Is because I'm now expected to negotiate Bluetooth synchronization and connection issues while operating a medium class machinery through traffic, trying to sound pleasant for the speech activated control system and holding a conversation without saying any key words. I mean, really? This technology saves lives? FFS! Can I just pick 2?!
And I expect we'll be waiting a fair while before the road fatality statistics start recording that the minority of people who insist on operating within the law will be the ones most severely punished by it.
(Note: Law states we can't touch our phone if the gear stick is out of park)
About two years ago I was with a really poor iBurst metro wireless service. The manager of that company was good enough to inform me back then that they did prioritize packets on the network and was even good enough to tell me which ports were more likely to respond faster.
At the end of the day the service was less useful to me than a dial-up account, which, all things considered, actually performed better using gnutella file sharing networks than it did using the wireless for internet access.
So, they way hes discovered these policies may sound a little simple, it makes his findings no less accurate.
well, to be pedantic, which I probably am, light travels at 2/3 the speed of light in water, not faster as Mr. Jedi seems to be suggesting. The denser the material the slower it travels, which is why light appears to bend when it enters water. Co-incidentally it travels about 2/3 the speed of light in copper as well. In air it is much closer to C, which is the speed it travels in a vacuum and is a constant.
Light in air travels a little slower than C also.
I would speculate that if the refractive index were negative light would actually bend back through the materials normal and provide a mirroring effect, sort of like turning a light ray around mid flight.
Ahh, Jar jar binks. Nobody loves you except for me
For some time in my last job I was in the role of hiring technicians being the most experienced technician / Engineer in the company.
I would normally start either with a dumby system or a general scenario relating to the network. I would have them explain the steps they would take to fix it. Normally I would at least expect to hear the words "ping" at some stage. I would like them to check the device manager and the tcp/ip settings.
Next I would have them configure a basic router. I wouldn't give them the IP, since that was the default gateway and they should know how to do this. They might want to turn the wireless on, or check security settings. They wouldn't need to know how to set up a NAT necessarily, or create firewall rules, but the simple ability to log into the router and understand basic networking terminology. 70% of our jobs came down to a network thing
I feel that ANY technician is going to come up against network problems and this is the minimal knowledge they need.
As we charged about $120 per hour to visit sites, so I would normally ask a more personal question too, like "If you went to a customers home who had a significant spyware problem that they required updates to fix, yet the customer only had a dialup connection, what might you advise the customer". This checks their sale skills, and how much they are going to piss off customers as I do find a number of techies to be a bit arrogant, and the last thing you want them to be doing is talking down to your clients. A diplomatic techie can often make up for lousy tech skills.
and trouble shooting - that IS something you can teach.
I have to say that if there was just one Microsoft product that needed patching, IE7 would most certaily be it. I've had numerous clients complain about the absolute incompetency of this browser to do what it is fundamentally made to do - view web pages. Even on my own system I encountered at least one complete crash of IE7 every..single..day that it was installed, not to mention the painfully slow performance of the product.
Granted, I didn't do everything in my power to make it stable - was running on default settings when I knew very well I could turn these off and run with the bare minimum of settings - but just the hastle of going to HP web sites and having the content blocked as potentially malicious code or the way the program can't render slashdot comments properly, or most web sites for that matter. urgh.
It may be secure, but it doesn't do what I would expect a web browser to do - browse the web. And the browser tab functionality lacked the one feature I have come to expect from tabbed browsing - for the browser to remember what pages I was looking at, so that every time it crashed I didn't have to work out what I was up to.
I know this is a big bitch session about the obvious shortcommings of IE7, but come on!! how can you release such an obviously flawed product and neglect to update it a month after its release?
On a side note - since removing IE7 from my machine my notebook will now successfully hybernate again. Coincidence?
