Very true. I am a telephony engineer, specializing in call centers.
I was at VoiceCon, a multi-vendor show, in SF in December; it was a joke. There were very few vendors there and attendance was very low despite /giving/ away passes.
(Note: the VoiceCon in Orlando is still pretty good though.)
Avaya, Cisco, Genesys (which are the big vendors I mostly work with) each have their own show. Cisco doesn't even show up at VoiceCon shows anymore.
SuperComm is a bit different from the world I work in but the point is still the same: Big vendors have their own shows so they can control the message.


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Not mentioned in summary: this is only verizon wireless.
http://status.4chan.org/


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moot is not known for that kind of crap.
It has also been confirmed by many vzw customers.


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And fast lane changes can cause plenty of accidents too. The only time I've been rear-ended was when I had to stop short, and the car behind me didn't even slow down, just swerved over to the next lane barely missing me, which gave NO time for the car behind him to see that traffic had stopped.



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Disaster recovery centers are mostly for mainframes and other uber-mission critical functions. Most of our servers/software are running in multiple redundant data centers. When I left the bank, Wachovia had four major data centers.
But that's not the point. You would never use disaster recovery centers or redundant servers as a make-shift lab. If there was a problem on the production box and the redundant server wasn't available, you'd definitely be in deep doo doo.

My original point is if you have a production environment with 20 physical sites all connected a certain way, then you can't really FULLY test your changes in the lab unless your lab has the same number of sites all wired the same way, which is ridiculous. It would literally cost 50 mil.

I'm a call-center telephony engineer. Kinda the same thing as network engineer in that you're routing calls instead of packets.
Back around '01, I was working for First Union (which later became Wachovia). They had this massive corporate push for anyone and everyone in IT to roll out a standardized Software Configuration Management, and of course we were included. The big problem was the lab. The corporate standard was to test changes in a lab environment and then move to production (duh).
For a telephony environment, we had a pretty good lab that could duplicate most of our production scenarios, but not all. Another problem was there were a LOT of people with their fingers in the lab since so many groups were involved: eg. The IVR team is in there because you have to have IVRs in the system. Same with call routing, call recording, desktop software, Q&A, etc.etc.
So the lab was in a constant state of flux with multiple products, multiple teams, and different software cycles and endless testing always occurring. We made it work by testing the stuff we weren't sure about in the lab, only doing changes in prod after hours, and having really good testing and back-out plans.
So when the corporate overlords started telling use we couldn't make any changes to production without running everything through the lab first, we basically laughed and told them we'd need around 500 million for the lab and dedicated resources to run it. I ended up telling them that to duplicate the production environment, we'd need another bank as our "test bank", and we could test changes on the test bank and then put them in the production bank.

As with so many things in that IT department, it went from being a priority to fading away when something else became a priority.

Same here. I worked for First Union at the time. Did a lot of Y2K work that would have been very VERY disruptive to the call centers.

What's amazing is most airports, ORD, SFO, and SEA included, still charge for Wifi.
I guess since you're stuck there and you need Wifi, they've got you by the balls.
Some of my coworkers who travel a lot have air cards just for when they're in airports.

or...

http://sourceforge.net/projects/eraser/


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Mod parent up. This was my first thought too.
I still think if a law is in a digital format you should be able to get a copy for free, esp if you bring in your own media. I can see them charging you $20 for a DVD-R disc and the time/resources it takes to burn it, but claims of copyright and having to use proprietary software to read the law is rediculous.

Ya know those "call may be monitored and recorded for quality blah blah" announcements you always hear when calling pretty much any company?
Most of that is done by Nice recording company, based in Israel (they sell the machines; they don't do the actual recording themselves.)
Every air traffic controller in the WORLD is recorded on Nice machines. They are HUGE.

So, yeah, Israelis know a thing or two about recording a phone call.

Yup, and it's also why I rarely check slashdot anymore:
Yahoo actually had this story on their front page this morning and /. is only getting around to posting it now.
(I read about it on photoshop disasters via reddit days ago.) Usually /. is ahead of the curve, but lately they've been behind it.
Sorry for the winy bitchy post. Just had to get it out of my system.

>two-and-a-half football fields
So is that US football fields or are we using the metric system (ie. Soccer fields) ?

I hope you filed for unemployment.... they have to pay that too based on work environment.

Yes there are a lot of fundamentalist nuts in the bible belt. I know. I live in it.
That said, I'll wager large piles of money that the real nuts WAY outnumber sensible people in Utah than any south-eastern state.

Anyone who's lived/worked in Charlotte, Raleigh, Columbia, Atlanta, Orlando, Jacksonville, Athens, St Louis, Nashville, Jackson, or Birmingham know they are actually fairly progressive cities.

Provo on the other hand....ugh.