@IT-ADMIN said:

cuz we dont have a dedicated IT team that can manage this headache of voip, so we decided to delegate this to our ISP, they set up everything for us

That's nothing like having a limitation. You just decided to use the ISP, that's all. VoIP does not take an IT team. There are tons of vendors that will do this for you, either on premises or hosted. It is a general practice to never, ever get any service, of any type, except for Internet service from an ISP.

Because of that decision, you are now needing more IT knowledge than it takes to run a PBX. You've not saved any effort.

Why do you feel that VoIP is a headache? It seems to only be a headache because of your ISP. As someone who has run VoIP for over a decade, these kinds of problems didn't exist even back then.

@IT-ADMIN said:

yes, but the problem our VOIP server is hosted UCM by our ISP, and they don't offer recording feature,

Can you get good phone service from someone else? Why get UCM from the ISP? General rule is that you never use an ISP for any services.

Some people liked Clippy too.

@JaredBusch said:

I do not know a single engineer that has not been through the engineering program at 4 year school.

You are mixing what you DO do, to what you CAN do. I don't know anyone running a hotel that doesn't have a hospitality degree.... but it is far easier to do it without one. Yet the people that motivated so rarely stay in that field that you almost never see it.

If anything, I suspect it is easier today not harder. The idea that college is needed for everything is often repeated and to a point that for many, many fields no one attempts the alternative. But that doesn't mean that the alternative isn't there.

I also need a CPAP, as an example. I can't get that without a doctor getting paid to say I can have it. I've needed it for a decade. It is just an air compressor. But to make a few extra bucks for doctors the FDA labels it as a "drug" classification and makes it illegal to purchase unless you get it by prescription!!

Once you make a CPAP a controlled substance, the degree of corruption in the system is out of control.

The vast majority of jobs do not require a degree. Has anyone noticed that I stopped some time ago calling people "IT Pros" and use "IT Practitioner" instead? It's because I feel that the "pro" designation, generally tied to doctors and such that don't earn their keep in society, is too low of a bar and makes a negative statement that really does not apply to IT. In IT you have to be good to move up. It's competition that lets you move up.

Same as business. Running a business the only barrier is how good you do at it. It's open. Do a good job and you will do well. Do a bad job and you will do poorly. You can't say that about accredited fields. If you are really, really awful eventually they might, in some cases, take away your right to work. But that is very, very rare and normally only tied to illegal or immoral activities.

You can downvote it, but can you honestly say that you'd be proud of being a doctor where you get your job by having bought it and having the government withhold healthcare from people who don't pay you instead of doing a job where you earn your keep by actually being good at it?

Think of it as "excelling" jobs. Those like IT, business, artist, musician, writer, professor, etc. Jobs where it comes down only to "how good are you." You do well by excelling.

Compare them to "good enough" or "minimum effort" jobs like doctor, civil engineer, etc. where you pay a huge fee to a university, pay a small fee to an accreditation board, pass a test (maybe hard, maybe not), possibly go through some juvenile hazing (looking at you, doctors) and then meet a "minimum qualification" stating that you are "good enough" to do your job.

I know that to many people, maybe most people, being "good enough" is literally "good enough". But if you want to love your job, I can't imagine that being the case.

@thecreativeone91 said:

Most states require Civil Engineers to have a bachelors degree and pass state certification.

Civil, yes. Which is only one of the vast array of engineering degrees and categories.

Manufacturing, industrial, chemical, mechanical, automotive, aeronautic, electrical, computer, manufacturing systems, etc. do not require degrees.

@Hubtech said:

oh. then nevermind. sorry to all those schmucks who have them ey!!!??

Well my whole point was what GOOD job requires a degree? Tons of bad jobs require a degree - basically all ones where you are forced to be a "union" worker with the government protecting your job because the job fails to stand on its own in the US.

Nursing does not require a degree, BTW, it is only because of the massive surplus of nurses out of work and getting degrees to make themselves more employable have created a market where you "need" a degree just because there is little way to differentiate yourself from others in your field.

That's one of the things that make all of these jobs suck - they are all "wellfare" jobs. Basically you buy a degree and the government "owes" you a job by way of guaranteeing only people who paid to get the degree get the limited jobs. These jobs lack the fulfillment that what, to me, any good job would offer.

@Hubtech said:

@Hubtech Engineers of any flavor.

Engineers favour degrees but do not require them. I came from an engineering background and engineers are not a "government union" like the others mentioned and can become engineers without a degree. At least in the US, there is no college requirement for engineering.

