i've always believed that the line is crossed somewhere in the automation of things we are allowed to do individually. you can go to your local register of deeds and get someone's marriage certificate or information on their home (property location, value, previous owners, etc). i don't have an issue with that until it's automated, where you go to a web site and can check on literally anyone you want in half a second. in the former there is a commitment of time and effort involved that would a) dissuade most individuals from abusing the system and b) make the entire process slow enough that any abuse would be limited. in the latter you can literally get information on hundreds of people per hour. i feel it's the same with these automatic tracking devices. having a cop enter a license plate manually when there is probable cause is a LOT different than having a machine attached to his car do it automatically and store the information. just my two cents.
i work at a convention hall...are you sure they're not containing your AP? we don't allow outside managed gear although most people don't realize it until they can't connect to their router five feet away. we have our APs contain any rogue APs to avoid losing $$$ to folks showing up and trying to provide free wifi. most of the convention and exhibit centers we deal with do the same thing. the last thing we want is someone providing unsecure free wifi in the building and then we get blamed for 1) shitty bandwidth 2) mitm attacks 3) bad customer service because there's nothing wrong with our gear when you have an issue with dude in the next booth's cell phone tethered AP.
thanks for this information. i've had this problem on and off all year. it seems to be triggered by turning on airline mode. every time i fly i deal with two or three days of the battery draining like mad, do a system restore and usually a few hard resets before it starts acting normal.
blindfolded moderating. parent shouldn't be modded troll. i've had the same experience and i'll add that i don't like the idea that when i delete a document it's up to some other company to determine how long it continues to exist.
they aren't choosing to buy snake oil. they're choosing to buy a product they think will benefit them, which in fact will in no way benefit them in the means advertised by the manufacturer of that product. a lot of scammy stuff is legal (publisher's clearinghouse) but this guy seems to go way over the line with the deception including overpriced books that are at best full of untruths and at worst medically dangerous.
exactly. i think at&t was being premature to block this. all they ended up getting was bad publicity on something that's so annoying to use regularly that no one will use it regularly. other than using skype via iphone to show relatives how skype works, i haven't used it at all, and not because of 3g restrictions.
i agree. an internship is exactly what you make of it. i've had both IT and non-IT interns work for me and universally i'd rather hire the intern who works hard, asks questions, and realizes that some of the stuff they are doing is menial crap that we all had to do when we started out. you can do your internship just to say you did one (which honestly won't matter to most potential employers that much) or you can really try, ask questions, try to be involved, etc. a lot of the busy work they ask you to do does help, but mostly it's to keep you busy while they work on important stuff. if you show you can be trusted (even just to grab a screwdriver when needed) they'll start bringing you along for fixes, start showing you the ropes, etc. if you pay attention you'll likely be surprised that you can be an asset relatively quickly.
when you're standing in the server room looking over someone's shoulder, pay attention to what they're doing. it's easy to let your mind wander but you might just happen to notice the thing the guy in charge is missing. if you're smart, you'll notice it, let him/her know by asking something like "is that screen configured correctly? i've never done it before", and then reap the benefit of having helped without seeming like a know-it-all. in my experience it's a tight-rope walk at first to be accepted as knowledgable without coming across as someone "dangerous" to everyone else, but if you can be helpful, personable, and willing to spend several months doing gopher stuff you'll be fine. just my 2 cents, your mileage may vary, etc.
i agree with the parent. when usb 2.0 came out, lots of machines came with both. they were usually marked with some non-descript color difference that had no reference so unless you natively remembered "purple outline means usb 2.0" you had to guess or wait for windows to tell you the device would work faster in a usb 2.0 port.
"wii toy" - right, because the other two are deal-making, shuttle launching, techno-heavy pieces of equipment. "hey guys, we better get some xbox360s in here before people stop taking us seriously."
exactly. sure it's frustrating for an implementation of a good idea to take a really long time, but in turn that usually ensures the implementation of a bad idea will be thoroughly vetted and exposed before its adopted (with a few notable exceptions). i'd much rather risk the eternally promised "end of the internet" with the notion that someone would likely provide a fix before it gets to that point than i would risk having some person or company "in charge". we see how far that gets us with basically every other industry - nowhere.
maybe i'm missing something obvious but what other global technology works as well with as little global oversight? it's easier from a "regulation" standpoint for me to email a home video to antarctica than it is to make a phone call to europe. just my 2 cents, ymmv, etc.
