Yet another collection of random links and rantings of a greying unix geek with a photography bent. Pass the Guinness and Grecian Formula.
The actual NYT article is here.
Of course it also goes well with this other video that was making the rounds earlier…. (description os vista’s features while OS X displays exactly those features it has had for years)
Or this one
I really cringe when people say they are a computer engineer or a systems engineer (the latter being my official title at the moment, said title being against my wishes).
An Engineer to me is someone who has an Engineering Degree and might actually know their ass from their elbow. Not to say that there aren’t plenty of degree holding halfwits out there, some engineers too, but for the most part they wouldn’t perpetrate the stupidity that I saw the results of this past weekend.
A real engineer would not be working as a Shaw cable modem installer and doing daft things to the in-law’s system such as disabling the xp software firewall, bypassing the hardware firewall, deleting existing email accounts (and losing the email for the in-law’s).
Yes, I R Computer Engineer did that to Lori’s parents.
Would it really have been that hard to leave the xp software firewall alone. To move the internet cable from the hardware router/firewall from the adsl to the cable modem. To add new email accounts and leave the old ones in place. Really simple stuff here.
The router is set up for dhcp, and is masquerading it’s external wan mac address to be the same as the pc’s mac address. So any funky lock-down-to-the-mac (ala telus) would have just-worked. If shaw even does that, which I doubt.
Apparently even trying to move the cable and see if it worked before leaving it flapping in the wind was too much for the installer. Mr I R Engineer.
To top it off, while we were down there this last weekend for an early christmas, the cable modem stopped working. While I was in the middle of hooking them up to their imap accounts on cyberdex.
(I set their email up to filter thru Cyberdex when they were originally on Telus. This was to get an extra layer of spam filtering plus actual backups of one of the most important data stores for them, their email. Never leave email backups to the isp, they don’t care what happens to your mail one iota)
A call or two into SHAW support confirms that nothing is wrong at all… other than signal strength to the modem. The moron didn’t meter it correctly when he was testing/setting things up.
I guess I should be glad that the actual cable tv was working, as was the shaw phone that I was calling, er, shaw on. Maybe I R Computer Engineer should stick to doing those bits and leave the internet setups to someone with more than two brain cells to rub together.
I really truely doubt he was as he claimed, a computer engineer. More like he put a pc together from parts one time, or installed windows on a system once. Certainly didn’t know his ass from his elbow when it came to network, email, and firewall basics.
I didn’t know Dilbert watched Battlestar Galactica 
snort! coffee > nose. Yes, I loooove the fun they poke at the form-over-function guy on the left but do the producers of these videos also realize that their guy, on the right, is being a bit snooty? OK as a parody of the mac/pc commercials they have really nailed it as the mac guy did seem to be a bit uppity.
I’m sure someone’s going to be highly offended by these.
WTF is Sony doing? Saying their windoze vaio pc’s are meant to be used by street hookers?