When I was 16, my parents went on holiday and left me at home alone for a few days. We lived in a detached house next door to a pub. It was a hot summer, so I left all the windows in the house open, and played music at full volume, as I partied with a few friends. We even moved the speakers into the garden at one point, to soundtrack our game of football. It was all very irresponsible, as teenagers left alone for the first time often are.

My parents came back, and a few weeks later they told me that several neighbours in the street had been bothered by loud music that they assumed was coming from the pub. Complaints were made against the pub, the council got involved, and the pub's licence was at stake. The pub apologised and promised to turn its music down in future. I knew nothing about this. I just said "that's interesting" and kept my head down. I never told them it was actually my fault.

I still feel a bit guilty about it.

In England, if you phoned the police to complain about your neighbour's music they'd tell you to stop wasting their time. They're unlikely to find time to visit even if you get your house burgled, never mind a mild neighbourly spat. I'm guessing you live in a very low crime neighbourhood, where the police have plenty of time on their hands?

Anyway, have you considered headphones?

Do you not get on with your neighbors? I'm just wondering why they called the police instead of asking you to turn it down directly.

Whilst the infographic is designed as a joke, it is bogus. You're not doing all those 13 jobs concurrently. So the correct calculation is to take an average. $843k divided by 13 is $64k. So that's what a System Admin is actually worth.

My old boss argued that one of my colleagues was underpaid for some of the work he did, but overpaid for other work he did, which went down like a lead balloon.

So his argument would be "when you're cleaning we're paying you $62k to do a $48k job. You're overpaid!"

You can already stream from Chrome can't you? What's the difference?

I'm not too fussed about hiding my identity because I don't believe I ever write anything that is mean or that I wouldn't want my employer (or prospective employer) to know. I don't get involved in forum spats or name calling or anything. What have you got to hide @PSX_Defector?

When I lived in Hong Kong it was standard that you didn't get any holiday entitlement in your first year. In your second year you'd get a week, and after that two weeks. Crazy.

As far as I'm concerned, my staff can ask for holiday whenever they want if that's what it says in their contract. Feeling obliged to wait 3 months before asking is ridiculous.

Competitive posting is completely new to me.

Why do you do it?

@ajstringham said:

They'll never see it but yeah, true.

You sure? ML is indexed by search engines. Someone Googling "A J Stringham McAfee" may well end up here and that could be bad news for you.

Anyway, congrats on your new job.

@garak0410 said:

OWA experience has "sucked' said the users forced to use it...sigh...

I'd be interested to know what they think sucks about it given that it is almost identical to Outlook. The only thing I can think of is the lack of new e-mail notifications (not that this is a feature of Outlook that I value).

@scottalanmiller said:

Very, VERY few. Because open licensing just creates more cost, I know of literally zero SMBs using it.

That was definitely the case in the past, as new Windows OS's needed new more powerful PCs to run efficiently (case in point, my wife worked for the government and two years ago they rolled out Vista to ten year old PCs - after the rollout it took her 20 minutes just to boot up in the morning!).

However, I now have a few old 64-bit XP and Vista PCs that actually run Windows 8.1 very well. So suddenly there is a case for keeping the hardware and just upgrading the OS.

On the surface, replacing PCs still looks cost effective, but you have to taken into account hidden costs like handling the boxes by your goods-in staff, wiping the old hard drives, and paying someone to dispose of the old PCs.

Most of our Windows 7 PCs are 4 years old now, but are still going strong. Certainly, if Windows 9 is a significant improvement on 8.1, I'd be tempted to upgrade just the OS on all my Windows 7 PCs via open licence rather than buying a whole load of new PCs.

@Dashrender said:

files that get abandoned and never cleaned up.

You think Sharepoint will fix that?

The boss's stuff is always less reliable than general users. It's like an IT law.

Fair enough. In my head, your 7Ps is spoken by Pippi from the film Mr Popper's Penguins.

Just playing devil's advocate here and criticizing the article, but isn't it a bit obvious? Does anyone not know that good project planning and lots of testing is a good thing?

This was my first laptop (well, portable PC)

Cost about $5k and had 640k RAM.

I'm *sooooo *old.

Danger Mouse FTW

Anyone use it? Experience of it? Implemented it?

@ajstringham said:

How can you NOT LIKE SPONGEBOB?!

He's not 8?

My kids love it.