I usually only buy a completely new system when it's no longer cost effective to upgrade the one I'm currently using and when that system will not run current (supported) software. There are fairly well established price points at around $1K, $2K, and $3K (including service/support contracts for a fully equipped system with monitor, etc.), with the $1K system being sort of entry level and the $3K being the Uber-nerd lust object. I find the middle price point to have a reasonably useful lifespan (thanks in part to being upgradable to bigger drives, more memory), but as with many things, your mileage or requirements may vary.
We are discussing someone's elderly mom, not Charles Bronson movie fantasies.
First of all, the bad guys are BAD and they have no hesitation (like mom) of using a gun against another person, so as soon as mom hesitates - for even a moment - the bad guys will grab the gun and maybe use it on her. Most bad guys are also going to be younger, healthier and more agile than mom.
Secondly, mom may be caught sleeping, or arrive home from shopping to find the bad guys have already found her gun. If they do not already have guns, providing them to bad and/or stupid people is not a good move.
There is at least one case I've read of where a gun shop owner wearing a holstered sidearm got robbed. Professionally trained police officers also get shot - way too often!
My stepfather is a life long hunter who keeps rifles and shotguns (secured in a locked case). On two occasions in the past 30 years my parents homes were burgled and the guns were taken, something which caused worry for both all of us and for the local police (several of whom are family members).
Have you ever seen the movie Robo Cop? In particular, the scene in the boardroom when the robot goes crazy during a demo and kills the demonstrator?
Anything that will harm a thief can harm an innocent like the 3 year old who lives next door and enters the vehicle after you forget to lock the car the first time.
Even if you only harm, but do not kill, a couple of car thieves, what makes you think they will never come back to retaliate once they are let loose? They are criminals and they already know where you live.
Stronger lights and perhaps security cameras backed up with a VCR are a much better idea. You would do much better by getting your mom a dog than a gun for protection. A dog can not be taken from her and used against her like a gun WILL be, and a dog is also very good company for an older person living alone.
I actually LIVE in Philly. I think universal free WIFI will be a nice upgrade to our city's existing amenities.
We already have had automatic meter readings for a few years. Our downtown is cleaner and safer than many suburbs these days. Our sports teams all have very nice brand new stadiums (and I will leave it at that:-). We have world class cultural resources in music and art. We have the largest urban park system in the US. We are conveniently located in-between the US political capital in Washington DC and the financial capital in NYC and if/when they get the Acela trains running full speed we will be a shorter commute to Manhattan than Brooklyn is. Despite all the history and other important symbols here we have (so far) managed to avoid terror attacks.
P.S. The guy who threw snowballs at Santa is no longer the mayor - he is now the governor of Pennsylvania (did you think California, Texas, and Minnesota were the only states to elect a yahoo guv?).
Umm, where are you going to plug in a jumpdrive on a six year old PC running Windows9X?
Sorry, I don't mean to single you out, because you appear to have lots of "real world" experience. When you walk into a situation where their PC is already hosed, where there have already been who knows how many hands in the pot, I agree that the cheapest/fastest solutions are to buy a new PC or format the drive, but in the real world, simple PC users think that we computer savy techs can just wave our magic wand and fix the gremlins. Up front, they will never, ever accept a buy new or format the drive type solution. Some of the posts above are too funny to believe! Imagine, a user who is using a computer older than 6 months, with an OS that is not {insert MY favorite here} JUST because it's worked fine all those years until she listened to the nerds who told her to get broadband (and also told her - for years - that dialup users did not NEED firewalls, etc. etc. etc.).
Average PC users are totally swamped with conflicting technical advice from people and media who "know all about computers", which is the other reason (besides the cost) they usually wind up doing nothing until they have a dead PC! Sure, there is always more than one way to do just about anything, but just check out this thread. The Tower of Electronic Babel! What's a simple computer user to do?
The car analogy is one I often use (installing antivirus/firewall software is like your car's safety inspection or insurance premium). Well fixing a 6 year old PC with Win9x is no different than spending money on a 10 year old car with over 100K miles. When do you repair and when do you replace? Ultimately, it is up to us to lay out the menu of options, but it is up to the owner to decide.
Re:basic... very basic.
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I have always shared the geeky bias against AOL (probably going back to early versions that were sometimes difficult to remove), but I recently picked up PC support for a new client. She is about 60 and has had a Gateway PC running WindowsME for about 3 years. She started out on AOL, moved to a local neighborhood (mom and pop) ISP and recently moved back, because they treated her better than the local guys(!).
