I watched 10 minutes of it the other night (on accident I swear!) and had to spend another 10 minutes explaining to my wife why I was laughing so hard. They were tracking down some cyber-bad guy (ugh) through the internet and one of the characters stopped working to do the obligatory "I'm going to explain how the internet works to the seasoned tech-illiterate detective who fears technology" part of the episode. He then proceeded to explain how data flows through many points on the internet to get where it needs to go (okay so far). He told the cop that these points are called (I am NOT kidding) "Router-hubs". These router-hubs each keep a "shadow copy" of every document (shut up shut up SHUT UP!) that flows through them for months (what the hell?) and that they could find the document they needed by going to some random data center with one of these router-hubs (it hurts to type that) and getting the shadow copy.
Then they went to some random building start doing things on a computer next to a long row of what appeared to be rack-mounted LED lights. Oh, and there was a smokey haze in the DC for some reason. Probably some atmospheric bullcrap. Anyway this show does have entertainment value, but only if you look at it as a parody.
I live just outside of Provo, UT and I had Comcrap install my internet service about a week after Google announced their fiber service was coming here (I had just moved). I'm not in the service area (dammit) but I asked the Comcast tech about how his office is feeling about it. Basically he said the bosses at the local Comcast office are scared to death. In Provo Comcast started offering cut-rate prices about 2 months after the Google Fiber announcement. My grandparents took their offer of $75/month for 30 Mbps internet, cable TV, and home phone service.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't change careers - but look at the business end of IT in the education market. I work for a large university and I just switched roles from a SysAdmin to a Business Analyst for our Office of IT and I'm 33 years old. I moved from the front-facing tech side of things to where I am basically the interface between the engineers/technicians and the "customers" (deans, departments, students to a much lesser extent). I get the project requirements from the customers and work with the engineers to provide what the customers need. I'm still in IT, but I'm in a position where I'm having a large impact on the infrastructure and our service quality (we have 32k students). Being already in education you'd be at least basically familiar with some of the unique things that occur with licensing, purchasing, etc. We tend to get better/cheaper terms than corporations and individuals. It's a challenge, but it can be a fun challenge. You don't sound like an engineer, but you DO sound like you can at least be conversant with them. Being that translation layer between engineer/normal person can be a lot of fun.
My father-in-law has a very nice Lexus he bought 3 years ago that has a built-in GPS. Unfortunately his GPS has gotten out of date, so he took it to the dealership to ask about getting it updated with new maps. The dealership wanted $800, half of that was labor. Turns out there is NO WAY to update the GPS in his car. They have to open up the dash board and replace the stupid computer. They're not smart enough to have a mechanism to update a built-in GPS - you think they'd do something as logical as OTA updates? Hah!
Oh my gosh...I typed a huge long reply to this and then the comment system ate it.
I have had this happen to me a lot. Enough so that my cousins and some of my friends refer to it as my super power. We saw two different types of lights (same day, different times of day) turn off in a movie theater parking lot as I walked past them, or parked under them.
My original reply was much longer and more detailed than this, but I don't want to retype it.
My father-in-law has a 2009 Lexus RX 350 hybrid and the in-dash system is already showing signs of obsolescence. The most glaring thing is actually the built-in GPS. It doesn't take long for those maps to get out of date and guess what Toyota's solution is to upgrade the maps? Replace the computer. It would cost nearly $2000 to get updated maps loaded into his car. Toyota didn't think to have some simple way of upgrading the mapping data via USB or anything. They have to take the dashboard apart and install a new computer to upgrade the maps. That's just stupid.
Is anyone else amazed by the sheer scale of an operation like that? Not just Foxconn itself (which I know is huge) but the effort and cost of installing 40,000 robots.
Any idea what the small distorted square shape is on the left 1/3 of the screen at 38 seconds? Looks like some unfinished effects work. It moves along with one of the dwarves (dwarfs?).