We work for many of HPs Outsourced businesses in their datacentre teams (now Global Outsourcing). We see a number of the day to day failures and I can tell you right now that for the majority of the issues we have with software comes from our larger suppliers like SAP, Backup providers, and soft/hardware control issues for industial equipment like automated tape drives.
While Dave Clarke might be correct in that Pure Play applications do incur significant costs in IT, a great deal of that is because many pure play applications seem to sit on their own individual servers which increases maintenance, backup and monitoring needs not to mention more space on the datacentre floor. The software itself is often quite tightly written and the preference definately seems to be that they are Unix based applications which tend to be a lot more reliable.
In addition to this, OS/390 applications and older systems will from time to time necessitate additional boxes to be put in as interpreters to newer software, but that is an inevitible consequence of updating any equipment in your organisation. Its not the propriety software that incurs the cost, its the way its often implemented by lazy IT officers who will pay for more equipment before properly planning product lifecycle and reducting in hardware redundancy
I remember buying my first Episodic game about 5 years ago now. Soul Reaver is probably the first time I experienced an Episodic style game. It was great because instead of paying $70AU for 1 game I paid $65 x 3 for three episodes of the same plot. Well, I would have, except Eidos never made game 3 and I really want to know how it all ended since the game was decidedly one of the more expensive games I have invested in even after only the first two Episodes.
Later I bought Frank Herbert's Dune, another hidden episodic gem. Once again, you don't really get to find out its episodic until after you have bought it at a fairly regular full-game retail price. You play a third of the story from the first Dune book then it ends telling you to buy the follow up components.... which, once again, company never bothered making.
I'm glad game designers have finally realised such a fantastic way to completely rip off the customer. No longer do game companies need to plan through a production, they just produce content while the product is viable and leave the gamer in the cold when the developers decide not to come to the party.
I used to work as a computer technician and towards the end of that job I was givin about a years worth of PC World by one of my clients. I'm not usually into magazines, but I do read a lot about tech.
Anyway, I got nothing out of the magazines I looked at. The information within was rather scant and I found my own experience with a lot of the equipment reviewed proved only that the reviewers weren't spending enough time with the requipment to write very informative reviews (the article I am thinking of in question compared Linksys and Netgear routers with a number of "competing" home or small business devices).
In anycase, I gradually started leaving these magazines at the office of my current job (HP) and all the guys I worked with just started paying the magazines out telling me they are just chocked with ads and no useful information. I ended up throwing the rest of them out because all the guys at work just bitched if they saw them, I didn't want to read them and no one seemed to want to take them off my hands.
Having said all that, the client I got the magazines off I still work for and because he gets them he typically gets an opportunity to talk up to my level when we're deciding on how he is going to grow his home IT and which brand to purchase, so I guess they are good for brand awareness.... but then, so is the junk mail I guess.
I can see the benefit of having online storage. I could put an ass load of movies and mp3s on it and potentially have it streaming to a digital media device if it had sufficient bandwidth. I can't think of any devices like this that I own off the top of my head, but who knows what MS are planning for their "iPod Killer" or whatever it is now.
Forget Capslock, its that stupid shutdown key developers insist on putting on keyboards now that really erks me. Always located in a useless spot on the keyboard (sometimes replacing more practical buttons that have to be moved to accomodate) that always inevitably gets pressed at the least convenient time resulting in all of your work getting lost as the computer arms itself for an unstoppable shutdown. Fantastic. And let me ask you all, is it that much of a convenience for this button to be made available on the keyboard? Do you need to turn your computer off that often? And if so, would you use this stupid key or the big monster button on the front of the computer? Thats what I thought
So until these stupid shutdown/standbye/wakeup keys are removed from designs, all of my keyboards will be missing three keys.
I work at HP in Australia in one of their Data Centres. We run a few large corps networks as well as government departments. The software we use is Clarify and Remedy.
Clarify is a web based version of our customer management tool, but I highly recommend Remedy over this. Purely because Remedy runs in an app window so dealing with a number of queues or jobs simultaneously is a lot easier.