When I got to her place the first thing I saw was a message from Norton Antivirus, "Your virus protection is 1297 days old, you should run LiveUpdate", and I thought of running out the door, but it turned out that some kind tech at AOL had helped her download and apply all the Windows critical patches. I got her Norton upgraded to Internet Security 2004 and surprise, she had NO viruses or anything else.
Most of my other dial-up users have MSN and they ALL got Blaster last year - which is what led each of them to ME!
I'm not saying that this is the typical experience, or that AOL is for everyone, but for people who DON'T want to become SysAdmins maybe their "Internet Appliance" approach is the way to go
Instead of unleashing more worms and viruses to muck up peoples computers without asking - and also creating huge network bottlenecks - why isn't there a bigger Offensive effort to hunt down the perpetrators and take out their machines?
Microsoft recently started offering a bounty on virus creators, and this is a good start, but why aren't more resources going into catching these folks? It seems to me that one reason that we get so much of it is that the perpetrators usually get away with it. Why are websites that provide script kiddies with virus writing tools allowed to continue to exist? These folks are like having a crack house on your street.
If the rich and powerful Gates, and other industry leaders like him, don't start going after them soon, then we will get the John Ashcrofts and Orin Hatches of the world trying to do it instead.
The worst problem for dialup users (and I do tech support for a couple) is really only the big downloads like service packs, or non-security related feature upgrades like Windows Media Player. This stuff should be on free CDs that are more commonly available than AOL CDs (and maybe we can ease up on the garbage going to landfills if AOL and MS will double up on a common CD!).
An awful lot (pun intended) of the recent Microsft security fixes have been small enough to download with dialup - particularly if you had a fairly current security CD and didn't have to download several years worth!
I think that a better solution would be for ISPs to take a page from some corporate and college LAN administrators and block access to the WWW for unpatched or infected machines.
Of course this solution needs to be thought out carefully. Perhaps display a "user friendly" message including detailed instructions on corrective action(s) needed, and then allow access ONLY to WindowsUpdate and anti-virus vendor sites? This moves the problem from the users to the service providers, where I think more attention needs to be directed!
If you bought a car that turned out to be a lemon you would certainly raise the issues forcefully with both the dealer and the manufacturer, but (perhaps due to slimey stuff like EULAs) we have become accustomed to not only accepting unsafe and badly flawed software and ISP service, we hardly hold the suppliers responsible at all!
I will share your idealistic thoughts with the guy who has been cutting my lawn for the past two years. His business card, from his last position, reads, "Vice President for Desktop Services (for the IT division of a local financial services company)". He used to have about 50 PC support and Help Desk people as direct reports before the work was moved offshore. He is smart, very business oriented, and has great people skills but there are no jobs. If he ever gets another management job I would work for him!
I have been out of work as a systems programmer for over two years. Maybe I should band together with a group of my (also un-employed) former IT co-workers to see if, together, we can underbid some guy with a backhoe???
This is just another example of corporate weasel-ing (before government was populated by so many CEOs there used to be a separate category for government weasel-ing).
In the long run this hurts the corporation's/government's credibility, when the facts inevitably come out, but it also hurts OUR credibility as computer professionals.
Does anyone remember Y2K? I personally saw LOTS of problems the first week of January 2000 (like going into my local drugstore chain and all their computers were down), and I certainly heard about a lot more through friends in the business, but every single business and government agency that had any Y2K problem tried to keep it quiet, and out of the media. The end result? I hear non-technical people all the time talking about the Y2K "bug" being a total myth or some kind of hoax/fraud, that never happened. I guess I worked all those 70-80 hour weeks for several years upgrading hardware and software multiple times for nothing????
If you think enforcing traffic laws is "Big Brother" then perhaps you should spend a week living in complete anarchy, like in Baghdad, where some news reports have described how http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/cgi-bin/blog/g uns/Lott/baghdad/iraq3.html?seemore=y#more you are much more likely to die in a traffic accident (little or no enforcement) or homicide (Saddam emptied the jails before the US led invasion), than at the hands of the terrorists.
Also, the next time you are stuck in gridlocked traffic because some self-centered type parked illegally and a bus or truck can't make a turn, please spend the time provided to you contemplating your stance on the "oppression" of issuing parking tickets.
That said, I think that these cameras are more stupidity (like the layer after layer of stupidity being added at the airports). As good SysAdmins we all understand that STUPIDITY/= SECURITY.
