Let us know when you figure out that if your life is all focused on running a business and making money, it eventually occurs to you that you havent really lived life at all.
If this is your experience with RPG's then I'm sorry to say you had an unimaginative gamemaster. If you have a talented storyteller that's willing to adapt from their intended plan quickly and creatively, then RPG's can be extremely entertaining.
It's all about creating scenarios where people can try bizarre crap and see what happens, an much less about adhering to some statistical dogma.
Or maybe Slashdot recognized some light-hearted fun and went with it. Maybe the author and/. just chose to take a moment to reflect on things, and point out some obvious truths we sometimes take for granted in a fun way.
As a great prophet once said : "Lighten up Francis."
Or maybe the author was just having a little light-hearted fun for fun's sake. Kinda like when you play an RPG.
Something I learned from D&D : Just because the NPC has 10 minutes of prepared dialogue doesn't mean that the NPC actually has anything of interest to say. Maybe he's just wasting your time. And maybe he's doing it on purpose...
"How do you quantify the guy who spent the weekend fixing the server?" You look at the number of times it's happened and you figure out how much it would cost to get that level of service agreement from an outside vendor.
The accountants are much more likely to be asking questions like "how would the business be affected if we outsourced IT at a cost of X, thereby allowing us to save Y in salaries, at a cost of Z in reduced productivity due to longer resolution times".
There are cases where it really doesn't make sense for a shop to handle their own IT. On the other hand, there are definitely cases where it does.
As you point out, the accountant is asking how much they could 'save' by switching vendors and having someone else manage the server. But the accountants never had the advisement of the guy who was in all weekened passed on to them from the guy's manager. The advisement was (and has been for months) that the server is a pile of outdated shit and needs to be replaced. The manager refuses to request a purchase of a new server from accounting because he knows accounting will say no, even though accounting will automatically renew the extended warranty and service contract on the old POS server without question every year. Those warranties and service contracts cost as much as a new server (every year) but that comes from a different colum on the spreadsheet.
The accountant also doesnt know that the guy that was in all weekened (again) who makes $60k knows every cable in the entire building. He knows which switch has to be tickled every Thursday at 2pm so that it doesn't reboot itself (the same switch he's requested be replaced for 6 months). He knows that a well placed 6 pack of micro brews will get the maintenance crew to -actually- do the preventative maintenance on the emergency generator that is supposed to kick in when the power fails and prevents the servers from going offline. He knows another 20 such items the accountant doesn't have a convenient colum on his spreadsheet for, so they have no 'value'. But certainly some kid with no experience and a 2 year IT degree will do just fine at $25k a year...
The point being that the accountants don't have a clue what is actually happening in the IT department. There's a good chance that even the manager of the IT department doesn't understand what's happening even if he knows the specifics. Their percieved dollar value of any particular facet of the department's function might have some merit. But collectively they don't often have a clue.
Once you've explained yourself clearly to a few hundred uneducated end-users you eventually start getting fed up with explaining. Particularly when you have to repeat yourself to the same end users on a regularly basis who keep coming back hoping that the answer will change despite an unchanging scenario.
If management says no to the funding today, it's likely to be the same tomorrow. And the day after. And the day after that. Yes, I would love to install a plotter in the printer room so that you can print 5foot banners congratulating your fellow employees for having kids, but the answer really is no. It will remain no for the forseable future. Stop asking.
When did IT customers learn "The Right Thing" to do?
I accept your basic premise. But the reality is that more often than not if you do what the end customer tells you to do, you're setting yourself up for failure. They are the end user of the IT services and not the IT service provider because (in general) they don't know **** about IT. You are the IT pro, and you should be the one making the recommendations and determinations on how to manage the services.
There's a long-standing debate on which method will ultimately provide the end-user with the greatest good, and you the least headache:
1) You do what they say, try to meet their unrealistic demands and expectations on shoestring budgets, and constantly attempt to explain why things are not running in an ideal way.
2) You say: "This is the service you get. It's standardized, hardened, stable, and gives you what you need to perform your jobs. Call us when/if it breaks."
In the former case the customer has the comfort of knowing that you're open to their needs and desire to give them what they what, but you're incompetent (and they'll be open to hearing a bid from the next contractor willing to take the work for a lower cost). In the latter case you're inflexible and uncooperative but your system is solid and stable (and they will be open to hearing a bid from the next contractor willing to take the work for a lower cost).
No issues = No need for staff. You're ready for upper management.
By your reasoning if you have a well-oiled IT staff that is proactive and keeps issues from coming up, you can fire them all.
Obviously if you fix everything right once, nothing will ever break. No one will ever do anything either malicious or stupid. Nor will anything ever evolve. Nor will your requirements change....
There's the IT pro that will be able to identify the actual root complaint of an unknowledgable customer, fix the issue, and move on to the next case. And then there's the guy in [insert off-shore labor country] who costs 1/6th the wage who will run the customer around in circles for half an hour, make them irrate, tell them the issue is due to an unsupported configuration, and then disconnect them trying to transfer them to another department. While the latter case has 'closed' a case in slightly more time than the former at 1/6th the wage cost, no issue has actually been resolved and the end user's productivity is a fraction of what it could have been with more appropriate funding in the IT staff.
There's also the interpretation of the metrics.
