Fry's associates actual serial numbers with customers (they're listed on the receipts). But I dunno if they do that with all their products, or just the easy to walk off ones (harddrives in particular are done this way). Can any employee verify?
Here in Chicago on I88 they have stoplights directly ON the on-ramp. They are generally about halfway down the ramp, and I believe the theory goes that during high traffic (rush hour) times, there is a camera aimed at the right lane of the highway a little ways before the onramp that controls whether the light shows green or red. When it goes green it's supposed to be free or easier to merge on. However, if you really do stop you're basically screwed anyway because it's only 75-125 yards from that point to where the merging lane ends. Very dangerous as far as I'm concerned.
It's fixed now. Took them a whole 6 minutes of downtime, too (from taking it down to bringing it back up, I have no idea how long the error was there). I wish my admins at work were that fast. More like 6 hours for them.
Glad to see you're being openly honest with your employees. In my company (multi-state health insurance company), we get our fair share of 'perks', but no overtime. We get our RIM pagers, cell phones (recently switched to blueberries), palm pilots or IPAQ's upon request, laptops as well as desktops, etc. I work in the network department, so we've had access from home for years before it started to be offered to other people (only upon their mgmt's request, and extreme business need for now). Most of our department has T1's from home, which go directly to the company (free internet access, albeit filtered and logged by firewall). Anybody outside of our department who wasn't extremely important got saddled with either ISDN or token based dialup. What we are finally starting to do is use VPN access. For the first year VPN was completely on the employee's dime, but if somebody had dsl or cable, we would setup a VPN account for them so they could do whatever they wanted to. In the past couple months we have started to rethink that strategy with the help of the legal department. The jury is still out on what our final solution will be, but we have two right now. If upper management approves the request (director or senior mgmt level), we will fully pay for certain people's entire home broadband connection. This will be a true internet connection, with VPN to the company, which is what you're concerned about. This opens up some legal dilemas regarding what if the employee hacks some website somewhere, or does something else illegal on an internet connection paid for by a company. So that is limited to an extremely few number of people (I would trade my T1 for flat unfiltered cable modem in a heartbeat!) The second option we are looking at is a prorated reimbursement based on how important you are - otherwise known as how much your management feels you would be required to work from home. For example, a fairly new employee with minimal projects that they are responsible for but was still allowed VPN access might get 30% of their broadband bill paid for by the company. Someone who responds to a majority of the after hours problems would get a maximum of 95% of their bill paid for. By requiring the employee to sign an internet usage agreement, and not paying for the entire connection (the employee would have to pay, and then submit expense forms every week), the company would negate any legal implications that could have occured from misuse. Our legal department is still checking into this, but we are pretty sure this is what is going to start being offered. For the most part we are completely happy with this - I have no problem paying $4 a month for business class DSL or cable service, and in return I simply have to send in my bill every month. No biggie, but it would be nice if they figured out some type of automatic system.
Not gonna make any noticable difference at all. Nobody ever sends large attachments to an external email address, because chances are that that external server will not accept it. Also, internal email for a large company is orders of magnitude greater than external email. You've got all your meeting notices, meeting minutes, project notes, quick questions, blah blah blah. I might get 100 emails a day from internal employees, and 5 or so from external.
I never said that the 'we' I was referring to meant the end user. I may have a tendency to switch back and forth between possessive's, but in this sentence, 'we' meant ITG services as a whole division. There are also many ways to setup an email backup solution, none of which I know of for sure are the one that we use. You could set it up so it backs up inboxes at a certain time each day - so anything that came in that day, and was deleted before then was not saved. You could trust people's judgement and remove from your archives any emails that the end user specifically deletes from their trash folder, or you could bite the bullet and archive everything every time.
I have a cousin who went to the college in Coeur d'Alene, and the town is pretty much owned by a group of cultist / supremacist / Aryan / whatever you want to call them run by some guy who I don't recall the name of with a compound up on the hill. He said that the guy shuts down the town once a year for a huge fireworks display - I don't recall if it's for July 4th or not. But he was very clear about the entire (useful) government being run by this guy, and that they're always having rallies.