Today's NYTimes.com (free registration req'd)
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/19/opinion/19JUDS.h tml?th
has an opinion piece discussing whether materials from Mars - which could contain life-forms - should be brought back to Earth. After mentioning "The War of the Worlds" and giving the examples of smallpox from Europe devastating Native North Americans, and the spread of HIV from monkeys to humans, the author mentions NASA's precautions, but further cautions that "Another, less careful space agency from another country might manage to bring rocks back to Earth before NASA". (Huh?)
Last Summer I went for a walk at a nature center near where I live and was shocked that the entire place was covered with a dense carpet of an ornamental bamboo about 6-8" high. This was something which had escaped from somebody's lawn and it had crowded out everything but the trees. Really spooky! The nature center was already struggling against those vines which suffocate all the trees, now they are spending tons of money that would have gone for educational programs on eradicating this new pest. Non-native species have caused lots of problems in the past (lack of biodiversity, crowding out the habitat for birds and animals, etc.). I used to think that the folks who were complaining about Genetically Modified foods were alarmists, but now I wonder about one of these projects getting out of control. (I shudder to think what would be left of the nature center if that bamboo was one of the varieties that grows 20' tall in a year?) Stuff like resistance to disease can also go haywire. What if most of the corn or wheat in the US was replaced by some GM type that later turned out to be susceptible to some kind of blight (many of my ancestors came to America because of the potato Famine!)?
Thanks for the further details. It sounds like you are doing much better than I thought based on your earlier post. In the early days of the PC we discovered that often a floppy (5 1/4") disk that would not format successfully on the first try could often be formatted on a second attempt. Experience eventually showed me that while this might be technically possible, maybe it was not a GOOD idea in regard to long term data integrity. When in doubt now I throw it out.
My next computer will have a DVD writing drive, but I'm still waiting for the standards "winner" to be determined (and still finding enough problems with CD burners and their media.:-) Hopefully, that will be before the DVD's replacement comes along.
Personally, I wouldn't trust the DVDs made on that drive. Aren't you the least bit afraid that you will discover in a couple months/years that your DVDs are all garbage? Too often in the past I have been burned. Oh, the JOY of finding that ALL your data (or backups!) on "XYZ" technology are gone forever.
About 20 years ago my IBM mainframe Customer Engineer told me, "Everyone keeps saying we need MORE standards, but the problem really is we already have TOO MANY standards". That, unfortunately, seems to describe the state of DVD writers today.
I use Yahoo's free email because my broadband provider (their initials are "Verizon DSL") gave me an email account where ALL email messages in my folders get automatically deleted for me after a couple months (no choice!). The calendar does not work, etc. They have recently given up(?) and now bundle MSN mail with their service. Several friends use MSN and their mailbox is 90%+ spam even though they barely use the Internet.
In the past week I have received several different email bounce messages because a couple Hotmail users were/are spoofing my email address in their spamming.
I fully understand that MS is a huge target for ALL this junk (viruses, etc.), but Yahoo appears to police things MUCH better by making it a priority - and of course Yahoo does not have the huge software cash stream that MS has, either!
I avidly read Tom Friedman on NYTimes.com and watch him whenever he is on TV because he often has some very enlightening thoughts on politics and culture, in particular on the Middle East, but I found this article very disappointing. Maybe he should stick to subjects which he knows about?
Sure, the whole world is plastered with American branded products, but almost nothing is MADE in America anymore. (My father-in-law is a very smart guy and very tough minded about buying stuff made here, so finding him a birthday present gets more impossible every year.)
Just because a lot of jobs are already moving offshore that does NOT mean that lots of NEW technology will automagically spring up to employ all the displaced workers here! We are seeing an economic change as disruptive as the Industrial Revolution and most of our politicians understand even less about technology than Al Gore.
IF this passes, and IF these devices reduce drunk driving (which often costs YOUR insurance company even when the OTHER driver is the drunk) will the insurance premiums go down in the state?
Crashes (they are usually NOT "accidents") cost everyone US$ Billions and tens of thousands of deaths and injuries each year. If automobile crashes was a disease it would be an issue on the top of the agenda, but it is almost invisible. Plus, every single time anyone tries to do something about it, whether airbags, blackbox recorders, mandatory helmet laws, or this proposal, there is always a small but very vocal minority to rise up and protest that the government is taking away their rights (although I haven't quite found which Article of the Constitution guarantees your right to drive drunk, or without using safety equipment proven to keep your brain in its container, or travel on the public roads at NASCAR speeds?). Please, don't get me wrong; I love cars and I love technology. The latter has made the former SO much better in the past couple decades, but the Luddites living among us think their "rights" to act aggressively stupid superceed the rights of everyone else to preserve their own life and liberty.
