A start to the solution may be to have a "Wake on Lan" script that runs for various computers at various times during the day depending on the arrival of employees. We moved to an online time card service and employees were afraid of being late because of computer boot times. There still is a lag while the computer completes the log in process and runs a log in script but most of the PC's are ready to clock in within 30 seconds.
Some of those PC's would probably take up to 10 minutes otherwise.
Minimize power consumption, Minimize employee/company clock-in issues.
I don't support limiting access to chemicals but even at the risk of making myself look like a complete moron, I have a cautionary tale.
I was once a Biochemist (That's a decade ago at this point) and worked in an Academic setting. I found that it encompassed all aspects of my life. I couldn't go and have a decent time with friends thinking about my research. What reactions can I attempt next time? Why didn't that last set work? Did I contaminate the product somehow? Am I that bad at my job? I was sure that was the combination to yield the result I wanted. I WILL come up with something better. I will succeed. Those thoughts dominated my mind and started to drive me to a type of madness.
Setting up a series of experiements, running them, and having to spend four straight days recording my failures in my journal became a hard way to spend a work week. I snapped and went into the marginally more sane world of IT.
I still have some equipment at home. My experimenting has tapered off in recent years but I did quite a bit of dabbling during my transition period. Even though I was pretty well trained in a lab setting, I made a horrible amateur mistake of opening a small bottle of Triethylamine without the benefit of the fume hood that was 10 feet away. As soon as the cap was off, I almost went under. I barely had the presence of mind to get the cap back on just on time to fall off my chair. Luckily the bottle fell on me and not on the ground. TEA is very volatile and the fumes likely would have circulated to the upstairs and may have put out my parents and wife(Girlfriend at the time) who were upstairs...smoking. TEA and fire = bad. I don't know if there were enough vapors or not to do anything more, but it's a scary thought.
My point being, one stupid mistake from a trained chemist with a dangerous chemical could have caused problems for others as well as myself. I'm sure people will think of this as a way of weeding out the stupid, but I assure you I am fairly high on the intelligence curve and had a lapse of reason induced by laziness.
While the intent of the laws locking down home chemists are probably not to prevent this sort of occurance and are directed at Meth makers, I still think that being completely willing to let hobby chemists have a free for all on purchasing chemicals may not be a good idea. As I said, I had worked in a lab and knew better and still almost made a huge mistake. How many out there have less actual experience and would be likely to do the same...or worse?
I'd also like to point out, for what it's worth, that the advances by kitchen chemists cited were from a century ago. Times have changed. I don't think there are such simple discoveries to be made at this point.
I'll admit to sometimes donning my tinfoil hat, but I see the current two party political system in the states to be akin to "Always being at war with Eurasia."
Politicians on both sides ruthlessly attack the other verbally, accusing them of lies/theft/taking liberties/whatever, sometimes factually and sometimes not factually. They get citizens riled up enough to create an "Us Vs. Them" mentality..especially during election years. The average person in the United States walks around spouting the same garbage they see in television ads to the friends, neighbors, family, and co workers. When their candidate wins, they walk around with their chests puffed out like they just won some great battle. The supporters of the losing team gets prepared to blame the problems of the State/Country until the next election cycle.
Polarizing in this fashion allows the politicians to move farther left and farther right to be MORE unlike those other guys, whom screwed up the country. The Far extremes of both the left and the right have ample reasons to take away your personal liberties, and like good foot soldiers of your chosen party you will cheer when they do it..happily accepting the increased security offered.
Meanwhile, the Democrats and Republicans revel in the fact that as long as the majority of the population remains fiery passionate about one or the other, intrusion by a third (or more) parties will never come to pass. Your vote is too important to keep the EVIL Democrats/Republicans out of office. Don't throw it away on something as silly as ideals. The Balance of Power will swing one way and then the other, allowing both major parties to have their victories and time in the spotlight. In the end, the two Government factions win and the American people lose.
Why would you need to save in this format? The existing binary support should be all you need if you need to collaborate with Microsoft Office users. It's their saving in Microsoft Office 2007 format that causes the roadblocks, not OpenOffice.org's lack of exporting to it.
Seriously.....MS Office is used by a large number more people than Open Office is. Telling the majority that they are roadblocking a minority by saving in the default file format isn't going to work.
