We had a single TV as well. My mom worked nights, I was an only child in a broken house, so she slept during the day and I watched TV (PBX and Cartoons) all day.
I could read a newspaper - not perfectly of course - before I started kindergarten.
I've become very cynical as I've grown older, and being bombarded with the Wisconsin teacher's Union issues - I can't help but assume this is FUD produced in their favor.
I have 4 children and the oldest is a royal brat and it's due to what a previous poster referred to - inconsistent expectations and follow through in regards to raising the child. We were young and dumb and our parents helped - too much. As she got older, she knew she could manipulate people, and the school system fell for it. They're just as bad as grandparents. All talk, no action. The other 3 are fine, with TV, VideoGames, PC access (of course my network has more security and fine-grain controls than the school system does - sad), and fast food when appropriate.
For your children to behave, you must be consistent. Don't remove TV or videogames, but just like a diet, variety in entertainment is key.
OMG - run away from Avaya. I've got that now, and I can't stand it. Throw Trixbox CE into a Proxmox VM and buy some Aastra phones - run it over the Internet with a decent bonded T1 server and sipstation.com
Then install Horde/IMP, and whatever other modules you want for your groupware - on top of Dovecot IMAP (with LDAP Auth) - and your favorite SMTP. I prefer Qmail, so I use Matt Simerson's email toaster as a basis (www.tnpi.biz)
I had the choice of converting email or sticking with Exchange - I wish I would have converted. Exchange is OK, but you also have to consider backups and disaster recovery. Backing up unnecessarily huge-ass Exchange databases is not fun. Instead, use Maildir (one file per email) and ZFS and you have simple site to site replication for your email data.
We invaded Iraq, who was selling their oil on the black market (outside of UN and OPEC regulation ) to France and Russia and a host of other countries.
Once we shut down Iraq, we reduced the amount of oil available - but did not decrease demand, allowing OPEC to keep their production levels the same, but increase their prices.
Now, whether people think that's a Republican act to create more local income for their own oil fields, is another matter. Personally, I don't think any politician see's much of what's in front of them.
If you run Windows DNS internally - some schmuck might have disabled DNSSEC. This really sucks because you don't expect that to be the case, and spend an hour trying to figure out why the new router isn't working.
We should also just get rid of guns because not all bullets are effective.
I've often thought that the common citizenry like ourselves should be bludgeoning in the heads of people who manufacture and sell weapons with rocks when we see them at the mall or out walking their dog. Is that what you mean?
No, but that's exactly why I have no problem with open carry laws.:)
We should also just get rid of guns because not all bullets are effective.;)
And to echo a troll above(Right, because taking out missiles before they reach us isnt important. While visiting a giant rock in space is beneficial.), the science that comes out of these contracts is far more beneficial than the actual product.
Exactly. IT is Customer Service. IT's job is to provide the company with the tools they need to get their jobs done when they need to do their jobs.
The trick is actually providing the best tools to the users. Say, an air nail gun for a roofer when the roofer insists on using his favorite hammer. That may be a great solution when you're building your dog house, but it's not a long-term productive tool.
Yes and no. I firmly believe 90% of in-house IT's time should be spent in R&D.
Essentially, you should be AHEAD of the curve, not trying to catch up. It sound like the OP is frustrated with the inability of his company to catch up.
"Are we seriously understaffed, or is this normal?"
It seems to me if you are able to read/post on Slashdot AND maintain those systems, you're doing something the rest of the world needs to look at.
I live in North Dakota, we've had these LED traffic lights for years, and I cannot remember the last time I saw one totally snowed up.
I'm in Wisconsin, and at least 2 years ago I could see the snow piling up on the shields above the green and yellow lights enough to cover the led lights above them. It seemed quite obvious that the LEDs weren't hot enough to melt the snow.
I just thought it was a well known issue by now.
Screw that. I can fit a car inside my house, so why not a couple stacks of these that take up 2 regrigerator spaces in the basement?
I don't care if they're dime sized, for home use they could be car battery sized.
