My kids want a Wii. I got them $300 in Best Buy gift cards. They are just going to wait it out. They are content with their PS2 until then.
I don't really care who won last years holiday race, I am more interested in when the full supply of the units come out. Then I think the Wii will win hands down.
Anybody know when the Wii becomes truly "generally available"?
I agree. The only version of Windows that I have seen my employers jumping on quickly was Windows 3.1 After that the delay has been at least a year for newer versions. Maybe IT gets a box with a newer version to play with, but general rollout is usually quite delayed.
Yes, Earthlink is still around. I get ADSL through Sprint (or Embarq) and the ISP they use is Earthlink so I have an earthlink email address as my main one.
I haven't noticed any problems at all with my email service. I do think their commercials with trolls, etc. are pretty stupid.
I agree with what you say and I think I could be a "good talent" you are looking for. My resume can be found on (in pig latin with no spaces) www dot resume dot airblay amrenhay dot com. My initials are bh if that helps. I read through your past posts and unlike one of the posters before me, it sounds like you would be great to work for. I am hoping you can contact me via theemail from my resume since I do strive to accomplish more than my current position. I am waiting until this thread is a bit older to post since by now most people have stopped paying attention to it.
I graduated with a B.A. in Mathematics with a Computer Science minor. When I started my first job, I had never even heard of RPG or an IBM System/34. I had enough of a background programming that learning new languages were not a problem. Like you said, specific languages can be taught to the right person very quickly. I have found that my math background has been very helpful in following logic in programs, especially complicated selection processes. It also was a huge help when we were developing our own graphics package and we had to create parabolas to build "ties" and "slurs" in our home grown sheet music program that printed on a digital typesetter in the 1980's.
I find that business skills and interpersonal skills are more important than all my programming and technical skills. If I am the greatest coder ever, it does me little good if I cannot communicate with those that I am coding for, both in a personable way and with a good degree of understanding of the business problems they want me to help them with.
I agree. We run an IBM iSeries (or System i or AS/400). Code written on a System/34 in the 1970's still runs on the newest machine with no problem. Code from a mid-1980's System/38 could be ported over without recompiling - it is object code compatible.
This article has given me a bit of satisfaction. I am an IT manager for a small company that uses 1993 code that has had tweaks here and there, but is largely unchanged. My boss likes it because the AS/400 has not been down in 13 years except when we want it to. Last year our main server for Terminal Services was down 9 times in 11 days!
I can also install and run Chips Challenge from a Windows 3.1 diskette on any Windows XP machine and run it no problem.
Even though this is/., I ran Linux for the first time last week when I tried out DSL. I guess I just don't see the big whoopdie doo.
Our problem with this "newer" type of spam started in the first week of September. We are a small shop with only about 25 active email users. First all mail goes through GFI MailSecurity for virus & attachment checking and then it goes through GFI MailEssentials (ME) for anti-spam. We are quite pleased with it but these type of spam has them stumped so far also. The ME package is quite comprehensive using multiple filters. We have ours set in the following order:
1. Custom Blacklist (to & from email addresses / domains)
2. Various Whitelists
3. DNS Blacklist
4. Spam URL Blacklist
5. Keyword checking
6. Bayesian Analysis
7. SPF
8. Header checking
We process about 1500 emails per day and during the weekdays about 67% are spam. On the weekend about 94% are spam! Our users were quite alarmed at these new image spam getting through since they are a bit spoiled by our good filters. Now the above named filters are catching more of these image spams but we still get about 30 per week companywide that slip through. What I am fighting for is for GFI to allow us to scan not just for keywords, but for certain HTML tags that always preceed these types of spam.
Overall, it takes a many pronged approach to solve this and not just a simple "Add SPF".
I wouldn't vote for Christ be cause he wouldn't be running. His reign is a kingdom and not an elected office. The beast gets it's power from the majority, the number of man, 666.
At my 25 year high school reunion a few years back, a classmate came up to me as I was leaving. He said the most memorable thing of the entire weekend. When we were little there were baseball games all summer at the "8th hole" of the golf course where kids from a rough range of 8 to 16 would gather and all play together. My classmate said that his kids never ever play outside with the neighbors. We make ours play outside with the neighbors and they are all better for it.