One reason that people may WANT to save in that format is if they typically create a lot of Powerpoint presentations or Word documents with images embedded. The files saved in OOXML formats are at times A LOT smaller. This may not be a big thing for hard drive space, but it does become a big thing for E-MAILING documents to other users. I've seen Powerpoint slides that save as 25 MB in ppt format, and about 6 MB in pptx format. This is huge because some companies have a very low cap on incoming message sizes (I've seen as low as 5 MB as recently as the last month.)
I'm going to have to agree someone with AC about the almost identical thing. When I arrived at the company I currently work for, they were rolling out a lot of new PC's and were not even close to being legit with their MS Office licenses as it was, so I gave them the Price Tag to become compliant for the computers that were loaded with Office (XP/2003) as well as the new desktops and then I gave them the choice of Open Office. They chose to let me give the Open Office a go on about 1/5 of the desktops.
It flopped. Miserably. There were file compatibility issues....not just between users in the office but between the users AND our customers. Next, users weren't able to figure out how to do all the quirky little things they do with Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. Seeing as how I have no need for anything but the most basic features, I had a hard time helping them figure out how to do them (And likely would have had a hard time helping them with similar MS Office questions).
There was also the issue of trying to use POP mail due to not having Outlook. I gave some type of open source Exchange connector (Groupware I think?) a shot but it wasn't terribly reliable. If an organization is running Exchange, they have to run Outlook. No doubt. I consider proposing just buying Outlook, but paying $100-120 for Outlook or $240 for the whole Small Business Package didn't impress management.
Now they company has gone with automatic barcode document filing through a product called Knowledge Lake Capture Server that runs off of SQL Server and Sharepoint. Sharepoint has some issues but Knowledge Lake offered what I considered to be the best document management system for the price (Considered a pHp/MySQL system called Knowledge Tree...it seemed to be pretty similar but lacked some key features). My Manager wanted me to start looking into other workflow/content management stuff with Sharepoint and I am very thankful that we purchased Office 2007 or it would have been an absolute fiasco with me looking very foolish for claiming that the Open Office package I was pushing was "Very Similar" to MSOffice.
If you are a home user, it's probably fine. If you work in an organization with tech savvy folks, it's probably fine. If you are using Linux Servers/Open source E-MAIL, SQL, and Document management, it's going to be fine. Otherwise, I would not recommend Open Office for most businesses that are more than a handful of users.
Does Office 2007 do anything Office 2003 doesn't? Or even anything Office 2000 doesn't
If anything, Outlook 2003 and 2007 have RPC over HTTPS or "Outlook Anywhere". Being able to connect over the internet fully functionally to an Exchange Server is a pretty big deal. In Office 2000/XP you have the choice of POP/IMAP/Establishing a VPN connection. POP and IMAP don't bring contacts, calenders, and all the other stuff companies like to use. VPN connections for some reason confuse the heck out of users. They just want to click on their "Microsoft Outlook" icon and get their mail.
That and I have found that users that travel end up connecting to networks that don't allow their VPN traffic through. It's better now but years ago I'd say that 50% of the locations users tried to connect through a VPN did not allow it for whatever reason.
I agree. This is pretty much stereotyping. My Office is well lit and messy, filled with a wide variety of CD's from "Folk" to "Classic and Modern Rock". I have books about Feminism, books about Religion (As well as books that define religions...Bible, Koran), books with maps, books about socialism, books about objectivism, books about capitalism, books about United States History, books about Biochemistry, Books about Immunology, a few dozen computer reference books, books about existentialism, books about metaphysics, fiction books of all sorts from Star Wars to the Classics. I have several pieces of travel memorabilia including a small American Flag that was given to me at the Vietnam War Memorial. I have a piece of sports memorabilia hanging up. I have a calender and a book of stamps. Heck, I just sewed a button back onto a pair of pants so I have sewing materials still laying out. My office also has the only closet the wife allowed me for my clothes, thus it also has a clothes hamper.
So what am I? Apparently someone with Multiple Personality Disorder or something.
About $35/month for the Time Warner Cable "Turbo" package. It is advertised as 15Mbps down, 1.5 Mbps Up. I've peaked out at 13.4 Mbps Down and 1.43 Mbps Up.
