I don't know what kind of work you do but I for sure would seek other employment if I was asked to do a wholesale move of the systems I work on to Windows. I'd also find other work if my employer told me the only work they had for me next month was mopping the floors.
It isn't beneath me to mop the floor. If they need me to do that *today*, I will. But janitorial work won't move my career in the direction I wish to go so if that's the core work they have for me, it's time to move on.
I feel the same way about managing and/or writing code for Windows systems.
This is the 21st century. "Computer camp" means getting involved in an open source project from the comfort of your basement.
If you want to come to summer camp in the U.S., by all means do it. You'll have a blast! But if you find aspiring young programmers in camp, it'll be sheer coincidence. Camp isn't where young programmers go to aspire.
Free Speech is a human right. It's still a human right when that speech is conveyed over the Internet. To the extent that a government obstructs Internet access by its citizens, it is obstructing a human right.
In a capitalist society, human rights are about obstruction, not compulsion. The right to life does not compel a government to provide you with medical care; it merely prevents the government from obstructing your ability to otherwise obtain treatment. Likewise, the right to free speech does not compel a government to provide you with an Internet account.
Socialist societies have a different point of view. A socialist government has a compulsion to provide its citizens at least minimalist and at most egalitarian facilities for the exercise of their human rights.
But guess what? Neither socialism nor capitalism are human rights.
Why would one store customer data in any kind of non-volatile storage on an ATM machine in the first place? You can run software on the local machine without storing data. It just seems like moving the software into a VM so as not to store customer data locally is hitting a thumbtack with a sledgehammer.
Speaking as an IT manager with 15 years of experience, I've found that when IT decisions are made more than two levels removed from the staff who use the technology, they tend to drift from the users' actual need at a cost which exceeds any streamlining, consolidation of skills or similar benefit.
Outsourcing a call center is one level of removal.
Implementing an IT management chain independent of the product management chain is another level of removal.
So, you are correct that outsourcing a call center tends to have a net negative impact on a company's operation. And perhaps now you have a better understanding of why.
Many of these are all things an IT department does BADLY.
a. It is NOT the job of the IT department to streamline the business. It is the job of the IT department to facilitate computing resources for other groups within the business who find it worthwhile to streamline using computers.
b. It is NOT the job of the IT department to keep employees productive. Nor is anyone in the IT department qualified to make decisions about employee productivity outside of the department.
c. It is not the job of the IT department to set information security policy. It is the job of the IT department to educate the other groups within the business as to the security impact of candidate business choices, enforce the information security policies those educated groups ultimately select and architect the system so that divergent security policies between the groups can not damage each other.
d. It is not the job of the IT department to market the organization online. In a successful organization, the online marketing professionals sit in the marketing group. It is the IT department's job to provide computing resources, to help vet prospective vendors and, on occasion, to warn the marketing group away from kinds of computing use that could be considered unethical.
The engineering department at a TV station *IS* an IT department. They manage the electronic equipment and the maintenance of the equipment which facilitates the business. Under no circumstances should an IT department stand alone from the engineering department; IT operations is unambiguously subservient to the overall "engineering" effort.
5 usable IP's in a/30 is easy: 1 router IP and the/30 routed to it. Instead of exposing the/30 internally, expose a larger subnet where the/30 falls in the middle and use proxy arp.
I run around 40 VPS servers scattered across as many locations and service providers as I could find.
Linode has to be my favorite. 6 server locations in the U.S., U.K. and Japan. Heavily automated, so you don't spend time waiting for a system administrator to do something. Supports Debian Linux in addition to a number of others. Inexpensive. And it performs well.
I have also had solid success with: Servint GPLhost Slicehost to name a few.
1. Raised floor. 4", a short one. And get extra tiles. Tech changes and you'll need to reconfigure the room every couple years to keep up. With raised floor you can put network and power on flexible whips and move them around where you need them. This'll allow you to move desks, move computers, move everything. You're going to put holes in these tiles. Later you'll discover you need some of the holes filled in. That isn't possible. So you'll need the extra tiles to cut new.
