Similarly, on Windows there is NetDrive and Mac OS X supports mounting WebDAV shares in the Finder. NetDrive in particular seems much better than the built-in Windows Web Folders support, although it still isn't superb. NetDrive 4.1 build 873 is the newest that I've been able to find; it seems to be an earlier version of what is now WebDrive, which isn't free.
The best thing I have found that exists in a ready-to-be-used state (as opposed to the countless hordes of maybe-someday projects) is vtfileman. Its available at http://vtfileman.sf.net/ and there are at least two instances of it running at universities (http://filebox.vt.edu/ is the original and http://filer.case.edu/ is the one that I run). I have some implementation notes on installing Filer at http://filer.case.edu/wiki/filer/notes
It does have a lot of other requirements though, such as an LDAP server for accounts, Apache to serve the HTTP and WebDAV pages, Apache Tomcat for the JSP interface and proftpd if you want FTP access. However, it is pretty sweet once its running.
If thats too complicated, you may be better off just making WebDAV shares individually for different groups. Personally I like that with vtfileman, people can set up their own accounts with little to know interaction with the system administrator.
The LW 16/600 is a decent printer, but I think that its HP counterparts are superior. For one thing, you can configure them in the usual HP LaserJet menu rather than using some impossible to find Mac OS 8 application; they take a variety of HP MIO JetDirect cards which you can change out rather than buying an AAUI to AUI to 10BaseT series of converters.
The LaserJet 4 is the best in my opinion. The only thing that has ever failed for me is the rear feed rollers become worn out and need to be replaced or lubricated every 15-20,000 pages or so. Toner is cheap. Paper path is pretty simple, which results in almost no jamming.
The 4+ and 4M+ have Postscript, and the 4 and 4M can be upgraded by adding a Postscript ROM from a 4+ or 4M+. Throw some SIMMs in there to get the memory up around 32MB and it will print much faster. The M version is a little bit faster than the regular one, although the difference isn't monstrous.
I don't agree with your reasoning. Microsoft is much more in a position to care about that bank being even 1% out of compliance than some random shareware author is for 100% compliance. Winzip has got to be the least paid for and most commonly installed program for Windows, and I have never heard of them going after anyone. Microsoft, on the other hand, does (as per this article).
Yes, they allow H.264, but they do not dictate that the disks use it. So what will happen is the same thing that happened with regular DVDs: some of them use the proper encoding methods and a reasonable bitrate, and others are packed with way too much crap or otherwise done poorly and there is no easy way to know other than DVDBeaver or your intuition.
How will I know (just by looking at the package) that a HD-DVD title is done in H.264? And even if it has that information on the back, thats meaningless to the average consumer.
I would be happier if one of the specifications dictated H.264 (or at least did not permit MPEG2 to be used on HD-DVD/BDs). At least that would remove one variable, you know that they're at least using the best codec permitted.
There are two reasons I see for going entirely wireless:
1. The ooh factor 2. Ease of installation
Reason #1 is of course no reason to do anything in a business environment, although it is often tempting. Think about things realistically, don't get too fancy and regret it later. New wireless standards will come out, and you'll want to upgrade to them. Since there is a new wireless standard brewing right now, and there is not likely to be a new wired standard for some time (10GB is probably 3-5 years away from being affordable), it would be wiser to invest your money in a stationary target.
Reason #2 is also not a good reason for doing this. You have a totally empty floor, so everything needs to be run to the various cubicles or offices that are you going to erect. That means at least power, maybe phone lines, and who knows what else. It is very little extra effort to do the networking at the same time, even taking into account that the lines shouldn't run in the same conduit. As long as a computer has to plug into a power source, which they always will, they may as well plug into a network interface as well. Sure you could also put wireless in here and there, but using it exclusively just to save on the effort of cabling is a bad move. I predict that you'll wind up buying wireless bridges for lots of things (printers?)
The indie movies that are successful are those that manage to reach a wide audience. They get picked up for distribution (art house or even multiplex), advertised, reviewed, and otherwise get very similar treatment to studio movies. There are lots of indie movies that aren't successful and don't get this treatment, but it is a possibility. There are movies out there that everyone has seen and never realized that they were indie.
