Err, what absolute power? The pope cannot have me executed, cannot seize my property or bank accounts, and would have a very hard time building an empire in the geographical sesne, considering that they have no army.
You speak of money. Well, let's see what the money looks like.. not a lot of money there, as they mention tens of millions of Euros and USD, not billions.
So, err, yeah. Not much absolute power there, even accounting for your false ideology that money somehow == power at some even ratio.
To say that an auction on ebay wouldn't absolutely blow up with bidding on The Pope's used shoes...
LOL! Seriously? You place a lot more faith in eBay (or Christie's, or whoever) than I would credibly want to (fake bids notwithstanding).
But you could sell a lot of vatican stuff and put that money to good use helping the poor. They don't and they still ask for donations instead -- often from the poor.
Oh? 'splain this. Note that we're not necessarily counting hospitals, clinics, refugee camps, schools...
or would that be a Louis Vuitton to match his Prada shoes?
...you do realize that those (like most other finery, etc) are donated, right? Hell, I worked for a company that donated nearly 2400 solar panels to the Vatican (enough for 300kWh peak output), and all the trimmings to convert it to AC power.
Seriously - it's one thing to pick on instances of actual snobbery and imperial trappings, but quite another to infer it from the donations.
I know the next argument - "sell it to the poor!" Well okay, but who would buy a shitload of used solar panels, a pair of red shoes of a specific size, or etc? Sell the Sistine Chapel? Okay - so how much do you sell a priceless historical treasure slathered with Michelangelo's artwork for?
I guess it's the problem with having an institution that's been around for longer than any existing political entity... you tend to gather up a lot of stuff.
The majority of catholics online just go to vatican.va for anything out of the Vatican, and studiously ignore the rest, if they even bother to go at all.
Seriously - even if every one of those squatted domain names pointed to lemonparty, it would make exactly zero difference to the laity. QED, no financial gain to be had. Overall, it's sort of like saying that the Vatican should have somehow snapped up any and all variations of @Pontifex on Twitter, when there's really no need.
I guess the confusion comes from thinking that the Catholic Church is like some sort of commercial entity, where brand recognition and trademark protection online trumps all. Fact is, it doesn't - the Church has been around administratively since Constantinople was a living human being, and has had to put up with a hell of a lot more defamation and disparagement over the millennia than a bunch of wannabe blackmailers holding GoDaddy accounts can muster.
...and that would solve their problem, right there.
Of course, I don't mean get rid of them in the execution sense, but more in the "you're fired - pack your shit and get out while the security guard escorts you." sense.
Find the most obvious slackers, fire them publicly and loudly, blackball the crap out of them using factual evidence (this isn't the US - good luck suing), and you may be impressed with how quickly the other doctors fall in line.
Err, bad news... I doubt the shutdown was religiously motivated.
Even outright atheists in government would happily close the site. Why? Because government doesn't get the huge 'vig' off of it, like they do with lotteries and suchlike. Now state lotteries on the other hand (especially as they expand into casino territory, with "video lottery" slot machines, keno, etc)? Well, the governments get their take in way bigger chunks. This in turn raises a huge incentive to keep competition from private industry to a minimum.
After all, if folks are going to gamble anyway, you may as well make it a levy on idiocy while funding government coffers at the same time...
While this is true, nowadays they tend to restrict their raids to organizations where they get evidence or a tip that teenage girls are being 'married' to adult men, and usually charge the perpetrators with statutory rape, sex with a minor, or suchlike (depending on state laws, etc). The organization itself also gets slapped with aiding/abetting and similar.
Your specific cite occurred in 1953, which was probably the last time they could simply tear into a polygamist group just on that one charge alone. (the April 2010 raid was on misuse of public funds, not polygamy).
I suspect nowadays that if they tried making arrests on mere polygamy charges, it would wind up in the Supreme Court, which would likely strike it down (and open a somewhat smallish can of worms). Another part of it is the loopholes (legal marriage versus "spiritual" marriage) that polygamists use to skirt the law. As further evidence I present that stupid 'reality' TV show Sister Wives, where that behavior is paraded openly on television.