On average I get about 10/1. I can live with that. However, there are some days when I drop to about 3/.4 and that is not acceptable.
If it goes on for more than a day I call and complain and they take a few days worth of service off of my Bill. The $5 isn't worth the time I spend dealing with them, but I feel letting them know I am displeased when I get about 20% of the advertised bandwidth.
Not to nitpick, but ftp.mozilla.org would be a good place to start downloading a web browser without a web browser.
Of course, the amount of people I know personally that know how to drop to a command prompt and ftp to a site isn't very high.
IMHO O-chem as it is taught by most chemistry departments is completely useless for pre-med students. There ought to be a lower level biochemistry course in its stead as a pre-req for pre-meds. Most MDs will NEVER have to worry about organic synthesis and crap like that; they WILL need to worry about metabolic pathways and enzymatic reactions.
IWABCBIDC (I was a Biochemist before I discovered computers)
Is it really a good idea for them to try to learn metabolic pathways and enzymatic reactions without going through organic chemistry? Sure! Given some time you can sit down and learn how to draw the metabolism of sugar through glycolysis and the 3CA Cycle, but will you understand it? What good are mechanisms if you can't tell me precisely how NADH is reducing some of the molecules in the process?
The higher level biochemistry courses I took revolved around thinking of novel ways to determine if metabolic cycles were really accurate (I believe one such example was trying to find out of the OH that is tacked back onto isocitrate came from the H20 or if it was the original from the Citric Acid Molecule). I would think without the electron pushing knowledge learned in Organic that this would be difficult to even comprehend much less theorize about.
Organic Chemistry is a class that relies on actually know how things work instead of knowing how to plug and chug memorized equations. I would rather have a doctor that knows how my body is supposed to function. Without that type of skill, they are as effective as diagnosing as google.com coupled with a home laboratory.
Carnage
Your statement seems to assume that everyone engaged in a marriage/long term relationship cheats on their spouse. I had a fair amount of sexual partners prior to meeting my current wife and exactly one since meeting her.....when I was a 20 year old in college. 11 Years later (Six of those married years) I can certainly say that I have never been "Polygamous in Secret". While I may be a nerd, I've had ample opportunities. I simply chose not to take advantage of those chances.
Perhaps as I grow older and my wife starts to lose some of her appeal I will change but I've found it to be easier and easier to suppress the "Sewing your wild oats" feeling with more interesting propositions in the past than I am likely to experience in the future.
As for my wife....if she's in/has been in a "Polygamous in secret" relationship I probably will never know. However, I'm reasonably certain she has not. Loyalty in all forms being pretty rare in the world today it seems to make sense to reciprocate what you truly believe to be someone else' loyalty to you.
I think the "Use competent people that actually give a damn" is a HUGE thing to consider. I worked for awhile at a place that wasn't too large....450 users inside and outside. We had 19 people on the IT staff. Two of them were for internal web development. The rest were desktop support/server support. The Environment had five Novel Servers, four sun servers, and about 20 Windows Servers. It was incredible how much time some of the staff spent doing absolutely nothing.
For the last two years, I have been working at a 90 Computer (Inside and Off-Site) manufacturing company that has.....just me! Actually, my boss who is the Engineering Manager will pick up some of the easier desktop support things to help me out so it's more like 1.15 IT workers or something.
I have six windows servers and one Unix Server. We have rolled out several new solutions (Exchange 2007, Sharepoint, Knowledgelake Document management, Terminal Server, switched the ERP system over to SQL Server from Gupta), added three new servers, and replaced forty 5-7 year old desktops/laptops in the two years I have been there and I have developed four custom apps for in house. I'm currently working on an external web ordering system for them...but I believe we will have to outsource some of it because I can't get it all done.
I work a LOT but it's very rewarding knowing that as long as a solution is going to be helpful AND not be extremely expensive.....the red tape associated with 20 IT workers in a small type company isn't going to stop my progress. I've been able to roll out more effective solutions alone in a 1:90 ratio than 20 of us had with a 1:20 at the previous job.
I'm a little disturbed by your post on two levels. The first is that you think charging $35 to install Windows is somehow "Ripping people off". Sure, they let you download the installer for free. How many people, even college students, necessarily know what to do next.
By the time you go through the long Vista install process, download the newest patches, hunt down drivers that didn't get installed automatically, and whatever else you can end up having spent a good 3 hours worth of your time.
