And it's a decent game, very buggy (although it was beta) and ran very choppy on my reasonably good machine (4GB ram, 8800GTS 320MB, Core2 Duo).
people who are in the early release and downloaded the RTM client (with huge patch included!) have said the new client is worlds apart from that open beta client. for some boneheaded reason Funcom released an open beta client with full debugging code compiled in and turned on. Not a smart move for an open beta just 2 weeks before launch where you're trying to generate buzz about the game, and people have to subscribe to an annoying service to get the client.
still, while the early release people aren't seeing any issues right now, we'll see what happens at release time when hundreds of thousands of players try to get on. the client may have been cleaned up but we haven't seen what the servers can handle yet.
Because I like to buck the slashdot trend of not actually RTFA before commenting, I read the article and also some of the discussion of it. Found this near the end and decided to repost it here (mainly because I'm too lazy to write up my own thoughts about the subject). I AM NOT the original author of this post, "The Real Bill Anderson" is. Here is the link to the Ars discussion where I found this: http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/174096756/m/953006491931/p/4
It seems few commenters on this thread have been involved with the process of compliance archiving and restoring. The law does not require an automated system.
Why is that important? Because often, government or not, if it isn't required you don't get funding for it. Get it and you'll see mass complaints about the government going beyond it's requirements, pork passing, etc.. Yes, we the technical crowd agree there *should* be one. But how often does what we say *should* happen get passed on because should != required?
I've witnessed many an org pass on "shoulds" to get the "have-tos". No politics involved.
It's important also to note what is missing. The congressional report linked earlier goes into some detail, though not enough IMO. But what we do see is that it isn't all Bush or even Bush related emails. It's "components". Given the description of what can at best be described as an ad hoc method of.pst files (semi-tongue-in-cheek prod: if they were text files it's be far easier to search and examine!) being stored and named by government employees it is entirely *expected* that stuff goes missing and may or may not be found later.
Again, no politics need be involved for this. Perhaps sad-but-basic office politics, and maybe high level politics. But the system and processes described are far from plausible, and in my experience in this industry over the last half-decade *common*.
Yes we can agree that the system sucks, and is ridiculous and non-scalable. And we can agree that the techies in the positions should have known that. But that does not mean BBB (Big Bad Bush) had anything to do with it. Indeed one thing from the congressional report mentioned earlier is that the office of the Vice President had lots of missing stuff. That has a familiar ring to it. Yes, read the GAO linked report all of it. VP Gore's office had stuff "missing".
No, that's not a defense-by-childhood-argument. There is a reason behind it. It's similar to tracking a server issue and it happening on the shift before you. Gore's office rightly concluded that that the FRA (Federal Records Act) did not apply to the OVP (Office of the Vice President), and neither did the PRA (Presidential Records Act). Therefore they were missing because they were not required to be there.
While we are under the impression that the records acts noted above require "all records", it is not true. For example, the the VP emails their [insert family relation here]] about dinner tonight or a movie tomorrow, those are not records covered by the acts. Nor should they be. We the people have no business reading those emails. Many may be shocked to learn the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) likewise does not require all email to be kept either. Again, this is sensible.
And it is nonsense. How does one decide what is a regulated email, and what is not? Who decides? This represents a fallacy in the notion that you can exclude certain emails from the system or rules. As a result most entities archive all of it. Which introduces other issues.
Regarding the current CIO not implementing something a prior CIO was working on... tell me it's never been seen outside of government? Go ahead. Accounts of new manager not doing old manager's projects come from all sectors.
It is too easy and too simple to conclude that anything that relates or touches the "White House" is automatically controlled by the POTUS.
My family. My old boss. My neighbor (and I live in SV). All these people can get by with a browser, email client, and gaim and not feel like they're missing anything.
I call Shenanigans. Even the most Luddite people I know expect more than just basic web browsing and a simple email client from their computer experience. And of course I'm not going to claim that the relatively small amount of human beings (of the 6+ billion on this planet) I know using computers qualifies as "most people".
I bought my Sony Reader back when it first came out, November 2006. Since mine is the first generation some things might have changed with the later second generation Reader that Sony is selling. My biggest gripes with it is that the battery life doesn't come anywhere near what they advertise, and the button layout is not very good.
The Sony Reader advertises a 7500 page turn battery life, i.e. you will get ~7500 page turns per battery charge. Obviously any manufacturer will want to "optimize" any test they do to get these numbers so they look good in advertisements, but I've found that Sony has outright lied about their battery life. From the moment I've had the Sony Reader, and even following all of the recommendations in the manual for use, I average about 700 page turns per battery charge. Less than 10 percent of what was advertised. Not to mention the battery will drain very quickly when the device is not in use, I have to charge it about every 3-4 weeks if I don't use it as the battery completely drains within that time.
