I'll pile on here. Your job is no longer to be the sysadmin, or even the BOFH - your job is to develop the projects, policies, etc. that the IT staff will implement, oversee the implementations, and ensure they transition to operations successfully - all the while planning the next move. You shouldn't need admin rights in an organization that size.
You SHOULD, however, have authority over the people doing the implementation and administration. If they work for you, or you have significant enough levers on them, you can exercise oversight. As another respondent mentioned, getting read access is simple, and I agree with that completely. Setting up a lab where you get deity rights is simple enough, and you should do that in your first year, but for the operational environment, you shouldn't ever have to sudo. You now have people to do that.
Like the NoDeerZone.com guy said... what a useless app. There's no enforcement capability here, no laws behind it, and no way to let a drone pilot know that the airspace they're flying through is "banned", with no penalties.
This is worse than one of those 2000s dot-coms with no product - this is something that will give people false hope. I call that fraud - maybe their local prosecutors will too.
The oddest thing I've written - code that crashed, deliberately, in different ways based on use selection.
I was working a project where we built atop an "abstraction layer" designed to insulate us from OS changes (this was the 90s, such things were in vogue). The team doing the abstraction layer, at another site, rolled out a new version. The best I can say of it is, it compiled.
Different parts of my code started exploding. Almost literally - I had one test case cause a kernel panic in AIX, which was no small challenge. Of course, it was all blamed on my "bad code practices" and couldn't POSSIBLY be flaws in their update.
Over the course of two weeks of core dump analysis, discussion with the AIX team at IBM, and heated exchanges going up the chain of command, I crafted a 200-line program which three different options to crash the system. Pick your choice, guaranteed crash, including the kernel panic. Once I delivered THAT through channels, they got silent quick. It took them another month to fix their internal bugs and re-deliver. The memory leak I found in that version required another "prove it!" program, but my management had my back by then.
I recall a rash of home burglaries when a certain company in Florida was using cheap materials under the siding, before the inner walls were finished, where burglars were removing the siding, punching through the outer walls, opening doors from the inside and making off with copper piping, wiring, and appliances. They were keeping track of the progress of the new homes and would wait until the appliances were installed before going in at night and removing them. They were even replacing the siding to make it harder for security to notice the holes until the work crews showed up to finish the drywall and install carpet.
An iOS, and Android app for tablets and phones, Simple Physics works very well to educate kids on forces, leverage, relative strength, etc. Build a bridge and drop rocks on it to see how many it can hold. Build a dam to withstand a flooding river. Build a shelter to withstand a bomb blast, all from the same simple "wooden" materials. My kids play this for hours when I let them.
There's also an excellent Wind Tunnel app for iOS that acts as a simple 2-D wind tunnel, with particle streams, smoke, pressure differentiation, etc.
It's the rolling bags of charts they have to carry with them whenever they fly. There are regulations that specify what charts they have to carry; all in all, a "Jep Bag" is about 35 pounds, and both pilots carry one. If they're using a Electronic Flight Bag app for the iPad, that's a pretty straightforward conversion of mass and very specific savings.
Consider setting up several servers and GlusterFS, auto-replicating the data when it's mounted and presenting a infield shared file system. You can run CentOS or RHEL6 for the OS, and the FS will take care of data persistence, replication, and presenting a CIFS or NFS view.
I wear a mechanical autowinder with a window on the front showing the grasshopper gear working, and a clear back, showing all the autowinder and all the other mechanical beauty. Muy steampunk.
For a more high-tech device, I'd just go with an iPod nano watch, with the clock screensaver. Touch it and it lights up with the time, and run headphones up your sleeve to listen to the music unobtrusively:-)
And most of those founding fathers were there when the US Navy was established to protect our trade and coasts, and agreed to it. As well as the Marine Corps, our first "expeditionary" capability derived from the Navy.
We had an advantage - we weren't in Europe surrounded by a bunch of historically hostile Powers. We had Canada to the north, with negligible offensive capability, and to the south and west were bordered by natives and weak colonies. A standing army wasn't needed. By 1812, we had one and we'd keep it forever - we realized the limitations of the "well-regulated militia" Teancum refers to.
It wasn't that long ago we had three powers openly espousing their intention to dominate their neighbors, and then the world - Germany, Japan, and the USSR. WWII reduced the open militarism of the first two, and the following decades of Cold War, however expensive and bloody in proxy fights, didn't not result in global domination by the USSR (or, by the USA, which has NEVER espoused a mission to dominate our neighbors, Monroe Doctrine notwhithstanding). We're not that far from military brutalism in the world today - just look at Sudan. The armies of the so-called Western powers exist mostly to defend themselves by deterring others from frontal warfare, and are succeeding, as shown by the fact that terrorism is the weapon of choice by hostile parties, instead of frontal warfare.
