Yeah, I've had the same argument/discussion with a friend of mine a couple times. He's all about going to Quakecon/etc and showing off his stuff. His current machine is a four drive SATA raid 0 setup. His roomie has a two drive SATA raid 0 setup. Very similar hardware specs except for the additional two drives. On my buddies machine, Windows XP will boot up from BIOS post to being able to click on an application on the desktop in just a couple seconds (somewhere around 2, I forget exactly). The other guys machine takes closer to 6 or 8 seconds. He is also always the first person in a level on a game due to loading speeds, which could make the difference to getting to the rocket launcher/etc first. Me, I prefer Raid 5 (+1 if you can get it), but my current setup is Raid 5 on the household server, and no protection on the pc's.
You're better off - they haven't changed much. They are not making direct accusations about anything, but they did outright say that a couple of our symptoms have nothing to do with the Siebel app and said it was either IIS or the network, which as early on in the troubleshoot as we were, that was impossible to know for a fact. I still think it is the swe.dll - it's the main one that is called for every get/post, and to us it is just a black box. They haven't been very forthright in explaining how it works and what exactly it does.
We do not have the luxury of stating that we will not support something. The app is used by our main inhouse customer (a very large division of departments that makes up almost 100% of the revenue generating portion of the company).
Although I do not believe we are paying anything - our VP called someone pretty high up in their organization and told them how it was going to go after their lowlevel post sales engineer interrupted one of our Directors a couple times while he was explaining the issue. He was stating that from a customer's perspective that Siebel was broken and not working, and the sales engineer kept interrupting him to say that the application was running fine. You just don't do that. It either works or it doesn't - don't pass blame, all that matters is that you make the paying customer happy and get them back up and running again in any way possible.
Interesting. Yeah, we've got some RST's. We have yet to prove if they are a symptom of the (suspected) application problem or the cause though. We're on 7.5 which is not the latest, and the clients go merrily on their way, then all of a sudden they start hanging and open up a dozen or so new connections with the server because they didn't get a response, which makes our session count on the firewall go from a couple thousand to thirty thousand in a matter of ten seconds. We also use load balancers behind the firewall, and that stupid resonate stuff as well. I can prove via sniffer traces that the traffic gets through the firewall, through the load balancer, onto the web server, and the web server never responds. The web server guys can prove that they received the request and handed it off to the swe.dll. The swe.dll logs don't even register that it received the request. But do they admit a problem? Noooooooo.... They just ask for more logs.
I'd give anything to know what that magic setting is that you used. We have had one Siebel tech on the call that stated that she had heard of a similar problem with a customer and was trying to find someone who knew the specifics, and we have not heard from her since.
And no, I never expect a pat on the back. I've been a network administrator for too long to expect that.
Sorry for venting with actual technical specifics:P
The people themselves seem pretty smart. My problem is management accountability. It took us forever just to get them to commit and have people on the conference calls with us, and now they're telling us that they'll give us 24 hour turnaround on our sniffer traces and server logs. The problem is that their management lets them get away with that, while we (the customer) suffer through another day of 60% uptime waiting on Siebel to give us some patch or parameter change.
Yeah, I'd love to. We rolled it out 3 years ago or so, and had major problems with it. We spent millions of bucks (this is not a small company I'm talking about here) and completely revamped the design a year ago. One of the reasons was that we were using AIX servers, and Siebel told us that almost all of their customers used Windows, so most of their patch testing was on the windows version. Now we have yet another problem. The darn thing was rolled out as an edict from one of the executive VP's - we have no choice but to fight through all of it's problems.
Well, I don't know about the rest of you, but I've been on a two week long troubleshoot call for Siebel problems, and today starts the third week. 8-12 hours a day, 100's of different _sets_ of sniffer traces, and no solution. The problem is in the application, not on the network. I am not familiar with Oracle's technical support, but it can't be worse than Siebel's, so I'm looking forward to this.
Yes, I agree that to those who know what they are doing, the certifications do not necessarily mean anything unless you're talking about top tier cert's like cisco's CCIE. However, I have yet to know of a large company's HR department that does not use ceritications to rule out potential applicants. A similar resume that both people have 5 years of experience and a bachelor's degree, but one person has a CCNP and a couple other cert's, they will sometimes throw out the person without a cert depending on their departmental regulations, and other times they will simply put the person with the cert's on top of the pile, so the hiring supervisor may not get to the person without a cert, even if it turns out that they are better qualified.
