Us folks here in Utah, we have a different eye on things. Diff'ent legal and cultural norms here. All you leftist liberals may have your federal laws, and free speech and what not; See, over here, we view things li'l differently. This is like if you're a black guy going into a southern town- little different ways of looking at things, you know. Value different things. That's all.
Now. The founding fathers, they were important men, no doubt. We LOVe our founding fathers. Really important men. Our young man here, (rest assure, we'll take care of him in our own, Utah way), he'd do well to take a lesson from our founding fathers.
Now, Amendment 1 may say "Free Speech", but it doesn't mean you can go reading your porn-oh mags, and your bitching. NAH. It only means stuff that comes out of your mouths, like words and stuff, unless its the word Fuck or something, and is said on campus, at which point- if the university takes any software you've written, or pictures you've drawn, or any stories you've told, and claim it as their own intellectual property, well HELL! You've got what was a coming to you! (See, that's how we do law here in Utah-like. We aren't all that too happy with you national region folks.)
Now, us Utah folks would like to get back to what we have been doing before, in our own ways, in our own times. All you out there interested in technics and porn, don't you be coming to Utah. Go right on by; skip Utah; you can go around the edge.
Make up a porn site name. (It's almost certainly taken.)
Enter it into the "What's that site running?" box.
Let me know when you find an IIS in there. I've tried valiently to find one, but have failed.)
Re:Current status of David Hahn
on
Duct Tape
·
· Score: 2
The maximum lifetime allowable dosage rating is typically for civilians, which is weeeeeeeell below the actual allowable dosage. Nuclear chemists frequently allow themselves much higher dosages, understanding full well the risks involved.
Waiting 533 ms is unacceptable for interactive response.
Human factors studies have found that an interactive response time longer than 100-200 ms is perceived as bad [Jacobson 1990a]. This is the round-trip time for an interactive packet to be sent and something to be returned (normally a character echo).
-- W. Richard Stevens, TCP/IP Illustrated Volume 1, pg. 31
Jacobson, V. 1990a. "Compressing TCP/IP Headers for Low-Speed Serial Links," RFC 1144, 43 Pages (Feb.).
Describes CSLIP, a version of SLIP with the TCP and IP headers compressed.
Good point. I guess I'm just going to have to do this the old fashion hard way, and explain to people that freely available porn and video games are something that we should desire as a free society, and that reports of the negative effects of porn and video games are greatly exagerated.
Yup. In a similar vein, why is sealing horrible monsters, spirits, and gods so much more popular than just destroying them?
I used to think that this was just because they wanted to get a cheap way into a sequel, but after a decade, I've come to believe that it's really a manifestation of the problem of evil, and freedom of choice.
Unless you restrict every awareness from the freedom to choose evil, people can still choose it. Evil forces like to get together to organize their evilness together, so the best way to put evil off for a while is to disperse it, so that it can't organize. You'll need security measures to keep the pieces from coming back together. But as we all should know, there is no lock that does not have a key, and everything can be done (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Every poison has an antidote, every thesis an antithesis). It's just a matter of how long it is before its undone.
Thus we see things like, "The great evil was sealed away for 10,000 years, until one century..." In Harry Potter, Dumbledore tells Harry, "Well, we can't destroy Voldemort, but if we're rather clever about it, we can delay his return to power. And then when he comes back strong, we can delay him some more. If we're lucky, we can delay him forever."
Your argument about communities where people are restricting unresponsible people doesn't work here, because game players and porn watchers aren't being irresponsible. If you think they are, that's your opinion.
Lets say someone is an alchoholic. They know they need help, and they get society to help them. That's one thing.
Now lets talk about someone who likes to eat bread in a place where bread is taboo. This person thinks bread is just fine, but the community views it as irresponsible. The person doesn't want the communities "help".
I've always thought that/. was full of Raving Libertarian Nuts who wanted to privatize environmentalism.