Our IT group is measured in a number of ways. One of them is the uptime of the systems we support. We manage only the servers that host the applications of the end users (code developers). The applications are beyond our scope because they are constantly in flux by the devs, and everyone knows it would be an unrealistic hope for us to manage those applications. But if the devs push out corrupt or unstable code and their application is offline for half a day, it is reported as downtime at the end of the month. The reality is that we've met our obligations (and in fact, exceeded them). The machines were always online and stable. The code the devs put their sucked, but the infrastructure was perfectly stable. But the interpretation by management is that the application was offline so we failed.
From there you could debate the cost differential between purchasing new hardware or purchasing extended warranties and service agreements on outdated equipment, and how that impacts the level of service possible for an IT department. We spend thousands of dollars per year per unit to continue warranties on 5year-old+ hardware, where we could instead spend that much and get brand new hardware that would be under warranty for free for several years to come. Accounting says we can't afford new hardware (that would be more stable, more reliable, more powerful, more manageable, more cost-effective), but we can spend even more on just the warranties purcahsed yearly for the old crap.
In the end, far too many IT departments are managed by people who have no clue about technical issues and who work from all-inclusive statements about the best-case scenarios in IT. The metrics they require you to provide (which take an appreciable percentage of your weekly man-hours to produce) will be misinterpreted (rarely in your favor) and be largely irrelevant to the actual function of your IT department. You can try to explain how the metrics actual give creedance to your beleifs on how the funding for the department should be reallocated for the sake of efficiency, but....
Unfortunately in the mind of the management and accounting teams, the alternative would be to allow the black magic voodoo in the basement to continue without absolute (and faulty) quantification. That cant be allowed. Those IT freaks would start sacraficing chickens and making bonfires out of bundles of cash.
I'm not suggesting that MS would be disinterested. I'm suggesting that there's previous evidence that providing the computers or OS for free doesn't inherently equate to greater market share. Particularly considering MS already has a substantially higher probability of being the future prefered OS of those kids anyway, purely by virtue of its dominance in the market.
As a side note, you can't 'make' MS do anything here. You could kiss their butts on both cheeks and hope for the best. But they are under no obligation whatsoever to provide anything to the government or the education system for free.
1) Agreed that breakage can be an issue. The same is true of textbooks. We already charge students who lose/"break" a textbook, the same would be true for the netbooks. And if a student chose not to take that risk, we could print off copies of the textbooks for them in the exceptional cases. Repair is not an issue if we keep a small stock of netbooks available for swap... easy to do and allows breakage to be repaired without downtime to the student.
There's a shortage of just about everything in schools. Why would netbooks be any different, and what hope is there for 'spares'? When you 'break' a book, it might look like crap but it's still almost entirely usable (unless you set it on fire or something). Loosing it can be fixed in the short term with a photocopy or two from a classmate. I'm curious what exceptional cases there would be and how many students would choose not to take the risk.
2) Most of that licensing is included either with the netbook or is freely available. We're not talking about exotic technologies here. We're talking about an os, Adobe Reader, Firefox, etc... industry standard, open source technologies for the most part. Sure, if we went with Windows there'd be the cost of antivirus. Not huge software costs in general though.
My guess is that you'd have to license access to the textbooks. You aren't going to get them for free. Textbook publishers are not in it for altruistic purposes. Windows is a licensed product, and tracking license inventories in an enterprise is no small task. Even if the license itself is covered, merely accounting for it takes resources. Anti-virus licenses are generally expire after a 1 year period and must be renewed unless you've purchased an enterprise license which incurrs ongoing costs. Going with an open source OS other than windows, or going with Mac, does not preclude the concern of viruses.
3) Not sure what "unintended usages" you are talking about here. Porn? Hacking? We cover that already with acceptable use policies. If you break them, you lose the netbook and you have to carry a printed copy with you. Ample disincentive if you ask me.
Porn, hacking, games, facebook... If you're suggesting that you just tell kids not to do it and they won't, then you're more naive than I thought and this entire debate can be more easily explained. Suggesting that you will easily know if kids break the policy then you have assumed an intensive scanning process to determine when the security measures in the netbooks have been tampered with. I'd also be curious of the legal implications of nefarious activity on state-supplied hardware... If the threat is that disobediance to the rules results in having to use a book instead of a netbook, then you've incurred the requirement to maintain multiple streams of productivity, which will ALWAYS increase man-hours spent and costs to maintain.
4) Lojacking for theft... well sure we might have some theft problems and we'd need to address that. But I think that a combination of things could be put into place to obviate the need for a lojack on each device. Police reports for real thefts for one thing (to prove you didn't just lose it) would be a start. We'd have to see how it went in a pilot program. And don't forget that since they get to keep the computer when they graduate, they'll take better care of it and will guard against theft on their own.
A suggestion of a lo-jack on the netbooks was a joke. It'd be impracticle at best. It was meant to illustrate that there would be a substantial threat of theft and little means to effectively police it. Particularly in the more crime-ridden areas of the state. And there's a case to be made that the higher crime areas would be the ones in greatest need of supplimental hardware provided to students who wouldn't otherwise be able to obtain it, AND who would be more willing to consider selling the device and claimin
Agreed - Printing is much cheaper than buying a hard bound version.
And, for those of you complaining about computers/Internet access, compare the cost of 1 semester's worth of books to the price of a cheap PC and a semester's worth of Internet access. You might be surprised. Heck, PC + Internet + printing/binding may still be significantly than my book costs some semesters - And you only have to buy the PC once (hopefully).
Wow...
You'll be buying a pc every couple of years, or at the least refreshing the OS install on most of them. And that's optomistic when you consider that the average kid is able to completely destroy a cell phone in a few short months.
