I had the pleasure of reading both the science fiction he and Larry Niven wrote, as well as the Chaos Manor columns in BYTE. The latter taught me a great deal about problem solving in this new era of computing, and it was great to read about actual use cases of the new technologies that were bursting on the scene every few months. He probably ran every networking protocol invented from the early '70s to today, along with all the different wiring standards through his house. He would stick a few different mass storage devices on the network to see which ones actually came close to their marketing hype, and which ones were c**p.
His fiction was good, hard SF - no fantasy stories of witches or unicorns, but an extension of the human race into outer space. The details were clever and believable. I especially remember the scene where a crew discovers how the Moties improved a coffee machine and how it opened the characters' eyes into both the positive and horrifying possibilities of what the creatures could, and eventually did, do to all human technology they came into contact with.
I was (am) willing to overlook his politics, much as I have RAH's. Jerry Pournelle will be missed, and I am sending my condolences to his family.
Thanks, Jerry, for all your insights and creativity!
I own mostly Apple gear. I've used/owned PC equipment (IBM, DEC, HP, Dell) but I averaged less than 2 years on each PC before something major needed to be replaced or upgraded in order to use the device on the most recent Windows version. Generally, most PC's are built to a low price point so the upgradeability is not all there. They are truly the 'toasters' of computing.
My current MacBook Pro's are over 6 years' old and neither are close to retirement. I added RAM and upgraded the disks, and I can still run not only the latest MacOS, but under Parallels - I can run various flavors of Windows and *NIX as needed. My iPhone and iPad work seamlessly as well. I am only replacing my iPhone (a 5) because the screen is getting too small for me to see well at my advanced age. My original iPad was replaced since I couldn't upgrade the IOS anymore. As Apple's old tagline used to say, "It just works". Do they cost more? Yep - but the investment for me has been well worth it since I use Apple devices longer than their competitors' devices. Even my Mac Plus lasted seven years, until I couldn't load the latest System and any useful applications.
Well, there is a business balance to look at - risk mitigation vs cost. However, if you are in a business where you take reputational risk seriously, you have to take security seriously. This means going through the whole gamut of access management, strict password management, audits and pen tests, user education, as well as the traditional hardware and software based security tools. Are these perfect? Hell no! But, often times having a serious security posture makes the difficulty of attack higher and at least in the days before "state-sponsored hacking", it was enough to keep script kiddies and lone wolves away. Today, with hackers having greater resources behind them, we are seeing the online repetition of the first Iraq War where the powerful and mobile coalition forces overwhelmed the fixed, inferior Iraqi forces.
What Yahoo! apparently did was to de-emphasize security more that they should have. As a Yahoo! customer, I have taken measures to move all relevant connections away from them and will end participation in other services as many peers have done. If indeed the corporate decision (Marissa) was to not take the logical steps to shore up security in order to prevent more subscriber losses, then she was definitely not the right person for this position. A successful CEO cannot have a short-term mentality. Also, they should have a good sounding board (and an effective governing board) to review and counsel. There are many people to share the blame at Yahoo!, and if Verizon doesn't restructure their deal then their board needs to be looked at skeptically as well.
Being a ditto-head here (and in the same field) having an ATS fail sounds right. No matter how well one tries to design redundancy and resiliency into a data center, there will always be that one weak spot. I would hope that Delta management and IT conduct a serious failure assessment (without it devolving into a witch hunt) to understand the failure process here and determine how to change it. I would like to see a better discussion of the exact cause so those of us in the data center industry can use the information to assess our own facilities.
And yes, regular service and maintenance might have helped catch this issue before it caused the outage.
1) Replacement parts were $100-150; which led me to think "Gee, I can do this!" 2) Reviewed video and decided "Nope" because of the time and effort needed. 3) Contacted local repair person(s) who stated (even after I told them what the problem was) they wanted to come on site. Finally, one gave me a ballpark $700-900 figure parts and labor, 4) Ordered new machine with a net cost less than the repair price thanks to my company's program to replace older appliances with newer (and hopefully more efficient) appliances
I realize that there is a landfill issue, but that is a secondary or tertiary issue when compared to having no washer over the holiday season (and a very upset spousal unit!). By contrast, when our dryer stopped drying a few months later, all it took was $45 in parts and about an hour of my time to replace two sensors and a heating element. Dryer now works properly.