The reason we use these particular programs over more run-of-the-mill Customer relationship management systems is that a lot of the problems logged through our systems are logged by the servers themselves, thus we get error tickets as they happen as well as while customers are calling in with issues.
I feel this article hits the nail on the head. I read the other day that Amazon has just recorded it's first profitable year. Napster 2 is still very new, and its entered during a period where the whole market is still within a state of flux. Audio DRM still lacks consumer confidence and the company is built on a completely new concept. By that I mean they have changed from a free-to-all concept to a pay-per-song model.
And considering age of the new company model, I would be surprised to see profit at all. I would not be counting them out of the game just yet.
This idea completely defies the KISS rule (Keep It Simple, Stupid).
I can see the possible benefits: having a network zeplin flying over iraq could have brought us some really high-quality CNN footage. By the same token, taking extremely expensive, highly delicate, slow moving experimental air equipment into a warzone where the enemy posesses missiles is probably a stupid idea.
This is a cool concept, but I can't fathom how it could be used as a long term set up. At best it could be used as a temporary network suppliment, but the ongoing maintenance, inspection and operation costs would be astronomically high and, ultimately, cost more than running a cable to the area that couldn't connect to broadband in the first place.
having said all that, as someone else pointed out, how many subscriber cells can you fit on one airship?
This to me seems like the ultimate vapor ware concept of humans being able to directly interface with microchip calculators and dictionaries. Promised by scientists for so long and never actually delivered. We will see if this one will break the trend...
I find it amusing that so many features are being packed into mobile phones when, realistically, they are so easy to steal. Wallets are hard to steal because they are only taken out at the point of sale, but people are always waving their mobiles around and losing them.
This to me seems like another case of packing more complexity into the telephone network while making sensitive data more available to thieves.
My boss recently lost his phone (stolen) at an XMAS party of only employees and he has had a really hard time getting back his numbers for overseas business contacts.
Don't get me wrong, I think this is a good idea on principal, but I think before further telephone application development is made, perhaps more effort should be made in integrating telephone retreival with local police authorities in locating stolen telephones... alternatively, like the kind folks at Miribalis eventually realised, that data be stored on the network rather than on the phones so the impact of having a stolen handset is not so devastating to consumers.
Optus Net in Australia had an interesting idea in one of its previous plans. They stated that 'acceptable use' for their users should be 10 times the average download. So, for a given month, any user could download 10 times the average users download on their cable connection before Optus would step in and say "nah ah. Your doin too much downloading". This was basically their premium plan, and it afforded about 8 gb per month. You could check your download percentage (against the average) using a netstat program provided on the Optus Net server.
My friends used this service, downloaded too much and were sent to an interview where they basically had to promise not to do it again and to promise they weren't doing anything illegal.
They were later reconnected. At AU$70 per month this doesn't seem to be a very good deal, but it is an interesting approach at stemming piracy... essentially restricting pirates to around the bandwidth legitmate users.... however if a lot of pirates / high bandwidth legitimate cable users are using your system your profit margin is going to drop dramatically.
You know, its not always so much that companies won't post outside of the US that really makes me confused and angry. Its when they don't explicitly state that they won't do so, so you end up bashing your information into the final credit card and postage page when you realise that they have only given you a list of states for which to send your product to and already they have started on-selling your email address that you were forced to give away on page 1 to two dozen spamming companies.
Its almost like US sites that sell only to the US assume that all people viewing their site are from the US, which is just arrogant. And I think that is one of the real issues here. These sites seem to be pushing their product as an international product, or atleast give no hint of an indication that its only for the special selected few, and give no after thought to the wasted time of international customers.
Its not just a public relations disaster, it is surely a legal loop hole (but then, once again, who is going to pay international fees for such a petty matter)
Slashdot Mirror
'... Shes gone all the way from Suck to Blow!'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXOAc5yt218
I find more and more often Slashdot technology emulates Spaceballs.