Take the same installer to Best Buy and ask them how much to install Vista for you. I guarantee it is more than $35.
The other disturbing part is that when dealing with a known fraudster, you assumed he used his real name to register the web site where he set up his scam.
As the sole IT person at a 75 user company, my biggest problem with moving to Vista is trying to support two operating systems. As I have several servers to maintain and more and more request for coding small database applications, I have got to keep the "Help Desk" type aspect of my work to as few hours a week as possible. Adding a second OS means I have to maintain a second Image for the machines and every time we upgrade/install a new software package I would have double the quirky little issues to work out.
Moving entirely to Vista is not an option. About 1/3 of the company's PC's are Pentium IV 2.0 Ghz machines with 768 MB of RAM. These machines were purchased (Not leased) years ago and will be ridden until they cannot function any longer. I've been running Vista for about two months now (Trying to get a good feel for it in case my hand is forced) and my AMD Turion64x2 notebook with 2 GB of RAM is much slower than it was when running XP Pro and Ubuntu, both of which were very stable. The most noticeably slow thing is simply trying to do a "Start" "Run" and trying to run something simple like cmd, calc, or mspaint. Some times I find that easier than looking around on my desktop or in the menu system. I'd say From the time I hit "Start" I won't have a command prompt open for at least 30 seconds.
With that in mind, I can't imagine trying to toss this thing on some of that older harder. Trying to sell a company wide upgrade of computers would be an amusing scene trying to sell it to the President.
"So you want me to purchase 30 new computers to run this Vista which you say will end up being slower than our current computers."
"YES SIR!"
"What good will it do for our company."
"Uhm, None!"
"Get out"
Carnage
At the company I work for, we went out and bought new laptops for our sales and service force. The service force realized that the new machines had no serial ports and declared them useless. We had to get different laptops. People still use serial ports to connect to old devices that are worth millions of dollars, not just mice. Serial ports will be around for a long time.
Slashdot Mirror
A start to the solution may be to have a "Wake on Lan" script that runs for various computers at various times during the day depending on the arrival of employees. We moved to an online time card service and employees were afraid of being late because of computer boot times. There still is a lag while the computer completes the log in process and runs a log in script but most of the PC's are ready to clock in within 30 seconds.
Some of those PC's would probably take up to 10 minutes otherwise.
Minimize power consumption, Minimize employee/company clock-in issues.
I don't support limiting access to chemicals but even at the risk of making myself look like a complete moron, I have a cautionary tale.
I was once a Biochemist (That's a decade ago at this point) and worked in an Academic setting. I found that it encompassed all aspects of my life. I couldn't go and have a decent time with friends thinking about my research. What reactions can I attempt next time? Why didn't that last set work? Did I contaminate the product somehow? Am I that bad at my job? I was sure that was the combination to yield the result I wanted. I WILL come up with something better. I will succeed. Those thoughts dominated my mind and started to drive me to a type of madness.
Setting up a series of experiements, running them, and having to spend four straight days recording my failures in my journal became a hard way to spend a work week. I snapped and went into the marginally more sane world of IT.
I still have some equipment at home. My experimenting has tapered off in recent years but I did quite a bit of dabbling during my transition period. Even though I was pretty well trained in a lab setting, I made a horrible amateur mistake of opening a small bottle of Triethylamine without the benefit of the fume hood that was 10 feet away. As soon as the cap was off, I almost went under. I barely had the presence of mind to get the cap back on just on time to fall off my chair. Luckily the bottle fell on me and not on the ground. TEA is very volatile and the fumes likely would have circulated to the upstairs and may have put out my parents and wife(Girlfriend at the time) who were upstairs...smoking. TEA and fire = bad. I don't know if there were enough vapors or not to do anything more, but it's a scary thought.
My point being, one stupid mistake from a trained chemist with a dangerous chemical could have caused problems for others as well as myself. I'm sure people will think of this as a way of weeding out the stupid, but I assure you I am fairly high on the intelligence curve and had a lapse of reason induced by laziness.
While the intent of the laws locking down home chemists are probably not to prevent this sort of occurance and are directed at Meth makers, I still think that being completely willing to let hobby chemists have a free for all on purchasing chemicals may not be a good idea. As I said, I had worked in a lab and knew better and still almost made a huge mistake. How many out there have less actual experience and would be likely to do the same...or worse?
