I don't disagree with your analysis much, although I do think you overemphasize the monetary quantification of all decisions and the ability of leadership to accurately provide dollar valuations of all possible situations and choices.
Show me your guide to correctly, accurately and predictably dollar-quantifying worker morale, brand image and any other number of intantigbles, and I'll give you my title to the Brooklyn Bridge.
Furthermore, how often are the signifcant portions of ANY decision identical? About as often as an economist or political scientist runs into the prototypical "rational man". You're addressing some ideal-world framework for how it ought to work, when it seldom comes close to that.
Thus my original complaint; too many management leaders simply choose not to understand the breadth and depth of It decision making beyond crude dollar valuations. Yes, they are important, but they don't tell the whole story.
That presumes that management generally has given broad authority to the CIO to make substantive changes in business process, organizational structure and other critical areas of business operation.
That broad of control isn't usually given out, thus its incumbant on more senior management to have a good operational understanding of technology's role in the business. It's not just thumbs up or down based on cost.
There's more to being in management than just wearing a suit, playing golf, and collecting a huge paycheck.
I work in a business that isn't defined by technology (at least not historically), and I don't think that management actually listens or comprehends when it comes to a lot of IT issues.
When they do listen, they tend to reduce it to profit/loss and destroy the subtlety of the information and its meaning. CIOs that "push" issues, especially when they're expensive, tend to get canned as gadflys, big spenders or for not being "team players".
When it comes to technology, managers often don't care and don't want to know, except when it costs money.
Eat shit. I spent more than minimum dollar on an American Standard, and the guy at Home Depot said he had one and it flushed great. It doesn't. I've reverted to flushing after I shit and then after I wipe, and even then some big, hard turds won't flush without plunging.
In fact, American Standard was in the paper the other day in the business section discussing their *new* low-flow toilet that's been designed by rocket scientists will be such a success because all the others suck so bad.
This is the new trend, though. Prisons are too full, so everyone gets a split sentence; some time in prison, some time out of prison on probation with a bunch of restrictions on what they can do.
What's worse is that since this is so utterly ineffective from a public safety perspective, we're more than willing to deny people their civil rights (voting, guns, etc) even after their sentence is over under the guise that it will keep them from being bad again.
It's a real convenient way to deny the vote to people, too.
And the most important aspect of search technology isn't finding things?
Isn't that kind of like saying the most important aspect of hard drives isn't storage, or some other bizzaro-world twisting of meaning?
Or am I merely missing out on the gee-whiz csci/engineering/theoretical challenges associated with search? Or is it one of those hipster, "if you have to ask you wouldn't understand", kind of situations?
As an engineer, I appreciate the technological achievement, and as a user, I am - to say it again - simply amazed.
...and as as hyperbole artist, you've fulfilled your role as a sycophant marvelously.
"Change your user experience -- completely." Either that's a complete overstatement, or you can't keep track of anything. I'm a slob, but I can find pretty much anything I want in 500GB of disk spread over 3 systems in a few seconds, without using find. It's called "o-r-g-an-i-z-a-t-i-o-n".
The tired, old reason was that back in the day, packets subject to ACLs were process-switched instead of being hardware-switched, and process switching on routing platforms with 8 or 16Mhz 68000s was painful.
This was amplified by the fact that, in the mid to late 1990s, most ISPs pipes & hardware were nearly obsolete and running at high utilization by the time they got the hardware from back order and the circuits from the carriers. Putting even simple ACLs on their links meant high queues, dropped packets, retransmits and trashed their upstream worse than it already was being trashed.
I guess that reason made sense then, but it seems that now that we have better packet processing, smarter ASICs and much more CPU horsepower, I don't see why this can't be done by ISPs.
I already have read "Zombie Survival Guide" more than once...
You can laugh if you want, but I think it's an interesting survival blueprint for something really ishy, like a worldwide Bird Flu epidemic..223 ammo will be tough to come by.