Right. Our company originally tried to instate size limits when we went to Notes (only 3 years ago), but then the lawyers said we need to keep everything anyway (HIPAA requirements). So even with the exorbitant expense of the system, it is probably still cheaper to keep expanding every couple months rather than pay people to sit there and sort through their own email. Anything from an external party must be kept, and anything remotely regarding a customer must be kept as well. It's a huge pain, and they took the easy way out by archiving every single email. But neither option is very cost effective. There are four people that I know of in my department alone that have email boxes (extensively categorized with dozens or up to hundreds of folders) with up to 20GB each. It's crazy. But even without the ever looming threat of a lawsuit, they claim that they have been able to disprove what other people were badmouthing them about by being able to produce an email from that person stating the exact opposite a year or two previously. I've witnessed it once, and it is pretty funny watching somebody turn beet red in a room with 25 supervisor's and above.
There comes a point where that, too, gets very expensive. At my company (large US healthcare provider, with governmental and private contracts both HMO and PPO), after saying 3, 5, and 7 years, our lawyers have told us we have to archive all email potentially forever that the end user doesn't specifically delete. They may do an end-run around the deletion and archive those, too, but I don't know. Anyway, our email system (Lotus Notes, which is an extreme HOG) eats somewhere between 100GB - 1TB/week. I was told it was well over 1TB, but I don't believe them. This is of course due to older Notes versions inability to store attachments in public directories and simply sending a copy to each and every recipient (and the stupidity of no size limits on internal email). There is a point to how many drives you can add to a SAN, and then you have to get a whole extra chassis, which is where the expensive part comes in. To keep buying new SAN units every 6 months or so, as well as the harddrives to put in them (plus the maintenance contracts, 24/7 support, etc) could easily add up to $1million/year or more. Which is definitely more costly than 10 average low-mid level administrator's salaries.
Maybe LL Bean should have filed suit in Utah instead of in Maine? Yes, it's different because this one will test Utah's new law. But this sounds like exactly the same problem, and since the story's short on details, it could even be the same culprit (claria).
Oh yeah, I was there just last weekend. A relative calls up and says his Dell 2.8Ghz is acting slow. Like slower than his old Pentium 90. I'm two states away, so I had to talk him through everything. It was so bad that he couldn't even get the start button to respond, or use the task manager to kill processes. We download adaware, and run it in safe mode. It cleans 850+ off the machine. Reboot, and the thing is still extremely slow. Back to safe mode, download the current reflist (I didn't think it was worth it at first to give him a half hour lesson over the phone on how to use winzip). Adaware with the current reference's then proceeds to find another 300 or so. Update Mcafee to current virus dat, and scan entire harddrive - finding nothing. Reboot again, and it's still insanely slow although better than before. So I give another lesson on how to edit the registry and he removed two more programs that were being run through rundll32 in startup. After 3 hours, 25+ process, hundreds of cookies and registry entries later, it was finally back and running. It would've been quicker to pop in the recovery disk and rebuild. Unfortunately, since I did all of it over the phone, so I wasn't able to backup copies of the adaware logs to get exact numbers. Damn junior high kids installing everything and its mother.
I don't understand things like these. It's just common sense that tells you that anyone who compains about the 'crap' on tv, or who just doesn't have certain shows that they watch all the time are going to be the people who participate. Those people may just be looking for an excuse to stop watching tv altogether. And that's fine with me. But I don't see how this will have any affect on the vast majority of us who actually enjoy watching tv, and cannot even fathom the phrase "successfully reduce the amount of television they watch permanently". Yes, I watch a fair amount of television (generally 3-4 hours a day). I watch some sitcoms, drama, crime investigation shows, and lots of movies. I don't have any desire to watch less tv, and I don't see any reason why some group sees the need to push their own agenda's through trying to get me to watch less tv. TV itself is not evil. Stupid people who do nothing other than sit on the couch and watch tv, or those who watch none at all and claim it rots people's brains are the ones that are evil.