i read somewhere james cameron said it was dances with wolves but with aliens. it's what came to my mind when i read the synopsis (dude infiltrates a foreign and somewhat hostile group, falls in love, becomes one of them, is forced to decide whether to betray his former life).
all developers think they could be sysadmins (the inherent problem in dealing with them).
i'm happy to finally be in a position where we don't have any in house developers. in the past ten years, no stereotypable group (technophobes, self-taught-it-experts, etc) has been more frustrating to work with than developers. all they NEED is something to input text and something to compile that text but they end up with $5,000 worth of equipment, countless hours of tech support, and endless perks but they still bitch that they can't work because we won't give them admin access to install twitter apps or "ram booster" software.
why don't you just add rss feeds to your bookmarks toolbar? assuming at least half of the sites you keep open have rss enabled, you could severely decrease your need to have an insane number of tabs open at once.
parent = perfectly stated.
my company is paying for a new web site. the developer does good stuff but didn't realize it needed to be optimized for: IE6, 7, 8, firefox, and basically every other browser someone might use. it also has to fit the specs for blind/handicapped users. 90% of the developer's clients are happy with it being optimized for IE as long as it's somewhat renderable for everything else. doesn't work that way for us for a variety of reasons. he's happy to do it for a renegotiation of the contract (he knows it's not a breeze).
i spent the past week modifying the site's css, html, and js to look and function in a variety of browsers and with a variety of requirements for different types of users. i can absolutely see a use for someone who can do this well, especially in a shop where new sites or additions to current sites come online often.
it's not rocket science but it certainly a skill set greater than it's being made out to be by people who i'm assuming haven't had to do much of it. it's tedious, there are a lot of nuances, trade-offs, tricks, pitfalls, etc.
the problem is that for your $60 and thousands of hours, you've got my $60 and a few hours here and there. how do you translate that to a final price?
i'd rather pay $60 for a "ten hour" game than $60 plus a monthly fee for a "thousand hour game", not to get off the point - it's a function of how much you value the thing vs the value of other things blah blah. it's why, although i'm sure world of warcraft is a great game, there's no way i'd justify spending the money on it plus the monthly fee when i'm only going to play it five hours a month. plus the inherent marriage you enter into with a game that you play against other people (if they play while you don't, they get better, gain experience, etc while you don't).
different (sword) strokes for different folks i guess.
isn't the long and short of it really "why do you care who has the passwords to a place that just fired you?" if my place of employment fired me they can have any password they want. go for it, screw something up, i don't care, i don't work there anymore. his real problem was making the job more than a job. he's only the superhero of the network in his mind.
several people have touched on this, but i'll speak from personal experience: even if you get over the hurdle of them doing their work instead of screwing around, you're alienating your team from the rest of the company. i promise. as soon as everyone else hears that your people are getting stupid non-job-related stuff like that they are going to resent your team and that will trickle down to inter-department performance. i just got done dealing with a year of this at my former place of employment. we hired an interactive manager who took a few months to hire four developers for a web site project. almost immediately he started throwing gobs of money at all sorts of ridiculous stuff his team didn't need but that could "motivate" them. $1,000 chairs, lamps, painting the room red, large monitors, endless food, etc. are some of these arguably motivators/ok for the office? sure, until you realize that the rest of the people in the building had old machines, crt monitors, couldn't get reimbursed for travel appropriately, job cuts, etc. it was nothing but complete resentment that these guys got tons of perks while everyone else had to fill out forms for basic office supplies. i'm not saying it's right of fair, but it absolutely fed into constant disagreement and bad work environment between that team and everyone else. it also gave a heightened sense of entitlement to the development team who were really impossible to deal with. they were given specials perks, they felt special, and they acted like none of the rules of the place applied to them. i'm not implying causation entirely on this, but when i left the project was a year behind schedule. your mileage may vary, my 2 cents, etc, but i'd think long and hard about how what you're giving your folks can impact not only their production within your team but their ability to be productive in the rest of the organization.
you're obviously not in IT administration. lucky for you. again, it's a workplace. if someone wants to talk to their friends i have no domain over that. if someone wants to talk to their friends via an unapproved piece of software, i have domain over that. the potential for viruses, using bandwidth, etc trumps your "oh just let them" attitude. it's like saying everyone should be able to run red lights because a lot of people do it anyway.
