Yesterday my manager, a couple coworkers and myself went to the area Microsoft sales office for a demo for System Center Ops Manager. The sales engineer said, "so, are you guys running Vista yet?" We all chuckled a bit, and I told him, "that's as funny as the statement in your literature here that Microsoft supports interoperability."
He stated that he would pose that Microsoft is very into interoperability. "As evidence of that, I'd put forward our partnership with Sun, and our partnership with Novell." He then grinned and said, "but we definitely do not partner with Google!"
I put my hands together and said, "well, that's because they've come to bury you, isn't it?"
He got quiet and didn't have a word to say to me the rest of the afternoon.
I work at an employer with over 20,000 users in this region and everything is passed on by oral tradition. Every few years I have to reverse engineer something or reinvent a couple wheels because someone leaves or gets fired.
I can't say I'm any better. I'm stretched so thin that my documentation for my projects is in the source. No documents, no comments, no nothing. I haven't even had time to set up something for versioning or a simple wiki to throw notes in.
I work for a not-for-profit healthcare organization. This has a few advantages:
1) Our IT department is sort of a black box. We maintain a lot of very esoteric software and systems that are purchased from vendors all over and are interfaced in-house. 2) Our management isn't always technically savvy; in fact, a lot of folks in our IT department isn't technically savvy (because they are often clinicians who moved over to IT to support an application or service here). To that end, they need the more technical people that we have hired. Thus, they lean on us. 3) Priorities change here constantly, so the odds of outsourcing us is small because we can react quickly. I write a lot of software at the last minute to fill a need that requires knowledge of our systems and configurations. Get that from an outsourced team in Bangalore. 4) People will always get sick, so it's not like our customer base will drop off.
What's sad is that it's used against us: we have the velvet handcuffs around here. We get four weeks of vacation (after the 90-day initial trial period of employment), pension and 401k/403b, decent benefits, and if you're really valued you get paid enough that it's hard to leave immediately and find another full-time position that pays as much.
I guess I might end up with a use for speakeasysucks.org after all. Think of the complaints that will be coming!
(Actually, I originally got it because my DSL was down for seven(!) weeks and they'd done very little to get it back up. I got the domain and called and asked them to change the email address on my account. When I told them the domain they asked why I had picked it, and I finally illicited a decent response to my problem.
The problem was, actually, equipment at the ILEC that had been fried in a lightning storm. Once they found it and replaced the card everything magically worked. Nonetheless, I was a little disenchanted with how long it took Speakeasy to resolve the problem. I only stayed because of the geek-friendly policies.)
This has been talked about for a few months, ever since Asus demoed a version like this. You can see a current take on it (with quite a few links) that works in Windows XP here: http://www.makezine.com/extras/41.html
Granted, it's ugly as sin, but it works and gives you space to start working on potential applications and uses for this technology.
They are just hoping that the Maya were right and the world ends on the winter solstice in 2012. That way, there's the off chance that they don't have to make the switch.
We looked in depth at Deep Freeze where I work (a healthcare provider). It wasn't suitable for a number of reasons:
We have a lot of one-of-a-kind apps from vendors that didn't work with it. Sure, you can say if the vendor won't fix it, get another vendor, but tell GE when they hold a lot of patents on something and are the only vendor for something. They have you by the balls and they know it. Same for Ernst and Young with financials apps, etc.
Patching. There's no good way to apply patches via SMS or Altiris with Deep Freeze installed. Sure, you can set a period where you can install them late at night, but being a hospital system, we're a 24/7 shop. You want to take a radiology, emergency room or gamma knife machine down like that?
Whining doctors love to play political games with the staff, including the amateur hackers (er, residents and interns).
Faronics said that this would improve with their enterprise product, but one never materialized. We also tried a solution from Altiris, but it wasn't suitable, either.
We've just come to a point where clinical workstations are standardized and locked down by a GPO. If it's not working right due to whatever reason, we send a field tech out and he blows it away with a fresh image, adds it to the domain and sets up a couple small things. Takes about thirty minutes.
