One company has not played a role in Dell's Linux decisions. "Microsoft has not talked to us about Linux. If they did, I wouldn't care. It's none of their business," concluded Dell.
I wonder how they determine what is unusual. I bought a new car juat one year ago--paid by check. No questions, no problems, no bank holds etc. Maybe my regular transactions are larger--I paid a lot more than the $6500 the retired teacher paid.
Sounds like this credit card company doesn't like it when people pay off their really high interest rate cards.
Anyone hear of refinancing high interest credit card debt with a fixed term home equity loan? Happens all the time. How can this be so unusual for a credit card company to see?
Not knowing what the "certain percentage higher than normal" threshold is, I'd like to see if this retired teacher/ACLU could sue the c.c. company to see if this is a practice used by this company to discourage payment of large balances. I hope this guy didn't have to pay interest on his c.c. balance while the validity of the payment was investigated.
I hear you on that point. So called support from DVR vendors comes from people who worked in the wiring/alarm system business and don't know jack about how a simple PC works. That is why most DVR vendors won't allow you to do anything to their windows install--they are afraid they won't be able to figure out what you've done and won't know how to support your system.
And for this "service" they charge an arm and a leg.
There's a market for geek aware security system people out there. Keep up your work--there's a lot of business you can steal. Even from the big guys--ADT vendors, for example, generally are not very knowledgable about computers and networking.
The problem with the Pelco devices is they are sold as is without any easy way to keep the OS up to date. Our company remembers to update DVR OS software as new things come out.
I myself have asked the exact question to our security cam vendors (and so have all the other larger real estate companies in my city) in part because of the updated software issue. For me, even more helpful would be a more open platform. Pelco (and all DVR vendors) lock you into their hardware platform, and if you so much as add or replace one of their $2000 120GB hard drives, they will discontinue your support. I would love a more open platform so I could network all my video systems together and store archival info on an UNLIMITED (or size of MY choosing) storage system.
The company I work for also sells internet services to other multiple tenant properties. This is something that comes up in almost every large company with lots of cameras. If you actually find a good solution, let me know.
finally an american company gets in on the techno-gadget craze that goes on in asia--Japan in particular.
maybe US companies will start producing more slick gadgets--so many cool technological gadgets get mode and marketed only for asian countries. being a bit of a geek, I would love that asian trend to come this side of the pacific.
Interesting perspective. I was thinking that I preferred things when win2k was the same--business or home.
With Microsoft, however, which features are available with which version seems arbitrary and at times frustrating. For instance, I understand the intent of limiting file sharing capabilieties on Windows XP home so that MS can offer that prooduct at a lower price for home users. However simple file sharing (tm) is a horrible idea. Maybe I don't trust others by nature, but I really don't like sharing anything without file security--even at home.
I guess the ease from uniformity of capabilities has to be balanced against over-bundling. I would prefer Microsoft start with a basic OS that is the same, then you can buy feature packs to add different levels of capability. They kind of did that with their "plus" versions of windows, but "plus" really just meant "plus more crap" instead of something meaningful.
About time someone in the content business stood up and flatly, publicly opossed the idea of charging content providers for sending their data.
I even run a small ISP, and I agreee that charging content providers for traffic is a horrible idea. The only way to fairly do this would be to have huge burdensome regulations (like the phone companies who receive money through a regulatory scheme for each call they receive from another carrier).
I hate intrusive regulation more than I hate bandwidth hogs. Besides, Bell South could just charge by bandwidth instead of by link capacity if they really wanted to cover the costs of some traffic consuming more resources than others. They won't do this of course because the consumer is hooked on unlimited traffic--much like what is happening more and more with unlimited phone calls.
If a hard drive craps out, I don't necessarily want my system to go with it--would rather have my raid monitoring system inform me of a bad disk so it can either be hot swapped, or if not swappable, replaced after hours.
I would think $100 is a kind of break even for MIT labs due to the altruistic goals of providing cheap computing resources to poorer countries and not a price set for the purpose of making much money. If the goal were to make a bunch of money, companies like Dell, HP, etc would be trying to get in on the game.
I'm not climate expert, but wouldn't that extra energy be dissipated through--yep, you guessed it--more hurricanes in the tropics?
I also heard something to the effect that during seasons of increased hurricanes, there is usually correspondingly colder winter weather. Wonder if there is a connection to that trend.
