I work in IT (sys admin), having spent a bit of time in the military. Military experience is certainly no stone-cold guarantee that you've got a quality person on your hands, but it does increase the probability significantly. Technical skills aside, the military tends to instill a fairly healthy amount of discipline, teamwork, and the ability to think/act under pressure. As my Dad puts it (formerly in the military for 12 years) - the ability to think and chew bubble gum at the same time.
You can have shitty people in the military, too, but the military is generally not an environment that lends itself to extreme incompitence, advancement out of nepotism, etc.
If I'm looking at a pile of resumes or interviewing candidates, I generally assume that if someone has military experience, they won't have too many issues coming in late, being poorly dressed, being disrespectful to team mates, etc.
Although VMware made no new friends with their v5 licensing debacle, they're still the undisputed technological king-of-the-hill. Microsoft, Citrix, and KVM are slowly catching up, but they're still a ways off on many fronts (DRS, storage DRS, HA, etc). Hyper V (R2 SP1) is just now adding overcommit - a technology that's been in vSphere for years..
Most big entireprise clients are leaving VMware for licensing and cost reasons, not technological. Microsoft is not a small player, so when you can save hundreds of thousands a year of licensing costs for a product that does more or less the same thing (minus the higher end features), there's a compelling arguement to be had. Not to mention, with the v5 licensing debacle, many customers are having to shell out big $$ just to upgrade. VMware softened the blow by re-tooling the licensing after community outrage, but they're still very expensive.
Keep in mind that with the advent of the interweb and social media, people can be a lot more vocal a lot easier. Suppose Apple sells a million iPhones in the first couple weeks worldwide, and half a percent of people are having an issue with something. That's 5000 angry people, whom a good proportion of which are going to jump on internet forums and such. The end result is that you get a couple of very busy forums and tech sites with angry customers, but the reality is it might not be a very big issue, or an issue at all.
I do think Apple is pretty responsive, though. Yes, they're a big corporate giant, but yes, I do sincerely believe someone at Apple gives a shit. That's partly what makes Apple... Apple. Look at Antennagate - they admitted to this issue fairly promptly (within a month), and ultimately ponied up to make a reasonble resolution. Short of a class action lawsuit, they're not really obligated to do much at all. Caveat emptor. There's no law that says you can't sell a shitty product.
From what I could see, the Good management suite does it by sandboxing everything into a separate app. So you then have a separate app for mail/calendar/contacts, etc. Although I suppose there's arguments on both sides of the fence for doing it this way, I think this is kind-of a step backwards. Everything is going towards a convergence model, where you have a unified inbox/contacts/calendar app for all your accounts, personal, work, and otherwise. Palm was the first big innovator with this with WebOS, followed by Windows Phone (mostly 7.5) and iOS 4 and 5. When I book an appointment, I don't want to check 2 or 3 or 4 calendars.
All you really need is a way of purging the device of corporate data, which may or may not mean wiping the whole device. Many companies already manage this (including my own) - if you want to hook in your (personal) phone into the corporate systems, you have to acknowledge it will get wiped when you leave. Simple as that. If it's a corporate device, it gets wiped regardless. The whole point is being able to securly wipe the corporate data at will.
RIM is still making money, and the one big factor that everyone seems to forget - BES. Nobody else even comes close to being able to offer companies the level of fine-grained administrative control over their companies devices as to RIM through BES. I work for a public company and whenever the discussion about phones comes up, one of the first questions is how one is supposed to remotely administer, control, and if needed, wipe the phones. The discussion pretty much starts and stops with BES. I'd love nothing more than to use an iPhone, but what am I going to do, install iTunes on every corporate PC? Have each user individually sign up for a 'find my iphone' account? No. With with an OSX Server (running on Apple's official server hardware - a Mac Mini), iPhone control leaves a lot to be desired.
BES is still a HUGE hook for businesses. I know Apple and Google boast that a lot of fortune 500 companies use iPhones/Androids, but until they can demonstrate their business compatibility (ala not having to install iTunes on every corporate machine, being able to centrally restrict apps, etc), RIM is still going to own a huge chunk of the corporate pie.
And when I say I'd love to be using an iPhone (or Android) - I'm serious. I use a new Bold 9900, and I think it's a POS. It can't even smoothly play the HD video that it recorded, despite it's crystal HD engine or whatever they call it. The browser reminds me of IE5. Hotlinks and the ability to click on them is still a fairly new, radical concept.
HP has always had extremely poor support at the consumer level, IMO. I remember about 10 years ago I wanted to buy a replacement Li-Ion battery for the OEM NiMH that came with my HP. With credit card and HP part number and SKU in hand, I called the HP store. I was transferred to literally 5 different people before I just gave up. I never did get a new battery, living with the ~40 minute degraded life of the NiMH for the next couple months.