@Hubtech said:

Nursing, Doctors, Accountants, CPAs, etc

All, to me, examples of crappy jobs.

Long ago, consumer connections were shoddy. High latency, low bandwidth and reliability problems. That era is long over. The Internet has changed, as you pointed out. Consumer lines are rock solid (normally), super low latency, low cost and high bandwidth. It is the very change in the way that networks are built that has made consumer lines or near-consumer lines so good that high cost SLA lines rarely have a place.

If you must have MPLS, you have no choice. But if you are looking for Internet connections, consumer lines are generally unbeatable. With super low latency, no congestion issues and huge bandwidth there is little for a high cost line to use to compete.

@thecreativeone91 said:

@scottalanmiller said:

Remember, I've working in consulting for sixteen years

16 years ago the internet and ISP world was very different. It's not the same today.

Yes, but just because I have MORE experience doesn't make my current experience less useful. And experience with things like SLAs does not change over time. Legal protection and skillful marketing is always the same. That the Internet has changed doesn't imply that the legal tactics to swindle people have.

@thecreativeone91 said:

Business Grade connections are much better. I wouldn't consider a low end connection. It's not worth it. You get what you pay for in terms of connections. Fiber connections are generally far more reliable and have less latency than a Cable or DSL connection. It also it's a shared trunk in most cases with DSL/Cable.

I've seen the opposite. Business grade often has the bigger outages. The "you get what you pay for" thing isn't true in the real world. Business grade connections are mostly smoke and mirrors. They get businesses to overbuy because it sounds good. But the consumer fiber is cheaper for more. Same or lower latency, better uptime. I've never seen any business get a fiber line as good as consumer cable in the northeast even at $1,000 a month.

Do anything to avoid business connections. If it comes with an SLA, you are being screwed.

@Dashrender said:

No fix? Even Lenovo is reporting you can 'restore your security' by uninstalling SuperFish... you're saying this is a lie?

We had the issue and nothing called Superfish was installed. It was a clean install and the network siphon was there the moment you installed the wireless driver. This is all the stuff I reported last year. Lenovo lied for months and months about having hacked peoples' data, why would we even think of listening to them now? We already know that they are evil and dishonest. There is no reason we should think that they would tell the truth once caught.

Remember we are talking about someone caught in a foreign hacking scam that only admitted to it months after being caught. They dragged it out and tried to use the "big vendors can do no wrong" mentality that IT in America tends to have in the hopes that they could make it go away. They even pay huge money to another online community to partner with them and be their PR to make it seem reasonable that they didn't mean to do anything wrong (I pointed out that as long as they were partnered the community had no integrity just this week directly to the PR person for Lenovo.) Lenovo is throwing big money at making IT professions feel warm and fuzzy that they are fixing what was a breach of ethics beyond imagination and can never, ever be forgiven without losing all sense of reality.

When using the Yoga 2 last year, it was incredibly obvious with use that there was a shim in the network driver. A little fiddling with it and you could see the driver enacted the shim and without the driver, there was no shim (or wireless.) Going to Windows 10 TP was the only way to get (that we found) a non-altered driver that didn't have the shim.

@Dashrender said:

@scottalanmiller said:

Lenovo didn't offer any drivers for this machine. They only had one that had a network shim it in to siphon off data. It's a non-Lenovo driver by necessity.

Yet another point against the Lenovo - it almost couldn't run Windows at all.

I thought the siphon was from the fish software - now you're saying it was the NIC driver?

That's where they put it. I reported on that last year. That's how they made sure that people could not work around it. They put the spyware right into the network drivers to ensure maximum penetration. That's why there was no fix.

@thecreativeone91 said:

@scottalanmiller said:

@thecreativeone91 said:
Hardware doesn't really have any computational advantage.

That is so wrong. A purpose built encoding circuit always wins over relying on a computer to do your encoding. Maybe in the SMB that's okay but for critical systems it's not at all. There's also added latency when using a computer to do the encoding.

The latency only matters if it is greater than can be noticed. Software encoding today is lightning fast. SMB vs. Enterprise doesn't impact the personal perception of latency. A phone call quality, for example, is measured the whether the people talking are employees of a big company or a little one. Where have you seen software unable to deliver imperceptible latency, unless you are talking decades old equipment?

@thecreativeone91 said:

Depends on the deployment. 90% of the time software is best. but for large tele-presence systems such as court rooms, conferences etc hardware (and hardware based encoders) will always win.

What makes the hardware better? Software encoding can easily go far, far beyond the needs of telepresence systems today. Hardware doesn't really have any computational advantage.

Hardware systems seem pretty silly today. That era is over.