Thanks for the great comments and advice. What you said about waiting at Denny's strikes home. I told my wife I am going to take some night time work - i.e. go to work for someone in the evenings and weekends in order make ends meet. She then suggested working for myself rather. It may surprise you but I don't make over $80k, I don't even make $55k.
I woke up in the middle of the night that night and registered a domain and bought a web site at 1and1. I don't have it up yet but I own it (AtHomePCTech.com). Based on other posts I don't know if I will use it right away. I think the first thing I may do is to put up notices on bulliten boards in local stores, etc.
Another thing, I am fairly new to/. and I would really like to thank whoever allowed my question to be posted. I am not sure how to send a personal thanks but it has been great. I copied every post so far into one big document so I can weed through it and get it into a digestible form - using the good and tucking away ideas for the future.
Is there any way we can move this off line? I would like to email you and I am not sure how to do it. I don't really want to post my email online. I am fairly new to/. and I could not find in the FAQ or anywhere else how to contact another poster. If you know of a way to do this, please contact me. Maybe I could comment on one of your old hockey blog posts with an obscure hint to my email.
My slashdot moniker gives it all away - RPG language on an AS/400 (or iSeries or Series i). Been doing that for almost 25 years now. Most of my time now is being the "computer guy". Any type of hardware problem (even copier, fax, etc.) falls under my domain. My network work takes up more than half my time now but my mainstay has been RPG on AS/400.
Thanks for the input from you and from everyone. I am the original poster (and also from Ohio). The reason I want to do this business is to support my family better. I have 9 kids from 7 to 19 so my time is pretty busy. Another reason I want to do this is that I realized that the only way to make decent money is to work for myself. I am the IT manager of a small business with about 25 people in the office. I just had the revelation that the only reason our business exists is to make our owner more of a millionaire. No matter how hard any of us work, or how much money we make the company, all we will get are token raises and token bonuses.
I may eventually go full time with this but I have a lot to learn so I want to start slow. I did my first job this week for someone at work. His home PC was running real slow with pop-ups windows always happening. He brought the PC, a 2-3 year old Dell with 256 Mb of memory into me and I took it home. It had some real buggers to get rid of, especially a toolbar tbps, wtools, and something surf. On top of this it was only running service pack 1. I cleaned it up and had major problems getting service pack 2 installed until I got the HKCR permissions reset to their default (what did we ever do without google?). All in all I had about 8 hours into it, off and on. I gave him a price beforehand of $40 per hour, $20 minimum and $80 maximum. I got my $80 this morning. All in all it was a good lesson.
I wish I could find someone like you who did use them!
I have sent out loads of resumes and had a few interviews. I would do way better on either a math based test or a crossword. Anything to get my foot in the door.
Drat! I was excited when I read the title of this but not the article.
I was hoping it was about the value of posting your references on your resume when applying for IT jobs. I have applied for so many jobs and I always emphasize for potential employers to contact my references since they are my best selling point. Hardly anyone ever does. Maybe I should ask this on a new thread.
When I was in 5th grade in North Branch, Minnesota our entire elementary school walked over a mile to the grand opening of I-35 going through the town. It was a great occasion for all of us. It saved us oodles of time over the years. I think the system is great.
I lived near Winnipeg in Canada for 6.5 years and they have nothing that compares. Their Highway 1 that crosses the country from east to west is a joke. They have stop lights and 2 lane roads and no fast access around cities. On top of this, twice in the short time I lived there the entire road was washed out in western Ontario by beaver dams breaking!! All east/west traffic had to be diverted to the U.S. for almost a week each time.
I don't think this will hurt the garage inventor. The decision only changes the way injunctions are handed out. It has been so common for the higher courts to implement permanent injunctions that the patent troll used this as leverage to exact a high settlement ala RIM v. NTP. It does not stop the ability of the small inventor / patent nolder to get recourse, it only makes it less likely that he can hang this permanent injunction over the head of the "infringer".
As an example, (and this is probably not exactly how it went) my brother in law invented a type of screwdriver with interchangable bits and patented it. He was looking into putting it into production and found someone was infringing on his patent. He sued for restitution from the infringer and won. He never tried to stop the infringer from selling the product, he just wanted his cut - and he won! He also gained certain restrictions on the infringer.
We run ~25 thin clients and 5 PC's. Most people run Outlook, Word, Excel, and iSeries Access (terminal emulation to our AS/400).