This is not true at all for indie games. There is no getting picked up by a distributor, getting reviewed, advertising or anything of the kind. They're either available for free from some site filled with indie games of dubious quality or they try to get sold by some new method (electronic delivery, serialized gaming, etc.). Its hard enough to be successful going against the flow in one aspect (indie vs large developer), and its even harder when you add a new distribution/payment scheme to that.
How am I supposed to find out which indie games are good? Without totally immersing myself into the scene, its next to impossible. Advertising, reviews and utilizing the existing distribution medium let people find independently produced things in the way that they're accustomed to finding establishment things.
Also: the game world does not have a clearly defined establishment in the same way that the movie world does. Just because EA is the behemoth now doesn't mean that they have the same kind of history as MGM (used to), and so being independent of them doesn't carry the same connotations in the consumer's mind.
That is true. All of the issues are inter-related. Although I have found that having a "high" salary (higher than other non-technical staff members but still not competitive for the computer field) does not fix the issues that I raised. I have been involved with so many furniture moves that I should start my own moving company.
Basically it all boils down to managing your people correctly, something which is sorely lacking in a lot of fields but is particularly problematic in IT. Many people who are worth something in IT don't want to be promoted above the level where you still do hands-on technical work, and so instead the IT losers wind up in the upper echelons (or people totally without IT experience from outside). They are either incompetent or fail to understand how to be effective managers, and so everything else stems from that in my mind.
That is hysterical, and also very familiar. I had someone in mind when I wrote that about firing people, and it seems like there is more than one of him in the world. Same deal with the certifications, being paid more, and every he touches turning to shit.
One thing you've illustrated is that having a degree and certifications does not make you qualified. Particularly certifications in my book; I have never personally met someone who had any and was actually worth something. To me its actually a bad thing when someone has them; it usually means they're trying to force their way into a job that they aren't right for.
A degree is somewhat more valuable, although plenty of people that I work with don't have one. I know that I never learned anything about systems administration by taking computer science courses. I see it as showing that I was able to make it through a college degree program. It does demonstrate an ability to learn, even though most degrees don't come with much practical knowledge by themselves. Of course there are plenty of people with them that are still worthless, like your pal.
I should have also added: I sympathize with your situation, but I doubt that they will step up and do right by you based on what you said.
Companies that have poor IT (and more generally, HR) setups are not going to change. It would be nice if you could make them, but in my experience its about as effective as a girlfriend who thinks she's going to change all of the things she doesn't like about her boyfriend (to coin a stereotype). Superficially you may see things moving in the direction you want, but ultimately things are the way they are. Companies, even non-profits and universities, are designed to make money. They are obviously making money at present, by having less than stellar IT practices and not offering competitive wages. And if they run into trouble with money making, they aren't going to respond by improving their employee relations -- they're going to fire you.
The best option is to keep working there -- no sense living on the street just to spite yourself -- while you take as long as you need to find something better. Try and find somewhere that addresses at least one of your major issues (pay for instance) without adding other things that will make you just as miserable. Just remember that every job will suck, its just a question of sucking in ways that you are comfortable with -- and sometimes its a question of just needing things to be fucked up differently from what you've been putting up with. I do understand that there are companies that treat their employees fairly out there somewhere, but beyond that they need to have their IT shit together too. Thats a real diamond in the rough.
There is a truism involved in all IT affairs: if you ask someone you'll be told "no".
Try it. Ask through the proper channels if you can have Firefox on your PC at work (for instance). You will be told "no, that would be too much extra work for our technicians; we need to have everything be the same on all the machines." They said this because if they tell you yes this one time, it will "set a precedent" that could cause the whole house of cards to come tumbling down. They install Firefox for you, now they have to take application installation requests from the 15 people you mentioned that to, etc., etc.
Now on the other hand, make friends with your systems administrator and ask for the same thing in a non-official manner. More than likely you will get what you asked for as a personal favor, because in this case it really wasn't much work to do.
This type of thing comes up CONSTANTLY in the IT field. As in about every five minutes. It applies equally well to much larger scale issues as well. Lets say you need some network ports from the central IT division in this one room. Oh well thats going to be $25,000. Or we could use these unused ports in the room next door by routing long (optical cables, no worry about exceeding the length limit) cables around in a crazy fashion, total price $300. This is a violation of the central IT division's terms, but it not only saved that $24,700 it also made the task possible at all -- if left at $25k it would have been a complete failure.