Or mooch off the rest of society, or spend your time scheming to increase your own power and influence instead of working your way up in society while having to provide for your own needs and those of your family.
Agreed. I carry my own laptop and the work laptop when I travel. The work laptop is imaged, controlled, and dedicated to work, and I don't do ANYTHING not work-related on it. If I want to video chat with my wife and kids from across the country, I do that on my home laptop.
Do NOT screw around with these machines. If you work for my company and it's discovered you've done something like this, for any reason, you're gone, and they're going to dissect the machine and see if you were careless with company confidential material, or if you used peer-to-peer software, or anything else that would put their data at risk. Porn, gambling, or other similar behavior is an escort-you-from-the-building offense if done on work systems.
It only takes one breach to make companies paranoid, and most have had that breach. Don't be tempted - be responsible.
We've been building a suite of tools using Django that combine near-real-time event processing and offline analytics. It's been very useful and flexible; the data model abstraction is clean, and we can target different databases with a couple of lines of config file change. We're integrating some Javascript and other visualization tools in our UIs, and finding it pretty easy to support in the Django framework. Performance scales with resources fairly linearly, the overhead has been very manageable, and it integrates into almost any security framework. I've seen nothing to convince me we need to look at a different framework.
It's not the usability and ease of use - it's stupid crap like removing the ability to right-click and get a menu of things to do with that menu item, instead of just having it kicked off... it's burying the UI customization where it can't be found easily, and removing the easy tailoring options in favor of the "Unity" standard.
Correct. Falcon 9 was designed to be man-rated, but SpaceX isn't spending the money to jump through NASA's hoops until they have more of a hope of a contract for human launch services. Man rating is a high enough hurdle that LM and Boeing have refrained from man rating the Delta IV or Atlas V on their own nickels.
I was working in the first computer store in my hometown and bought it (using my wages - heh). This and Archon... I lost entire weeks to the two of them.
Someone should be auditing Apache and Linux, and it had better be the vendors making the cash off it. If Red Hat and the others aren't reviewing the code base regularly, I want to know what my support contract's paying for. I should receive an assurance that the system has been audited for most known vulnerabilities, and every patch should have eyes on it (besides the maintainer's) that look for obvious things (buffer overflows, SQL injection vulnerabilities) and oddness (the nightmare of a multi-patch Easter Egg full of badness from a malicious source).
That last bit is one of the things I have to fight most when recommending Open Source to non-techies. I've had them talk about the Jurassic Park scenario, where someone embeds lots of littls things in the code and then they know how to trigger a catastrophic reaction. The easy security vulnerabilities are treatable with monitoring and audits - it's an order of magnitude harder to audit a whole change trail.
YOU may not need a book to know this. but there are intelligent-in-their-area bean-counters who get sold on these things at major companies every year. THEY need this book, and as responsible techies, it's our job to make sure they have it. Remember, if it's in a book, it's not just OUR opinion - it's Official:)
One of the things that the metrics can hide, though, is the effect of institutionalizing reviews. If you're on a long project with the same team, everyone begins to perform to a certain level and the code reviews seem to lose their importance. It's ironic, it is.
If you have new folks join the team, though, it usually only takes a few code reviews for them to "get it" and figure out the level of expertise expected.
On my favorite project so far, we had full code reviews for the first phase, and dialed them back to "peer reviews" requiring only 2-3 folks to do online review of the code units. Critical units were also reviewed by the lead developer and systems engineer responsible for that component. It was very much worth it.
"On the other hand, the flight computer has the experience of every simulated and real emergency any plane has ever been through"
No, it doesn't. The flight computer has the control laws of the airplane. It's not an AI - it doesn't learn, although it can be updated. Avionics and airframe manufacturers are always learning more about their planes, and these lead to tweaks in fly-by-wire systems, but the plane doesn't "learn" or gain "experience".
You seem ignorant of the degree to which professional commercial pilots get torture-tested in simulators. FlightSafety International does a multi-million dollar business every year training corporate pilots in handling emergencies, and each of the major airlines in the US and Europe operates their own simulation centers where pilots have to be re-certified every six months or so. They may not live through actual emergencies often, but they go through simulated ones in fully accurate cockpits on motion bases with good graphics outside. Check out http://www.flightsafety.com/fs_service_simulation_systems.php to see what they can do.
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I'll pile on here. Your job is no longer to be the sysadmin, or even the BOFH - your job is to develop the projects, policies, etc. that the IT staff will implement, oversee the implementations, and ensure they transition to operations successfully - all the while planning the next move. You shouldn't need admin rights in an organization that size.
