Yeah I seem to remember seeing that as well. Don't remember the details. Actually, a lot of people think the whole infraction system ought to be unconstitutional, because eventually, it CAN lead to jail time if taken out to its extreme. I'm on the fence, myself--can see where having a full-blown jury trial is not a practical thing for certain violations, but am not comfortable with the presumption of guilt.
I dug into this quite a bit earlier last year to justify a new hire. The best formula I found came out of this whitepaper.
In a nutshell, the formula is:
HR = W/500 + U/1000 + C/15 + A/50 + L/25 + V
where HR is total IT staff required, W is number of workstations, U is number of users, C is workgroups (clusters of users, basically--physical sites is how I count it), A is the number of supported applications, L is the total licenses required, and V is the number of distinct vendor platforms to be supported (operating systems, basically). That is about as good a predictor as I could find, although it's not magic--you can still have variations based on the specific requirements for the department.
Using that, I get a figure of 3.8 FTE; in reality, we have 2 FTE and a consultant who may as well be another.:/ That's to support 120-150 users on about 100 workstations with two major vendor platforms... the kicker for us, though, is they are spread out at about eleven sites, which ups our requirements considerably. You have either travel time, or telephone time, or crawling VNC link time to account for--I could do the same number all at one site for a lot less.
It's nice to think that your salary would go up if you were making do with less and getting the same results, but in practice you pretty much get stuck with industry standard in your area, unless you get particularly astute employers who know the value of what they are getting out of you.
That has happened to several people where I am at, as well.
I often wonder how exactly they'll handle it when they can me (I'm the sysadmin). Yeah, they could have one of my techs lock my account... but I'd just figure I mistyped my password a few times and go in on the admin account and unlock myself! Sticky wicket for them if they ever decide to fire me. "Scuzz, could you please lock yourself out? We're getting rid of you in a bit here...":)
The police don't have the power to decide if you have broken the law.
While that's true, it's not really applicable to the example the two of you are riffing off of. Namely, speeding, FTY, etc, are not crimes, but rather civil infractions. They are violations of code which can only result in a civil sanction (fine, loss of license, etc). They cannot be punished with jail time, and because of that they don't afford you the same sorts of protections that you have when accused of a crime. I don't believe there is even any presumption of innocence. Probable cause is not a factor in infractions--they are rather decided by a preponderance of evidence. PC only comes into the equation if they find something that is evidence of a criminal offense after they stop you.
In other words, the officer DOES decide if you've broken the law when citing you for a traffic violation. He's not establishing PC for anything--he observed a violation and writes the citation. There is no further investigation and no necessity to file formal charges. If you don't respond to the citation, guilt is presumed (rather than innocence, which would be the case in a criminal offense) and the officer's judgement is upheld.
All this is true at least in my state, and I believe in most of them.
That's somewhat true, but it ignores one of the larger reasons that you force password changes in the first place. Obviously, any password that can stay secure over time would never need to be changed except for one thing--brute force attacks. The idea behind forcing password changes is that even if somehow someone gets hold of a set of your encrypted passwords, by the time they manage to crack one, it will have changed.
There's a decision to be made, obviously, as to how great a risk that is versus the cost of having someone deal with lost or forgotten passwords, but if 'qwerty1' is secure from a cracker (yes, I know, it's just an example) then 'qwerty2' is no less so--I've not seen a brute force cracker bright enough to extrapolate even simple tweaks like that, even though a human might do so.
Guessing is a different matter, but sufficiently enforced rules cut down on guessability as well.
And then we would have got the story from the [i]buyer[/i] about how he sent this check off and it got cashed and WHOOPS! the PowerBook never showed up and he then had to track down the seller and threaten him with a baseball bat.:)
It's actually not a bad comparison. You're looking at design intent. They are looking at effect. Which is more important at the end of the day--what was intended or how it works out?
DDT was designed to kill insects. Agent Orange was designed to defoliate trees. Can you see how the original design principals fall by the wayside in practice? It's important to get away from the theory and look at the numbers. The 'cars versus guns' argument is more complex than a lot of people make it out to be, but it's not an irrelevant comparison. They are two pieces of hardware, each with different design principals, but both with many similar effects on the populace. That's where the comparison is at--not in what the tool was intended for.