I would rather that firms spend a little thought up front to make the current state of the art last a little longer, especially now that prices are getting into the ridiculous range.
Anyone might think something as low-tech as a washing machine would be easily self-repairable. When my mid-2000's front loader started sounding like a cement mixer, I went to the Intertubes and found relevant and well-documented repair videos. When I got to the end of the first video covering the complete teardown of said washer, ending with a requirement to find "a strong friend for the next steps" I called my local retailer and purchased a new washing machine. The point here is that while it would be nice to be able to fix some of the devices we own, sometimes the investment in time, money, health and frustration are not worth it versus replacing the broken device outright.
Being a ditto-head here. My 2010/11 Macbook Pro has 16Gb and the original slow 320Gb drive. As soon as I feel flush enough to spring for a 500Gb SSD, then that will be the last direct physical upgrade to what is a very reliable laptop. All the other items - external storage, larger monitors - are cheap enough to swap and upgrade as needed, but the core CPU will still soldier on.
Again, to echo what has been said here, traditional laptops/desktops are at the pinnacle of their power now and have been since about 2009 or so. Tablets and phones have made consumption easier, which takes that task away from the 'PC' and moves them more to the producer side. While I like my I-devices (there are at least 7 or 8 floating around between me, the wife and the dog) I really don't like creating or editing on them. It is not as easy (yet!) as on the traditional PC.
I'll ditto CAIMLAS' remarks except that I run FreeNAS on a home-kludge setup - Sunfire x4100 with a no-name $99 external disk array and bundled eSATA card. Setup was clean and quick - the Sun hardware did not burp when I put the non-Sun eSATA card in - and now I am able to use the 3TB array as a networked Time Machine drive as well as a media drive. If FreeNAS can survive my ham-handed efforts, as well as small- to medium-enterprise installations for lower cost and better performance, then I think they are doing something right. Now, if someone wants to work on forked-daapd and bring it up to date with the current version of ITunes, I would be very happy.
You know, if her contract was specific to her new book, and she retained the rights to the short stories, then Penguin is indeed the enemy. But, really, hasn't Penguin been reading the papers lately? This Intertube thingy is catching on - you can get direct to user music and videos and shopping. Aren't they a little behind the curve here?
Actually, the issue of decreasing linewidths has been a major concern ever since UV lithography came into play. The progress is really amazing. It was a big deal in the late '80s to get under 100nm, now there is consistent production at 32nm. There have been research programs investigating X-Ray lithography and electron-beam lithography, but I don't think any of these have panned out for mass production. Now, another concern is electron leakage from these tinier linewidths. Sure, high-K materials help, but there is still some loss.
I was an online facilitator for UoP from 2001 to 2002. I taught an intro course that went into the SDLC, and had a good time with it. A few of the students were not prepared for the work, but overall there was good participation and good feedback from both students and support faculty. I stopped due to family issues, and when I tried to jump back in a couple of years later, there was no interest in having a former, well rated facilitator on board.
In my last class, I had both a woman who lived in Idaho who was 2-3 hours away from a bricks and mortar school and a Navy seaman stationed in Guam. RIght there is a powerful argument for effective distance learning. Sure, some of us did do the "college experience" and we wouldn't trade what we remember for anything (and trust me, there are some things I really don't remember!). However, schools need to take back the online/distance learning franchise for those people who truly wish to increase their knowledge but cannot make the physical commitment to travel to a set location. Of course, many of these traditional schools like the endowments that help them build the ornate business schools or mall-like student centers because they can use that for advertising and for jacking up tuition.
In any case, someone in Education needs to do this right and not as a ripoff.
A decade ago, I went from a university where I had built the network and helped move the campus into the information age to a business where the entire IT staff was outsourced since the business thought it would help them manage their costs. Couple that with the increase in government oversight and regulation (SOX, HIPAA), and now IT means spending more time writing process documents and less time working on the things that attracted bright people to the business. Ed Yourdon saw this coming in his book "The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer", but the same precepts apply across the board. If your function is thought to be a commodity, then business will find a lower cost provider than you. If (as others have mentioned) your IT functions are not seen as a strategic asset, then IT becomes a commodity automatically - something you have to have like lights, plumbing, power, garbage collection.