You won't be able to get to them in time. Besides, we know the threat is closer than than that. Some of us even know that the apocalypse isn't coming, it's here already.
Look what happens in every zombie movie; you think you have an opportunity to drive even 25 miles and dig up your S&W 1006 and your M4? You're zombie food.
You need your sidearm ON YOU, and your rifle at arm's length. You need 2k rounds for your sidearm and 5k rounds for your rifle on hand ALL the time, along with supplies to crank out another 10k rounds if necessary.
More shit buried in the woods is a great idea, too, but don't leave yourself unarmed.
...then you have ANOTHER reason, outside of his impetuous nature, to associate Jobs too closely with the brand: failed leadership.
It is a gross failure of leadership to not have a plan or system for succession. Furthermore, it is a blatant case of egomania to believe that Apple will fail without Jobs. Last I heard there were other people who worked there.
One of the critical mistakes any company can make in branding is too close of an association of the actual product brand with both individual corporate leadership or celebrity spokespeople. People are humans; they grow old, they die, they commit crimes, they act insolent and imprudent, and do a bunch of other things that the product can't do and make the product look bad.
Shaking it's head in agreement with the same dopey blank stare as any other bobblehead.
One thing I love about these Slashdot bits on Jobs' bratty behavior are the legions of Apple/Jobs yes men that come out of the woodwork like cockroaches in an East Village walkup.
Just face facts; a publisher published a book that made Steve out to be petulant and capricious. His actions relative to the book merely demonstrate he's that and venegeful, too.
All in all it reminds me of the unrepentant socialists I know who like to downplay Stalin. "Perhaps he went to far, but you have to remember that he kept the nation together in spite of Nazi aggression." A little denial goes a long way...
Apple is under no obligation whatsover, implied or otherwise, to carry any publisher's books.....Think what you want, but businesses shouldn't be forced to support other businesses they disagree with.
Both I, Adam Smith and the Apple shareholders strongly disagree. Apple's in business to make money for the shareholders. It's not in business to defend Mr. Jobs personality or social standing. If Wiley books sell well at their stores and provide Apple with decent profits, they should be sold, and particularly so if they lead to sales of other core products ("Gee, making movies is easy in this book. I'll take a new Mac.")
Is it fair to judge Blu-Ray media prices now? I know there are some limited numbers of commercial products available (primarily in Japan), but it's hardly been exposed to mass production.
We just started using VMWare GSX Server on Win2003 and it is both a cool concept and thusfar has been working really well.
For us the idea is we have a half-dozen 1U boxes that are getting old and need to run basically stand-alone environments; they don't play well with other software environments. Budgetarily replacing the 1U boxes with new 1U boxes that meet the hardware standards is ridiculously expensive _and_ a complete waste of disk, CPU and I/O capacity, not to mention power, heat, etc. The current boxes (dual P3 700s) sit at near-idle all the time and don't have much, if any, local storage or I/O demands.
As it stands right now, we have 4 virtual systems (1 freebsd, 3 win2k) running on a dual P4/3.2 xeon server using 1-10 percent of CPU capacity. We have about 6 more systems we'll migrate over to this environment and I seriously doubt we'll get beyond 20% CPU utilization. Plus we can easily clone some a template server and have a test or eval box going in about 5 minutes. You can also snapshot a virtual disk so that you can rollback to the checkpoint point (great for upgrades or testing), or just clone the entire virtual disk.
It works best with systems that have low I/O and CPU demands or bursty demands; I wouldn't do it with systems that have high I/O or CPU demands. You can dedicate physical LUNs to VMs, but it kills some of the flexibility in exchange for performance.
For the wags who criticize me for not running it on Linux or using their high-buck ESX product: We looked at ESX, and management of the ESX system we thought was excessively convoluted and the performance for our needs not meaningfully different. We have no problems with stability on 2003, either, plus we're a FreeBSD shop, not a Linux shop, and we didn't want to BS around trying to run GSX under FreeBSD, as it wasn't a supported host OS.