Bless you - I wish I had a whole bucket of mod points for you. I've been upset that I would need to shift off of my Speakeasy connection to a paltry offering of SBC because of this. However, it still makes me worried that Covad and XO will be in their sights next.
How did Speakeasy's test in California using SBC lines go, anyway? If they'd offer 6K/768, that might not be so bad, but from what I heard it was limited to 3K/384 so as not to compete with what SBC was willing to offer.
So, if you work for Microsoft, either you're with them for the rest of your IT professional life or you're unemployed?
Reminds me of the mob. Quentin Tarantino should do a movie rendition of Microserfs, but with a cool soundtrack, more guns and a bald crime bosses... er, corporate exec getting sodomized.
While talking about operating system innovation coming from companies rather than open source, Metcalfe said:
"I'm thinking of investing in a company that sells software, and its competitors are open source. I've been speaking to the company's customers and asking them why they'd buy this software instead of just taking the open source. Their answer: 'We don't want to learn about the software, and we need it serviced and supported, so we're going to buy it from this company instead of taking it free from the open-source community.'"
I work in a healthcare organization's IT department. We have vendors that go out of business or stop offering products we've come to depend on, but then offer an "upgrade" that will cause us to change our entire workflow. Therefore, we make sure we know our systems intimately so we don't get burned. We're largely a Microsoft shop, but I am slowly pushing a bit of open source in there.
I guess there's truth in Mencken's saying, "No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public." I guess that goes for its laziness, too.
I've been there many times, including on the property when we went by while a tour was happening. It's quite a sight to behold, and beautiful in its own right.
That's not been my experience. I and several of my coworkers got two of these monitors each, along with an ATI video card that can support dual monitors. Not one dead monitor, one dead pixel and all are awesome.
The only complaint I have is that one of my monitors is "warmer" in color than the other. That can be adjusted with the onscreen menus, though.
I have Speakeasy DSL service and run servers, consistently use several gigs of transfer a week (sometimes per day), etc. Not a peep from them on my bandwidth usage. They are very cool with consumption of the 'net. They must get some sort of monster volume deal from InterNAP.
It's not always all sugar and cream, though. The one thing that is bad about Speakeasy, though, is some of the front-line tech support folks. For example, I got noise on the voice portion of my phone line and called SBC to take a look at it. SBC fixed that problem by disconnecting my Covad circuit. It took almost seven weeks and escalating the ticket four times to get my DSL back on. The escalations were almost all like pulling teeth, too.
The problem at the end? Splitter card at the CO - SBC didn't want to replace the hardware, and was stonewalling Covad. Granted, this isn't the front-line tech's problem, but some of them are surly and others are outright rude. There are some really good and really knowledgeable guys over there, though - especially Jesse and Mark, who immediately come to mind as really helpful whenever I have to contact Speakeasy.
Also, in Speakeasy's defense, they really went above and beyond the call of duty and never gave up on my problem, even down to putting down some coin to resolve the problem. For instance, they told me I needed a pro install on my circuit before Covad would issue more tickets for techs to work on this issue, and I was about to get upset that I would be out $150 for something I knew wasn't related to the problem. I was told not to worry about it because they were going to pay for it. On top of that, they gave me a month free for each week that it had been down.
Speakeasy took me at my most angry and disgruntled and turned it around to make a customer for life. Although dealing with their front-line tech support at times lives up to its poor reputation, they did the right thing, and continue to do the right thing.
I think it's because they must be geeks at heart. At about the five-and-a-half weeks point of my DSL being down, I told the executive escalations manager I was dealing that I had become Zen with it. "It's okay - there's no rush. I've gotten used to my dialup service again." I think those were fighting words to him, or maybe that gave him a clue that somebody somewhere had really dropped the ball. All the same, it's all good again, and I really love my Speakeasy service.
I simply paused when the line "Under God" was recited while I was in school. I was true to myself, and nobody made a big fuss over it all.
Back then I was an atheist, but I wasn't a hostile atheist who spit on every religious practice that anyone had around me. Live and let live is a good phrase to live by most of the time. (Maybe growing up in the Bible belt had something to do with that, but then again, now I'm a Pagan and living in the Bible belt, so perhaps I'm just a glutton for punishment!)