Labs, yeah, good times! The biggest problem is keeping the labs both operational and relevant. I just finished cleaning out my company's network lab as the switchgear was not L3-capable, out of production and out of our network, and none of the interfaces were faster than 100Mbps. None of it could be updated to a relevant OS level. It is mentioned earlier that if you are a large enough network, you designate a branch to serve as a guinea pig for planned changes. Also, if you have a branch close down, make sure you reclaim the equipment if it is new enough and use that for your 'lab' until the next refresh. Sadly, using older equipment only works if you never plan to use leading (bleeding?) edge features. However, my colleagues and I have found that using older equipment sometimes masks new and unknown interactions between the new services and older, perceived-stable, protocols.
Plan ahead meticulously - using paper and pen is not a sin as it is often faster than trying to model your system in software. Also, leverage your vendors heavily. They have the latest gear, and hopefully you will have service contracts, and they can assist you in planning out major changes.
Back in my early techie years, I was a unionized IT employee at an East Coast university. When pagers started to roll out, our union leadership started to make noise about getting overtime (or added compensation) for carrying said pagers. Long story short, the university system leadership said not only "No" but "H*** No". We didn't strike either.
Fast forward about 23 years and the network group I was in had a rotating on-call pager. For a long time, we would take an extra day off to make up for the fact that we were on-call (answering questions that should never have come to our group). However, that ended with a new manager who said that we couldn't afford to provide these "undocumented" days' off. Our colleagues in a foreign country, however, still receive extra pay for carrying a pager.
Bottom line is, in the US over the last 20-25 years, employers have been squeezing the employees harder and harder even as more jobs go overseas or to low-balling contractors. Unless there is a major sea change in employer-employee relations (and there will not be any time soon), forget about collecting any extras.
A firm I worked with recently tore down an arbitrage network (they were getting out of the business as it was not core) which comprised of a great deal of Layer 2 dark fiber between sites in NYC and an external data center in NJ, Force 10 fabric switches with multiple paths to server clusters, and a great many Sun X-series servers running Linux. This arbitrage network bypassed the standard corporate (i.e. Cisco-based) network as they wanted exclusivity, higher bandwidth and as much speed as possible. Still, there were issues and the whole environment was scrapped since the actual returns did not match the expectations or cover the costs.
When I looked over the shoulders of the designers (they didn't want too much support from the regular network engineering team) they were concerned with raw performance and not as much with security or other daily operational issues. I would characterize it as the difference between, say, a NASCAR Sprint Cup car and your regular transportation. The former is purpose-built solely for performance while the other has to contend with safety requirements, daily functionality, and a lower common denominator for use.
Linked In - worth the effort and exposure
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Besides echoing earlier comments about keeping in touch with colleagues from previous employers, one feature of Linked In I find helpful is with research for jobs and companies. A head hunter pinged me about an interesting-sounding position at a local university. I went to the school's website and did not find it in their listings. I saw that one of my former colleagues was at a similar level at that school, so I queried him about the position. His reply was that there was no such position open - and he confirmed it with the VP supposedly hiring for that job. So, having the Linked In connections provides a great deal of added support to winnow out the garbage from recruitment firms.
True story - I start my new job as Network Team Lead with one cabling tech and one temporary consultant hired to fill in after the rest of the network team resigned. My documentation? Six large moving boxes full of c**p from the previous two leads and their managers. No online docu, no drawings, and a whole lot of head-scratching. This lead to us scrapping a major disaster recovery test because it was based on a network that had been dismantled two years prior, and no one had bothered to maintain the documentation. Yes, the company was in bad shape, but it was improving. By the time I left four years later (after a merger with a larger firm who did not require my services) we knew down to the specific patch cable where things were, and what processes we needed for hardware/software configuration.
I have to be a ditto-head with the earlier post about Apple finally pissing someone off. They are no longer the lovable underdog (nor have they really been except during the lost years under Gil Amelio), valiantly battling M$oft for world dominance. They are also a business that has to protect their intellectual property. A nuisance lawsuit by a patent troll or a blogger with great, if confidential, resources are both fair game for any firm - not just Apple - to go after if they feel their property has been improperly used. Sure, it's great for us fanbois (and grrls) to get the really advance word on OS or hardware decisions, but for Apple (or any business) it can mean their business would be adversely affected.
I will continue to look at Apple products first in certain areas because I like the fact they work with relatively minimal fuss. I like not having to support my daughters' laptops over the phone and late at night before one of their papers/tests/etc are due. I like the whole iPod ecosystem - with DRM and without - because it works. However, I would expect that, as a business, they will be just as evil as others/.'ers have dumped on in these pages.
