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I'm half curious to know how Comcast manages their accounts, the system has to be unbelievably massive and burdened by decades of hacks trying to integrate regions and acquisitions. Supporting that must be one stressful loving job.
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Dec 28, 2016 17:26
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stevewm posted:We use Vivotek IP cameras and utilize their excellent (well it used to be anyways) included DVR software. We have been having a issue where the Playback fails to work on some cameras randomly. Vivotek gave me a patch to fix the issue, and initially it seemed to work. Milestone
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Dec 28, 2016 17:36
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If it's anything like Verizon, it's a hilarious nightmare. Vz has tried to tie it all together over and over, each time adding another layer that interacts with the last few that were written, creating a pyramid of failure.
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Dec 28, 2016 17:37
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Yeah most of the larger companies like that are a disaster because they've merged/bought out other companies and rather than properly import data into their own system, they have attempted to integrate multiple systems which has caused a giant mess.
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Dec 28, 2016 18:27
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Radium started working for Comcast?
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Dec 28, 2016 18:43
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The Romanian call relay bandits strike again. loving Romania.  After our first foray into our SBC being publicly available on the internet I turned on account security and required registrations, everything looked ok. Turns out it's really easy to exploit that so by 2pm a different SIP relay hacker had access (also from romania). I had to put the SBC behind a firewall and restrict access to and from our provider only. Not a big deal, just wasted hours and multiple calls in the middle of the night.
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Dec 28, 2016 18:55
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skooma512 posted:People think you'll somehow do your fix at ludicrous speed if they whine to a manager. As if we are purposefully sandbagging everyone and only they can unlock the hacker movie speed. It's not like jobs take a certain amount of time. At $AWFUL_JOB the owner hired a friend to be the techs manager. The guy wasn't technical at all, but years earlier (like 95) he worked nights managing a database server, so he assumed he know computers. His management style was basically to argue with me whenever I told him how long something would take. Like if he didn't argue, he wasn't Managing. My favorite was that he wanted me to drive to Secaucus NJ (we are in Midtown NYC) pick up a rack from a vendor and then be back by noon to drop if off in the office. It's about 10am, and I just got to the office. I explain to him it'll take me a half hour to get to our van and get it out of the garage, then easily an hour to to drive across town to the tunnel and then to Secaucus, and another hour to drive back, and then I have to drop off the rack at the office and drive the van back to the garage and walk back to the office. The round trip, not including actually getting the rack, which won't be ready, and I'll have to deal with the hardware vendor because I'm sure the order is wrong, or it's not ready or something. He proceeds to yell at me about how he's lived in NJ his entire life and he knows it's only five miles to Secaucus and I just want to waste time. I explain to him how exactly I'll be screwing around wasting time sitting in traffic for two hours and he gets super pissed. It ended up taking me all day at the warehouse because of course the rack wasn't right, we hadn't paid or something, so I ended up sitting there at the warehouse while everyone argues about the hardware. Turns out they never actually ordered a rack. The guy was selling used hardware from the back of a warehouse, and the boss heard about it and just sent me. It was like a "the good coats are in the back situation". I didn't get back to the office with the (wrong) rack until around 8pm. Every single thing I did was like that.
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Dec 28, 2016 19:01
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DigitalMocking posted:The Romanian call relay bandits strike again. loving Romania. If it works for the sort of setup you have, it's always nice to have SIP stuff on a private VLAN provided by your ISP, firewalled off to your voice provider and with QoS applied.
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Dec 28, 2016 19:09
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anthonypants posted:Neither of those things seem too bad or difficult in PowerShell But what then if both objects have Name attributes. How do you distinguish $_.Name from $_.$_.Name obviously not valid Powershell  code:It turns into a nightmare, but this is probably a tangent better suited for the PowerShell Megathread
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Dec 28, 2016 19:17
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Thanks Ants posted:If it works for the sort of setup you have, it's always nice to have SIP stuff on a private VLAN provided by your ISP, firewalled off to your voice provider and with QoS applied. Our SIP links were supposed to be part of a private MPLS network, suddenly 2 days ago one of the nodes was no longer private, but routed to the general internet. I'm just taking precautions and changing all of our SIP endpoints to secure them.