There is a definite need to circumvent the power structure and bend the rules in most corporate environments if you are focused on getting the results you need. Some people would just shrug and say thats the way it goes; other people come up with ways around it to get what they need. The real point is that there are a lot of worthless rules that clog up people's work, and a lot of inflexible bureaucratic people (particularly in the upper echelons of most IT divisions) who you have to bypass to get any work done. The downfall is that if you're bending rules, you may come to one that really shouldn't have been bent for real.
I had a similar experience to this at one of my prior jobs. I was hired part-time for not-so-great pay, but I was doing other things as well so I didn't really mind. Then all of a sudden my supervisor retired (he wasn't even that old!), and I was promoted to his position.
Oh, except that the pay stayed the same.
I came in every day and worked my ass off, and nothing came of it after three months. So I started looking for another job, found it, and left them totally in the lurch.
Turns out that next job was also a little problematic when it came to money. I was promised a $0.25 per hour raise within the first three months (not too great, but a promise is a promise). They didn't deliver, even though they agreed that my work had been exemplary. So I started looking for another job, and eventually found a better one (although still far from perfect).
It has been my experience that companies think like this: if we are currently paying you next to nothing and you're doing all of your work well, then we will gain nothing from paying you a competitive wage. You must be ignorant of the pay scale of the rest of the world, desperate for work, or not very good at your job. That doesn't mean that someone is sitting in their office thinking this exact thing, but subconsciously that seems to be whats running through the minds of many managers.
There seems to be only two kinds of upward movement possible in IT today: up to a position with more responsibility and the same pay, or out to hopefully greener pastures at another company. No one starts at computer janitor and retires a CIO at the same company.
I agree that laying blame is worthless when the issue is still going on. Afterwards, however, it can be useful to realize what caused things in order to avoid it in the future (or build a case for someone's incompetence perhaps).
As a professional systems administrator for nearly ten years, I have certainly been in my fair share of crappy IT environments. I think the issues can usually be fixed by adhering to two principles:
1. You get what you pay for
This is a far-reaching statement. The first aspect is salary. Companies (well, universities) are always trying to get by with meager salaries that are NOT competitive at all (let alone poor to non-existent raises, benefits, etc.). In my opinion, it is better to pay one really competitive salary than two or three shitty ones. That one person is going to be so much more valuable than three scrubs; more experience, better attitude, maybe actually be happy with their job and stay for a while. Sure, you can get good people for cheap on occasion, but they are going to be miserable because they know how badly you're screwing them. That demotivates otherwise good employees, leading to decline in work performance as well as leaving for greener pastures.
In a field like systems administration, there is a really big emphasis on personal initiative. You have to proactively go looking for problems before they become problems, come up with bizarre-ass ways to fix things immediately or within the confines of your budget (usually small or zero), man-power, etc. If you're seriously unhappy with your job, it drains your initiative. I have personally experienced this. I want to do a good job, and I take pride in my work, but since I know that I'm being treated like shit (in ways other than pay too), I have a harder time caring as much as I would like to about my work. Thats just the way people operate; if you want the best out of your employees, you have to recognize that.
Stemming from this: you need to fire worthless people. The inability or unwillingness to fire worthless employees is one of the biggest problems for employers that I see. If a sysadmin is always causing more work just by his attitude and ineptitude, then they need to get the boot. If you don't do that, all of his co-workers who aren't fuckups are going to see that you don't care about the quality of their work. Another demotivator.
Also pertaining to this: you are paying these people to administer your computers. NOT to move furniture. NOT to hang pictures on the walls. NOT to do anything with anything that doesn't plug into the wall and beep when it turns on. Its one thing to do a favor for someone, its another to turn into a moving man when you ought to be doing a highly skilled job for your salary.
