You beat me to it. VCL was a great starting point for learning how to write virii. It was the first thing that I thought of when I read saw the article. [nostalgia]Sometimes I miss the days of Digital Decay and the NuKE vs YAM flame wars.[/nostalgia]
I don't understand how ITI is trying to sue Colon. Obviously Colon did not buy the products directly from ITI but bought them instead through a distributor. How did the distributor sell the products to Colon and make a profit, while at the same time still allowing him to resell them at less than what ITI says he is allowed to sell them for? It seems to me like ITI should be going after their distributor for breach of contract, not Colon. Or did I misread the article?
Nope. You are saying that I said that. Instead of trying to imply something, how about you go ahead and offer an example of SPECIFICALLY what Sun is doing?
Which one of those is the plug-in for OpenOffice or the office suite of your choice that allows users to File > SaveAs whatever they are working on into the appropriate respository?
It's a work flow / collaboration tool. Think of it as a Wiki on steroids that is fully integrated with Office. It can act as a document repository. It can drive a workflow. The product is new and it is a PITA to get setup and running (which is pretty much the case with any new MS product). I've personally seen it implimented at an architectural firm. They have a lot of requirements when it comes to submitting bids. They need a lot of documentation to go with the bid. Sharepoint provides a convenient place for them to organize all of the information in one place. It sends out notifications to team members as the project progresses. Everyone who needs to be aware of their responsibilities is aware of them. Nobody can say, "I didn't know that I need to do...." because it's all right there in SharePoint.
Since when has banging together a quick powerpoint presentation been challenging?
It's easy to bang together a quick PowerPoint presentation if you want to put some slides up for a presentation you are doing to your class. It's easy to bang together a presentation if all of the data that you need is stored in a single location, or in a single spreadsheet. On the other hand if you need to draw together data from multiple business units spread across the globe that are stored on servers spread across the globe, you might want some collaboration tools. You might want something like SharePortal and Office 2007. Your board of directors might expect to see things like trend data, and market capitalization, and ROI, and all sorts of other information that people often store in Excel, or Access or SQL, or Oracle, or whatever. You might a tool like Excel that can pull data from multiple data sources and correlate it before you dump it into something like PowerPoint to display it.
You are right when you think that the individual, specific tasks in and of themselves may not be all that complex. However tying all of those tasks together in an enterprise environment is a completely different story.
Scenario #2 is some of the most blindingly obviously insightful ways of how things should work in a just world that I have read in quite some time. It's so obvious that it seems insane that Scenario #1 is the way that things really happen.
It is typical. You need to grant a few people immunity to get them to dish the dirt on their co-workers. As citizens, we just have to hope that the prosecuters handle the situation appropriately. They should flip the little guys to catch the big fish, as opposed to letting the big fish off in exchange for a bunch of little guys.
First of all, be as detailed as possible in your resume. I was in the market for a new job about a year ago and I have a little over a decade of IT experience. In that time I've done Novell, Windows, databases, security, servers, workstations, networks (WAN/LAN), blah blah blah. I tried to condense it all down into a single page resume. Eventually I talked to a tech recruiter and he summed up my resume by saying, "You have ten plus years of experience but a single page resume? You need more detail." So like others have already suggested here, point out specifics. I spent my last seven years a consultant. In that seven years I racked up a HUGE list of accomplishments and once I sat down and started to bullet point those accomplishments, the resume grew to the size that it should have been.
To rehash what others have said, you basically have two options... General purpose IT guy for a small company, or consulting. If I were you, I'd look at consulting. I think that any company in their right mind would be hesitant to turn over all of their IT operations to a guy who just came out of college. They are going to want someone with experience in the business world. The person who lands the JOAT position in a small shop needs some managerial experience, and proven skills when it comes to project management and interacting with other executives.
The consulting company that I left to work at my current position would be a perfect fit for you. They do general purpose IT consulting for small/medium sized businesses. They need a person who they can throw into the deep end of the pool who won't drown and won't bring down the systems while trying to troubleshoot the problem. Competent IT consulting shops are a lot like plumbers... there are a lot of them, but there are few competent ones. Therefore the competent ones are always up to their eyeballs in work and are often times looking for help. For what it's worth my boss found my replacement on Craigslist of all places. When I was searching around for jobs, I found that Dice was pretty tech recruiter biased and very position specific. They weren't looking for JOAT people. They were looking for "Systems Admin Level II" kind of positions.