Now, when we most need it, it seems everyone wants government controls on network providers. Our loyal libertarians now want to be able to sue someone for not forwarding their network traffic. What?!
One guy with a Score: 3 complains, "Hey! I paid for the full internet! Who's trying to censor me?"
If I put a network node up, why do I have to agree to pass your shit through? Why can you sue me for not wanting to forward your traffic? There's no requirement. Route your own damn traffic around me.
At the rate we're going, by the look of reader response here, it seems that if someone decides that they don't want to route traffic any more (say, they decide to turn all of their computers OFF), that they may be in for legal trouble. YeeeE!
What I need to do is, instead of posting to slashdot, notice the way people behave about these things. As one person only peripherally connected with all this, I have no influence whatsoever on this irrational behavior. I need to take this as an opportunity for learning about human behavior, and take note of the underlying influences, so that if they ever pass before me, I can take the correct motions.
Note to self: Zillions of dollars are wrapt up in the InterNetwork. Turning off your computer WILL be a crime.
I work at LithTech. I work, probably technically illegally, on OpenSource/Free Software at home. I have contributed to various game projects in minor ways. One thing that other Free/OpenSource game programmers say to me is, "You work at a game company?! How Cool! That's a dream job." Not once have I heard, "Die Fascist Proprietary Software Developer!" Almost all of them want to be game developers, or wish they were.
I also teach free classes on programming (Seattle/Kirkland,WA). I have some exceptional students. One understands C very well, and regularly reads FreeBSD Kernel source. My students are all looking for jobs in programming; I encourage them to write OpenSource code. That way, their code and work is visible, rather than hidden. It's not just games companies that should be looking for coders in the Open/Free communities.
Open/Free software and Proprietary houses have a symbiotic relationship. I believe that it has always been that way. By all means, please, look into the very eager, very motivated, Free Software programmers pool. They want to work professionally on games. Hey! You can look at what their code is actually like before you even talk with them..! It's a win-win.
Shared Source: Embrace and Extend
on
Shared Source?
·
· Score: 2
Damn, who would have imagined that the Microsoft would try to, with their own proprietary extensions of course, Embrace and Extend the GPL itself!?!
First I thought I'd write a comment on what would happen if human genetic manipulation companies decided that in order to protect their intellectual property, they'd have to establish the legal age for breeding up from 18 to 20 (USA statutory rape: 18 years, USA patent duration: 20 years), and I'd include a neat comment about how odd and absurd it would be for people to be considered proprietary.
Then I realized... No, humans have quite a bit of experience with this sort of thing. In fact, people have "protected" their property property by establishing directly whom could breed with whom, frequently with special attention to genetics...
In Finder, there's a part where a kid telnets into his little systers biological interface. I forget if it was telnet, or if he manipulated her through/dev/something. It was rather interesting to see that it was UNIX. The series also includes lots of plausible AI, genetic manipulation, etc., etc.,. One of the smartest series I have read in a long time. Thought I should mention it, since it is a neat comic that includes this idea of telnetting into people's bio systems.
If I understand correctly, the idea is that the RDBMS is turned into an object persistance store. You pull the object's data from the data store, manipulate the object (which may or may not update the database), and then you can store the object back away.
The idea seems to be that we should not abstract ("essentialize") database transactions. We shouldn't have to think about transactions with the data store, and by golly, we won't. We'll make the database a 1:1 mapping with the objects, and that'll be that.
It's a terrible idea. You want as tight control over your trips to the database as possible. Sure, if you're running a small app on one machine, you're fine. But if you've got hoards of transactions coming through, it is really important to watch those trips.
When I worked with WebObjects/EOF, us developers were constantly doing a tug and pull with the system, trying to get just the data we wanted. Different object sets and different APIs would have different ways of presenting the very simple information we needed.
For example, say I have 500K entries in the People table. We want to view their name and email, and a couple other things, 50 at a time.