--
Do Something! They're getting all their air back!
And the award for the least common use case scenario is Mister Whirly!
Is because I'm now expected to negotiate Bluetooth synchronization and connection issues while operating a medium class machinery through traffic, trying to sound pleasant for the speech activated control system and holding a conversation without saying any key words. I mean, really? This technology saves lives? FFS! Can I just pick 2?! And I expect we'll be waiting a fair while before the road fatality statistics start recording that the minority of people who insist on operating within the law will be the ones most severely punished by it. (Note: Law states we can't touch our phone if the gear stick is out of park)
About two years ago I was with a really poor iBurst metro wireless service. The manager of that company was good enough to inform me back then that they did prioritize packets on the network and was even good enough to tell me which ports were more likely to respond faster. At the end of the day the service was less useful to me than a dial-up account, which, all things considered, actually performed better using gnutella file sharing networks than it did using the wireless for internet access. So, they way hes discovered these policies may sound a little simple, it makes his findings no less accurate.
well, to be pedantic, which I probably am, light travels at 2/3 the speed of light in water, not faster as Mr. Jedi seems to be suggesting. The denser the material the slower it travels, which is why light appears to bend when it enters water. Co-incidentally it travels about 2/3 the speed of light in copper as well. In air it is much closer to C, which is the speed it travels in a vacuum and is a constant. Light in air travels a little slower than C also. I would speculate that if the refractive index were negative light would actually bend back through the materials normal and provide a mirroring effect, sort of like turning a light ray around mid flight. Ahh, Jar jar binks. Nobody loves you except for me
For some time in my last job I was in the role of hiring technicians being the most experienced technician / Engineer in the company. I would normally start either with a dumby system or a general scenario relating to the network. I would have them explain the steps they would take to fix it. Normally I would at least expect to hear the words "ping" at some stage. I would like them to check the device manager and the tcp/ip settings. Next I would have them configure a basic router. I wouldn't give them the IP, since that was the default gateway and they should know how to do this. They might want to turn the wireless on, or check security settings. They wouldn't need to know how to set up a NAT necessarily, or create firewall rules, but the simple ability to log into the router and understand basic networking terminology. 70% of our jobs came down to a network thing I feel that ANY technician is going to come up against network problems and this is the minimal knowledge they need. As we charged about $120 per hour to visit sites, so I would normally ask a more personal question too, like "If you went to a customers home who had a significant spyware problem that they required updates to fix, yet the customer only had a dialup connection, what might you advise the customer". This checks their sale skills, and how much they are going to piss off customers as I do find a number of techies to be a bit arrogant, and the last thing you want them to be doing is talking down to your clients. A diplomatic techie can often make up for lousy tech skills. and trouble shooting - that IS something you can teach.
I have to say that if there was just one Microsoft product that needed patching, IE7 would most certaily be it. I've had numerous clients complain about the absolute incompetency of this browser to do what it is fundamentally made to do - view web pages. Even on my own system I encountered at least one complete crash of IE7 every..single..day that it was installed, not to mention the painfully slow performance of the product. Granted, I didn't do everything in my power to make it stable - was running on default settings when I knew very well I could turn these off and run with the bare minimum of settings - but just the hastle of going to HP web sites and having the content blocked as potentially malicious code or the way the program can't render slashdot comments properly, or most web sites for that matter. urgh. It may be secure, but it doesn't do what I would expect a web browser to do - browse the web. And the browser tab functionality lacked the one feature I have come to expect from tabbed browsing - for the browser to remember what pages I was looking at, so that every time it crashed I didn't have to work out what I was up to. I know this is a big bitch session about the obvious shortcommings of IE7, but come on!! how can you release such an obviously flawed product and neglect to update it a month after its release? On a side note - since removing IE7 from my machine my notebook will now successfully hybernate again. Coincidence?
It seems people in the malware biz know what the best AVs are then. I think we should all take a page from their book.