case in point - we started getting network notifications that we were using 80% of our allotted bandwidth during the afternoon. this happened several days in a row. turns out someone is sales had pointed everyone to a streaming radio program that they were all using after lunch. they were killing the ability of the other 90 people in the office to do their job. if they want to listen to the radio that's between them and their manager. if they want to do it via my network it's not going to happen without going through the right channels. my original post/point was that the "right channels" often don't understand the ramifications either.
it's exactly that attitude that frustrates those of us who deal with this on a daily basis. you're there to do a job. go do it. installing endless twitter programs and ram boosters and other stuff so you can screw around all day should get you fired. unfortunately it doesn't even get a reprimand from your supervisor because they have no idea why it doesn't belong on a corporate network. i'm the unfortunate schlub who is a sysadmin with a general manager who is completely tech clueless and mandates a more open policy. we have an approved software list, we have users locked down, we address concerns about software and devices, and we have a usage policy that every employee signs but it doesn't matter. the corporate overlords introduced a program for laptops that allows local admin rights for ten minutes in case a user is in the field and needs to access something with elevated rights. that's fine, just stop asking why these machines get reimaged once a month and why the company keeps getting hit with malware and viruses. i can't do my job if the policy is "welcome to the playground".
The way to get karma at slashdot is to comment honestly, rationally, candidly, without rancor, and most of all don't worry about the karma. I get modded "troll" and "flamebait" quite often (despite the fact that I don't, in fact, troll, and try to be calm) but my karma is excellent and I usually metamoderate daily.
it's interesting (+1 interesting) to note that you smell (-1 troll) and tanya anderson, a female human (+1 informative) is dumb (-1 flamebait), however i will note that the riaa could drag this out for years (+1 interesting) and the chicken crossed the road to get to the other side (+1 funny) and the chicken crossed the road to get to the other side (-1 redundant) and i really should have thought this through before posting (+1 insightful).
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i've always believed that the line is crossed somewhere in the automation of things we are allowed to do individually. you can go to your local register of deeds and get someone's marriage certificate or information on their home (property location, value, previous owners, etc). i don't have an issue with that until it's automated, where you go to a web site and can check on literally anyone you want in half a second. in the former there is a commitment of time and effort involved that would a) dissuade most individuals from abusing the system and b) make the entire process slow enough that any abuse would be limited. in the latter you can literally get information on hundreds of people per hour. i feel it's the same with these automatic tracking devices. having a cop enter a license plate manually when there is probable cause is a LOT different than having a machine attached to his car do it automatically and store the information. just my two cents.
i work at a convention hall...are you sure they're not containing your AP? we don't allow outside managed gear although most people don't realize it until they can't connect to their router five feet away. we have our APs contain any rogue APs to avoid losing $$$ to folks showing up and trying to provide free wifi. most of the convention and exhibit centers we deal with do the same thing. the last thing we want is someone providing unsecure free wifi in the building and then we get blamed for 1) shitty bandwidth 2) mitm attacks 3) bad customer service because there's nothing wrong with our gear when you have an issue with dude in the next booth's cell phone tethered AP.
thanks for this information. i've had this problem on and off all year. it seems to be triggered by turning on airline mode. every time i fly i deal with two or three days of the battery draining like mad, do a system restore and usually a few hard resets before it starts acting normal.
blindfolded moderating. parent shouldn't be modded troll. i've had the same experience and i'll add that i don't like the idea that when i delete a document it's up to some other company to determine how long it continues to exist.
they aren't choosing to buy snake oil. they're choosing to buy a product they think will benefit them, which in fact will in no way benefit them in the means advertised by the manufacturer of that product. a lot of scammy stuff is legal (publisher's clearinghouse) but this guy seems to go way over the line with the deception including overpriced books that are at best full of untruths and at worst medically dangerous.
filehippo has an update checker. i've used it for a while and it works well: http://www.filehippo.com/updatechecker/
the universe is awful old to be going through heliopause. it would explain the hot flashes though.
exactly. i think at&t was being premature to block this. all they ended up getting was bad publicity on something that's so annoying to use regularly that no one will use it regularly. other than using skype via iphone to show relatives how skype works, i haven't used it at all, and not because of 3g restrictions.