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Dec 28, 2016 19:26
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SeaborneClink posted:But what then if both objects have Name attributes. How do you distinguish $_.Name from $_.$_.Name obviously not valid Powershell Not everything has to be a one-liner and obviously at that point you'd start using actual variable names?
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Dec 28, 2016 19:46
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Jeoh posted:Not everything has to be a one-liner and obviously at that point you'd start using actual variable names?
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Dec 28, 2016 19:49
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Just merely pointing out that "passing objects in pipelines" isn't nearly as simple as you make it out to be. 
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Dec 28, 2016 20:47
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SeaborneClink posted:Just merely pointing out that "passing objects in pipelines" isn't nearly as simple as you make it out to be. It is, though, unless you add criteria like "No variables and you have to pull info from different stages of the pipeline" to it.
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Dec 28, 2016 21:42
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SeaborneClink posted:Just merely pointing out that "passing objects in pipelines" isn't nearly as simple as you make it out to be.
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Dec 28, 2016 22:27
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Pissing me off: we have two Dell UPS in our server racks. Our offsite IT (who manages out network) tells us that they can't reach one of them on the network and we need to check it. I defer to our two junior guys because it's not my job and it's a simple problem. They take weeks of talking to Dell, who told us we need to power down our UPS and reboot them. The exact words were "drain the power from the UPS" which our guys took to mean unplug from power and let the batteries drain out. Strike One Then after I get them to finally just call Dell and ask what they mean, Dell sends a guy out to replace what they think is a defective nic. He comes onsite, and even though Dell specifically told us to power down the UPS before switching out cards, but of course the don't and just hot swap them. Strike Two. So I come back from lunch and they are in the close with the Dell tech, who has no idea what he's doing, and they tell me it doesn't work. I ask him if the new NIC pulls an IP or it has a default IP address. The card they show me says "DHCP Enabled, default IP 192.168.0.100". He tells me he can't ping the 192.168.0.100 IP address. I about flip out, this guy is a senior experienced RHEL guy and he can't even understand why that doesn't work from his laptop on our WiFi. I try to explain to him that's pulling an IP address and we need the MAC address so I can look on our DHCP server and find the IP it pulled down and he doesn't understand what that means. Strike Three But even more than that, somehow they've broken our actually working UPS. I ask them to clarify. They say the following nonsense word salad: When we unplug and replace the NIC from UPS2 with the new one, UPS1 goes offline. When we reconnect the old NIC back to UPS2, UPS1 comes back online. I ask what are they doing to UPS1, and they tell me they are doing nothing. I ask them to show me exactly what they are doing. Then I say, how is it possible that when you mess with UPS2, it makes UPS1 someone go offline? He says they must be in some kind of redundant mode. I tell him that makes no sense, and it's pretty clear that they are just working on the wrong UPS. The guy 100% can't follow. I tell him to get his laptop and run a ping to the UPS that works and I unplug the cable to show him how the ping stops. It's obvious he's working on the wrong UPS, but he's got an email from someone saying it's the one on the right, so he can't get past that. I'm about ready to jump out a window. Then I say "wait, you've spent all this time on the wrong UPS, have you looked at the other one?" I kneel down, and notice the ethernet is connect to the "CONSOLE" port on it, and move it to the right port, and suddenly UPS2 comes online. Weeks of fighting with Dell, coming in early for them to reboot our UPS and take our entire network down, and it was just a freaking cable in the wrong place. I'm livid, these guys should know better. Super-NintendoUser fucked around with this message at 22:32 on Dec 28, 2016 |
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Dec 28, 2016 22:29
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On the plus side though, if you'd connected the wrong cable into the console port on an APC unit you'd have shut down your environment and blown the card up.
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Dec 28, 2016 23:03
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pixaal posted:Finance person is having problems printing checks because they have no idea what the settings do to do their job. I tell them to give me 20 minutes I need to turn the old server on and rename the titles. Yeah I mean waiting for loading bars etc is boring and I'm no fan of them either, but if you walk off to god-knows-where and I'm sat waiting for input/knowledge from you, I'm not going to waste more than 5 five minutes before leaving.