The button layout is pretty poor on the device as well, the 1G model has two very small buttons on the left side for going forward or back, and a sort of circular pad like button about an inch in diameter on the bottom left that you have to press in a certain spot to get the page to go forward or back. I've read some reviews for the Kindle complaining about the big buttons on the side for page turning, but after using my Sony Reader for the past year those big buttons seem very appealing to me.
The Sony connect store was advertised as having 14,000 books at the time, and I believe I read somewhere that they're up to 20,000 items now. If you only read recently released mainstream books, or popular "classics" from authors like Dickens or Twain, then you most likely won't be disappointed with the selection. If on the other hand you prefer a much wider selection, then the Sony Connection store can be a letdown. I've had about a 50/50 chance of finding books that I wanted to buy on Sony Connect, but I don't usually get books you'd find at any mall book store, and might not find at some big Borders superstore. The Kindle store seems to be better stocked, but when I've looked through it for things I wasn't able to find on the Sony store, there were still items that weren't available for the Kindle either. Oh yeah, the Sony Connect software is a blatant, poorly done attempt to mimic iTunes that only runs on Windows, and not very well. Not to mention their search function is a joke.
Now the good. The hype about the E-Ink technology used is pretty much spot on, text is incredibly easy to read on the Sony Reader, even in bright light. It's the same as reading from an actual book, with the extra bonus of being able to make the type bigger or smaller to meet your needs. One thing it doesn't do to well is graphics, Some of the books I've bought from the Sony store have attempted to reproduce drawings or such from the original book, they don't display all that well, but are usually still recognizable. Overall though I'm impressed with how well this technology replicates reading a real book.
Overall, I'd avoid the Sony Reader. Even if they've fixed some of the issues I've experienced with the 1G model in the new 2G model, the poor selection of the Sony store, not to mention the poor implementation of the Sony store, would keep me from buying it had I known then what I know now.
Just to name a few reasons why someone would want to creat an "Outlook Killer":
1. Everyone uses it and therefore if you successfully overthrow M$, you will have a fair bit of $ or exposure on hand.
2. Search function is slow as molasses on a freezing cold day.
3. While customizeable it's not really "skin" able.
4. Advanced features can be overwhelming & you need a college level level course to understand the whole program, or be a techie who can figure it out (like most of us) but even then, you might use outlook to 1/2 it's potential.
5. Help files o.k., but an integrated tutorial would be nice.
6. Spam Filtering doesn't work so well.
This is not to look at office 2k7 because I haven't seen an office with it yet. If you use the "new" outlook, what are your impressions?
2. with outlook 2007 Microsoft threw out the search feature they developed in house and used one from a company they bought, it is much, much better and faster now, though it could still use some extra features like an advanced search options.
6. The IMF spam filtering feature of Exchange 2003 SP1 and above works quite well when properly set up. I run my own server at home (MSDN sub, so no i'm not pirating software) with a domain I've had for close to a decade. If I turn all filtering off I have an old email account that will get upwards of 300 spam a day, with IMF turned on/configured completely and Outlook Junk E-Mail filtering turned on I see about 5 a week in my Inbox.
why in the bloody hell were they testing with VMWare Server 1? If they want to test a production business app then they should have used a tuned VMWare ESX machine and tuned guest OS. As far as I'm concerned VMWare Server, while a good product (and better than MS's server product) is not something to be used in production, it's more for labs/dev environments, or very small companies that have no budget for virtualization and can live with the performance decrease.
I also see they used cheap hardware, something meant for small SoHo or branch offices. Should have tested on a Poweredge 2950 at least, with good storage.
... And other cheap shareware type programs, all heavily pirated and distributed through pirate sites or p2p, and this includes key makers to unlock the legit shareware versions you download as well as full blown versions that have had any sort of locks removed.
Software is pirated because there are people with the technical know how who want this stuff for free, even if they're quite capable of paying for it. Yes, there are some big ticket items that are pirated a lot like Photoshop, Windows, etc, but there are just as many cheap software products that are pirated heavily, ask any shareware developer about it.
I'm against DRM just as much as anyone else, but lets not start trying to blow smoke up peoples asses like RIAA or MPAA does.
The first thing that came to my mind when reading this story is "why in the hell was the V.P. of Sales telling this guys he's being sued?", because being an IT grunt, like most other people who read slashdot, I assumed the submitter was working in IT. what if it's a sales rep? S/he could have had access to client lists and company confidential sales data that the hosting company is worried S/he will share with the new employer.
Now, add to that, there wasn't much info on the lawsuit itself. Was this lawsuit seeking monetary damages? was it seeking a way to ensure the former sales rep (assuming that's what the position was) didn't share anything with the new employer that shouldn't be shared? you know, like things that would be covered under a non-compete clause that so many of us are used to signing before we start working for a company?
it still sounds like some knee jerk reaction on the part of the original employer, but I've seen companies get insane when it comes to sales data and client lists. Add in to that mix the the submitter was going to work for a competitor, and I'm not as surprised by this as others are.