The university I work for has developed our own home-grown learning management system. The beta is going...so-so and we're supposed to drop-kick Blackboard in 2 months and go wholesale with our own LMS. As a tech I'm somewhat concerned.
Yep. I got my CES badge at the airport 2 years ago. It was really convenient. They had a table setup by the baggage claim. The line stayed short since they generally only had people come up when a plane landed so it kind of went in surges that were mitigated by the time it took to get off the plane. Worked really well.
I work IT in education. The general attitude at the institutions I've worked for has been that if you end up putting in extra time for some reason you can make it up by pulling half days or leaving early without taking vacation time.
Education may not pay the best but the benefits sure are nice. On top of liberal policies, free tuition, and excellent health insurance, I also get 6 weeks vacation time, and 2 weeks sick time each year (and they roll over!).
I'm one of the people that 3D is absolutely painful for (take THAT grammar nazis!). I'm already prone to migraines and the 3D just makes it worse. When I went to see Avatar in 3D I preemptively popped 2 Excedrin and still ended up with a mild headache by the end.
Just give it to Angela on "Bones." She'll just happen to have recently finished writing some program that will figure it out in under an hour based on a grainy picture of the note.
Woah - I had no idea. I always thought the hindu gods were all different (like ancient Greek, Roman, or Egyptian gods). You have taught me something today good sir.
I'm a Mormon and that is the most awesome explanation for the theistic beliefs of different religions I've ever heard.
Although I think the Mormon view would be more like God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit each have their own accounts, but they all play alliance holy paladins on the same server in the same guild.
This is just a "status quo" article. There are occasional spending upticks centered around events (like Y2K) but we typically get our marching orders from the C-level people and are expected to just get it done.
I work for a large university (32k students) and we've got roughly 30 people taking care of about 4,000 computers, 10 important web servers (there are a whole bunch more that no one cares about), Active Directory and Novell Netware (we're in the process of dumping Novell), Groupwise, Magic Service Desk, VMWare, network file storage, multiple POS systems, and a whole bunch of backend stuff that makes all of these systems talk to each other for authentication purposes. That 30 people includes all of our support personnel, network admins, AD admin, programmers, DBA guys, and our email admin. We're also moving from Netware to AD, and from Groupwise to Exchange. If you look at just our desktop support personnel we've got 13 full-time technicians to do desktop level support for 2,000 employees and 32,000 students. We're all looking at this as an opportunity to get good experience to put on the resume and then jump ship for decent money.
Part of that need for maintenance is a need to have good people to do that maintenance. We finally got the school to cough up funding for IT personnel training (we were paying for our own training/certifications), now we just want to get paid more than the high school dropouts working for facilities.
The school where I work has a layer 7 firewall implemented that just blocks all P2P traffic (BT, Kazaa, etc.). If a teacher has a legit/teaching use for it we can unblock it for their IP/computer lab. Yeah, it's annoying since I can't update WoW from work anymore, but it's mostly been a "set it and forget it" solution for us.
How about the fact that there was never really any serious tension? The Star Wars prequels made telling the backstory mildly interesting (Jar Jar Binks not included) even though you knew what was ultimately going to happen. It's not like anyone thought Obi Wan Kenobi wouldn't survive his fight with Anakin at the end of Episode 3.
Caprica had too much existing backstory to deal with. You knew that no matter what happened there would be a decades-long peace with the Cylons and then they would destroy the colonies. They never built up any tension and the show got boring.
I seem to recall Apple getting a lot of flack over the fact that Snow Leopard shipped with an out of date version of Flash. Now they're getting crap for not shipping Flash and encouraging people to download the latest version themselves.
It really depends on what kind of volume you expect to come through your shop. I work for a university where we have an on-campus shop that builds our desktops and it definitely has its ups and downs. One significant problem we have is in build quality we see during summer when our orders ramp up. That's when lab managers across campus plan lab replacements and the problem is that if we don't put our orders in starting in March/April they just can't build fast enough to deliver the machines in time for us to have them installed and setup for fall semester (secondary problem is that they delivered 70 machines to me in June, when I wouldn't be able to put them in place until mid-August, I had to find a place to put 70 full desktops with monitors, mice, etc). The reason the build quality slips is that the shop manager hires extra help during the summer to try and cope with the additional demand. Warranty-wise we're typically okay and we've got about 1,500 of our on-campus built machines deployed.