2. Dedicated supplemental HVAC. A room full of computers will get hotter than the ordinary school HVAC can handle during the spring and fall. It'll get even hotter during the winter when the school heating system pumps out the heat. The normal solution - a thermostat-controlled duct damper - isn't going to do you much good. You need a small, inexpensive HVAC that can put out a couple tons of cooling supplementing the normal school HVAC.
3. Second dedicated HVAC for the server closet unless you're remoting the class servers in the school's IT room. In which case, make sure the school's IT room has a dedicated HVAC.
4. 200 amp subpanel in the room. You'll find you need to reconfigure the electrical when you reconfigure the room. Reconfiguring all the way back to a basement circuit breaker panel will be costly and problematic.
Foreign degrees usually get the stink eye in the U.S. -- too many shops in India and the like handing out PhD's whose recipients exhibit skills on par with one of our 2-year trade schools. A well known university (Oxford) gets respect but if the university is not known outside your country, don't hang you candidacy on the fact of having a degree.
At the U.S. Bachelor's Degree level, the main thing companies look for is whether or not you have a degree in an accredited program. It is very common for computer science workers to have gotten their degree in a random unrelated engineering field such as Mechanical Engineering. Pure science degrees are less common for CS workers but if the work is even vaguely related no hiring manager will think twice about it.
Someone fresh out with a Biology PhD looking for applied math / computer programming work is pretty weird though. Biology BS with a CS PhD sure (and not uncommon) but the Biology PhD is going to raise questions during job interviews the first half decade out of school. You're supposed to have figured out what kind of work you wanted to do before starting your PhD program and the application of biology to computer science is not obvious.
If your area of interest is machine learning, you want to be in Computer Science with an AI focus. The biology degree is either going in to biology academia or medicine.
Beyond the first half decade, no one cares. Degree? Check. Now, does he have the experience we're looking for?
Do you spend two and half hours a day in the bathroom? Do you know anybody who spends two and a half hours a day in the bathroom? Then the average human doesn't spend 7 years in the bathroom over their 75ish year lifetime.
You don't have an impressive resume? Bull. Everybody's resume is impressive for *some* job. It may not pay as much. It may have some other negative aspect. But your current job is sucking the life out of you. For an activity you'll be compelled to spend 2000 hours per year doing, would you prefer the pay or the joy?
Consider government public policy measures, such as a security check at an airport. They have a dollar cost but they also have a time cost. Walking through a metal detector has one consumes a certain number of hours of travelers' and employees' time each year. Taking off your shoes and belt, and then standing in a xray machine consumes another.
Human lifetimes correlate a little more easily with human lives than dollars do, so it makes it easier, on an emotional level, to understand the difference in policy costs in terms of the impact to human life.
You seem to be arguing that sharing between friends is OK but sharing to the whole world is problematic. What I'm saying is that it leads to the same result.
Were your position correct, "mix tapes" and the like would have been observed to have the same impact as file sharing prior to the Internet's existence, particularly with radio available to serve as a source of relatively clean copies.
At any rate, that's not what I'm arguing. What I'm arguing is that there is some level of sharing of intellectual property that a supermajority of Americans intuitively finds to be "OK." Law which criminalizes behavior within that zone is as doomed to failure as Prohibition, but not before hurting a lot of people.
I don't know if sharing between friends falls in that zone. I haven't asked. Neither have you. And for damn sure the RIAA hasn't.
The right to property is inalienable - natural, self evident and universal.
Tell that to a communist.
And what about Real Estate? The native Americans found nothing natural or self-evident in the European notion that land should be owned.
What about slaves? Ownership of other people is sufficiently self-evident to find permission and rules in the Bible.
Property is whatever our consensus as a people says it is. If we decide a song should be property then it's property. The problem comes along when the law says something out of sync with that consensus -- like asserting that not only is a song property, publicly singing it even when you paid for a copy is stealing.
let's make the assumption -- in person sharing is still just as bad.
Why would you make that assumption? Would the average man on the street think it unreasonable to make a mix tape and share copies with his friends? Would he still say "yes" if you asked if it was OK to share with his seven billion "closest" friends?
There are no moral absolutes with infringement of intellectual property. Heck, Jefferson thought it shouldn't even be allowed to exist. So, poll the people. Find out where the people draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable copying and derivative work. And then set the law's boundary there.