Personally, my company pays for $2000 of technical training per employee per year. We can choose to use that money towards a class, or towards taking tests, etc. They don't pay if we fail. We also do not typically get raises because of it, but when promotions do come around, it does make you look better as compared to your coworkers. Also, it is something to fall back on if you do get fired or quit from your current job. There is no downside to getting a certification unless you are legitimately broke and your employer does not pay. I see no reason for the general masses to not get a certification as the pointy hairs generally look at it and think you're a god.
The cost of the drive (granted the consumer is definitely not being charged the price M$ pays) might have something to do with buffering, read/write speed, and most importantly (I hope) the physical characterists of the gforce ratings. No, not the Nvidia geforce, Gforce, like as in I can drop the 360 or kick it with my foot while playing a rather exciting game and the harddrive won't get damaged. The last time I checked, typical laptop drives had much better protection than 3.5" drives. As always there are exceptions to every rule.
I'm not exactly sure why we care that our CCO account names and passwords were stolen. Does it really matter to me if someone downloads IOS while masquerading as me? Or maybe I should care if somebody opens up a TAC case as me, or submits a bug report as me? I really don't see the problem with someone else having access to my account on CCO. The only thing I use it for is to download code (we call TAC directly, or called our dedicated Advanced Services guy for everything else). I'm sure 90% of the people who have CCO accounts also use it solely for the purpose of downloading code/drivers/etc. So am I missing something that is highly private on the site?
I just want to know how you managed to both get pregnant and acquire ex-girlfriends. That leaves only one subset of people. So what are you doing reading slashdot? There are 10's of thousands of guys on here who would like to meet you....
Yeah, yeah. I know it was just an example. But still, don't get everyone's hopes up for nothing.
I have no info for the questions you actually asked, but I'll warn you against the bluetooth crackberry. I have the 7280, and it works just fine for me, but I don't have any IM programs. Just poker, checkers, and Webviewer. Anyway, I can get 4+ days of battery power out of by 7280, but my coworkers with the newer 7290's get about 2 days or less. This is with mediocre use of the cell phone, but extensive use of email. If you talk on the phone constantly, you'll get even less time than that.
Yeah, it does suck. And I wouldn't do it if it were my money. But it's not, so I don't really care. I'm sure there are more reasons than what I know (I'm just an engineer), and I may not have the dollar amounts right. Also, as for throwing the old machines away, we are not allowed. Our bean counters don't allow anything to be sold, and nothing can be thrown away. Before we started leasing, the only thing we were allowed to do with old computers was crate them up by pallet, ship them downstate and sell them at state auctions - typically low income school systems would buy them for use in their classrooms. As I said, my company has a really weird take on leasing.
My company has a weird take on this. We are a large US based Healthcare company. We buy most of our largest servers (We're an IBM shop: Mainframes, Regatta's, etc). But we typically lease a lot of our midrange UNIX based systems. Our Windows servers are all bought and paid for, as well as all the backend switches/routers/etc. But desktops are leased for about $50/month, and laptops are leased for about $80/month. Monitors are purchased as far as I know. I believe we're on a 3 year rotation for the desktops and laptops, and the ones we've been getting in for the past couple months are 2.8Gig P4's, 60-80GB HDD, etc, so they're pretty decent machines. Laptops are the IBM T41 and T42 series, so they're good as well. I've heard that the reason we no longer buy the desktops is that we were never able to sell the old ones before because of tax purposes (we are not a for-profit company), and it took many years to write the assets off on taxes. Another big reason for the leasing of the desktops is for quicker support. We have dedicated in house people for hardware RMA's with onsite storage of common parts, so a fried system can be replaced within a few hours. You can get a good service contract with purchases, but I would assume it would cost more than with leases.
20% for a project of your own choosing and one that actually interests you? That's awesome. I'd give just about anything just to get my workload of projects that are dumped on me down to only 100% of my time (if 100% is 40 hours a week instead of the typical 60, that is). Sounds like their management team actually understands the concept of burnout.
The mirrored site that one of the guys posted says that it is a DIVX encoded AVI file. I bet you don't have the codec installed. If you have Windows, I swear by the Cole2K codec package from Cole2k.net
If you're running a Linux flavor, you can download the pure divx codec from Divx.com
Your comment about making sure everyone has an armed escort struck me as pretty funny. Here's our situation:
We recently had this same problem at my employer's state of the art datacenter. I work for a large (multi-state, a name the vast majority in the US knows) health care provider. One of our security guards was teaching a new security guard the ropes, and showed him the emergency button. Now, if we had any other type of power failure that myseteriously killed both our A and B power feeds, our emergency generators would immediately kick in and not even the lights would flicker. But the emergency button obviously has to cut everything. So he actually said "Now, whatever you do, don't do this" while pointing to the button, and hit it by mistake. However, it seems we fared much better than live-journal in that it only took about 10 hours to get everything back up and fully tested. A couple parts failed that we had full onsite support contracts for, but nothing major (including multiple mainframes that went down hard!) The good news is that now we know that all the disaster recovery drills we've done in the past 5 years actually work. It did make the newspaper though, and marketing had to call all of our large clients individually and apologize.
