Baloney. Girls at college/graduate age care about two things: Money and image.
Just tell her you are an engineer and flash some green at her. She'll be yours until the next guy comes along!
By "resident domain thing" I'm guessing you mean Eminent Domain. Just remember Scalia and Thomas voted in the minority on that one. It was Ginsberg and the other liberals that encroached on your private property rights and expanded the power of the State over the individual.
This is not relevant. Freedom is not a team sport; blaming the 'liberals' and implicitly praising the 'conservatives' is an obfuscation of the truth.
The truth is that the government will continue to erode our freedoms, no matter which color occupies the White House.
Republicans and Democrats are simply two branches of the same fascist Party.
fascism: n : a political theory advocating an authoritarian hierarchical government (as opposed to democracy or liberalism)
Companies like mine that get their Internet connection through a local T1 provider really don't have a choice to switch to a non-Verizon company.
In my area, Verizon owns all of the connections. Sure, I can order a T1 through Sprint, or AT&T, or any number of smaller carriers, but they all, each and every one, work through the Verizon network, because there simply is no fiber not owned by Verizon here in NH, and I'm not in a rural area.
I am switching from a small provider to Sprint soon, and the best connection diversity I can get is to have multiple T1s connecting to different Verizon COs, but no matter what I do, I am going to be getting my connection through Verizon, no matter who I send my money to every month.
If Verizon's network starts bogging down because their video service is using too much bandwidth, I will have exactly zero options other than to call my provider and complain, or file a lawsuit against Verizon. No matter what company I do business with for connectivity, Verizon will have me as a customer.
When I brought the idea up with management here, they were extremely receptive to it. For us, there really is no strignent requirement that we use MS Office, except that we use Outlook as our messaging client.
My thought process was that once we implemented MS Exchange in Q1 2006, which provides MS Outlook with each CAL, we could abandon MS Office altogether except for those few people who either develop the integration part of our product with MS Office, and perhaps a few people who, for compatibility reasons with external contacts, might need to keep MS Office around.
We are a small business with just over 60 employees. OOo is very attractive to us for several reasons. First is the cost; while we don't have to 'pay' for OOo, I will be pushing for a donation to the project, which will still end up being far less than it will cost us to continue purchasing MSO licenses each time we add employees. We have always purchased OEM licenses of MSO with new computers, so we don't have software assurance to provide free upgrades to the new version of MSO, so upgrading will be a very expensive prospect for us. Second is that we have built support for OOo into our own product as well as MSO, and because we use our own product in house, it means that OOo can be inserted into the evironment relatively painlessly. Third, well...there is some feeling of getting off the MS teat wherever possible.
Anyway, it could very well be that we will be using OOo rather than MSO by this time next year. I can't guarantee it, but it is a direction that I would like to go.
There's nothing that says you have to implement all the changes you want right away. Often, it's much more effective (and accepted by your uppers) to implement new processes/equipment/software packages slowly and let them become a natural part of people's day-to-day use. Don't rip out all your Windows servers, replace them with FreeBSD, push everybody to OOo and FF and install a brand new totally locked down Smoothwall all in one week - you'll get fired.
I find at my company, where I am the only IT guy here, so I am responsible for everything from paper jams to procurement to the phone system, that it is much easier to plan a project, gather quotes, and present it to your boss in a manner that shows why it makes sense for the company to do it. If you can, put together a budget plan for 2006, broken down by quarter and by project, with all the costs involved for the things you want to do. Then, ask your boss for a meeting to discuss your plans for the year, and be prepared to explain why you want to do these things in layman's terms.
You probably won't get everything approved, and maybe only a couple of your ideas will fly, but it's a start. Once you can follow through with a project and then help your company see the benefit, things will get easier down the road as they learn to trust your judgement.
However, none of this will matter if you don't broaden your mind about your responsibilities. If you are the single IT or IS guy in the company, you are basically responsible for everything with an On/Off switch. Connectivity is only a part of your job, and if that is all you focus on, then it's not surprising that your company does not see a lot of value in having you around.