I'd also like to point out, for what it's worth, that the advances by kitchen chemists cited were from a century ago. Times have changed. I don't think there are such simple discoveries to be made at this point.
I'll admit to sometimes donning my tinfoil hat, but I see the current two party political system in the states to be akin to "Always being at war with Eurasia."
Politicians on both sides ruthlessly attack the other verbally, accusing them of lies/theft/taking liberties/whatever, sometimes factually and sometimes not factually. They get citizens riled up enough to create an "Us Vs. Them" mentality..especially during election years. The average person in the United States walks around spouting the same garbage they see in television ads to the friends, neighbors, family, and co workers. When their candidate wins, they walk around with their chests puffed out like they just won some great battle. The supporters of the losing team gets prepared to blame the problems of the State/Country until the next election cycle.
Polarizing in this fashion allows the politicians to move farther left and farther right to be MORE unlike those other guys, whom screwed up the country. The Far extremes of both the left and the right have ample reasons to take away your personal liberties, and like good foot soldiers of your chosen party you will cheer when they do it..happily accepting the increased security offered.
Meanwhile, the Democrats and Republicans revel in the fact that as long as the majority of the population remains fiery passionate about one or the other, intrusion by a third (or more) parties will never come to pass. Your vote is too important to keep the EVIL Democrats/Republicans out of office. Don't throw it away on something as silly as ideals. The Balance of Power will swing one way and then the other, allowing both major parties to have their victories and time in the spotlight. In the end, the two Government factions win and the American people lose.
Why would you need to save in this format? The existing binary support should be all you need if you need to collaborate with Microsoft Office users. It's their saving in Microsoft Office 2007 format that causes the roadblocks, not OpenOffice.org's lack of exporting to it.
Seriously.....MS Office is used by a large number more people than Open Office is. Telling the majority that they are roadblocking a minority by saving in the default file format isn't going to work.
One reason that people may WANT to save in that format is if they typically create a lot of Powerpoint presentations or Word documents with images embedded. The files saved in OOXML formats are at times A LOT smaller. This may not be a big thing for hard drive space, but it does become a big thing for E-MAILING documents to other users. I've seen Powerpoint slides that save as 25 MB in ppt format, and about 6 MB in pptx format. This is huge because some companies have a very low cap on incoming message sizes (I've seen as low as 5 MB as recently as the last month.)
I'm going to have to agree someone with AC about the almost identical thing. When I arrived at the company I currently work for, they were rolling out a lot of new PC's and were not even close to being legit with their MS Office licenses as it was, so I gave them the Price Tag to become compliant for the computers that were loaded with Office (XP/2003) as well as the new desktops and then I gave them the choice of Open Office. They chose to let me give the Open Office a go on about 1/5 of the desktops.
It flopped. Miserably. There were file compatibility issues....not just between users in the office but between the users AND our customers. Next, users weren't able to figure out how to do all the quirky little things they do with Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. Seeing as how I have no need for anything but the most basic features, I had a hard time helping them figure out how to do them (And likely would have had a hard time helping them with similar MS Office questions).
There was also the issue of trying to use POP mail due to not having Outlook. I gave some type of open source Exchange connector (Groupware I think?) a shot but it wasn't terribly reliable. If an organization is running Exchange, they have to run Outlook. No doubt. I consider proposing just buying Outlook, but paying $100-120 for Outlook or $240 for the whole Small Business Package didn't impress management.
Now they company has gone with automatic barcode document filing through a product called Knowledge Lake Capture Server that runs off of SQL Server and Sharepoint. Sharepoint has some issues but Knowledge Lake offered what I considered to be the best document management system for the price (Considered a pHp/MySQL system called Knowledge Tree...it seemed to be pretty similar but lacked some key features). My Manager wanted me to start looking into other workflow/content management stuff with Sharepoint and I am very thankful that we purchased Office 2007 or it would have been an absolute fiasco with me looking very foolish for claiming that the Open Office package I was pushing was "Very Similar" to MSOffice.