I noticed the same on my Linksys BEFW11S4. I wasn't humored by this at all.
In the end, I decided to put a static IP that wasn't being used by any devices on my network as the DMZ address. Now all requests from outside to ports 135, 137, 139, 445, etc. are neatly and conveniently routed off to a black hole, as verified by LinkLogger, nmap from outside my network and the occasional glancing at netstat -a or TCPView to check my connections.
Granted, this is a pain if you need to change it for gaming or IRC, but it's better than being owned by the random script kiddie.
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Yesterday my manager, a couple coworkers and myself went to the area Microsoft sales office for a demo for System Center Ops Manager. The sales engineer said, "so, are you guys running Vista yet?" We all chuckled a bit, and I told him, "that's as funny as the statement in your literature here that Microsoft supports interoperability." He stated that he would pose that Microsoft is very into interoperability. "As evidence of that, I'd put forward our partnership with Sun, and our partnership with Novell." He then grinned and said, "but we definitely do not partner with Google!" I put my hands together and said, "well, that's because they've come to bury you, isn't it?" He got quiet and didn't have a word to say to me the rest of the afternoon.
I work at an employer with over 20,000 users in this region and everything is passed on by oral tradition. Every few years I have to reverse engineer something or reinvent a couple wheels because someone leaves or gets fired.
I can't say I'm any better. I'm stretched so thin that my documentation for my projects is in the source. No documents, no comments, no nothing. I haven't even had time to set up something for versioning or a simple wiki to throw notes in.
I work for a not-for-profit healthcare organization. This has a few advantages:
1) Our IT department is sort of a black box. We maintain a lot of very esoteric software and systems that are purchased from vendors all over and are interfaced in-house.
2) Our management isn't always technically savvy; in fact, a lot of folks in our IT department isn't technically savvy (because they are often clinicians who moved over to IT to support an application or service here). To that end, they need the more technical people that we have hired. Thus, they lean on us.
3) Priorities change here constantly, so the odds of outsourcing us is small because we can react quickly. I write a lot of software at the last minute to fill a need that requires knowledge of our systems and configurations. Get that from an outsourced team in Bangalore.
4) People will always get sick, so it's not like our customer base will drop off.
What's sad is that it's used against us: we have the velvet handcuffs around here. We get four weeks of vacation (after the 90-day initial trial period of employment), pension and 401k/403b, decent benefits, and if you're really valued you get paid enough that it's hard to leave immediately and find another full-time position that pays as much.
I guess I might end up with a use for speakeasysucks.org after all. Think of the complaints that will be coming!
(Actually, I originally got it because my DSL was down for seven(!) weeks and they'd done very little to get it back up. I got the domain and called and asked them to change the email address on my account. When I told them the domain they asked why I had picked it, and I finally illicited a decent response to my problem.
The problem was, actually, equipment at the ILEC that had been fried in a lightning storm. Once they found it and replaced the card everything magically worked. Nonetheless, I was a little disenchanted with how long it took Speakeasy to resolve the problem. I only stayed because of the geek-friendly policies.)
I'm sure the Romans didn't forge ring stamps either.
I think breaking well-designed, peer-reviewed, large-key encryption schemes is a little less trivial than making a reverse mask of a wax seal.
This has been talked about for a few months, ever since Asus demoed a version like this. You can see a current take on it (with quite a few links) that works in Windows XP here: http://www.makezine.com/extras/41.html
Granted, it's ugly as sin, but it works and gives you space to start working on potential applications and uses for this technology.
They are just hoping that the Maya were right and the world ends on the winter solstice in 2012. That way, there's the off chance that they don't have to make the switch.
We looked in depth at Deep Freeze where I work (a healthcare provider). It wasn't suitable for a number of reasons:
Faronics said that this would improve with their enterprise product, but one never materialized. We also tried a solution from Altiris, but it wasn't suitable, either.
We've just come to a point where clinical workstations are standardized and locked down by a GPO. If it's not working right due to whatever reason, we send a field tech out and he blows it away with a fresh image, adds it to the domain and sets up a couple small things. Takes about thirty minutes.