I've had great success with their printers, though. I still think at the mid-to-high business end, they're very solid machines. I recently worked at an office that used Ricoh's, and never again with I touch Ricoh printers. They can't even get simply LDAP right...
I have a new BB (9900) with OS7 (via. work) and have been completely underwhelmed by it. OS7 is really just OS6.1, and OS6 was more like 5.1, which was more like a 4.8 in real functionality. It feels like Windows 98 with a Windows 7 skin on top of it.
The web browser is a massive improvement, luckily, but I still find myself frustrated by it. Clicking on simple links doesn't work half the time, and I now fondly look back to my browsing experience on my iPhone 3G, a now 3 year old phone, and how it never faultered nearly as much as OS7. The app store is still more or less a joke compared to even android marketplace, and nowhere near Apple's App Store. RIM may be able to tout reasonable numbers of apps, but 95% of them are usually junk apps with very limited functionality. Not that I download many apps, seeing as a 2MB download takes about 2 minutes (and I have excellent coverage).
Even with a 1.2 GHz proc, the phone still stutters and lags, and in general, feels dated. It can't even play back HD video captured by its own camera without stuttering, despite it's new 'crystal hd' rendering engine, or whatever the hell it's called.
It's functional, it works, and gets stuff done, so I suppose I can't complain (except for today's outage, which I'm a part of). I'd easily prefer an android or IOS device, though.
As a sysadmin. I've been in this situation a couple times over the past 6-7 years. Usually working for smaller companies (less then 500 people), after 2-3 years, it's not terribly difficult for me to find a job somewhere else that pays high-4 or low-5 figures more.
I've always leaned on the side of moving to make more. I'm not the type of person to blindly chase $$, but when it gets into the high four figure (or low 5 figure) point, it's tough not to say no. That;s not to say I jump on any old position that comes by, I still make my moves carefully... The way I see it, it's just too much money to give up. Unless I was working for immediate family (which I never have, not even distant family), the feeling of guilt of leaving the place usually subsides very quickly. If they can't keep up with market rate for my position, tough beans for them.
Most people I know don't even know what the touchpad is/was. I would honestly say HP didn't so a very good job marketing this thing, because it was just a whole lot of *shrugs shoulders*. Most people didn't even know what the Pre was, or that Palm was even a player in the market for the past 5 years. Tech saavy people know what's up, but the other 95% of the population never put much thought into palm post early-2000's. Palm's pre-Pre devices (no oun intended) were pretty much for the power user set.
It's too bad, really. The touchpas I thought was a great device.
AMD has usually been ahead of Intel?? At the low-end price-point maybe. For under $100, AMD has usually offered the more competitive options. But rarely has AMD really been ahead of intel in any other market segment.
The Athlon XP was more or less on par with the P4, P4A, and P4B. I bought into AMDs architecture at the time because it was a bit more bang for the buck, and excellent companion chipsets for gamers and enthusiasts (nForce and nForce 2). They couldn't stand up top the P4C's, so in comes the Athlon64. The Athlon64 compared to the later P4's / PD's were indeed competitive. Hence, AMD did really well during this time, and most would argue this was really the only time when AMD was truly "ahead" of intel. Their financials reflected as much.
Post-core has been another story. Since Core2 (Conroe), Intel has pretty much dominated. The only times I really see AMD doing well is, again, the low price point segment. This is partially because they always shove another core in, so 3-core chips end up getting compared to 2-core chips.
AMD is certainly competitive, always has been... They've often offered slightly better bang for the buck, but saying AMD has 'usually' been ahead of intel is a big, big strech.
The discussions seem to be pretty biased towards coding. In the sysadmin side of things, I don't tend to see a ton of age bias. Where I do see it is where you get 50-somethings who are applying to be sysadmins, but because they moved career's 5 or 10 years ago from something completely different. But otherwise, a late-40's or 50's sysadmin is usually in a pretty senior position, because they usually have a lot of root experience. I see a TON of older people when I do various training courses. They're excellent teachers simply because they have so much experience and can bring so much depth to the course.
But I'm not a coder, so I can't comment to the coding side of things.
I'm just really, really surprised that the world's #1 terrorist would be stupid enough not to implement basic encryption. It's always funny how you see otherwise very intelligent people who do all sorts of shady stuff on a computer, and end up not using some sort of encryption. But then again, shows like 24 show the public that any good analyst can bypass it in a few seconds, so it's all useless anyway.