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Dec 28, 2016 23:07
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stevewm posted:Comcast fucks up yet again. Comcast is the worst. I loving hate their god drat phone tree, half the time I end up saying I want to add new business service, then make the person I get on the phone transfer me to the right department, that's if it hasn't just hung up on me for no reason. And gently caress you if you need tech support and there is an outage anywhere near you, because even if that's not your issue the phone tree will just tell you there is an outage and they can call you when its resolved and then it hangs up on you. The account number change is a god drat nightmare if you have lots of cable boxes, which I do since I support TV for all the people in our building who have a "business need" for it. Under the old system I had one account number with all my boxes (50ish), now they changed it so each account number can only have 25 things one it, but each cable box counts as two things so I now have 5 different account numbers, but because their system is poo poo no one there can tell me which box goes to which account number or which # has open space on it for me to add new boxes. All the techs I've dealt with obliquely imply that their systems aren't really designed for locations to have more than a few boxes and it shows. Replacing defective/obsolete boxes and activating new ones is a god drat nightmare guessing game, and half the time requires multiple calls since the techs always gently caress up the remote activation procedure. xzzy posted:I'm half curious to know how Comcast manages their accounts, the system has to be unbelievably massive and burdened by decades of hacks trying to integrate regions and acquisitions. Supporting that must be one stressful loving job. From what I was told by the techs the new lovely account system is because they completely overhauled the back end to a unified, yet still very lovely, system.
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Dec 28, 2016 23:07
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Jerk McJerkface posted:Pissing me off: we have two Dell UPS in our server racks. Our offsite IT (who manages out network) tells us that they can't reach one of them on the network and we need to check it. I defer to our two junior guys because it's not my job and it's a simple problem. They take weeks of talking to Dell, who told us we need to power down our UPS and reboot them. The exact words were "drain the power from the UPS" which our guys took to mean unplug from power and let the batteries drain out. I spent a week with Dell troubleshooting a VRTX CMC failover issue. There was an unrelated hard drive failure, but the main thing is the cmc would come up for about 10 minutes after reseating it or swapping it and it sounded like the main board was bad. Got a replacement cmc because why not and after updating the firmware it would still show as redundant for a few minutes before losing redundancy. It turns out the second cmc was not plugged into the onboard ethernet switch. I don't understand why the cmc would come up at all if the ethernet wasn't plugged in. Or how it came unplugged in the first place as it was working fine for months. Or why there is an ethernet port on the CMC at all and it doesn't just use the backplane to communicate.
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Dec 28, 2016 23:11
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Speaking of cable TV, what *is* a good way to get every channel to lots of different TVs in one building? When our cable company switched to all digital the schools got a nice surprise. Every TV in the gym at the rec center on an ad for digital cable and the company not willing to bend on the per box fee.
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Dec 28, 2016 23:26
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thebigcow posted:Speaking of cable TV, what *is* a good way to get every channel to lots of different TVs in one building? When our cable company switched to all digital the schools got a nice surprise. Every TV in the gym at the rec center on an ad for digital cable and the company not willing to bend on the per box fee.
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Dec 28, 2016 23:27
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Don't distribute every channel because there might only be a handful that you actually give a poo poo about, convert to an IP stream at a headend, use small media players at each TV that can hop between streams. You're looking for something similar to http://www.exterity.com/products/avediastream/tvgateways
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Dec 28, 2016 23:52
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We had a small snack table in the IT office. Muddy buddies, some pecan turtles, some other stuff. Owner came down and was looking around then started on with "WHAT IS THIS BULLSHIT!?" and made us throw it all away. I kept the pecan turtles in my desk out of view.
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Dec 29, 2016 00:24
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Content human beings? In MY OFFICE? That ends right now! 
