As a current government contractor I can say with some authority that at least in my little nitch just about any code you demo to a manager and get even a mild grunt of afrimation from is both going to be used and expected to work as if you had spent 4 months carefully crafting it, refining it, load testing it, and what not.
I've found that there's a real lack of technical savvy in the people who actually make the decisions about how to do things, and what to do. Most of the time contractors bid on a problem, get the problem, and then figure out what the real problems are, and then have to pitch a solution to the "real" problems to managment. It's pretty rare that their vision of the solution really jives with what some practical and scalable solutions might be.
I'd also say that there is an appalling lack of automation in many government systems. Even routine things such as "is the disk filled" or "is a mission critical webserver up" are novel advances when automated.
But even given all of this, my experience has been that most contractors are putting out very high quality work compared to Federal FTEs, and that usually after a year or two of wrestling with the existing architecture contractor built systems tend to be fairly good.
Well for less rich organizations out there, bringing one service down on a box is much preferable to bringing THEM ALL DOWN. Some of our servers run our email & our websites and others run our development enviornments and our intranets. The ability to bring one service down and then back up is much preferable to having to reboot the whole box.
Check out the website I work on, http://Coastwatch.noaa.gov. (There is a search interface at http://coastwatch.noaa.gov/interface/interface.htm l) We do near real time processing of Modis data and a host of other satellites. MODIS is a joint operation between NOAA & NASA.
Ironically I have a good friend who works at one of the largest pron and sex toy websites in the world. (Think of the garden of Eden) They actually seem pretty worried about this sort of thing. My buddy got warned about "spending too much time instant messeging his friends" and he basically was given the impression that they were monitoring his communications and what he was doing on the companies internet dime.
Hey Pr0n didn't fuel the expansion of VCRs, CDs,DVDs, and internet video streaming just for their employees to dick around with their time...
Honestly I think that sounds like a great idea. I wish more municipalities would do that. I would think that there would a pretty big draw to any locality that had that kind of civic infrastructure. I know here at my job we are still waiting after 4 months to get a fiber connection laid or some dark fiber lit up between two buildings, and these are federal buildings! I think it could be a hard sell to your average tax payer though. I guess the argument could be boiled down to "Do you think local governments should make improvements to draw buisnesses to your area." I think these days most people would vote yes, but I think at the same time the naysayers would point to this as another "internet boom idea." But you'ld have my tax dollars. =)
Well there are other reasons to want to work from home as well. For instance when you work with a production system for any sort of data manipulation there are often access restrictions. This is starting to become a much bigger deal for me. The agency I work for is considering severely limiting outside access to any of our boxes from outside our network, even development boxes. However the precursor data for our processing is publicly available to me at home. If I could have the bandwidth to pull in the raw data I could run a local development box at home and continue development even when I can't get to work. (I work around DC and today for instance is a snow emergency day.) I'm not saying that fiber is for everyone, but there are those of us out there who are interested and aren't waiting for prices to drop to $50 a month. =)
I can tell you why I would want it. I work for the government as a contractor processing satellite data. The data files are HUGE, routinely over 250 megs a file, with 20+ files a day. A cable modem or dsl line simply doesn't have enough bandwidth for me to work from home effectively. Sure I can SSH into a box at work or whatever, but after all the tcp wrappers, ipchains, dns, etc, there is a noticeable lag when I work with things in X-windows. I don't know what minority of the tech population is also in my shoes, but for us fiber to the home would be great, and something I'd be willing to pay a premium for.
I happen to know the guy who wrote Snood
on
Snood, the Simple Game
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The author of Snood, Dave Dobson, is a professor where I went to College. From what I understand from talking with him and people who asked him about it in school, he wrote it just for fun and figured he might make a couple hundred bucks over the lifetime of the game from the few people gracious enough to register the game. Its hard to believe how the game has taken off. I think this is more a triumph of the internet and the ways an uncontrolled distribution channel can let just about anyone into the marketplace. There are plenty of markets where cost of getting into the distribution channels alone is enough to stifle meaningful competition. Just read Charles H. Ferguson's High Stakes, No Prisoners for an example.
I think another thing to consider is that the internet doesn't just allow for originality or quality but also popularity. I think its sobering to realize that even in the anti-clique of the open source movement there is a lot pressure to conform to certain world views and also to tear down what's popular. (I'm sure everyone who posts to slashdot with a @aol.com address can attest to that) I'm sure there are games with better graphics and maybe better game play than snood out there, but I think a lot of peoples reflex reaction is to attack snood simply because its not necessarily the very first game of its kind. The problem is that without popular products, even ones that are not the best of their breed, some markets will never get wide exposure. I think that most genre's of software benefit immeasurably from exposure, it almost always spurs competition and I'm sure there will be bigger,faster,stronger snood that I'll hear about on slashdot in another year.
Umm. I work at NOAA and we Transmit 500-1 gigabyte files routinely, you can try tranporting that data over a modem if you want, but trust me the interent is critical when it comes to transporting satellite data files...
I think you're living in a glass house if you think that people shouldn't test the security of your privacy. If people simply assumed that their freedoms were protected, and they were not, far more damage could and probably would be done.
People need to take responsibility for their own security, granted, but in a public enviornment such as the internet it takes legions of smart skilled people to ensure basic rights. Figuring out problems in the system is vital to the continued community and connection we all enjoy at places like slashdot.
It is very important for ethical people to examine the security of public venues, when you go to a concert you want it swept for bombs, when you have nuclear weapons, you want them safe guarded, locked. Certainly we have people governments appoint for these things, but in a non-govermental society like the internet we must rely on WhiteHats to help ensure our safety, privacy, and freedoms.
You can't assume people are ethical in such an anonymous and large group, you have to assume they aren't and be plesently surprised when they are.
