Posts by randommagic 15 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Oct 2012
Actually they won't be out of that business.
Also Dell has native English speaking tech support. If you buy a Pro Support warranty you will speak to a native English speaker usually from Glasgow if you are in the UK. Dell does still do a very basic warranty for those who are able to take the hardware apart and work out what is wrong with it themselves. As there is no profit in this because the prices are driven so low you get to speak to someone in India. The Enterprise tech support agents are in Ireland and Glasgow and they all speak English. Although Dell is moving into services the company still wants to be an end to end service provider and still makes a small profit on those consumer products.
Trevor makes a lot of sense.
With technology changing so rapidly now the need for customers can change in an instant. You just can't know everything so you have to have specialists in different areas. Most sales people are just sales people but in IT you have to have a technical background as well to sell solutions to customers.
I've seen a lot of negative comments about Dell but I have also seen them about every IT company on the planet on here and while these companies are worth billions most of us on here are not even close to a 6 figure pay.
I've worked in tech and worked in sales selling technical solutions to customers so to see a company moving away from being the bitch of the stock market to trying to create something that is focussed on customers can only be a good thing. Dell is going to make most of its money from Enterprise as well as services and I can't see Michael offloading people who can bring benefit to this part of the business regardless of what rumours are on the internet.
We should all be thankful that big business, the government and lawyers understand very little about how the internet works.
I am all for paying artists for their hard work and skill but paying a music company who screwed same artists over, stealing all their rights and leaving them penniless I definitely won't. If an artist received a reasonable amount of money from the cost of an album then we would all happily pay because we love what they do but the music company gets an excessive cut of that money. The only way real bands make money is through live concerts these days which I will gladly pay to go see but the ticket sellers screw us over making us pay them excessive fees for selling us a bit of paper.
So the bands get screwed, the fans get screwed. Big business makes more money than they deserve and they wonder why piracy is the biggest bandwidth user on the internet. Do companies like Sony really think they can persuade pirates to go legit? Ha!
Seeing a lot of comments about mental illness and Aspergers but its not a mental illness. The stress of not understanding something can cause some problems with depression and such but it isn't a mental illness at all. I can sometimes read emotions on someone's face but most of the time I fail to recognise it. I am seen as being cold because I show almost no emotion ever, mostly because I don't understand what emotions I should be displaying. I know lots of antisocial techs who just haven't learned to be social mainly because they spend all their time online yet they don't have Aspergers at all. They are just lacking in social skills. Yes some with Aspergers have innate abilities to find patterns and problem solving. I can take a problem and break it down into smaller problems solve each of them and put it back together again in the time it takes most people to read the problem which was great when I was a tech. When I became a manager I had no ability to manage anyone. I spent 2 years just trying to figure out all the social skills needed for that position and finding ways to associate what skills I had and to use them in different ways. It took 6 months of me analysing every single little thing I did at work and trying to match them to a competency that my company said I needed to develop before it sunk in that I could transfer the skills to do other things. 3 years on I am a completely different person but it took a lot of frustration and fights with my own manager going through that process but eventually it sinks in. Just because your gifted technically doesn't mean that is all you are. That ability to analyse can also solve business problems improving lots of business process and supply chain issues amongst other things. Understanding it is a skill and it is transferable actually opens up a lot of doors in your life. I no longer work in IT instead I work in a sales job selling storage and networking talking to anyone from IT workers to finance directors and company directors. I never thought I would be able to do that but hard work and determination can work wonders for everyone even those who's brains are superior like ours.
Dunno why your all complaining. Apple was never known for innovation they are known for making things that just work. All the substance is in the design not the innovation. Design something that looks good and people will buy it in droves. They made a nice operating system but its never been known to do lots or have lots of features but its stable and does exactly what they say it does. I think too many people are expecting them to come up with another outstanding product but they won't because they have already made it on the first model. The upside to that was everyone else got the chance to see what something decent should look like and made the effort to improve. If they hadn't we would probably still be using that horrid windows mobile and a stupid stylus.