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Baloney. Girls at college/graduate age care about two things: Money and image. Just tell her you are an engineer and flash some green at her. She'll be yours until the next guy comes along!
By "resident domain thing" I'm guessing you mean Eminent Domain. Just remember Scalia and Thomas voted in the minority on that one. It was Ginsberg and the other liberals that encroached on your private property rights and expanded the power of the State over the individual.
This is not relevant. Freedom is not a team sport; blaming the 'liberals' and implicitly praising the 'conservatives' is an obfuscation of the truth.
The truth is that the government will continue to erode our freedoms, no matter which color occupies the White House.
Republicans and Democrats are simply two branches of the same fascist Party.
fascism: n : a political theory advocating an authoritarian hierarchical government (as opposed to democracy or liberalism)
Companies like mine that get their Internet connection through a local T1 provider really don't have a choice to switch to a non-Verizon company. In my area, Verizon owns all of the connections. Sure, I can order a T1 through Sprint, or AT&T, or any number of smaller carriers, but they all, each and every one, work through the Verizon network, because there simply is no fiber not owned by Verizon here in NH, and I'm not in a rural area. I am switching from a small provider to Sprint soon, and the best connection diversity I can get is to have multiple T1s connecting to different Verizon COs, but no matter what I do, I am going to be getting my connection through Verizon, no matter who I send my money to every month. If Verizon's network starts bogging down because their video service is using too much bandwidth, I will have exactly zero options other than to call my provider and complain, or file a lawsuit against Verizon. No matter what company I do business with for connectivity, Verizon will have me as a customer.
When I brought the idea up with management here, they were extremely receptive to it. For us, there really is no strignent requirement that we use MS Office, except that we use Outlook as our messaging client.
My thought process was that once we implemented MS Exchange in Q1 2006, which provides MS Outlook with each CAL, we could abandon MS Office altogether except for those few people who either develop the integration part of our product with MS Office, and perhaps a few people who, for compatibility reasons with external contacts, might need to keep MS Office around.
We are a small business with just over 60 employees. OOo is very attractive to us for several reasons. First is the cost; while we don't have to 'pay' for OOo, I will be pushing for a donation to the project, which will still end up being far less than it will cost us to continue purchasing MSO licenses each time we add employees. We have always purchased OEM licenses of MSO with new computers, so we don't have software assurance to provide free upgrades to the new version of MSO, so upgrading will be a very expensive prospect for us. Second is that we have built support for OOo into our own product as well as MSO, and because we use our own product in house, it means that OOo can be inserted into the evironment relatively painlessly. Third, well...there is some feeling of getting off the MS teat wherever possible.
Anyway, it could very well be that we will be using OOo rather than MSO by this time next year. I can't guarantee it, but it is a direction that I would like to go.
There's nothing that says you have to implement all the changes you want right away. Often, it's much more effective (and accepted by your uppers) to implement new processes/equipment/software packages slowly and let them become a natural part of people's day-to-day use. Don't rip out all your Windows servers, replace them with FreeBSD, push everybody to OOo and FF and install a brand new totally locked down Smoothwall all in one week - you'll get fired. I find at my company, where I am the only IT guy here, so I am responsible for everything from paper jams to procurement to the phone system, that it is much easier to plan a project, gather quotes, and present it to your boss in a manner that shows why it makes sense for the company to do it. If you can, put together a budget plan for 2006, broken down by quarter and by project, with all the costs involved for the things you want to do. Then, ask your boss for a meeting to discuss your plans for the year, and be prepared to explain why you want to do these things in layman's terms. You probably won't get everything approved, and maybe only a couple of your ideas will fly, but it's a start. Once you can follow through with a project and then help your company see the benefit, things will get easier down the road as they learn to trust your judgement. However, none of this will matter if you don't broaden your mind about your responsibilities. If you are the single IT or IS guy in the company, you are basically responsible for everything with an On/Off switch. Connectivity is only a part of your job, and if that is all you focus on, then it's not surprising that your company does not see a lot of value in having you around.