The other issue we have is that we often can't sit on hardware for too long. Hard drives, processors, and RAM aren't typically a big deal but we have real issues with staying on the same motherboard for more than about 6 months. Hardware gets revved, or something else stupid happens and we can't get the board we've standardized on, then it takes us about 6 weeks if we fast track our testing. Motherboard changes sound like they're not a big deal, but we've gotten boards in that we couldn't image with our imaging software, or other strange issues that are specific to the model (as opposed to a one-off bad motherboard). Also don't forget that you're going to have to start handling your own RMAs versus having Dell do it for you.
So, it's generally worked fairly well, but some of the lab managers (myself included) have sworn off any more mass orders from our on-campus shop. The main reason being that they can't keep up with the demand when we switch out our labs. We're looking at keeping 1 to 10 machine orders on campus, but anything larger than that we might divert to Dell as they have a lower failure rate on the few large orders we have done with them, and their next business day service is straight up better than anything our on-campus shop can hope to match - that's a logistics and manpower issue for them, they just can't respond as quickly to repair requests as our local Dell depot can.
I live in Utah. I have for most of my life. I have never...ever...voted for Orrin Hatch. The man is an idiot. It's gray haired straight part ticket republicans that are keeping him in office. No one under 40 wants him to be reelected yet it keeps happening. He doesn't represent my interests, or the interests of most of his constituency any more. He's bought and paid for by the RIAA/MPAA.
Slashdot Mirror
Call: Let me ask you a question
Me: Click
They had me so excited it was going to be the ones that are calling me twice a day right now. At least it's not the stupid car warranty scam again.
I watched 10 minutes of it the other night (on accident I swear!) and had to spend another 10 minutes explaining to my wife why I was laughing so hard. They were tracking down some cyber-bad guy (ugh) through the internet and one of the characters stopped working to do the obligatory "I'm going to explain how the internet works to the seasoned tech-illiterate detective who fears technology" part of the episode. He then proceeded to explain how data flows through many points on the internet to get where it needs to go (okay so far). He told the cop that these points are called (I am NOT kidding) "Router-hubs". These router-hubs each keep a "shadow copy" of every document (shut up shut up SHUT UP!) that flows through them for months (what the hell?) and that they could find the document they needed by going to some random data center with one of these router-hubs (it hurts to type that) and getting the shadow copy.
Then they went to some random building start doing things on a computer next to a long row of what appeared to be rack-mounted LED lights. Oh, and there was a smokey haze in the DC for some reason. Probably some atmospheric bullcrap. Anyway this show does have entertainment value, but only if you look at it as a parody.
I live just outside of Provo, UT and I had Comcrap install my internet service about a week after Google announced their fiber service was coming here (I had just moved). I'm not in the service area (dammit) but I asked the Comcast tech about how his office is feeling about it. Basically he said the bosses at the local Comcast office are scared to death. In Provo Comcast started offering cut-rate prices about 2 months after the Google Fiber announcement. My grandparents took their offer of $75/month for 30 Mbps internet, cable TV, and home phone service.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't change careers - but look at the business end of IT in the education market. I work for a large university and I just switched roles from a SysAdmin to a Business Analyst for our Office of IT and I'm 33 years old. I moved from the front-facing tech side of things to where I am basically the interface between the engineers/technicians and the "customers" (deans, departments, students to a much lesser extent). I get the project requirements from the customers and work with the engineers to provide what the customers need. I'm still in IT, but I'm in a position where I'm having a large impact on the infrastructure and our service quality (we have 32k students). Being already in education you'd be at least basically familiar with some of the unique things that occur with licensing, purchasing, etc. We tend to get better/cheaper terms than corporations and individuals. It's a challenge, but it can be a fun challenge. You don't sound like an engineer, but you DO sound like you can at least be conversant with them. Being that translation layer between engineer/normal person can be a lot of fun.