As I was reading your response I was reminded of my own experience with Microsoft operating systems. I started using DOS 5. With DOS 5, Microsoft actually gave fairly extensive documentation (somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 pages) about what all of the various files on the system did. It was literally possible to sit down with the book and figure out how to make the computer work. It only ran one program at a time, there were only a couple of files that controlled the boot process, and things were simple. That was 1992.
The Microsoft operating system of today is WAY more complex than DOS 5.0 ever dreamt of being. I am running Windows XP and there are currently 45 processes running simultaneously. I remember when the idea of being able to run two at a time was voodoo black magic. With that complexity has come main stream acceptance. The masses don't have time to figure out what every single file on their computer does. They don't have time to figure out the registry. The issue isn't that you can't get down to the low levels of the system. Those low levels are still there, they are just obfuscated by the GUI.
I compare the current state of Linux with Windows 3.11. Sure it has a GUI, but most of the people who use it are comfortable with the command line. Given the option to complete any specific task, odds are they are going to go to the shell to do it. When I say I compare it to Win311, I don't mean in terms of nifty eye candy, and process control, and all of that. I mean in terms of where the GUI is in relation to the underlying shell. Win311 had.ini files that pretty much controlled every aspect of the GUI. My understanding is that Linux has.conf files that accomplish the same thing. Microsoft eventually got sick of.ini files all over the place so they came up with the Registry. Does Linux have something similar? If not, how long until they do?
If I were a kid today, I'd be playing with Linux because that is where all of the control is. Linux provides kids today with the equivalent of what I got with DOS 5... full documentation as to what the heck is going on with the system. Microsoft has taken things to a whole other level at this point. They have pushed computing to the masses. They have given computers to the people who don't care about what the system is doing. Those people are the AOL users and the spam infested zombie machine owners. The computer landscape is a reflection of society as a whole. For every one person who wants to do things the right way, there are thousand others who want "good enough" and "right right now". And for the necessary car analogy, Windows users are like SUV owners. They don't care how much they pollute the world around them and how many resources they suck up doing it.
IMO, given an open tool, kids will figure it out, give them a closed tool and they may use it but the restrictions on how it's used will limit their growth and learning.
What you are saying doesn't make any sense what so ever. The only "restrictions" a closed tool will have might show up in file incompatibilities. Kids will figure out whatever you put in front of them, period, end of story. I'm willing to bet that given the current state of OSS vs. closed source software development, the perceived restrictions, from the point of view of a child, will be in the OSS software. It won't be nearly as feature rich. Just look at Excel vs. the rest of the OSS spreadsheet offerings as an example.
So when school systems start using more and more Linux and the kids get familiar with how it works and how they do things the Linux way, you'll find far fewer people switching to Windows.
I completely agree with this. Kids learn whatever happens to be in front of them. Kids learn to speak the language that their parents speak. The learning of the second language is what is relatively difficult. The same thing goes for computers. I can do just about anything (I say just about because there might be some isoteric exception out there) on a PC that anybody else can do on a Mac or a *nix box. The tools that I use to get the job done might not be the same as the tools that a Mac or *nix user would use, but the outcome will be the same.
You're on the right track with convincing them that the computer and software are just tools. The big problem that comes up is when they need help with their tool. You can't always be there to show them how to use their tool. When they ask their friends, their friends are going to say, "I did it with Photoshop." and then they are going to look at them silly when they try to tell their friends that they are using. "GiMP." Another thing going against open source (Gimp in this example) is the fact that the "profesionals" use a specific tool (Photoshop in this example) and most people want to be like the professionals.
I actually went to work for one of my clients full time and it is starting to seem like it was a bad decision. I just didn't want to spend my life constantly staying on the cutting edge and as a consultant, at least at the firm that I was at, I had to do that. So I took an easy job that wasn't too taxing on my skills so that I can focus on other areas of my life.
But back on topic, I completely agree with you that bad bosses can definitely severely hamper a career. I have a bad boss right now, and he is actually my first one. Luckily for me I have enough experience that I can have his job if he keeps up what he is doing. Truth be told though, I don't want his job.