Very true, but despite the death of the main character, I found "Consider Phlebas" to be pretty uplifting once you get to the Epilogue. I'm sure it's not intended that way... the "Brief History of the Idiran War" synopsis is very typical of Banks' dark humor; after regaling the reader with the mind-numbing statistics of death and destruction, he gives it a twist by framing the conflict as a 'minor' one... but on a more human level, I liked very much how it ends in a circle. You can imagine how the question the woman asks about the ship's name at the end is what prompts the telling of the story in the first place. And it evokes a sense of pride and honor that the Mind which survived adopted the name of the man which was trying to capture it for the enemy.
I don't know; I guess it still leaves me with a sense of melancholy but much less so than most of his other books. It's like watching a particularly bloody movie like "Saving Private Ryan" or some such, and despite the horror, finding a place to feel happy about how people handled themselves under such horrible circumstances.
"Excession" is another one that comes to mind which isn't terribly unhappy at the end. And I don't think that his latest one, "Look To Windward" was all that bad, either. Maybe he's mellowing out in his old age?:)
Well, whether the company should be using Microsoft OS based products or not is a different issue, really. While you're most likely correct from a 'friendly for new hires' perspective, the point shouldn't be what everyone else uses, but what his company's standard is. If it's Mac, then it's Mac... that's something that should be decided on its own merits and not amended simply because someone coming in the door prefers MS.
I think basically we're saying the same thing, it's just that I view a politely worded 'no' (which is essentially what you're saying when you say "Sure, we can do that, but it's going to cost you more than the combined revenue of the company for the next five years") as being a 'no' nonetheless. You shouldn't talk down to your users--but you should maintain enough control over your network to ensure stability and productivity for the [i]whole[/i] of the office and not sacrifice that for a few people who can't get with the program. Because at the end of the day, it's your butt on the line when something goes wrong, even if it was a result of someone else's pressuring you into it. The guy down the hall is going to call you when things break, not the dude with the PC.
I've had limited success with the "Okay, if you must do that, go ahead, but I don't have the budget to support you" route. It is fine for some things--it's basically what I tell people about third-party screensavers, freeware utilities, and the like--but anything that is going to dramatically increase my exposure to viruses, network traffic, or other ills, I'm not going to be that cavalier about. I sat down with the bosses, we picked a standard, and if they like the speed and stability that has resulted from that, they would be wise to listen when I explain to them that what they want to do threatens it. That sounds like the situation he's in, he just doesn't know a more, um, politic way to explain it.
IT is not in place to tell the users what they can't do.
Actually, I think this should be exactly what IT is in place to do. Some of the worst messes I've ever had the displeasure of walking into have been the result of an overly permissive "yeah, sure, whatever you need, go ahead and get it and plug it in" policy.
That's not to say that supporting users and their job requirements isn't important--you're right, it's job one. But the users, generally, should not be dictating the software or equipment they need to do the job. After all, they are not the IT professionals. There is a whole department there to find the right tools for the job. That's the entire point of having an IT department--people to make professional decisions about technology. If the users were capable of doing this, you wouldn't need IT in the first place.
Instead, typically, the users see a neat new toy at the last trade show or in someone else's business and decide suddenly that it's a requirement for them to get their job done. They don't consider the consequences or how it fits in to the rest of the system. IT should, and it should use that knowledge to set limits. The users should present IT with the business requirements and allow the techs to find and implement the technology that will best support those; they should NOT present IT with a new technology and say "here, make it work".
Saying no is one of my most important functions as an IT manager, IMHO. The company I am now at is running stable, under-budget, and effective systems because I've been able to cut off all the pie in the sky user-initiated projects off at the knees by saying no. I'm nicer about it than that, of course... usually it's more along the lines of "Wow, that really is a neat piece of gear! But why don't you tell me what exactly it is that you need to accomplish, and let's see if we can do it with something that fits in a little better with our current platform, shall we?"
