I'm fairly certain any file I've saved, from safari at least, the first time it's opened, I get a warning saying "This is the first time this file downloaded from the internet has been opened - are you sure you want to proceed"
The problem though is viewing IT as a customer service department rather than a strategic partner tightly integrated with the entire business. THe former is what the article is against, the latter, what it's for, and it's sensible. It's the direction things are heading in. (Note: Most small/mid sized IT departments ahve never even made it to the first scenario, let alone the second).
Finding out what tools the company needs is the hard part. Structuring IT, and how other departments relate to IT is the real challenge. IT cannot decide on it's own what is best for a given business unit, and a business unit can't decide without the help of IT - it goes both ways.
"I was once asked to turn encryption off on a highly sensitive authentication system for the HR/Finance/Payroll system of one of our country's biggest institutions. I just told the manager that it's not his call to make, because he simply does not understand the implications of that decision to make it.
Unfortunately, saying things like that is a personal risk to me, because there's nothing I can point to that will back me up."
If there's nothing there to back you up, then you are running things solely based on your own opinion, which, right or wrong, is a risk to you.
If you have encryption policies in place, for a reason, then document them and get them signed off by senior management...... and then you have your backup.
"One of the important jobs of the IT department, and one that tends to annoy the people that pay the bills, is to keep the IT infrastructure from becoming so obsolete that it becomes unmaintainable"
Right - and well run IT department doesn't just bring this up now and then willy-nilly - they have it budgeted out and planned for,and approved at the corporate level years in advance, with everyone understanding when things will be retired, what will replace them, what the ongoing costs will be, and so on.
The problem in many organisations that start small is they are missing these practices - they are great at finding out what the great solution is now, and what it will cost - but don't think "What will the plan be for the next 10 years... when will we retire these servers, etc...".
The attack seems to be to get an IP law that is even more draconian than what CAFTA requires passed - lawmakers aren't taking issue with CAFTA, but with the current proposal on the table. Various parties, who knows, probably want the more draconian version put in.
Why sugar? BEcause it wont' kill CR - it will just exert some pressure. If you block coffee and bananas, that's economic warfar, and will escalate things horribly. Sugar - sugar will just cause a bit of political pressure down here to possibly get the legislature to pass what it is required to do a bit more quickly.
All parties agreed to some IP standards, and costa rica has yet to put into law some of the required elements.
And it's not because they are opposing those elements - it's apparently because the laws the legislators are trying to pass go above and *beyond* what the trade agreement requires, and they're being called on it - that's what is holding things up.
Yup, they did agree... the problem is in the execution - the laws currently on the table go beyond what the trade agreement requires, and some lawmakers are opposing it. So they are guilty of not passing the laws they are required, it's not because they don't want to, it's because other parties are polluting them to beyond what they should be, and trying to pass them through under pressure from CAFTA.
Costa Rica has failed to pass legislation making local law compatible with CAFTA in the time allotted. A current proposal on the table, which would meet *and exceed* these requirements is currently being blocked, by some Costa Rican lawmakers (this is good, in that a bad law is being blocked, but bad, as it's putting pressure on CR due to CAFTA, and they may end up passing law even more draconian than what CAFTA requires)
There is more to this than simple will/wont politics.
Fair enough - except the issue at hand is not costa ricans wanting to pirate everything - it's the current government's inability to pass a law compatable with CAFTA in the required timeframe. There is a law on the table that would suffice, but it's being blocked by some lawmakers because they see that it goes well *beyond* what CAFTA requires - and who wants to pass a draconian law for no reason?
CR needs to speed up it's compliance with CAFTA - they have a slow legislative process here - but they also need to be careful to protect their own intersts. They should comply with CAFTA and nothing more - that's what this is about.
It's not that simple - The CR lawmakers are trying to pass legislation (as required by CAFTA) to meet the IP requirements - but are being blocked in CR by other lawmakers who are insisting that the laws go above and beyond what CAFTA requires.
It's nowhere near as black and white as "We're ignoring this" "We're ignoring that". To comply with CAFTA - Costa Rica had to pass a bunch of new laws to bring it's legal system up to cafta regulations - now that deadlines are passing, the US is exerting pressure. Whether that pressure is right or wrong is political, I don't know enough about the situation - but from what I've seen, it's likely US pressure to go above and beyond what CAFTA requires to pass *bad* legislation here in CR.