With an object store, even though I only want their name and email, I've got to pull out everything else in there. What an incredible waste! There are so 10-20 fields in there!
In proper OO fashion, these folks are in a list. I can't possibly pull out 500K entries, so the API goes through twists and contortions to let me select out just the first 50, and then page through in 50.
Do you see what's happened? OO programming has "degraded" itself into what should be SQL land, though it's doing a damn poor job of it. Sure, it sounds nice to say, "Oh yeah, we'll just make an object in the OOP program an object in the database", but what happens when that object is a linked list of 500K items? Suddenly you have these lazy bindings from your linked lists, and each time you traverse another item in the list, it's making a query!
We had to have 5-7 test database servers so that we could make sure our performance was okay, every time we made a change!
Ug! What a terrible idea..!
We would have the friggen SQL written down, EXACTLY like we wanted, and it was terribly frustrating to have to wrestle with this system, trying to get our fucking data out, and nothing BUT our data out..! A lot of programmers just didn't bother. "We'll just pack in more RAM." Eeeee! The database guys hated us.
All in all, I found what was said to be rather accurate, and it is interested to see Microsoft moving itself towards a Shared Source model. 2 years ago, I never saw any source. I found it kind of humerous that they included their "samples" as a significant contribution of source code, and that they boasted that "100 universities" had the source code. But all in all, it was rather rational.
This is coming from a guy who volunteered for the GNU booth at LISA (sysadmin conference), writes GPL'ed software at home, advocates Free and Open Source software at work, and teaches free classes on programming twice a week in his free time. Honestly, this article seems like a nice concise representation of the issues that we are facing in the technical world, and the licensing tradeoffs as well. It is a remarkably centered piece, especially considering that it's coming from Microsoft. Maybe it's coming from their Biz department, rather than Marketting.
However, I wouldn't take the article as a sign of the impending doom or non-use of GPL'ed software. As another/. reader said, it's good to view GPL'ed and OpenSource software as software belong to a single company (GNU?), namely, the company consisting of all contributors.
I believe quite strongly that Free and OpenSource software will overcome Microsoft.
First, the very thing that allowed Linux to exist in the first place, the life blood of Free/OpenSource Software, namely, communication, is becoming cheaper and easier. We are watching a bandwidth and connection revolutions. As barriers to communication come down, the success of Free and OpenSource software will increase.
Second, as more and more people become involved in the computing world (and they are coming, they are definitely coming- just look overseas) and the online world, the # of Free and OpenSource developers will increase. I believe that our numbers as Free/OS software developers are, and will, increase faster than the # of employees at Microsoft.
That KDE and GNOME (particularly KDE) would cease development because OS/Free software isn't a viable business model would be a faulty conclusion. KDE is not a business. Go to the KDE web page and tell me that they're running a business. It's very clearly a community.
We can build our own operating system, and as developers, it's just sort of our nature to do so.
Anyways, Kudo's to MicroSoft for a well written summary, and a "Yay" if they actually follow through on their commitment to share their source.
Back to my side of the fence: Yay KDE! Yay GNOME!
Re:More lost millions: the car CD player.
on
Ring-Tone Royalties
·
· Score: 5
Remember, when you are playing music out of a Boom Box, you are playing... Communism.
I owe Philip Greenspun a lot. Philip Greenspun is personally responsible for changing how I looked at technology, programming, as well as changing how I looked at Life.
It's terrible and saddening to see ArsDigita becoming just another silly company.
On the upside ("Long Live the King"), I look forward to seeing where he decides to turn his life next. Maybe this is actually a turn for the better. Maybe he'll be a little more humble, not just in thought and deed, but also speech. Maybe he'll write about his trip to India. Maybe he'll become a spokesperson for Nikon. Maybe he'll just relax, read, and mull over some books.
Regardless, I feel very priveledged to have been able to read what he has written, and to have heard him lecture, and look forward to his new life.