Keep in mind that Windows 7 (and Vista) in HAL independent, and installs with Windows' new WIM imaging. This means that you can have 1 master Windows 7 image, and it will install onto ANY hardware. It's not like the "old" XP days where you needed 17 images for 17 different boxes. You can now effectively have 1 master Win7 for your entire environment, regardless of how many different kinds of hardware you have. Microsoft also has a lot of good, reasonably easy to use tools to easily maintain these.wim images. It's really easy to inject drivers into the.wim images as well, without the need for 3rd party tools (like nLite).
Down the road, as new desktops and laptops come on board, all you really have to to is update the single master image with drivers for the new box, which is usually a single download and about 5 CLI entries (on Microsoft's deployment CLI toolkit).
Don't overlook Windows 7's deployment and built-in imaging features. All of the pains of drivers and imaging from the XP days are reduced by about 98% with Windows Vista and 7.
I don't really give a hoot about @aol.com (but it still sounds a little funny). But e-mail, just like any outward facing part of yourself, makes up part of your image. I'm going to be less likely to have a positive first image from someone if I get a resume in my inbox from trew_gangsta_47@domain.com or latino_heat_69. C'mon, let's me reasonable here folks. It still surprises me the amount of resume emails I see from these kinds of addresses (I'm not joking).
For nothing other than resumes, you would think people would get a bit more normal gmail or hotmail address.
Granted, we don't know how 'bad' or negative the action in question was, but here's my thoughts based on my experience...
People aren't supposed to discriminate during interviews if it's not 'theoretically' relevant, but the reality is that it happens. But more importantly to you, do you really want to work somewhere where they're judging you with such shallow naivety? Me - not so much. I've turned down a few positions and not returned for second interviews over the years purely because the impression I got from the company was one that I felt I didn't want to associate with in the long term.
The technical reality is that you may never be able to fully clean up something that makes its way onto the internet. You can obviously try to hunt things down to the best of your ability, though. That said, reputation can be powerful, but you can always put on the best face in front of a potential employer. People make mistakes, everyone knows this. But if I'm interviewing someone, I'm not going to care so much about the mistake, instead I'm going to look for how maturely you explain and carry yourself during the rest of the interview.
Agreed. The home automation field seems to have many of the same issues as Linux and many FOSS projects - too many small players and not enough industry-wide standardization and focus. As the OP points out, there's tons of options out there, all with their own major issues and problems. Crestron and AMX are the two big players out there, but they're not cheap, and far from open.
I know Microsoft is often poked at, especially around these parts, for having so many vulnerabilities to patch, but at least there on the ball doing it. Not to mention, automatic updating has been the defacto standard now since XPSP2, so nowadays it's pretty hard not to be somewhat up to date. So my OS pulls down a batch of updates once or twice a month, big deal... I think Microsoft has done a good job with the hand of cards they've been dealt.
Not to mention, WSUS in the enterprise is an excellent, free tool for centrally managing patch deployment.
Number of patches and vulnerabilities aside, I think MS is a standout leader in this category.
This debate always seems to come up somewhere every few months.
'...You need to write at least 7 times because of minute, traceable EM signals'. OK, fine, prove it. I have searched this topic to death and never have I found someone who was able to recover ANY data after 1 wipe, let alone 3.
If I had the money, I'd personally post a $1M USD bounty to whoever could recover a single file from a drive autonuked (3 passes) with DBAN. All this talk, nobody's ever done it.
Encryption is pretty much as good if done properly. Currently, if you had the worlds top 1000 supercomputers at your personal disposal, it would take millions of quadrillions of years to crack a 128bit key, and that's if you got extremely and cracked the key very early.
Wipe it or encrypt it, or show us that you can crack or read it.
This is a pretty open ended question. A lot of it depends on the kind of company, the kind of work you do, types of users, etc. This kind of transition would pose very different challenges for a 20 person company versus a 200 or 2000 person office. I've seen small companies who run the entire business out of Access and Excel, so switching from these programs would bring things to a griding halt. I've seen big companies where the excel users / accountants would stage a revolt, most likely resulting in your death. It really depends on the kind of company and the kind of users.
I always like to look at the 'Why' factor, both positively and negatively. Why are you bothering? What is it about Office that's making you consider alternatives?
As expensive as Office is, I do think it's a solid piece of software. Every case is different, but cost aside I would question the need to move to OO.o in many cases. Maybe cost is a big thing for you, I don't know. I think the roughly $350 expense every 3-6 years is bearable and justifiable in most cases, but that's just me.
MS propaganda aside, you do have to do some evaluations as to the cost/benefit of the solution. I'm a Linux/FOSS fan as much as the next guy, but I've been involved in cases where it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense or the cost savings are often negated.