(IN CR, it is notoriously easy to throw a monkeywrench into any new law.. which is good and bad)
For example, I can walk into the local video store and rent anything, it's all pirated stuff. Great selection. Great prices. Great location. Great service. It's not stricty legal, but unless the rightsholders want to show up in person, set up a legal presence in the country, hire lawyers, and go to court - they can't do anything about it. No law enforcement is going to just magically show up and start shutting them down without someone pressing charges (at least that's my understanding.). IN other words - if you want your copyright enforced here, you shoudl have some kind of business presence here. If you don't - we're not interested.
I'd have to agree... there are very few hubs left out there, even fakes masquerading as switches. Everything is a switch nowadays - nobody's even bothering to make hub gear.
There was a short time when this wasn't true, and there was confusion - but that was, like, 10 years ago.
To your first statement: My understanding, from my system programmer friends is it's generally the opposite - it's extremely difficult to second-guess their good compilers (speaking intel here) - and even though the compiler spits out weird things, out of order, that don't make sense, after profiling, the compiler beats them out 90% of the time.
I don't follow your conclusion - there are still a limited number of states for any given particle (point) we can know... uncertainty principle or not - what am I overlooking?
That philosophy works great until the technology changes suddenly - then their experience isn't worth so much, and those with experience as well as the ability to actually do work come out on top.
An old mentor of mine, when I asked him what doing this job right meant, told me "it means doing it from 9 to 5 and then going home"
He didn't mean be a lazy clock-puncher, but to be clear about what you need to do, when yo need to do it, and do it well, during the time allotted. Then go home. This is complicated by the fact that most organizations really have no idea how to manage IT resources.
Work smart, organized, and hard, but do it during work hours, and then leave it alone.
The solution: good record keeping, good timekeeping, and finding a way to demonstrate your efficiency within the organization.
To quote from my past (and continuing) mistakes:
Don't overcommit. Communicate expectations clearly. Do what you say you will at the time you said you would do it. If you can't, communicate THAT clearly to those who need to know. Your boss is expecting you to do X. If you are going to miss that deadline, you need to let him know ASAP... because it's also HIS deadline. No excuses. Smile and be nice.
Possibly. THey also might just be sitting pretty because IT in general is often not well managed. Just because you have some value because you can fix product A faster than anyone else in the company, well, that doenst' help much down the road when new management dumps product A. A smart new grad can surpass lazy old-timers awfully quickly with a good work ethic and the ability to learn and adapt.
Don't fall into that trap though - learn good time management, set clear goals for yourself, keep a detailed log of how you spend your paid time. Don't think of missing goals as bad- but do keep track of it.
In the end (which could be years) - such behavior is recognized, and will cover your ass in the end.
Stay calm, cool, collected, be clear about what who expects what from you (deliverables) - keep timelines and things communicated clearly, and stay focused on YOU.
That doesnt' mean abandon the team, as teams are often judged on what the team does, but, especially as the new guy, dont' rock the boat. If a project fails, someone should be doing post-mortem analysis as to why, and those details matter. Those notes you keep will save your ass. The guys with good record keeping come out on top, and advance faster in the long run. Don't get jealous, don't worry if you are doing more work than others - just think of it as practice (which it is). KEEP RECORDS. Did I mention keep records? And be clear about deliverables.
Don't be passive-aggressive, and don't worry about what others are doing - just do good work.
Has never happened in a US city, and would likely cause immense terror if done right. Terrorism isn't about the dead - it's about terrorizing the living - changing the way they think and live.
Observe london after that tube bombing. what did they do? Fix the tube, londoners kept on using the rest of the tube. Security was increased a bit, but not bothersome. End result? Terror plot not too effective. More people die from drunk driving accidents.
9/11 was *horrific* and sad, especially given this kind of thing doesn't happen in north america. The US & much of the world were shocked, appalled, and saddened by what happened that day.
What the US has done in response to that, however, has been pretty much a huge waste of time and money on public security theater. Hopefully behind the scenes some real intelligence work is also being done by real intelligence people, unhindered by beurocratic nonsense... but if they're doing that part right, we won't know about it.
Yes.... science could be nicer about it. But from a scientific point of view, why should they be? Billions weren't spent on this thing like they were on, say, nonsense political wars. A great many learned individuals who have studied the physics in question for, you know, their entire adult lives are cool with this experiment - it's the next natural step to figure out how the universe works. If they skipped a step, let's point it out... but otherwise, enough is enough already.