Personally, I find WoW to be quite the grind as well - but at least you get enough exp from quests to make questing a better value than straight-up monster grinding. Other than that, I find it a fairly average RPG.
I'm in the closed Burning Crusade beta (currently level 66 Druid) and blizz has definitely toned down the ability to grind mobs for levelling. I get anywhere from 9,000 to 13,000 XP from a single completed quest (the little ones where you walk 3 feet and talk to another guy even give about 2,000), while a level 66 mob kill will give me about 1300 XP in rested state. And the first 2 zones in Outlands have so many quests that you will probably gain about 2-3 levels from their XP alone. Trying to level by single mob grinding would take ages to do.
The grind isn't totally gone though, while the 5 man instances have some great loot the drop rate can be annoyingly low, so to get all of the gear you want you have to run through the instances 20, 30 or more times. Blizz could fix this by spreading the class loot drops out amongst the instances more (the first 2 are heavy with druid drops, but the next one has hardly any worth a druid's time). Hopefully they'll tweak the loot tables of the instances before TBC goes live so that you're not encouraged to spend weeks runnign through a single instance.
My 2005 Acura TL (with full sound system and navigation package) has both a 6 disc CD changer and a tape player, so I'm all set.
Re:Ex-Military IT staff described in a nutshell.
on
The Living Dilbert?
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· Score: 1
This describes me exactly 10 years ago when I got out of the Air Force. I wasn't in "IT" per se, I was a Communications Computer Systems Operator which was a pretty broad career field. I did everything from mainframe operations to telephone switchboard operator, including a stint as sysadmin/desktop support. I taught myself all that I know because the Air Force training was decades behind the rest of the world (as well as their systems and networks), mostly by playing around with the cheap 286's & 386's that I could afford to buy; my first experience with Linux was when I downloaded it from a BBS while stationed in England, the kernel was.99 and my phone bill was £500.
After getting out I started with small time desktop support contracts and worked my way up to what I am now, the email team lead for a large software company. I was lucky in that I got out right as the dot com boom was heating up, and I was stationed in the Silicon Valley at the time, Onizuka Air Station in Sunnyvale CA. I still don't have any certs and have never even tested, but I make a 6 figure salary and the rest of the team respect my experience and knowledge. On the other hand I am well aware that I am no "guru", I've dealt with people that make me feel like a granny that can't set the time on her VCR so I have no illusions about "knowing it all".
As some have said already the private sector isn't all that it's cracked up to be, but the military it aint. There may be politics and boneheads that shouldn't be in the position that they're in but it pales in comparison to what my experience was in 8 years in the Air Force. If you're looking to jump to civilian IT you'll have to accept the fact that you're going to have to start out small, helpdesk/desktop support. It's best to start out in a city where IT job growth is on the rise, you're much more likely to get chances to advance in a booming IT area like the San Francisco Bayarea or Austin Texas. Also get a few basic certs to help you make it past the HR pre-screening; I may have been able to make it without certs but I was in the right place at just the right time. When you do get interviews don't focus on certs or military background, focus on your experiences, what you've learned and how you learned it, assuming the HR people aren't doing the interviews.
I've found that I got the most calls when I posted on dice.com, no one ever called me because of the other job boards I posted to, even the supposed tech job boards (your mileage may vary, different regions may have different trends so post on them all). Also it's important to do social networking, a lot of people get jobs because they know someone, companies would much rather hire an IT employee because one of their current employee's recommended that person. Don't be afraid to jump ship if a better opportunity comes along but always be professional and give at least 2 weeks notice, people who just "disappear" for another job burn a lot of bridges with the people they were working with, and it *will* come back to haunt them.
One last piece of advice, don't get discouraged if it goes slowly or you end up with jobs that you feel are below your skill level, sometimes you have to take the crap jobs to pay the rent, but IT can be a big turnover field so better opportunities are usually right around the corner.
I recently quit WoW after playing non stop since it's opening day in the US. I had changed servers (PvE only, not interested in dealing with gankers and griefers) a couple of times and then finally found one I liked and got to 60, joined a raiding guild and tried my hand at end game raiding, then came to the conclusion that it was nothing more than glorified grinding, and I hate grinding. I'm looking for an MMO that doesn't follow the EQ model of grinding/time sinks, unfourtunately I haven't found any yet.
We recently started switching from SDLT320's to LTO3 libraries, and the oldest LTO3 libraries we have are starting to have problems. We've already replaced maybe 5 of the 35 drives we've bought so far, after 8 months. It's still too soon to tell if this was just an abnormality or if we can expect to have more problems with the drives/tapes, but for nervous buyers I'd say go with AIT for now.