You'll also be paying the licensing fees for the anti-virus, and readers, and on-line books, etc. None of that is free.
You'll pay out a ton to build the networking infrastructure in the schools to handle thousands of connections instead of the previous hundred or so.
You'll be implementing significant server hardware to maintain filesharing, backups, authentication, etc.
You'll be spending more on the internet bandwidth at the schools that's been increased exponentially.
You'll be paying for the deskside support staff to fix the PC's, either when they just die, or get corrupted or you screw them up.
You'll be paying for the network admin team that would have to be on-hand at each school.
You'll be paying for the server admins, and security admins.
You'll be paying the maintenance contracts for all the hardware/networking you have in place.
You'll be paying for the additional power/cooling costs associated with millions of additional machines online for 7+hours a day at the schools.
You'll be paying for the administration of patching and updates to the OS and every application on the machines.
You'll be paying for code integrators who are modifying the OS to harden against unintended uses, and use specific to education.
The list goes on indefinately. Every time a manager (in this case a governor) utters the phrases "All it takes..." or "We'll save 'X' dollars...", don't be skeptical. Resolve yourself completely to the certainty that there's a list of costs (s)he hasn't even begun to consider.
Nice theory. Except that it's already been proved false. Apple donated to millions of schools in the 80's, and they have what percentage of the current market share?
The economics of this proposal is compelling. If the books can be put on a netbook, I can save money day one by buying each student a cheap netbook (say $300)... My district already spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on textbooks each year. They go for something like $100 a pop. Granted, you can use them for more than one year - we generally get about 7 years of real useful life out of them. Then again, I can buy a netbook for a student, let them use it for the 4 years they are in high school, and GIVE it to them at the end and it still doesn't cost me a dime.
As a tech person you have to concede that these statements are incredibly optomistic.
The optomism is proven realistic IF:
1....the kids don't destroy the equipment in a matter of weeks or months rather than years.
2....you can get Microsoft/McAfee/Apple/Symantec/etc to provide free licensing for the required products.
3....you can come up with a method of securing the OS against "unintended uses".
4....you lo-jack every unit to mitigate theft.
5....you assume the kids will fix their own machines and you won't need to hire additional IT staff for every school.
6....you assume that there are not incidental and normal hardware failures requiring repair/replacement.
7....you increase the infrastructure in every school to handle the thousands of connections rather than the few hundred previous connections.
8....you disregard the cost for the build-out of all the hard LAN connections, or the purchase/deployment of WiFi in the schools on a scale that can handle thousands of students.
9....you obtain contractural agreement with every school districts internet provider to compound the network bandwidth many fold at little or no additional ongoing cost.
10....you have a fall-back for the inevitable network failures during school hours.
And that's just the top 10 off the top of my head. And it doesn't really begin to address the administrative burdens, the accounting and inventory tracking burdens, the patching and updating burdens.....
In the end the residual costs associated with the deployment of MILLIONS of machines to inherently irresponsible and destructive kids would be unparalelled. Suggesting that any of it is a 'one-time cost' is wholly false. It's an adoption of dozens of on-going costs even if you get every software vendor, hardware manufacturer, and service provider to cough up the initial investments for free. Anyone that has worked in IT in any kind of an enterprise environment could go on forever telling you of the nightmares they've faced from non-tech managers mandating tech solutions that will 'save money', without understanding of the realities in the task.
It's an age-old scenario. The manager says, "Look, it's all just three simple steps. We make a rocket, fly it to the moon, and get it and the astronauts back. How hard is that? "
The -HEAD OF THE CHURCH- is the one that ordered the fetus, and is now defending that action by any of his followers.
He defines the policies of the church. He owns the IP's that were banned. He is the one responsible for the process of using the Church's staff and computers to edit wiki so that only positive things are said about his church. What he ordered and the policies that he upholds is precisely the scope of this discussion.
If that's not enough of a warning flag about this guy, he then correlates getting his hand slapped for abuse of a public information system to the systematic attempt to highlight, humiliate, issolate and ultimately eradicate an entire religion.
If anything, the CoS is being punishemed for censoring others. This isnt a case of censorship against The Church of Scientology.
Censorship suggests that a person or group is not allowed to say what they wish. The Church of Scientology had that ability. They could have outlined factual information about their church in the appropriate places on Wiki. But they abused the system and used it has a propoganda tool, editing the contributions of others to further their own agenda.
Another thing to note is that Wiki is specifically meant and designed to be an apolitical, unbiased, and nuetral publication. Everyone agrees to those terms when they post there. Everyone can openly edit so long as they dont hamper the ability for the facts to be presented. CoS chose to disregard those terms and edit out any facts that shed them in an unfavorable light (of which there are plenty of choices).
Wiki isnt an advertising service, no matter how much these people seem to think it is. It is for the passage of information, ALL information, whether favorable to them or not.
You do realize that everything you're describing can be applied to pretty much any church, right?
- Teaching you what the *right* way of doing something is.
- Teaching you to resist being steared away.
- Teaching you that attempts to meet a middle-ground are attempts to corrupt you.
What do you think Confession and Penance are if not a judgement and punishment for personality flaw in a non-state court (albeit a court of 1).
No, it means they have to use other IP addresses. It's stupid of Wikipedia to think this stops anything.
By this line of reasoning, its stupid of me to put a lock on my house. After all, if a burgler realy wants to rob me he'll find a way in, so what's the point in trying to stop him...