I figure this is way more the future (since it is the past on OS/390) of computing than blades, especially once its merged with SAN virtualization. Now if only Intel would give us a CPU capable of complete virtualization. I also think that eventually MS will merge virtualization completely into the OS, and will license you on total CPUs and total concurrent images.
There's a most amusing article in Scientific American addressing the issues with the infamous Janet Jackson boob episode and Randy Moss' mooning incident. It seems that while everyone was outraged about those, they forgot to pay attention to the carnage on field.
I've made that argument when it comes to prostitution and pornography.
We're perfectly willing to pay a group of men millions of dollars to jack themselves up on steroids and beat the hell out of each other, but it's unacceptable to pay a woman 1/1000th or less than that amount of money to either disrobe or engage in sex.
Why is it that paying people to be violent with their bodies is OK?
For example, take manslaughter. I swerve to miss a schoolbus that drifts into my lane and I hit and kill a pedestrian on the sidewalk. Why should this be considered a crime?
It probably wouldn't be. There's a legal principal that holds that the party responsible for the initial event holds responsibility for events occuring as a direct result of their first action.
The problem is that people use prison for all the wrong reasons. It is approached emotionally (the victims suffered - somebody else should suffer too - who cares if there is only a 51% chance that they are guilty).
Crime and punishment are inextricably linked to ethics and morality. While it seems unlikely that the penal system would ever be run as a completely rationalized system (ie, one where the sentence was solely dependent on the perpetrators's danger to society), it's probably more like that than you think. In many states sentence lengths are often set based on projected crime rates and prison capacity, although within the ranges established by the legislature.
As populations increase, the number of things we're willing to throw people in jail for increases, and the perpetual lack of money in legislatures, I expect we'll be seeing MORE "formula" based sentencing and less "morality" based sentencing.
Overall, I think it's good and bad. If I was the victim of any crime, I'd expect punishment, particularly for more serious crimes towards my family members.
"Act of passion" prisoners, people who comitted a basically one-time act that happened to be illegal. Usually includes murder and assault, but might also include rape (but very few), and many other types of crimes. Mose of these prisoners aren't all that dangerous because they're not generally sociopathic personality types, but people exposed to very stressful situations who overreacted. You can argue the fact that they did whatever it is they did makes them more dangerous than other people, but generally outside of their stress situation, they're not anymore dangerous than you or I.
"Political" prisoners. People in jail for a range of crimes that generally center around drugs, prostitution and gambling. Generally speaking these people aren't either dangerous or sociopathic, they just got involved with an activity that's banned by our politicians.
"Sociopathic" prisoners. These are the people that most people think about when they think about prisoners; dangerous, sociopathic (sometimes even psychopathic) personality types that are largely immune from the kinds of right/wrong calculations you and I make. They're not afraid to hurt other people to get what they want, they will almost always take advantage of any one or any situation.
Most people assume everyone in prison is a dangerous sociopath, which is why they have so little sympathy for them. It's possible to make an argument that "act of passion" prisoners are inherently dangerous because of what they've demonstrated they're capable of, but it assumes an awful lot. The rest are in jail largely on morals grounds or because they're mentally ill.
The FCC gives out some tiny sliver of the spectrum that can be used by the everyman without a federal license; why should private businesses be allowed to use a significant portion of the spectrum for their own for-profit business? It'd be kind of like Clear Channel setting up radio stations on the walkie-talkie and CB bands.
It just seems like a rip off for consumers to get a useful radio technology and then get it essentially taken away by someone making a buck off it.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't disagree with your analysis much, although I do think you overemphasize the monetary quantification of all decisions and the ability of leadership to accurately provide dollar valuations of all possible situations and choices.
Show me your guide to correctly, accurately and predictably dollar-quantifying worker morale, brand image and any other number of intantigbles, and I'll give you my title to the Brooklyn Bridge.