My father-in-law has a very nice Lexus he bought 3 years ago that has a built-in GPS. Unfortunately his GPS has gotten out of date, so he took it to the dealership to ask about getting it updated with new maps. The dealership wanted $800, half of that was labor. Turns out there is NO WAY to update the GPS in his car. They have to open up the dash board and replace the stupid computer. They're not smart enough to have a mechanism to update a built-in GPS - you think they'd do something as logical as OTA updates? Hah!
Oh my gosh...I typed a huge long reply to this and then the comment system ate it.
I have had this happen to me a lot. Enough so that my cousins and some of my friends refer to it as my super power. We saw two different types of lights (same day, different times of day) turn off in a movie theater parking lot as I walked past them, or parked under them.
My original reply was much longer and more detailed than this, but I don't want to retype it.
Apple has an app store for Mac OS as well. It uses the same sign-in as the iTunes app store.
My father-in-law has a 2009 Lexus RX 350 hybrid and the in-dash system is already showing signs of obsolescence. The most glaring thing is actually the built-in GPS. It doesn't take long for those maps to get out of date and guess what Toyota's solution is to upgrade the maps? Replace the computer. It would cost nearly $2000 to get updated maps loaded into his car. Toyota didn't think to have some simple way of upgrading the mapping data via USB or anything. They have to take the dashboard apart and install a new computer to upgrade the maps. That's just stupid.
Is anyone else amazed by the sheer scale of an operation like that? Not just Foxconn itself (which I know is huge) but the effort and cost of installing 40,000 robots.
Any idea what the small distorted square shape is on the left 1/3 of the screen at 38 seconds? Looks like some unfinished effects work. It moves along with one of the dwarves (dwarfs?).
The university I work for has developed our own home-grown learning management system. The beta is going...so-so and we're supposed to drop-kick Blackboard in 2 months and go wholesale with our own LMS. As a tech I'm somewhat concerned.
Yep. I got my CES badge at the airport 2 years ago. It was really convenient. They had a table setup by the baggage claim. The line stayed short since they generally only had people come up when a plane landed so it kind of went in surges that were mitigated by the time it took to get off the plane. Worked really well.
I work IT in education. The general attitude at the institutions I've worked for has been that if you end up putting in extra time for some reason you can make it up by pulling half days or leaving early without taking vacation time. Education may not pay the best but the benefits sure are nice. On top of liberal policies, free tuition, and excellent health insurance, I also get 6 weeks vacation time, and 2 weeks sick time each year (and they roll over!).
I'm one of the people that 3D is absolutely painful for (take THAT grammar nazis!). I'm already prone to migraines and the 3D just makes it worse. When I went to see Avatar in 3D I preemptively popped 2 Excedrin and still ended up with a mild headache by the end.
Just give it to Angela on "Bones." She'll just happen to have recently finished writing some program that will figure it out in under an hour based on a grainy picture of the note.
Woah - I had no idea. I always thought the hindu gods were all different (like ancient Greek, Roman, or Egyptian gods). You have taught me something today good sir.
I'm a Mormon and that is the most awesome explanation for the theistic beliefs of different religions I've ever heard.
Although I think the Mormon view would be more like God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit each have their own accounts, but they all play alliance holy paladins on the same server in the same guild.
This is just a "status quo" article. There are occasional spending upticks centered around events (like Y2K) but we typically get our marching orders from the C-level people and are expected to just get it done.