Exactly. That's also implied by the fact the article mentions that an outside consultant had previously recommended a network overhaul and that it had already been approved--just not yet implemented, unfortunately.
Well, there was that whole capitulating right at the start of WWII thing...;)
I'm just kidding, mostly... there were a sizable number of Free French who escaped and returned to fight another day. But I think that this is where the modern conception of the French as cowards comes from. Although they fought very valiantly during the opening rounds of the Battle of France, the early capitulation and subsequent refusals to cooperate with Allied efforts (not that they weren't in a bad spot, but still, actively resisting the North African invasion was a bit much), contrasted especially to Britain's spirited resistance with far fewer resources, didn't leave the country in a very favorable light.
So, either Taco's original description of the article was pretty far off the mark (not unheard of), or this is not the text of the article in question, but rather some subtle and clever karma whoring (which seems to have worked nicely, incidentally--congratulations, sir!). Where is the pregnant Korean guy, is what I want to know?
Nah, I live in Seattle... was in Portland last weekend though, which is what occassioned the comment.
From strictly random observation, it seemed to me like busy stations down there had two or three people working (one inside and one or two outside manning the pumps), while the two very busy gas stations down the street from me, here in Seattle, only have one person on even during the evening rush hour--just sitting behind the counter, raking in the cash. So, that's where I'm seeing a difference in staffing.
I wasn't thinking of the small ones so much--the thing is, even at large, busy Washington stations, there's usually still only one person working. In Oregon, that doesn't seem to be the case--someone to watch the till, and one or two guys out running around pumping gas. Where do you come up with those extra two salaries, if not from your main source of revenue (gas, presumably)?
I was mostly being flippant, but I don't see how that wouldn't have to be passed along in the price somehow. I mean, really, how else could you pay for the labor? Gas sales must be the majority of sales at gas stations, even the convenience store types... how could they avoid passing the cost along and still somehow stay in business?
I've always noticed better prices on the Washington side of the border (was just down there last weekend, in fact) as well, and other than the labor factor, I can't understand what the difference could be.
Well, our stations don't have labor costs of keeping some poor, unschooled schmuck around to pump the gas for you; cost savings passed on to you, the consumer!
God bless Washington--a place where a man can stand tall and pump his own damn gas!
Yeah, but it also says something that the margins have gotten lower every time... the more people learned about the details, the less they liked it.
I'm pretty well convinced that most people who voted for it didn't really have a good idea of what they were actually getting in the deal and what it was going to cost them to get it. Cool? Yeah, it's cool. Cost effective? Not so much.
At least the monorail will help curb the amount of people commuting by car within Seattle. I agree that the buses (with reduced funding) certainly aren't helping a whole lot.
My question is, did you go to the polls thinking this? Because if that's why you voted for the monorail, you should not have. The studies that ETC did (this is the company that was for the initiative, mind you) indicate the the primary source of riders for the monorail will come from existing bus ridership. In other words, the monorail won't do a damn thing about people commuting by car in Seattle--the people who do that will still do it. It will be no more helpful than buses have been--and that's the optimistic take on the situation.
I am convinced that if the public education effort had started a little sooner, the monorail wouldn't have passed at all. There were too many misconceptions about the costs and benefits. The closer the election got, the more people began to examine the proposal, the fewer of them liked it. Unfortunately, I think a lot of them voted for it with those misconceptions and aren't going to be thrilled with what they end up with for their money.
Exactly. You just have to fake it enough to get in the door. A good generalist can spend the evening before the interview soaking up enough pertinent details to pass himself off as a specialist--and then it's generally easy enough to pick up the details after you've got the job.
In fact, this is one of the best ways to become a generalist. Having to absorb a lot of information about something you only know a little about, relatively quickly, is the hallmark of a good generalist. The important thing is to be able to adapt.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah I seem to remember seeing that as well. Don't remember the details. Actually, a lot of people think the whole infraction system ought to be unconstitutional, because eventually, it CAN lead to jail time if taken out to its extreme. I'm on the fence, myself--can see where having a full-blown jury trial is not a practical thing for certain violations, but am not comfortable with the presumption of guilt.