Aside from salaries, you need to pay for equipment. IT costs money, computers cost money, software costs money. Just because computers are $800 instead of $5000 now doesn't mean that they're free. IT departments need budgets, they need control over those budgets, and they need to be set at reasonable levels. There is a lot of waste here, from sending people to training seminars and paying for support contracts that you don't really need (or use). That isn't what we need. We need money for hardware. If you have to cobble things together, or use a production server to test out things, you're going to run into trouble sooner or later. A lot of the time out-dated, overly heterogenous or inadequate hardware is one of the biggest contributors to an overburdened IT staff. Getting rid of all those 400MHz PCs running Windows ME (when the rest of the place is using XP) is a huge help, more than worth that $800 you need to shell out.
Number two is: Let the experts handle it.
I have worked in a few places where computer decisions were made by someone with no technical knowledge, often based on the latest buzzwords or something someone told them or who knows what. Professors who need 24" LCDs because it will make their computers faster (false), people who think they need a LaserJet 1300 because its a higher number than 1200 (the difference is so minimal as to be a complete waste of time and money). On a larger scale, the complete decision making process of the computer infrastructure may be entirely out of th
There hasn't been a majorly changed CUPS release since then I don't think. CUPS 1.2 is supposed to be out in the semi-near future, perhaps some of the issues will have finally been addressed then.
Its certainly the best of the slim crop of printing systems (LPRng and PPR being the only other two I believe), but it leaves a lot to be desired in some areas.
Now that's funny. If you want a job that pays half as much (if you're lucky), where you can be talked down to by PhDs that know virtually nothing about practical computing, and laid off at a moments notice then yeah, higher education is the place to be.
I was a professional systems administrator at 17, and still work in that field at 25. I don't think age is the issue here, but what the author's interests and responsibilities are. If you're not really a systems administrator, then there's nothing very sexy about radmind or Jumpstart.
I do use tail all the time, but its hardly a secret sysadmin tool. And I don't need a version of tail that writes to my desktop background.
As the author even says in the first paragraph of the article, this is totally not a systems administrator's toolbox. BitTorrent clients, music players and tail aren't super helpful in making disk quotas or setting up DNS.
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It is possible to distribute those kinds of maps over LDAP as well, if you have control over adding data to your LDAP server.
You can also keep NIS around just for those maps.
I just hold the hard drive up to my ear to figure out JDK problems.
Similarly, on Windows there is NetDrive and Mac OS X supports mounting WebDAV shares in the Finder. NetDrive in particular seems much better than the built-in Windows Web Folders support, although it still isn't superb. NetDrive 4.1 build 873 is the newest that I've been able to find; it seems to be an earlier version of what is now WebDrive, which isn't free.
The best thing I have found that exists in a ready-to-be-used state (as opposed to the countless hordes of maybe-someday projects) is vtfileman. Its available at http://vtfileman.sf.net/ and there are at least two instances of it running at universities (http://filebox.vt.edu/ is the original and http://filer.case.edu/ is the one that I run). I have some implementation notes on installing Filer at http://filer.case.edu/wiki/filer/notes
It does have a lot of other requirements though, such as an LDAP server for accounts, Apache to serve the HTTP and WebDAV pages, Apache Tomcat for the JSP interface and proftpd if you want FTP access. However, it is pretty sweet once its running.
If thats too complicated, you may be better off just making WebDAV shares individually for different groups. Personally I like that with vtfileman, people can set up their own accounts with little to know interaction with the system administrator.
The LW 16/600 is a decent printer, but I think that its HP counterparts are superior. For one thing, you can configure them in the usual HP LaserJet menu rather than using some impossible to find Mac OS 8 application; they take a variety of HP MIO JetDirect cards which you can change out rather than buying an AAUI to AUI to 10BaseT series of converters.
The LaserJet 4 is the best in my opinion. The only thing that has ever failed for me is the rear feed rollers become worn out and need to be replaced or lubricated every 15-20,000 pages or so. Toner is cheap. Paper path is pretty simple, which results in almost no jamming.
The 4+ and 4M+ have Postscript, and the 4 and 4M can be upgraded by adding a Postscript ROM from a 4+ or 4M+. Throw some SIMMs in there to get the memory up around 32MB and it will print much faster. The M version is a little bit faster than the regular one, although the difference isn't monstrous.
I don't agree with your reasoning. Microsoft is much more in a position to care about that bank being even 1% out of compliance than some random shareware author is for 100% compliance. Winzip has got to be the least paid for and most commonly installed program for Windows, and I have never heard of them going after anyone. Microsoft, on the other hand, does (as per this article).