i agree. an internship is exactly what you make of it. i've had both IT and non-IT interns work for me and universally i'd rather hire the intern who works hard, asks questions, and realizes that some of the stuff they are doing is menial crap that we all had to do when we started out. you can do your internship just to say you did one (which honestly won't matter to most potential employers that much) or you can really try, ask questions, try to be involved, etc. a lot of the busy work they ask you to do does help, but mostly it's to keep you busy while they work on important stuff. if you show you can be trusted (even just to grab a screwdriver when needed) they'll start bringing you along for fixes, start showing you the ropes, etc. if you pay attention you'll likely be surprised that you can be an asset relatively quickly. when you're standing in the server room looking over someone's shoulder, pay attention to what they're doing. it's easy to let your mind wander but you might just happen to notice the thing the guy in charge is missing. if you're smart, you'll notice it, let him/her know by asking something like "is that screen configured correctly? i've never done it before", and then reap the benefit of having helped without seeming like a know-it-all. in my experience it's a tight-rope walk at first to be accepted as knowledgable without coming across as someone "dangerous" to everyone else, but if you can be helpful, personable, and willing to spend several months doing gopher stuff you'll be fine. just my 2 cents, your mileage may vary, etc.
i wonder if each employer did a criminal background check? his next book will be called "why i get stopped at the airport every time i fly".
i agree with the parent. when usb 2.0 came out, lots of machines came with both. they were usually marked with some non-descript color difference that had no reference so unless you natively remembered "purple outline means usb 2.0" you had to guess or wait for windows to tell you the device would work faster in a usb 2.0 port.
"wii toy" - right, because the other two are deal-making, shuttle launching, techno-heavy pieces of equipment. "hey guys, we better get some xbox360s in here before people stop taking us seriously."
exactly. sure it's frustrating for an implementation of a good idea to take a really long time, but in turn that usually ensures the implementation of a bad idea will be thoroughly vetted and exposed before its adopted (with a few notable exceptions). i'd much rather risk the eternally promised "end of the internet" with the notion that someone would likely provide a fix before it gets to that point than i would risk having some person or company "in charge". we see how far that gets us with basically every other industry - nowhere. maybe i'm missing something obvious but what other global technology works as well with as little global oversight? it's easier from a "regulation" standpoint for me to email a home video to antarctica than it is to make a phone call to europe. just my 2 cents, ymmv, etc.
i read somewhere james cameron said it was dances with wolves but with aliens. it's what came to my mind when i read the synopsis (dude infiltrates a foreign and somewhat hostile group, falls in love, becomes one of them, is forced to decide whether to betray his former life).
all developers think they could be sysadmins (the inherent problem in dealing with them). i'm happy to finally be in a position where we don't have any in house developers. in the past ten years, no stereotypable group (technophobes, self-taught-it-experts, etc) has been more frustrating to work with than developers. all they NEED is something to input text and something to compile that text but they end up with $5,000 worth of equipment, countless hours of tech support, and endless perks but they still bitch that they can't work because we won't give them admin access to install twitter apps or "ram booster" software.
why don't you just add rss feeds to your bookmarks toolbar? assuming at least half of the sites you keep open have rss enabled, you could severely decrease your need to have an insane number of tabs open at once.
parent = perfectly stated. my company is paying for a new web site. the developer does good stuff but didn't realize it needed to be optimized for: IE6, 7, 8, firefox, and basically every other browser someone might use. it also has to fit the specs for blind/handicapped users. 90% of the developer's clients are happy with it being optimized for IE as long as it's somewhat renderable for everything else. doesn't work that way for us for a variety of reasons. he's happy to do it for a renegotiation of the contract (he knows it's not a breeze).
i spent the past week modifying the site's css, html, and js to look and function in a variety of browsers and with a variety of requirements for different types of users. i can absolutely see a use for someone who can do this well, especially in a shop where new sites or additions to current sites come online often. it's not rocket science but it certainly a skill set greater than it's being made out to be by people who i'm assuming haven't had to do much of it. it's tedious, there are a lot of nuances, trade-offs, tricks, pitfalls, etc.