They have the most comprehensive benchmarks and NAS's around (that I've stumbled across, at least). Also, lots of good tests showing various things like Jumbo frames, etc. Very good overall.
I frequent the site a bit, and there's a couple tricks to getting good performance out of a NAS, or LAN throughput in general.
1. Use Jumbo Frames, period.
2. Use PCI-e NIC's, onboard or PCI just can't deliver the speeds offered by GigE. You can find smiple intel PCI-e nics for under $20.
3. Drives make a big difference, obviously.
These I learned in the military...
Probably one of, if not the biggest things to do - Lead by Example. There's no better way to shred your credibility and reputation for barking at someone for coming in a bit late, if you come in late all the time.
Secondly, always check up on your people. It's amazingly simple to do, but it's almost a bygone in the modern corporate world. No matter how busy your month, take a good 5 or 10 minutes with each member of your team as ask them how everything's going, what some of there frustrations are, what are some things they may need. It's amazing how good a roadmap you get when you just sit an listen.
Communicate - both ways. Encourge input from your team, but dont be afraid to send some the other way. If someone's doing something you like, or not doing something, say so. Probably my biggest personal pet peeve is non-confrontational managers who basically shotgun-blast you with their little annoyances once a year at your performance review. Your team doesn't necessarily have to know where your at every second of every day, but it's always good to provide some high-level status updates. Take a few minutes out of your schedule to update the team.
Recognize good performance, but don't be overly cheesy about it. Taking a minute to walk into an office and say 'I really appreciate the effort you put in last week to meet the deadline, Jim' will often mean a lot. It means even more in person, rather than email.
I could go on, but really a lot of it is pretty straight forward. You people should want to work hard for you and want to impress you, and good leadership shows when they do. Treat you team members as professionals with respect and how you would like to be treated.
Good post, good points.
Age doesn't necessarily mean everything. Like anything else in life, the guy with 20 years experience might know a bunch, but might also be a total fop. I've seen 'old' experiences guys show just as much arrogance and, quite frankly, inexperience as younger people.
I make similar arguments for this amongst my peers when the whole 'do certifications matter' debate comes up. You can have a guy who's early 20's, tons of certs, but very little real world experience, and might have trouble solving real world problems or creating real world solutions. But like the Wolfguru says, you can have a guy with 2 years experience 10 times over.
You have to find a happy middleground when looking for experienced IT people. Ask a couple technical questions, present a few hypothetical situations.
...Just recently where they're timing Dwight, and every time he sneezes or looks away from his desk they start a stopwatch, threatenting to report his 'time theft' to management. Gold.
But seriously, this is a giant load of crap, and it surprises me that employers actually [try to] get away with this. Positions or careers that are paid on a job or comission basis - fine. I used to work commissioned sales way back and we were in the store usually an hour or two before it opened - not paid a dime. But for most other positions, this is laughable.
On both sides of the employee/employer table, I always say it's give and take. If one party nickle-dime's the other, it will always end up reciprocating. If an employer were to nickle dime me like this, then I don't touch my email, blackberry, or whatever after 5:00:00PM, no matter how dire. What goes around comes around.
The reality is there are companies who will get away with this. And in a loose job market where there's plenty of supply, especially at the lower end of the spectrum, people will get away with this, fact of life. Up here in Canada, the job markets are relatively tight, especially in western canada where there's massive shortages, so an employer would never bother trying a stunt like this. Even at the retail level, it's really tough to replace people, so this would never happen. If anything, the employees can take advantage of the employers. Local coffee shops are paying high school kids here $17/hr at Tim hortons. You can fairly easily find work for $20/hr. Advantages of a job-seekers market I guess. Come work up here, god knows we can use it. Entry level help-desk pays even $21-$23/hr at most of the major ISP's.
You're absolutely right. AES just takes a bit of time, too. Let's see, with the world's top 1000 supercomputers at your perminant, personal disposal, you could easily crack a 128bit AES key in oh... only a couple thousand-quadrillion years (literally). And that's if you get lucky.
Let's be realistic here, it would be easier to just break into the house and steal the computer.
For the record, that WPA 'crack' isn't all it's cracked up to be (no pun intended). It's very ingenious, taking advantage of several protocols' vulnerabilities, but it's pretty limited. It's not as though it lets you out right snoop the end to end traffic. From the looks of it, it only takes advantage of a few short, predictable packet transmissions and allows spoofing or injection of certain packets if certain protocols are in use on the network (i.e..1Q). Pretty much a non-event for home-users. Business can easily circumvent.