Also, avoid quantum libraries like the plague. We've had constant problem with all of our quantum libraries, about 15 around the globe.
Why Home users get into so much trouble. I don't think it's because they feel they can ignore security due to the existance of an IT department to clean up their mess, I feel it's because they try to think of this technology like any other technology, a blackbox that you push a few buttons and turn a few dials, something that is completely harmless.
Our company has consequences for stupid user action, up to and including employment termination, so uers are "motivated" to learn the dangers that might confront them and how to avoid them.
A large part of their problem seems to be bandwidth related. Well, that's fixable
I disagree, I play on a medium populated server and while most of the realm is lag free I run into certain areas that have severe lag (30 second lag time or more), yet my ping bar shows no more than 220 MSec ping times, same as any other area. It's no fun to hit a lagged area where it will take 30+ seconds for my keyed commands to hit the server while it only takes me 15 seconds to get ganked to death by mobs, but it's damn annoying when I hit one of those areas and see absolutely no other players about (the usuall suspect with lag, i.e. IronForge bank and AuctionHouse areas). This tells me they have a scalability problem on the back end, and I doubt it's a hardware issue. I wonder what database system they're using, maybe they bought into the whole Oracle mystique.
The Iraqi resistor may be shooting at the American soldier because he believes that the occupation is unjust. The American soldier may be shooting back only because he has been trained to kill instead of think.
Now just hold on here a second, this sounds like a loaded statement. I served 8 years in the US military and I can say that one of the things they train you on quite a bit is conduct in war, especially the Geneva Conventions and the Laws of War. To insinuate that American troops are trained to shoot first and ask questions later is bullhockey, the military spends a lot of money on training it's personnel about how to deal with combatants and non-combatants. Just because one individual might ignore all the training he's received doesn't mean the entire US military is made up of blood thirsty monsters looking to kill anything in their path. Your statement certainly appears to point to that conclusion, and if that's not what you meant then I apologize for the rant. But on the other hand if you're the type to blindly make assumptions about well over a million Americans serving their country in the armed forces, then you, Sir or Madam, should go Fuck yourself. Pardon the language.
The vast majority of zombies were infected via Outlook's ability to run executables from email.
The vast majority of spam zombies out there today did not exploit a security hole in outlook, they relied on the user to knowingly execute the attachment. Hell, some of the latest succesful viruses send the infected file in a password protected zip file (to get past MTA virus scanners) and put the password in the body of the email, and users actually unzip the file using that password, save it to the file system, and run the attachment; users are that stupid!
I've been working in IT for close to 14 years, and I have no certs. When I was laid off last year I was only out of work for 3 months (longest 3 months of my life), and I've been getting steady contract work since then. As part of my current contract I'm helping the company interview people and we see lots of people with tons of certs and no experience, they rarely even get a phone interview and the ones that do don't make it past that stage. Now, I'm not saying certs are a waste of time, I'd most certainly have a much better job if I had certs to go along with my experience, but even with your certs you're most likely going to have to start at the bottom and work your way up the company ladder. And by start at the bottom I mean helpdesk.
If the brakes were faulty due to Ford's negligence, yes. In this case Microsoft made a faulty product that is being exploited for these extortion schemes. If an auto maker were to put out a product as faulty as, say, Microsoft Windows 98, they'd have to recall it or face serious consequences.
And while I think it's a good product for offering it's core functionality, integrated groupware, it is not something to be put at the edge for routing or relaying. Part of the problem with what your boss wants to do is that you'll have to extend Active Directory (AD) into your DMZ; exchange is very heavily integrated with AD, and as a security conscious admin I shudder at the thought of extending AD into the DMZ, you'd either have to open up the ports for AD to your backend, or even worse, put a domain controller in the DMZ. Another annoying habit exchange has (although I don't know if exchange 2003 does this, haven't been able to get my hands on it yet) is that it will blindly accept all emails whether the recipient is a legitimate address or not. Only after accepting the email and writing it to disk does it check if the address is legit, then send an NDR if it is not. This is a waste of bandwidth and disk resources, especially if you have a large amount of spam coming into your organization with bad recipient addresses, a very common problem these days. Tell your boss it doesn't make good business sense to use exchange in this capacity, it's not what it was designed for.
It's more like "blurbed", this article is really thin. I'm about to attempt to install this beta using vmware (can you say fun?) so maybe I can come up with a real review, assuming my computer doesn't eat itself.