I did this in my apartment, except I actually ran the cat5 under the carpet. It takes a while to pull up the entire corner of carpet and then put it back down again, but if you're careful when doing it it doesn't look too bad and the cable will never be seen again. When we moved out, just yank on one end and eventually you'll pull the end through.
What's so great about Fry's in a discussion where we're talking prices? I'm a mile from the new one in Chicago and went there on opening day and was amazed at their sale prices. However, I've gone a couple more times to look for stuff that wasn't specifically advertised as on sale, and their prices did not seem to be more than a couple bucks cheaper than best buy, etc. I will definitely shop there when I need some specific or obscure part because I'm sure they'll have it. But unless there's a good sale going on, I doubt I'm going to just roam the aisles. Plus, their return policy really sucks. If you return past their 15-30 day policy they give you a printout of your iou instead of a plastic card like everybody else. They know that about 60% of everyone who gets one of those will lose them because they don't fit in wallets. I know cuz I lost one.
No, that's close to what he meant, but not the same thing. Not that this thread has anything to do whatsoever with the question at hand, though. What he was talking about was the Zen allows you to edit, create, etc any playlist on the fly. e.g, you already have your playlist created, and you want to add or delete a few more songs to it without going back to your computer. Feel free, go right ahead. From what you're saying, the iPod cannot do this, it only allows editing of a single playlist called 'on the go'.
Yep. Pretty much they deserve it based on their own stupidity. I mean, c'mon. Everybody knows you only sell this type of thing through Ebay with vaguely worded descriptions.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I've had the same argument/discussion with a friend of mine a couple times. He's all about going to Quakecon/etc and showing off his stuff. His current machine is a four drive SATA raid 0 setup. His roomie has a two drive SATA raid 0 setup. Very similar hardware specs except for the additional two drives. On my buddies machine, Windows XP will boot up from BIOS post to being able to click on an application on the desktop in just a couple seconds (somewhere around 2, I forget exactly). The other guys machine takes closer to 6 or 8 seconds. He is also always the first person in a level on a game due to loading speeds, which could make the difference to getting to the rocket launcher/etc first. Me, I prefer Raid 5 (+1 if you can get it), but my current setup is Raid 5 on the household server, and no protection on the pc's.
You're better off - they haven't changed much. They are not making direct accusations about anything, but they did outright say that a couple of our symptoms have nothing to do with the Siebel app and said it was either IIS or the network, which as early on in the troubleshoot as we were, that was impossible to know for a fact. I still think it is the swe.dll - it's the main one that is called for every get/post, and to us it is just a black box. They haven't been very forthright in explaining how it works and what exactly it does.
We do not have the luxury of stating that we will not support something. The app is used by our main inhouse customer (a very large division of departments that makes up almost 100% of the revenue generating portion of the company).
Although I do not believe we are paying anything - our VP called someone pretty high up in their organization and told them how it was going to go after their lowlevel post sales engineer interrupted one of our Directors a couple times while he was explaining the issue. He was stating that from a customer's perspective that Siebel was broken and not working, and the sales engineer kept interrupting him to say that the application was running fine. You just don't do that. It either works or it doesn't - don't pass blame, all that matters is that you make the paying customer happy and get them back up and running again in any way possible.
Thanks for the info - I appreciate it.
Interesting. Yeah, we've got some RST's. We have yet to prove if they are a symptom of the (suspected) application problem or the cause though. We're on 7.5 which is not the latest, and the clients go merrily on their way, then all of a sudden they start hanging and open up a dozen or so new connections with the server because they didn't get a response, which makes our session count on the firewall go from a couple thousand to thirty thousand in a matter of ten seconds. We also use load balancers behind the firewall, and that stupid resonate stuff as well. I can prove via sniffer traces that the traffic gets through the firewall, through the load balancer, onto the web server, and the web server never responds. The web server guys can prove that they received the request and handed it off to the swe.dll. The swe.dll logs don't even register that it received the request. But do they admit a problem? Noooooooo.... They just ask for more logs.
