I moved from England to Hong Kong with just a suitcase. I put all my possessions into storage for 3 years, at huge expense. When I moved back to England I had a massive crate of new stuff shipped back with me to add to all the crap I had in storage.
I have at least managed to go minimalist at work where I don't have a wife and kids to worry about. I have a paperless office. It's tough trying to persuade the rest of my organisation that a paperless office is actually possible.
@thanksajdotcom said:
I'd bet you were more concerned that they appreciated your skills and dedication than the money itself.
If my boss called me in to his office said "I can give you a raise or I can give you some appreciation, which would you prefer?", I'm pretty sure what my answer would be.
The boss's stuff is always less reliable than general users. It's like an IT law.
@scottalanmiller said:
It's not like raising it to 200 and saying "Okay, yes, there are a handful of cars on the market that under ideal conditions might actually go over 200, we understand that it is theoretically possible to break the limit if you put in some real effort and try really hard to do so."
Erm, I suspect it probably is like that. I don't have any data to back me up (but then again, I'm pretty confident you don't either), but I reckon 99% of people have less than 20k files they want to store online.
I don't think semi-serious music collectors or semi-serious photographers would look at OneDrive anyway. It's for file general storage. For serious music collectors I would use Amazon Cloud and for serious photographers I would use Flickr or any of the other, well known, specialist photography sites.
I agree that the term "unlimited" is often abused though. I don't know if it's the same in the US, but we had a big problem over here with ISPs offering "unlimited" internet usage that was actually capped. I think the term was "Unlimited - subject to fair usage policy" where fair usage was an arbitrary figure set by the ISP.
Interesting post. I'm looking at it from a different perspective in that I'm internal IT. I receive a fixed salary regardless of how much work I accomplish or how many hours I work. Whereas you are paid by a client.
Generally speaking, I don't automate enough. If there is a task that I perform annually and takes me an hour to complete manually, and I spend 2 hours on automating it to reduce the time complete to 15 minutes then the ROI is a couple of years. But I'm always under time pressure, so I carry on doing it manually. I prioritize the short-term over the long-term efficiency, which is often wrong. But gradually I've automated many of my tasks and after 12 years (12 years!) of working here, I'm now really benefiting from the long hours I put in working on automation in my early years.
My biggest issue is with automating other people's tasks. It's an issue because this is my primary job - making the whole company more efficient. The problem is, let's say Sue in accounts performs task A and task A currently takes her 4 hours per week. If I spend 12 hours on scripting I could get that task down to 2 hours. That's a saving of 100 hours per year. It appears a no-brainer to automate.
However, the issue is although Sue and I are both contracted to work 40 hours per work, I'm currently working 50 hours per week and Sue is only working 30 hours per week. So I end up working late, and Sue ends up browsing Facebook and chatting with colleagues for 10 hours a week and leaving bang on 5 o'clock. So unless the company deals with Sue's underemployment (for example, by redeploying her to other activities, or making her redundant), there is no real saving to the company. All it means is I end up working even more unpaid overtime than I currently do.
Even if Sue is more conscientious, and doesn't slack off at work, if I automate her task, she may just find new work to fill her 40 hours. There is no guarantee that the new work she finds is productive and benefiting the company. Many people are just busy for busy's sake.
So I often ignore Sue's request to automate. Which is frustrating for me and for her. But it's equally frustrating working my ass off to help a user whilst the user is messing around on Facebook all day long.
Not sure if that is relevant to your post at all but I felt like a rant! Sorry!
It's not unusual. For tasks that your brain is familiar with it can use it's sub-concious part and still use the concious part for other things. Like having the ability to drive a car, listen to the radio, and talk at the same time - everyone can do that. You just turn on your brain's autopilot to drive the car. When you've written as many forum posts as Scott, then your brain is bound to use it's sub-concious part to do it. But there's probably only a handful of people in the world that have written that many posts.
I can type and talk at the same time, which occasionally dazzles my colleagues. But I've been typing for over 30 years now. Some of the mutlitasking that my 9 year old can do whilst playing Minecraft dazzles me. I guess that his brain is getting programmed differently to how mine was at his age, which may or may not turn out to be a good thing.
I get really annoyed when I'm reading a book and my mind starts thinking about something else. I carry on reading then at the end of the chapter I realise that even though I've read every word, I have no idea what I've just read and have to start again.
I just googled "spoint". That was a mistake at work.
I've never understood the need for different versions of the desktop OS (Home, Pro & Enterprise). Why not have one version and then charge for the extra features, or put up the prices of Windows Server CALs?
Erm, so what are risks? I'm a complete novice when it comes to wifi (as you can probably tell).
Websites that transfer sensitive data always use HTTPS. Does that protect you?
E-mail uses SSL. Does that protect you?
And when you connect to a new wifi network, Windows will ask you if it is a public connection and will lock down certain things. Does that protect you?
What are the risks exactly? What does a VPN bring to the table that the above doesn't?
@scottalanmiller said:
I know that there are some security specialty shops out there (I've been asked to lead teams for one of them.) But even big ones that I have worked with just use skilled "normal" IT people, not "security" specialists.
I would have thought that a good security guy is a good generalist as you need to have a good understanding of all applications in order to gain a good understanding of where those application vulnerabilities lie. For example, you need a modest understanding of SQL in order to understand SQL vulnerabilities like SQL injection. So if I was forming a crack team of security experts I'd want a SQL guy, a web guy, a Windows guy etc etc. A bit like the A-team, with BA Baracus as my Windows guy.
@scottalanmiller said:
They never were popular with serious photographers because they destroy the originals so quickly.
Define serious photographer.
I thought they were the same. Windows 7 Ultimate definitely includes Direct Access support as I've used it.
Interesting read. I suspect a member of family has Aspergers, but they haven't been diagnosed. It's interesting to read people's experiences.
@coliver said:
The person doing the hiring mentions it to someone they are acquainted with who knows someone who is "good with computers".
I've had a bit of that but it is normally a waste of time. I have to explain to my acquaintance that just because their son lays cable for the phone company it doesn't mean they'd be a good fit for managing Microsoft servers. "Good with computers" is a very big field.
Yeah, I read that, but it doesn't help. I think it's a problem with AD rather than anything that Veeam is doing wrong.
@mlnews said:
This highlights not only the lack of security in PDF documents but moreoverly shows us that when you have physical access to a file, cracking the password is likely trivially easy.
Does it? Or just it just show that the encryption PDFs use is crap? How easy is it to crack a password protected Office document, for example? It used to be trivial, but I thought it was pretty tight these days? Certainly, when I needed to crack one recently I couldn't find out how to do it.
How easy is it to crack an AES encrypted 7Zip file?
I started because I was inspired by what a blogger called Justin Paul wrote about why he blogs. He nails it for me:
http://www.jpaul.me/2010/11/why-do-i-blog/
But I lack the dedication to persevere with it. Also, I think to be a successful and committed blogger you have to a reasonably sized ego, which I don't have.
I quit without having another job to go to when I decided to move from England to Hong Kong. I told the bank I needed a loan to buy a car and then used that to buy plane tickets and live on for a few months until I eventually found a job. It was pretty scary.
I've dreamt about having enough wealth to be able to just quit my job whenever the mood takes me. Unfortunately, I'm mortgaged to the hilt so have to suck up to my bosses all the time 
It's still under Screen Saver settings. Windows key and "Screen Saver", then select "turn screen saver on or off". It looks the same as XP from what I recall with the "On resume, display logon screen" check box.
Tell me the contents of secretdoc.txt