So much for what you shouldn't do. My resume tip for Jobs is: "Make sure your resume includes the fact that you were CEO of Apple Computer." HTH. HAND!
Anecdotes are no match for statistics, I know, but I've heard from reliable sources that Yahoo! transferred a major portion of their customer support to an Indian call center. The company discovered after that fact that the overseas contractors were not trained, not experienced, not equipped, and not able to do the job--all things they had been promised when they signed the contract. After two months of horror, they pulled out and moved the support back in-house.
I'll bet they're not the only company discovering that outsourcing isn't the silver bullet that will make you profitable.
My company, meanwhile, handles everything about the core business in-house. From development, to hosting, to IT, to customer support; it's all done in-house at great expense. And yet we're incredibly profitable (plus we have great customer satisfaction--something outsourced support centers aren't known for delivering).
there's only evidence so far of life on one, but the very fact that scientists are even considering it is a testament to life's tenacity.
A testament to wishful thinking, maybe, but no real proof of life's tenacity at all.
Not, mind you, that I have any objections to theories of extraterrestrial life, just that this particular factoid doesn't really support your hypothesis.
Why not? There are advantages to a homogenous environment. Many of these advantages are the same no matter which vendor provides 100% of your systems.
But hey! Let's consider the "alternative": 60 webservers all serving the same site, some running IIS, some running Apache, some running Iplanet. Now, go and maintain all of that.
I work in a very heterogenous datacenter, but all machines of the same type, in the same environment, run the same code on the same platform. The reasons for homogeneity on some level should be readily apparent.
The stupid ones, of course, being those that provide a way for you to send them money. The smart ones won't do that, and so will be much harder to trace.
But I hold fast to my belief that Canda is, in fact, another planet.
Let me see... that works out to roughly $250, in American dollars (paying American prices, not converting Canadian money). All things being equal, that's not so bad. However, I don't think SC:G is the game to buy a console for. If you've got one already, then SC:G might help the console work off its debt, but obviously we won't know that for a while yet. I hope so, though.
Well, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that very few games by themselves are worth buying a console for. The only way I could justify my PS2 was because I knew of 4 or 5 games I wanted to play on it, I needed a cheap DVD player, and I was reasonably confident that more worthwhile games would be published in the future.
But I think you must live on some strange, faraway planet, where people tell you that Starcraft:Ghost (or any other game) is worth $400, and where game consoles cost much more money than they do here.
Come visit Earth, my friend, where the PS2 is $199, and the Gamecube is $149.
Finally, don't forget that the article is very vague about what platform they're developing for. As others have pointed out, it's likely to be released for one or more next-generation consoles. Blizzard hasn't even come close to committing to the Xbox.
It would be. However, mostly we're all too busy to feel much stress. And the UNIX teams report the same level of satisfaction as the Windows teams on the annual employee satisfaction survey. So either we're all equally brainwashed, or else stress has more to do with the work environment and management than with the OS flavor of choice.
Well, there are two numbers there: 90 servers per sysadmin, and "single point of contact" for 300 servers.
If you took all our sysadmins and divided them evenly among all our servers, you'd get that first number.
I figured it would be instructive to mention that under my organization's "single point of contact" model, a sysadmin is the primary problem solver for a pool of servers. I'm responsible for writing and maintaining the escalation docs that the NOC uses to resolve issues on 300+ servers without paging me. If I haven't done my job properly, then I'm the one who gets paged in the middle of the night. I'm the one who has to fix the problem. If I can't, I'm the one who decides who to call--the storage team, the monitoring team, the networking team, &c.---and I'm the one who makes sure they fix the problem. For over 300 machines.
As both of us pointed out, the only way this is possible is if I have a good process and a good team to fall back on. And that's why I feel comfortable being solely and individually responsible for what happens on those systems.
I'd be surprised if there were many sysadmins out there with the same responsibilities, let alone without any team support. I'm surprised already by how many sysadmins can't handle even 90 servers, evenly spread according to your calculations.
We're running upwards of 90 Windows servers per Admin. I'm the single point of contact for sysadmin issues on over 300 Windows machines.
Naturally, the vast majority of these systems are in maintenance mode, and I'm backed up by a first-rate process and a team of highly motivated people (all sysadmins in their own right, each responsible for their own giant pools of servers), but still... 10 servers per sysadmin is unconscionable.
Our distribution of labor on the UNIX side is about the same as on the Windows side.
N1 will make it much easier to run corporate data centres--thus eliminating much of the work now done by armies of systems administrators.
Yeah, and our third-party ticketing system was supposd to make it easier to run the datacenter. We're still hiring sysadmins, plus a large team of admins and contractors to manage the ticketing system.