I have been around long enough to remember when mere mortals were not allowed near any (mainframe) computers. These days, guys like Bill Gates seem to want to turn the whole world into systems admins. It stinks! Anyone who can turn on a PC without killing themself now THINKS
that "they know all about computers". At least until something breaks or gets hosed up.
I am a very patient person when it comes to technophobes, after all, I spent 20 years trying to explain technology to managers in Fortune 100 companies and the US government. What I don't have any patience for is cheapskates and intellectual know-it-alls who first come to me for (free) advice and then argue with every single thing I advise them. I am currently "downsized" but I have been spending a fair amount of time (especially every time the latest Blaster type conflagration hits) straightening out computer messes.
One neighbor had a several year old PC running a copy of Win/XP/Home that had NEVER been patched, and AV software that had never been installed. It was infected with Blaster AND it had a backlevel version of MSN software which was causing MSN to unplug him every time he tried to connect to do anything. He basically had a non-functional PC. I spent about 40 hours over many sessions getting the PC de-virused, WindowsUpdated, AV software and free XP firewall configured, PC vendor patches, etc, etc. and also patiently trying to GIVE HIM A CLUE. My one request for him to DO ANYTHING was to upgrade his 2002 AV software (about to expire) to a current version including a more robust firewall. I even printed him a coupon and gave him the vendor info on how to do this for exactly what renewing the AV software alone would have cost him. So far it has been 2 months and he hasn't done it. The next time he gets bit he can buy a new computer instead of calling me! Or he can go back to the people who were giving him tech support before (his brother, and his daughter's BABYSITTER) - the ones who left him completely wide open.
Back in 1999 while we were working furiously on preventing Y2K I had adopted a fake career as an "auto-detailer". When "The Big One" virus/worm attack of 9-11 proportions formats all the hard drives of the computer ignorentsia I am going back to being just a "humble auto detailer". Computer professionals get no respect when everyone is an "expert".
I'm going to go even farther than typing in URLs (after all, that won't protect you from keystroke loggers and other mal-ware): From now on I am going to write down all URLs with paper and pencil and send them to my friends via snail-mail.
We used to have a comment on computer system or application designs that relied totally on the stupidity of users for security: "Stupidity does NOT equal Security!".
Gee, health care and Information Technology were SUPPOSED to be the careers for the 21st century!
If you want to leave medicine because you are tired of the long hours, and being constantly on-call, and fighting endless bureaucracy, stupid government regulations, no time to keep up with rapid technological change, and your work (like reading Xrays and lab reports) is rapidly being moved offshore... well forget programming.
I have worked in government IT as both an employee and a contractor. I have also worked in IT jobs in non-profits and in Fortune 50 companies
and they are all lousy. A former IBMer I know used to describe systems work as "blue collar" because of the terrible hours, lousy working conditions, and total lack of respect for IT professionals.
If you want decent pay plus job satisfaction and security (a job that can't be moved offshore) then learn skills useful for home remodeling or automotive repair.
"It's nice being a programmer at one job (no one knows what IT does) and then being the lowest of the low at another job."
After 20 years in IT, "lowest of the low" sounds like a pretty good job description, and "no one IN MANAGEMENT knows what IT does", of course. IT work is blue collar, except you don't get overtime. The hours and working conditions stink and you are treated worse than the guy who cleans the bathrooms (which I have done).
My coldest job: I worked in a jelly factory where they would put me on a truck loading dock washing 5 gallon cans that had been filled with frozen strawberries. We had to stack the washed cans in a tractor trailer and it was January and 0 degrees F. Ice was everywhere and we got soaked really good. THEN the forman would put us outside unloading a railroad freezer boxcar (-20 F) of the filled cans. We would be out there for a couple hours lifting and carrying those cans and it seemed like we never put a dent in the number of cans left in the boxcar.
My hottest job: I worked in a supermarket bakery in the Summer. The oven where they bake that square white bread was about a block long converor belt and open at both ends. At the front end we would load the pans holding 4 family sized loaves, placing lids that looked like metal cafeteria trays over the pans (to keep the bread square). Once the oven was filled we would go around to the back end to remove the now dangerously hot lids and knock out the cooked loaves. The bakery proper was about 120 F, but working at the oven it was over 300 F, so we would shiver when we stepped away into 120 F. It was very easy to get badly burned (most people who had been there a few years had nasty scars up their forearms).