I work for a large university (32k students) and we've got roughly 30 people taking care of about 4,000 computers, 10 important web servers (there are a whole bunch more that no one cares about), Active Directory and Novell Netware (we're in the process of dumping Novell), Groupwise, Magic Service Desk, VMWare, network file storage, multiple POS systems, and a whole bunch of backend stuff that makes all of these systems talk to each other for authentication purposes. That 30 people includes all of our support personnel, network admins, AD admin, programmers, DBA guys, and our email admin. We're also moving from Netware to AD, and from Groupwise to Exchange. If you look at just our desktop support personnel we've got 13 full-time technicians to do desktop level support for 2,000 employees and 32,000 students. We're all looking at this as an opportunity to get good experience to put on the resume and then jump ship for decent money.
Part of that need for maintenance is a need to have good people to do that maintenance. We finally got the school to cough up funding for IT personnel training (we were paying for our own training/certifications), now we just want to get paid more than the high school dropouts working for facilities.
So how does it taste?
At the University I work for no one cares except HR. Most of the time I'm taking off for Christmas is sick time and my boss knows and doesn't care.
The school where I work has a layer 7 firewall implemented that just blocks all P2P traffic (BT, Kazaa, etc.). If a teacher has a legit/teaching use for it we can unblock it for their IP/computer lab. Yeah, it's annoying since I can't update WoW from work anymore, but it's mostly been a "set it and forget it" solution for us.
How about the fact that there was never really any serious tension? The Star Wars prequels made telling the backstory mildly interesting (Jar Jar Binks not included) even though you knew what was ultimately going to happen. It's not like anyone thought Obi Wan Kenobi wouldn't survive his fight with Anakin at the end of Episode 3. Caprica had too much existing backstory to deal with. You knew that no matter what happened there would be a decades-long peace with the Cylons and then they would destroy the colonies. They never built up any tension and the show got boring.
I seem to recall Apple getting a lot of flack over the fact that Snow Leopard shipped with an out of date version of Flash. Now they're getting crap for not shipping Flash and encouraging people to download the latest version themselves.
Pick a complaint already.
It really depends on what kind of volume you expect to come through your shop. I work for a university where we have an on-campus shop that builds our desktops and it definitely has its ups and downs. One significant problem we have is in build quality we see during summer when our orders ramp up. That's when lab managers across campus plan lab replacements and the problem is that if we don't put our orders in starting in March/April they just can't build fast enough to deliver the machines in time for us to have them installed and setup for fall semester (secondary problem is that they delivered 70 machines to me in June, when I wouldn't be able to put them in place until mid-August, I had to find a place to put 70 full desktops with monitors, mice, etc). The reason the build quality slips is that the shop manager hires extra help during the summer to try and cope with the additional demand. Warranty-wise we're typically okay and we've got about 1,500 of our on-campus built machines deployed.
The other issue we have is that we often can't sit on hardware for too long. Hard drives, processors, and RAM aren't typically a big deal but we have real issues with staying on the same motherboard for more than about 6 months. Hardware gets revved, or something else stupid happens and we can't get the board we've standardized on, then it takes us about 6 weeks if we fast track our testing. Motherboard changes sound like they're not a big deal, but we've gotten boards in that we couldn't image with our imaging software, or other strange issues that are specific to the model (as opposed to a one-off bad motherboard). Also don't forget that you're going to have to start handling your own RMAs versus having Dell do it for you.
So, it's generally worked fairly well, but some of the lab managers (myself included) have sworn off any more mass orders from our on-campus shop. The main reason being that they can't keep up with the demand when we switch out our labs. We're looking at keeping 1 to 10 machine orders on campus, but anything larger than that we might divert to Dell as they have a lower failure rate on the few large orders we have done with them, and their next business day service is straight up better than anything our on-campus shop can hope to match - that's a logistics and manpower issue for them, they just can't respond as quickly to repair requests as our local Dell depot can.
I live in Utah. I have for most of my life. I have never...ever...voted for Orrin Hatch. The man is an idiot. It's gray haired straight part ticket republicans that are keeping him in office. No one under 40 wants him to be reelected yet it keeps happening. He doesn't represent my interests, or the interests of most of his constituency any more. He's bought and paid for by the RIAA/MPAA.