That will never happen. MSSQL server exists because of Visual Studio and the ease of creating programs that rely on it as a backend. Which leads one back to the argument that I've come across a few times in this topic... Postgres is lacking a good development environment.
As an Exchange-Server-In-A-Box admin, I will take your flamebait and politely tell you to go shove it. It's a lot easier to let a company like Postini take first crack at the incoming emails than to devote resources on my end to dealing with the problem. The issue isn't that I can't configure spam and content filtering, because I can. The issue is that it's more cost effective for my organization (non-profit, ~300 users) to farm it out to a company that does nothing but spam and content filtering. Let Postini take the bandwidth hit, and the CPU hit to deal with the spam.
We use Postini here too. One of the benefits is that Postini's servers deal with all of the spam and it never even hits the perimeter of your network. They also give your domain some level of obfuscation because your MX records point to Postini's servers instead of your own.
I've been working in IT for over a decade and recently spent the last seven years as a consultant. As a consultant I ran into every personality in every position possible. When you run into the kind of boss who wants access to everything you just need to CYA. Give them enough rope to hang themselves with and make sure that you've got the safety net in place. In the mean time, start looking for another job. Life is too short to work for worthless bosses.
If some of you Microsoft haters actually understood some of the power within the Office group (interop is wonderful) then you might not hate it quite so much.
With power comes responsibility. In this case the responsibility is to make sure that things are secure. I tend to agree with you that the Office suite is extremely powerful and interoperates very well. With 2007 and SharePortal it is becoming even more useful for workflow/process automation kind of work. However the problem is that Microsoft focuses on functionality first and security second. That has always been the case and probably always will be. I'm just glad that they are patching things on a regular basis these days. Sure there will always be people who say, "Ah ha!! See, they released more patches, Microsoft software sucks!!" However I've been working in corporate IT for over a decade at this point and I've yet to see any computer owned by an Excel macro virus. The last time I saw any Office related exploit in the wild involved malicious code in the normal.dot file on an Word 97 installation... in 1998.
Other people have pointed this out but maybe you just went ahead and posted before bothering to read the replies. There are policies that can be put in place through the BES server that prevent third party software from being installed. Most of the comments to this article have been pure FUD from people who have obviously never used a BES server or been responsible for Blackberry's in any sort of enterprise environment.
In other words, it doesn't matter how big of a tool the manager type is. I'm completely inclined to agree with all three of the points you made. However, none of them matter when your BES server policies are setup right. The manager type can be the type of person who clicks on everything that pops up onto the screen, but it won't matter because the server policy will prevent the install.
How long until they pass a mandate that says something to the effect of, "Companies who want to pass legitimate torrent traffic over the network need to do so in an unencrypted fashion."?? I hate to rain on everyone's encryption utopia, and as cliche as the saying is, if you don't have anything to hide, you don't need to encrypt it.
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You beat me to it. VCL was a great starting point for learning how to write virii. It was the first thing that I thought of when I read saw the article. [nostalgia]Sometimes I miss the days of Digital Decay and the NuKE vs YAM flame wars.[/nostalgia]
I don't understand how ITI is trying to sue Colon. Obviously Colon did not buy the products directly from ITI but bought them instead through a distributor. How did the distributor sell the products to Colon and make a profit, while at the same time still allowing him to resell them at less than what ITI says he is allowed to sell them for? It seems to me like ITI should be going after their distributor for breach of contract, not Colon. Or did I misread the article?
There are a lot of SharePoint features that I didn't list. That eGroupware looks pretty nifty none the less.
I spend a few hours a day using a particular productivity suite. I don't have time to use software designed by amateurs and/or hobbyists.
are not my words.
...maintained BY amateurs...
My question back to you is, where specifically did I either say or imply that OpenOffice.org is maintained my amateurs and hobbyists?
Nope. You are saying that I said that. Instead of trying to imply something, how about you go ahead and offer an example of SPECIFICALLY what Sun is doing?
Which one of those is the plug-in for OpenOffice or the office suite of your choice that allows users to File > SaveAs whatever they are working on into the appropriate respository?