:P
I'd give anything to know what that magic setting is that you used. We have had one Siebel tech on the call that stated that she had heard of a similar problem with a customer and was trying to find someone who knew the specifics, and we have not heard from her since.
And no, I never expect a pat on the back. I've been a network administrator for too long to expect that.
Sorry for venting with actual technical specifics
Are you my VP? I swear, he couldn't come up with a better BS one liner than that.
Yeah, that's cuz we're in the same department. Small world :p
Anyway, for the rest of you, it's healthcare insurance if you're interested.
The people themselves seem pretty smart. My problem is management accountability. It took us forever just to get them to commit and have people on the conference calls with us, and now they're telling us that they'll give us 24 hour turnaround on our sniffer traces and server logs. The problem is that their management lets them get away with that, while we (the customer) suffer through another day of 60% uptime waiting on Siebel to give us some patch or parameter change.
Yeah, I'd love to. We rolled it out 3 years ago or so, and had major problems with it. We spent millions of bucks (this is not a small company I'm talking about here) and completely revamped the design a year ago. One of the reasons was that we were using AIX servers, and Siebel told us that almost all of their customers used Windows, so most of their patch testing was on the windows version. Now we have yet another problem. The darn thing was rolled out as an edict from one of the executive VP's - we have no choice but to fight through all of it's problems.
Well, I don't know about the rest of you, but I've been on a two week long troubleshoot call for Siebel problems, and today starts the third week. 8-12 hours a day, 100's of different _sets_ of sniffer traces, and no solution. The problem is in the application, not on the network. I am not familiar with Oracle's technical support, but it can't be worse than Siebel's, so I'm looking forward to this.
Yes, I agree that to those who know what they are doing, the certifications do not necessarily mean anything unless you're talking about top tier cert's like cisco's CCIE. However, I have yet to know of a large company's HR department that does not use ceritications to rule out potential applicants. A similar resume that both people have 5 years of experience and a bachelor's degree, but one person has a CCNP and a couple other cert's, they will sometimes throw out the person without a cert depending on their departmental regulations, and other times they will simply put the person with the cert's on top of the pile, so the hiring supervisor may not get to the person without a cert, even if it turns out that they are better qualified.
Personally, my company pays for $2000 of technical training per employee per year. We can choose to use that money towards a class, or towards taking tests, etc. They don't pay if we fail. We also do not typically get raises because of it, but when promotions do come around, it does make you look better as compared to your coworkers. Also, it is something to fall back on if you do get fired or quit from your current job. There is no downside to getting a certification unless you are legitimately broke and your employer does not pay. I see no reason for the general masses to not get a certification as the pointy hairs generally look at it and think you're a god.
The cost of the drive (granted the consumer is definitely not being charged the price M$ pays) might have something to do with buffering, read/write speed, and most importantly (I hope) the physical characterists of the gforce ratings. No, not the Nvidia geforce, Gforce, like as in I can drop the 360 or kick it with my foot while playing a rather exciting game and the harddrive won't get damaged. The last time I checked, typical laptop drives had much better protection than 3.5" drives. As always there are exceptions to every rule.
I'm not exactly sure why we care that our CCO account names and passwords were stolen. Does it really matter to me if someone downloads IOS while masquerading as me? Or maybe I should care if somebody opens up a TAC case as me, or submits a bug report as me? I really don't see the problem with someone else having access to my account on CCO. The only thing I use it for is to download code (we call TAC directly, or called our dedicated Advanced Services guy for everything else). I'm sure 90% of the people who have CCO accounts also use it solely for the purpose of downloading code/drivers/etc. So am I missing something that is highly private on the site?
I just want to know how you managed to both get pregnant and acquire ex-girlfriends. That leaves only one subset of people. So what are you doing reading slashdot? There are 10's of thousands of guys on here who would like to meet you....
Yeah, yeah. I know it was just an example. But still, don't get everyone's hopes up for nothing.
I have no info for the questions you actually asked, but I'll warn you against the bluetooth crackberry. I have the 7280, and it works just fine for me, but I don't have any IM programs. Just poker, checkers, and Webviewer. Anyway, I can get 4+ days of battery power out of by 7280, but my coworkers with the newer 7290's get about 2 days or less. This is with mediocre use of the cell phone, but extensive use of email. If you talk on the phone constantly, you'll get even less time than that.