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I work in IT (sys admin), having spent a bit of time in the military. Military experience is certainly no stone-cold guarantee that you've got a quality person on your hands, but it does increase the probability significantly. Technical skills aside, the military tends to instill a fairly healthy amount of discipline, teamwork, and the ability to think/act under pressure. As my Dad puts it (formerly in the military for 12 years) - the ability to think and chew bubble gum at the same time.
You can have shitty people in the military, too, but the military is generally not an environment that lends itself to extreme incompitence, advancement out of nepotism, etc.
If I'm looking at a pile of resumes or interviewing candidates, I generally assume that if someone has military experience, they won't have too many issues coming in late, being poorly dressed, being disrespectful to team mates, etc.
Although VMware made no new friends with their v5 licensing debacle, they're still the undisputed technological king-of-the-hill. Microsoft, Citrix, and KVM are slowly catching up, but they're still a ways off on many fronts (DRS, storage DRS, HA, etc). Hyper V (R2 SP1) is just now adding overcommit - a technology that's been in vSphere for years..
Most big entireprise clients are leaving VMware for licensing and cost reasons, not technological. Microsoft is not a small player, so when you can save hundreds of thousands a year of licensing costs for a product that does more or less the same thing (minus the higher end features), there's a compelling arguement to be had. Not to mention, with the v5 licensing debacle, many customers are having to shell out big $$ just to upgrade. VMware softened the blow by re-tooling the licensing after community outrage, but they're still very expensive.
Keep in mind that with the advent of the interweb and social media, people can be a lot more vocal a lot easier. Suppose Apple sells a million iPhones in the first couple weeks worldwide, and half a percent of people are having an issue with something. That's 5000 angry people, whom a good proportion of which are going to jump on internet forums and such. The end result is that you get a couple of very busy forums and tech sites with angry customers, but the reality is it might not be a very big issue, or an issue at all.
I do think Apple is pretty responsive, though. Yes, they're a big corporate giant, but yes, I do sincerely believe someone at Apple gives a shit. That's partly what makes Apple... Apple. Look at Antennagate - they admitted to this issue fairly promptly (within a month), and ultimately ponied up to make a reasonble resolution. Short of a class action lawsuit, they're not really obligated to do much at all. Caveat emptor. There's no law that says you can't sell a shitty product.
From what I could see, the Good management suite does it by sandboxing everything into a separate app. So you then have a separate app for mail/calendar/contacts, etc. Although I suppose there's arguments on both sides of the fence for doing it this way, I think this is kind-of a step backwards. Everything is going towards a convergence model, where you have a unified inbox/contacts/calendar app for all your accounts, personal, work, and otherwise. Palm was the first big innovator with this with WebOS, followed by Windows Phone (mostly 7.5) and iOS 4 and 5. When I book an appointment, I don't want to check 2 or 3 or 4 calendars.
All you really need is a way of purging the device of corporate data, which may or may not mean wiping the whole device. Many companies already manage this (including my own) - if you want to hook in your (personal) phone into the corporate systems, you have to acknowledge it will get wiped when you leave. Simple as that. If it's a corporate device, it gets wiped regardless. The whole point is being able to securly wipe the corporate data at will.
RIM is still making money, and the one big factor that everyone seems to forget - BES. Nobody else even comes close to being able to offer companies the level of fine-grained administrative control over their companies devices as to RIM through BES. I work for a public company and whenever the discussion about phones comes up, one of the first questions is how one is supposed to remotely administer, control, and if needed, wipe the phones. The discussion pretty much starts and stops with BES. I'd love nothing more than to use an iPhone, but what am I going to do, install iTunes on every corporate PC? Have each user individually sign up for a 'find my iphone' account? No. With with an OSX Server (running on Apple's official server hardware - a Mac Mini), iPhone control leaves a lot to be desired.
BES is still a HUGE hook for businesses. I know Apple and Google boast that a lot of fortune 500 companies use iPhones/Androids, but until they can demonstrate their business compatibility (ala not having to install iTunes on every corporate machine, being able to centrally restrict apps, etc), RIM is still going to own a huge chunk of the corporate pie.
And when I say I'd love to be using an iPhone (or Android) - I'm serious. I use a new Bold 9900, and I think it's a POS. It can't even smoothly play the HD video that it recorded, despite it's crystal HD engine or whatever they call it. The browser reminds me of IE5. Hotlinks and the ability to click on them is still a fairly new, radical concept.
HP has always had extremely poor support at the consumer level, IMO. I remember about 10 years ago I wanted to buy a replacement Li-Ion battery for the OEM NiMH that came with my HP. With credit card and HP part number and SKU in hand, I called the HP store. I was transferred to literally 5 different people before I just gave up. I never did get a new battery, living with the ~40 minute degraded life of the NiMH for the next couple months.
