Posts made by pchiodo

@DustinB3403 said in CenturyLink, you so fancy!:

The US Government is the only sanctioned monopoly in the US.

It's illegal to try to create another Government to rule over the US.

Well, isn't this the case with all countries?

@DustinB3403 said in CenturyLink, you so fancy!:

@pchiodo ha, but it is the only paid one.

And no, that isn't it.

Are you thinking the post office and non-overnight letters? Still a "paid" service.

Frankly, there are quite a number of de facto monopolies, such as Mallinckodt (only legal supplier of cocaine). Or professional sports to some degree. Making and selling alcohol can be depending on the jurisdiction.

But I bet you're thinking the post office.

@DustinB3403 said in CenturyLink, you so fancy!:

So to give everyone a legal question, what is the only legal monopoly in the US?

Sirius XM Radio

@scottalanmiller said in Let's all get blindsided together!:

@pchiodo said in Let's all get blindsided together!:

@Carnival-Boy said in Let's all get blindsided together!:

I've never understood discussions on the price of e-mail. All offerings seem so trivially cheap to me. I mean in the US you're paying your employees, on average, over $50,000 per year and you're worried about an extra $50 a year for e-mail? We probably spend more on paper towels in the rest room than e-mail but I rarely see the president starting that discussion.

It certainly is about perspective. One of the things I like to bring up in meetings is how much is the meeting costing. When you have even as little as 5 people in the room, and the average salary is still a meager $50K, it's still costing $120+ an hour to be in the room. Increase this by 4 or 5 more people and add executive management and your talking $1000/hour just to talk about saving less than $5K/year.

I call this the "high cost of decision making". You have to account for the time to research the solutions, too. And the risk of the change. And the cost of making the change.

Exactly. An email migration is going to cost well in excess of $5K when you take into account the tech time, the learning time, not to mention the lost productivity while everyone learns a new system.

@Carnival-Boy said in Let's all get blindsided together!:

I've never understood discussions on the price of e-mail. All offerings seem so trivially cheap to me. I mean in the US you're paying your employees, on average, over $50,000 per year and you're worried about an extra $50 a year for e-mail? We probably spend more on paper towels in the rest room than e-mail but I rarely see the president starting that discussion.

It certainly is about perspective. One of the things I like to bring up in meetings is how much is the meeting costing. When you have even as little as 5 people in the room, and the average salary is still a meager $50K, it's still costing $120+ an hour to be in the room. Increase this by 4 or 5 more people and add executive management and your talking $1000/hour just to talk about saving less than $5K/year.

@scottalanmiller I went to a university for about 18 months until I realized that what they were teaching me from a technology standpoint was already outdated, and by the time I finished, I would be 3-4 years behind the technology curve.

I brought my own copy of DOS 5.0 (Yes this dates me) and was told I could not load it because the systems at the time would not support it. They were using DOS 3.2

The primary language offerings were Fortran or Cobal.

I don't think much has changed with the fact that they lag the technology curve, and are therefore fairly useless.

The proliferation of this metric is driven from the often times misalignment with IT to Finance. Many organizations place the IT roles under the finance umbrella, and decisions are made based on cost vs. based on need.

When I came to my current company, I made it clear that I didn't care who I reported to, but that IT MUST be involved in the business goals and objectives decision making process.

The biggest mistake companies make in the realm of IT is allowing IT costs to drive IT decisions. IT expenditures must be based on the business need, not the overall cost. Certainly being economical is prudent, but not at the cost of critical technology required for the business goals.

IT "Managers" falling into the group of delegated decision making would be better served, and may be able to initiate change, by highlighting the benefits and risks associated with adopting or not adopting critical technologies, and concentrating on the risks more than the benefits.

@art_of_shred It might have been made up

@DustinB3403 Well, 6.5 million watched. 6.4 million knew it wouldn't work. 30% of those actually have iPhones, and a third of those went and bought the iPhone 7, so that makes about 10,000 that actually believed the video, and I would guess that maybe 5% of those actually got out the drill, so, best guess +/- 200 phones?

Also, were you aware that 83.6% of all statistics are made up?