We are a small office with Windows Server 2003 with 35 Terminal Server License CAL's. Overall positive experience.
Here are specific plus and minus things we have run into that haven't been mentioned.
Thin Client Plusses:
1. I don't have to run Windows update on all those PC's
2. Easy to enforce policies
3. Users can switch locations easily
4. Last a long time (most of ours are 6 years old but only our newer ones accept a wheel mouse)
Thin Client minuses:
1. If the server goes down, everyone goes down
2. Some peripherals like scanners need PC's
On another note, if you use Microsoft TS CAL's, be sure you set it up as "per user" rather than "per device".
They don't really know how to count the "per user" ones yet so it just looks for 1 license.
The "per device" one remembers every device that signs on for one time and is harder to manage.
In reality, mainframes never went away. Many businesses run on them. We run on an AS/400 (which used to be "midrange" but now scales way up into mainframe range).
My boss is an AS/400 bigot for good reasons - it just works. We have a main Windows Server 2003 server that most users connect to via thin clients. It and our other servers have problems regularly. Our AS/400 (or iSeries or System i) has not gone down unless we brought it down since we got it in 1993!
Slashdot Mirror
Lisa, if you don't like your job you don't strike. You just go in every day and do it really half-assed. That's the American way. -- Homer Simpson
I don't really care who won last years holiday race, I am more interested in when the full supply of the units come out. Then I think the Wii will win hands down.
Anybody know when the Wii becomes truly "generally available"?
I agree. The only version of Windows that I have seen my employers jumping on quickly was Windows 3.1 After that the delay has been at least a year for newer versions. Maybe IT gets a box with a newer version to play with, but general rollout is usually quite delayed.
I haven't noticed any problems at all with my email service. I do think their commercials with trolls, etc. are pretty stupid.
I agree. I love SCO stories. It is the best reason I have ever seen for the HAHA tag.
Now all I need to do is forward this to my boss (and make sure my eyes are open).
I graduated with a B.A. in Mathematics with a Computer Science minor. When I started my first job, I had never even heard of RPG or an IBM System/34. I had enough of a background programming that learning new languages were not a problem. Like you said, specific languages can be taught to the right person very quickly. I have found that my math background has been very helpful in following logic in programs, especially complicated selection processes. It also was a huge help when we were developing our own graphics package and we had to create parabolas to build "ties" and "slurs" in our home grown sheet music program that printed on a digital typesetter in the 1980's.
I find that business skills and interpersonal skills are more important than all my programming and technical skills. If I am the greatest coder ever, it does me little good if I cannot communicate with those that I am coding for, both in a personable way and with a good degree of understanding of the business problems they want me to help them with.
Just like the old Beatles albums that proclaimed "John is dead" when played backwards, when you play the Windows CD backwards it says "Jobs is dead".
This article has given me a bit of satisfaction. I am an IT manager for a small company that uses 1993 code that has had tweaks here and there, but is largely unchanged. My boss likes it because the AS/400 has not been down in 13 years except when we want it to. Last year our main server for Terminal Services was down 9 times in 11 days!
I can also install and run Chips Challenge from a Windows 3.1 diskette on any Windows XP machine and run it no problem.
Even though this is /., I ran Linux for the first time last week when I tried out DSL. I guess I just don't see the big whoopdie doo.
1. Custom Blacklist (to & from email addresses / domains)
2. Various Whitelists
3. DNS Blacklist
4. Spam URL Blacklist
5. Keyword checking
6. Bayesian Analysis
7. SPF
8. Header checking
We process about 1500 emails per day and during the weekdays about 67% are spam. On the weekend about 94% are spam! Our users were quite alarmed at these new image spam getting through since they are a bit spoiled by our good filters. Now the above named filters are catching more of these image spams but we still get about 30 per week companywide that slip through. What I am fighting for is for GFI to allow us to scan not just for keywords, but for certain HTML tags that always preceed these types of spam.
Overall, it takes a many pronged approach to solve this and not just a simple "Add SPF".
--
no sig, I don't smoke
Just another reason to get out of this job where I am in the computer room of 89 degrees!
Borat
I wouldn't vote for Christ be cause he wouldn't be running. His reign is a kingdom and not an elected office. The beast gets it's power from the majority, the number of man, 666.
It is already implemented in Washington - they are called pages.