All of the stories seem to be very short on details. How did the scheme work? How were they getting users to their site instead of Hotmail? Was it something stupid, like a spam email with a link? Or was it DNS forgery or something more subtle?
Everyone is reporting that it was a particularly big haul for a phishing campaign, but nobody seems to be reporting what the deal was, or why this was more successful than your typical, run-of-the-mill phishing attack.
I run an email service, and regularly get emails like this:
From: Support@MyService
Subject: Service Upgrade
Please send your password so we can migrate your account to our new servers..
Everytime it happens I block the sender and recipient addresses, and grep the logs to verify nobody fell for it. If I'm quick enough, it doesn't matter, but people have fallen for it before I see the fake email.
I did this for PCI Compliance. Add NTLM auth with Squid and only allow a small number of people to have unrestricted access. Have everyone else filtered down to only required business sites.
You'll probably actually see fast boot sooner in the cheap seats, which are much more likely to just be a basic business box relabeled as a "pedestal server" or reboxed as a cheap 1/2U and will thus be able to borrow the fast boot stuff directly from the consumer lines. That is also where servers are much less likely to be backed by any serious redundancy, which would make coming up quickly more of a selling point.
I don't kow that I'd agree with that, but it's a frame of mind. For example, I use 'consumer grade' systems for servers for multiple reasons. They're cheaper, they use less power (especially when I choose a low power cpu), they're more 'standard'. ("standard", as I discovered once HP or Dell servers required a particular firmware for scsi drives to work - PITA) Because of that, I can easily and cheaply put up multiple boxes for redundancy and load blancing.
That is EXACTLY the position a jack of all trades should be going for.
That's exactly what and where I am and have been for the past 7 years. It's WONDERFUL working for a small company vs. any larger ones. I actually work part time for a larger one as well, and it's not something I would consider a career-path.
Conversely, when you're the lone guy at a small company you lose:
Big Projects - there will be a list when you get there - how long will that list last? How dynamic is the IT of the small company?
'Moral' Support - Who are you going to bounce techie stuff off of?
Hmm I can only think of two right now... I thought there was one or two other cons. The biggest one is the second one. It's VERY hard to get a good opinion about a tech direction from non-technical people, or people who don't know your business.
But it's not my choice! Stupid application still works like a charm. Whoever wrote it back in '92 did a pretty decent job overall. New enhancements are written by me grudgingly. A re-write is in the pipes, so I'll be looking forward to turning it into a web app and be done with it.
FoShizzle! Don't rewrite that app! Just use the solaris RunTime and run it on Linux. Output your screens in HTML, and make it a webapp on Linux!
Back in the day, I LOVED DOS. In fact, I still love DOS. It's simple, and straight to the point. Windows, however, has never had a place in my heart. Yet, that has nothing to do with the company itself. My most used applications (not games) were DOS (5/6) and MSWorks. A great OS, with a great application. I even defended Microsoft to my friends during the whole 'DriveSpace corruption' scandal. I never had a problem with DriveSpace, and faithfully used every single revision of DOS 6. I was a happy camper. Even used Windows 3.0 in High School without too much complaining:) Really, my main fault with Windows was that games and Telix for DOS ran like crap on it - you had to do some major tweaking to get that full 2400baud out of the com ports for two modems;) One of my fondest memories of HS was sitting in the school office for a couple hours 'researching colleges' by playing a copy of solitaire they left in the original Windows install directory on the network.
Then came Windows 95. At the time, I had been a tech at Best Buy for a year. OS/2 had been released, and as a tech, it was my duty to learn that OS to support the customers. Holy Crap - it ROCKED! 4 copies of Descent running simultaneously - in 320x200 windows!?!? Proportioned properly to the rest of the OS desktop?! WOW! "Hey MS Rep - OS/2 has these templates for creating specific DOS/Windows sessions - will Win95 have that?"
"We're not answering any questions about Win95."
"Errr"
Months later....Maybe June
"Hey MS Rep - OS/2 has a flat memory model, so hoever much memory I need for whatever type of app I'm running is available. If I have two DOS apps that require 500k of conventional memory, OS/2 can run them both! How does Win95 handle that?"