You're more likely to die slipping in the shower tomorrow morning than from the LHC.
"Oh, the math can't prove it?" math can't *prove* anything but math - math is not physics. Math is a tool, and a study that is purely logical and abstract and lives by itself. No math is going to *prove* smashing large hadrons together at incredibly high energies is safe - the only thing that will prove that is smashing lots of them together in a controlled, observed environment. Which is what we are doing.
But you don't buy Backblaze storage pods, right? Backblaze is an online service - they built them for themselves as I understand it.
Yes - there are excellent OSS solutions - if you can keep and maintain an engineering staff who can keep up to speed with things, and build things out, you can absolutely build out lots and lots of storage, and maintain it. Jimmy can swap drives. No problem.
The problem is - as a business grows (that's what they want to do) - this could become unmaintainable. Staffing becomes more difficult. All problems become in-house problems rather than vendor problems (and unfortunately, politics matter). In the end - the commercial SAN/NAS setup cost is nothing compared to the burn rate of the organization.
a) The bottleneck in pricing, I don't see 64 gig memory modules on the cheap, or supported by any motherboards yet. b) The initial load of data (whether prefetch or whatever) that I want to work with is still constrained by whatever it's stored on.
I'd love to have a few terabytes of ram. That would work for me... and that's where we're heading. how the OS manages the various levels of RAM (as cache, storage, or whatever) is up for debate, I'm sure we'll see some interesting mechanisms. (like how ZFS can have an SSD assigned as a cache drive for a given storage pool, -vs- the home user putting system files and software on the SSD,and using regular storage for data, etc)
So yes - people SHOULD get systems with a lot more memory. Lots of memory is good. ('m a "no swapfile" guy myself. If I don't have enough physical RAM To do what I need, then I need more ram - not the gradual slowdown that swap brings. Yes, I know there are counter-arguments to this. All of them can be refuted by simply buying more ram.)
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Unlesss you have to deal with multiple proxpies, QuickProxy should do the job.
I'm fairly certain any file I've saved, from safari at least, the first time it's opened, I get a warning saying "This is the first time this file downloaded from the internet has been opened - are you sure you want to proceed"
Exactly - the energy required to get out of the atmosphere is a very small portion of the energy required to actually reach orbital velocity.
The problem though is viewing IT as a customer service department rather than a strategic partner tightly integrated with the entire business. THe former is what the article is against, the latter, what it's for, and it's sensible. It's the direction things are heading in.
(Note: Most small/mid sized IT departments ahve never even made it to the first scenario, let alone the second).
Finding out what tools the company needs is the hard part. Structuring IT, and how other departments relate to IT is the real challenge. IT cannot decide on it's own what is best for a given business unit, and a business unit can't decide without the help of IT - it goes both ways.
"I was once asked to turn encryption off on a highly sensitive authentication system for the HR/Finance/Payroll system of one of our country's biggest institutions. I just told the manager that it's not his call to make, because he simply does not understand the implications of that decision to make it.
Unfortunately, saying things like that is a personal risk to me, because there's nothing I can point to that will back me up."
If there's nothing there to back you up, then you are running things solely based on your own opinion, which, right or wrong, is a risk to you.
If you have encryption policies in place, for a reason, then document them and get them signed off by senior management...... and then you have your backup.
"One of the important jobs of the IT department, and one that tends to annoy the people that pay the bills, is to keep the IT infrastructure from becoming so obsolete that it becomes unmaintainable"
Right - and well run IT department doesn't just bring this up now and then willy-nilly - they have it budgeted out and planned for ,and approved at the corporate level years in advance, with everyone understanding when things will be retired, what will replace them, what the ongoing costs will be, and so on.
The problem in many organisations that start small is they are missing these practices - they are great at finding out what the great solution is now, and what it will cost - but don't think "What will the plan be for the next 10 years... when will we retire these servers, etc...".
Eh? In every shop I've ever seen, software development is a sub-group within the IT department.
The attack seems to be to get an IP law that is even more draconian than what CAFTA requires passed - lawmakers aren't taking issue with CAFTA, but with the current proposal on the table. Various parties, who knows, probably want the more draconian version put in.
Why sugar? BEcause it wont' kill CR - it will just exert some pressure. If you block coffee and bananas, that's economic warfar, and will escalate things horribly. Sugar - sugar will just cause a bit of political pressure down here to possibly get the legislature to pass what it is required to do a bit more quickly.