I installed Leopard on my PPC Mac Mini and my daughter's relatively new Intel MacBook. No issues with either one, but the time it took was approaching Win2k/XP levels. Still, it was far more painless than any Windows install, any Linux install (and I've gone from Slackware to SuSE and RedHat), and pre OS X Macintosh (System 7 anyone?).
It should be no surprise to many Mac users that each build does break/improve things that may not have been explicitly allowed in earlier builds. Unlike the non-Mac OS worlds, Apple is still the final arbiter on what does and does not make it on their OS.
Compared to other mini systems of the era the DEC VAX kicked major butt in the scientific and education arenas before getting sucked into Compaq. Still, we had a major challenge getting DECnet and TCP/IP to coexist at the desktop level. Macintoshes required DAVE, and until Microsoft came out with their TCP/IP stack (anyone remember Wolverine for Win3.11?) we had to struggle with Pathworks. I built three identical PC's running WFW3.11 and installed Pathworks on all three (massaging the loads and so forth carefully). Only one ran! Never found out why as we junked Pathworks.
In another job, I sysadmin'd a VAX network that was used to build complex optics. The company wanted to keep that network separate, so we installed DEMPR's (Digital Equipment MultiPort Repeaters - 8-10Mb coax ports with one uplink) all over the building for the engineers and the fabrication stands. The system ran 7x24 for over four years. I think the IBM mainframe in the same building came down a few times and stayed down longer than anyone cared to admit. Ah, when hardware was really hardware!
I've seen both the best and the worst of having admins involved, and in not having them involved. About three years ago, my firm rolled out a web-based customer service app. My comrades in UNIX, NT and my network team were only told that they needed to provide servers and connections, not that there was a major application rollout. The first day the app was in use, I had the operations VP screaming in my ear that his agents at our remote site were unable to work because the app was so slow. We found that, because of the undocumented and untested requirements of the new application, the WAN usage at our remote sites went from under 200k to maxing out two T1 circuits. It took two years to finally get that situation stabilized by increasing our bandwidth several times over (increasing our costs) and spending several man-years to correct the application.
After a change at the CIO level, we now have multidisciplinary teams - programmers, admins, DBA's - working together to prevent such expensive oversights. The problem with the article is that it romanticizes the past. How many of us have had to live through DOS programs whose programmer assumed their program was the only one running? Today, more than in the past, we cannot afford to have walls built between the various groups in IT. The costs of failure are too great.
that FTP'ing X^Y Gb of data really chokes our WAN/LAN/Internet pipes and that they should use Tapes or DVD's. When we show them that the $1000's of recurring costs for bandwidth can be used more efficiently for a DVD +/- R/RW and postage, they realize this actually makes their bottom line a whole lot better.
One issue that has come up, and that is having media/reader problems. Make sure your data partner can actually read your tapes/disks/cards.
Here's a fun situation - firm outsources infrastructure IT (ops/network/telecomm/servers) then after a change in CIO 18 months later, insources 80% of them who are left. Original head count was about 130, coming back about 75-80.
Let's face it, firms don't want to be in the IT business, but those firms that do not have an effective IT function will invite another firm to do it for them. If your company is growing quickly and changing rapidly, fight for the creation of a ninja IT team that will act as an IT strike force. Your firm will have the benefit of dedicated professionals that will (hopefully) share in the bennies as you grow.
If your firm is stable, then look at outsourcing. Your IT people will have new vistas open up for them, and your company will now have to justify all of those weird requests since they have to pay dearly for them.
I am on two sides of this topic. On one hand, when I wanted to move away from my last job in a state university IT department, I found I needed to have a cert (CCNA in my case) just to get an interview. Now that I have the job, a cert is fine depending on how old it is, but I like to see the actual experience. I have an engineer working for me who is a Cert King, but I am still leery of having him handle anything more complex than programming a data switch. He has been in situations where his previous certs (Master CNE, MCSE, CCNA/DA) should have helped, but he still asks basic questions that he should already know.
Get the experience, and leaven with certs wisely. Cisco is still the best for networking, and Microsoft has some good points for desktop/NT/Windows. The college degree did not go for naught since you gained a good base in problem solving (I hope!) that is more important than the certs.