I think you'll be surprised: folks are smart enough to "get it" that anonymous file sharing is "bad" while friend sharing is "good." A law which respects that prevailing opinion will have few enough offenders to be enforceable.
shoplifting is still primarily enforced by the shop owner
It starts with the shop owner. Who hands it over to police who generally spend a lot more than the stolen goods were worth punishing the offender. If it relied on the shop owner to do the follow through, they wouldn't because it isn't cost effective. And then you'd have a plague of shoplifters who know they can get away with it.
Shoplifting is a misdemeanor because public order is not achieved through civil torts alone. Infringement via filesharing has become the petty offense of the 21st century. Sooner or later it will need the same treatment.
Before that can happen, the notion of infringement must be revised to something that isn't so expansive as to criminalize ordinary and reasonable behavior. We need a more comprehensive view of the unwaivable rights of the owner of one copy of a work before we can clearly understand when those rights have been exceeded to the copyright owner's detriment. Right now it's getting the Prohibition treatment and that's not sustainable either.
The prototype wasn't built for $7000 and the team isn't taking orders with a promise to deliver at $7000. When (if) that changes it will then be time to compare it with the Focus, the Volt and the Leaf.
Don't get me wrong: I applaud their ambition and as long as it could handle 50 mile round trips and 60 mph speeds I'd would definitely buy a street-legal EV for $7000. But they're not there yet and it's neither a short path nor a sure thing from where they are today.
I didn't say that. I'm very hopeful. And if it ever comes out and it costs anything close to $7000, I'll very likely buy one. But criticizing the Focus is as premature as criticizing Solaris in 1991 would have been. Sure Linux makes Solaris look silly now, but that's now...
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I don't know what kind of work you do but I for sure would seek other employment if I was asked to do a wholesale move of the systems I work on to Windows. I'd also find other work if my employer told me the only work they had for me next month was mopping the floors.
It isn't beneath me to mop the floor. If they need me to do that *today*, I will. But janitorial work won't move my career in the direction I wish to go so if that's the core work they have for me, it's time to move on.
I feel the same way about managing and/or writing code for Windows systems.
Since when is Google in the business of building web sites for small businesses?
This is the 21st century. "Computer camp" means getting involved in an open source project from the comfort of your basement.
If you want to come to summer camp in the U.S., by all means do it. You'll have a blast! But if you find aspiring young programmers in camp, it'll be sheer coincidence. Camp isn't where young programmers go to aspire.
In Soviet Russia, the Internet has a right to access you.
Free Speech is a human right. It's still a human right when that speech is conveyed over the Internet. To the extent that a government obstructs Internet access by its citizens, it is obstructing a human right.
In a capitalist society, human rights are about obstruction, not compulsion. The right to life does not compel a government to provide you with medical care; it merely prevents the government from obstructing your ability to otherwise obtain treatment. Likewise, the
right to free speech does not compel a government to provide you with an Internet account.
Socialist societies have a different point of view. A socialist government has a compulsion to provide its citizens at least minimalist and at most egalitarian facilities for the exercise of their human rights.
But guess what? Neither socialism nor capitalism are human rights.
Why would one store customer data in any kind of non-volatile storage on an ATM machine in the first place? You can run software on the local machine without storing data. It just seems like moving the software into a VM so as not to store customer data locally is hitting a thumbtack with a sledgehammer.
Speaking as an IT manager with 15 years of experience, I've found that when IT decisions are made more than two levels removed from the staff who use the technology, they tend to drift from the users' actual need at a cost which exceeds any streamlining, consolidation of skills or similar benefit.
Outsourcing a call center is one level of removal.
Implementing an IT management chain independent of the product management chain is another level of removal.
So, you are correct that outsourcing a call center tends to have a net negative impact on a company's operation. And perhaps now you have a better understanding of why.