I, too, prefer Sniffer Pro to everything else I've tried. We use many of their hardware appliances at the office (have at least one in every remote site), plus everyone in the department runs the portable software on their laptops. It is indispensible, but don't even start to think that you can just believe everything the 'expert' tells you. Unless you spend hours training it as to what constitutes a broadcast storm on your network, and what is excessive for this and that (the defaults are useless on any enterprise network), it will only start to give you the picture. It is better than not having an expert (at a glance diagnostics of your traffic), but you still have to dig through the individual packets except for the most simple problems. They also have had quite a few bugs over the years, especially with the hardware appliances (distributed), but overall I am happy with them. Better than Finisar and ethereal (for me).
The company I work for (Healthcare inustry, 20-60 Billion a year in revenue) uses them for almost every job, however they may not actually get around to interviewing people off of them. They post internally, and we have 7 days to apply from within. Then if the supervisor wants to fill the job with a consultant, they talk to one of the 3-5 consultant firms that we hire from exclusivley. If nobody from within looks good, or they don't want a consultant, then and only then will they start going through the pile of resumes that they get from their job posting(mostly from Monster). Most people in IT get in from friends/relatives, or consultancy to full time conversions, but I do know a few that came in from internet postings.
I agree. Everytime somebody on/. mentions Nvidia the very first thing that is replied is when will they be opensource. I've never had a problem with the binaries either.
I agree with the recommendations of getting a T1, especially with the apparently exorbitant setup fee's for the Direcway system. T1 initial setup fees are almost certainly in the thousands, but you will be happier in the long run. I currently have a T1 to my house from SBC (Illinois). It took about 2 months to get setup, and my company pays somewhere around $250/month for the service (it's hard to get them to give specific answers). We have a longterm consultant who lives along the coast in Mass. and it took the phone company over 2 years to get his T1 up and running. But to be fair, he lives in the boonies along the coast and they had to erect new poles just to hold his line.
Obviously you would have to get a 'real' router to service the T1. The cheapest way I can think of is to purchase a Cisco 1600 series off of Ebay (EOL, but the IOS still supports everything a normal person needs) for about $100. You also need a T1 WIC card to install in the router, which will run you another $115 on Ebay. Now you have a fully functional non-neutered T1 router for $215 plus shipping. If you talk to your accountant and you can write off 50% of the T1 cost, it will even out and you will be much happier.
Okay, so what I want to know is, what's this number? I called it, and it's a fax machine. Should we be sending them lots of faxes telling them that killing this is a bad idea?
These methods all take too long and do not provide the desired outrageous sound effects that should go along with properly destroying a computer.
When I was in college a couple years ago, a friend of mine had a computer from a major manufacturer that had intermittent problems with simply turning on and all sorts of other useful activities. He talked on the phone with them several times, and sent it in and they supposedly worked on it and sent it back. The problem was that since it was intermittent they were never able to see the problem and hence were unaware and unwilling to do anything about it.
So as any enterprising computer science major with a bum computer would do, he took matters into his own hands and allowed us to watch. He took a standard pc power cable, cut off the end, and stripped the shielding off it to expose the bare wires. He then proceeded to plug the cable into the outlet, and verrrry carefully (don't try this at home kids, although it is pretty cool) touched the two wires together to the middle of the motherboard. This is guaranteed to provide at least a little smoke and the desirable fried plastic and electronics vapor that we all know and love. In his case, he was able to kill the circuit for the entire dorm room floor. So not only did he fry the computer and was able to finally get a replacement, but we got to hear various people yelling from inside their dorm rooms trying to figure out who did it 'this time'.
In my company we are an IBM mainframe shop. We still have extensive use of SNA, IPX, 16Mb Token Ring, FDDI, switched token ring, and one instance of thinnet. These all still fully support the machines that are running on them with no network based problems in a long time. We've been converting everything to ethernet for 2 years now, but we probably won't be done until sometime mid next year, and even then we still might be using SNA and IPX for some applications.
Yes, Snood is definitely one of the most popular games out there. Every once in a while it comes up in a conversation, and people always recognize it. My wife plays it on the pc for hours, and I play on my palm pilot whenever I'm stuck somewhere and have nothing better to do.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanksgiving night, and there's still enough of us sitting around doing nothing better than looking at /. that the pictures are already down.
Fry's associates actual serial numbers with customers (they're listed on the receipts). But I dunno if they do that with all their products, or just the easy to walk off ones (harddrives in particular are done this way). Can any employee verify?