Slashdot Mirror
And it's a decent game, very buggy (although it was beta) and ran very choppy on my reasonably good machine (4GB ram, 8800GTS 320MB, Core2 Duo).
people who are in the early release and downloaded the RTM client (with huge patch included!) have said the new client is worlds apart from that open beta client. for some boneheaded reason Funcom released an open beta client with full debugging code compiled in and turned on. Not a smart move for an open beta just 2 weeks before launch where you're trying to generate buzz about the game, and people have to subscribe to an annoying service to get the client. still, while the early release people aren't seeing any issues right now, we'll see what happens at release time when hundreds of thousands of players try to get on. the client may have been cleaned up but we haven't seen what the servers can handle yet.
Because I like to buck the slashdot trend of not actually RTFA before commenting, I read the article and also some of the discussion of it. Found this near the end and decided to repost it here (mainly because I'm too lazy to write up my own thoughts about the subject). I AM NOT the original author of this post, "The Real Bill Anderson" is. Here is the link to the Ars discussion where I found this: http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/174096756/m/953006491931/p/4
.pst files (semi-tongue-in-cheek prod: if they were text files it's be far easier to search and examine!) being stored and named by government employees it is entirely *expected* that stuff goes missing and may or may not be found later.
... tell me it's never been seen outside of government? Go ahead. Accounts of new manager not doing old manager's projects come from all sectors.
It seems few commenters on this thread have been involved with the process of compliance archiving and restoring. The law does not require an automated system.
Why is that important? Because often, government or not, if it isn't required you don't get funding for it. Get it and you'll see mass complaints about the government going beyond it's requirements, pork passing, etc.. Yes, we the technical crowd agree there *should* be one. But how often does what we say *should* happen get passed on because should != required?
I've witnessed many an org pass on "shoulds" to get the "have-tos". No politics involved.
It's important also to note what is missing. The congressional report linked earlier goes into some detail, though not enough IMO. But what we do see is that it isn't all Bush or even Bush related emails. It's "components". Given the description of what can at best be described as an ad hoc method of
Again, no politics need be involved for this. Perhaps sad-but-basic office politics, and maybe high level politics. But the system and processes described are far from plausible, and in my experience in this industry over the last half-decade *common*.
Yes we can agree that the system sucks, and is ridiculous and non-scalable. And we can agree that the techies in the positions should have known that. But that does not mean BBB (Big Bad Bush) had anything to do with it. Indeed one thing from the congressional report mentioned earlier is that the office of the Vice President had lots of missing stuff. That has a familiar ring to it. Yes, read the GAO linked report all of it. VP Gore's office had stuff "missing".
No, that's not a defense-by-childhood-argument. There is a reason behind it. It's similar to tracking a server issue and it happening on the shift before you. Gore's office rightly concluded that that the FRA (Federal Records Act) did not apply to the OVP (Office of the Vice President), and neither did the PRA (Presidential Records Act). Therefore they were missing because they were not required to be there.
While we are under the impression that the records acts noted above require "all records", it is not true. For example, the the VP emails their [insert family relation here]] about dinner tonight or a movie tomorrow, those are not records covered by the acts. Nor should they be. We the people have no business reading those emails. Many may be shocked to learn the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) likewise does not require all email to be kept either. Again, this is sensible.
And it is nonsense. How does one decide what is a regulated email, and what is not? Who decides? This represents a fallacy in the notion that you can exclude certain emails from the system or rules. As a result most entities archive all of it. Which introduces other issues.
Regarding the current CIO not implementing something a prior CIO was working on
It is too easy and too simple to conclude that anything that relates or touches the "White House" is automatically controlled by the POTUS.
My family. My old boss. My neighbor (and I live in SV). All these people can get by with a browser, email client, and gaim and not feel like they're missing anything.
I call Shenanigans. Even the most Luddite people I know expect more than just basic web browsing and a simple email client from their computer experience. And of course I'm not going to claim that the relatively small amount of human beings (of the 6+ billion on this planet) I know using computers qualifies as "most people".
I bought my Sony Reader back when it first came out, November 2006. Since mine is the first generation some things might have changed with the later second generation Reader that Sony is selling. My biggest gripes with it is that the battery life doesn't come anywhere near what they advertise, and the button layout is not very good.
The Sony Reader advertises a 7500 page turn battery life, i.e. you will get ~7500 page turns per battery charge. Obviously any manufacturer will want to "optimize" any test they do to get these numbers so they look good in advertisements, but I've found that Sony has outright lied about their battery life. From the moment I've had the Sony Reader, and even following all of the recommendations in the manual for use, I average about 700 page turns per battery charge. Less than 10 percent of what was advertised. Not to mention the battery will drain very quickly when the device is not in use, I have to charge it about every 3-4 weeks if I don't use it as the battery completely drains within that time.
The button layout is pretty poor on the device as well, the 1G model has two very small buttons on the left side for going forward or back, and a sort of circular pad like button about an inch in diameter on the bottom left that you have to press in a certain spot to get the page to go forward or back. I've read some reviews for the Kindle complaining about the big buttons on the side for page turning, but after using my Sony Reader for the past year those big buttons seem very appealing to me.