Yes, they allow H.264, but they do not dictate that the disks use it. So what will happen is the same thing that happened with regular DVDs: some of them use the proper encoding methods and a reasonable bitrate, and others are packed with way too much crap or otherwise done poorly and there is no easy way to know other than DVDBeaver or your intuition.
How will I know (just by looking at the package) that a HD-DVD title is done in H.264? And even if it has that information on the back, thats meaningless to the average consumer.
I would be happier if one of the specifications dictated H.264 (or at least did not permit MPEG2 to be used on HD-DVD/BDs). At least that would remove one variable, you know that they're at least using the best codec permitted.
There are two reasons I see for going entirely wireless:
1. The ooh factor
2. Ease of installation
Reason #1 is of course no reason to do anything in a business environment, although it is often tempting. Think about things realistically, don't get too fancy and regret it later. New wireless standards will come out, and you'll want to upgrade to them. Since there is a new wireless standard brewing right now, and there is not likely to be a new wired standard for some time (10GB is probably 3-5 years away from being affordable), it would be wiser to invest your money in a stationary target.
Reason #2 is also not a good reason for doing this. You have a totally empty floor, so everything needs to be run to the various cubicles or offices that are you going to erect. That means at least power, maybe phone lines, and who knows what else. It is very little extra effort to do the networking at the same time, even taking into account that the lines shouldn't run in the same conduit. As long as a computer has to plug into a power source, which they always will, they may as well plug into a network interface as well. Sure you could also put wireless in here and there, but using it exclusively just to save on the effort of cabling is a bad move. I predict that you'll wind up buying wireless bridges for lots of things (printers?)
The indie movies that are successful are those that manage to reach a wide audience. They get picked up for distribution (art house or even multiplex), advertised, reviewed, and otherwise get very similar treatment to studio movies. There are lots of indie movies that aren't successful and don't get this treatment, but it is a possibility. There are movies out there that everyone has seen and never realized that they were indie.
This is not true at all for indie games. There is no getting picked up by a distributor, getting reviewed, advertising or anything of the kind. They're either available for free from some site filled with indie games of dubious quality or they try to get sold by some new method (electronic delivery, serialized gaming, etc.). Its hard enough to be successful going against the flow in one aspect (indie vs large developer), and its even harder when you add a new distribution/payment scheme to that.
How am I supposed to find out which indie games are good? Without totally immersing myself into the scene, its next to impossible. Advertising, reviews and utilizing the existing distribution medium let people find independently produced things in the way that they're accustomed to finding establishment things.
Also: the game world does not have a clearly defined establishment in the same way that the movie world does. Just because EA is the behemoth now doesn't mean that they have the same kind of history as MGM (used to), and so being independent of them doesn't carry the same connotations in the consumer's mind.
That is true. All of the issues are inter-related. Although I have found that having a "high" salary (higher than other non-technical staff members but still not competitive for the computer field) does not fix the issues that I raised. I have been involved with so many furniture moves that I should start my own moving company.
Basically it all boils down to managing your people correctly, something which is sorely lacking in a lot of fields but is particularly problematic in IT. Many people who are worth something in IT don't want to be promoted above the level where you still do hands-on technical work, and so instead the IT losers wind up in the upper echelons (or people totally without IT experience from outside). They are either incompetent or fail to understand how to be effective managers, and so everything else stems from that in my mind.
That is hysterical, and also very familiar. I had someone in mind when I wrote that about firing people, and it seems like there is more than one of him in the world. Same deal with the certifications, being paid more, and every he touches turning to shit.
One thing you've illustrated is that having a degree and certifications does not make you qualified. Particularly certifications in my book; I have never personally met someone who had any and was actually worth something. To me its actually a bad thing when someone has them; it usually means they're trying to force their way into a job that they aren't right for.
A degree is somewhat more valuable, although plenty of people that I work with don't have one. I know that I never learned anything about systems administration by taking computer science courses. I see it as showing that I was able to make it through a college degree program. It does demonstrate an ability to learn, even though most degrees don't come with much practical knowledge by themselves. Of course there are plenty of people with them that are still worthless, like your pal.
I should have also added: I sympathize with your situation, but I doubt that they will step up and do right by you based on what you said.