I wouldn't even try to guess what my worst IT job was, but I have worked in government, non-profit, and corporate (Fortune 10) accounts and I have been a contractor and employee Systems Programmer and they were all the pits. I remember one particlar datacenter migration where I drove 100 miles on the Turnpike at 3AM in zero visability fog (all the truck drivers were parked!) but the customer expected me to be there. I always really enjoyed working 24 or more hours in a row and then crawing into my car to drive over 120 miles home in an ice storm or blizzard because my manager would not pay to let me stay over (MY fault: I should have paid out-of-pocket). Perhaps the worst was being a telecommuter for 8 years and the company never supplied me with as much as a modem. Everything that I needed for work came from 1-800-JIMPAYS. This was while we got excuses for raises and the CEO knocked down $200+ million while he laid off 5-10% of the staff each quarter.
I've been laid off now for over a year, and my real blue collar jobs still look a lot better than my IT experience except for the pay, but then I never tried dividing my salary by the 70 to 100 hours a week that I worked. It probably would have been much better to work in a factory and collect overtime - and not be on 24x7 on-call.
To paraphrase Mark Twain (on quitting smoking), "quitting caffeine is easy, I've done it dozens of times".
Several times I have stayed off coffee for a whole year only to get dragged back into the habit either by work demands (being 24x7 Oncall forever will do it), or by the onset of Spring allergy season, when I just could not get moving without caffeine.
The times that I was most successful in quitting for the longest were when I went cold-turkey and they were always when I was already feeling very sick, like with flu or bronchitis (I also have asthma). I decided that since I already felt like crap that it was a convenient time to go through withdrawal. Also, the decongestants and analgesics used to cope with a cold are somewhat helpful in reducing the symptoms of caffeine withdrawal.
I gave up coffee the last time on the day I got laid off (18 months ago), and I had been drinking a half gallon pitcher of coffee every day. I started up again when Spring Fever hit, but I am now drinking "only" 2 to 3 mugs a day.
I'm very sorry to hear about your kidney stones, I have passed dozens of them. I actually switched from tea to coffee due to the high oxalate content of tea (implicated in calcium oxalate stone formation). This may be unfortunate, since I find coffee to be much more addictive than tea. There could be other compounds in coffee which make it more addictive, I don't know.
Best of luck for a healthier 2004 for everyone.
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I usually only buy a completely new system when it's no longer cost effective to upgrade the one I'm currently using and when that system will not run current (supported) software. There are fairly well established price points at around $1K, $2K, and $3K (including service/support contracts for a fully equipped system with monitor, etc.), with the $1K system being sort of entry level and the $3K being the Uber-nerd lust object. I find the middle price point to have a reasonably useful lifespan (thanks in part to being upgradable to bigger drives, more memory), but as with many things, your mileage or requirements may vary.
First of all, the bad guys are BAD and they have no hesitation (like mom) of using a gun against another person, so as soon as mom hesitates - for even a moment - the bad guys will grab the gun and maybe use it on her. Most bad guys are also going to be younger, healthier and more agile than mom.
Secondly, mom may be caught sleeping, or arrive home from shopping to find the bad guys have already found her gun. If they do not already have guns, providing them to bad and/or stupid people is not a good move.
There is at least one case I've read of where a gun shop owner wearing a holstered sidearm got robbed. Professionally trained police officers also get shot - way too often!
My stepfather is a life long hunter who keeps rifles and shotguns (secured in a locked case). On two occasions in the past 30 years my parents homes were burgled and the guns were taken, something which caused worry for both all of us and for the local police (several of whom are family members).
Anything that will harm a thief can harm an innocent like the 3 year old who lives next door and enters the vehicle after you forget to lock the car the first time.
Even if you only harm, but do not kill, a couple of car thieves, what makes you think they will never come back to retaliate once they are let loose? They are criminals and they already know where you live.
Stronger lights and perhaps security cameras backed up with a VCR are a much better idea. You would do much better by getting your mom a dog than a gun for protection. A dog can not be taken from her and used against her like a gun WILL be, and a dog is also very good company for an older person living alone.
We already have had automatic meter readings for a few years. Our downtown is cleaner and safer than many suburbs these days. Our sports teams all have very nice brand new stadiums (and I will leave it at that :-). We have world class cultural resources in music and art. We have the largest urban park system in the US. We are conveniently located in-between the US political capital in Washington DC and the financial capital in NYC and if/when they get the Acela trains running full speed we will be a shorter commute to Manhattan than Brooklyn is. Despite all the history and other important symbols here we have (so far) managed to avoid terror attacks.