As if I'd tell the techs what the admin password was in the first place... otherwise they'd do the same thing when I had to get rid of them!
I dug into this quite a bit earlier last year to justify a new hire. The best formula I found came out of this whitepaper.
:/ That's to support 120-150 users on about 100 workstations with two major vendor platforms... the kicker for us, though, is they are spread out at about eleven sites, which ups our requirements considerably. You have either travel time, or telephone time, or crawling VNC link time to account for--I could do the same number all at one site for a lot less.
In a nutshell, the formula is:
HR = W/500 + U/1000 + C/15 + A/50 + L/25 + V
where HR is total IT staff required, W is number of workstations, U is number of users, C is workgroups (clusters of users, basically--physical sites is how I count it), A is the number of supported applications, L is the total licenses required, and V is the number of distinct vendor platforms to be supported (operating systems, basically). That is about as good a predictor as I could find, although it's not magic--you can still have variations based on the specific requirements for the department.
Using that, I get a figure of 3.8 FTE; in reality, we have 2 FTE and a consultant who may as well be another.
It's nice to think that your salary would go up if you were making do with less and getting the same results, but in practice you pretty much get stuck with industry standard in your area, unless you get particularly astute employers who know the value of what they are getting out of you.
Hope that helps!
That has happened to several people where I am at, as well.
:)
I often wonder how exactly they'll handle it when they can me (I'm the sysadmin). Yeah, they could have one of my techs lock my account... but I'd just figure I mistyped my password a few times and go in on the admin account and unlock myself! Sticky wicket for them if they ever decide to fire me. "Scuzz, could you please lock yourself out? We're getting rid of you in a bit here..."
The police don't have the power to decide if you have broken the law.
While that's true, it's not really applicable to the example the two of you are riffing off of. Namely, speeding, FTY, etc, are not crimes, but rather civil infractions. They are violations of code which can only result in a civil sanction (fine, loss of license, etc). They cannot be punished with jail time, and because of that they don't afford you the same sorts of protections that you have when accused of a crime. I don't believe there is even any presumption of innocence. Probable cause is not a factor in infractions--they are rather decided by a preponderance of evidence. PC only comes into the equation if they find something that is evidence of a criminal offense after they stop you.
In other words, the officer DOES decide if you've broken the law when citing you for a traffic violation. He's not establishing PC for anything--he observed a violation and writes the citation. There is no further investigation and no necessity to file formal charges. If you don't respond to the citation, guilt is presumed (rather than innocence, which would be the case in a criminal offense) and the officer's judgement is upheld.
All this is true at least in my state, and I believe in most of them.
That's somewhat true, but it ignores one of the larger reasons that you force password changes in the first place. Obviously, any password that can stay secure over time would never need to be changed except for one thing--brute force attacks. The idea behind forcing password changes is that even if somehow someone gets hold of a set of your encrypted passwords, by the time they manage to crack one, it will have changed.
There's a decision to be made, obviously, as to how great a risk that is versus the cost of having someone deal with lost or forgotten passwords, but if 'qwerty1' is secure from a cracker (yes, I know, it's just an example) then 'qwerty2' is no less so--I've not seen a brute force cracker bright enough to extrapolate even simple tweaks like that, even though a human might do so.
Guessing is a different matter, but sufficiently enforced rules cut down on guessability as well.
And then we would have got the story from the [i]buyer[/i] about how he sent this check off and it got cashed and WHOOPS! the PowerBook never showed up and he then had to track down the seller and threaten him with a baseball bat. :)
It's actually not a bad comparison. You're looking at design intent. They are looking at effect. Which is more important at the end of the day--what was intended or how it works out?
DDT was designed to kill insects. Agent Orange was designed to defoliate trees. Can you see how the original design principals fall by the wayside in practice? It's important to get away from the theory and look at the numbers. The 'cars versus guns' argument is more complex than a lot of people make it out to be, but it's not an irrelevant comparison. They are two pieces of hardware, each with different design principals, but both with many similar effects on the populace. That's where the comparison is at--not in what the tool was intended for.
Congrats to you both, and best wished.