Companies that have poor IT (and more generally, HR) setups are not going to change. It would be nice if you could make them, but in my experience its about as effective as a girlfriend who thinks she's going to change all of the things she doesn't like about her boyfriend (to coin a stereotype). Superficially you may see things moving in the direction you want, but ultimately things are the way they are. Companies, even non-profits and universities, are designed to make money. They are obviously making money at present, by having less than stellar IT practices and not offering competitive wages. And if they run into trouble with money making, they aren't going to respond by improving their employee relations -- they're going to fire you.
The best option is to keep working there -- no sense living on the street just to spite yourself -- while you take as long as you need to find something better. Try and find somewhere that addresses at least one of your major issues (pay for instance) without adding other things that will make you just as miserable. Just remember that every job will suck, its just a question of sucking in ways that you are comfortable with -- and sometimes its a question of just needing things to be fucked up differently from what you've been putting up with. I do understand that there are companies that treat their employees fairly out there somewhere, but beyond that they need to have their IT shit together too. Thats a real diamond in the rough.
There is a truism involved in all IT affairs: if you ask someone you'll be told "no".
Try it. Ask through the proper channels if you can have Firefox on your PC at work (for instance). You will be told "no, that would be too much extra work for our technicians; we need to have everything be the same on all the machines." They said this because if they tell you yes this one time, it will "set a precedent" that could cause the whole house of cards to come tumbling down. They install Firefox for you, now they have to take application installation requests from the 15 people you mentioned that to, etc., etc.
Now on the other hand, make friends with your systems administrator and ask for the same thing in a non-official manner. More than likely you will get what you asked for as a personal favor, because in this case it really wasn't much work to do.
This type of thing comes up CONSTANTLY in the IT field. As in about every five minutes. It applies equally well to much larger scale issues as well. Lets say you need some network ports from the central IT division in this one room. Oh well thats going to be $25,000. Or we could use these unused ports in the room next door by routing long (optical cables, no worry about exceeding the length limit) cables around in a crazy fashion, total price $300. This is a violation of the central IT division's terms, but it not only saved that $24,700 it also made the task possible at all -- if left at $25k it would have been a complete failure.
There is a definite need to circumvent the power structure and bend the rules in most corporate environments if you are focused on getting the results you need. Some people would just shrug and say thats the way it goes; other people come up with ways around it to get what they need. The real point is that there are a lot of worthless rules that clog up people's work, and a lot of inflexible bureaucratic people (particularly in the upper echelons of most IT divisions) who you have to bypass to get any work done. The downfall is that if you're bending rules, you may come to one that really shouldn't have been bent for real.
I had a similar experience to this at one of my prior jobs. I was hired part-time for not-so-great pay, but I was doing other things as well so I didn't really mind. Then all of a sudden my supervisor retired (he wasn't even that old!), and I was promoted to his position.
Oh, except that the pay stayed the same.
I came in every day and worked my ass off, and nothing came of it after three months. So I started looking for another job, found it, and left them totally in the lurch.
Turns out that next job was also a little problematic when it came to money. I was promised a $0.25 per hour raise within the first three months (not too great, but a promise is a promise). They didn't deliver, even though they agreed that my work had been exemplary. So I started looking for another job, and eventually found a better one (although still far from perfect).
It has been my experience that companies think like this: if we are currently paying you next to nothing and you're doing all of your work well, then we will gain nothing from paying you a competitive wage. You must be ignorant of the pay scale of the rest of the world, desperate for work, or not very good at your job. That doesn't mean that someone is sitting in their office thinking this exact thing, but subconsciously that seems to be whats running through the minds of many managers.
There seems to be only two kinds of upward movement possible in IT today: up to a position with more responsibility and the same pay, or out to hopefully greener pastures at another company. No one starts at computer janitor and retires a CIO at the same company.
I agree that laying blame is worthless when the issue is still going on. Afterwards, however, it can be useful to realize what caused things in order to avoid it in the future (or build a case for someone's incompetence perhaps).