I've noticed that about bigger companies. A lot of CYA going on. I did the same move the guy did in the article. Same deal--"it'd be great of you could just do this without spending money". Big difference for me is I did not work for a big company and had support from my boss--happened to be the comptroller, hence no moeny spending allowed. Microsoft is now trying more to keep the mid sized business crowd on MS products, but when I did this, it seemed absurdly expensive to have to outgrow Small Business Server and buy all full verison replacements.
Anyway, when I see how big companies work, they seem to be all staffed with a bunch of pu$$ies--nobody has a backbone and the first sign of trouble brings out the finger pointing. The most successful companies are those that can successfully take on prudent risk--so many big companies are complacent and just want to hold on. Too bad, since I bet those big companies were less risk averse when they started out.
Price point is way off. Equipment, management, access rights costs more than $5/user/mo let alone the cost of internet service itself. This is not going to be a freebe, but rather a competetive option in the market place for internet service.
Why not require more specificity in a lawsuit complaint? If plaintifs were required to do so, wouldn't that cut out at least some of the flat out frivolous?
IANAL, so I have no way to judge your assertion, but it sounds like a good enough justification for why the dismissal motion will go nowhere. Is there such a thing as a "please tell me wtf you are talking about" motion? Or is what the lawyers did in this case the only way to get a better idea of what the other side has before going through the mess of starting the whole discovery process?
I agree with much of what you say--though a CS degree in particular may not suit every IT job. I can't tell from the original posting what type of job the poster would prefer, but I find CS majors often do not have a well rounded enough education to fit in at my place of work. I hire people to do more than just programming--should I need a full time programmer, I would probably look for a CS guy/gal.
I prefer college educated candidates, and give extra bonus points to non-CS majors who have learned significant CS skills on their own. A CS major candidate would have to demonstrate the ability to learn new skills outside the CS field for me to be impressed.
I myself have a degree in math and physics. I've even found a humanities degree holder who is great at learning new technical skills. The weakness I've seen in all the CS majors I've worked with in the past is the breadth of their education (despite the fact that CS is often located in liberal arts colleges on many campuses). Like many companies, the one I work for is a medium sized company that has a handful of geeks running an IT department. Web programming, database applications, network management, phone systems, end user support, etc are the main focus. While a CS major could handle any of the technical requirements for these skills, I have found it difficult to get them to learn/understand:
1. How their CS skills can best be used to improve business processes. 2. How to work in a team with members from non IT related departments. 3. How to communicate IT/CS concepts to non IT/CS people. 4. That the company they work for does not exist for the sole purpose of propogating an IT department.
Companies that have good IT departments tend to have the above points figured out. Those companies that have bad IT departments tend to be missing the boat on one or more of the above points.
So I suppose the argument will be advanced that I should hire MIS people. I find that MIS folks tend not to be very creative and too conservative.
Any way, I don't exclude CS people from consideration, but previous experience makes me be more careful. I'd love to see a candidate with CS + just about anything else. CS + one of humanities, arts, math/physical sciences, etc would definitely impress me--the more dissimilar the second major to CS, the better.
This is from the perspective of an IT geek in a (i'd call it a small company as little as 4 years ago) medium size company. Of course I'd like to take all the credit for the company's growth--many others contributed significantly in their own areas of responsibility.
The problem with consulting is that managers tend to look at IT spending as buying a commodity. Spend more, and you will get more of this stuff called IT. Consultants make it easy for managers to not have to understand how IT impacts business processes. Sure, it is the consultant's job to recommend those systems, but without an IT aware person on staff, how does the manager practically evaluate the consultant's recomendations.
As a director of IT in my company, I find myself spending a large amount of time educating other managers about what IT can and cannot do. Again, consultants can do this work, but they have a profit motive to spend more and do more on IT projects. The fact is, consultants love to keep their clients in the dark so they can be milked for more money. A consultant can never understand the inner workings of a company, because unlike the IT staffer, they don't see the day to day.
Consultant bashing asside, it would be tough to justify one full time IT person for an office of 20 people in some, but not all offices. Though, achitecture firms are the obvious choice for full time IT person since that IT person can do other design oriented things as well--web, graphics, etc .
Our company has looked at other comanies in our industry and have found that bigger companies in particular spend a lot more on IT when they rely on consulting. I guess they never internalized how to use IT before they got big. End result--we are a lot more efficient than big companies.