Geoffrey James translated Yong Yo Sef when he wrote:
Thus spoke the master programmer:
"Though a program be but three lines long, someday it will have to be maintained."
Looks like you'll continue to pay the sysadmins $50,000, even in the future.
The way I see it, if a sysadmin is lazy, you have a good sysadmin. What should [s]he be doing? The best sysadmin will automate it all the way, and hold the keys of the structure in his or her head.
What, would you like your sysadmin to be pedaling a bicycle? A good system administrator is like a security guard, making sure your data is safe. Guards doesn't "do" anything but stand there and protect you against danger. Sure, a certain amount of keeping up with the latest security updates and installations is important, but for the most part, the best should be able to automate quite a bit, and then just sit on the keys.
I'm not saying that to become a good system administrator, do nothing. A sysadmin should know the tools and tricks of the trade. But once a fort is secure, they shouldn't make themselves look busy just to appease you.
Again, you will always need system administrators because no system, out of the box, is tailored to your needs.
When I think of professionalism (what a lot of people here are advocating), I think, "Oh God, how stifling." In particular, the following flashes across me:
"Work harder, not smarter."
Republicans, in their Suits.
"Do what you're told. We're paying you, dammit."
Alchoholics.
"I'm afraid I have to kill you; I wish the world weren't this way, but, you know, who can you trust? Yes, I will have to kill you."
Weapons. Old musket guns in particular.
Machines.
Being a program, rather than a programmer.
I question the value of turning people into programs, rather than programmers. ("Who you callin' Program, Program?" --Tron)
It does not seem to be a very stable configuration for humanity. I'd refer you to Leiji Matsumoto's Galaxy Express 999 and the machine planet, but only a few of you will know what I'm talking about.
Sure, the world is harsh, but it's not that harsh. Do we really need to make sure that all our employees are stuffed in suits, and behaving like automotons? Do we really want to live in that world? I've seen plenty of projects that succeeded, "despite" not having people stuffed in suits.
Slashdot Mirror
Us folks here in Utah, we have a different eye on things. Diff'ent legal and cultural norms here. All you leftist liberals may have your federal laws, and free speech and what not; See, over here, we view things li'l differently. This is like if you're a black guy going into a southern town- little different ways of looking at things, you know. Value different things. That's all.
Now. The founding fathers, they were important men, no doubt. We LOVe our founding fathers. Really important men. Our young man here, (rest assure, we'll take care of him in our own, Utah way), he'd do well to take a lesson from our founding fathers.
Now, Amendment 1 may say "Free Speech", but it doesn't mean you can go reading your porn-oh mags, and your bitching. NAH. It only means stuff that comes out of your mouths, like words and stuff, unless its the word Fuck or something, and is said on campus, at which point- if the university takes any software you've written, or pictures you've drawn, or any stories you've told, and claim it as their own intellectual property, well HELL! You've got what was a coming to you! (See, that's how we do law here in Utah-like. We aren't all that too happy with you national region folks.)
Now, us Utah folks would like to get back to what we have been doing before, in our own ways, in our own times. All you out there interested in technics and porn, don't you be coming to Utah. Go right on by; skip Utah; you can go around the edge.
...just apply the Golden Rule.
Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You.
This case of blacking out the programmers faces is clearly a violation of the Golden Rule, and therefore, unethical.
Right On!
Preach it, Brother..!
OpenSource makes the world plenty of money, just not necessarily (but certainly not prohibitively, either) for the authors of it.
Just ask any porn company. Apache seems to be the server of choice among porn companies.
(Here's a fun challenge:
Let me know when you find an IIS in there. I've tried valiently to find one, but have failed.)
The maximum lifetime allowable dosage rating is typically for civilians, which is weeeeeeeell below the actual allowable dosage. Nuclear chemists frequently allow themselves much higher dosages, understanding full well the risks involved.
Incidentally, the Grateful Dead have allowed tape trading, have allowed MP3 trading, and encouraged all of these things.