All parties agreed to some IP standards, and costa rica has yet to put into law some of the required elements.
And it's not because they are opposing those elements - it's apparently because the laws the legislators are trying to pass go above and *beyond* what the trade agreement requires, and they're being called on it - that's what is holding things up.
Yup, they did agree... the problem is in the execution - the laws currently on the table go beyond what the trade agreement requires, and some lawmakers are opposing it. So they are guilty of not passing the laws they are required, it's not because they don't want to, it's because other parties are polluting them to beyond what they should be, and trying to pass them through under pressure from CAFTA.
Costa Rica has failed to pass legislation making local law compatible with CAFTA in the time allotted. A current proposal on the table, which would meet *and exceed* these requirements is currently being blocked, by some Costa Rican lawmakers (this is good, in that a bad law is being blocked, but bad, as it's putting pressure on CR due to CAFTA, and they may end up passing law even more draconian than what CAFTA requires)
There is more to this than simple will/wont politics.
Fair enough - except the issue at hand is not costa ricans wanting to pirate everything - it's the current government's inability to pass a law compatable with CAFTA in the required timeframe. There is a law on the table that would suffice, but it's being blocked by some lawmakers because they see that it goes well *beyond* what CAFTA requires - and who wants to pass a draconian law for no reason?
CR needs to speed up it's compliance with CAFTA - they have a slow legislative process here - but they also need to be careful to protect their own intersts. They should comply with CAFTA and nothing more - that's what this is about.
It's not that simple - The CR lawmakers are trying to pass legislation (as required by CAFTA) to meet the IP requirements - but are being blocked in CR by other lawmakers who are insisting that the laws go above and beyond what CAFTA requires.
It's nowhere near as black and white as "We're ignoring this" "We're ignoring that". To comply with CAFTA - Costa Rica had to pass a bunch of new laws to bring it's legal system up to cafta regulations - now that deadlines are passing, the US is exerting pressure. Whether that pressure is right or wrong is political, I don't know enough about the situation - but from what I've seen, it's likely US pressure to go above and beyond what CAFTA requires to pass *bad* legislation here in CR.
(IN CR, it is notoriously easy to throw a monkeywrench into any new law.. which is good and bad)
For example, I can walk into the local video store and rent anything, it's all pirated stuff. Great selection. Great prices. Great location. Great service. It's not stricty legal, but unless the rightsholders want to show up in person, set up a legal presence in the country, hire lawyers, and go to court - they can't do anything about it. No law enforcement is going to just magically show up and start shutting them down without someone pressing charges (at least that's my understanding.). IN other words - if you want your copyright enforced here, you shoudl have some kind of business presence here. If you don't - we're not interested.
I'd have to agree... there are very few hubs left out there, even fakes masquerading as switches. Everything is a switch nowadays - nobody's even bothering to make hub gear.
There was a short time when this wasn't true, and there was confusion - but that was, like, 10 years ago.
To your first statement: My understanding, from my system programmer friends is it's generally the opposite - it's extremely difficult to second-guess their good compilers (speaking intel here) - and even though the compiler spits out weird things, out of order, that don't make sense, after profiling, the compiler beats them out 90% of the time.
I don't follow your conclusion - there are still a limited number of states for any given particle (point) we can know... uncertainty principle or not - what am I overlooking?
No - PI is perfectly accurate within the field of geometry. Math is purely abstract, though - it's not reality.
circles may not actually exist - therefore PI is only truly "accurate" in an imaginary world where they do.
That philosophy works great until the technology changes suddenly - then their experience isn't worth so much, and those with experience as well as the ability to actually do work come out on top.
An old mentor of mine, when I asked him what doing this job right meant, told me "it means doing it from 9 to 5 and then going home"
He didn't mean be a lazy clock-puncher, but to be clear about what you need to do, when yo need to do it, and do it well, during the time allotted. Then go home.
This is complicated by the fact that most organizations really have no idea how to manage IT resources.
Work smart, organized, and hard, but do it during work hours, and then leave it alone.
The solution: good record keeping, good timekeeping, and finding a way to demonstrate your efficiency within the organization.
To quote from my past (and continuing) mistakes:
Don't overcommit.
Communicate expectations clearly.