Outsourcing does have a role. Don't be afraid to outsource those areas your IT person doesn't have strength in. Only pay to outsource those areas you need to--that way you don't have to pay consultant rates for someone else to do all your IT thinking for you. As your company grows, you can wean yourself away from consultants as you complement skills of existing IT staff with new hires. Honestly, besides some design oriented stuff and some basic office network stuff, this architecture firm doesn't need a lot of high end IT talent. When you have multiple offices, hire a good networking/telecom guy to tie all your offices together.
I routinely monitor my logs and observed this activity starting over a year ago. Sysadmins--if this is news to you, check your logs now!
It got so bad that thousands of attempts per day--up to 1000 fomr just one server-- would try to guess ssh username/password combinations on my comptuer.
I tracked one such incident down to the owner of a server who found out he was owned.
I've greatly limited from where peopls can log into almost all my servers, but where I need to grant access to generic users, I will employ connection limiting using iptables to stop the obvious brute force password guesses. Obviously, ssh root login is a no-no from now on on my boxes.
Not being a big fan microsoft--your last point is dead on and not one I thought of much. I first got into computers when microsoft was actually in the last throes of competing with IBM for PC market share.
At that point, Microsoft and its partner companies were the Davids, and IBM was the goliath. None of my friends bought IBM computers, they bought competing "generic" PCs. Dos and then windows 3.1 brought the PC to the masses.
That said, roles have reversed--IBM does have a track record of developing new technologies. Microsoft hasn't done something new in a long time.
Slashdot Mirror
Guess people will have to choose only one of either the cable or phone company.
From the article:
One company has not played a role in Dell's Linux decisions. "Microsoft has not talked to us about Linux. If they did, I wouldn't care. It's none of their business," concluded Dell.
Followup question should have been:
So Mr Dell, has Intel talked to you about AMD?
I wonder how they determine what is unusual. I bought a new car juat one year ago--paid by check. No questions, no problems, no bank holds etc. Maybe my regular transactions are larger--I paid a lot more than the $6500 the retired teacher paid.
Sounds like this credit card company doesn't like it when people pay off their really high interest rate cards.
Anyone hear of refinancing high interest credit card debt with a fixed term home equity loan? Happens all the time. How can this be so unusual for a credit card company to see?
Not knowing what the "certain percentage higher than normal" threshold is, I'd like to see if this retired teacher/ACLU could sue the c.c. company to see if this is a practice used by this company to discourage payment of large balances. I hope this guy didn't have to pay interest on his c.c. balance while the validity of the payment was investigated.
I hear you on that point. So called support from DVR vendors comes from people who worked in the wiring/alarm system business and don't know jack about how a simple PC works. That is why most DVR vendors won't allow you to do anything to their windows install--they are afraid they won't be able to figure out what you've done and won't know how to support your system.
And for this "service" they charge an arm and a leg.
There's a market for geek aware security system people out there. Keep up your work--there's a lot of business you can steal. Even from the big guys--ADT vendors, for example, generally are not very knowledgable about computers and networking.
thanx for the suggestion. I'll check them out.
Have you had to use these in court? Any issues upholding timestamp/authenticity? Just curious.
I myself have looked into these...any scalable software around that can be used with this cameras?
...company with 200+ cameras.
The problem with the Pelco devices is they are sold as is without any easy way to keep the OS up to date. Our company remembers to update DVR OS software as new things come out.
I myself have asked the exact question to our security cam vendors (and so have all the other larger real estate companies in my city) in part because of the updated software issue. For me, even more helpful would be a more open platform. Pelco (and all DVR vendors) lock you into their hardware platform, and if you so much as add or replace one of their $2000 120GB hard drives, they will discontinue your support. I would love a more open platform so I could network all my video systems together and store archival info on an UNLIMITED (or size of MY choosing) storage system.
The company I work for also sells internet services to other multiple tenant properties. This is something that comes up in almost every large company with lots of cameras. If you actually find a good solution, let me know.
burn to cd and convert back to mp3, make it into avi, ogg, whatever
i really don't understand the arguement that the format will be obsolete. Just convert it to whatever comes out.
finally an american company gets in on the techno-gadget craze that goes on in asia--Japan in particular.
maybe US companies will start producing more slick gadgets--so many cool technological gadgets get mode and marketed only for asian countries. being a bit of a geek, I would love that asian trend to come this side of the pacific.