The (justifiable) effort by Wikipedia is not an unrealistic hope that the Church of Scientology will just give up and slink off to the shadows. It's an effort to mitigate and slow the effects of the (hopefully few) people within that organization that are abusing the purpose of Wikipedia for their own agenda. And repeated abuses after this effort may well require additional efforts.
A service like Wiki can't just throw their hands up and allow the abuses, reasoning that they will never actually stop it all. That would be as contrary to their interests as banning all edits from all IPs in the world.
Your title suggests that people who play the games aren't addicted to them. You make no effort to define "They". Being that there are no people addicted to the games, the only other group left that has been discussed by you would be "People who play video games".
They are just losers who have no satisfaction in real life. The easy successes and minor penalty for failure make the game world more attractive than real life.
As "They" was taken to mean "people who play video games", and this interpretation is reinforced by the blanket assessment that follows about the game itself, you appear to be asserting that all "people who play video games" are losers who "have no satisfaction in real life".
In that interpretation, you were denegrating all people who play video games (who number in the tens of millions). You say people aren't addicted to the games, so how can I respond with a statement suggesting that you were targeting only those people addicted to the games?
Maybe you should present your statements with clarity to avoid people filling in the vaccuum that is your case with speculation and interpretation.
There's an obvious stereotype of gamers that they are weak minded idiots addicted to computer games. They are either pasty-faced pimpled teenage geeks or fat 30+ social rejects who still live with their parents. In whatever case, they must not be able to handle real life, or can't control their emotions, and fall victim to these addictive games designed to ruin their lives. But the reality is more people in America play computer games than not. (http://www.npd.com/press/releases/press_090520.html) In fact, more people play video games than go out to movies. And these gamers aren't just shriveling up in their parent's basements.
Consider further the impact of that information becoming public on the playability of MMO's for celebrities. Would you risk having your anonymous personal entertainment fall prey to the same stalkers and paparazi-type wacko's constantly hassling you like they do when you leave your house? Or would you keep the fact that you play as closely held as possible so that you had some avenue of socialization in your life that was genuine, instead of the ass-kissing and intrusion that you consistently face in real life?
There are many many famous people who play. I posted a few with evidence here already. But in the same position I'd keep my mouth shut as most of them do.
I know of a famous person who played Everquest. That person's ID got out, and they ended up quitting because of it. The enjoyment of the game was completely ruined when their identity was revealed.
When you start thinking in these terms its easy to reconcile that there are plenty of people that lead perfectly pruductive and healthy lives that -also- play computer games. It is not the games themselves that are a destructive force in some lives. It is the addictive personality of some people who play games that is used as ammo to demonize that which some others are ignorant of.
The prolific fantasy artist Ruth Thompson plays Warcraft (and I can tell you she is CERTAINLY not wanted in the attractiveness category) :
http://www.tarnishedimages.com/
I've also read that that author Michael Moorcock plays WoW. I've heard rumor of Steven King. I know with certainty about 4 semi-pro hockey players, and rumor of 4 more pro hockey players.
This list could continue indefinately. And these are just the ones that I knew of offhand that were easy to find evidence for. The point being that there are plenty of very successful, influential, wealthy and talented people who find the escape of an online fantasy world to be not only entertaining, but also a healthy distraction from the pressures in their every day lives.
I'm sure there are hundreds of household names that could be added to the list, if not thousands. But would you make it public knowledge if you knew you'd be judged, or worse, stalked, in the one place you might be able to socialize regularly with total anonymity? Especially if you literally couldn't leave your home with people taking photos of your every step?
The kind of people who get consumed by online engagement usually aren't very successful in real life anyway. If they become successful in real life following a WoW addiction, very often it's specifically because they now value the real world so much more after being essentially isolated from it.
Well,... yes. And the same could be said of anyone 'consumed' by any thing. Except of course someone who is consumed by a need to achieve success in real life.
A person can become addicted to food. Does it logically follow that food is inherently addictive or purposefully manufactured to be so? No. A person can become addicted to sex, or tv, or gardening. But it does not mean that those things are addictive. It means that the person has succumbed to a compulsive behavior.
I agree with you completely that a person who is succeptible to a WoW addiction is also succeptible to any number of addictions. If they allow an online computer game to control their lives it's my opinion that are just as likely to allow alcohol or drugs or porn to do so equally.
You see the stories about how WoW is demonized when a kid who is allowed to sit issolated in his room for months on end kills himself. But I would place even money that if it wasn't WoW that led him down that path of issolation and self-destruction, it'd be something else. There was a serious problem there already (that went unnoticed and/or unaddressed by the loved ones...) .
I play WoW with my wife, and my two sons. I introduced her to EverQuest, which we played together for 5 year.
You're here on/. using sophmoric humor and ridiculing total strangers to achieve some validation or approval, and attempting to get +1 to your Karma rating. I am enjoying the company of my whole family in a cooperative activity several times a week, and having fun playing a game, (and getting laid), and doing it at the expense of no one....
Slashdot Mirror
Let us know when you figure out that if your life is all focused on running a business and making money, it eventually occurs to you that you havent really lived life at all.
If this is your experience with RPG's then I'm sorry to say you had an unimaginative gamemaster. If you have a talented storyteller that's willing to adapt from their intended plan quickly and creatively, then RPG's can be extremely entertaining.
It's all about creating scenarios where people can try bizarre crap and see what happens, an much less about adhering to some statistical dogma.