Furthermore, how often are the signifcant portions of ANY decision identical? About as often as an economist or political scientist runs into the prototypical "rational man". You're addressing some ideal-world framework for how it ought to work, when it seldom comes close to that.
Thus my original complaint; too many management leaders simply choose not to understand the breadth and depth of It decision making beyond crude dollar valuations. Yes, they are important, but they don't tell the whole story.
That presumes that management generally has given broad authority to the CIO to make substantive changes in business process, organizational structure and other critical areas of business operation.
That broad of control isn't usually given out, thus its incumbant on more senior management to have a good operational understanding of technology's role in the business. It's not just thumbs up or down based on cost.
There's more to being in management than just wearing a suit, playing golf, and collecting a huge paycheck.
I work in a business that isn't defined by technology (at least not historically), and I don't think that management actually listens or comprehends when it comes to a lot of IT issues.
When they do listen, they tend to reduce it to profit/loss and destroy the subtlety of the information and its meaning. CIOs that "push" issues, especially when they're expensive, tend to get canned as gadflys, big spenders or for not being "team players".
When it comes to technology, managers often don't care and don't want to know, except when it costs money.
What's wrong with my diet? High fiber cereal, broccoli and other veggies about 6 times a week, sometimes 2-3 heads of broccoli in a day.
I shit fine, it's the flushing that doesn't work.
Eat shit. I spent more than minimum dollar on an American Standard, and the guy at Home Depot said he had one and it flushed great. It doesn't. I've reverted to flushing after I shit and then after I wipe, and even then some big, hard turds won't flush without plunging.
In fact, American Standard was in the paper the other day in the business section discussing their *new* low-flow toilet that's been designed by rocket scientists will be such a success because all the others suck so bad.
...don't use any less water, since you have to flush them 5 times to get the crap down the hole.
The old ones at least worked the first time around, even after a big meal.
This is the new trend, though. Prisons are too full, so everyone gets a split sentence; some time in prison, some time out of prison on probation with a bunch of restrictions on what they can do.
What's worse is that since this is so utterly ineffective from a public safety perspective, we're more than willing to deny people their civil rights (voting, guns, etc) even after their sentence is over under the guise that it will keep them from being bad again.
It's a real convenient way to deny the vote to people, too.
And the most important aspect of search technology isn't finding things?
Isn't that kind of like saying the most important aspect of hard drives isn't storage, or some other bizzaro-world twisting of meaning?
Or am I merely missing out on the gee-whiz csci/engineering/theoretical challenges associated with search? Or is it one of those hipster, "if you have to ask you wouldn't understand", kind of situations?
As an engineer, I appreciate the technological achievement, and as a user, I am - to say it again - simply amazed.
...and as as hyperbole artist, you've fulfilled your role as a sycophant marvelously.
"Change your user experience -- completely." Either that's a complete overstatement, or you can't keep track of anything. I'm a slob, but I can find pretty much anything I want in 500GB of disk spread over 3 systems in a few seconds, without using find. It's called "o-r-g-an-i-z-a-t-i-o-n".
The tired, old reason was that back in the day, packets subject to ACLs were process-switched instead of being hardware-switched, and process switching on routing platforms with 8 or 16Mhz 68000s was painful.
This was amplified by the fact that, in the mid to late 1990s, most ISPs pipes & hardware were nearly obsolete and running at high utilization by the time they got the hardware from back order and the circuits from the carriers. Putting even simple ACLs on their links meant high queues, dropped packets, retransmits and trashed their upstream worse than it already was being trashed.
I guess that reason made sense then, but it seems that now that we have better packet processing, smarter ASICs and much more CPU horsepower, I don't see why this can't be done by ISPs.
I already have read "Zombie Survival Guide" more than once...
.223 ammo will be tough to come by.
You can laugh if you want, but I think it's an interesting survival blueprint for something really ishy, like a worldwide Bird Flu epidemic.