P.S. The guy who threw snowballs at Santa is no longer the mayor - he is now the governor of Pennsylvania (did you think California, Texas, and Minnesota were the only states to elect a yahoo guv?).
Sorry, I don't mean to single you out, because you appear to have lots of "real world" experience. When you walk into a situation where their PC is already hosed, where there have already been who knows how many hands in the pot, I agree that the cheapest/fastest solutions are to buy a new PC or format the drive, but in the real world, simple PC users think that we computer savy techs can just wave our magic wand and fix the gremlins. Up front, they will never, ever accept a buy new or format the drive type solution. Some of the posts above are too funny to believe! Imagine, a user who is using a computer older than 6 months, with an OS that is not {insert MY favorite here} JUST because it's worked fine all those years until she listened to the nerds who told her to get broadband (and also told her - for years - that dialup users did not NEED firewalls, etc. etc. etc.).
Average PC users are totally swamped with conflicting technical advice from people and media who "know all about computers", which is the other reason (besides the cost) they usually wind up doing nothing until they have a dead PC! Sure, there is always more than one way to do just about anything, but just check out this thread. The Tower of Electronic Babel! What's a simple computer user to do?
The car analogy is one I often use (installing antivirus/firewall software is like your car's safety inspection or insurance premium). Well fixing a 6 year old PC with Win9x is no different than spending money on a 10 year old car with over 100K miles. When do you repair and when do you replace? Ultimately, it is up to us to lay out the menu of options, but it is up to the owner to decide.
When I got to her place the first thing I saw was a message from Norton Antivirus, "Your virus protection is 1297 days old, you should run LiveUpdate", and I thought of running out the door, but it turned out that some kind tech at AOL had helped her download and apply all the Windows critical patches. I got her Norton upgraded to Internet Security 2004 and surprise, she had NO viruses or anything else.
Most of my other dial-up users have MSN and they ALL got Blaster last year - which is what led each of them to ME!
I'm not saying that this is the typical experience, or that AOL is for everyone, but for people who DON'T want to become SysAdmins maybe their "Internet Appliance" approach is the way to go
Microsoft recently started offering a bounty on virus creators, and this is a good start, but why aren't more resources going into catching these folks? It seems to me that one reason that we get so much of it is that the perpetrators usually get away with it. Why are websites that provide script kiddies with virus writing tools allowed to continue to exist? These folks are like having a crack house on your street.
If the rich and powerful Gates, and other industry leaders like him, don't start going after them soon, then we will get the John Ashcrofts and Orin Hatches of the world trying to do it instead.
An awful lot (pun intended) of the recent Microsft security fixes have been small enough to download with dialup - particularly if you had a fairly current security CD and didn't have to download several years worth!
Of course this solution needs to be thought out carefully. Perhaps display a "user friendly" message including detailed instructions on corrective action(s) needed, and then allow access ONLY to WindowsUpdate and anti-virus vendor sites? This moves the problem from the users to the service providers, where I think more attention needs to be directed!
If you bought a car that turned out to be a lemon you would certainly raise the issues forcefully with both the dealer and the manufacturer, but (perhaps due to slimey stuff like EULAs) we have become accustomed to not only accepting unsafe and badly flawed software and ISP service, we hardly hold the suppliers responsible at all!
I have been out of work as a systems programmer for over two years. Maybe I should band together with a group of my (also un-employed) former IT co-workers to see if, together, we can underbid some guy with a backhoe???
In the long run this hurts the corporation's/government's credibility, when the facts inevitably come out, but it also hurts OUR credibility as computer professionals.
Does anyone remember Y2K? I personally saw LOTS of problems the first week of January 2000 (like going into my local drugstore chain and all their computers were down), and I certainly heard about a lot more through friends in the business, but every single business and government agency that had any Y2K problem tried to keep it quiet, and out of the media. The end result? I hear non-technical people all the time talking about the Y2K "bug" being a total myth or some kind of hoax/fraud, that never happened. I guess I worked all those 70-80 hour weeks for several years upgrading hardware and software multiple times for nothing????
Also, the next time you are stuck in gridlocked traffic because some self-centered type parked illegally and a bus or truck can't make a turn, please spend the time provided to you contemplating your stance on the "oppression" of issuing parking tickets.
That said, I think that these cameras are more stupidity (like the layer after layer of stupidity being added at the airports). As good SysAdmins we all understand that STUPIDITY /= SECURITY.