Or maybe Slashdot recognized some light-hearted fun and went with it. Maybe the author and /. just chose to take a moment to reflect on things, and point out some obvious truths we sometimes take for granted in a fun way.
As a great prophet once said : "Lighten up Francis."
As are assumptions. For instance, assuming that D&D is a video game.
Or maybe the author was just having a little light-hearted fun for fun's sake. Kinda like when you play an RPG.
Something I learned from D&D : Just because the NPC has 10 minutes of prepared dialogue doesn't mean that the NPC actually has anything of interest to say. Maybe he's just wasting your time. And maybe he's doing it on purpose...
"How do you quantify the guy who spent the weekend fixing the server?" You look at the number of times it's happened and you figure out how much it would cost to get that level of service agreement from an outside vendor.
The accountants are much more likely to be asking questions like "how would the business be affected if we outsourced IT at a cost of X, thereby allowing us to save Y in salaries, at a cost of Z in reduced productivity due to longer resolution times".
There are cases where it really doesn't make sense for a shop to handle their own IT. On the other hand, there are definitely cases where it does.
As you point out, the accountant is asking how much they could 'save' by switching vendors and having someone else manage the server. But the accountants never had the advisement of the guy who was in all weekened passed on to them from the guy's manager. The advisement was (and has been for months) that the server is a pile of outdated shit and needs to be replaced. The manager refuses to request a purchase of a new server from accounting because he knows accounting will say no, even though accounting will automatically renew the extended warranty and service contract on the old POS server without question every year. Those warranties and service contracts cost as much as a new server (every year) but that comes from a different colum on the spreadsheet.
The accountant also doesnt know that the guy that was in all weekened (again) who makes $60k knows every cable in the entire building. He knows which switch has to be tickled every Thursday at 2pm so that it doesn't reboot itself (the same switch he's requested be replaced for 6 months). He knows that a well placed 6 pack of micro brews will get the maintenance crew to -actually- do the preventative maintenance on the emergency generator that is supposed to kick in when the power fails and prevents the servers from going offline. He knows another 20 such items the accountant doesn't have a convenient colum on his spreadsheet for, so they have no 'value'. But certainly some kid with no experience and a 2 year IT degree will do just fine at $25k a year...
The point being that the accountants don't have a clue what is actually happening in the IT department. There's a good chance that even the manager of the IT department doesn't understand what's happening even if he knows the specifics. Their percieved dollar value of any particular facet of the department's function might have some merit. But collectively they don't often have a clue.
Once you've explained yourself clearly to a few hundred uneducated end-users you eventually start getting fed up with explaining. Particularly when you have to repeat yourself to the same end users on a regularly basis who keep coming back hoping that the answer will change despite an unchanging scenario.
If management says no to the funding today, it's likely to be the same tomorrow. And the day after. And the day after that. Yes, I would love to install a plotter in the printer room so that you can print 5foot banners congratulating your fellow employees for having kids, but the answer really is no. It will remain no for the forseable future. Stop asking.
When did IT customers learn "The Right Thing" to do?
I accept your basic premise. But the reality is that more often than not if you do what the end customer tells you to do, you're setting yourself up for failure. They are the end user of the IT services and not the IT service provider because (in general) they don't know **** about IT. You are the IT pro, and you should be the one making the recommendations and determinations on how to manage the services.
There's a long-standing debate on which method will ultimately provide the end-user with the greatest good, and you the least headache:
1) You do what they say, try to meet their unrealistic demands and expectations on shoestring budgets, and constantly attempt to explain why things are not running in an ideal way.
2) You say: "This is the service you get. It's standardized, hardened, stable, and gives you what you need to perform your jobs. Call us when/if it breaks."
In the former case the customer has the comfort of knowing that you're open to their needs and desire to give them what they what, but you're incompetent (and they'll be open to hearing a bid from the next contractor willing to take the work for a lower cost). In the latter case you're inflexible and uncooperative but your system is solid and stable (and they will be open to hearing a bid from the next contractor willing to take the work for a lower cost).
No issues = No need for staff. You're ready for upper management.
By your reasoning if you have a well-oiled IT staff that is proactive and keeps issues from coming up, you can fire them all.
Obviously if you fix everything right once, nothing will ever break. No one will ever do anything either malicious or stupid. Nor will anything ever evolve. Nor will your requirements change....
Ever...
Excellent points.
....
There's the IT pro that will be able to identify the actual root complaint of an unknowledgable customer, fix the issue, and move on to the next case. And then there's the guy in [insert off-shore labor country] who costs 1/6th the wage who will run the customer around in circles for half an hour, make them irrate, tell them the issue is due to an unsupported configuration, and then disconnect them trying to transfer them to another department. While the latter case has 'closed' a case in slightly more time than the former at 1/6th the wage cost, no issue has actually been resolved and the end user's productivity is a fraction of what it could have been with more appropriate funding in the IT staff.
There's also the interpretation of the metrics. Our IT group is measured in a number of ways. One of them is the uptime of the systems we support. We manage only the servers that host the applications of the end users (code developers). The applications are beyond our scope because they are constantly in flux by the devs, and everyone knows it would be an unrealistic hope for us to manage those applications. But if the devs push out corrupt or unstable code and their application is offline for half a day, it is reported as downtime at the end of the month. The reality is that we've met our obligations (and in fact, exceeded them). The machines were always online and stable. The code the devs put their sucked, but the infrastructure was perfectly stable. But the interpretation by management is that the application was offline so we failed.