Many of these are all things an IT department does BADLY.
a. It is NOT the job of the IT department to streamline the business. It is the job of the IT department to facilitate computing resources for other groups within the business who find it worthwhile to streamline using computers.
b. It is NOT the job of the IT department to keep employees productive. Nor is anyone in the IT department qualified to make decisions about employee productivity outside of the department.
c. It is not the job of the IT department to set information security policy. It is the job of the IT department to educate the other groups within the business as to the security impact of candidate business choices, enforce the information security policies those educated groups ultimately select and architect the system so that divergent security policies between the groups can not damage each other.
d. It is not the job of the IT department to market the organization online. In a successful organization, the online marketing professionals sit in the marketing group. It is the IT department's job to provide computing resources, to help vet prospective vendors and, on occasion, to warn the marketing group away from kinds of computing use that could be considered unethical.
The engineering department at a TV station *IS* an IT department. They manage the electronic equipment and the maintenance of the equipment which facilitates the business. Under no circumstances should an IT department stand alone from the engineering department; IT operations is unambiguously subservient to the overall "engineering" effort.
Second servint. I've been a customer for 10 years and a VPS customer for 2. Never disappointed. VPSes hosted in DC and LA.
5 usable IP's in a /30 is easy: 1 router IP and the /30 routed to it. Instead of exposing the /30 internally, expose a larger subnet where the /30 falls in the middle and use proxy arp.
13 usable IPs in a /29 is more of a challenge. ;-)
I run around 40 VPS servers scattered across as many locations and service providers as I could find.
Linode has to be my favorite. 6 server locations in the U.S., U.K. and Japan. Heavily automated, so you don't spend time waiting for a system administrator to do something. Supports Debian Linux in addition to a number of others. Inexpensive. And it performs well.
I have also had solid success with:
Servint
GPLhost
Slicehost
to name a few.
1. Raised floor. 4", a short one. And get extra tiles. Tech changes and you'll need to reconfigure the room every couple years to keep up. With raised floor you can put network and power on flexible whips and move them around where you need them. This'll allow you to move desks, move computers, move everything. You're going to put holes in these tiles. Later you'll discover you need some of the holes filled in. That isn't possible. So you'll need the extra tiles to cut new.
2. Dedicated supplemental HVAC. A room full of computers will get hotter than the ordinary school HVAC can handle during the spring and fall. It'll get even hotter during the winter when the school heating system pumps out the heat. The normal solution - a thermostat-controlled duct damper - isn't going to do you much good. You need a small, inexpensive HVAC that can put out a couple tons of cooling supplementing the normal school HVAC.
3. Second dedicated HVAC for the server closet unless you're remoting the class servers in the school's IT room. In which case, make sure the school's IT room has a dedicated HVAC.
4. 200 amp subpanel in the room. You'll find you need to reconfigure the electrical when you reconfigure the room. Reconfiguring all the way back to a basement circuit breaker panel will be costly and problematic.
tail -f /var/log/messages
In mysql? How?
Computer Science IS NOT about number crunching. Beyond high school algebra it only crosses paths with Mathematics in some very specialized niches.
If PhD biology is heavy on the math then it surely bears no relationship with computer science.
Foreign degrees usually get the stink eye in the U.S. -- too many shops in India and the like handing out PhD's whose recipients exhibit skills on par with one of our 2-year trade schools. A well known university (Oxford) gets respect but if the university is not known outside your country, don't hang you candidacy on the fact of having a degree.
At the U.S. Bachelor's Degree level, the main thing companies look for is whether or not you have a degree in an accredited program. It is very common for computer science workers to have gotten their degree in a random unrelated engineering field such as Mechanical Engineering. Pure science degrees are less common for CS workers but if the work is even vaguely related no hiring manager will think twice about it.
Someone fresh out with a Biology PhD looking for applied math / computer programming work is pretty weird though. Biology BS with a CS PhD sure (and not uncommon) but the Biology PhD is going to raise questions during job interviews the first half decade out of school. You're supposed to have figured out what kind of work you wanted to do before starting your PhD program and the application of biology to computer science is not obvious.
If your area of interest is machine learning, you want to be in Computer Science with an AI focus. The biology degree is either going in to biology academia or medicine.
Beyond the first half decade, no one cares. Degree? Check. Now, does he have the experience we're looking for?
Do you spend two and half hours a day in the bathroom?
Do you know anybody who spends two and a half hours a day in the bathroom?
Then the average human doesn't spend 7 years in the bathroom over their 75ish year lifetime.