****POSSIBLE SPOILERS BELOW*****
:)
Very true, but despite the death of the main character, I found "Consider Phlebas" to be pretty uplifting once you get to the Epilogue. I'm sure it's not intended that way... the "Brief History of the Idiran War" synopsis is very typical of Banks' dark humor; after regaling the reader with the mind-numbing statistics of death and destruction, he gives it a twist by framing the conflict as a 'minor' one... but on a more human level, I liked very much how it ends in a circle. You can imagine how the question the woman asks about the ship's name at the end is what prompts the telling of the story in the first place. And it evokes a sense of pride and honor that the Mind which survived adopted the name of the man which was trying to capture it for the enemy.
I don't know; I guess it still leaves me with a sense of melancholy but much less so than most of his other books. It's like watching a particularly bloody movie like "Saving Private Ryan" or some such, and despite the horror, finding a place to feel happy about how people handled themselves under such horrible circumstances.
"Excession" is another one that comes to mind which isn't terribly unhappy at the end. And I don't think that his latest one, "Look To Windward" was all that bad, either. Maybe he's mellowing out in his old age?
Well, whether the company should be using Microsoft OS based products or not is a different issue, really. While you're most likely correct from a 'friendly for new hires' perspective, the point shouldn't be what everyone else uses, but what his company's standard is. If it's Mac, then it's Mac... that's something that should be decided on its own merits and not amended simply because someone coming in the door prefers MS.
I think basically we're saying the same thing, it's just that I view a politely worded 'no' (which is essentially what you're saying when you say "Sure, we can do that, but it's going to cost you more than the combined revenue of the company for the next five years") as being a 'no' nonetheless. You shouldn't talk down to your users--but you should maintain enough control over your network to ensure stability and productivity for the [i]whole[/i] of the office and not sacrifice that for a few people who can't get with the program. Because at the end of the day, it's your butt on the line when something goes wrong, even if it was a result of someone else's pressuring you into it. The guy down the hall is going to call you when things break, not the dude with the PC.
I've had limited success with the "Okay, if you must do that, go ahead, but I don't have the budget to support you" route. It is fine for some things--it's basically what I tell people about third-party screensavers, freeware utilities, and the like--but anything that is going to dramatically increase my exposure to viruses, network traffic, or other ills, I'm not going to be that cavalier about. I sat down with the bosses, we picked a standard, and if they like the speed and stability that has resulted from that, they would be wise to listen when I explain to them that what they want to do threatens it. That sounds like the situation he's in, he just doesn't know a more, um, politic way to explain it.
IT is not in place to tell the users what they can't do.
Actually, I think this should be exactly what IT is in place to do. Some of the worst messes I've ever had the displeasure of walking into have been the result of an overly permissive "yeah, sure, whatever you need, go ahead and get it and plug it in" policy.
That's not to say that supporting users and their job requirements isn't important--you're right, it's job one. But the users, generally, should not be dictating the software or equipment they need to do the job. After all, they are not the IT professionals. There is a whole department there to find the right tools for the job. That's the entire point of having an IT department--people to make professional decisions about technology. If the users were capable of doing this, you wouldn't need IT in the first place.
Instead, typically, the users see a neat new toy at the last trade show or in someone else's business and decide suddenly that it's a requirement for them to get their job done. They don't consider the consequences or how it fits in to the rest of the system. IT should, and it should use that knowledge to set limits. The users should present IT with the business requirements and allow the techs to find and implement the technology that will best support those; they should NOT present IT with a new technology and say "here, make it work".
Saying no is one of my most important functions as an IT manager, IMHO. The company I am now at is running stable, under-budget, and effective systems because I've been able to cut off all the pie in the sky user-initiated projects off at the knees by saying no. I'm nicer about it than that, of course... usually it's more along the lines of "Wow, that really is a neat piece of gear! But why don't you tell me what exactly it is that you need to accomplish, and let's see if we can do it with something that fits in a little better with our current platform, shall we?"
Exactly. That's also implied by the fact the article mentions that an outside consultant had previously recommended a network overhaul and that it had already been approved--just not yet implemented, unfortunately.