Interesting perspective. I was thinking that I preferred things when win2k was the same--business or home.
With Microsoft, however, which features are available with which version seems arbitrary and at times frustrating. For instance, I understand the intent of limiting file sharing capabilieties on Windows XP home so that MS can offer that prooduct at a lower price for home users. However simple file sharing (tm) is a horrible idea. Maybe I don't trust others by nature, but I really don't like sharing anything without file security--even at home.
I guess the ease from uniformity of capabilities has to be balanced against over-bundling. I would prefer Microsoft start with a basic OS that is the same, then you can buy feature packs to add different levels of capability. They kind of did that with their "plus" versions of windows, but "plus" really just meant "plus more crap" instead of something meaningful.
if only I had mod points to mod funny--especially enjoyed the back to the future reference.
About time someone in the content business stood up and flatly, publicly opossed the idea of charging content providers for sending their data.
I even run a small ISP, and I agreee that charging content providers for traffic is a horrible idea. The only way to fairly do this would be to have huge burdensome regulations (like the phone companies who receive money through a regulatory scheme for each call they receive from another carrier).
I hate intrusive regulation more than I hate bandwidth hogs. Besides, Bell South could just charge by bandwidth instead of by link capacity if they really wanted to cover the costs of some traffic consuming more resources than others. They won't do this of course because the consumer is hooked on unlimited traffic--much like what is happening more and more with unlimited phone calls.
If a hard drive craps out, I don't necessarily want my system to go with it--would rather have my raid monitoring system inform me of a bad disk so it can either be hot swapped, or if not swappable, replaced after hours.
I would think $100 is a kind of break even for MIT labs due to the altruistic goals of providing cheap computing resources to poorer countries and not a price set for the purpose of making much money. If the goal were to make a bunch of money, companies like Dell, HP, etc would be trying to get in on the game.
I'm not climate expert, but wouldn't that extra energy be dissipated through--yep, you guessed it--more hurricanes in the tropics? I also heard something to the effect that during seasons of increased hurricanes, there is usually correspondingly colder winter weather. Wonder if there is a connection to that trend.
I think this is a really interesting idea...if google makes the ads like they are on their search page--relevant and unobtrusive.
You already tell them everything they need to know about you if you use their (or any other free providor) email service.
Afraid of google tracking your p0rn viewing habits? Then don't fricken watch the p0rn through your google DVR. Problem solved.
Seriously, why bother with the paper anyway? Electronic is quicker, easier, and less expensive to produce and distribute.
hear! hear!
I've noticed that about bigger companies. A lot of CYA going on. I did the same move the guy did in the article. Same deal--"it'd be great of you could just do this without spending money". Big difference for me is I did not work for a big company and had support from my boss--happened to be the comptroller, hence no moeny spending allowed. Microsoft is now trying more to keep the mid sized business crowd on MS products, but when I did this, it seemed absurdly expensive to have to outgrow Small Business Server and buy all full verison replacements.
Anyway, when I see how big companies work, they seem to be all staffed with a bunch of pu$$ies--nobody has a backbone and the first sign of trouble brings out the finger pointing. The most successful companies are those that can successfully take on prudent risk--so many big companies are complacent and just want to hold on. Too bad, since I bet those big companies were less risk averse when they started out.
Price point is way off. Equipment, management, access rights costs more than $5/user/mo let alone the cost of internet service itself. This is not going to be a freebe, but rather a competetive option in the market place for internet service.
Why not require more specificity in a lawsuit complaint? If plaintifs were required to do so, wouldn't that cut out at least some of the flat out frivolous?
IANAL, so I have no way to judge your assertion, but it sounds like a good enough justification for why the dismissal motion will go nowhere. Is there such a thing as a "please tell me wtf you are talking about" motion? Or is what the lawyers did in this case the only way to get a better idea of what the other side has before going through the mess of starting the whole discovery process?
I agree with much of what you say--though a CS degree in particular may not suit every IT job. I can't tell from the original posting what type of job the poster would prefer, but I find CS majors often do not have a well rounded enough education to fit in at my place of work. I hire people to do more than just programming--should I need a full time programmer, I would probably look for a CS guy/gal.