You SHOULD, however, have authority over the people doing the implementation and administration. If they work for you, or you have significant enough levers on them, you can exercise oversight. As another respondent mentioned, getting read access is simple, and I agree with that completely. Setting up a lab where you get deity rights is simple enough, and you should do that in your first year, but for the operational environment, you shouldn't ever have to sudo. You now have people to do that.
Like the NoDeerZone.com guy said... what a useless app. There's no enforcement capability here, no laws behind it, and no way to let a drone pilot know that the airspace they're flying through is "banned", with no penalties.
This is worse than one of those 2000s dot-coms with no product - this is something that will give people false hope. I call that fraud - maybe their local prosecutors will too.
Ditto. Hit the job boards and find somewhere competent. The people you're working for will be out of business soon at this rate, anyway.
The oddest thing I've written - code that crashed, deliberately, in different ways based on use selection.
I was working a project where we built atop an "abstraction layer" designed to insulate us from OS changes (this was the 90s, such things were in vogue). The team doing the abstraction layer, at another site, rolled out a new version. The best I can say of it is, it compiled.
Different parts of my code started exploding. Almost literally - I had one test case cause a kernel panic in AIX, which was no small challenge. Of course, it was all blamed on my "bad code practices" and couldn't POSSIBLY be flaws in their update.
Over the course of two weeks of core dump analysis, discussion with the AIX team at IBM, and heated exchanges going up the chain of command, I crafted a 200-line program which three different options to crash the system. Pick your choice, guaranteed crash, including the kernel panic. Once I delivered THAT through channels, they got silent quick. It took them another month to fix their internal bugs and re-deliver. The memory leak I found in that version required another "prove it!" program, but my management had my back by then.
I recall a rash of home burglaries when a certain company in Florida was using cheap materials under the siding, before the inner walls were finished, where burglars were removing the siding, punching through the outer walls, opening doors from the inside and making off with copper piping, wiring, and appliances. They were keeping track of the progress of the new homes and would wait until the appliances were installed before going in at night and removing them. They were even replacing the siding to make it harder for security to notice the holes until the work crews showed up to finish the drywall and install carpet.
An iOS, and Android app for tablets and phones, Simple Physics works very well to educate kids on forces, leverage, relative strength, etc. Build a bridge and drop rocks on it to see how many it can hold. Build a dam to withstand a flooding river. Build a shelter to withstand a bomb blast, all from the same simple "wooden" materials. My kids play this for hours when I let them.
There's also an excellent Wind Tunnel app for iOS that acts as a simple 2-D wind tunnel, with particle streams, smoke, pressure differentiation, etc.
Fun toys, and the kids learn while they play 'em.
You forgot:
6. Profit.
There will still be graphics overkill. There will also be actors "acting" and a plot that might make sense outside King George's skull.
It's the rolling bags of charts they have to carry with them whenever they fly. There are regulations that specify what charts they have to carry; all in all, a "Jep Bag" is about 35 pounds, and both pilots carry one. If they're using a Electronic Flight Bag app for the iPad, that's a pretty straightforward conversion of mass and very specific savings.
Consider setting up several servers and GlusterFS, auto-replicating the data when it's mounted and presenting a infield shared file system. You can run CentOS or RHEL6 for the OS, and the FS will take care of data persistence, replication, and presenting a CIFS or NFS view.
And it's good to see them "rewarded" for this behavior by the /. populace, and the greater Internet community at large. Bravo!
Well, yeah... he's a prolific author of heroic fantasy - you'd expect him to be sane?
I wear a mechanical autowinder with a window on the front showing the grasshopper gear working, and a clear back, showing all the autowinder and all the other mechanical beauty. Muy steampunk.
For a more high-tech device, I'd just go with an iPod nano watch, with the clock screensaver. Touch it and it lights up with the time, and run headphones up your sleeve to listen to the music unobtrusively :-)
"didn't not" == "did not" - hate when I catch that kind of thing after hitting "Submit"
And most of those founding fathers were there when the US Navy was established to protect our trade and coasts, and agreed to it. As well as the Marine Corps, our first "expeditionary" capability derived from the Navy.
We had an advantage - we weren't in Europe surrounded by a bunch of historically hostile Powers. We had Canada to the north, with negligible offensive capability, and to the south and west were bordered by natives and weak colonies. A standing army wasn't needed. By 1812, we had one and we'd keep it forever - we realized the limitations of the "well-regulated militia" Teancum refers to.