Exactly right.
You don't have an impressive resume? Bull. Everybody's resume is impressive for *some* job. It may not pay as much. It may have some other negative aspect. But your current job is sucking the life out of you. For an activity you'll be compelled to spend 2000 hours per year doing, would you prefer the pay or the joy?
It's just you.
Consider government public policy measures, such as a security check at an airport. They have a dollar cost but they also have a time cost. Walking through a metal detector has one consumes a certain number of hours of travelers' and employees' time each year. Taking off your shoes and belt, and then standing in a xray machine consumes another.
Human lifetimes correlate a little more easily with human lives than dollars do, so it makes it easier, on an emotional level, to understand the difference in policy costs in terms of the impact to human life.
If a waking lifetime is around 450,000 hours then at 1,200,000,000 hours Angry Birds consumes nearly 2,700 lifetimes per year.
You seem to be arguing that sharing between friends is OK but sharing to the whole world is problematic. What I'm saying is that it leads to the same result.
Were your position correct, "mix tapes" and the like would have been observed to have the same impact as file sharing prior to the Internet's existence, particularly with radio available to serve as a source of relatively clean copies.
At any rate, that's not what I'm arguing. What I'm arguing is that there is some level of sharing of intellectual property that a supermajority of Americans intuitively finds to be "OK." Law which criminalizes behavior within that zone is as doomed to failure as Prohibition, but not before hurting a lot of people.
I don't know if sharing between friends falls in that zone. I haven't asked. Neither have you. And for damn sure the RIAA hasn't.
The right to property is inalienable - natural, self evident and universal.
Tell that to a communist.
And what about Real Estate? The native Americans found nothing natural or self-evident in the European notion that land should be owned.
What about slaves? Ownership of other people is sufficiently self-evident to find permission and rules in the Bible.
Property is whatever our consensus as a people says it is. If we decide a song should be property then it's property. The problem comes along when the law says something out of sync with that consensus -- like asserting that not only is a song property, publicly singing it even when you paid for a copy is stealing.
let's make the assumption -- in person sharing is still just as bad.
Why would you make that assumption? Would the average man on the street think it unreasonable to make a mix tape and share copies with his friends? Would he still say "yes" if you asked if it was OK to share with his seven billion "closest" friends?
There are no moral absolutes with infringement of intellectual property. Heck, Jefferson thought it shouldn't even be allowed to exist. So, poll the people. Find out where the people draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable copying and derivative work. And then set the law's boundary there.
I think you'll be surprised: folks are smart enough to "get it" that anonymous file sharing is "bad" while friend sharing is "good." A law which respects that prevailing opinion will have few enough offenders to be enforceable.
shoplifting is still primarily enforced by the shop owner
It starts with the shop owner. Who hands it over to police who generally spend a lot more than the stolen goods were worth punishing the offender. If it relied on the shop owner to do the follow through, they wouldn't because it isn't cost effective. And then you'd have a plague of shoplifters who know they can get away with it.
Shoplifting is a misdemeanor because public order is not achieved through civil torts alone. Infringement via filesharing has become the petty offense of the 21st century. Sooner or later it will need the same treatment.
Before that can happen, the notion of infringement must be revised to something that isn't so expansive as to criminalize ordinary and reasonable behavior. We need a more comprehensive view of the unwaivable rights of the owner of one copy of a work before we can clearly understand when those rights have been exceeded to the copyright owner's detriment. Right now it's getting the Prohibition treatment and that's not sustainable either.
The prototype wasn't built for $7000 and the team isn't taking orders with a promise to deliver at $7000. When (if) that changes it will then be time to compare it with the Focus, the Volt and the Leaf.
Don't get me wrong: I applaud their ambition and as long as it could handle 50 mile round trips and 60 mph speeds I'd would definitely buy a street-legal EV for $7000. But they're not there yet and it's neither a short path nor a sure thing from where they are today.
I don't expect the final car to be very good.
I didn't say that. I'm very hopeful. And if it ever comes out and it costs anything close to $7000, I'll very likely buy one. But criticizing the Focus is as premature as criticizing Solaris in 1991 would have been. Sure Linux makes Solaris look silly now, but that's now...