"We're not answering any questions about Win95."
"What?"
"Sorry"
In August, Win95 is released...
'No More DOS!' - WTF? Any moron can see it's still DOS and Windows, they just put up an animated GIF.
MS Rep shows up - avoids techs, goes to the sales floor "Whatever the customer needs, memory, HD, CPU, Sell them Windows 95 - It will take care of it all!"
So much for not talking about Win95.
That was when my eyes were opened. Sure, Win95 still sucked, and MS didn't have an answer for OS/2 until Win2k came out - at which time, most apps were Windows apps anyways. But the point is, the company will tell the customer ANYTHING to make the sale. I saw the same rep at CompUSA a couple months later, spewing total BS about Office. I should have said something, but I knew it was pointless. Just look at all the fanboy mags - my favorite was PCComputing (or WindowsComputing). Before I threw them away, I probably had 5 covers that said "New Windows xx!!! NEVER REBOOT AGAIN!!" Or the editor saying "We're a PC magazine, we don't review OS/2 or Novell products because that's not what the customer's want." Umm, so people read the magazine reviews about products they've ALREADY bought? Sorry - I'm getting in the land of the paranoid here, but it just seems to all fit too nicely.
I even have a 'Get Warped' 2'x3' poster from Best Buy that was never hung up. I always wonder if there was some sort of politics behind that...
Now, as an IT Manager, I do not immediately count out Microsoft Products. I need to evaluate everything that's available that will fit the needs of MY customer - the end user. Obviously, the viability of the company is included - and a company that I cannot trust, does not score high on that scale. I run Debian Sid. My user's run WinXP. My file/print/directory server is Netware. My app servers are Linux. I have a Mac for Photoshop/Illustrator/Quark. IMHO, trying to force-feed any one vendor for all your needs just bad policy to begin with, and because of what I've seen from Microsoft, they aren't the first place I look for a solution.
Slashdot Mirror
I could read a newspaper - not perfectly of course - before I started kindergarten.
I've become very cynical as I've grown older, and being bombarded with the Wisconsin teacher's Union issues - I can't help but assume this is FUD produced in their favor.
I have 4 children and the oldest is a royal brat and it's due to what a previous poster referred to - inconsistent expectations and follow through in regards to raising the child. We were young and dumb and our parents helped - too much. As she got older, she knew she could manipulate people, and the school system fell for it. They're just as bad as grandparents. All talk, no action. The other 3 are fine, with TV, VideoGames, PC access (of course my network has more security and fine-grain controls than the school system does - sad), and fast food when appropriate.
For your children to behave, you must be consistent. Don't remove TV or videogames, but just like a diet, variety in entertainment is key.
My first word in response to that is SECURITY - but then again, it's not as if the 'trained masses' are much better..
Then install Horde/IMP, and whatever other modules you want for your groupware - on top of Dovecot IMAP (with LDAP Auth) - and your favorite SMTP. I prefer Qmail, so I use Matt Simerson's email toaster as a basis (www.tnpi.biz)
I had the choice of converting email or sticking with Exchange - I wish I would have converted. Exchange is OK, but you also have to consider backups and disaster recovery. Backing up unnecessarily huge-ass Exchange databases is not fun. Instead, use Maildir (one file per email) and ZFS and you have simple site to site replication for your email data.
Enjoy
You mean you're not already running a squid/dansguardian box with NTLM auth locally and blocking all other Internet access? :)
We invaded Iraq, who was selling their oil on the black market (outside of UN and OPEC regulation ) to France and Russia and a host of other countries. Once we shut down Iraq, we reduced the amount of oil available - but did not decrease demand, allowing OPEC to keep their production levels the same, but increase their prices. Now, whether people think that's a Republican act to create more local income for their own oil fields, is another matter. Personally, I don't think any politician see's much of what's in front of them.
To re-enable: dnscmd /Config /EnableEDnsProbes 1
This is Da Shizzle. http://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=770
We should also just get rid of guns because not all bullets are effective.