I've had great success with their printers, though. I still think at the mid-to-high business end, they're very solid machines. I recently worked at an office that used Ricoh's, and never again with I touch Ricoh printers. They can't even get simply LDAP right...
I have a new BB (9900) with OS7 (via. work) and have been completely underwhelmed by it. OS7 is really just OS6.1, and OS6 was more like 5.1, which was more like a 4.8 in real functionality. It feels like Windows 98 with a Windows 7 skin on top of it.
The web browser is a massive improvement, luckily, but I still find myself frustrated by it. Clicking on simple links doesn't work half the time, and I now fondly look back to my browsing experience on my iPhone 3G, a now 3 year old phone, and how it never faultered nearly as much as OS7. The app store is still more or less a joke compared to even android marketplace, and nowhere near Apple's App Store. RIM may be able to tout reasonable numbers of apps, but 95% of them are usually junk apps with very limited functionality. Not that I download many apps, seeing as a 2MB download takes about 2 minutes (and I have excellent coverage).
Even with a 1.2 GHz proc, the phone still stutters and lags, and in general, feels dated. It can't even play back HD video captured by its own camera without stuttering, despite it's new 'crystal hd' rendering engine, or whatever the hell it's called.
It's functional, it works, and gets stuff done, so I suppose I can't complain (except for today's outage, which I'm a part of). I'd easily prefer an android or IOS device, though.
As a sysadmin. I've been in this situation a couple times over the past 6-7 years. Usually working for smaller companies (less then 500 people), after 2-3 years, it's not terribly difficult for me to find a job somewhere else that pays high-4 or low-5 figures more.
I've always leaned on the side of moving to make more. I'm not the type of person to blindly chase $$, but when it gets into the high four figure (or low 5 figure) point, it's tough not to say no. That;s not to say I jump on any old position that comes by, I still make my moves carefully... The way I see it, it's just too much money to give up. Unless I was working for immediate family (which I never have, not even distant family), the feeling of guilt of leaving the place usually subsides very quickly. If they can't keep up with market rate for my position, tough beans for them.
Most people I know don't even know what the touchpad is/was. I would honestly say HP didn't so a very good job marketing this thing, because it was just a whole lot of *shrugs shoulders*. Most people didn't even know what the Pre was, or that Palm was even a player in the market for the past 5 years. Tech saavy people know what's up, but the other 95% of the population never put much thought into palm post early-2000's. Palm's pre-Pre devices (no oun intended) were pretty much for the power user set.
It's too bad, really. The touchpas I thought was a great device.
AMD has usually been ahead of Intel?? At the low-end price-point maybe. For under $100, AMD has usually offered the more competitive options. But rarely has AMD really been ahead of intel in any other market segment.
The Athlon XP was more or less on par with the P4, P4A, and P4B. I bought into AMDs architecture at the time because it was a bit more bang for the buck, and excellent companion chipsets for gamers and enthusiasts (nForce and nForce 2). They couldn't stand up top the P4C's, so in comes the Athlon64. The Athlon64 compared to the later P4's / PD's were indeed competitive. Hence, AMD did really well during this time, and most would argue this was really the only time when AMD was truly "ahead" of intel. Their financials reflected as much.
Post-core has been another story. Since Core2 (Conroe), Intel has pretty much dominated. The only times I really see AMD doing well is, again, the low price point segment. This is partially because they always shove another core in, so 3-core chips end up getting compared to 2-core chips.
AMD is certainly competitive, always has been... They've often offered slightly better bang for the buck, but saying AMD has 'usually' been ahead of intel is a big, big strech.
The discussions seem to be pretty biased towards coding. In the sysadmin side of things, I don't tend to see a ton of age bias. Where I do see it is where you get 50-somethings who are applying to be sysadmins, but because they moved career's 5 or 10 years ago from something completely different. But otherwise, a late-40's or 50's sysadmin is usually in a pretty senior position, because they usually have a lot of root experience. I see a TON of older people when I do various training courses. They're excellent teachers simply because they have so much experience and can bring so much depth to the course. But I'm not a coder, so I can't comment to the coding side of things.
I'm just really, really surprised that the world's #1 terrorist would be stupid enough not to implement basic encryption. It's always funny how you see otherwise very intelligent people who do all sorts of shady stuff on a computer, and end up not using some sort of encryption. But then again, shows like 24 show the public that any good analyst can bypass it in a few seconds, so it's all useless anyway.
But still, seems odd.