Just disconnect the yellow. Who needs all three (or four in some cases) colors anyway?
Sorry, That'd be on 290 not I88. I88 ends for some unknown reason and I always forget which highway is called which.
Here in Chicago on I88 they have stoplights directly ON the on-ramp. They are generally about halfway down the ramp, and I believe the theory goes that during high traffic (rush hour) times, there is a camera aimed at the right lane of the highway a little ways before the onramp that controls whether the light shows green or red. When it goes green it's supposed to be free or easier to merge on. However, if you really do stop you're basically screwed anyway because it's only 75-125 yards from that point to where the merging lane ends. Very dangerous as far as I'm concerned.
It's fixed now. Took them a whole 6 minutes of downtime, too (from taking it down to bringing it back up, I have no idea how long the error was there). I wish my admins at work were that fast. More like 6 hours for them.
Glad to see you're being openly honest with your employees. In my company (multi-state health insurance company), we get our fair share of 'perks', but no overtime. We get our RIM pagers, cell phones (recently switched to blueberries), palm pilots or IPAQ's upon request, laptops as well as desktops, etc. I work in the network department, so we've had access from home for years before it started to be offered to other people (only upon their mgmt's request, and extreme business need for now). Most of our department has T1's from home, which go directly to the company (free internet access, albeit filtered and logged by firewall). Anybody outside of our department who wasn't extremely important got saddled with either ISDN or token based dialup. What we are finally starting to do is use VPN access. For the first year VPN was completely on the employee's dime, but if somebody had dsl or cable, we would setup a VPN account for them so they could do whatever they wanted to. In the past couple months we have started to rethink that strategy with the help of the legal department. The jury is still out on what our final solution will be, but we have two right now. If upper management approves the request (director or senior mgmt level), we will fully pay for certain people's entire home broadband connection. This will be a true internet connection, with VPN to the company, which is what you're concerned about. This opens up some legal dilemas regarding what if the employee hacks some website somewhere, or does something else illegal on an internet connection paid for by a company. So that is limited to an extremely few number of people (I would trade my T1 for flat unfiltered cable modem in a heartbeat!) The second option we are looking at is a prorated reimbursement based on how important you are - otherwise known as how much your management feels you would be required to work from home. For example, a fairly new employee with minimal projects that they are responsible for but was still allowed VPN access might get 30% of their broadband bill paid for by the company. Someone who responds to a majority of the after hours problems would get a maximum of 95% of their bill paid for. By requiring the employee to sign an internet usage agreement, and not paying for the entire connection (the employee would have to pay, and then submit expense forms every week), the company would negate any legal implications that could have occured from misuse. Our legal department is still checking into this, but we are pretty sure this is what is going to start being offered. For the most part we are completely happy with this - I have no problem paying $4 a month for business class DSL or cable service, and in return I simply have to send in my bill every month. No biggie, but it would be nice if they figured out some type of automatic system.
Not gonna make any noticable difference at all. Nobody ever sends large attachments to an external email address, because chances are that that external server will not accept it. Also, internal email for a large company is orders of magnitude greater than external email. You've got all your meeting notices, meeting minutes, project notes, quick questions, blah blah blah. I might get 100 emails a day from internal employees, and 5 or so from external.
I never said that the 'we' I was referring to meant the end user. I may have a tendency to switch back and forth between possessive's, but in this sentence, 'we' meant ITG services as a whole division. There are also many ways to setup an email backup solution, none of which I know of for sure are the one that we use. You could set it up so it backs up inboxes at a certain time each day - so anything that came in that day, and was deleted before then was not saved. You could trust people's judgement and remove from your archives any emails that the end user specifically deletes from their trash folder, or you could bite the bullet and archive everything every time.
I have a cousin who went to the college in Coeur d'Alene, and the town is pretty much owned by a group of cultist / supremacist / Aryan / whatever you want to call them run by some guy who I don't recall the name of with a compound up on the hill. He said that the guy shuts down the town once a year for a huge fireworks display - I don't recall if it's for July 4th or not. But he was very clear about the entire (useful) government being run by this guy, and that they're always having rallies.