Yeah, it does suck. And I wouldn't do it if it were my money. But it's not, so I don't really care. I'm sure there are more reasons than what I know (I'm just an engineer), and I may not have the dollar amounts right. Also, as for throwing the old machines away, we are not allowed. Our bean counters don't allow anything to be sold, and nothing can be thrown away. Before we started leasing, the only thing we were allowed to do with old computers was crate them up by pallet, ship them downstate and sell them at state auctions - typically low income school systems would buy them for use in their classrooms. As I said, my company has a really weird take on leasing.
My company has a weird take on this. We are a large US based Healthcare company. We buy most of our largest servers (We're an IBM shop: Mainframes, Regatta's, etc). But we typically lease a lot of our midrange UNIX based systems. Our Windows servers are all bought and paid for, as well as all the backend switches/routers/etc. But desktops are leased for about $50/month, and laptops are leased for about $80/month. Monitors are purchased as far as I know. I believe we're on a 3 year rotation for the desktops and laptops, and the ones we've been getting in for the past couple months are 2.8Gig P4's, 60-80GB HDD, etc, so they're pretty decent machines. Laptops are the IBM T41 and T42 series, so they're good as well. I've heard that the reason we no longer buy the desktops is that we were never able to sell the old ones before because of tax purposes (we are not a for-profit company), and it took many years to write the assets off on taxes. Another big reason for the leasing of the desktops is for quicker support. We have dedicated in house people for hardware RMA's with onsite storage of common parts, so a fried system can be replaced within a few hours. You can get a good service contract with purchases, but I would assume it would cost more than with leases.
20% for a project of your own choosing and one that actually interests you? That's awesome. I'd give just about anything just to get my workload of projects that are dumped on me down to only 100% of my time (if 100% is 40 hours a week instead of the typical 60, that is). Sounds like their management team actually understands the concept of burnout.
The AVI is fine. Works perfectly in Winamp with the Cole2k Advanced codec pack installed on Windows. Good luck with it, guess I won't try to help you.
If you're running a Linux flavor, you can download the pure divx codec from Divx.com
Mod this guy up. He not only has the AVI mirrored, but he has a very fast connection.
Thanks!!
Disney made a movie? I remember loving the book!
Your comment about making sure everyone has an armed escort struck me as pretty funny. Here's our situation:
We recently had this same problem at my employer's state of the art datacenter. I work for a large (multi-state, a name the vast majority in the US knows) health care provider. One of our security guards was teaching a new security guard the ropes, and showed him the emergency button. Now, if we had any other type of power failure that myseteriously killed both our A and B power feeds, our emergency generators would immediately kick in and not even the lights would flicker. But the emergency button obviously has to cut everything. So he actually said "Now, whatever you do, don't do this" while pointing to the button, and hit it by mistake. However, it seems we fared much better than live-journal in that it only took about 10 hours to get everything back up and fully tested. A couple parts failed that we had full onsite support contracts for, but nothing major (including multiple mainframes that went down hard!) The good news is that now we know that all the disaster recovery drills we've done in the past 5 years actually work. It did make the newspaper though, and marketing had to call all of our large clients individually and apologize.
I did this in my apartment, except I actually ran the cat5 under the carpet. It takes a while to pull up the entire corner of carpet and then put it back down again, but if you're careful when doing it it doesn't look too bad and the cable will never be seen again. When we moved out, just yank on one end and eventually you'll pull the end through.
What's so great about Fry's in a discussion where we're talking prices? I'm a mile from the new one in Chicago and went there on opening day and was amazed at their sale prices. However, I've gone a couple more times to look for stuff that wasn't specifically advertised as on sale, and their prices did not seem to be more than a couple bucks cheaper than best buy, etc. I will definitely shop there when I need some specific or obscure part because I'm sure they'll have it. But unless there's a good sale going on, I doubt I'm going to just roam the aisles. Plus, their return policy really sucks. If you return past their 15-30 day policy they give you a printout of your iou instead of a plastic card like everybody else. They know that about 60% of everyone who gets one of those will lose them because they don't fit in wallets. I know cuz I lost one.
No, that's close to what he meant, but not the same thing. Not that this thread has anything to do whatsoever with the question at hand, though. What he was talking about was the Zen allows you to edit, create, etc any playlist on the fly. e.g, you already have your playlist created, and you want to add or delete a few more songs to it without going back to your computer. Feel free, go right ahead. From what you're saying, the iPod cannot do this, it only allows editing of a single playlist called 'on the go'.
Yep. Pretty much they deserve it based on their own stupidity. I mean, c'mon. Everybody knows you only sell this type of thing through Ebay with vaguely worded descriptions.