I think a lot of people are missing the point on this. This isn't about stopping children watching porn its about winning votes in the next election. They have deliberately picked a policy that appeals to the 2.4 children family hoping that enough people will forget the abject misery they have caused. They need those middle class votes and they have done enough surveys to realise that parents worry about their kids and struggle to watch them all the time and this looks like a policy that will win them votes with the middle class. It doesn't matter if you think its wrong and it doesn't matter that it won't work because by the time anyone realises this they will have already been voted back into power.
Anyone that thinks MPs and Prime Ministers do things for the good of the people are naive they do it for the money and the perks. When the perks get removed they pay themselves more to cover the loss using "Independent" advice. If they really cared would we see all these disabled people being treated so badly by ATOS or our soldiers injured in the war losing their homes?
I thought IPMI was a thing of the past but some vendors still use it. Dells cloud systems still use IPMI as they only have a BMC installed on them. On the plus side their BMC can be logged into and they have a nice GUI like a RAC card. I would still rather have the RAC or should I call it iDRAC with a separate NIC port to separate the management from the rest of the network. One cost cutting I would prefer never happened!
I think Eadon has failed to consider how much profit Dell makes in a year. Paying that loan off will be relatively simple for a company that is spending billions buying up companies every year.
He has stood up to the investors and decided to go his own way with the company I doubt he will suddenly bow down to Microsoft. That would be just silly and a waste of his time changing one devil for another. It looks like he wants to move the company without having to answer to anyone and that can only be a good thing. I fully expect him to keep going with the move into solutions provider as there is a lot more profit involved and the market is massive and worth hundreds of billions to any company who can carve themselves a slice of the pie.
As an FYI Michael Dell wants to sell more systems with Linux not less.
I was in the same position 6 years ago. I had to take early retirement at 35 and wanted to start in IT. I got a first line support job with a major computer manufacturer doing hardware support with just the A+ cert.
From there I moved up the company and added more certs along the way.
The starting positions are desktop support - Get the Microsoft Windows 7 or 8 exams. If you want to go further start on the server certs. Once you have done 3 of 4 Microsoft exams you will be bored to tears with them but you should be in a better position to make a decision on where you want to go. If you choose to go with the Linux route then most of what you learn will be self taught but Cloud and Virtualisation jobs seem to be showing up a lot in job searches. I am VCP - Vmware Certified which my company paid for and if you can find a company that is willing to invest in you the sky's the limit. When negotiating for a wage always take slightly under what they offer if they are willing to pay for some training that way you help build more marketable skills. There are a LOT of specialisations out there but really you would need at least 12 months doing the basics before you decide what you want to go after next. If you decide on cloud technologies you will need SAN technology experience and will need to go after some Linux skils rather than Windows.
To make yourself the most marketable in the 12-18 month of your career a couple of Server 2008/2012 with exchange and SQL of some sort will help you apply for an Administrator role but you would need to be pretty dedicated to learn all that on your own with lots of matchsticks and coffee to keep you awake.
Definitely do ITIL foundations 2011 is the new version its boring but a dawdle to pass.
Do a networking cert CCNA does seem to be the most popular but there are other Networking courses out there that certification pays better. The Network + exam from Comptia is pretty easy and will give you a grounding in the basics.
There is no quick solution in your first couple of years but good luck.
Every country needs a steady stream of electricity. More in the winter or when Coronation Street has an advert and all the kettles go on. Power stations are the only method for providing this. Unless someone suddenly invents a super battery that can store huge amounts of energy created over the short time that tidal or wind power creates they are never ever going to be viable alternatives handling more than 5% of the any countries demand. As demand grows they become even less of a viability. As Oil has a limited lifespan we are left with coal or Nuclear. We could dig up the coal ( the UK has a LOT of this but again its finite) and cause the atmosphere more damage or we can do the right thing and build some Nuclear plants. No matter how green you are or how much you think its the right thing to do it just isn't viable and we could never build enough wind farms or wave machines to keep up with the huge demand that is increasing all of the time. Until we can invent cheap unlimited energy we should ensure that we can provide for the next 20 years or the cost we are paying will just keep climbing as resources fall.
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