Nah, I've done worse things and almost been fired (it was a very close call. If I hadn't bailed on a three day weekend ski trip and came in Friday to address the issue it might have been a different story.)
Yea, it's been getting worse over the years. I think it depends on how visible you are as well. In my second to the last job, we worked in the data center which was behind a locked door so we didn't get random people wandering through. Just the admins. I had a mini-stereo under my desk and could play music without complaints. The last place was pretty quiet so no music but it was a contracting job so I didn't bring anything in. This is my first full time, non-contractor/consultant position in over 20 years so there may be some sensibility in play you don't get as a contractor.
I've worked at quite a few places over the years and this is the first place where personal items were frowned upon, at least by my supervisor. I'm in IT by the way; Sr Unix Admin. He's very into "perception" and not waiting for someone to complain.
I don't interact with any of the company's customers so the only people that drop into my cube are ones requesting work.
I do note that in general, personal items aren't frowned upon much. There are quite a few nerf guns floating about in addition to man made nerf blowguns (someone snagged a 8' or 9' piece of pipe and blows the rubber darts). They were recently chastised in part because they put a hole in one of the walls.
And again, I do get it. I only use work approved screen savers and default wallpaper on my Linux/Mac systems.
No no, it's work so I get it. I've worked at quite a few places over the years and this is the first one where personal stuff was frowned upon. The odd thing is it's not universally frowned upon. I guess it's the subject matter.
I get the same thing at work. A few friends had a photo op for a school project and the main person decided to do a Shadowrun themed shoot. We dressed up in our gear and I grabbed my fake Katana ($40 at a game convention; yea fake) for some fluff along with my hat and oversized coat over my motorcycle jacket (for bulkiness). Anyway, she took some really good pictures. I printed out one of me with my sheathed sword and posted it in my cube. I got a little "talking to" from my supervisor about appropriate content at work.
I've been talked to a few times about different things. My Zombie t-shirt with the shotgun on the back was one. I'm to the point that I have only one non-work related item up in my cubical. My Zombie calendar. I'm actually surprised it's lasted this long.
I've read the Harry Potter books, the Arthur C. Clarke 2001 series, the Discworld series, the James Bond series, the Stephen King books, the Lord of the Rings series, the Foundation series, the Zombie books (zombie survival guide and WWZ), the Tom Clancy Jack Ryan books, Harry Turtledove's Civil War series, HP Lovecraft, Pern books, various other singletons, and I'm on the first book of the Wheel of Time series (although I may bail on it).
I have 16 gigs of gaming PDFs that I read and use constantly; Shadowrun, All Flesh Must Be Eaten, Pathfinder, Eclipse Phase, CthulhuTech, Call of Cthulhu, Hollow Earth Expedition, Dark Heresy, Deathwatch, Rogue Trader, My Life With Master, Paranoia, and Deadlands along with various PDFs I pick up from the 'net.
All on my iPad, backed up to several systems.
I think you have far too small an audience to be able to say people who own tablets don't read. Try, people you know who own tablets next time.
At least for me, every time I've paid for Internet service, I get basic cable for free as long as I don't get the digital box. So I get the main local channels along with a few stragglers. I think there are a few sports and Spanish language channels but I have them disabled on the TV.
I like the 23" ones. I bought four for $500 and set up a pretty decent monitor array. Gaming only works on the one main 23" one but I really spread my work out when all four are up and available.
I'm with you and am a big supporter of Solaris and Sun but the Oracle licensing costs were killing the company and killing me since I couldn't get new Sun boxes to replace the old gear. Hence the move to Dell and HP and the transition to mysql for the database side (although when Oracle bought Sun, it threw a bit of a wrench into the works).
Considering the licenses are for the number of cores, changing the number of cores from 16, or 32, or 256 to 8 cores would certainly bring the Oracle DB license costs down again. And since that's the reason we haven't been upgrading our Sun systems and have been moving to Dell R710's or HP, there might be some strategy involved from Sun (since this couldn't have been something that took a bit over a years to produce).
As a fresh full time Unix Admin at the time, I was proud I could keep an ancient Sun pizza box running smoothly. When our Usenix server bailed, I spent several days trying to recover the Sun array when the lead admin finally dropped by to see what I was doing. He said it was built with a MTBF of 6 months and running RAID 0 so a disk fails, we replace the disk, lay out a new file system and let the Usenet feeds fill it back up again. A failing I have is keeping gear running long after it should have been pitched. It's a point of pride, what can I say? Prior to that, I was the last admin in the building that was able to keep LAN Manager running well on some cast off server hardware when everyone else went to Novell.
I'm somewhat better now. I make my complaints about old hardware and am ignored. About the same results, I'm thinking:)
Actually it was at least initially part of the smaller government initiative back in the 90's. All the IT folks had to be contractors. No government IT folks. Our first couple of contracts were so badly written that servers didn't get updated. If a server broke, the government paid to replace it. But if it got old, the contractor pays for a replacement. So as long as we could keep it going, it wouldn't cost the contractor anything.