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Dec 29, 2016 00:26
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Bob Morales posted:We had a small snack table in the IT office. Muddy buddies, some pecan turtles, some other stuff. Owner came down and was looking around then started on with "WHAT IS THIS BULLSHIT!?" and made us throw it all away. I kept the pecan turtles in my desk out of view. I worked at a small FSBO, like a gas station for airplanes on a small regional airport. From time to time a local celebrity or politician would arrive at the airport and they'd put out food and have a lunch for them. One time they had several feet of sandwiches left over untouched, and the owner asked me to pack it all up and take it to his office. I figured maybe he'd let the staff eat it, since there was like five or six of us working and there was enough food for fifty people left. But nope, a half hour later he calls me to his office to throw out all these garbage bags full of food, like five big black construction bags of all the food he had be bring to his office. The guy was a jerk.
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Dec 29, 2016 02:13
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Jerk McJerkface posted:I worked at a small FSBO, like a gas station for airplanes on a small regional airport. From time to time a local celebrity or politician would arrive at the airport and they'd put out food and have a lunch for them. One time they had several feet of sandwiches left over untouched, and the owner asked me to pack it all up and take it to his office. I figured maybe he'd let the staff eat it, since there was like five or six of us working and there was enough food for fifty people left. There are actually health concerns with letting an employee eat something that wasn't eaten by a celebrity
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Dec 29, 2016 02:30
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The worst is when catering brings salad fixings. It ends up in the break room and by 5pm the place smells like a garbage dump because instead of putting it in the fridge, it got dumped on a table and left.
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Dec 29, 2016 03:01
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If we have catered lunches he bags it up and takes it home to eat for the next week
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Dec 29, 2016 04:28
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stevewm posted:Any recommendations on IP camera software? Each of our branches has on average 18x 1 Megapixel+ mpeg4/h264 IP cameras. All Vivotek branded. Most of them are also ONVIF compatible. I've read good things about Zoneminder. No personal experience, but I have been thinking of running a project migrating my home security cameras to it. Also ONVIF compatible from memory.
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Dec 29, 2016 12:03
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poo poo that is pissing me off: my boss is back in the office after a week off, and he has the making GBS threads flu. No amount of me telling him to get the gently caress out of the office seems to be getting through to him. "Well I have all these meetings later today!" Dude, you tell the people you are meeting with what you've got, they will be more than willing to cancel/reschedule. Tomorrow is my first day of vacation in months after just having to work 28 days straight, if I catch the making GBS threads flu I am going to murder him.
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Dec 29, 2016 15:06
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making GBS threads flu sounds apocalyptic
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Dec 29, 2016 15:14
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mewse posted:There are actually health concerns with letting an employee eat something that wasn't eaten by a celebrity I don't get this but our "boss" for night shift is just a glorified babysitter who knows how the old database and discontinued services work. We, as a team, have brought in food for everyone several times in the past year. I paid 200 bucks to take our team of 6 out to a nice dinner on a slow night last week just so people could feel less lovely about our situation. The most our "boss" does is sit up from his desk like a gopher looking around any time he smells or hears what sounds like someone bringing in food. Bob Morales posted:If we have catered lunches he bags it up and takes it home to eat for the next week He stops just shy of doing this, basically. Though there isn't likely to be leftovers after he gets done with his fifth helping.
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Dec 29, 2016 15:16
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Thanks Ants posted:Milestone Second. I haven't had to mess with it, which is a really good thing. Just make sure to buy a dedicated storage device because the archive retention policy is 'use all space on the drive first, then overwrite the old stuff'. Doesn't play nice with a SAN (which is an idiotic choice for a write-intensive application anyway).
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Dec 29, 2016 15:25
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Yay, he came to his senses and left!! Maybe I'm spared now...