The Sony connect store was advertised as having 14,000 books at the time, and I believe I read somewhere that they're up to 20,000 items now. If you only read recently released mainstream books, or popular "classics" from authors like Dickens or Twain, then you most likely won't be disappointed with the selection. If on the other hand you prefer a much wider selection, then the Sony Connection store can be a letdown. I've had about a 50/50 chance of finding books that I wanted to buy on Sony Connect, but I don't usually get books you'd find at any mall book store, and might not find at some big Borders superstore. The Kindle store seems to be better stocked, but when I've looked through it for things I wasn't able to find on the Sony store, there were still items that weren't available for the Kindle either. Oh yeah, the Sony Connect software is a blatant, poorly done attempt to mimic iTunes that only runs on Windows, and not very well. Not to mention their search function is a joke.
Now the good. The hype about the E-Ink technology used is pretty much spot on, text is incredibly easy to read on the Sony Reader, even in bright light. It's the same as reading from an actual book, with the extra bonus of being able to make the type bigger or smaller to meet your needs. One thing it doesn't do to well is graphics, Some of the books I've bought from the Sony store have attempted to reproduce drawings or such from the original book, they don't display all that well, but are usually still recognizable. Overall though I'm impressed with how well this technology replicates reading a real book.
Overall, I'd avoid the Sony Reader. Even if they've fixed some of the issues I've experienced with the 1G model in the new 2G model, the poor selection of the Sony store, not to mention the poor implementation of the Sony store, would keep me from buying it had I known then what I know now.
Just to name a few reasons why someone would want to creat an "Outlook Killer":
1. Everyone uses it and therefore if you successfully overthrow M$, you will have a fair bit of $ or exposure on hand.
2. Search function is slow as molasses on a freezing cold day.
3. While customizeable it's not really "skin" able.
4. Advanced features can be overwhelming & you need a college level level course to understand the whole program, or be a techie who can figure it out (like most of us) but even then, you might use outlook to 1/2 it's potential.
5. Help files o.k., but an integrated tutorial would be nice.
6. Spam Filtering doesn't work so well.
This is not to look at office 2k7 because I haven't seen an office with it yet. If you use the "new" outlook, what are your impressions?
2. with outlook 2007 Microsoft threw out the search feature they developed in house and used one from a company they bought, it is much, much better and faster now, though it could still use some extra features like an advanced search options.
6. The IMF spam filtering feature of Exchange 2003 SP1 and above works quite well when properly set up. I run my own server at home (MSDN sub, so no i'm not pirating software) with a domain I've had for close to a decade. If I turn all filtering off I have an old email account that will get upwards of 300 spam a day, with IMF turned on/configured completely and Outlook Junk E-Mail filtering turned on I see about 5 a week in my Inbox.
why in the bloody hell were they testing with VMWare Server 1? If they want to test a production business app then they should have used a tuned VMWare ESX machine and tuned guest OS. As far as I'm concerned VMWare Server, while a good product (and better than MS's server product) is not something to be used in production, it's more for labs/dev environments, or very small companies that have no budget for virtualization and can live with the performance decrease.
I also see they used cheap hardware, something meant for small SoHo or branch offices. Should have tested on a Poweredge 2950 at least, with good storage.
... And other cheap shareware type programs, all heavily pirated and distributed through pirate sites or p2p, and this includes key makers to unlock the legit shareware versions you download as well as full blown versions that have had any sort of locks removed.
Software is pirated because there are people with the technical know how who want this stuff for free, even if they're quite capable of paying for it. Yes, there are some big ticket items that are pirated a lot like Photoshop, Windows, etc, but there are just as many cheap software products that are pirated heavily, ask any shareware developer about it.
I'm against DRM just as much as anyone else, but lets not start trying to blow smoke up peoples asses like RIAA or MPAA does.
The first thing that came to my mind when reading this story is "why in the hell was the V.P. of Sales telling this guys he's being sued?", because being an IT grunt, like most other people who read slashdot, I assumed the submitter was working in IT. what if it's a sales rep? S/he could have had access to client lists and company confidential sales data that the hosting company is worried S/he will share with the new employer.
Now, add to that, there wasn't much info on the lawsuit itself. Was this lawsuit seeking monetary damages? was it seeking a way to ensure the former sales rep (assuming that's what the position was) didn't share anything with the new employer that shouldn't be shared? you know, like things that would be covered under a non-compete clause that so many of us are used to signing before we start working for a company?
it still sounds like some knee jerk reaction on the part of the original employer, but I've seen companies get insane when it comes to sales data and client lists. Add in to that mix the the submitter was going to work for a competitor, and I'm not as surprised by this as others are.
unemployed was the one I was thinking of. wouldn't be too surprised if this guy gets fired after the publicity that this is getting.