Cute joke, but I recall having a realtime manufacturing BI system that was programmed so all production at two sites would come to a halt if any node computer was more than 30 seconds off-time from the rest.
Took a hell of an NTP architecture, which is what I would answer TFA submitter with: NTP is nearly universal platform/OS-wise, and it saves you from having to worry about whatever standard a given computing device uses.
Even Windows (which has a pretty crap set-up IMHO) can be tweaked to behave time-wise with the right registry settings.
Politics and penis-waving aside (though Whitehead lived in Connecticut when he built it, but anyway...)
Given the image, I'd love to see if someone actually managed to reconstruct the thing and see if it actually can fly... ah, wait - someone managed it )
So in other words, EA is saying: "we're sorry you discovered that our product is complete DRM-ridden shit, so we want to allow you to download any of our outdated examples of complete DRM-ridden shit from our online catalog!"
I'm thinking that a lot of otherwise unconcerned folks are discovering the hard way that maybe DRM is a bad idea?
You asked for one special right, I provided it. Just because you were proven wrong by fact does not make me anything, and your resort to name-calling only proves you to be defeated in debate.
PS: What color is my skin? You don't know, and likely never will. Welcome to the Internet.;)
(OTOH, I find it hilarious that I get more calls when I declare my race as "Other" (as though the HR machinery seems to completely ignore the fact that I put "Human" in the descriptor field. Go figure.)
Understood, but that perception of favoritism is going to be the same no matter what we're talking about - pay, promotions, etc. There's no escaping that when you're talking about a civilian corporation (and to be honest, there's a lot of talk/rumor/worse about favoritism in military organizations as well).
As long as you set a published standard, and anyone who qualifies gets the bennies, you can at least diminish it somewhat.
Never said I was special, or that I would simply rely on one thing to do it. However, it wouldn't take a whole lot of work to pass muster, yet still slack off.
Here's why:
In a company as ginormous as Yahoo, they would have to rely on automation and algorithm to check the metrics of any one employee. BI can only do so much. If you can simulate an average day's work (with some randomness thrown in), you don't pop up on the radar. Since you would be one of many, the logistics required to 'catch' every slacker with a careful human analysis would be prohibitively expensive. To top that off, since you'd have to do some actual work on occasion, there's a bit of randomness thrown in atop whatever you already have scripted and running. T
All that said, the point wasn't to make a perfect slacking system, but to point out that mere data metrics off a VPN line can be easily fooled, and are a crappy way to measure employee performance.
Note that atop all of that, these metrics can't tell the boss about the time I saved a pissed-off client from quitting their contract. They can't describe how I caught and fixed a developer's mistake before it snowballed out of control and took down a client's 80,000-user financial website. They definitely do not tell the boss a damned thing about how I came up with a better solution to securely automate financial data batch transmissions. At the summit of fail that grading-by-VPN-metrics represents, the very fact that they would have to sniff packets represents a potential point of security breach (albeit an internal one) for sensitive data, sicne they'd have to sniff packets to know anything more than the usual source/destination/port/duration.
Well, you do... but it takes a few high-profile firings, a few pay cuts for management types (for non-performance), some new blood set off in the right direction, and a few boots in asses on occasion.
Trust me - when the other managers start seeing metaphorical heads set on on pikes, they become supremely interested in keeping their own jobs, and will do whatever it takes to make sure they're not next. Unlike blue-collar jobs where there's potential union considerations, with white-collar workers you can do this at will and whim (contractual obligations depending).
I can make a script to randomly send data to and from servers, then delete the data once it arrives at the destination. If I uploaded, oh, a geolocation IP file to random servers, that's 250MB each go. If you're just measuring MB/GB, I could be a top performer in less than a week by stint of a simple script.;)
In order to reliably measure employee productivity remotely, you have to do one of two things:
1) install a keylogger and mouse tracker on every employee's remote laptop, some BI bits to the VPN connections and mail servers, then have teams combing through the resulting data. Be prepared to add FTE slots, disk space, a server or so, and a lot of budget for this.