As a professional systems administrator for nearly ten years, I have certainly been in my fair share of crappy IT environments. I think the issues can usually be fixed by adhering to two principles:
1. You get what you pay for
This is a far-reaching statement. The first aspect is salary. Companies (well, universities) are always trying to get by with meager salaries that are NOT competitive at all (let alone poor to non-existent raises, benefits, etc.). In my opinion, it is better to pay one really competitive salary than two or three shitty ones. That one person is going to be so much more valuable than three scrubs; more experience, better attitude, maybe actually be happy with their job and stay for a while. Sure, you can get good people for cheap on occasion, but they are going to be miserable because they know how badly you're screwing them. That demotivates otherwise good employees, leading to decline in work performance as well as leaving for greener pastures.
In a field like systems administration, there is a really big emphasis on personal initiative. You have to proactively go looking for problems before they become problems, come up with bizarre-ass ways to fix things immediately or within the confines of your budget (usually small or zero), man-power, etc. If you're seriously unhappy with your job, it drains your initiative. I have personally experienced this. I want to do a good job, and I take pride in my work, but since I know that I'm being treated like shit (in ways other than pay too), I have a harder time caring as much as I would like to about my work. Thats just the way people operate; if you want the best out of your employees, you have to recognize that.
Stemming from this: you need to fire worthless people. The inability or unwillingness to fire worthless employees is one of the biggest problems for employers that I see. If a sysadmin is always causing more work just by his attitude and ineptitude, then they need to get the boot. If you don't do that, all of his co-workers who aren't fuckups are going to see that you don't care about the quality of their work. Another demotivator.
Also pertaining to this: you are paying these people to administer your computers. NOT to move furniture. NOT to hang pictures on the walls. NOT to do anything with anything that doesn't plug into the wall and beep when it turns on. Its one thing to do a favor for someone, its another to turn into a moving man when you ought to be doing a highly skilled job for your salary.
Aside from salaries, you need to pay for equipment. IT costs money, computers cost money, software costs money. Just because computers are $800 instead of $5000 now doesn't mean that they're free. IT departments need budgets, they need control over those budgets, and they need to be set at reasonable levels. There is a lot of waste here, from sending people to training seminars and paying for support contracts that you don't really need (or use). That isn't what we need. We need money for hardware. If you have to cobble things together, or use a production server to test out things, you're going to run into trouble sooner or later. A lot of the time out-dated, overly heterogenous or inadequate hardware is one of the biggest contributors to an overburdened IT staff. Getting rid of all those 400MHz PCs running Windows ME (when the rest of the place is using XP) is a huge help, more than worth that $800 you need to shell out.
Number two is: Let the experts handle it.
I have worked in a few places where computer decisions were made by someone with no technical knowledge, often based on the latest buzzwords or something someone told them or who knows what. Professors who need 24" LCDs because it will make their computers faster (false), people who think they need a LaserJet 1300 because its a higher number than 1200 (the difference is so minimal as to be a complete waste of time and money). On a larger scale, the complete decision making process of the computer infrastructure may be entirely out of th
There hasn't been a majorly changed CUPS release since then I don't think. CUPS 1.2 is supposed to be out in the semi-near future, perhaps some of the issues will have finally been addressed then.
Its certainly the best of the slim crop of printing systems (LPRng and PPR being the only other two I believe), but it leaves a lot to be desired in some areas.
Probably by themselves, since teaching actual programming is beneath most university curriculums.
No, but I would consider selling it for $400.
You sure showed him.
Oh man, you guys totally got me. That was a good one.
Did you know that April Fool's jokes are:
1. Lame
2. Supposed to actually fool you into thinking they're real for a split second.
Now that's funny. If you want a job that pays half as much (if you're lucky), where you can be talked down to by PhDs that know virtually nothing about practical computing, and laid off at a moments notice then yeah, higher education is the place to be.
To respond to a few comments made:
I was a professional systems administrator at 17, and still work in that field at 25. I don't think age is the issue here, but what the author's interests and responsibilities are. If you're not really a systems administrator, then there's nothing very sexy about radmind or Jumpstart.
I do use tail all the time, but its hardly a secret sysadmin tool. And I don't need a version of tail that writes to my desktop background.
As the author even says in the first paragraph of the article, this is totally not a systems administrator's toolbox. BitTorrent clients, music players and tail aren't super helpful in making disk quotas or setting up DNS.
The real question is: Does anyone with a slashdot id under 500 understand it?