"It took police two-and-a-half days to find the gun in the Hyundai..."

Those damn guns, always getting lost in the seat cushions or under the floor mats.

6 pm local time is when we've scheduled to end our maintenance time at work tomorrow, replacing the core switch. Huh. I guess it's not going to go so well.

Sorry, everyone. If I'd have known that my work network was in actuality running a virtual instance of the known universe, I wouldn't have ignored all those Kerberos errors. Although in retrospect, a half-ass, thrown together Active Directory environment does explain a lot about the world we live in.

Netflix subscribers: 23 million
Cable TV subscribers: 100 million

Who do you think content producers are going to side with (NBC/Comcast type mergers aside) if push comes to shove? It's just a matter of numbers.

Kind of ironic that the relatively recent push to get TV shows out on DVD as quickly as possible, as well as getting all the old shows out, is probably one of the leading causes of the decline in cable TV. This is what really allowed Netflix, especially Netflix Streaming, to take off. How many of you would be subscribing to Netflix Streaming if it were only movies, and not TV shows as well? I doubt I would; and I guarantee you I'd still be subscribing to Cox.

Networks got a huge profit boost when DVD sales started coming in, but in the long run it may end up doing them more harm than good.

If you're not comfortable/willing to install a custom firmware, the Netgear N600 has a meter built in.

"I’ve been on teams that eat together every day, and it’s awesome."
"...but you’ll also see a distressing number of loners eating by themselves..."
" Maybe they’re reading a book or checking their email while they eat so they don’t look sad."
"Maybe they genuinely don’t like people and they’re happy to eat alone. Or maybe they’re just telling you that."

This is something I see a lot in workplaces: Extroverted people just not understanding the mind of introverted people. Honestly I'm surprised a person with experience in the tech field (I assume) is falling into this trap.

Not everyone enjoys being around and talking to other people all day long. Maybe it's because they're shy, maybe it's because they don't like their co-workers, maybe it's because they have some kind of disorder, or maybe it's just their natural personality. I gotta be honest, there's no way I'd last at that place, because if my boss/coworkers were on my case every day to come eat with them, I'd be miserable. It's fine if the group wants to go out/gather once in a while, but not every day. Most days I just want to go have an hour where I can be left to myself and not have to talk to anyone else. Wonder how many otherwise good employees he's run off with this policy?

See what happens.

You're the one that's out of line here. Even if you do know what you're doing in setting this up and getting it to work, you're intruding on IT's job. Would you be OK with it if out of the blue IT decided to setup their own X-Ray machine or MRI? Even if they told you that they "took all the necessary precautions"?

At the base level, this is not about your ability to run a server, competently or otherwise. It's about IT being responsible for the IT infrastructure. They don't know how competent you are, they don't know whether you'll keep it patched or up and running properly, but they know they'll damn sure get the blame if you do not. If you're IT shop is incompetent or inflexible, this is an issue to "send up the chain", but don't expect to be treated with respect if you go rogue.

You know what though? It's time to stop letting user get a free pass with crap like this. They've been told. Don't follow unknown links you get in emails. Don't reply to emails asking for sensitive information. Don't give the dude who cold-called you your password. But they still keep doing this crap.

If someone calls me up out of the blue and wants to know the schedules for building security, and the locations of all the security camera's, and I give it to them, I'm responsible. If someone backs a truck up to the loading dock saying they need to take all the office furniture in for a monthly cleaning and I open the dock door for and help them load it all up, I'm responsible. If someone asks me to provide them with information on all of my businesses customers, and I give it to them, I'm responsible. I'm fired, I'm possibly fined, I maybe even go to jail. Why does it suddenly become an "Oopsie" when there's a computer involved? It's Two thousand and fucking eleven already. These people have been using computers at their job daily for the better part of a decade in most cases by now. They know better, and if they really don't, then they need to hurry up and learn, or face the consequences.

That users are children. They lie, they don't listen, they ignore your advice, they actively look for ways to get around the measures you put in place for their benefit, and at the end of the day, when the users have done something galactically stupid, IT'S ALL YOUR FAULT!

Your users are children. Treat them as such.

Look, we told them we had to program an autonomous artificial intelligence agent to proactively scan cyberspace for hackers looking to bypass the firewall using port cross-scripting. They bought it, don't screw this up for us.

Why do video games have to reach some mythical, arbitrary level of artistic worth? "Hey, that's a great game that's fun to play, but....oh, it's not a 200 year old painting of nude fat women. Sorry, it's worth less now on the Society Scorecard".

Get over it already. So some people think video games aren't art. Hell, so what if 99% of the world feels this way. So fucking what? Dickens wasn't writing to make art, he was writing to entertain and sell a product. Michelangelo created David because someone paid him to do so. In another 100 years people may start really feeling this way about video games....or maybe they won't. In the end, it doesn't make a shit bit of difference. Play video games, enjoy them. Stop worrying what other people think about them.

Far too often, however, the problem comes not in whether you can properly educate your users/punish them for non-compliance, but whether you, as an IT entity, have the power to do so. If you do, awesome, but if you don't have the favor of the high muckity-mucks, phrases like "3 strikes" are going to get you stricken from the payroll records. This is particularly a problem in educational or medical environments, where profs/docs rule the roost, have for years, and aren't particularly interested in you coming in and changing things.

The point being, you sometimes have to pick your battles. A device like this is potentially a good way to avoid a particularly nasty battle, if it allows for increased security without having to constantly berate the people who have the ear of your CEO/Board of Directors/Dean.

Are just plain evil to begin with. Broadcom, Intel, HP, Dell, whomever it comes from, I've yet to encounter one that didn't interfere with the normal function of the computer in some way.

I'm sure all my friends will be happy to know that Mark, Jason, and Princess (or Ace, Dirk, and Agatha, depending on when you were born) enjoy Boulevard Beer. Maybe I'll mix it up and see if Boxy Brown might recommend Mafia Wars or something.

...chime in please. It seems like the solution to this is potentially all user-side, and controllable? Adjust the buffers in your devices if you can, or perhaps find a way to reduce the TCP buffer in your modern operating system?

...speed dial with enough memory to store ten numbers...

Whoa whoa whoa....what now? What's all this fancy schmancy wizardry again? I'm expected to remember some arcane, complicated button combination simply to dial a phone number? It's always the same: you get something working just the way you want it, and some damn hot-shot wiz kid has to come along and make screw it all up.