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I had the pleasure of reading both the science fiction he and Larry Niven wrote, as well as the Chaos Manor columns in BYTE. The latter taught me a great deal about problem solving in this new era of computing, and it was great to read about actual use cases of the new technologies that were bursting on the scene every few months. He probably ran every networking protocol invented from the early '70s to today, along with all the different wiring standards through his house. He would stick a few different mass storage devices on the network to see which ones actually came close to their marketing hype, and which ones were c**p.
His fiction was good, hard SF - no fantasy stories of witches or unicorns, but an extension of the human race into outer space. The details were clever and believable. I especially remember the scene where a crew discovers how the Moties improved a coffee machine and how it opened the characters' eyes into both the positive and horrifying possibilities of what the creatures could, and eventually did, do to all human technology they came into contact with.
I was (am) willing to overlook his politics, much as I have RAH's. Jerry Pournelle will be missed, and I am sending my condolences to his family.
Thanks, Jerry, for all your insights and creativity!
I own mostly Apple gear. I've used/owned PC equipment (IBM, DEC, HP, Dell) but I averaged less than 2 years on each PC before something major needed to be replaced or upgraded in order to use the device on the most recent Windows version. Generally, most PC's are built to a low price point so the upgradeability is not all there. They are truly the 'toasters' of computing.
My current MacBook Pro's are over 6 years' old and neither are close to retirement. I added RAM and upgraded the disks, and I can still run not only the latest MacOS, but under Parallels - I can run various flavors of Windows and *NIX as needed. My iPhone and iPad work seamlessly as well. I am only replacing my iPhone (a 5) because the screen is getting too small for me to see well at my advanced age. My original iPad was replaced since I couldn't upgrade the IOS anymore. As Apple's old tagline used to say, "It just works". Do they cost more? Yep - but the investment for me has been well worth it since I use Apple devices longer than their competitors' devices. Even my Mac Plus lasted seven years, until I couldn't load the latest System and any useful applications.
Well, there is a business balance to look at - risk mitigation vs cost. However, if you are in a business where you take reputational risk seriously, you have to take security seriously. This means going through the whole gamut of access management, strict password management, audits and pen tests, user education, as well as the traditional hardware and software based security tools. Are these perfect? Hell no! But, often times having a serious security posture makes the difficulty of attack higher and at least in the days before "state-sponsored hacking", it was enough to keep script kiddies and lone wolves away. Today, with hackers having greater resources behind them, we are seeing the online repetition of the first Iraq War where the powerful and mobile coalition forces overwhelmed the fixed, inferior Iraqi forces.
What Yahoo! apparently did was to de-emphasize security more that they should have. As a Yahoo! customer, I have taken measures to move all relevant connections away from them and will end participation in other services as many peers have done. If indeed the corporate decision (Marissa) was to not take the logical steps to shore up security in order to prevent more subscriber losses, then she was definitely not the right person for this position. A successful CEO cannot have a short-term mentality. Also, they should have a good sounding board (and an effective governing board) to review and counsel. There are many people to share the blame at Yahoo!, and if Verizon doesn't restructure their deal then their board needs to be looked at skeptically as well.
Being a ditto-head here (and in the same field) having an ATS fail sounds right. No matter how well one tries to design redundancy and resiliency into a data center, there will always be that one weak spot. I would hope that Delta management and IT conduct a serious failure assessment (without it devolving into a witch hunt) to understand the failure process here and determine how to change it. I would like to see a better discussion of the exact cause so those of us in the data center industry can use the information to assess our own facilities.
And yes, regular service and maintenance might have helped catch this issue before it caused the outage.
So - context:
1) Replacement parts were $100-150; which led me to think "Gee, I can do this!"
2) Reviewed video and decided "Nope" because of the time and effort needed.
3) Contacted local repair person(s) who stated (even after I told them what the problem was) they wanted to come on site. Finally, one gave me a ballpark $700-900 figure parts and labor,
4) Ordered new machine with a net cost less than the repair price thanks to my company's program to replace older appliances with newer (and hopefully more efficient) appliances
I realize that there is a landfill issue, but that is a secondary or tertiary issue when compared to having no washer over the holiday season (and a very upset spousal unit!). By contrast, when our dryer stopped drying a few months later, all it took was $45 in parts and about an hour of my time to replace two sensors and a heating element. Dryer now works properly.
I would rather that firms spend a little thought up front to make the current state of the art last a little longer, especially now that prices are getting into the ridiculous range.