Personally, I find WoW to be quite the grind as well - but at least you get enough exp from quests to make questing a better value than straight-up monster grinding. Other than that, I find it a fairly average RPG.
I'm in the closed Burning Crusade beta (currently level 66 Druid) and blizz has definitely toned down the ability to grind mobs for levelling. I get anywhere from 9,000 to 13,000 XP from a single completed quest (the little ones where you walk 3 feet and talk to another guy even give about 2,000), while a level 66 mob kill will give me about 1300 XP in rested state. And the first 2 zones in Outlands have so many quests that you will probably gain about 2-3 levels from their XP alone. Trying to level by single mob grinding would take ages to do.
The grind isn't totally gone though, while the 5 man instances have some great loot the drop rate can be annoyingly low, so to get all of the gear you want you have to run through the instances 20, 30 or more times. Blizz could fix this by spreading the class loot drops out amongst the instances more (the first 2 are heavy with druid drops, but the next one has hardly any worth a druid's time). Hopefully they'll tweak the loot tables of the instances before TBC goes live so that you're not encouraged to spend weeks runnign through a single instance.
My 2005 Acura TL (with full sound system and navigation package) has both a 6 disc CD changer and a tape player, so I'm all set.
This describes me exactly 10 years ago when I got out of the Air Force. I wasn't in "IT" per se, I was a Communications Computer Systems Operator which was a pretty broad career field. I did everything from mainframe operations to telephone switchboard operator, including a stint as sysadmin/desktop support. I taught myself all that I know because the Air Force training was decades behind the rest of the world (as well as their systems and networks), mostly by playing around with the cheap 286's & 386's that I could afford to buy; my first experience with Linux was when I downloaded it from a BBS while stationed in England, the kernel was .99 and my phone bill was £500.
After getting out I started with small time desktop support contracts and worked my way up to what I am now, the email team lead for a large software company. I was lucky in that I got out right as the dot com boom was heating up, and I was stationed in the Silicon Valley at the time, Onizuka Air Station in Sunnyvale CA. I still don't have any certs and have never even tested, but I make a 6 figure salary and the rest of the team respect my experience and knowledge. On the other hand I am well aware that I am no "guru", I've dealt with people that make me feel like a granny that can't set the time on her VCR so I have no illusions about "knowing it all".
As some have said already the private sector isn't all that it's cracked up to be, but the military it aint. There may be politics and boneheads that shouldn't be in the position that they're in but it pales in comparison to what my experience was in 8 years in the Air Force. If you're looking to jump to civilian IT you'll have to accept the fact that you're going to have to start out small, helpdesk/desktop support. It's best to start out in a city where IT job growth is on the rise, you're much more likely to get chances to advance in a booming IT area like the San Francisco Bayarea or Austin Texas. Also get a few basic certs to help you make it past the HR pre-screening; I may have been able to make it without certs but I was in the right place at just the right time. When you do get interviews don't focus on certs or military background, focus on your experiences, what you've learned and how you learned it, assuming the HR people aren't doing the interviews.
I've found that I got the most calls when I posted on dice.com, no one ever called me because of the other job boards I posted to, even the supposed tech job boards (your mileage may vary, different regions may have different trends so post on them all). Also it's important to do social networking, a lot of people get jobs because they know someone, companies would much rather hire an IT employee because one of their current employee's recommended that person. Don't be afraid to jump ship if a better opportunity comes along but always be professional and give at least 2 weeks notice, people who just "disappear" for another job burn a lot of bridges with the people they were working with, and it *will* come back to haunt them.
One last piece of advice, don't get discouraged if it goes slowly or you end up with jobs that you feel are below your skill level, sometimes you have to take the crap jobs to pay the rent, but IT can be a big turnover field so better opportunities are usually right around the corner.
I recently quit WoW after playing non stop since it's opening day in the US. I had changed servers (PvE only, not interested in dealing with gankers and griefers) a couple of times and then finally found one I liked and got to 60, joined a raiding guild and tried my hand at end game raiding, then came to the conclusion that it was nothing more than glorified grinding, and I hate grinding. I'm looking for an MMO that doesn't follow the EQ model of grinding/time sinks, unfourtunately I haven't found any yet.
not the relatives of the killer. I didn't even have to read the article to see that:
Although that defense was thrown out, the multi-million dollar suit filed by relatives of the victims claim that Moore was in fact mimicking GTA
We recently started switching from SDLT320's to LTO3 libraries, and the oldest LTO3 libraries we have are starting to have problems. We've already replaced maybe 5 of the 35 drives we've bought so far, after 8 months. It's still too soon to tell if this was just an abnormality or if we can expect to have more problems with the drives/tapes, but for nervous buyers I'd say go with AIT for now.