From there you could debate the cost differential between purchasing new hardware or purchasing extended warranties and service agreements on outdated equipment, and how that impacts the level of service possible for an IT department. We spend thousands of dollars per year per unit to continue warranties on 5year-old+ hardware, where we could instead spend that much and get brand new hardware that would be under warranty for free for several years to come. Accounting says we can't afford new hardware (that would be more stable, more reliable, more powerful, more manageable, more cost-effective), but we can spend even more on just the warranties purcahsed yearly for the old crap.
In the end, far too many IT departments are managed by people who have no clue about technical issues and who work from all-inclusive statements about the best-case scenarios in IT. The metrics they require you to provide (which take an appreciable percentage of your weekly man-hours to produce) will be misinterpreted (rarely in your favor) and be largely irrelevant to the actual function of your IT department. You can try to explain how the metrics actual give creedance to your beleifs on how the funding for the department should be reallocated for the sake of efficiency, but
Unfortunately in the mind of the management and accounting teams, the alternative would be to allow the black magic voodoo in the basement to continue without absolute (and faulty) quantification. That cant be allowed. Those IT freaks would start sacraficing chickens and making bonfires out of bundles of cash.
I'm not suggesting that MS would be disinterested. I'm suggesting that there's previous evidence that providing the computers or OS for free doesn't inherently equate to greater market share. Particularly considering MS already has a substantially higher probability of being the future prefered OS of those kids anyway, purely by virtue of its dominance in the market.
As a side note, you can't 'make' MS do anything here. You could kiss their butts on both cheeks and hope for the best. But they are under no obligation whatsoever to provide anything to the government or the education system for free.
1) Agreed that breakage can be an issue. The same is true of textbooks. We already charge students who lose/"break" a textbook, the same would be true for the netbooks. And if a student chose not to take that risk, we could print off copies of the textbooks for them in the exceptional cases. Repair is not an issue if we keep a small stock of netbooks available for swap... easy to do and allows breakage to be repaired without downtime to the student.
There's a shortage of just about everything in schools. Why would netbooks be any different, and what hope is there for 'spares'? When you 'break' a book, it might look like crap but it's still almost entirely usable (unless you set it on fire or something). Loosing it can be fixed in the short term with a photocopy or two from a classmate. I'm curious what exceptional cases there would be and how many students would choose not to take the risk.
2) Most of that licensing is included either with the netbook or is freely available. We're not talking about exotic technologies here. We're talking about an os, Adobe Reader, Firefox, etc... industry standard, open source technologies for the most part. Sure, if we went with Windows there'd be the cost of antivirus. Not huge software costs in general though.
My guess is that you'd have to license access to the textbooks. You aren't going to get them for free. Textbook publishers are not in it for altruistic purposes. Windows is a licensed product, and tracking license inventories in an enterprise is no small task. Even if the license itself is covered, merely accounting for it takes resources. Anti-virus licenses are generally expire after a 1 year period and must be renewed unless you've purchased an enterprise license which incurrs ongoing costs. Going with an open source OS other than windows, or going with Mac, does not preclude the concern of viruses.
3) Not sure what "unintended usages" you are talking about here. Porn? Hacking? We cover that already with acceptable use policies. If you break them, you lose the netbook and you have to carry a printed copy with you. Ample disincentive if you ask me.
Porn, hacking, games, facebook ... If you're suggesting that you just tell kids not to do it and they won't, then you're more naive than I thought and this entire debate can be more easily explained. Suggesting that you will easily know if kids break the policy then you have assumed an intensive scanning process to determine when the security measures in the netbooks have been tampered with. I'd also be curious of the legal implications of nefarious activity on state-supplied hardware... If the threat is that disobediance to the rules results in having to use a book instead of a netbook, then you've incurred the requirement to maintain multiple streams of productivity, which will ALWAYS increase man-hours spent and costs to maintain.
4) Lojacking for theft... well sure we might have some theft problems and we'd need to address that. But I think that a combination of things could be put into place to obviate the need for a lojack on each device. Police reports for real thefts for one thing (to prove you didn't just lose it) would be a start. We'd have to see how it went in a pilot program. And don't forget that since they get to keep the computer when they graduate, they'll take better care of it and will guard against theft on their own.
A suggestion of a lo-jack on the netbooks was a joke. It'd be impracticle at best. It was meant to illustrate that there would be a substantial threat of theft and little means to effectively police it. Particularly in the more crime-ridden areas of the state. And there's a case to be made that the higher crime areas would be the ones in greatest need of supplimental hardware provided to students who wouldn't otherwise be able to obtain it, AND who would be more willing to consider selling the device and claimin
Agreed - Printing is much cheaper than buying a hard bound version.
And, for those of you complaining about computers/Internet access, compare the cost of 1 semester's worth of books to the price of a cheap PC and a semester's worth of Internet access. You might be surprised. Heck, PC + Internet + printing/binding may still be significantly than my book costs some semesters - And you only have to buy the PC once (hopefully).
Wow...
You'll be buying a pc every couple of years, or at the least refreshing the OS install on most of them. And that's optomistic when you consider that the average kid is able to completely destroy a cell phone in a few short months.
You'll also be paying the licensing fees for the anti-virus, and readers, and on-line books, etc. None of that is free.
You'll pay out a ton to build the networking infrastructure in the schools to handle thousands of connections instead of the previous hundred or so.
You'll be implementing significant server hardware to maintain filesharing, backups, authentication, etc.