We work for many of HPs Outsourced businesses in their datacentre teams (now Global Outsourcing). We see a number of the day to day failures and I can tell you right now that for the majority of the issues we have with software comes from our larger suppliers like SAP, Backup providers, and soft/hardware control issues for industial equipment like automated tape drives. While Dave Clarke might be correct in that Pure Play applications do incur significant costs in IT, a great deal of that is because many pure play applications seem to sit on their own individual servers which increases maintenance, backup and monitoring needs not to mention more space on the datacentre floor. The software itself is often quite tightly written and the preference definately seems to be that they are Unix based applications which tend to be a lot more reliable. In addition to this, OS/390 applications and older systems will from time to time necessitate additional boxes to be put in as interpreters to newer software, but that is an inevitible consequence of updating any equipment in your organisation. Its not the propriety software that incurs the cost, its the way its often implemented by lazy IT officers who will pay for more equipment before properly planning product lifecycle and reducting in hardware redundancy
I remember buying my first Episodic game about 5 years ago now. Soul Reaver is probably the first time I experienced an Episodic style game. It was great because instead of paying $70AU for 1 game I paid $65 x 3 for three episodes of the same plot. Well, I would have, except Eidos never made game 3 and I really want to know how it all ended since the game was decidedly one of the more expensive games I have invested in even after only the first two Episodes.
Later I bought Frank Herbert's Dune, another hidden episodic gem. Once again, you don't really get to find out its episodic until after you have bought it at a fairly regular full-game retail price. You play a third of the story from the first Dune book then it ends telling you to buy the follow up components.... which, once again, company never bothered making.
I'm glad game designers have finally realised such a fantastic way to completely rip off the customer. No longer do game companies need to plan through a production, they just produce content while the product is viable and leave the gamer in the cold when the developers decide not to come to the party.
I used to work as a computer technician and towards the end of that job I was givin about a years worth of PC World by one of my clients. I'm not usually into magazines, but I do read a lot about tech.
Anyway, I got nothing out of the magazines I looked at. The information within was rather scant and I found my own experience with a lot of the equipment reviewed proved only that the reviewers weren't spending enough time with the requipment to write very informative reviews (the article I am thinking of in question compared Linksys and Netgear routers with a number of "competing" home or small business devices).
In anycase, I gradually started leaving these magazines at the office of my current job (HP) and all the guys I worked with just started paying the magazines out telling me they are just chocked with ads and no useful information. I ended up throwing the rest of them out because all the guys at work just bitched if they saw them, I didn't want to read them and no one seemed to want to take them off my hands.
Having said all that, the client I got the magazines off I still work for and because he gets them he typically gets an opportunity to talk up to my level when we're deciding on how he is going to grow his home IT and which brand to purchase, so I guess they are good for brand awareness.... but then, so is the junk mail I guess.
I can see the benefit of having online storage. I could put an ass load of movies and mp3s on it and potentially have it streaming to a digital media device if it had sufficient bandwidth. I can't think of any devices like this that I own off the top of my head, but who knows what MS are planning for their "iPod Killer" or whatever it is now.
Forget Capslock, its that stupid shutdown key developers insist on putting on keyboards now that really erks me. Always located in a useless spot on the keyboard (sometimes replacing more practical buttons that have to be moved to accomodate) that always inevitably gets pressed at the least convenient time resulting in all of your work getting lost as the computer arms itself for an unstoppable shutdown. Fantastic. And let me ask you all, is it that much of a convenience for this button to be made available on the keyboard? Do you need to turn your computer off that often? And if so, would you use this stupid key or the big monster button on the front of the computer? Thats what I thought So until these stupid shutdown/standbye/wakeup keys are removed from designs, all of my keyboards will be missing three keys.