Right. Our company originally tried to instate size limits when we went to Notes (only 3 years ago), but then the lawyers said we need to keep everything anyway (HIPAA requirements). So even with the exorbitant expense of the system, it is probably still cheaper to keep expanding every couple months rather than pay people to sit there and sort through their own email. Anything from an external party must be kept, and anything remotely regarding a customer must be kept as well. It's a huge pain, and they took the easy way out by archiving every single email. But neither option is very cost effective. There are four people that I know of in my department alone that have email boxes (extensively categorized with dozens or up to hundreds of folders) with up to 20GB each. It's crazy. But even without the ever looming threat of a lawsuit, they claim that they have been able to disprove what other people were badmouthing them about by being able to produce an email from that person stating the exact opposite a year or two previously. I've witnessed it once, and it is pretty funny watching somebody turn beet red in a room with 25 supervisor's and above.
There comes a point where that, too, gets very expensive. At my company (large US healthcare provider, with governmental and private contracts both HMO and PPO), after saying 3, 5, and 7 years, our lawyers have told us we have to archive all email potentially forever that the end user doesn't specifically delete. They may do an end-run around the deletion and archive those, too, but I don't know. Anyway, our email system (Lotus Notes, which is an extreme HOG) eats somewhere between 100GB - 1TB/week. I was told it was well over 1TB, but I don't believe them. This is of course due to older Notes versions inability to store attachments in public directories and simply sending a copy to each and every recipient (and the stupidity of no size limits on internal email). There is a point to how many drives you can add to a SAN, and then you have to get a whole extra chassis, which is where the expensive part comes in. To keep buying new SAN units every 6 months or so, as well as the harddrives to put in them (plus the maintenance contracts, 24/7 support, etc) could easily add up to $1million/year or more. Which is definitely more costly than 10 average low-mid level administrator's salaries.
I'm not exactly sure why anyone's surprised. Either that Yahoo is doing this, or that they ran the story. It's business.
Maybe LL Bean should have filed suit in Utah instead of in Maine? Yes, it's different because this one will test Utah's new law. But this sounds like exactly the same problem, and since the story's short on details, it could even be the same culprit (claria).
Oh yeah, I was there just last weekend. A relative calls up and says his Dell 2.8Ghz is acting slow. Like slower than his old Pentium 90. I'm two states away, so I had to talk him through everything. It was so bad that he couldn't even get the start button to respond, or use the task manager to kill processes. We download adaware, and run it in safe mode. It cleans 850+ off the machine. Reboot, and the thing is still extremely slow. Back to safe mode, download the current reflist (I didn't think it was worth it at first to give him a half hour lesson over the phone on how to use winzip). Adaware with the current reference's then proceeds to find another 300 or so. Update Mcafee to current virus dat, and scan entire harddrive - finding nothing. Reboot again, and it's still insanely slow although better than before. So I give another lesson on how to edit the registry and he removed two more programs that were being run through rundll32 in startup. After 3 hours, 25+ process, hundreds of cookies and registry entries later, it was finally back and running. It would've been quicker to pop in the recovery disk and rebuild. Unfortunately, since I did all of it over the phone, so I wasn't able to backup copies of the adaware logs to get exact numbers. Damn junior high kids installing everything and its mother.
I don't understand things like these. It's just common sense that tells you that anyone who compains about the 'crap' on tv, or who just doesn't have certain shows that they watch all the time are going to be the people who participate. Those people may just be looking for an excuse to stop watching tv altogether. And that's fine with me. But I don't see how this will have any affect on the vast majority of us who actually enjoy watching tv, and cannot even fathom the phrase "successfully reduce the amount of television they watch permanently". Yes, I watch a fair amount of television (generally 3-4 hours a day). I watch some sitcoms, drama, crime investigation shows, and lots of movies. I don't have any desire to watch less tv, and I don't see any reason why some group sees the need to push their own agenda's through trying to get me to watch less tv. TV itself is not evil. Stupid people who do nothing other than sit on the couch and watch tv, or those who watch none at all and claim it rots people's brains are the ones that are evil.