Greatest tech troll ever:

How to hack a jack for your iPhone 7:

Youtube Video

The comments are golden

@scottalanmiller said in A Mandate to Be Cheap:

@art_of_shred said in A Mandate to Be Cheap:

Perhaps you meant "Poll"

Except that is not a pole in the picture... it is a staff.

Staff on a pole.

It was the best I could find on short notice.

@scottalanmiller said in A Mandate to Be Cheap:

@Dashrender said in A Mandate to Be Cheap:

@scottalanmiller said in A Mandate to Be Cheap:

@Dashrender That was very possibly a case where he failed to convey who was the IT Manager and got burned for it. Someone felt that he was a decision maker when he was not and it spread. Once people start repeating that stuff, it becomes the accepted truth. It's so important to never let that happen.

I'm sure I am personally in that situation - If I took a pole of staff and management, who is the IT manager/decision maker, I bet most (meaning more than 80%) would say I am. This is simply not the case though. If I want to spend more than $1000 it has to be approved by either my boss (the CEO) or, and more likely, the BOD.

Approved to spend is not quite the same. That they probe your logic is not the same as them making the decision.

We have a general "budget" based primarily on a guess as too how much new stuff will cost at time of replacement, along with another guess as to the growth, topped off with a pretty good number on subscriptions, licensing, and maintenance.

We don't add in payroll, as this just skews numbers IMHO.

At the end of the day though, we always review the projects, the estimated costs, and then, of course, quote out the solution. Then we meet as a team, including ownership, and decide whether to proceed or not.

All of this is based on what is best for the company.

@Dashrender said in A Mandate to Be Cheap:

If I took a pole of staff

Grammar Nazi incoming...

I pictured a bunch of your staff members like this:

https://bigstickcombat.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/polejmp.jpg

Perhaps you meant "Poll"

Yes, parroting your sentiment.

And Victoires was awesome.

Here's a link to the awesome musician that played for us by the fireside:

http://www.teressawilcox.net

@dafyre said in You Cannot Virtualize That:

@fuznutz04 said in You Cannot Virtualize That:

In other words, if you have a problem, and their support cannot figures out that you are virtualized, they will refuse to give you any support. out the solution, they will always come back to the fact that you virtualized their product, which is "not supported."

FTFY.

I would argue with them, and have done so on other issues. This is especially true when they say the application needs to be reinstalled. This is a clear sign they do not know their application.

At the end of the day, it's their application, and as long as it is running on a supported OS with the minimum HD requirements, they have to support it.

I also have no problem moving up the food chain, and if that takes talking to the head of the company, and explaining the result of bad reviews, then so be it.

I've had two software vendors tell me these exact words. In both cases, I was able to virtualize their products without issue. One even had the audacity to say that the SQL server supporting the application couldn't be virtualized IN A 3 TIER environment.

As far as support, I don't necessarily tell them it's virtualized, and have yet to have them not support the issue nor fix the issue. In my mind there is no difference between an application on a virtual box and one on a physical box.

@ChrisL said in MangoCon 2016:

@JaredBusch said in MangoCon 2016:

@Ambarishrh said in MangoCon 2016:

Is it possible to share some of the presentations from MC2016? And hope people like us who couldn't attend this year, get to see some videos soon!

Everything was recorded.

Give them some time to to post production.

EVERYTHING was recorded. Even midnight trips into sleeping people's rooms.

Is Sam still alive?

@gjacobse said in MangoCon 2016:

These two are waiting for their swap bag,....

So is this a Rochester thing or was this just a hotel thing? Because if this was just a hotel thing, they need to seriously get an exterminator. WTF!

@Minion-Queen AKA @scottalanmiller

@Minion-Queen said in MS SQL export / import:

Has to be Express as this is Windows 7 to Windows 10. No Server OS.

I think this changed with SQL Server 2012. Fairly certain it could be installed on Windows 7:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms143506(v=sql.110).aspx

The goal was never to get into just one phone. They wanted a legal precedent that would allow them to force a manufacturer to assist in breaking any phone, along with the potential to use the same case to force manufacturers to provide an encryption back door.