If you are a home user, it's probably fine. If you work in an organization with tech savvy folks, it's probably fine. If you are using Linux Servers/Open source E-MAIL, SQL, and Document management, it's going to be fine. Otherwise, I would not recommend Open Office for most businesses that are more than a handful of users.
Does Office 2007 do anything Office 2003 doesn't? Or even anything Office 2000 doesn't
If anything, Outlook 2003 and 2007 have RPC over HTTPS or "Outlook Anywhere". Being able to connect over the internet fully functionally to an Exchange Server is a pretty big deal. In Office 2000/XP you have the choice of POP/IMAP/Establishing a VPN connection. POP and IMAP don't bring contacts, calenders, and all the other stuff companies like to use. VPN connections for some reason confuse the heck out of users. They just want to click on their "Microsoft Outlook" icon and get their mail.
That and I have found that users that travel end up connecting to networks that don't allow their VPN traffic through. It's better now but years ago I'd say that 50% of the locations users tried to connect through a VPN did not allow it for whatever reason.
I agree. This is pretty much stereotyping. My Office is well lit and messy, filled with a wide variety of CD's from "Folk" to "Classic and Modern Rock". I have books about Feminism, books about Religion (As well as books that define religions...Bible, Koran), books with maps, books about socialism, books about objectivism, books about capitalism, books about United States History, books about Biochemistry, Books about Immunology, a few dozen computer reference books, books about existentialism, books about metaphysics, fiction books of all sorts from Star Wars to the Classics. I have several pieces of travel memorabilia including a small American Flag that was given to me at the Vietnam War Memorial. I have a piece of sports memorabilia hanging up. I have a calender and a book of stamps. Heck, I just sewed a button back onto a pair of pants so I have sewing materials still laying out. My office also has the only closet the wife allowed me for my clothes, thus it also has a clothes hamper.
So what am I? Apparently someone with Multiple Personality Disorder or something.
Ugh
While Consumedbeers > 10 don't try to write a "Programming Joke"
That's better. ;)
Very true. We've known this for many many years.
private sub desperation
{
int consumedbeers = 0;
int pretty = 12;
do
{
consumedbeers++
}
While (pretty > drinks);
}
About $35/month for the Time Warner Cable "Turbo" package. It is advertised as 15Mbps down, 1.5 Mbps Up. I've peaked out at 13.4 Mbps Down and 1.43 Mbps Up. On average I get about 10/1. I can live with that. However, there are some days when I drop to about 3/.4 and that is not acceptable. If it goes on for more than a day I call and complain and they take a few days worth of service off of my Bill. The $5 isn't worth the time I spend dealing with them, but I feel letting them know I am displeased when I get about 20% of the advertised bandwidth.
Not to nitpick, but ftp.mozilla.org would be a good place to start downloading a web browser without a web browser. Of course, the amount of people I know personally that know how to drop to a command prompt and ftp to a site isn't very high.
IAABP (I am a biology professor).
IMHO O-chem as it is taught by most chemistry departments is completely useless for pre-med students. There ought to be a lower level biochemistry course in its stead as a pre-req for pre-meds. Most MDs will NEVER have to worry about organic synthesis and crap like that; they WILL need to worry about metabolic pathways and enzymatic reactions.
IWABCBIDC (I was a Biochemist before I discovered computers) Is it really a good idea for them to try to learn metabolic pathways and enzymatic reactions without going through organic chemistry? Sure! Given some time you can sit down and learn how to draw the metabolism of sugar through glycolysis and the 3CA Cycle, but will you understand it? What good are mechanisms if you can't tell me precisely how NADH is reducing some of the molecules in the process? The higher level biochemistry courses I took revolved around thinking of novel ways to determine if metabolic cycles were really accurate (I believe one such example was trying to find out of the OH that is tacked back onto isocitrate came from the H20 or if it was the original from the Citric Acid Molecule). I would think without the electron pushing knowledge learned in Organic that this would be difficult to even comprehend much less theorize about. Organic Chemistry is a class that relies on actually know how things work instead of knowing how to plug and chug memorized equations. I would rather have a doctor that knows how my body is supposed to function. Without that type of skill, they are as effective as diagnosing as google.com coupled with a home laboratory. Carnage
Your statement seems to assume that everyone engaged in a marriage/long term relationship cheats on their spouse. I had a fair amount of sexual partners prior to meeting my current wife and exactly one since meeting her.....when I was a 20 year old in college. 11 Years later (Six of those married years) I can certainly say that I have never been "Polygamous in Secret". While I may be a nerd, I've had ample opportunities. I simply chose not to take advantage of those chances. Perhaps as I grow older and my wife starts to lose some of her appeal I will change but I've found it to be easier and easier to suppress the "Sewing your wild oats" feeling with more interesting propositions in the past than I am likely to experience in the future. As for my wife....if she's in/has been in a "Polygamous in secret" relationship I probably will never know. However, I'm reasonably certain she has not. Loyalty in all forms being pretty rare in the world today it seems to make sense to reciprocate what you truly believe to be someone else' loyalty to you.