Keep in mind that Windows 7 (and Vista) in HAL independent, and installs with Windows' new WIM imaging. This means that you can have 1 master Windows 7 image, and it will install onto ANY hardware. It's not like the "old" XP days where you needed 17 images for 17 different boxes. You can now effectively have 1 master Win7 for your entire environment, regardless of how many different kinds of hardware you have. Microsoft also has a lot of good, reasonably easy to use tools to easily maintain these .wim images. It's really easy to inject drivers into the .wim images as well, without the need for 3rd party tools (like nLite).
Down the road, as new desktops and laptops come on board, all you really have to to is update the single master image with drivers for the new box, which is usually a single download and about 5 CLI entries (on Microsoft's deployment CLI toolkit).
Don't overlook Windows 7's deployment and built-in imaging features. All of the pains of drivers and imaging from the XP days are reduced by about 98% with Windows Vista and 7.
I don't really give a hoot about @aol.com (but it still sounds a little funny). But e-mail, just like any outward facing part of yourself, makes up part of your image. I'm going to be less likely to have a positive first image from someone if I get a resume in my inbox from trew_gangsta_47@domain.com or latino_heat_69. C'mon, let's me reasonable here folks. It still surprises me the amount of resume emails I see from these kinds of addresses (I'm not joking).
For nothing other than resumes, you would think people would get a bit more normal gmail or hotmail address.
Granted, we don't know how 'bad' or negative the action in question was, but here's my thoughts based on my experience...
People aren't supposed to discriminate during interviews if it's not 'theoretically' relevant, but the reality is that it happens. But more importantly to you, do you really want to work somewhere where they're judging you with such shallow naivety? Me - not so much. I've turned down a few positions and not returned for second interviews over the years purely because the impression I got from the company was one that I felt I didn't want to associate with in the long term.
The technical reality is that you may never be able to fully clean up something that makes its way onto the internet. You can obviously try to hunt things down to the best of your ability, though. That said, reputation can be powerful, but you can always put on the best face in front of a potential employer. People make mistakes, everyone knows this. But if I'm interviewing someone, I'm not going to care so much about the mistake, instead I'm going to look for how maturely you explain and carry yourself during the rest of the interview.
Agreed. The home automation field seems to have many of the same issues as Linux and many FOSS projects - too many small players and not enough industry-wide standardization and focus. As the OP points out, there's tons of options out there, all with their own major issues and problems. Crestron and AMX are the two big players out there, but they're not cheap, and far from open.
I know Microsoft is often poked at, especially around these parts, for having so many vulnerabilities to patch, but at least there on the ball doing it. Not to mention, automatic updating has been the defacto standard now since XPSP2, so nowadays it's pretty hard not to be somewhat up to date. So my OS pulls down a batch of updates once or twice a month, big deal... I think Microsoft has done a good job with the hand of cards they've been dealt.
Not to mention, WSUS in the enterprise is an excellent, free tool for centrally managing patch deployment.
Number of patches and vulnerabilities aside, I think MS is a standout leader in this category.
This debate always seems to come up somewhere every few months.
'...You need to write at least 7 times because of minute, traceable EM signals'. OK, fine, prove it. I have searched this topic to death and never have I found someone who was able to recover ANY data after 1 wipe, let alone 3.
If I had the money, I'd personally post a $1M USD bounty to whoever could recover a single file from a drive autonuked (3 passes) with DBAN. All this talk, nobody's ever done it.
Encryption is pretty much as good if done properly. Currently, if you had the worlds top 1000 supercomputers at your personal disposal, it would take millions of quadrillions of years to crack a 128bit key, and that's if you got extremely and cracked the key very early.
Wipe it or encrypt it, or show us that you can crack or read it.
This is a pretty open ended question. A lot of it depends on the kind of company, the kind of work you do, types of users, etc. This kind of transition would pose very different challenges for a 20 person company versus a 200 or 2000 person office. I've seen small companies who run the entire business out of Access and Excel, so switching from these programs would bring things to a griding halt. I've seen big companies where the excel users / accountants would stage a revolt, most likely resulting in your death. It really depends on the kind of company and the kind of users.
I always like to look at the 'Why' factor, both positively and negatively. Why are you bothering? What is it about Office that's making you consider alternatives?
As expensive as Office is, I do think it's a solid piece of software. Every case is different, but cost aside I would question the need to move to OO.o in many cases. Maybe cost is a big thing for you, I don't know. I think the roughly $350 expense every 3-6 years is bearable and justifiable in most cases, but that's just me.
MS propaganda aside, you do have to do some evaluations as to the cost/benefit of the solution. I'm a Linux/FOSS fan as much as the next guy, but I've been involved in cases where it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense or the cost savings are often negated.