It wasn't that long ago we had three powers openly espousing their intention to dominate their neighbors, and then the world - Germany, Japan, and the USSR. WWII reduced the open militarism of the first two, and the following decades of Cold War, however expensive and bloody in proxy fights, didn't not result in global domination by the USSR (or, by the USA, which has NEVER espoused a mission to dominate our neighbors, Monroe Doctrine notwhithstanding). We're not that far from military brutalism in the world today - just look at Sudan. The armies of the so-called Western powers exist mostly to defend themselves by deterring others from frontal warfare, and are succeeding, as shown by the fact that terrorism is the weapon of choice by hostile parties, instead of frontal warfare.
Or mooch off the rest of society, or spend your time scheming to increase your own power and influence instead of working your way up in society while having to provide for your own needs and those of your family.
Thanks for playing, troll.
Agreed. I carry my own laptop and the work laptop when I travel. The work laptop is imaged, controlled, and dedicated to work, and I don't do ANYTHING not work-related on it. If I want to video chat with my wife and kids from across the country, I do that on my home laptop.
Do NOT screw around with these machines. If you work for my company and it's discovered you've done something like this, for any reason, you're gone, and they're going to dissect the machine and see if you were careless with company confidential material, or if you used peer-to-peer software, or anything else that would put their data at risk. Porn, gambling, or other similar behavior is an escort-you-from-the-building offense if done on work systems.
It only takes one breach to make companies paranoid, and most have had that breach. Don't be tempted - be responsible.
We've been building a suite of tools using Django that combine near-real-time event processing and offline analytics. It's been very useful and flexible; the data model abstraction is clean, and we can target different databases with a couple of lines of config file change. We're integrating some Javascript and other visualization tools in our UIs, and finding it pretty easy to support in the Django framework. Performance scales with resources fairly linearly, the overhead has been very manageable, and it integrates into almost any security framework. I've seen nothing to convince me we need to look at a different framework.
It's not the usability and ease of use - it's stupid crap like removing the ability to right-click and get a menu of things to do with that menu item, instead of just having it kicked off... it's burying the UI customization where it can't be found easily, and removing the easy tailoring options in favor of the "Unity" standard.
We just rolled back...
Correct. Falcon 9 was designed to be man-rated, but SpaceX isn't spending the money to jump through NASA's hoops until they have more of a hope of a contract for human launch services. Man rating is a high enough hurdle that LM and Boeing have refrained from man rating the Delta IV or Atlas V on their own nickels.
I was working in the first computer store in my hometown and bought it (using my wages - heh). This and Archon... I lost entire weeks to the two of them.
Someone should be auditing Apache and Linux, and it had better be the vendors making the cash off it. If Red Hat and the others aren't reviewing the code base regularly, I want to know what my support contract's paying for. I should receive an assurance that the system has been audited for most known vulnerabilities, and every patch should have eyes on it (besides the maintainer's) that look for obvious things (buffer overflows, SQL injection vulnerabilities) and oddness (the nightmare of a multi-patch Easter Egg full of badness from a malicious source).
That last bit is one of the things I have to fight most when recommending Open Source to non-techies. I've had them talk about the Jurassic Park scenario, where someone embeds lots of littls things in the code and then they know how to trigger a catastrophic reaction. The easy security vulnerabilities are treatable with monitoring and audits - it's an order of magnitude harder to audit a whole change trail.
YOU may not need a book to know this. but there are intelligent-in-their-area bean-counters who get sold on these things at major companies every year. THEY need this book, and as responsible techies, it's our job to make sure they have it. Remember, if it's in a book, it's not just OUR opinion - it's Official :)
Amen.
One of the things that the metrics can hide, though, is the effect of institutionalizing reviews. If you're on a long project with the same team, everyone begins to perform to a certain level and the code reviews seem to lose their importance. It's ironic, it is.
If you have new folks join the team, though, it usually only takes a few code reviews for them to "get it" and figure out the level of expertise expected.
On my favorite project so far, we had full code reviews for the first phase, and dialed them back to "peer reviews" requiring only 2-3 folks to do online review of the code units. Critical units were also reviewed by the lead developer and systems engineer responsible for that component. It was very much worth it.
"On the other hand, the flight computer has the experience of every simulated and real emergency any plane has ever been through"
No, it doesn't. The flight computer has the control laws of the airplane. It's not an AI - it doesn't learn, although it can be updated. Avionics and airframe manufacturers are always learning more about their planes, and these lead to tweaks in fly-by-wire systems, but the plane doesn't "learn" or gain "experience".
You seem ignorant of the degree to which professional commercial pilots get torture-tested in simulators. FlightSafety International does a multi-million dollar business every year training corporate pilots in handling emergencies, and each of the major airlines in the US and Europe operates their own simulation centers where pilots have to be re-certified every six months or so. They may not live through actual emergencies often, but they go through simulated ones in fully accurate cockpits on motion bases with good graphics outside. Check out http://www.flightsafety.com/fs_service_simulation_systems.php to see what they can do.