At my 25 year high school reunion a few years back, a classmate came up to me as I was leaving. He said the most memorable thing of the entire weekend. When we were little there were baseball games all summer at the "8th hole" of the golf course where kids from a rough range of 8 to 16 would gather and all play together. My classmate said that his kids never ever play outside with the neighbors. We make ours play outside with the neighbors and they are all better for it.
I woke up in the middle of the night that night and registered a domain and bought a web site at 1and1. I don't have it up yet but I own it (AtHomePCTech.com). Based on other posts I don't know if I will use it right away. I think the first thing I may do is to put up notices on bulliten boards in local stores, etc.
Another thing, I am fairly new to /. and I would really like to thank whoever allowed my question to be posted. I am not sure how to send a personal thanks but it has been great. I copied every post so far into one big document so I can weed through it and get it into a digestible form - using the good and tucking away ideas for the future.
Is there any way we can move this off line? I would like to email you and I am not sure how to do it. I don't really want to post my email online. I am fairly new to /. and I could not find in the FAQ or anywhere else how to contact another poster. If you know of a way to do this, please contact me. Maybe I could comment on one of your old hockey blog posts with an obscure hint to my email.
My slashdot moniker gives it all away - RPG language on an AS/400 (or iSeries or Series i). Been doing that for almost 25 years now. Most of my time now is being the "computer guy". Any type of hardware problem (even copier, fax, etc.) falls under my domain. My network work takes up more than half my time now but my mainstay has been RPG on AS/400.
I may eventually go full time with this but I have a lot to learn so I want to start slow. I did my first job this week for someone at work. His home PC was running real slow with pop-ups windows always happening. He brought the PC, a 2-3 year old Dell with 256 Mb of memory into me and I took it home. It had some real buggers to get rid of, especially a toolbar tbps, wtools, and something surf. On top of this it was only running service pack 1. I cleaned it up and had major problems getting service pack 2 installed until I got the HKCR permissions reset to their default (what did we ever do without google?). All in all I had about 8 hours into it, off and on. I gave him a price beforehand of $40 per hour, $20 minimum and $80 maximum. I got my $80 this morning. All in all it was a good lesson.
I have sent out loads of resumes and had a few interviews. I would do way better on either a math based test or a crossword. Anything to get my foot in the door.
I also code great and get along with people
I think my resume skills suck, though.
I was hoping it was about the value of posting your references on your resume when applying for IT jobs. I have applied for so many jobs and I always emphasize for potential employers to contact my references since they are my best selling point. Hardly anyone ever does. Maybe I should ask this on a new thread.
When I was in 5th grade in North Branch, Minnesota our entire elementary school walked over a mile to the grand opening of I-35 going through the town. It was a great occasion for all of us. It saved us oodles of time over the years. I think the system is great.
I lived near Winnipeg in Canada for 6.5 years and they have nothing that compares. Their Highway 1 that crosses the country from east to west is a joke. They have stop lights and 2 lane roads and no fast access around cities. On top of this, twice in the short time I lived there the entire road was washed out in western Ontario by beaver dams breaking!! All east/west traffic had to be diverted to the U.S. for almost a week each time.
As an example, (and this is probably not exactly how it went) my brother in law invented a type of screwdriver with interchangable bits and patented it. He was looking into putting it into production and found someone was infringing on his patent. He sued for restitution from the infringer and won. He never tried to stop the infringer from selling the product, he just wanted his cut - and he won! He also gained certain restrictions on the infringer.
Here are specific plus and minus things we have run into that haven't been mentioned.
Thin Client Plusses:
1. I don't have to run Windows update on all those PC's
2. Easy to enforce policies
3. Users can switch locations easily
4. Last a long time (most of ours are 6 years old but only our newer ones accept a wheel mouse)
Thin Client minuses:
1. If the server goes down, everyone goes down
2. Some peripherals like scanners need PC's
On another note, if you use Microsoft TS CAL's, be sure you set it up as "per user" rather than "per device". They don't really know how to count the "per user" ones yet so it just looks for 1 license. The "per device" one remembers every device that signs on for one time and is harder to manage.
My boss is an AS/400 bigot for good reasons - it just works. We have a main Windows Server 2003 server that most users connect to via thin clients. It and our other servers have problems regularly. Our AS/400 (or iSeries or System i) has not gone down unless we brought it down since we got it in 1993!