I've often thought that the common citizenry like ourselves should be bludgeoning in the heads of people who manufacture and sell weapons with rocks when we see them at the mall or out walking their dog. Is that what you mean?
No, but that's exactly why I have no problem with open carry laws. :)
We should also just get rid of guns because not all bullets are effective. ;)
And to echo a troll above(Right, because taking out missiles before they reach us isnt important. While visiting a giant rock in space is beneficial.), the science that comes out of these contracts is far more beneficial than the actual product.
Exactly. IT is Customer Service. IT's job is to provide the company with the tools they need to get their jobs done when they need to do their jobs. The trick is actually providing the best tools to the users. Say, an air nail gun for a roofer when the roofer insists on using his favorite hammer. That may be a great solution when you're building your dog house, but it's not a long-term productive tool.
Essentially, you should be AHEAD of the curve, not trying to catch up. It sound like the OP is frustrated with the inability of his company to catch up.
"Are we seriously understaffed, or is this normal?" It seems to me if you are able to read/post on Slashdot AND maintain those systems, you're doing something the rest of the world needs to look at.
I live in North Dakota, we've had these LED traffic lights for years, and I cannot remember the last time I saw one totally snowed up.
I'm in Wisconsin, and at least 2 years ago I could see the snow piling up on the shields above the green and yellow lights enough to cover the led lights above them. It seemed quite obvious that the LEDs weren't hot enough to melt the snow. I just thought it was a well known issue by now.
Exactly. I already did the math and I only need 50lbs of PU-238 to power my home. A meesly 100lbs and I'm good for life! (err half-life)
Screw that. I can fit a car inside my house, so why not a couple stacks of these that take up 2 regrigerator spaces in the basement? I don't care if they're dime sized, for home use they could be car battery sized.
All of the stories seem to be very short on details. How did the scheme work? How were they getting users to their site instead of Hotmail? Was it something stupid, like a spam email with a link? Or was it DNS forgery or something more subtle?
Everyone is reporting that it was a particularly big haul for a phishing campaign, but nobody seems to be reporting what the deal was, or why this was more successful than your typical, run-of-the-mill phishing attack.
I run an email service, and regularly get emails like this:
From: Support@MyService
Subject: Service Upgrade
Please send your password so we can migrate your account to our new servers..
Everytime it happens I block the sender and recipient addresses, and grep the logs to verify nobody fell for it. If I'm quick enough, it doesn't matter, but people have fallen for it before I see the fake email.
Rick
So he top posted. How appropriate.
Aye Laddie, it's quaint - only 50% successful.
Load it into the buffer and do a continuous CRC check until someone coms around to rematerialize it.
I did this for PCI Compliance. Add NTLM auth with Squid and only allow a small number of people to have unrestricted access. Have everyone else filtered down to only required business sites.
You'll probably actually see fast boot sooner in the cheap seats, which are much more likely to just be a basic business box relabeled as a "pedestal server" or reboxed as a cheap 1/2U and will thus be able to borrow the fast boot stuff directly from the consumer lines. That is also where servers are much less likely to be backed by any serious redundancy, which would make coming up quickly more of a selling point.
I don't kow that I'd agree with that, but it's a frame of mind. For example, I use 'consumer grade' systems for servers for multiple reasons. They're cheaper, they use less power (especially when I choose a low power cpu), they're more 'standard'. ("standard", as I discovered once HP or Dell servers required a particular firmware for scsi drives to work - PITA) Because of that, I can easily and cheaply put up multiple boxes for redundancy and load blancing.
Corn? You just pass that in 4 to 6 hours, how about a little smack? http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.11/columbia.html
Hmm I can only think of two right now... I thought there was one or two other cons. The biggest one is the second one. It's VERY hard to get a good opinion about a tech direction from non-technical people, or people who don't know your business.
Apparently, the pros far outweigh the cons. ;)
RickFoxPro for DOS 2.6
But it's not my choice! Stupid application still works like a charm. Whoever wrote it back in '92 did a pretty decent job overall. New enhancements are written by me grudgingly. A re-write is in the pipes, so I'll be looking forward to turning it into a web app and be done with it.