They are eternal.
Jacobson, V. 1990a. "Compressing TCP/IP Headers for Low-Speed Serial Links," RFC 1144, 43 Pages (Feb.). Describes CSLIP, a version of SLIP with the TCP and IP headers compressed.
Good point. I guess I'm just going to have to do this the old fashion hard way, and explain to people that freely available porn and video games are something that we should desire as a free society, and that reports of the negative effects of porn and video games are greatly exagerated.
Yup. In a similar vein, why is sealing horrible monsters, spirits, and gods so much more popular than just destroying them?
I used to think that this was just because they wanted to get a cheap way into a sequel, but after a decade, I've come to believe that it's really a manifestation of the problem of evil, and freedom of choice.
Unless you restrict every awareness from the freedom to choose evil, people can still choose it. Evil forces like to get together to organize their evilness together, so the best way to put evil off for a while is to disperse it, so that it can't organize. You'll need security measures to keep the pieces from coming back together. But as we all should know, there is no lock that does not have a key, and everything can be done (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Every poison has an antidote, every thesis an antithesis). It's just a matter of how long it is before its undone.
Thus we see things like, "The great evil was sealed away for 10,000 years, until one century..." In Harry Potter, Dumbledore tells Harry, "Well, we can't destroy Voldemort, but if we're rather clever about it, we can delay his return to power. And then when he comes back strong, we can delay him some more. If we're lucky, we can delay him forever."
It's basically a manifestation of our free will.
Your argument about communities where people are restricting unresponsible people doesn't work here, because game players and porn watchers aren't being irresponsible. If you think they are, that's your opinion.
Lets say someone is an alchoholic. They know they need help, and they get society to help them. That's one thing.
Now lets talk about someone who likes to eat bread in a place where bread is taboo. This person thinks bread is just fine, but the community views it as irresponsible. The person doesn't want the communities "help".
I've always thought that /. was full of Raving Libertarian Nuts who wanted to privatize environmentalism.
Now, when we most need it, it seems everyone wants government controls on network providers. Our loyal libertarians now want to be able to sue someone for not forwarding their network traffic. What?!
One guy with a Score: 3 complains, "Hey! I paid for the full internet! Who's trying to censor me?"
If I put a network node up, why do I have to agree to pass your shit through? Why can you sue me for not wanting to forward your traffic? There's no requirement. Route your own damn traffic around me.
At the rate we're going, by the look of reader response here, it seems that if someone decides that they don't want to route traffic any more (say, they decide to turn all of their computers OFF), that they may be in for legal trouble. YeeeE!
What I need to do is, instead of posting to slashdot, notice the way people behave about these things. As one person only peripherally connected with all this, I have no influence whatsoever on this irrational behavior. I need to take this as an opportunity for learning about human behavior, and take note of the underlying influences, so that if they ever pass before me, I can take the correct motions.
Note to self: Zillions of dollars are wrapt up in the InterNetwork. Turning off your computer WILL be a crime.
By all means, DO IT!
I work at LithTech. I work, probably technically illegally, on OpenSource/Free Software at home. I have contributed to various game projects in minor ways. One thing that other Free/OpenSource game programmers say to me is, "You work at a game company?! How Cool! That's a dream job." Not once have I heard, "Die Fascist Proprietary Software Developer!" Almost all of them want to be game developers, or wish they were.
I also teach free classes on programming (Seattle/Kirkland,WA). I have some exceptional students. One understands C very well, and regularly reads FreeBSD Kernel source. My students are all looking for jobs in programming; I encourage them to write OpenSource code. That way, their code and work is visible, rather than hidden. It's not just games companies that should be looking for coders in the Open/Free communities.
Open/Free software and Proprietary houses have a symbiotic relationship. I believe that it has always been that way. By all means, please, look into the very eager, very motivated, Free Software programmers pool. They want to work professionally on games. Hey! You can look at what their code is actually like before you even talk with them..! It's a win-win.