Interesting article, overall, though.
Last Summer I went for a walk at a nature center near where I live and was shocked that the entire place was covered with a dense carpet of an ornamental bamboo about 6-8" high. This was something which had escaped from somebody's lawn and it had crowded out everything but the trees. Really spooky! The nature center was already struggling against those vines which suffocate all the trees, now they are spending tons of money that would have gone for educational programs on eradicating this new pest. Non-native species have caused lots of problems in the past (lack of biodiversity, crowding out the habitat for birds and animals, etc.). I used to think that the folks who were complaining about Genetically Modified foods were alarmists, but now I wonder about one of these projects getting out of control. (I shudder to think what would be left of the nature center if that bamboo was one of the varieties that grows 20' tall in a year?) Stuff like resistance to disease can also go haywire. What if most of the corn or wheat in the US was replaced by some GM type that later turned out to be susceptible to some kind of blight (many of my ancestors came to America because of the potato Famine!)?
Thanks for that URL!
My next computer will have a DVD writing drive, but I'm still waiting for the standards "winner" to be determined (and still finding enough problems with CD burners and their media. :-) Hopefully, that will be before the DVD's replacement comes along.
About 20 years ago my IBM mainframe Customer Engineer told me, "Everyone keeps saying we need MORE standards, but the problem really is we already have TOO MANY standards". That, unfortunately, seems to describe the state of DVD writers today.
In the past week I have received several different email bounce messages because a couple Hotmail users were/are spoofing my email address in their spamming.
I fully understand that MS is a huge target for ALL this junk (viruses, etc.), but Yahoo appears to police things MUCH better by making it a priority - and of course Yahoo does not have the huge software cash stream that MS has, either!
Sure, the whole world is plastered with American branded products, but almost nothing is MADE in America anymore. (My father-in-law is a very smart guy and very tough minded about buying stuff made here, so finding him a birthday present gets more impossible every year.)
Just because a lot of jobs are already moving offshore that does NOT mean that lots of NEW technology will automagically spring up to employ all the displaced workers here! We are seeing an economic change as disruptive as the Industrial Revolution and most of our politicians understand even less about technology than Al Gore.
Crashes (they are usually NOT "accidents") cost everyone US$ Billions and tens of thousands of deaths and injuries each year. If automobile crashes was a disease it would be an issue on the top of the agenda, but it is almost invisible. Plus, every single time anyone tries to do something about it, whether airbags, blackbox recorders, mandatory helmet laws, or this proposal, there is always a small but very vocal minority to rise up and protest that the government is taking away their rights (although I haven't quite found which Article of the Constitution guarantees your right to drive drunk, or without using safety equipment proven to keep your brain in its container, or travel on the public roads at NASCAR speeds?). Please, don't get me wrong; I love cars and I love technology. The latter has made the former SO much better in the past couple decades, but the Luddites living among us think their "rights" to act aggressively stupid superceed the rights of everyone else to preserve their own life and liberty.
I am a very patient person when it comes to technophobes, after all, I spent 20 years trying to explain technology to managers in Fortune 100 companies and the US government. What I don't have any patience for is cheapskates and intellectual know-it-alls who first come to me for (free) advice and then argue with every single thing I advise them. I am currently "downsized" but I have been spending a fair amount of time (especially every time the latest Blaster type conflagration hits) straightening out computer messes.
One neighbor had a several year old PC running a copy of Win/XP/Home that had NEVER been patched, and AV software that had never been installed. It was infected with Blaster AND it had a backlevel version of MSN software which was causing MSN to unplug him every time he tried to connect to do anything. He basically had a non-functional PC. I spent about 40 hours over many sessions getting the PC de-virused, WindowsUpdated, AV software and free XP firewall configured, PC vendor patches, etc, etc. and also patiently trying to GIVE HIM A CLUE. My one request for him to DO ANYTHING was to upgrade his 2002 AV software (about to expire) to a current version including a more robust firewall. I even printed him a coupon and gave him the vendor info on how to do this for exactly what renewing the AV software alone would have cost him. So far it has been 2 months and he hasn't done it. The next time he gets bit he can buy a new computer instead of calling me! Or he can go back to the people who were giving him tech support before (his brother, and his daughter's BABYSITTER) - the ones who left him completely wide open.
Back in 1999 while we were working furiously on preventing Y2K I had adopted a fake career as an "auto-detailer". When "The Big One" virus/worm attack of 9-11 proportions formats all the hard drives of the computer ignorentsia I am going back to being just a "humble auto detailer". Computer professionals get no respect when everyone is an "expert".