FoShizzle! Don't rewrite that app! Just use the solaris RunTime and run it on Linux. Output your screens in HTML, and make it a webapp on Linux!Yes. I did that:H .PRG i srt/
http://www.havokmon.com/stuff/workstuff/prg/SEARC
Solaris Runtime:
http://www.havokmon.com/stuff/workstuff/prg/solar
You'll need to use another program to call your FoxPro app (outputting HTML comments) otherwise you'll get ansi gook in your page.
Here's Why.
Back in the day, I LOVED DOS. In fact, I still love DOS. It's simple, and straight to the point. Windows, however, has never had a place in my heart. Yet, that has nothing to do with the company itself. My most used applications (not games) were DOS (5/6) and MSWorks. A great OS, with a great application. I even defended Microsoft to my friends during the whole 'DriveSpace corruption' scandal. I never had a problem with DriveSpace, and faithfully used every single revision of DOS 6. I was a happy camper. Even used Windows 3.0 in High School without too much complaining :) Really, my main fault with Windows was that games and Telix for DOS ran like crap on it - you had to do some major tweaking to get that full 2400baud out of the com ports for two modems ;) One of my fondest memories of HS was sitting in the school office for a couple hours 'researching colleges' by playing a copy of solitaire they left in the original Windows install directory on the network.
Then came Windows 95. At the time, I had been a tech at Best Buy for a year. OS/2 had been released, and as a tech, it was my duty to learn that OS to support the customers. Holy Crap - it ROCKED! 4 copies of Descent running simultaneously - in 320x200 windows!?!? Proportioned properly to the rest of the OS desktop?! WOW!
"Hey MS Rep - OS/2 has these templates for creating specific DOS/Windows sessions - will Win95 have that?"
"We're not answering any questions about Win95."
"Errr"
Months later....Maybe June "Hey MS Rep - OS/2 has a flat memory model, so hoever much memory I need for whatever type of app I'm running is available. If I have two DOS apps that require 500k of conventional memory, OS/2 can run them both! How does Win95 handle that?"
"We're not answering any questions about Win95."
"What?"
"Sorry"
In August, Win95 is released... 'No More DOS!' - WTF? Any moron can see it's still DOS and Windows, they just put up an animated GIF.
MS Rep shows up - avoids techs, goes to the sales floor "Whatever the customer needs, memory, HD, CPU, Sell them Windows 95 - It will take care of it all!"
So much for not talking about Win95.
That was when my eyes were opened. Sure, Win95 still sucked, and MS didn't have an answer for OS/2 until Win2k came out - at which time, most apps were Windows apps anyways. But the point is, the company will tell the customer ANYTHING to make the sale. I saw the same rep at CompUSA a couple months later, spewing total BS about Office. I should have said something, but I knew it was pointless. Just look at all the fanboy mags - my favorite was PCComputing (or WindowsComputing). Before I threw them away, I probably had 5 covers that said "New Windows xx!!! NEVER REBOOT AGAIN!!" Or the editor saying "We're a PC magazine, we don't review OS/2 or Novell products because that's not what the customer's want." Umm, so people read the magazine reviews about products they've ALREADY bought? Sorry - I'm getting in the land of the paranoid here, but it just seems to all fit too nicely.
I even have a 'Get Warped' 2'x3' poster from Best Buy that was never hung up. I always wonder if there was some sort of politics behind that...
Now, as an IT Manager, I do not immediately count out Microsoft Products. I need to evaluate everything that's available that will fit the needs of MY customer - the end user. Obviously, the viability of the company is included - and a company that I cannot trust, does not score high on that scale.
I run Debian Sid. My user's run WinXP. My file/print/directory server is Netware. My app servers are Linux. I have a Mac for Photoshop/Illustrator/Quark.
IMHO, trying to force-feed any one vendor for all your needs just bad policy to begin with, and because of what I've seen from Microsoft, they aren't the first place I look for a solution.