I prefer college educated candidates, and give extra bonus points to non-CS majors who have learned significant CS skills on their own. A CS major candidate would have to demonstrate the ability to learn new skills outside the CS field for me to be impressed.
I myself have a degree in math and physics. I've even found a humanities degree holder who is great at learning new technical skills. The weakness I've seen in all the CS majors I've worked with in the past is the breadth of their education (despite the fact that CS is often located in liberal arts colleges on many campuses). Like many companies, the one I work for is a medium sized company that has a handful of geeks running an IT department. Web programming, database applications, network management, phone systems, end user support, etc are the main focus. While a CS major could handle any of the technical requirements for these skills, I have found it difficult to get them to learn/understand:
1. How their CS skills can best be used to improve business processes.
2. How to work in a team with members from non IT related departments.
3. How to communicate IT/CS concepts to non IT/CS people.
4. That the company they work for does not exist for the sole purpose of propogating an IT department.
Companies that have good IT departments tend to have the above points figured out. Those companies that have bad IT departments tend to be missing the boat on one or more of the above points.
So I suppose the argument will be advanced that I should hire MIS people. I find that MIS folks tend not to be very creative and too conservative.
Any way, I don't exclude CS people from consideration, but previous experience makes me be more careful. I'd love to see a candidate with CS + just about anything else. CS + one of humanities, arts, math/physical sciences, etc
would definitely impress me--the more dissimilar the second major to CS, the better.
This is from the perspective of an IT geek in a (i'd call it a small company as little as 4 years ago) medium size company. Of course I'd like to take all the credit for the company's growth--many others contributed significantly in their own areas of responsibility.
The problem with consulting is that managers tend to look at IT spending as buying a commodity. Spend more, and you will get more of this stuff called IT. Consultants make it easy for managers to not have to understand how IT impacts business processes. Sure, it is the consultant's job to recommend those systems, but without an IT aware person on staff, how does the manager practically evaluate the consultant's recomendations.
As a director of IT in my company, I find myself spending a large amount of time educating other managers about what IT can and cannot do. Again, consultants can do this work, but they have a profit motive to spend more and do more on IT projects. The fact is, consultants love to keep their clients in the dark so they can be milked for more money. A consultant can never understand the inner workings of a company, because unlike the IT staffer, they don't see the day to day.
Consultant bashing asside, it would be tough to justify one full time IT person for an office of 20 people in some, but not all offices. Though, achitecture firms are the obvious choice for full time IT person since that IT person can do other design oriented things as well--web, graphics, etc .
Our company has looked at other comanies in our industry and have found that bigger companies in particular spend a lot more on IT when they rely on consulting. I guess they never internalized how to use IT before they got big. End result--we are a lot more efficient than big companies.
Outsourcing does have a role. Don't be afraid to outsource those areas your IT person doesn't have strength in. Only pay to outsource those areas you need to--that way you don't have to pay consultant rates for someone else to do all your IT thinking for you. As your company grows, you can wean yourself away from consultants as you complement skills of existing IT staff with new hires. Honestly, besides some design oriented stuff and some basic office network stuff, this architecture firm doesn't need a lot of high end IT talent. When you have multiple offices, hire a good networking/telecom guy to tie all your offices together.
The article states things started May 05.
I routinely monitor my logs and observed this activity starting over a year ago. Sysadmins--if this is news to you, check your logs now!
It got so bad that thousands of attempts per day--up to 1000 fomr just one server-- would try to guess ssh username/password combinations on my comptuer.
I tracked one such incident down to the owner of a server who found out he was owned.
I've greatly limited from where peopls can log into almost all my servers, but where I need to grant access to generic users, I will employ connection limiting using iptables to stop the obvious brute force password guesses. Obviously, ssh root login is a no-no from now on on my boxes.
Also, check out http://chrootssh.sourceforge.net/index.php for a chrooted login solution. Not a panacea for securing your servers, but one more barrier to throw up.
Not being a big fan microsoft--your last point is dead on and not one I thought of much. I first got into computers when microsoft was actually in the last throes of competing with IBM for PC market share.
At that point, Microsoft and its partner companies were the Davids, and IBM was the goliath. None of my friends bought IBM computers, they bought competing "generic" PCs. Dos and then windows 3.1 brought the PC to the masses.
That said, roles have reversed--IBM does have a track record of developing new technologies. Microsoft hasn't done something new in a long time.