We used to have a comment on computer system or application designs that relied totally on the stupidity of users for security: "Stupidity does NOT equal Security!".
If you want to leave medicine because you are tired of the long hours, and being constantly on-call, and fighting endless bureaucracy, stupid government regulations, no time to keep up with rapid technological change, and your work (like reading Xrays and lab reports) is rapidly being moved offshore... well forget programming.
I have worked in government IT as both an employee and a contractor. I have also worked in IT jobs in non-profits and in Fortune 50 companies and they are all lousy. A former IBMer I know used to describe systems work as "blue collar" because of the terrible hours, lousy working conditions, and total lack of respect for IT professionals.
If you want decent pay plus job satisfaction and security (a job that can't be moved offshore) then learn skills useful for home remodeling or automotive repair.
After 20 years in IT, "lowest of the low" sounds like a pretty good job description, and "no one IN MANAGEMENT knows what IT does", of course. IT work is blue collar, except you don't get overtime. The hours and working conditions stink and you are treated worse than the guy who cleans the bathrooms (which I have done).
My coldest job: I worked in a jelly factory where they would put me on a truck loading dock washing 5 gallon cans that had been filled with frozen strawberries. We had to stack the washed cans in a tractor trailer and it was January and 0 degrees F. Ice was everywhere and we got soaked really good. THEN the forman would put us outside unloading a railroad freezer boxcar (-20 F) of the filled cans. We would be out there for a couple hours lifting and carrying those cans and it seemed like we never put a dent in the number of cans left in the boxcar.
My hottest job: I worked in a supermarket bakery in the Summer. The oven where they bake that square white bread was about a block long converor belt and open at both ends. At the front end we would load the pans holding 4 family sized loaves, placing lids that looked like metal cafeteria trays over the pans (to keep the bread square). Once the oven was filled we would go around to the back end to remove the now dangerously hot lids and knock out the cooked loaves. The bakery proper was about 120 F, but working at the oven it was over 300 F, so we would shiver when we stepped away into 120 F. It was very easy to get badly burned (most people who had been there a few years had nasty scars up their forearms).
I wouldn't even try to guess what my worst IT job was, but I have worked in government, non-profit, and corporate (Fortune 10) accounts and I have been a contractor and employee Systems Programmer and they were all the pits. I remember one particlar datacenter migration where I drove 100 miles on the Turnpike at 3AM in zero visability fog (all the truck drivers were parked!) but the customer expected me to be there. I always really enjoyed working 24 or more hours in a row and then crawing into my car to drive over 120 miles home in an ice storm or blizzard because my manager would not pay to let me stay over (MY fault: I should have paid out-of-pocket). Perhaps the worst was being a telecommuter for 8 years and the company never supplied me with as much as a modem. Everything that I needed for work came from 1-800-JIMPAYS. This was while we got excuses for raises and the CEO knocked down $200+ million while he laid off 5-10% of the staff each quarter.
I've been laid off now for over a year, and my real blue collar jobs still look a lot better than my IT experience except for the pay, but then I never tried dividing my salary by the 70 to 100 hours a week that I worked. It probably would have been much better to work in a factory and collect overtime - and not be on 24x7 on-call.
To paraphrase Mark Twain (on quitting smoking), "quitting caffeine is easy, I've done it dozens of times". Several times I have stayed off coffee for a whole year only to get dragged back into the habit either by work demands (being 24x7 Oncall forever will do it), or by the onset of Spring allergy season, when I just could not get moving without caffeine. The times that I was most successful in quitting for the longest were when I went cold-turkey and they were always when I was already feeling very sick, like with flu or bronchitis (I also have asthma). I decided that since I already felt like crap that it was a convenient time to go through withdrawal. Also, the decongestants and analgesics used to cope with a cold are somewhat helpful in reducing the symptoms of caffeine withdrawal. I gave up coffee the last time on the day I got laid off (18 months ago), and I had been drinking a half gallon pitcher of coffee every day. I started up again when Spring Fever hit, but I am now drinking "only" 2 to 3 mugs a day. I'm very sorry to hear about your kidney stones, I have passed dozens of them. I actually switched from tea to coffee due to the high oxalate content of tea (implicated in calcium oxalate stone formation). This may be unfortunate, since I find coffee to be much more addictive than tea. There could be other compounds in coffee which make it more addictive, I don't know. Best of luck for a healthier 2004 for everyone.