I, too, prefer Sniffer Pro to everything else I've tried. We use many of their hardware appliances at the office (have at least one in every remote site), plus everyone in the department runs the portable software on their laptops. It is indispensible, but don't even start to think that you can just believe everything the 'expert' tells you. Unless you spend hours training it as to what constitutes a broadcast storm on your network, and what is excessive for this and that (the defaults are useless on any enterprise network), it will only start to give you the picture. It is better than not having an expert (at a glance diagnostics of your traffic), but you still have to dig through the individual packets except for the most simple problems. They also have had quite a few bugs over the years, especially with the hardware appliances (distributed), but overall I am happy with them. Better than Finisar and ethereal (for me).
The company I work for (Healthcare inustry, 20-60 Billion a year in revenue) uses them for almost every job, however they may not actually get around to interviewing people off of them. They post internally, and we have 7 days to apply from within. Then if the supervisor wants to fill the job with a consultant, they talk to one of the 3-5 consultant firms that we hire from exclusivley. If nobody from within looks good, or they don't want a consultant, then and only then will they start going through the pile of resumes that they get from their job posting(mostly from Monster). Most people in IT get in from friends/relatives, or consultancy to full time conversions, but I do know a few that came in from internet postings.
I agree. Everytime somebody on /. mentions Nvidia the very first thing that is replied is when will they be opensource. I've never had a problem with the binaries either.
I agree with the recommendations of getting a T1, especially with the apparently exorbitant setup fee's for the Direcway system. T1 initial setup fees are almost certainly in the thousands, but you will be happier in the long run. I currently have a T1 to my house from SBC (Illinois). It took about 2 months to get setup, and my company pays somewhere around $250/month for the service (it's hard to get them to give specific answers). We have a longterm consultant who lives along the coast in Mass. and it took the phone company over 2 years to get his T1 up and running. But to be fair, he lives in the boonies along the coast and they had to erect new poles just to hold his line.
Obviously you would have to get a 'real' router to service the T1. The cheapest way I can think of is to purchase a Cisco 1600 series off of Ebay (EOL, but the IOS still supports everything a normal person needs) for about $100. You also need a T1 WIC card to install in the router, which will run you another $115 on Ebay. Now you have a fully functional non-neutered T1 router for $215 plus shipping. If you talk to your accountant and you can write off 50% of the T1 cost, it will even out and you will be much happier.
So it's actually the right court? How interesting....
Okay, so what I want to know is, what's this number? I called it, and it's a fax machine. Should we be sending them lots of faxes telling them that killing this is a bad idea?
These methods all take too long and do not provide the desired outrageous sound effects that should go along with properly destroying a computer.
When I was in college a couple years ago, a friend of mine had a computer from a major manufacturer that had intermittent problems with simply turning on and all sorts of other useful activities. He talked on the phone with them several times, and sent it in and they supposedly worked on it and sent it back. The problem was that since it was intermittent they were never able to see the problem and hence were unaware and unwilling to do anything about it.
So as any enterprising computer science major with a bum computer would do, he took matters into his own hands and allowed us to watch. He took a standard pc power cable, cut off the end, and stripped the shielding off it to expose the bare wires. He then proceeded to plug the cable into the outlet, and verrrry carefully (don't try this at home kids, although it is pretty cool) touched the two wires together to the middle of the motherboard. This is guaranteed to provide at least a little smoke and the desirable fried plastic and electronics vapor that we all know and love. In his case, he was able to kill the circuit for the entire dorm room floor. So not only did he fry the computer and was able to finally get a replacement, but we got to hear various people yelling from inside their dorm rooms trying to figure out who did it 'this time'.
In my company we are an IBM mainframe shop. We still have extensive use of SNA, IPX, 16Mb Token Ring, FDDI, switched token ring, and one instance of thinnet. These all still fully support the machines that are running on them with no network based problems in a long time. We've been converting everything to ethernet for 2 years now, but we probably won't be done until sometime mid next year, and even then we still might be using SNA and IPX for some applications.
Yes, Snood is definitely one of the most popular games out there. Every once in a while it comes up in a conversation, and people always recognize it. My wife plays it on the pc for hours, and I play on my palm pilot whenever I'm stuck somewhere and have nothing better to do.