Damn, who would have imagined that the Microsoft would try to, with their own proprietary extensions of course, Embrace and Extend the GPL itself!?!
First I thought I'd write a comment on what would happen if human genetic manipulation companies decided that in order to protect their intellectual property, they'd have to establish the legal age for breeding up from 18 to 20 (USA statutory rape: 18 years, USA patent duration: 20 years), and I'd include a neat comment about how odd and absurd it would be for people to be considered proprietary.
Then I realized... No, humans have quite a bit of experience with this sort of thing. In fact, people have "protected" their property property by establishing directly whom could breed with whom, frequently with special attention to genetics...
In Finder, there's a part where a kid telnets into his little systers biological interface. I forget if it was telnet, or if he manipulated her through /dev/something. It was rather interesting to see that it was UNIX. The series also includes lots of plausible AI, genetic manipulation, etc., etc.,. One of the smartest series I have read in a long time. Thought I should mention it, since it is a neat comic that includes this idea of telnetting into people's bio systems.
One of the finder issues is free to view online. No, doesn't feature what I was describing.
I'm sure that others have thought of this before, but hey. I think other nerds would like this comic. (News for Nerds, News that Matters.)
If I understand correctly, the idea is that the RDBMS is turned into an object persistance store. You pull the object's data from the data store, manipulate the object (which may or may not update the database), and then you can store the object back away.
The idea seems to be that we should not abstract ("essentialize") database transactions. We shouldn't have to think about transactions with the data store, and by golly, we won't. We'll make the database a 1:1 mapping with the objects, and that'll be that.
It's a terrible idea. You want as tight control over your trips to the database as possible. Sure, if you're running a small app on one machine, you're fine. But if you've got hoards of transactions coming through, it is really important to watch those trips.
When I worked with WebObjects/EOF, us developers were constantly doing a tug and pull with the system, trying to get just the data we wanted. Different object sets and different APIs would have different ways of presenting the very simple information we needed.
For example, say I have 500K entries in the People table. We want to view their name and email, and a couple other things, 50 at a time.
With an object store, even though I only want their name and email, I've got to pull out everything else in there. What an incredible waste! There are so 10-20 fields in there!
In proper OO fashion, these folks are in a list. I can't possibly pull out 500K entries, so the API goes through twists and contortions to let me select out just the first 50, and then page through in 50.
Do you see what's happened? OO programming has "degraded" itself into what should be SQL land, though it's doing a damn poor job of it. Sure, it sounds nice to say, "Oh yeah, we'll just make an object in the OOP program an object in the database", but what happens when that object is a linked list of 500K items? Suddenly you have these lazy bindings from your linked lists, and each time you traverse another item in the list, it's making a query!
We had to have 5-7 test database servers so that we could make sure our performance was okay, every time we made a change!
Ug! What a terrible idea..!
We would have the friggen SQL written down, EXACTLY like we wanted, and it was terribly frustrating to have to wrestle with this system, trying to get our fucking data out, and nothing BUT our data out..! A lot of programmers just didn't bother. "We'll just pack in more RAM." Eeeee! The database guys hated us.
All in all, I found what was said to be rather accurate, and it is interested to see Microsoft moving itself towards a Shared Source model. 2 years ago, I never saw any source. I found it kind of humerous that they included their "samples" as a significant contribution of source code, and that they boasted that "100 universities" had the source code. But all in all, it was rather rational.
This is coming from a guy who volunteered for the GNU booth at LISA (sysadmin conference), writes GPL'ed software at home, advocates Free and Open Source software at work, and teaches free classes on programming twice a week in his free time. Honestly, this article seems like a nice concise representation of the issues that we are facing in the technical world, and the licensing tradeoffs as well. It is a remarkably centered piece, especially considering that it's coming from Microsoft. Maybe it's coming from their Biz department, rather than Marketting.