You'll be spending more on the internet bandwidth at the schools that's been increased exponentially.
You'll be paying for the deskside support staff to fix the PC's, either when they just die, or get corrupted or you screw them up.
You'll be paying for the network admin team that would have to be on-hand at each school.
You'll be paying for the server admins, and security admins.
You'll be paying the maintenance contracts for all the hardware/networking you have in place.
You'll be paying for the additional power/cooling costs associated with millions of additional machines online for 7+hours a day at the schools.
You'll be paying for the administration of patching and updates to the OS and every application on the machines.
You'll be paying for code integrators who are modifying the OS to harden against unintended uses, and use specific to education.
The list goes on indefinately. Every time a manager (in this case a governor) utters the phrases "All it takes..." or "We'll save 'X' dollars...", don't be skeptical. Resolve yourself completely to the certainty that there's a list of costs (s)he hasn't even begun to consider.
Nice theory. Except that it's already been proved false. Apple donated to millions of schools in the 80's, and they have what percentage of the current market share?
The economics of this proposal is compelling. If the books can be put on a netbook, I can save money day one by buying each student a cheap netbook (say $300)... My district already spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on textbooks each year. They go for something like $100 a pop. Granted, you can use them for more than one year - we generally get about 7 years of real useful life out of them. Then again, I can buy a netbook for a student, let them use it for the 4 years they are in high school, and GIVE it to them at the end and it still doesn't cost me a dime.
As a tech person you have to concede that these statements are incredibly optomistic.
...the kids don't destroy the equipment in a matter of weeks or months rather than years. ...you can get Microsoft/McAfee/Apple/Symantec/etc to provide free licensing for the required products. ...you can come up with a method of securing the OS against "unintended uses". ...you lo-jack every unit to mitigate theft. ...you assume the kids will fix their own machines and you won't need to hire additional IT staff for every school. ...you assume that there are not incidental and normal hardware failures requiring repair/replacement. ...you increase the infrastructure in every school to handle the thousands of connections rather than the few hundred previous connections. ...you disregard the cost for the build-out of all the hard LAN connections, or the purchase/deployment of WiFi in the schools on a scale that can handle thousands of students. ...you obtain contractural agreement with every school districts internet provider to compound the network bandwidth many fold at little or no additional ongoing cost. ...you have a fall-back for the inevitable network failures during school hours.
The optomism is proven realistic IF:
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And that's just the top 10 off the top of my head. And it doesn't really begin to address the administrative burdens, the accounting and inventory tracking burdens, the patching and updating burdens.....
In the end the residual costs associated with the deployment of MILLIONS of machines to inherently irresponsible and destructive kids would be unparalelled. Suggesting that any of it is a 'one-time cost' is wholly false. It's an adoption of dozens of on-going costs even if you get every software vendor, hardware manufacturer, and service provider to cough up the initial investments for free. Anyone that has worked in IT in any kind of an enterprise environment could go on forever telling you of the nightmares they've faced from non-tech managers mandating tech solutions that will 'save money', without understanding of the realities in the task.
It's an age-old scenario. The manager says, "Look, it's all just three simple steps. We make a rocket, fly it to the moon, and get it and the astronauts back. How hard is that? "
The -HEAD OF THE CHURCH- is the one that ordered the fetus, and is now defending that action by any of his followers.
He defines the policies of the church. He owns the IP's that were banned. He is the one responsible for the process of using the Church's staff and computers to edit wiki so that only positive things are said about his church. What he ordered and the policies that he upholds is precisely the scope of this discussion.
If that's not enough of a warning flag about this guy, he then correlates getting his hand slapped for abuse of a public information system to the systematic attempt to highlight, humiliate, issolate and ultimately eradicate an entire religion.
If anything, the CoS is being punishemed for censoring others. This isnt a case of censorship against The Church of Scientology.
Censorship suggests that a person or group is not allowed to say what they wish. The Church of Scientology had that ability. They could have outlined factual information about their church in the appropriate places on Wiki. But they abused the system and used it has a propoganda tool, editing the contributions of others to further their own agenda.
Another thing to note is that Wiki is specifically meant and designed to be an apolitical, unbiased, and nuetral publication. Everyone agrees to those terms when they post there. Everyone can openly edit so long as they dont hamper the ability for the facts to be presented. CoS chose to disregard those terms and edit out any facts that shed them in an unfavorable light (of which there are plenty of choices).
Wiki isnt an advertising service, no matter how much these people seem to think it is. It is for the passage of information, ALL information, whether favorable to them or not.
You do realize that everything you're describing can be applied to pretty much any church, right?
- Teaching you what the *right* way of doing something is.
- Teaching you to resist being steared away.
- Teaching you that attempts to meet a middle-ground are attempts to corrupt you.
What do you think Confession and Penance are if not a judgement and punishment for personality flaw in a non-state court (albeit a court of 1).
No, it means they have to use other IP addresses. It's stupid of Wikipedia to think this stops anything.
By this line of reasoning, its stupid of me to put a lock on my house. After all, if a burgler realy wants to rob me he'll find a way in, so what's the point in trying to stop him...
The (justifiable) effort by Wikipedia is not an unrealistic hope that the Church of Scientology will just give up and slink off to the shadows. It's an effort to mitigate and slow the effects of the (hopefully few) people within that organization that are abusing the purpose of Wikipedia for their own agenda. And repeated abuses after this effort may well require additional efforts.