Bless you - I wish I had a whole bucket of mod points for you. I've been upset that I would need to shift off of my Speakeasy connection to a paltry offering of SBC because of this. However, it still makes me worried that Covad and XO will be in their sights next.
How did Speakeasy's test in California using SBC lines go, anyway? If they'd offer 6K/768, that might not be so bad, but from what I heard it was limited to 3K/384 so as not to compete with what SBC was willing to offer.
So, if you work for Microsoft, either you're with them for the rest of your IT professional life or you're unemployed?
Reminds me of the mob. Quentin Tarantino should do a movie rendition of Microserfs , but with a cool soundtrack, more guns and a bald crime bosses... er, corporate exec getting sodomized.
...but in Houston, you can cover your house with disposed aluminum beer cans and it's considered outsider art. Sacramento may be flat and have hot weather like we do, but at least we celebrate our eccentrics.
I've been there many times, including on the property when we went by while a tour was happening. It's quite a sight to behold, and beautiful in its own right.
That's not been my experience. I and several of my coworkers got two of these monitors each, along with an ATI video card that can support dual monitors. Not one dead monitor, one dead pixel and all are awesome. The only complaint I have is that one of my monitors is "warmer" in color than the other. That can be adjusted with the onscreen menus, though.
I have Speakeasy DSL service and run servers, consistently use several gigs of transfer a week (sometimes per day), etc. Not a peep from them on my bandwidth usage. They are very cool with consumption of the 'net. They must get some sort of monster volume deal from InterNAP.
It's not always all sugar and cream, though. The one thing that is bad about Speakeasy, though, is some of the front-line tech support folks. For example, I got noise on the voice portion of my phone line and called SBC to take a look at it. SBC fixed that problem by disconnecting my Covad circuit. It took almost seven weeks and escalating the ticket four times to get my DSL back on. The escalations were almost all like pulling teeth, too.
The problem at the end? Splitter card at the CO - SBC didn't want to replace the hardware, and was stonewalling Covad. Granted, this isn't the front-line tech's problem, but some of them are surly and others are outright rude. There are some really good and really knowledgeable guys over there, though - especially Jesse and Mark, who immediately come to mind as really helpful whenever I have to contact Speakeasy.
Also, in Speakeasy's defense, they really went above and beyond the call of duty and never gave up on my problem, even down to putting down some coin to resolve the problem. For instance, they told me I needed a pro install on my circuit before Covad would issue more tickets for techs to work on this issue, and I was about to get upset that I would be out $150 for something I knew wasn't related to the problem. I was told not to worry about it because they were going to pay for it. On top of that, they gave me a month free for each week that it had been down.
Speakeasy took me at my most angry and disgruntled and turned it around to make a customer for life. Although dealing with their front-line tech support at times lives up to its poor reputation, they did the right thing, and continue to do the right thing.
I think it's because they must be geeks at heart. At about the five-and-a-half weeks point of my DSL being down, I told the executive escalations manager I was dealing that I had become Zen with it. "It's okay - there's no rush. I've gotten used to my dialup service again." I think those were fighting words to him, or maybe that gave him a clue that somebody somewhere had really dropped the ball. All the same, it's all good again, and I really love my Speakeasy service.
I simply paused when the line "Under God" was recited while I was in school. I was true to myself, and nobody made a big fuss over it all.
Back then I was an atheist, but I wasn't a hostile atheist who spit on every religious practice that anyone had around me. Live and let live is a good phrase to live by most of the time. (Maybe growing up in the Bible belt had something to do with that, but then again, now I'm a Pagan and living in the Bible belt, so perhaps I'm just a glutton for punishment!)
I noticed the same on my Linksys BEFW11S4. I wasn't humored by this at all.
In the end, I decided to put a static IP that wasn't being used by any devices on my network as the DMZ address. Now all requests from outside to ports 135, 137, 139, 445, etc. are neatly and conveniently routed off to a black hole, as verified by LinkLogger, nmap from outside my network and the occasional glancing at netstat -a or TCPView to check my connections.
Granted, this is a pain if you need to change it for gaming or IRC, but it's better than being owned by the random script kiddie.