They have the most comprehensive benchmarks and NAS's around (that I've stumbled across, at least). Also, lots of good tests showing various things like Jumbo frames, etc. Very good overall.
I frequent the site a bit, and there's a couple tricks to getting good performance out of a NAS, or LAN throughput in general.
1. Use Jumbo Frames, period.
2. Use PCI-e NIC's, onboard or PCI just can't deliver the speeds offered by GigE. You can find smiple intel PCI-e nics for under $20.
3. Drives make a big difference, obviously.
www.smallnetbuilder.com -- Good site.
These I learned in the military... Probably one of, if not the biggest things to do - Lead by Example. There's no better way to shred your credibility and reputation for barking at someone for coming in a bit late, if you come in late all the time.
Secondly, always check up on your people. It's amazingly simple to do, but it's almost a bygone in the modern corporate world. No matter how busy your month, take a good 5 or 10 minutes with each member of your team as ask them how everything's going, what some of there frustrations are, what are some things they may need. It's amazing how good a roadmap you get when you just sit an listen.
Communicate - both ways. Encourge input from your team, but dont be afraid to send some the other way. If someone's doing something you like, or not doing something, say so. Probably my biggest personal pet peeve is non-confrontational managers who basically shotgun-blast you with their little annoyances once a year at your performance review. Your team doesn't necessarily have to know where your at every second of every day, but it's always good to provide some high-level status updates. Take a few minutes out of your schedule to update the team.
Recognize good performance, but don't be overly cheesy about it. Taking a minute to walk into an office and say 'I really appreciate the effort you put in last week to meet the deadline, Jim' will often mean a lot. It means even more in person, rather than email.
I could go on, but really a lot of it is pretty straight forward. You people should want to work hard for you and want to impress you, and good leadership shows when they do. Treat you team members as professionals with respect and how you would like to be treated.
Good post, good points. Age doesn't necessarily mean everything. Like anything else in life, the guy with 20 years experience might know a bunch, but might also be a total fop. I've seen 'old' experiences guys show just as much arrogance and, quite frankly, inexperience as younger people.
I make similar arguments for this amongst my peers when the whole 'do certifications matter' debate comes up. You can have a guy who's early 20's, tons of certs, but very little real world experience, and might have trouble solving real world problems or creating real world solutions. But like the Wolfguru says, you can have a guy with 2 years experience 10 times over.
You have to find a happy middleground when looking for experienced IT people. Ask a couple technical questions, present a few hypothetical situations.
...Just recently where they're timing Dwight, and every time he sneezes or looks away from his desk they start a stopwatch, threatenting to report his 'time theft' to management. Gold.
But seriously, this is a giant load of crap, and it surprises me that employers actually [try to] get away with this. Positions or careers that are paid on a job or comission basis - fine. I used to work commissioned sales way back and we were in the store usually an hour or two before it opened - not paid a dime. But for most other positions, this is laughable.
On both sides of the employee/employer table, I always say it's give and take. If one party nickle-dime's the other, it will always end up reciprocating. If an employer were to nickle dime me like this, then I don't touch my email, blackberry, or whatever after 5:00:00PM, no matter how dire. What goes around comes around.
The reality is there are companies who will get away with this. And in a loose job market where there's plenty of supply, especially at the lower end of the spectrum, people will get away with this, fact of life. Up here in Canada, the job markets are relatively tight, especially in western canada where there's massive shortages, so an employer would never bother trying a stunt like this. Even at the retail level, it's really tough to replace people, so this would never happen. If anything, the employees can take advantage of the employers. Local coffee shops are paying high school kids here $17/hr at Tim hortons. You can fairly easily find work for $20/hr. Advantages of a job-seekers market I guess. Come work up here, god knows we can use it. Entry level help-desk pays even $21-$23/hr at most of the major ISP's.
You're absolutely right. AES just takes a bit of time, too. Let's see, with the world's top 1000 supercomputers at your perminant, personal disposal, you could easily crack a 128bit AES key in oh... only a couple thousand-quadrillion years (literally). And that's if you get lucky.
Let's be realistic here, it would be easier to just break into the house and steal the computer.
For the record, that WPA 'crack' isn't all it's cracked up to be (no pun intended). It's very ingenious, taking advantage of several protocols' vulnerabilities, but it's pretty limited. It's not as though it lets you out right snoop the end to end traffic. From the looks of it, it only takes advantage of a few short, predictable packet transmissions and allows spoofing or injection of certain packets if certain protocols are in use on the network (i.e. .1Q). Pretty much a non-event for home-users. Business can easily circumvent.