I think the "Use competent people that actually give a damn" is a HUGE thing to consider. I worked for awhile at a place that wasn't too large....450 users inside and outside. We had 19 people on the IT staff. Two of them were for internal web development. The rest were desktop support/server support. The Environment had five Novel Servers, four sun servers, and about 20 Windows Servers. It was incredible how much time some of the staff spent doing absolutely nothing. For the last two years, I have been working at a 90 Computer (Inside and Off-Site) manufacturing company that has.....just me! Actually, my boss who is the Engineering Manager will pick up some of the easier desktop support things to help me out so it's more like 1.15 IT workers or something. I have six windows servers and one Unix Server. We have rolled out several new solutions (Exchange 2007, Sharepoint, Knowledgelake Document management, Terminal Server, switched the ERP system over to SQL Server from Gupta), added three new servers, and replaced forty 5-7 year old desktops/laptops in the two years I have been there and I have developed four custom apps for in house. I'm currently working on an external web ordering system for them...but I believe we will have to outsource some of it because I can't get it all done. I work a LOT but it's very rewarding knowing that as long as a solution is going to be helpful AND not be extremely expensive.....the red tape associated with 20 IT workers in a small type company isn't going to stop my progress. I've been able to roll out more effective solutions alone in a 1:90 ratio than 20 of us had with a 1:20 at the previous job.
I'm a little disturbed by your post on two levels. The first is that you think charging $35 to install Windows is somehow "Ripping people off". Sure, they let you download the installer for free. How many people, even college students, necessarily know what to do next.
By the time you go through the long Vista install process, download the newest patches, hunt down drivers that didn't get installed automatically, and whatever else you can end up having spent a good 3 hours worth of your time.
Take the same installer to Best Buy and ask them how much to install Vista for you. I guarantee it is more than $35.
The other disturbing part is that when dealing with a known fraudster, you assumed he used his real name to register the web site where he set up his scam.
As the sole IT person at a 75 user company, my biggest problem with moving to Vista is trying to support two operating systems. As I have several servers to maintain and more and more request for coding small database applications, I have got to keep the "Help Desk" type aspect of my work to as few hours a week as possible. Adding a second OS means I have to maintain a second Image for the machines and every time we upgrade/install a new software package I would have double the quirky little issues to work out. Moving entirely to Vista is not an option. About 1/3 of the company's PC's are Pentium IV 2.0 Ghz machines with 768 MB of RAM. These machines were purchased (Not leased) years ago and will be ridden until they cannot function any longer. I've been running Vista for about two months now (Trying to get a good feel for it in case my hand is forced) and my AMD Turion64x2 notebook with 2 GB of RAM is much slower than it was when running XP Pro and Ubuntu, both of which were very stable. The most noticeably slow thing is simply trying to do a "Start" "Run" and trying to run something simple like cmd, calc, or mspaint. Some times I find that easier than looking around on my desktop or in the menu system. I'd say From the time I hit "Start" I won't have a command prompt open for at least 30 seconds. With that in mind, I can't imagine trying to toss this thing on some of that older harder. Trying to sell a company wide upgrade of computers would be an amusing scene trying to sell it to the President. "So you want me to purchase 30 new computers to run this Vista which you say will end up being slower than our current computers." "YES SIR!" "What good will it do for our company." "Uhm, None!" "Get out" Carnage
At the company I work for, we went out and bought new laptops for our sales and service force. The service force realized that the new machines had no serial ports and declared them useless. We had to get different laptops. People still use serial ports to connect to old devices that are worth millions of dollars, not just mice. Serial ports will be around for a long time.