Anyone might think something as low-tech as a washing machine would be easily self-repairable. When my mid-2000's front loader started sounding like a cement mixer, I went to the Intertubes and found relevant and well-documented repair videos. When I got to the end of the first video covering the complete teardown of said washer, ending with a requirement to find "a strong friend for the next steps" I called my local retailer and purchased a new washing machine. The point here is that while it would be nice to be able to fix some of the devices we own, sometimes the investment in time, money, health and frustration are not worth it versus replacing the broken device outright.
Being a ditto-head here. My 2010/11 Macbook Pro has 16Gb and the original slow 320Gb drive. As soon as I feel flush enough to spring for a 500Gb SSD, then that will be the last direct physical upgrade to what is a very reliable laptop. All the other items - external storage, larger monitors - are cheap enough to swap and upgrade as needed, but the core CPU will still soldier on.
Again, to echo what has been said here, traditional laptops/desktops are at the pinnacle of their power now and have been since about 2009 or so. Tablets and phones have made consumption easier, which takes that task away from the 'PC' and moves them more to the producer side. While I like my I-devices (there are at least 7 or 8 floating around between me, the wife and the dog) I really don't like creating or editing on them. It is not as easy (yet!) as on the traditional PC.
I'll ditto CAIMLAS' remarks except that I run FreeNAS on a home-kludge setup - Sunfire x4100 with a no-name $99 external disk array and bundled eSATA card. Setup was clean and quick - the Sun hardware did not burp when I put the non-Sun eSATA card in - and now I am able to use the 3TB array as a networked Time Machine drive as well as a media drive. If FreeNAS can survive my ham-handed efforts, as well as small- to medium-enterprise installations for lower cost and better performance, then I think they are doing something right. Now, if someone wants to work on forked-daapd and bring it up to date with the current version of ITunes, I would be very happy.
You know, if her contract was specific to her new book, and she retained the rights to the short stories, then Penguin is indeed the enemy. But, really, hasn't Penguin been reading the papers lately? This Intertube thingy is catching on - you can get direct to user music and videos and shopping. Aren't they a little behind the curve here?
Actually, the issue of decreasing linewidths has been a major concern ever since UV lithography came into play. The progress is really amazing. It was a big deal in the late '80s to get under 100nm, now there is consistent production at 32nm. There have been research programs investigating X-Ray lithography and electron-beam lithography, but I don't think any of these have panned out for mass production. Now, another concern is electron leakage from these tinier linewidths. Sure, high-K materials help, but there is still some loss.
I was an online facilitator for UoP from 2001 to 2002. I taught an intro course that went into the SDLC, and had a good time with it. A few of the students were not prepared for the work, but overall there was good participation and good feedback from both students and support faculty. I stopped due to family issues, and when I tried to jump back in a couple of years later, there was no interest in having a former, well rated facilitator on board.
In my last class, I had both a woman who lived in Idaho who was 2-3 hours away from a bricks and mortar school and a Navy seaman stationed in Guam. RIght there is a powerful argument for effective distance learning. Sure, some of us did do the "college experience" and we wouldn't trade what we remember for anything (and trust me, there are some things I really don't remember!). However, schools need to take back the online/distance learning franchise for those people who truly wish to increase their knowledge but cannot make the physical commitment to travel to a set location. Of course, many of these traditional schools like the endowments that help them build the ornate business schools or mall-like student centers because they can use that for advertising and for jacking up tuition.
In any case, someone in Education needs to do this right and not as a ripoff.
A decade ago, I went from a university where I had built the network and helped move the campus into the information age to a business where the entire IT staff was outsourced since the business thought it would help them manage their costs. Couple that with the increase in government oversight and regulation (SOX, HIPAA), and now IT means spending more time writing process documents and less time working on the things that attracted bright people to the business. Ed Yourdon saw this coming in his book "The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer", but the same precepts apply across the board. If your function is thought to be a commodity, then business will find a lower cost provider than you. If (as others have mentioned) your IT functions are not seen as a strategic asset, then IT becomes a commodity automatically - something you have to have like lights, plumbing, power, garbage collection.