2) allow only the people who are known to perform well in the office to telecommute, and insure they work on deadline-driven projects with measurable goals and milestones. As an alternative, insure that they have definitive SLA's to meet if their job is problem/solution-driven as opposed to project-driven. Also insure that they come in to work on a periodic basis, distance permitting. Be certain you have competent managers in place to insure, refine, and tweak as needed.
Obviously one of these is easier to do, save for that last bit.;)
If I wanted to slack off and pretend to work (like the rest of the team would ever let that happen!), I'd simply fire up the VPN, then have some small program randomly open and close certain binaries on the remote servers, etc.
At work? Meh - I could slack off very easily by simply walking around a lot carrying papers, chatting with friends, or whatever. Far too many ways to slack off in a cube farm.
Problem is, when I was telecommuting? I was too busy on the phone in conferences w/ remote company clients, had deadlines to meet, and in IM sessions with other team members helping them out (and getting help). Because I worked on the servers, I had VPN open from 8am to 6pm on most days... working. Now, I show up at 8, then leave at 5.
It's sixes, given that OSS was the target for Ballmer's ire:
"Ballmer was trying to articulate his concern, whether real or imagined, that limited recourse to the GNU GPL requires that all software be made open source. "The way the license is written, if you use any open-source software, you have to make the rest of your software open source,"
Perhaps, but the company that once called it a "cancer" is going to have a hard time reconciling its culture to it - especially since Microsoft relies on proprietary software for its very existence. Sure they do make (and mostly give away) some FOSS software, but it's very little and you really have to look for it.
I suspect that the best Microsoft could do is to try and hijack existing FOSS projects and slather on a proprietary UI, or some sort of glue to tie to loosely to products they already make.
Incidentally, Microsoft tried this gambit before with its 'me too!' 'shared source' licensing (and similar). I wonder how many projects not hosted/sponsored/funded by Microsoft actually use those?
1) I'm not a software engineer, but a sysadmin who happens to be on deck for building up complete one-off infrastructures used by financial institutions (be they hosted by my employer, or provided by the client - in the client's case the rules differ greatly since it's their property). I work with dev teams to insure they have what they need, and to get in and help tune it where necessary. Your assumptions are irrelevant.
2) Documentation for all changes (including things like connectivity) is required along the way, and all of mine is actually included in the repository along with the code. If it isn't there and up to date, I'm not doing my job.
3) A single laptop VM is impossible to use for troubleshooting inter-server communications. Multiple laptop VMs are impossible to use for performance testing of the overall system. When you're building an environment and custom software where components (and users!) expect sub-second response times in a banking application suite? Pray tell how a VirtualBox instance on a laptop is going to provide what is needed.
4) If it isn't in production yet, just provide what is asked and get the hell out of the way. I've done this myself in a provider role, and if the dev/admin/whoever blows it all up, I simply restore from snapshot (and/or cut off the connections to said firewall) until the problem is fixed. Takes less than 10 minutes, and since it is isolated, the problem stays there.
5) Those devs (and those like myself) are your customers. If you cannot provide in a timely manner (to the point of your department being the biggest burden to the effing project timeline, as has happened numerous times), then yeah - get your ass to the unemployment line and make way for someone who can.
Clearly you haven't worked in a joint big enough to benefit from something we call: Controls. Labs as small as a hundred machines benefit from strict IT controls.
Ah, but I have - if we were talking about shared firewalls, you would have had a solid point. However, when the environment I'm building up has its own firewalls, and has its own auditing sweeps, one would think that I could simply make the changes I need. If my opening port 443 from $extIP to $serverIP blows things up, it would be my problem (and my ass if done irresponsibly), and no other environment would be affected (which is why I worded the post exactly as I did up there). Of course, that ain't how things work in a division that is more interested in job security than in providing competent infrastructure. Meanwhile, I get to inform the client that their new 3rd-party provider connection will have to wait a week and may possibly put the overall deadline at risk. Yay?