You won't be able to get to them in time. Besides, we know the threat is closer than than that. Some of us even know that the apocalypse isn't coming, it's here already.
Look what happens in every zombie movie; you think you have an opportunity to drive even 25 miles and dig up your S&W 1006 and your M4? You're zombie food.
You need your sidearm ON YOU, and your rifle at arm's length. You need 2k rounds for your sidearm and 5k rounds for your rifle on hand ALL the time, along with supplies to crank out another 10k rounds if necessary.
More shit buried in the woods is a great idea, too, but don't leave yourself unarmed.
...then you have ANOTHER reason, outside of his impetuous nature, to associate Jobs too closely with the brand: failed leadership.
It is a gross failure of leadership to not have a plan or system for succession. Furthermore, it is a blatant case of egomania to believe that Apple will fail without Jobs. Last I heard there were other people who worked there.
Steve Jobs isn't the brand, Apple is the brand.
One of the critical mistakes any company can make in branding is too close of an association of the actual product brand with both individual corporate leadership or celebrity spokespeople. People are humans; they grow old, they die, they commit crimes, they act insolent and imprudent, and do a bunch of other things that the product can't do and make the product look bad.
Shaking it's head in agreement with the same dopey blank stare as any other bobblehead.
One thing I love about these Slashdot bits on Jobs' bratty behavior are the legions of Apple/Jobs yes men that come out of the woodwork like cockroaches in an East Village walkup.
Just face facts; a publisher published a book that made Steve out to be petulant and capricious. His actions relative to the book merely demonstrate he's that and venegeful, too.
All in all it reminds me of the unrepentant socialists I know who like to downplay Stalin. "Perhaps he went to far, but you have to remember that he kept the nation together in spite of Nazi aggression." A little denial goes a long way...
Apple is under no obligation whatsover, implied or otherwise, to carry any publisher's books.....Think what you want, but businesses shouldn't be forced to support other businesses they disagree with.
Both I, Adam Smith and the Apple shareholders strongly disagree. Apple's in business to make money for the shareholders. It's not in business to defend Mr. Jobs personality or social standing. If Wiley books sell well at their stores and provide Apple with decent profits, they should be sold, and particularly so if they lead to sales of other core products ("Gee, making movies is easy in this book. I'll take a new Mac.")
Are they? Since they don't sell PCs and Dell hasn't sold phones, we don't really know how true that is.
You don't think that Dell has any experience dominating a saturated market through business efficiency, do you?
Q: Why are the roads in France lined with trees?
A: So the German army can march in the shade.
Is it fair to judge Blu-Ray media prices now? I know there are some limited numbers of commercial products available (primarily in Japan), but it's hardly been exposed to mass production.
We just started using VMWare GSX Server on Win2003 and it is both a cool concept and thusfar has been working really well.
For us the idea is we have a half-dozen 1U boxes that are getting old and need to run basically stand-alone environments; they don't play well with other software environments. Budgetarily replacing the 1U boxes with new 1U boxes that meet the hardware standards is ridiculously expensive _and_ a complete waste of disk, CPU and I/O capacity, not to mention power, heat, etc. The current boxes (dual P3 700s) sit at near-idle all the time and don't have much, if any, local storage or I/O demands.
As it stands right now, we have 4 virtual systems (1 freebsd, 3 win2k) running on a dual P4/3.2 xeon server using 1-10 percent of CPU capacity. We have about 6 more systems we'll migrate over to this environment and I seriously doubt we'll get beyond 20% CPU utilization. Plus we can easily clone some a template server and have a test or eval box going in about 5 minutes. You can also snapshot a virtual disk so that you can rollback to the checkpoint point (great for upgrades or testing), or just clone the entire virtual disk.
It works best with systems that have low I/O and CPU demands or bursty demands; I wouldn't do it with systems that have high I/O or CPU demands. You can dedicate physical LUNs to VMs, but it kills some of the flexibility in exchange for performance.