Labs, yeah, good times! The biggest problem is keeping the labs both operational and relevant. I just finished cleaning out my company's network lab as the switchgear was not L3-capable, out of production and out of our network, and none of the interfaces were faster than 100Mbps. None of it could be updated to a relevant OS level. It is mentioned earlier that if you are a large enough network, you designate a branch to serve as a guinea pig for planned changes. Also, if you have a branch close down, make sure you reclaim the equipment if it is new enough and use that for your 'lab' until the next refresh. Sadly, using older equipment only works if you never plan to use leading (bleeding?) edge features. However, my colleagues and I have found that using older equipment sometimes masks new and unknown interactions between the new services and older, perceived-stable, protocols.
Plan ahead meticulously - using paper and pen is not a sin as it is often faster than trying to model your system in software. Also, leverage your vendors heavily. They have the latest gear, and hopefully you will have service contracts, and they can assist you in planning out major changes.
Praying when a change goes in is good, too.
Back in my early techie years, I was a unionized IT employee at an East Coast university. When pagers started to roll out, our union leadership started to make noise about getting overtime (or added compensation) for carrying said pagers. Long story short, the university system leadership said not only "No" but "H*** No". We didn't strike either.
Fast forward about 23 years and the network group I was in had a rotating on-call pager. For a long time, we would take an extra day off to make up for the fact that we were on-call (answering questions that should never have come to our group). However, that ended with a new manager who said that we couldn't afford to provide these "undocumented" days' off. Our colleagues in a foreign country, however, still receive extra pay for carrying a pager.
Bottom line is, in the US over the last 20-25 years, employers have been squeezing the employees harder and harder even as more jobs go overseas or to low-balling contractors. Unless there is a major sea change in employer-employee relations (and there will not be any time soon), forget about collecting any extras.
Yeah, and then when they went to a road course, the whole thing fell apart since they could only turn left.
A firm I worked with recently tore down an arbitrage network (they were getting out of the business as it was not core) which comprised of a great deal of Layer 2 dark fiber between sites in NYC and an external data center in NJ, Force 10 fabric switches with multiple paths to server clusters, and a great many Sun X-series servers running Linux. This arbitrage network bypassed the standard corporate (i.e. Cisco-based) network as they wanted exclusivity, higher bandwidth and as much speed as possible. Still, there were issues and the whole environment was scrapped since the actual returns did not match the expectations or cover the costs.
When I looked over the shoulders of the designers (they didn't want too much support from the regular network engineering team) they were concerned with raw performance and not as much with security or other daily operational issues. I would characterize it as the difference between, say, a NASCAR Sprint Cup car and your regular transportation. The former is purpose-built solely for performance while the other has to contend with safety requirements, daily functionality, and a lower common denominator for use.
Besides echoing earlier comments about keeping in touch with colleagues from previous employers, one feature of Linked In I find helpful is with research for jobs and companies. A head hunter pinged me about an interesting-sounding position at a local university. I went to the school's website and did not find it in their listings. I saw that one of my former colleagues was at a similar level at that school, so I queried him about the position. His reply was that there was no such position open - and he confirmed it with the VP supposedly hiring for that job. So, having the Linked In connections provides a great deal of added support to winnow out the garbage from recruitment firms.
True story - I start my new job as Network Team Lead with one cabling tech and one temporary consultant hired to fill in after the rest of the network team resigned. My documentation? Six large moving boxes full of c**p from the previous two leads and their managers. No online docu, no drawings, and a whole lot of head-scratching. This lead to us scrapping a major disaster recovery test because it was based on a network that had been dismantled two years prior, and no one had bothered to maintain the documentation. Yes, the company was in bad shape, but it was improving. By the time I left four years later (after a merger with a larger firm who did not require my services) we knew down to the specific patch cable where things were, and what processes we needed for hardware/software configuration.
Write it down!
I have to be a ditto-head with the earlier post about Apple finally pissing someone off. They are no longer the lovable underdog (nor have they really been except during the lost years under Gil Amelio), valiantly battling M$oft for world dominance. They are also a business that has to protect their intellectual property. A nuisance lawsuit by a patent troll or a blogger with great, if confidential, resources are both fair game for any firm - not just Apple - to go after if they feel their property has been improperly used. Sure, it's great for us fanbois (and grrls) to get the really advance word on OS or hardware decisions, but for Apple (or any business) it can mean their business would be adversely affected.
/.'ers have dumped on in these pages.
