I manage both iPhones and BES at an office of about 100 devices. Here are a couple small anecdotes about the 2 technologies: 1)iPhone support was an after thought in Exchange or at most, an added feature for Exchange 03. This doesn't really make me feel too confident in the technology. 2)iPhone remote wipe feature does not always work for some reason. 3)iPhones have huge hard drives and give people opportunities to save content to the local device. There are no hard disk encryption technologies that I know of that support the iPhone. The amount of data you could grab from a company then jump off the cell phone grid is unsettling 4)Crackberries have policies, controls, filtering options etc that sys admins love to see. 5)Crackberries are corporate issued in most instances. Corporate assets given to individual users do not get the same respect as hardware bought by the users. I have yet to see a company start giving out iPhones as a policy. This being stated, I tend to think people treat Crackberries with a lot less respect then iPhones. 6)End to end encryption 7)Support that is not based on the whim of Microsoft. I could go on forever. People that use cellphones for personal and not work related matters and do not have significant knowledge of back end processes and phone management will never get blackberries and last time I checked, no one who uses a blackberry in the manner it was supposed to be used ever really wanted anything more then a blackberry.

I would have to say that most of the misrecognition failures are due to terrible voice quality relating to cell phone issues. I've heard enough cell phone based voice mails to interpret just what exactly people are saying. I really don't blame the voice recognition software, more the carrier.

A lot of what coaxes people out of VMware has to do with the attractive licensing that Hyper-V offers, or at least that is my perception. In a nutshell, with Hyper-V you only need a processor license for an operating system or whatever other type of Microsoft application you are running. At first this sounds really attractive. You get this win2k8 license and you only need that one license to run windows on all virtual machines housed on that Hyper-V box. Pretty sweet right? Until you find out you can only run a quarter of the machines you can on a Hyper-V box as opposed to an ESX or vSphere server. On the same 1u IBM x3550 I can run 10 VMware VMs you can apparently only run 4 Hyper-V boxes comfortably. On top of that Hyper-V is based on a Windows Kernel. vSphere/ESX is almost a complete ground up build (originally it was based of CentOS I believe). Can anyone comment for sure on the licensing?

Look, does anyone else think it's kind of messed up he's asking a sysadmin to do the job of a Database Admin? I hate to be nit picking but how much other stuff is this guy responsible for if his title is sysadmin and you are asking him to upgrade a SQL database system. Maybe he doesn't feel like upgrading the database system because it's going to be one more hat he has to wear.

Actually blackberries have had a loophole for sms text messages for quite some time. You can actually just send an email to the phonenumber@carrierssmstextdomain.com. For a listing of the email to sms gateways please look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_carriers_providing_SMS_transit

SMS messages are actually voice packets posing as data packets. The best analogue to sms messages for IT geeks, is that SMS messages actually travel in a wireless voice b channel of sorts like a voice t1. It's an old school fix. Now that unlimited data plans exist it's a good way to rip off the consumer to high heavens for no apparent reason. It is a fantastic revenue stream though for providers, I must say.

I don't know about an iPhone but this app works fantastic on my Blackberry. Every strike against Apple like this means companies like RIM get good press. They need to be careful about this type of activity. On a happy note, I recommend applying for the Beta if you have a Blackberry. It's nice using my personal 8320 for work mobile, home, and personal mobile phone.

There's a ton of good advice in this thread surprisingly. Hershal Walker was one of the most ripped guys in the NFL for a long time. People were scared of this guy because of his fitness. He ate nothing but garbage too. I read an ESPN the Mag article that said he basically got ripped from sitting around watching tv (soap operas) for like 8 hours a day and doing nothing but pushups and sit ups during commercial breaks. So obviously it doesn't take much. I work about 60-70 hours a week in IT spread over a 5-7 day work week. In light of the responsibilities that I have and the demand of the job, I asked management if I could have an extended lunch break 3 days a week. They agreed and 3 days a week I take an hour and a half lunch break and go to the gym. I feel that this was a very fair compromise for both the company and myself. Me staying healthy means less sick days and less medical problems therefore lowering my medical expenses and raising my reliability. Just bounce it off your supervisor/manager/HR departments head and see what they think. It doesn't hurt to ask at all. Sell it to them as an investment in a valuable resource (you).

One thing I would like to point out, is that this guy is saying he's been on the helpdesk for more then a year. To me this indicates less then two years. I'm a Sysadmin of a relatively small shop. I am pretty young and I've been in IT (counting helpdesk as IT) for over 10 years. I worked helpdesk in high school and through most of college, doing both full time work and full time school. I graduated with an IT related college degree. Once I got my education the world wasn't handed to me on a silver platter nor was I doing anything significant with my degree. I was still jockeying phones like a monkey. That being said, it wasn't like I was answering phones in a Verizon call center either. I was basically a hybrid level 1, 2, 3, and Sysadmin employee rolled into one. Opportunity comes at different times and I would tend to think that after a year at any organization of being on the helpdesk, you really wouldn't be looked at as being a candidate for a Sysadmin position. On top of that you don't have a degree or certifications (this is a guess). Is IT really your passion? Or is it a hobby? To be honest with you, the poster sounds extremely green and reality needs to set in that you aren't going to be maintaining full systems after a year of being on the helpdesk anywhere. I would imagine the same story could be told from the perspective of a developer. It's not like you would be coding production stuff after a full year of helpdesking. You need to put in your time and due diligence, get your education, and show that you are deserving of the next level. This is all day one stuff guys...

That is true, but the context of my point is that you COULD address 16 gigs if needed. That's all. /PAE also needs specific hardware but most server technology these days support it anyway. I think the real point of my comment is that not everyone has a need to address 16 gigs on a single instance server and just because they don't doesn't disqualify their "environment."

64-bit isn't a mandatory requirement to sport volumes of RAM 16gigs and greater. MS = /PAE w/Enterprise and VMware's ESX 3.5 can support 64 gigs. And just FYI, not everyone works for Cray and Pixar.

A large part of this narcissistic group of individuals are a result of the unrealistic musings of college professors telling kids what they want to hear. I heard, throughout all of college, about how I would be making an excess of 40-60k a year when I got out into the job market. The reality of it, is that NO ONE, in their right mind is going to pay a 21 year old that type of money who has little to no experience besides what he or she has learned from a text book. I worked all throughout college, and I had been in the IT field since I was 17 going from a phone jockey to a Network/Systems Engineer. I knew the realities of what the industry was like and I chose to keep my mouth shut when professors were advertising their competency. The professors have their livelihoods to watch out for and their jobs are directly related to the interest in their field of study. They are pressured/obligated/motivated to do anything they can to generate interest. The resultant is that A students, which lets be honest, if you don't have a job in college and you are not an A student you're doing something wrong, come out of universities with a HUGE unchecked sense of entitlement. Just my 2 cents.