Well, there was that whole capitulating right at the start of WWII thing... ;)
I'm just kidding, mostly... there were a sizable number of Free French who escaped and returned to fight another day. But I think that this is where the modern conception of the French as cowards comes from. Although they fought very valiantly during the opening rounds of the Battle of France, the early capitulation and subsequent refusals to cooperate with Allied efforts (not that they weren't in a bad spot, but still, actively resisting the North African invasion was a bit much), contrasted especially to Britain's spirited resistance with far fewer resources, didn't leave the country in a very favorable light.
That would be my guess, anyway...
So, either Taco's original description of the article was pretty far off the mark (not unheard of), or this is not the text of the article in question, but rather some subtle and clever karma whoring (which seems to have worked nicely, incidentally--congratulations, sir!). Where is the pregnant Korean guy, is what I want to know?
Engine failure during takeoff is the worst possible scenario for a twin engine plane.
Again, I'm thinking single-engine planes might not be a real comfortable place to be in that situation either....
That's because, when fully-loaded, the Metro would, under some conditions, be unable to climb on takeoff if there was an engine failure.
Er... I would think that would be a pretty common problem among planes, fully-loaded or not...
Or I'm just really short. Or you're too tall. Or some combination of the three... :)
Nah, I live in Seattle... was in Portland last weekend though, which is what occassioned the comment.
From strictly random observation, it seemed to me like busy stations down there had two or three people working (one inside and one or two outside manning the pumps), while the two very busy gas stations down the street from me, here in Seattle, only have one person on even during the evening rush hour--just sitting behind the counter, raking in the cash. So, that's where I'm seeing a difference in staffing.
I wasn't thinking of the small ones so much--the thing is, even at large, busy Washington stations, there's usually still only one person working. In Oregon, that doesn't seem to be the case--someone to watch the till, and one or two guys out running around pumping gas. Where do you come up with those extra two salaries, if not from your main source of revenue (gas, presumably)?
I was mostly being flippant, but I don't see how that wouldn't have to be passed along in the price somehow. I mean, really, how else could you pay for the labor? Gas sales must be the majority of sales at gas stations, even the convenience store types... how could they avoid passing the cost along and still somehow stay in business?
I've always noticed better prices on the Washington side of the border (was just down there last weekend, in fact) as well, and other than the labor factor, I can't understand what the difference could be.
Well, our stations don't have labor costs of keeping some poor, unschooled schmuck around to pump the gas for you; cost savings passed on to you, the consumer!
God bless Washington--a place where a man can stand tall and pump his own damn gas!
Yeah, but it also says something that the margins have gotten lower every time... the more people learned about the details, the less they liked it.
I'm pretty well convinced that most people who voted for it didn't really have a good idea of what they were actually getting in the deal and what it was going to cost them to get it. Cool? Yeah, it's cool. Cost effective? Not so much.
At least the monorail will help curb the amount of people commuting by car within Seattle. I agree that the buses (with reduced funding) certainly aren't helping a whole lot.
My question is, did you go to the polls thinking this? Because if that's why you voted for the monorail, you should not have. The studies that ETC did (this is the company that was for the initiative, mind you) indicate the the primary source of riders for the monorail will come from existing bus ridership. In other words, the monorail won't do a damn thing about people commuting by car in Seattle--the people who do that will still do it. It will be no more helpful than buses have been--and that's the optimistic take on the situation.
I am convinced that if the public education effort had started a little sooner, the monorail wouldn't have passed at all. There were too many misconceptions about the costs and benefits. The closer the election got, the more people began to examine the proposal, the fewer of them liked it. Unfortunately, I think a lot of them voted for it with those misconceptions and aren't going to be thrilled with what they end up with for their money.
Exactly. You just have to fake it enough to get in the door. A good generalist can spend the evening before the interview soaking up enough pertinent details to pass himself off as a specialist--and then it's generally easy enough to pick up the details after you've got the job.
In fact, this is one of the best ways to become a generalist. Having to absorb a lot of information about something you only know a little about, relatively quickly, is the hallmark of a good generalist. The important thing is to be able to adapt.