the problem is that for your $60 and thousands of hours, you've got my $60 and a few hours here and there. how do you translate that to a final price? i'd rather pay $60 for a "ten hour" game than $60 plus a monthly fee for a "thousand hour game", not to get off the point - it's a function of how much you value the thing vs the value of other things blah blah. it's why, although i'm sure world of warcraft is a great game, there's no way i'd justify spending the money on it plus the monthly fee when i'm only going to play it five hours a month. plus the inherent marriage you enter into with a game that you play against other people (if they play while you don't, they get better, gain experience, etc while you don't). different (sword) strokes for different folks i guess.
the whole thing is riddickulous.
isn't the long and short of it really "why do you care who has the passwords to a place that just fired you?" if my place of employment fired me they can have any password they want. go for it, screw something up, i don't care, i don't work there anymore. his real problem was making the job more than a job. he's only the superhero of the network in his mind.
several people have touched on this, but i'll speak from personal experience: even if you get over the hurdle of them doing their work instead of screwing around, you're alienating your team from the rest of the company. i promise. as soon as everyone else hears that your people are getting stupid non-job-related stuff like that they are going to resent your team and that will trickle down to inter-department performance. i just got done dealing with a year of this at my former place of employment. we hired an interactive manager who took a few months to hire four developers for a web site project. almost immediately he started throwing gobs of money at all sorts of ridiculous stuff his team didn't need but that could "motivate" them. $1,000 chairs, lamps, painting the room red, large monitors, endless food, etc. are some of these arguably motivators/ok for the office? sure, until you realize that the rest of the people in the building had old machines, crt monitors, couldn't get reimbursed for travel appropriately, job cuts, etc. it was nothing but complete resentment that these guys got tons of perks while everyone else had to fill out forms for basic office supplies. i'm not saying it's right of fair, but it absolutely fed into constant disagreement and bad work environment between that team and everyone else. it also gave a heightened sense of entitlement to the development team who were really impossible to deal with. they were given specials perks, they felt special, and they acted like none of the rules of the place applied to them. i'm not implying causation entirely on this, but when i left the project was a year behind schedule. your mileage may vary, my 2 cents, etc, but i'd think long and hard about how what you're giving your folks can impact not only their production within your team but their ability to be productive in the rest of the organization.
you're obviously not in IT administration. lucky for you. again, it's a workplace. if someone wants to talk to their friends i have no domain over that. if someone wants to talk to their friends via an unapproved piece of software, i have domain over that. the potential for viruses, using bandwidth, etc trumps your "oh just let them" attitude. it's like saying everyone should be able to run red lights because a lot of people do it anyway. case in point - we started getting network notifications that we were using 80% of our allotted bandwidth during the afternoon. this happened several days in a row. turns out someone is sales had pointed everyone to a streaming radio program that they were all using after lunch. they were killing the ability of the other 90 people in the office to do their job. if they want to listen to the radio that's between them and their manager. if they want to do it via my network it's not going to happen without going through the right channels. my original post/point was that the "right channels" often don't understand the ramifications either.
it's exactly that attitude that frustrates those of us who deal with this on a daily basis. you're there to do a job. go do it. installing endless twitter programs and ram boosters and other stuff so you can screw around all day should get you fired. unfortunately it doesn't even get a reprimand from your supervisor because they have no idea why it doesn't belong on a corporate network. i'm the unfortunate schlub who is a sysadmin with a general manager who is completely tech clueless and mandates a more open policy. we have an approved software list, we have users locked down, we address concerns about software and devices, and we have a usage policy that every employee signs but it doesn't matter. the corporate overlords introduced a program for laptops that allows local admin rights for ten minutes in case a user is in the field and needs to access something with elevated rights. that's fine, just stop asking why these machines get reimaged once a month and why the company keeps getting hit with malware and viruses. i can't do my job if the policy is "welcome to the playground".
The way to get karma at slashdot is to comment honestly, rationally, candidly, without rancor, and most of all don't worry about the karma. I get modded "troll" and "flamebait" quite often (despite the fact that I don't, in fact, troll, and try to be calm) but my karma is excellent and I usually metamoderate daily.
it's interesting (+1 interesting) to note that you smell (-1 troll) and tanya anderson, a female human (+1 informative) is dumb (-1 flamebait), however i will note that the riaa could drag this out for years (+1 interesting) and the chicken crossed the road to get to the other side (+1 funny) and the chicken crossed the road to get to the other side (-1 redundant) and i really should have thought this through before posting (+1 insightful).
i'm not sure which isle you're referring to, but the mainland isn't necessarily as much a fan.