However, I wouldn't take the article as a sign of the impending doom or non-use of GPL'ed software. As another /. reader said, it's good to view GPL'ed and OpenSource software as software belong to a single company (GNU?), namely, the company consisting of all contributors.
I believe quite strongly that Free and OpenSource software will overcome Microsoft.
First, the very thing that allowed Linux to exist in the first place, the life blood of Free/OpenSource Software, namely, communication, is becoming cheaper and easier. We are watching a bandwidth and connection revolutions. As barriers to communication come down, the success of Free and OpenSource software will increase.
Second, as more and more people become involved in the computing world (and they are coming, they are definitely coming- just look overseas) and the online world, the # of Free and OpenSource developers will increase. I believe that our numbers as Free/OS software developers are, and will, increase faster than the # of employees at Microsoft.
That KDE and GNOME (particularly KDE) would cease development because OS/Free software isn't a viable business model would be a faulty conclusion. KDE is not a business. Go to the KDE web page and tell me that they're running a business. It's very clearly a community.
We can build our own operating system, and as developers, it's just sort of our nature to do so.
Anyways, Kudo's to MicroSoft for a well written summary, and a "Yay" if they actually follow through on their commitment to share their source.
Back to my side of the fence: Yay KDE! Yay GNOME!
Remember, when you are playing music out of a Boom Box, you are playing... Communism.
I'd like to live in a glass house.
I think it'd be pretty cool.
Unfortunately, my neighbors disagree...
Agreed.
I owe Philip Greenspun a lot. Philip Greenspun is personally responsible for changing how I looked at technology, programming, as well as changing how I looked at Life.
My students owe Philip Greenspun a lot as well; If it weren't for his article on software professionalism, I don't know that I would be teaching free programming classes to the public.
It's terrible and saddening to see ArsDigita becoming just another silly company.
On the upside ("Long Live the King"), I look forward to seeing where he decides to turn his life next. Maybe this is actually a turn for the better. Maybe he'll be a little more humble, not just in thought and deed, but also speech. Maybe he'll write about his trip to India. Maybe he'll become a spokesperson for Nikon. Maybe he'll just relax, read, and mull over some books.
Regardless, I feel very priveledged to have been able to read what he has written, and to have heard him lecture, and look forward to his new life.
Mod this one up, please. Thanks.
Geoffrey James translated Yong Yo Sef when he wrote:
Looks like you'll continue to pay the sysadmins $50,000, even in the future.
The way I see it, if a sysadmin is lazy, you have a good sysadmin. What should [s]he be doing? The best sysadmin will automate it all the way, and hold the keys of the structure in his or her head.
What, would you like your sysadmin to be pedaling a bicycle? A good system administrator is like a security guard, making sure your data is safe. Guards doesn't "do" anything but stand there and protect you against danger. Sure, a certain amount of keeping up with the latest security updates and installations is important, but for the most part, the best should be able to automate quite a bit, and then just sit on the keys.
I'm not saying that to become a good system administrator, do nothing. A sysadmin should know the tools and tricks of the trade. But once a fort is secure, they shouldn't make themselves look busy just to appease you.
Again, you will always need system administrators because no system, out of the box, is tailored to your needs.
When I think of professionalism (what a lot of people here are advocating), I think, "Oh God, how stifling." In particular, the following flashes across me:
I question the value of turning people into programs, rather than programmers. ("Who you callin' Program, Program?" --Tron)
It does not seem to be a very stable configuration for humanity. I'd refer you to Leiji Matsumoto's Galaxy Express 999 and the machine planet, but only a few of you will know what I'm talking about.
Sure, the world is harsh, but it's not that harsh. Do we really need to make sure that all our employees are stuffed in suits, and behaving like automotons? Do we really want to live in that world? I've seen plenty of projects that succeeded, "despite" not having people stuffed in suits.
Suppose:
It's 4:00am.
What do you do? What do you do !!