It's a work flow / collaboration tool. Think of it as a Wiki on steroids that is fully integrated with Office. It can act as a document repository. It can drive a workflow. The product is new and it is a PITA to get setup and running (which is pretty much the case with any new MS product). I've personally seen it implimented at an architectural firm. They have a lot of requirements when it comes to submitting bids. They need a lot of documentation to go with the bid. Sharepoint provides a convenient place for them to organize all of the information in one place. It sends out notifications to team members as the project progresses. Everyone who needs to be aware of their responsibilities is aware of them. Nobody can say, "I didn't know that I need to do ...." because it's all right there in SharePoint.
It's easy to bang together a quick PowerPoint presentation if you want to put some slides up for a presentation you are doing to your class. It's easy to bang together a presentation if all of the data that you need is stored in a single location, or in a single spreadsheet. On the other hand if you need to draw together data from multiple business units spread across the globe that are stored on servers spread across the globe, you might want some collaboration tools. You might want something like SharePortal and Office 2007. Your board of directors might expect to see things like trend data, and market capitalization, and ROI, and all sorts of other information that people often store in Excel, or Access or SQL, or Oracle, or whatever. You might a tool like Excel that can pull data from multiple data sources and correlate it before you dump it into something like PowerPoint to display it.
You are right when you think that the individual, specific tasks in and of themselves may not be all that complex. However tying all of those tasks together in an enterprise environment is a completely different story.
Scenario #2 is some of the most blindingly obviously insightful ways of how things should work in a just world that I have read in quite some time. It's so obvious that it seems insane that Scenario #1 is the way that things really happen.
It is typical. You need to grant a few people immunity to get them to dish the dirt on their co-workers. As citizens, we just have to hope that the prosecuters handle the situation appropriately. They should flip the little guys to catch the big fish, as opposed to letting the big fish off in exchange for a bunch of little guys.
To rehash what others have said, you basically have two options... General purpose IT guy for a small company, or consulting. If I were you, I'd look at consulting. I think that any company in their right mind would be hesitant to turn over all of their IT operations to a guy who just came out of college. They are going to want someone with experience in the business world. The person who lands the JOAT position in a small shop needs some managerial experience, and proven skills when it comes to project management and interacting with other executives.
The consulting company that I left to work at my current position would be a perfect fit for you. They do general purpose IT consulting for small/medium sized businesses. They need a person who they can throw into the deep end of the pool who won't drown and won't bring down the systems while trying to troubleshoot the problem. Competent IT consulting shops are a lot like plumbers... there are a lot of them, but there are few competent ones. Therefore the competent ones are always up to their eyeballs in work and are often times looking for help. For what it's worth my boss found my replacement on Craigslist of all places. When I was searching around for jobs, I found that Dice was pretty tech recruiter biased and very position specific. They weren't looking for JOAT people. They were looking for "Systems Admin Level II" kind of positions.
The Microsoft operating system of today is WAY more complex than DOS 5.0 ever dreamt of being. I am running Windows XP and there are currently 45 processes running simultaneously. I remember when the idea of being able to run two at a time was voodoo black magic. With that complexity has come main stream acceptance. The masses don't have time to figure out what every single file on their computer does. They don't have time to figure out the registry. The issue isn't that you can't get down to the low levels of the system. Those low levels are still there, they are just obfuscated by the GUI.
I compare the current state of Linux with Windows 3.11. Sure it has a GUI, but most of the people who use it are comfortable with the command line. Given the option to complete any specific task, odds are they are going to go to the shell to do it. When I say I compare it to Win311, I don't mean in terms of nifty eye candy, and process control, and all of that. I mean in terms of where the GUI is in relation to the underlying shell. Win311 had .ini files that pretty much controlled every aspect of the GUI. My understanding is that Linux has .conf files that accomplish the same thing. Microsoft eventually got sick of .ini files all over the place so they came up with the Registry. Does Linux have something similar? If not, how long until they do?
If I were a kid today, I'd be playing with Linux because that is where all of the control is. Linux provides kids today with the equivalent of what I got with DOS 5... full documentation as to what the heck is going on with the system. Microsoft has taken things to a whole other level at this point. They have pushed computing to the masses. They have given computers to the people who don't care about what the system is doing. Those people are the AOL users and the spam infested zombie machine owners. The computer landscape is a reflection of society as a whole. For every one person who wants to do things the right way, there are thousand others who want "good enough" and "right right now". And for the necessary car analogy, Windows users are like SUV owners. They don't care how much they pollute the world around them and how many resources they suck up doing it.
