I don't want to be the target of an advertising (or worse yet hate) campaign just because I fell into some arbitrary category based on the stereotypes of self righteous fools in the ivory tower.
I already am. I bought a French movie on Amazon called Cote d'Azur and rated it highly - not any higher than say Battle Star Galactica - and ever since it has thought that I am gay... a gay nerd.
I run a small IT outsourcing company and we used and recommended Symantec Corporate edition for years as it has a very easy to use administrator console, alerting when there was a virus, and those features outweighed frankly not very good detection. Unfortunately when they changed the engine that they were using in Symantec Corporate Edition with the now renamed product Symantec Endpoint Protection it has become to resource intensive to use. Any machine that we have that is not a Dual Core or Core 2 Duo is very slugish even after creating 'lite' packages that don't have all of the features enabled.
We are currently in trial with Nod32 for business and Trend Client / Server with a couple of customers, but it has not been long enough for me to provide anecdotal feedback with either product.
Unfortunately, those people tend to be rare, at least in my experience.
They are! I worked for a firm that did a lot of government engineering. Our meetings lasted a maximum of 42 minutes (we had to account for all of our time in 6 minute increments) and any meeting with more than two other people required a meeting moderator. Since we only had a couple of meeting moderators for 3000 engineers we had few, but very productive meetings.
Lots of places: several startups, industry and govt, one superlarge corp, etc. I have seen a lot of people fired for basic HR violations--running a business out of one's cube, not showing up to work, etc. But nothing regarding skill.
As an employer and someone who has fired programmers before I can tell you that lack of skills or incompetence is usually the reason that we let someone go. If someone is really good an employer will often look the other way.
The reason that it seems to you that someone has been fired for reasons other than incompetence is that we do not want to end up in front of the labor board with unfair firing claim filed against us and it is easiest to document and write up employees for being late or not calling into work when they are sick, etc.
It's a naive, domestic operating system without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.