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Dec 29, 2016 15:39
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At what point do things fall out of IT's control? We're implementing new ERP software. Across 5 companies that are all under the same roof. Some people are involved with more than one and some are only involved in a single company. So questions come with one company. How do we do this, how do we do this. They've been trained by the outside consultants we are working with. Lots of time and money in hours of training. Applying payments, charging credit cards, invoicing customers. All basic poo poo they did before in the previous software. One problem is they don't understand what they are doing, they just memorized the old interface. Hit 5, then 7, then 3, then enter the customer number and payment. They don't understand you pull up the customer record, go to financial, them go into accept payment... bunch of button pushers. A big part of this we have C and D-level employees here. Can't fire the, because they are nice people! So and so has been with us for years we can't replace her! The other problem is the companies fight with each other and refuse to help each other. Again, managements problem. Accounting department does all the companies but for some companies there are a couple people who do things like collect payments. And guess what, the process is different for billing in all of the companies. So they come to IT looking for solutions, when the solution is why does one person take the credit card payment, then another person applies the payment to the account. And then someone else takes the checks from the mail and enters those. Stupid. Management thinks that IT should know how to do "everyone's jobs" because it's on the computer and in the YOTL 2016 only computer nerds know how to use fancy future machines. Guess what, that's not going to happen. Remember one of the reasons we wanted a new system was that AS/400 guy was the only one who knew anything about the old system? We wanted each department to have some ownership?
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Dec 29, 2016 20:08
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Bob Morales posted:At what point do things fall out of IT's control? Do you work for my company? When we get checques mailed to our UK payment address they're forwarded to the US to be applied to the proper UK account.
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Dec 29, 2016 20:39
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I used to work at dining halls in college, and every night we'd throw away hundreds of pounds of perfectly edible food instead of letting the employees have it or donating to a shelter or something. So wasteful.
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Dec 29, 2016 21:07
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Bigass Moth posted:I used to work at dining halls in college, and every night we'd throw away hundreds of pounds of perfectly edible food instead of letting the employees have it or donating to a shelter or something. So wasteful. It's a liability thing, from what I've been told by food service managers in the past. On the off chance something goes bad in transit or HAS gone bad (see: 5-lb meat chubs that are so old the packaging is puffy and green) and gets somebody sick, the store could theoretically be liable. At least that's my understanding. It routinely bothered me pitching 40-50 pounds of hot bar food every night and 40-50 pounds of salads every 3 nights, and a shopping cart full of bad chubs every 5 nights.
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Dec 29, 2016 21:39
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I work in the county-run government tv station. It's a semi laid back job compared to being at one of the commercial stations I've worked at in the past. But sometimes it is a bit too laid back. We started streaming our various meetings on YouTube last year. Everyone is happy, the video looks great compared to our other streaming service which is a heaping pile of crap that only runs in IE. But I start seeing that YouTube is flagging most of our meetings as having copyrighted content. I do some digging and it is the end music we use for the end of meeting credits. Still not sure why we need almost two minutes to run credits after every meeting, but I really don't care. I ask my coworkers about the music and they say we have a license for it. At the time I was satisfied and didn't think about it for a couple months. Back in August I start to get worried about it again. I ask them where the license paperwork is for that track. Turns out we don't have a license, the guy who set the station up in the first place just grabbed whatever music he felt like and used it with no regard to licenses or rights. So now I'm very worried about this because pissing off music license holders is a very bad thing. I find out who owns the license and give them a call to see about getting legal. They quote me a price for using the track in a internet stream of $150 per show which is the discounted rate for non-profits and government agencies. For the airing of the show on our station it is $400 per show per airing. So just one days worth of shows is going to cost the county $1100 bucks and about $5-6k each week. ] I tell them thanks for the info and go tell my coworkers that we need to stop using that music right now. The response is "well how are they gonna know, "we like the music as is," and "we don't have the time to find new music." We already pay a blanket license fee for two other libraries that is renewed on a yearly basis, but they can't take a half hour to find something that we are license for so that a major poo poo storm doesn't come down on us. How big a storm, they have been using this music for at least ten years if not 15 or more with no license. The cost per year is around $400k just to use that one track times 10 year plus possible punative costs for doing this.... It's not good and the county lawyers would have a heart attack if they knew this was going on. But no one seems to care other than me. I've told my direct boss about this and my department head and I got no response other than "that isn't good." I've brought it up during staff meetings and not a dam thing has been done. I'm half tempted to delete the sound file from the server and force the hand of everyone but I'm going to give them one more chance next week to pull their heads out of their asses before I do it. Sorry just had to vent about this bullshit.
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Dec 29, 2016 21:45
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