What you are saying doesn't make any sense what so ever. The only "restrictions" a closed tool will have might show up in file incompatibilities. Kids will figure out whatever you put in front of them, period, end of story. I'm willing to bet that given the current state of OSS vs. closed source software development, the perceived restrictions, from the point of view of a child, will be in the OSS software. It won't be nearly as feature rich. Just look at Excel vs. the rest of the OSS spreadsheet offerings as an example.
So when school systems start using more and more Linux and the kids get familiar with how it works and how they do things the Linux way, you'll find far fewer people switching to Windows.
I completely agree with this. Kids learn whatever happens to be in front of them. Kids learn to speak the language that their parents speak. The learning of the second language is what is relatively difficult. The same thing goes for computers. I can do just about anything (I say just about because there might be some isoteric exception out there) on a PC that anybody else can do on a Mac or a *nix box. The tools that I use to get the job done might not be the same as the tools that a Mac or *nix user would use, but the outcome will be the same.
You're on the right track with convincing them that the computer and software are just tools. The big problem that comes up is when they need help with their tool. You can't always be there to show them how to use their tool. When they ask their friends, their friends are going to say, "I did it with Photoshop." and then they are going to look at them silly when they try to tell their friends that they are using. "GiMP." Another thing going against open source (Gimp in this example) is the fact that the "profesionals" use a specific tool (Photoshop in this example) and most people want to be like the professionals.
But back on topic, I completely agree with you that bad bosses can definitely severely hamper a career. I have a bad boss right now, and he is actually my first one. Luckily for me I have enough experience that I can have his job if he keeps up what he is doing. Truth be told though, I don't want his job.
That will never happen. MSSQL server exists because of Visual Studio and the ease of creating programs that rely on it as a backend. Which leads one back to the argument that I've come across a few times in this topic... Postgres is lacking a good development environment.
As an Exchange-Server-In-A-Box admin, I will take your flamebait and politely tell you to go shove it. It's a lot easier to let a company like Postini take first crack at the incoming emails than to devote resources on my end to dealing with the problem. The issue isn't that I can't configure spam and content filtering, because I can. The issue is that it's more cost effective for my organization (non-profit, ~300 users) to farm it out to a company that does nothing but spam and content filtering. Let Postini take the bandwidth hit, and the CPU hit to deal with the spam.
We use Postini here too. One of the benefits is that Postini's servers deal with all of the spam and it never even hits the perimeter of your network. They also give your domain some level of obfuscation because your MX records point to Postini's servers instead of your own.
I've been working in IT for over a decade and recently spent the last seven years as a consultant. As a consultant I ran into every personality in every position possible. When you run into the kind of boss who wants access to everything you just need to CYA. Give them enough rope to hang themselves with and make sure that you've got the safety net in place. In the mean time, start looking for another job. Life is too short to work for worthless bosses.
With power comes responsibility. In this case the responsibility is to make sure that things are secure. I tend to agree with you that the Office suite is extremely powerful and interoperates very well. With 2007 and SharePortal it is becoming even more useful for workflow/process automation kind of work. However the problem is that Microsoft focuses on functionality first and security second. That has always been the case and probably always will be. I'm just glad that they are patching things on a regular basis these days. Sure there will always be people who say, "Ah ha!! See, they released more patches, Microsoft software sucks!!" However I've been working in corporate IT for over a decade at this point and I've yet to see any computer owned by an Excel macro virus. The last time I saw any Office related exploit in the wild involved malicious code in the normal.dot file on an Word 97 installation... in 1998.
In other words, it doesn't matter how big of a tool the manager type is. I'm completely inclined to agree with all three of the points you made. However, none of them matter when your BES server policies are setup right. The manager type can be the type of person who clicks on everything that pops up onto the screen, but it won't matter because the server policy will prevent the install.
How long until they pass a mandate that says something to the effect of, "Companies who want to pass legitimate torrent traffic over the network need to do so in an unencrypted fashion."?? I hate to rain on everyone's encryption utopia, and as cliche as the saying is, if you don't have anything to hide, you don't need to encrypt it.
I think you need to change it to "un-penetratING life." and then you're right on target. Even geek girls can get penetrated on a regular basis.