Do what you say you will at the time you said you would do it. If you can't, communicate THAT clearly to those who need to know. Your boss is expecting you to do X. If you are going to miss that deadline, you need to let him know ASAP... because it's also HIS deadline.
No excuses.
Smile and be nice.
Possibly. THey also might just be sitting pretty because IT in general is often not well managed. Just because you have some value because you can fix product A faster than anyone else in the company, well, that doenst' help much down the road when new management dumps product A. A smart new grad can surpass lazy old-timers awfully quickly with a good work ethic and the ability to learn and adapt.
It's all too common.
Don't fall into that trap though - learn good time management, set clear goals for yourself, keep a detailed log of how you spend your paid time. Don't think of missing goals as bad- but do keep track of it.
In the end (which could be years) - such behavior is recognized, and will cover your ass in the end.
Stay calm, cool, collected, be clear about what who expects what from you (deliverables) - keep timelines and things communicated clearly, and stay focused on YOU.
That doesnt' mean abandon the team, as teams are often judged on what the team does, but, especially as the new guy, dont' rock the boat. If a project fails, someone should be doing post-mortem analysis as to why, and those details matter. Those notes you keep will save your ass. The guys with good record keeping come out on top, and advance faster in the long run. Don't get jealous, don't worry if you are doing more work than others - just think of it as practice (which it is). KEEP RECORDS. Did I mention keep records?
And be clear about deliverables.
Don't be passive-aggressive, and don't worry about what others are doing - just do good work.
Has never happened in a US city, and would likely cause immense terror if done right.
Terrorism isn't about the dead - it's about terrorizing the living - changing the way they think and live.
Observe london after that tube bombing. what did they do? Fix the tube, londoners kept on using the rest of the tube. Security was increased a bit, but not bothersome. End result? Terror plot not too effective. More people die from drunk driving accidents.
9/11 was *horrific* and sad, especially given this kind of thing doesn't happen in north america. The US & much of the world were shocked, appalled, and saddened by what happened that day.
What the US has done in response to that, however, has been pretty much a huge waste of time and money on public security theater. Hopefully behind the scenes some real intelligence work is also being done by real intelligence people, unhindered by beurocratic nonsense... but if they're doing that part right, we won't know about it.
Yes.... science could be nicer about it. But from a scientific point of view, why should they be? Billions weren't spent on this thing like they were on, say, nonsense political wars. A great many learned individuals who have studied the physics in question for, you know, their entire adult lives are cool with this experiment - it's the next natural step to figure out how the universe works. If they skipped a step, let's point it out... but otherwise, enough is enough already.
You're more likely to die slipping in the shower tomorrow morning than from the LHC.
"Oh, the math can't prove it?" math can't *prove* anything but math - math is not physics. Math is a tool, and a study that is purely logical and abstract and lives by itself. No math is going to *prove* smashing large hadrons together at incredibly high energies is safe - the only thing that will prove that is smashing lots of them together in a controlled, observed environment. Which is what we are doing.
But you don't buy Backblaze storage pods, right? Backblaze is an online service - they built them for themselves as I understand it.
Yes - there are excellent OSS solutions - if you can keep and maintain an engineering staff who can keep up to speed with things, and build things out, you can absolutely build out lots and lots of storage, and maintain it. Jimmy can swap drives. No problem.
The problem is - as a business grows (that's what they want to do) - this could become unmaintainable. Staffing becomes more difficult. All problems become in-house problems rather than vendor problems (and unfortunately, politics matter). In the end - the commercial SAN/NAS setup cost is nothing compared to the burn rate of the organization.
a) The bottleneck in pricing, I don't see 64 gig memory modules on the cheap, or supported by any motherboards yet.
b) The initial load of data (whether prefetch or whatever) that I want to work with is still constrained by whatever it's stored on.
I'd love to have a few terabytes of ram. That would work for me... and that's where we're heading. how the OS manages the various levels of RAM (as cache, storage, or whatever) is up for debate, I'm sure we'll see some interesting mechanisms. ,and using regular storage for data, etc)
(like how ZFS can have an SSD assigned as a cache drive for a given storage pool, -vs- the home user putting system files and software on the SSD
So yes - people SHOULD get systems with a lot more memory. Lots of memory is good. ('m a "no swapfile" guy myself. If I don't have enough physical RAM To do what I need, then I need more ram - not the gradual slowdown that swap brings. Yes, I know there are counter-arguments to this. All of them can be refuted by simply buying more ram.)