My wife pestered me to move us to the Denver area from Virginia due to the heat and humidity and the really bad traffic. I lived in the DC area for 30 years before we finally moved. We've been here 8 years and now she wants us to move to Florida.
My home system does come up pretty quickly having the login screen in a minute or so (Windows 7). That's assuming the video cards didn't take a crap and require several reboots before they're useable.
It's not really the "boot" itself but the access to the network servers for authentication and reconfiguration of your laptop that's the slow part. My old Dell laptop would take up to 20 minutes to get to a login screen. It got to the point that I'd power it on and walk away to get my morning soda.
Now my new laptop comes up and is ready to use within a minute or so. But it's a MacBook Pro as well and doesn't have to go through all the hoops to get authenticated and on the network.
The funny thing is, I went in to my specialist and got a checkup and then fitted for a hearing aid. She went through the motions of explaining the extra stuff and that adding Blue Tooth would be another $300 on top of the $49.95 she quoted. She offered to have me take a set she had with her on vacation with me while mine was being ordered and configured but she needed $50 up front. I didn't think it was a problem. Basically pay for it first then exchange it for the pair I wanted. At the end of the 45 minutes, she pulled out the paperwork and I saw it was $4,995.00 !! She didn't think I was seriously thinking it was $49.95 and of course being a techie, I didn't think it was really $4,995.00.
Of course I didn't get it. My hearing loss from physical abuse as a kid, working in data centers, riding motorcycles, and listening to music wasn't $5,000 serious.
I'm not an ad clicker (ever) so ad blocking (and script blocking) is important to me. That there are drive by malware downloads just proves that I'm doing it right.
The problem you have with those of us who are technical is that we'll advise folks who aren't so technical to get Firefox, Adblock, and Noscript and then spend an hour explaining what to do in order to reduce the amount of time spent in de-malwareing their systems.
You really need to head over to Taiwan, China, Korea, etc and unionize them since the reason things are cheap, is that workers are cheap. Raise their standard of living to match ours and corporations will have to outsource again. Perhaps to the Martians or Venusians.
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Nah, I've done worse things and almost been fired (it was a very close call. If I hadn't bailed on a three day weekend ski trip and came in Friday to address the issue it might have been a different story.)
[John]
Yea, it's been getting worse over the years. I think it depends on how visible you are as well. In my second to the last job, we worked in the data center which was behind a locked door so we didn't get random people wandering through. Just the admins. I had a mini-stereo under my desk and could play music without complaints. The last place was pretty quiet so no music but it was a contracting job so I didn't bring anything in. This is my first full time, non-contractor/consultant position in over 20 years so there may be some sensibility in play you don't get as a contractor.
[John]
I've worked at quite a few places over the years and this is the first place where personal items were frowned upon, at least by my supervisor. I'm in IT by the way; Sr Unix Admin. He's very into "perception" and not waiting for someone to complain.
I don't interact with any of the company's customers so the only people that drop into my cube are ones requesting work.
I do note that in general, personal items aren't frowned upon much. There are quite a few nerf guns floating about in addition to man made nerf blowguns (someone snagged a 8' or 9' piece of pipe and blows the rubber darts). They were recently chastised in part because they put a hole in one of the walls.
And again, I do get it. I only use work approved screen savers and default wallpaper on my Linux/Mac systems.
[John]
Monthly pics of zombies attacking. This month we have Pirate Zombies on a ship in rainy weather.
[John]
No no, it's work so I get it. I've worked at quite a few places over the years and this is the first one where personal stuff was frowned upon. The odd thing is it's not universally frowned upon. I guess it's the subject matter.
[John]
I get the same thing at work. A few friends had a photo op for a school project and the main person decided to do a Shadowrun themed shoot. We dressed up in our gear and I grabbed my fake Katana ($40 at a game convention; yea fake) for some fluff along with my hat and oversized coat over my motorcycle jacket (for bulkiness). Anyway, she took some really good pictures. I printed out one of me with my sheathed sword and posted it in my cube. I got a little "talking to" from my supervisor about appropriate content at work.
I've been talked to a few times about different things. My Zombie t-shirt with the shotgun on the back was one. I'm to the point that I have only one non-work related item up in my cubical. My Zombie calendar. I'm actually surprised it's lasted this long.
[John]
Good thing you posted as an AC since "intents and purposes" is grammatically correct. "intensive purposes" is incorrect. Now who's the "know-it-all?"
[John]
I've read the Harry Potter books, the Arthur C. Clarke 2001 series, the Discworld series, the James Bond series, the Stephen King books, the Lord of the Rings series, the Foundation series, the Zombie books (zombie survival guide and WWZ), the Tom Clancy Jack Ryan books, Harry Turtledove's Civil War series, HP Lovecraft, Pern books, various other singletons, and I'm on the first book of the Wheel of Time series (although I may bail on it).