I will continue to look at Apple products first in certain areas because I like the fact they work with relatively minimal fuss. I like not having to support my daughters' laptops over the phone and late at night before one of their papers/tests/etc are due. I like the whole iPod ecosystem - with DRM and without - because it works. However, I would expect that, as a business, they will be just as evil as others
I installed Leopard on my PPC Mac Mini and my daughter's relatively new Intel MacBook. No issues with either one, but the time it took was approaching Win2k/XP levels. Still, it was far more painless than any Windows install, any Linux install (and I've gone from Slackware to SuSE and RedHat), and pre OS X Macintosh (System 7 anyone?).
It should be no surprise to many Mac users that each build does break/improve things that may not have been explicitly allowed in earlier builds. Unlike the non-Mac OS worlds, Apple is still the final arbiter on what does and does not make it on their OS.
Compared to other mini systems of the era the DEC VAX kicked major butt in the scientific and education arenas before getting sucked into Compaq. Still, we had a major challenge getting DECnet and TCP/IP to coexist at the desktop level. Macintoshes required DAVE, and until Microsoft came out with their TCP/IP stack (anyone remember Wolverine for Win3.11?) we had to struggle with Pathworks. I built three identical PC's running WFW3.11 and installed Pathworks on all three (massaging the loads and so forth carefully). Only one ran! Never found out why as we junked Pathworks.
In another job, I sysadmin'd a VAX network that was used to build complex optics. The company wanted to keep that network separate, so we installed DEMPR's (Digital Equipment MultiPort Repeaters - 8-10Mb coax ports with one uplink) all over the building for the engineers and the fabrication stands. The system ran 7x24 for over four years. I think the IBM mainframe in the same building came down a few times and stayed down longer than anyone cared to admit. Ah, when hardware was really hardware!
I've seen both the best and the worst of having admins involved, and in not having them involved. About three years ago, my firm rolled out a web-based customer service app. My comrades in UNIX, NT and my network team were only told that they needed to provide servers and connections, not that there was a major application rollout. The first day the app was in use, I had the operations VP screaming in my ear that his agents at our remote site were unable to work because the app was so slow. We found that, because of the undocumented and untested requirements of the new application, the WAN usage at our remote sites went from under 200k to maxing out two T1 circuits. It took two years to finally get that situation stabilized by increasing our bandwidth several times over (increasing our costs) and spending several man-years to correct the application.
After a change at the CIO level, we now have multidisciplinary teams - programmers, admins, DBA's - working together to prevent such expensive oversights. The problem with the article is that it romanticizes the past. How many of us have had to live through DOS programs whose programmer assumed their program was the only one running? Today, more than in the past, we cannot afford to have walls built between the various groups in IT. The costs of failure are too great.
that FTP'ing X^Y Gb of data really chokes our WAN/LAN/Internet pipes and that they should use Tapes or DVD's. When we show them that the $1000's of recurring costs for bandwidth can be used more efficiently for a DVD +/- R/RW and postage, they realize this actually makes their bottom line a whole lot better.
One issue that has come up, and that is having media/reader problems. Make sure your data partner can actually read your tapes/disks/cards.
Here's a fun situation - firm outsources infrastructure IT (ops/network/telecomm/servers) then after a change in CIO 18 months later, insources 80% of them who are left. Original head count was about 130, coming back about 75-80.
Let's face it, firms don't want to be in the IT business, but those firms that do not have an effective IT function will invite another firm to do it for them. If your company is growing quickly and changing rapidly, fight for the creation of a ninja IT team that will act as an IT strike force. Your firm will have the benefit of dedicated professionals that will (hopefully) share in the bennies as you grow.
If your firm is stable, then look at outsourcing. Your IT people will have new vistas open up for them, and your company will now have to justify all of those weird requests since they have to pay dearly for them.
Just a thought...
I am on two sides of this topic. On one hand, when I wanted to move away from my last job in a state university IT department, I found I needed to have a cert (CCNA in my case) just to get an interview. Now that I have the job, a cert is fine depending on how old it is, but I like to see the actual experience. I have an engineer working for me who is a Cert King, but I am still leery of having him handle anything more complex than programming a data switch. He has been in situations where his previous certs (Master CNE, MCSE, CCNA/DA) should have helped, but he still asks basic questions that he should already know.
Get the experience, and leaven with certs wisely. Cisco is still the best for networking, and Microsoft has some good points for desktop/NT/Windows. The college degree did not go for naught since you gained a good base in problem solving (I hope!) that is more important than the certs.