A service like Wiki can't just throw their hands up and allow the abuses, reasoning that they will never actually stop it all. That would be as contrary to their interests as banning all edits from all IPs in the world.
They aren't really addicted to the game
Your title suggests that people who play the games aren't addicted to them. You make no effort to define "They". Being that there are no people addicted to the games, the only other group left that has been discussed by you would be "People who play video games".
They are just losers who have no satisfaction in real life. The easy successes and minor penalty for failure make the game world more attractive than real life.
As "They" was taken to mean "people who play video games", and this interpretation is reinforced by the blanket assessment that follows about the game itself, you appear to be asserting that all "people who play video games" are losers who "have no satisfaction in real life".
In that interpretation, you were denegrating all people who play video games (who number in the tens of millions). You say people aren't addicted to the games, so how can I respond with a statement suggesting that you were targeting only those people addicted to the games?
Maybe you should present your statements with clarity to avoid people filling in the vaccuum that is your case with speculation and interpretation.
As opposed to the losers who troll /. seeking oppurtunity to anonymously belittle and degrade millions of strangers based on ignorant stereotypes.
There's an obvious stereotype of gamers that they are weak minded idiots addicted to computer games. They are either pasty-faced pimpled teenage geeks or fat 30+ social rejects who still live with their parents. In whatever case, they must not be able to handle real life, or can't control their emotions, and fall victim to these addictive games designed to ruin their lives. But the reality is more people in America play computer games than not. (http://www.npd.com/press/releases/press_090520.html) In fact, more people play video games than go out to movies. And these gamers aren't just shriveling up in their parent's basements.
Considering this stereotype, how many people like Curt Schilling and Doug Glanville (MLB players, http://www.boston.com/news/globe/living/articles/2003/12/04/schillings_got_his_online_game_face_on/)would openly admit to playing MMO's?
Consider further the impact of that information becoming public on the playability of MMO's for celebrities. Would you risk having your anonymous personal entertainment fall prey to the same stalkers and paparazi-type wacko's constantly hassling you like they do when you leave your house? Or would you keep the fact that you play as closely held as possible so that you had some avenue of socialization in your life that was genuine, instead of the ass-kissing and intrusion that you consistently face in real life?
There are many many famous people who play. I posted a few with evidence here already. But in the same position I'd keep my mouth shut as most of them do.
I know of a famous person who played Everquest. That person's ID got out, and they ended up quitting because of it. The enjoyment of the game was completely ruined when their identity was revealed.
When you start thinking in these terms its easy to reconcile that there are plenty of people that lead perfectly pruductive and healthy lives that -also- play computer games. It is not the games themselves that are a destructive force in some lives. It is the addictive personality of some people who play games that is used as ammo to demonize that which some others are ignorant of.
Curt Schilling (Major Leage Baseball Pitcher) plays(ed) EverquestEverquest2. http://www.joystiq.com/2006/03/16/curt-schilling-looses-the-mitt-for-the-ole-mouse-and-keyboard/
Dave Chappelle the comedian plays Warcraft. http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/2-23-2006-89653.asp
Eric Bloom from Blue Oyster Cult plays Warcraft. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Bloom
The prolific fantasy artist Ruth Thompson plays Warcraft (and I can tell you she is CERTAINLY not wanted in the attractiveness category) : http://www.tarnishedimages.com/
I've also read that that author Michael Moorcock plays WoW. I've heard rumor of Steven King. I know with certainty about 4 semi-pro hockey players, and rumor of 4 more pro hockey players.
This list could continue indefinately. And these are just the ones that I knew of offhand that were easy to find evidence for. The point being that there are plenty of very successful, influential, wealthy and talented people who find the escape of an online fantasy world to be not only entertaining, but also a healthy distraction from the pressures in their every day lives.
I'm sure there are hundreds of household names that could be added to the list, if not thousands. But would you make it public knowledge if you knew you'd be judged, or worse, stalked, in the one place you might be able to socialize regularly with total anonymity? Especially if you literally couldn't leave your home with people taking photos of your every step?
The kind of people who get consumed by online engagement usually aren't very successful in real life anyway. If they become successful in real life following a WoW addiction, very often it's specifically because they now value the real world so much more after being essentially isolated from it.
Well, ... yes. And the same could be said of anyone 'consumed' by any thing. Except of course someone who is consumed by a need to achieve success in real life.
A person can become addicted to food. Does it logically follow that food is inherently addictive or purposefully manufactured to be so? No. A person can become addicted to sex, or tv, or gardening. But it does not mean that those things are addictive. It means that the person has succumbed to a compulsive behavior.
I agree with you completely that a person who is succeptible to a WoW addiction is also succeptible to any number of addictions. If they allow an online computer game to control their lives it's my opinion that are just as likely to allow alcohol or drugs or porn to do so equally.
You see the stories about how WoW is demonized when a kid who is allowed to sit issolated in his room for months on end kills himself. But I would place even money that if it wasn't WoW that led him down that path of issolation and self-destruction, it'd be something else. There was a serious problem there already (that went unnoticed and/or unaddressed by the loved ones...) .
I play WoW with my wife, and my two sons. I introduced her to EverQuest, which we played together for 5 year.
/. using sophmoric humor and ridiculing total strangers to achieve some validation or approval, and attempting to get +1 to your Karma rating. I am enjoying the company of my whole family in a cooperative activity several times a week, and having fun playing a game, (and getting laid), and doing it at the expense of no one....
You're here on