Our NOC actually does make our job easier, but now we have a large NOC staff that we keep having to replace because we keep promoting the NOC operators to fill the sysadmin positions that keep getting added.
Products like this start out in the initial press release as "this will solve all your problems and reduce your headcount by 100%!" By the time it ships, it's abundantly clear that it actually has very limited usefulness, and while it does in fact streamline some aspect of your operation (if you're lucky), at best it frees up your resources for other things--sysadmins get busy with more important things, ease of management means more room for upward scaling (including scaling of headcount), &c.
An equivalent to a ping in mail might take two weeks using letters.
Which just goes to show that "synergy" isn't just a dot-com buzzword.
Netflix and I handle all of the "pinging" (i.e., the administrative tasks such as creating an account, placing an order, and tracking progress) via the web & email--almost instantaneously.
Then we handle the high-volume data transfers via USPS, which works out pretty nicely. Sure, there's about 5 days of latency (from the time I return a DVD to the time the next one arrives), but the way it works out I generally have one or more new movies waiting for me whenever my schedule allows me the time to watch one.
I've yet to experience significant "packet loss" from Netflix, and I go through about 16 DVDs a month with their service. Since February, I've received 1 disk I couldn't read, and one disk that was broken (but I think I stepped on that one).
As I recall, the Greek government wisely recognized its own technical ignorance. Realizing they could not tell the difference between illegal electronic gambling and other forms of electronic games, they chose the only rational solution.
You! Yeah, you! That was irony, fuckwit. You know who you are.
I, on the other hand, not being a Starcraft Fan, am looking forward to this game. If it's at least as fun as MG:S, I'll count my money and my hours well spent.
I'd say "sucks to be you, Starcraft Fan", but then you'd just retaliate with "sucks to be you, Starcraft Hater", and then this would all just degenerate into pointless namecalling and inane arguments.
I think I have a clearer understanding now, but I feel like I've reached my limit of understanding. I'm not sure I can do anything more at this point except withdraw to contemplate the things you've mentioned.
Thanks! It's definitely been fun. We should do this again some time:)
So far, so good. But I still need something unchanging, otherwise I have no baseline against which to measure change in other things. How can I know what change is, unless I already have a clear idea of what constancy looks like?
Slashdot Mirror
You're using a Dragon chip, aren't you?
Of course, the Dragon chip will block out most websites and turn all your documents into communist propaganda, so it's not really much of a trade-off.
So much for what you shouldn't do. My resume tip for Jobs is: "Make sure your resume includes the fact that you were CEO of Apple Computer." HTH. HAND!
Anecdotes are no match for statistics, I know, but I've heard from reliable sources that Yahoo! transferred a major portion of their customer support to an Indian call center. The company discovered after that fact that the overseas contractors were not trained, not experienced, not equipped, and not able to do the job--all things they had been promised when they signed the contract. After two months of horror, they pulled out and moved the support back in-house. I'll bet they're not the only company discovering that outsourcing isn't the silver bullet that will make you profitable. My company, meanwhile, handles everything about the core business in-house. From development, to hosting, to IT, to customer support; it's all done in-house at great expense. And yet we're incredibly profitable (plus we have great customer satisfaction--something outsourced support centers aren't known for delivering).
A testament to wishful thinking, maybe, but no real proof of life's tenacity at all.
Not, mind you, that I have any objections to theories of extraterrestrial life, just that this particular factoid doesn't really support your hypothesis.
You'd think that a question that "must" have already been asked would be in the FAQ, wouldn't you?
Why not? There are advantages to a homogenous environment. Many of these advantages are the same no matter which vendor provides 100% of your systems.
But hey! Let's consider the "alternative": 60 webservers all serving the same site, some running IIS, some running Apache, some running Iplanet. Now, go and maintain all of that.
I work in a very heterogenous datacenter, but all machines of the same type, in the same environment, run the same code on the same platform. The reasons for homogeneity on some level should be readily apparent.
The stupid ones, of course, being those that provide a way for you to send them money. The smart ones won't do that, and so will be much harder to trace.
Well put.
But I hold fast to my belief that Canda is, in fact, another planet.
Let me see... that works out to roughly $250, in American dollars (paying American prices, not converting Canadian money). All things being equal, that's not so bad. However, I don't think SC:G is the game to buy a console for. If you've got one already, then SC:G might help the console work off its debt, but obviously we won't know that for a while yet. I hope so, though.
Touch the link. It will take you to the canonical anti-scientology site.
Well, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that very few games by themselves are worth buying a console for. The only way I could justify my PS2 was because I knew of 4 or 5 games I wanted to play on it, I needed a cheap DVD player, and I was reasonably confident that more worthwhile games would be published in the future.