Slashdot Mirror
https://www.mapbox.com/
Not exactly proect management oriented, but could be an easy bolt on to Trello or your project management tool of choice
Friend Speaks my mind.
As a current government contractor I can say with some authority that at least in my little nitch just about any code you demo to a manager and get even a mild grunt of afrimation from is both going to be used and expected to work as if you had spent 4 months carefully crafting it, refining it, load testing it, and what not.
I've found that there's a real lack of technical savvy in the people who actually make the decisions about how to do things, and what to do. Most of the time contractors bid on a problem, get the problem, and then figure out what the real problems are, and then have to pitch a solution to the "real" problems to managment. It's pretty rare that their vision of the solution really jives with what some practical and scalable solutions might be.
I'd also say that there is an appalling lack of automation in many government systems. Even routine things such as "is the disk filled" or "is a mission critical webserver up" are novel advances when automated.
But even given all of this, my experience has been that most contractors are putting out very high quality work compared to Federal FTEs, and that usually after a year or two of wrestling with the existing architecture contractor built systems tend to be fairly good.
Well for less rich organizations out there, bringing one service down on a box is much preferable to bringing THEM ALL DOWN. Some of our servers run our email & our websites and others run our development enviornments and our intranets. The ability to bring one service down and then back up is much preferable to having to reboot the whole box.
=)
Check out the website I work on, .m l)
http://Coastwatch.noaa.gov
(There is a search interface at http://coastwatch.noaa.gov/interface/interface.ht
We do near real time processing of Modis data and a host of other satellites. MODIS is a joint operation between NOAA & NASA.
Ironically I have a good friend who works at one of the largest pron and sex toy websites in the world. (Think of the garden of Eden) They actually seem pretty worried about this sort of thing. My buddy got warned about "spending too much time instant messeging his friends" and he basically was given the impression that they were monitoring his communications and what he was doing on the companies internet dime.
Hey Pr0n didn't fuel the expansion of VCRs, CDs,DVDs, and internet video streaming just for their employees to dick around with their time...
Honestly I think that sounds like a great idea. I wish more municipalities would do that. I would think that there would a pretty big draw to any locality that had that kind of civic infrastructure. I know here at my job we are still waiting after 4 months to get a fiber connection laid or some dark fiber lit up between two buildings, and these are federal buildings! I think it could be a hard sell to your average tax payer though. I guess the argument could be boiled down to "Do you think local governments should make improvements to draw buisnesses to your area." I think these days most people would vote yes, but I think at the same time the naysayers would point to this as another "internet boom idea." But you'ld have my tax dollars. =)
Well there are other reasons to want to work from home as well. For instance when you work with a production system for any sort of data manipulation there are often access restrictions. This is starting to become a much bigger deal for me. The agency I work for is considering severely limiting outside access to any of our boxes from outside our network, even development boxes. However the precursor data for our processing is publicly available to me at home. If I could have the bandwidth to pull in the raw data I could run a local development box at home and continue development even when I can't get to work. (I work around DC and today for instance is a snow emergency day.) I'm not saying that fiber is for everyone, but there are those of us out there who are interested and aren't waiting for prices to drop to $50 a month. =)
I can tell you why I would want it. I work for the government as a contractor processing satellite data. The data files are HUGE, routinely over 250 megs a file, with 20+ files a day. A cable modem or dsl line simply doesn't have enough bandwidth for me to work from home effectively. Sure I can SSH into a box at work or whatever, but after all the tcp wrappers, ipchains, dns, etc, there is a noticeable lag when I work with things in X-windows. I don't know what minority of the tech population is also in my shoes, but for us fiber to the home would be great, and something I'd be willing to pay a premium for.
The author of Snood, Dave Dobson, is a professor where I went to College. From what I understand from talking with him and people who asked him about it in school, he wrote it just for fun and figured he might make a couple hundred bucks over the lifetime of the game from the few people gracious enough to register the game. Its hard to believe how the game has taken off. I think this is more a triumph of the internet and the ways an uncontrolled distribution channel can let just about anyone into the marketplace. There are plenty of markets where cost of getting into the distribution channels alone is enough to stifle meaningful competition. Just read Charles H. Ferguson's High Stakes, No Prisoners for an example.
I think another thing to consider is that the internet doesn't just allow for originality or quality but also popularity. I think its sobering to realize that even in the anti-clique of the open source movement there is a lot pressure to conform to certain world views and also to tear down what's popular. (I'm sure everyone who posts to slashdot with a @aol.com address can attest to that) I'm sure there are games with better graphics and maybe better game play than snood out there, but I think a lot of peoples reflex reaction is to attack snood simply because its not necessarily the very first game of its kind. The problem is that without popular products, even ones that are not the best of their breed, some markets will never get wide exposure. I think that most genre's of software benefit immeasurably from exposure, it almost always spurs competition and I'm sure there will be bigger,faster,stronger snood that I'll hear about on slashdot in another year.
Umm. I work at NOAA and we Transmit 500-1 gigabyte files routinely, you can try tranporting that data over a modem if you want, but trust me the interent is critical when it comes to transporting satellite data files...
People need to take responsibility for their own security, granted, but in a public enviornment such as the internet it takes legions of smart skilled people to ensure basic rights. Figuring out problems in the system is vital to the continued community and connection we all enjoy at places like slashdot.
It is very important for ethical people to examine the security of public venues, when you go to a concert you want it swept for bombs, when you have nuclear weapons, you want them safe guarded, locked. Certainly we have people governments appoint for these things, but in a non-govermental society like the internet we must rely on WhiteHats to help ensure our safety, privacy, and freedoms.
You can't assume people are ethical in such an anonymous and large group, you have to assume they aren't and be plesently surprised when they are.