I work at HP in Australia in one of their Data Centres. We run a few large corps networks as well as government departments. The software we use is Clarify and Remedy. Clarify is a web based version of our customer management tool, but I highly recommend Remedy over this. Purely because Remedy runs in an app window so dealing with a number of queues or jobs simultaneously is a lot easier. The reason we use these particular programs over more run-of-the-mill Customer relationship management systems is that a lot of the problems logged through our systems are logged by the servers themselves, thus we get error tickets as they happen as well as while customers are calling in with issues.
I feel this article hits the nail on the head. I read the other day that Amazon has just recorded it's first profitable year. Napster 2 is still very new, and its entered during a period where the whole market is still within a state of flux. Audio DRM still lacks consumer confidence and the company is built on a completely new concept. By that I mean they have changed from a free-to-all concept to a pay-per-song model. And considering age of the new company model, I would be surprised to see profit at all. I would not be counting them out of the game just yet.
This idea completely defies the KISS rule (Keep It Simple, Stupid). I can see the possible benefits: having a network zeplin flying over iraq could have brought us some really high-quality CNN footage. By the same token, taking extremely expensive, highly delicate, slow moving experimental air equipment into a warzone where the enemy posesses missiles is probably a stupid idea. This is a cool concept, but I can't fathom how it could be used as a long term set up. At best it could be used as a temporary network suppliment, but the ongoing maintenance, inspection and operation costs would be astronomically high and, ultimately, cost more than running a cable to the area that couldn't connect to broadband in the first place. having said all that, as someone else pointed out, how many subscriber cells can you fit on one airship?
This to me seems like the ultimate vapor ware concept of humans being able to directly interface with microchip calculators and dictionaries. Promised by scientists for so long and never actually delivered. We will see if this one will break the trend...
I find it amusing that so many features are being packed into mobile phones when, realistically, they are so easy to steal. Wallets are hard to steal because they are only taken out at the point of sale, but people are always waving their mobiles around and losing them. This to me seems like another case of packing more complexity into the telephone network while making sensitive data more available to thieves. My boss recently lost his phone (stolen) at an XMAS party of only employees and he has had a really hard time getting back his numbers for overseas business contacts. Don't get me wrong, I think this is a good idea on principal, but I think before further telephone application development is made, perhaps more effort should be made in integrating telephone retreival with local police authorities in locating stolen telephones... alternatively, like the kind folks at Miribalis eventually realised, that data be stored on the network rather than on the phones so the impact of having a stolen handset is not so devastating to consumers.
Optus Net in Australia had an interesting idea in one of its previous plans. They stated that 'acceptable use' for their users should be 10 times the average download. So, for a given month, any user could download 10 times the average users download on their cable connection before Optus would step in and say "nah ah. Your doin too much downloading". This was basically their premium plan, and it afforded about 8 gb per month. You could check your download percentage (against the average) using a netstat program provided on the Optus Net server. My friends used this service, downloaded too much and were sent to an interview where they basically had to promise not to do it again and to promise they weren't doing anything illegal. They were later reconnected. At AU$70 per month this doesn't seem to be a very good deal, but it is an interesting approach at stemming piracy... essentially restricting pirates to around the bandwidth legitmate users.... however if a lot of pirates / high bandwidth legitimate cable users are using your system your profit margin is going to drop dramatically.
You know, its not always so much that companies won't post outside of the US that really makes me confused and angry. Its when they don't explicitly state that they won't do so, so you end up bashing your information into the final credit card and postage page when you realise that they have only given you a list of states for which to send your product to and already they have started on-selling your email address that you were forced to give away on page 1 to two dozen spamming companies.
Its almost like US sites that sell only to the US assume that all people viewing their site are from the US, which is just arrogant. And I think that is one of the real issues here. These sites seem to be pushing their product as an international product, or atleast give no hint of an indication that its only for the special selected few, and give no after thought to the wasted time of international customers.
Its not just a public relations disaster, it is surely a legal loop hole (but then, once again, who is going to pay international fees for such a petty matter)