For the wags who criticize me for not running it on Linux or using their high-buck ESX product: We looked at ESX, and management of the ESX system we thought was excessively convoluted and the performance for our needs not meaningfully different. We have no problems with stability on 2003, either, plus we're a FreeBSD shop, not a Linux shop, and we didn't want to BS around trying to run GSX under FreeBSD, as it wasn't a supported host OS.
I figure this is way more the future (since it is the past on OS/390) of computing than blades, especially once its merged with SAN virtualization. Now if only Intel would give us a CPU capable of complete virtualization. I also think that eventually MS will merge virtualization completely into the OS, and will license you on total CPUs and total concurrent images.
You'd think they'd run into inflationary pressures if they essentially printed money.
There's a most amusing article in Scientific American addressing the issues with the infamous Janet Jackson boob episode and Randy Moss' mooning incident. It seems that while everyone was outraged about those, they forgot to pay attention to the carnage on field.
I've made that argument when it comes to prostitution and pornography.
We're perfectly willing to pay a group of men millions of dollars to jack themselves up on steroids and beat the hell out of each other, but it's unacceptable to pay a woman 1/1000th or less than that amount of money to either disrobe or engage in sex.
Why is it that paying people to be violent with their bodies is OK?
For example, take manslaughter. I swerve to miss a schoolbus that drifts into my lane and I hit and kill a pedestrian on the sidewalk. Why should this be considered a crime?
It probably wouldn't be. There's a legal principal that holds that the party responsible for the initial event holds responsibility for events occuring as a direct result of their first action.
The problem is that people use prison for all the wrong reasons. It is approached emotionally (the victims suffered - somebody else should suffer too - who cares if there is only a 51% chance that they are guilty).
Crime and punishment are inextricably linked to ethics and morality. While it seems unlikely that the penal system would ever be run as a completely rationalized system (ie, one where the sentence was solely dependent on the perpetrators's danger to society), it's probably more like that than you think. In many states sentence lengths are often set based on projected crime rates and prison capacity, although within the ranges established by the legislature.
As populations increase, the number of things we're willing to throw people in jail for increases, and the perpetual lack of money in legislatures, I expect we'll be seeing MORE "formula" based sentencing and less "morality" based sentencing.
Overall, I think it's good and bad. If I was the victim of any crime, I'd expect punishment, particularly for more serious crimes towards my family members.
There's about 3 types of prisoners.
"Act of passion" prisoners, people who comitted a basically one-time act that happened to be illegal. Usually includes murder and assault, but might also include rape (but very few), and many other types of crimes. Mose of these prisoners aren't all that dangerous because they're not generally sociopathic personality types, but people exposed to very stressful situations who overreacted. You can argue the fact that they did whatever it is they did makes them more dangerous than other people, but generally outside of their stress situation, they're not anymore dangerous than you or I.
"Political" prisoners. People in jail for a range of crimes that generally center around drugs, prostitution and gambling. Generally speaking these people aren't either dangerous or sociopathic, they just got involved with an activity that's banned by our politicians.
"Sociopathic" prisoners. These are the people that most people think about when they think about prisoners; dangerous, sociopathic (sometimes even psychopathic) personality types that are largely immune from the kinds of right/wrong calculations you and I make. They're not afraid to hurt other people to get what they want, they will almost always take advantage of any one or any situation.
Most people assume everyone in prison is a dangerous sociopath, which is why they have so little sympathy for them. It's possible to make an argument that "act of passion" prisoners are inherently dangerous because of what they've demonstrated they're capable of, but it assumes an awful lot. The rest are in jail largely on morals grounds or because they're mentally ill.
The FCC gives out some tiny sliver of the spectrum that can be used by the everyman without a federal license; why should private businesses be allowed to use a significant portion of the spectrum for their own for-profit business? It'd be kind of like Clear Channel setting up radio stations on the walkie-talkie and CB bands.
It just seems like a rip off for consumers to get a useful radio technology and then get it essentially taken away by someone making a buck off it.