I have 16 gigs of gaming PDFs that I read and use constantly; Shadowrun, All Flesh Must Be Eaten, Pathfinder, Eclipse Phase, CthulhuTech, Call of Cthulhu, Hollow Earth Expedition, Dark Heresy, Deathwatch, Rogue Trader, My Life With Master, Paranoia, and Deadlands along with various PDFs I pick up from the 'net.
All on my iPad, backed up to several systems.
I think you have far too small an audience to be able to say people who own tablets don't read. Try, people you know who own tablets next time.
[John]
At least for me, every time I've paid for Internet service, I get basic cable for free as long as I don't get the digital box. So I get the main local channels along with a few stragglers. I think there are a few sports and Spanish language channels but I have them disabled on the TV.
[John]
I like the 23" ones. I bought four for $500 and set up a pretty decent monitor array. Gaming only works on the one main 23" one but I really spread my work out when all four are up and available.
[John]
Got me. I'm in operations, not in development.
[John]
I'm with you and am a big supporter of Solaris and Sun but the Oracle licensing costs were killing the company and killing me since I couldn't get new Sun boxes to replace the old gear. Hence the move to Dell and HP and the transition to mysql for the database side (although when Oracle bought Sun, it threw a bit of a wrench into the works).
[John]
Considering the licenses are for the number of cores, changing the number of cores from 16, or 32, or 256 to 8 cores would certainly bring the Oracle DB license costs down again. And since that's the reason we haven't been upgrading our Sun systems and have been moving to Dell R710's or HP, there might be some strategy involved from Sun (since this couldn't have been something that took a bit over a years to produce).
[John]
As a fresh full time Unix Admin at the time, I was proud I could keep an ancient Sun pizza box running smoothly. When our Usenix server bailed, I spent several days trying to recover the Sun array when the lead admin finally dropped by to see what I was doing. He said it was built with a MTBF of 6 months and running RAID 0 so a disk fails, we replace the disk, lay out a new file system and let the Usenet feeds fill it back up again. A failing I have is keeping gear running long after it should have been pitched. It's a point of pride, what can I say? Prior to that, I was the last admin in the building that was able to keep LAN Manager running well on some cast off server hardware when everyone else went to Novell.
I'm somewhat better now. I make my complaints about old hardware and am ignored. About the same results, I'm thinking :)
[John]
Actually it was at least initially part of the smaller government initiative back in the 90's. All the IT folks had to be contractors. No government IT folks. Our first couple of contracts were so badly written that servers didn't get updated. If a server broke, the government paid to replace it. But if it got old, the contractor pays for a replacement. So as long as we could keep it going, it wouldn't cost the contractor anything.
[John]
My wife pestered me to move us to the Denver area from Virginia due to the heat and humidity and the really bad traffic. I lived in the DC area for 30 years before we finally moved. We've been here 8 years and now she wants us to move to Florida.
Not happening.
[John]
My home system does come up pretty quickly having the login screen in a minute or so (Windows 7). That's assuming the video cards didn't take a crap and require several reboots before they're useable.
[John]
It's not really the "boot" itself but the access to the network servers for authentication and reconfiguration of your laptop that's the slow part. My old Dell laptop would take up to 20 minutes to get to a login screen. It got to the point that I'd power it on and walk away to get my morning soda.
Now my new laptop comes up and is ready to use within a minute or so. But it's a MacBook Pro as well and doesn't have to go through all the hoops to get authenticated and on the network.
[John]
The funny thing is, I went in to my specialist and got a checkup and then fitted for a hearing aid. She went through the motions of explaining the extra stuff and that adding Blue Tooth would be another $300 on top of the $49.95 she quoted. She offered to have me take a set she had with her on vacation with me while mine was being ordered and configured but she needed $50 up front. I didn't think it was a problem. Basically pay for it first then exchange it for the pair I wanted. At the end of the 45 minutes, she pulled out the paperwork and I saw it was $4,995.00 !! She didn't think I was seriously thinking it was $49.95 and of course being a techie, I didn't think it was really $4,995.00.
Of course I didn't get it. My hearing loss from physical abuse as a kid, working in data centers, riding motorcycles, and listening to music wasn't $5,000 serious.
[John]
$5,000. I asked.
[John]
Not covered by my insurance. And at $5,000, the current loss of hearing wasn't worth the cost.
[John]
Funny, that's why I went dual-core vs quad-core when I built my game machine (specifically for Starcraft II).
[John]
That's funny. I checked the app store before I submitted just to make sure. I guess my search-fu isn't working. Thanks for the links folks.
[John]
I'm not an ad clicker (ever) so ad blocking (and script blocking) is important to me. That there are drive by malware downloads just proves that I'm doing it right.
The problem you have with those of us who are technical is that we'll advise folks who aren't so technical to get Firefox, Adblock, and Noscript and then spend an hour explaining what to do in order to reduce the amount of time spent in de-malwareing their systems.
[John]
You really need to head over to Taiwan, China, Korea, etc and unionize them since the reason things are cheap, is that workers are cheap. Raise their standard of living to match ours and corporations will have to outsource again. Perhaps to the Martians or Venusians.
[John]