But I think you must live on some strange, faraway planet, where people tell you that Starcraft:Ghost (or any other game) is worth $400, and where game consoles cost much more money than they do here.
Come visit Earth, my friend, where the PS2 is $199, and the Gamecube is $149.
Finally, don't forget that the article is very vague about what platform they're developing for. As others have pointed out, it's likely to be released for one or more next-generation consoles. Blizzard hasn't even come close to committing to the Xbox.
It would be. However, mostly we're all too busy to feel much stress. And the UNIX teams report the same level of satisfaction as the Windows teams on the annual employee satisfaction survey. So either we're all equally brainwashed, or else stress has more to do with the work environment and management than with the OS flavor of choice.
Well, there are two numbers there: 90 servers per sysadmin, and "single point of contact" for 300 servers. If you took all our sysadmins and divided them evenly among all our servers, you'd get that first number. I figured it would be instructive to mention that under my organization's "single point of contact" model, a sysadmin is the primary problem solver for a pool of servers. I'm responsible for writing and maintaining the escalation docs that the NOC uses to resolve issues on 300+ servers without paging me. If I haven't done my job properly, then I'm the one who gets paged in the middle of the night. I'm the one who has to fix the problem. If I can't, I'm the one who decides who to call--the storage team, the monitoring team, the networking team, &c.---and I'm the one who makes sure they fix the problem. For over 300 machines. As both of us pointed out, the only way this is possible is if I have a good process and a good team to fall back on. And that's why I feel comfortable being solely and individually responsible for what happens on those systems. I'd be surprised if there were many sysadmins out there with the same responsibilities, let alone without any team support. I'm surprised already by how many sysadmins can't handle even 90 servers, evenly spread according to your calculations.
We're running upwards of 90 Windows servers per Admin. I'm the single point of contact for sysadmin issues on over 300 Windows machines.
Naturally, the vast majority of these systems are in maintenance mode, and I'm backed up by a first-rate process and a team of highly motivated people (all sysadmins in their own right, each responsible for their own giant pools of servers), but still... 10 servers per sysadmin is unconscionable.
Our distribution of labor on the UNIX side is about the same as on the Windows side.
Yeah, and our third-party ticketing system was supposd to make it easier to run the datacenter. We're still hiring sysadmins, plus a large team of admins and contractors to manage the ticketing system.
Our NOC actually does make our job easier, but now we have a large NOC staff that we keep having to replace because we keep promoting the NOC operators to fill the sysadmin positions that keep getting added.
Products like this start out in the initial press release as "this will solve all your problems and reduce your headcount by 100%!" By the time it ships, it's abundantly clear that it actually has very limited usefulness, and while it does in fact streamline some aspect of your operation (if you're lucky), at best it frees up your resources for other things--sysadmins get busy with more important things, ease of management means more room for upward scaling (including scaling of headcount), &c.
Which just goes to show that "synergy" isn't just a dot-com buzzword.
Netflix and I handle all of the "pinging" (i.e., the administrative tasks such as creating an account, placing an order, and tracking progress) via the web & email--almost instantaneously.
Then we handle the high-volume data transfers via USPS, which works out pretty nicely. Sure, there's about 5 days of latency (from the time I return a DVD to the time the next one arrives), but the way it works out I generally have one or more new movies waiting for me whenever my schedule allows me the time to watch one.
I've yet to experience significant "packet loss" from Netflix, and I go through about 16 DVDs a month with their service. Since February, I've received 1 disk I couldn't read, and one disk that was broken (but I think I stepped on that one).
Packet loss is negligible.
Damn your eyes! Now I'll have to get into an inane argument with you!
You! Yeah, you! That was irony, fuckwit. You know who you are.
I'd say "sucks to be you, Starcraft Fan", but then you'd just retaliate with "sucks to be you, Starcraft Hater", and then this would all just degenerate into pointless namecalling and inane arguments.
Hrm.
Sucks to be you, Starcraft Fan!
Thanks! This clarifies things a bit for me. Now, I shall go and meditate on what I've learned :)
This happened in a MacGuyver episode, too.
Clever!
:)
No worries, I'm still a little groggy myself.
I think I have a clearer understanding now, but I feel like I've reached my limit of understanding. I'm not sure I can do anything more at this point except withdraw to contemplate the things you've mentioned.
Thanks! It's definitely been fun. We should do this again some time
So far, so good. But I still need something unchanging, otherwise I have no baseline against which to measure change in other things. How can I know what change is, unless I already have a clear idea of what constancy looks like?
Thank you.
That truth value is also independent of whatever meaning you extract from the medium. Thus, the message.