Also, avoid quantum libraries like the plague. We've had constant problem with all of our quantum libraries, about 15 around the globe.
Why Home users get into so much trouble. I don't think it's because they feel they can ignore security due to the existance of an IT department to clean up their mess, I feel it's because they try to think of this technology like any other technology, a blackbox that you push a few buttons and turn a few dials, something that is completely harmless.
Our company has consequences for stupid user action, up to and including employment termination, so uers are "motivated" to learn the dangers that might confront them and how to avoid them.
Also, the IIS metabase has been completely dropped in favor of easily editable XML configuration files
That damn metabase has been a pain in the arse for ages, it's about time they got rid of it.
A large part of their problem seems to be bandwidth related. Well, that's fixable
I disagree, I play on a medium populated server and while most of the realm is lag free I run into certain areas that have severe lag (30 second lag time or more), yet my ping bar shows no more than 220 MSec ping times, same as any other area. It's no fun to hit a lagged area where it will take 30+ seconds for my keyed commands to hit the server while it only takes me 15 seconds to get ganked to death by mobs, but it's damn annoying when I hit one of those areas and see absolutely no other players about (the usuall suspect with lag, i.e. IronForge bank and AuctionHouse areas). This tells me they have a scalability problem on the back end, and I doubt it's a hardware issue. I wonder what database system they're using, maybe they bought into the whole Oracle mystique.
The Iraqi resistor may be shooting at the American soldier because he believes that the occupation is unjust. The American soldier may be shooting back only because he has been trained to kill instead of think.
Now just hold on here a second, this sounds like a loaded statement. I served 8 years in the US military and I can say that one of the things they train you on quite a bit is conduct in war, especially the Geneva Conventions and the Laws of War. To insinuate that American troops are trained to shoot first and ask questions later is bullhockey, the military spends a lot of money on training it's personnel about how to deal with combatants and non-combatants. Just because one individual might ignore all the training he's received doesn't mean the entire US military is made up of blood thirsty monsters looking to kill anything in their path. Your statement certainly appears to point to that conclusion, and if that's not what you meant then I apologize for the rant. But on the other hand if you're the type to blindly make assumptions about well over a million Americans serving their country in the armed forces, then you, Sir or Madam, should go Fuck yourself. Pardon the language.
The vast majority of zombies were infected via Outlook's ability to run executables from email.
The vast majority of spam zombies out there today did not exploit a security hole in outlook, they relied on the user to knowingly execute the attachment. Hell, some of the latest succesful viruses send the infected file in a password protected zip file (to get past MTA virus scanners) and put the password in the body of the email, and users actually unzip the file using that password, save it to the file system, and run the attachment; users are that stupid!
I've got a bridge in brooklyn to sell you. real cheap, only 5 million dollars, what a steal!
I've been working in IT for close to 14 years, and I have no certs. When I was laid off last year I was only out of work for 3 months (longest 3 months of my life), and I've been getting steady contract work since then. As part of my current contract I'm helping the company interview people and we see lots of people with tons of certs and no experience, they rarely even get a phone interview and the ones that do don't make it past that stage. Now, I'm not saying certs are a waste of time, I'd most certainly have a much better job if I had certs to go along with my experience, but even with your certs you're most likely going to have to start at the bottom and work your way up the company ladder. And by start at the bottom I mean helpdesk.
If the brakes were faulty due to Ford's negligence, yes. In this case Microsoft made a faulty product that is being exploited for these extortion schemes. If an auto maker were to put out a product as faulty as, say, Microsoft Windows 98, they'd have to recall it or face serious consequences.
And while I think it's a good product for offering it's core functionality, integrated groupware, it is not something to be put at the edge for routing or relaying. Part of the problem with what your boss wants to do is that you'll have to extend Active Directory (AD) into your DMZ; exchange is very heavily integrated with AD, and as a security conscious admin I shudder at the thought of extending AD into the DMZ, you'd either have to open up the ports for AD to your backend, or even worse, put a domain controller in the DMZ. Another annoying habit exchange has (although I don't know if exchange 2003 does this, haven't been able to get my hands on it yet) is that it will blindly accept all emails whether the recipient is a legitimate address or not. Only after accepting the email and writing it to disk does it check if the address is legit, then send an NDR if it is not. This is a waste of bandwidth and disk resources, especially if you have a large amount of spam coming into your organization with bad recipient addresses, a very common problem these days. Tell your boss it doesn't make good business sense to use exchange in this capacity, it's not what it was designed for.
It's more like "blurbed", this article is really thin. I'm about to attempt to install this beta using vmware (can you say fun?) so maybe I can come up with a real review, assuming my computer doesn't eat itself.