyboard power button command. $200+ for the ones I'm finding isn't worth the cost to me for a home server. There's an optional remote management card for my server, but the web interface sucks and it uses up a whole expansion card slot when there's only two slots total.
The customer should be informed that they need to provide a support number. If the customer assumes that because they paid some contractor to install it and they are entitled to support, they should be refereed back to the contractor or person that installed it. Any IT contractor worth their salt should have a Statement Of Work that outlines exactly what services are being provided at what cost signed by both parties so there are no questions.
Subby needs to put something clear next to the support number that the customer needs their support contract number ready for the support line, support is pay only, and a link to where they can get a support contract with preferably a schedule of pricing (eg. one time case cost, five cases, flat month to month, flat annual). Anybody that screams at me about not getting free support is a candidate for my block list.
At my last job we encountered too many links to scammers and malware from sites on their subdomains via spam and customer applications. We went ahead and blocked *.co.cc and would not approve any potential customer applications if that's where their website was.
If a company wants to do a website on the cheap, domains don't cost much and hosting can be had for $5/mo to free depending on your content.
Yes. Working on your people skills will help a bunch. The key thing to remember is that not everyone is adept at programming and one's natural skills can play in favor or against them in learning something. I am a firm believer that anyone can learn to do anything; how much effort they're willing to put into learning will determine how well they succeed.
I have high spacial reasoning with a partial photographic memory that makes me adept at being a Systems Engineer and have the capability to be successful in a number of other non-IT trades if I chose to. That being said, I have my deficiencies. Take for example, art and drawing. It took me a while as a 10yo to learn to draw a cube. My best drawings outside of that are stick figures. My spacial reasoning helps in things like an algebra formula and computer hardware, but it doesn't help me draw a 3D object from a single perspective onto a 2D piece of paper. Could I learn to do it? Sure. Could I become great at it? Possibly with enough learning and practice.
Everyone, including us nerds, need to remember that we're not awesome at everything and there are things we just aren't adept at. Don't get on that high horse just because one is better at something than the other. Understand that other people aren't going to understand something that one understands, but they probably have the capability to understand it if they're willing to learn and it can be taught to them in a way that they will understand.
Everyone also needs to understand that there are different learning styles as well. I am a tactile learner; I learn by doing. I am not a visual learner so If someone is showing me how to do something, I will pick up 10%-80% of what they showed me depending on the subject material and how focused I am. I am even worse at auditory learning as an example.
Have a good attitude, understand that one is not better than anyone else, one has a skill they trained in and someone else's skills and training may be different, and don't be a pushover and one can go pretty far.
Process it as a credit instead. Sure the merchant has to pay a higher transaction fee, but the card holder has all the power. The card issuing bank must honor any chargeback requests from the card holder and it is on the merchant to prove that the transaction is legit.
Opting out doesn't mean anything to me. Ok so I opt-out of them selling my information; unless I missed it, nothing on that opt-out page said anything about stopping all of their data collection. What guarantee do I have that they're not going to sell my information anyways? So I move a few radio buttons around and they stay there when I refresh the page; what stops them from distributing that information anyways? They don't have any ethics to begin with. They'll happily change someone's plan mid-contract and tell them too-bad.
Have you seen their new plans? That's an ass-raping right there and their Q3 profits are up as a result.