"A lot of people on slashdot think that anyone who is not a software developer is just dead wood"
To set things straight, I'm not one of those people. Each department does have a role to play (esp. ones not mentioned, such as Payroll, Accounting, etc).
However, I do find it a problem to see Sales people who aren't selling, HR folks who aren't hiring/firing people directly, Accountants who aren't involved with keeping the books, and IT folks who aren't doing something with applications, DBs, infrastructure, etc. I guess I'm one of those odd folks who think that if you're going to work in a department, you should either get in the trenches and get your hands dirty, produce/provide something that actually contributes a recognizeable value to the company, or you should be managing enough people/projects to be somewhat busy on average.
When (real example here- ) you have six people tending all of the servers, desktops, DBs, networking, etc for the whole company (1500 employees total), but three managers (PM, Operations Mgr, IT Director), and a CIO above all that? Am I the only one seeing a massive problem with paying four people sizable salaries to manage and direct the output of six workers?
Oh, it's not just managers and deadwood/slackers... too many corporate departments have specialized and bloated-out unnecessarily (Note: at risk of being called troll, IT is admittedly included to an extent - depending on company/practices.)
We can start with "Human Resources" - I'm willing to wager that you can easily chop or outsource (to computer or external service) 90% of what an HR specialist does, and still run the company just fine. Seriously - how many effing times does one have to sit through company-wide mandatory sex-harassment or diversity-appreciation classes? Fire any SOB who crosses the line, call it good. It's not as if anyone can claim ignorance of the law, for heaven's sake.
That's just the biggest one that comes to mind for me, but I'm very sure that any sales department whose members aren't actually selling the company's product? Yeah - bloat. IT departments with members that aren't getting their hands into desktops, servers, networks, or actual code, etc? Ditto.
'course, I'm also of a mind that unless the company is sufficiently large enough (e.g. Fortune 500-sized), middle managers shouldn't even exist.
Finally, there's redundant positions. If I'm a Systems Engineer who deals with building whole environments for clients, why do I need dedicated server engineers helping me put together my company's hosted solutions? Cut me out a few VMs in their own subnet, point me to the internal website/share where the approved software lives, tell me what IP my own virtual firewall lives at, then get the hell out of my way. Need Change-Management/ITIL? Okay - but keep it to a minimum and save it for anything after production-stage. No need for projects to be hung up by internal SLAs, no waiting a literal week on someone with almost the same skillset to change some setting for me that I could have done five minutes after recognizing the need for it, etc. (Mind you, that last example exists in the real world... hence the justification for, you know, cutting the $#@! fat out.)
Slashdot Mirror
Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Err, what absolute power? The pope cannot have me executed, cannot seize my property or bank accounts, and would have a very hard time building an empire in the geographical sesne, considering that they have no army.
You speak of money. Well, let's see what the money looks like.. not a lot of money there, as they mention tens of millions of Euros and USD, not billions.
Net worth? Not anywhere near as much as, say, the market cap of Intel, Microsoft or Apple...
So, err, yeah. Not much absolute power there, even accounting for your false ideology that money somehow == power at some even ratio.
To say that an auction on ebay wouldn't absolutely blow up with bidding on The Pope's used shoes...
LOL! Seriously? You place a lot more faith in eBay (or Christie's, or whoever) than I would credibly want to (fake bids notwithstanding).
But you could sell a lot of vatican stuff and put that money to good use helping the poor. They don't and they still ask for donations instead -- often from the poor.
Oh? 'splain this. Note that we're not necessarily counting hospitals, clinics, refugee camps, schools...
PS, concerning:
or would that be a Louis Vuitton to match his Prada shoes?
...you do realize that those (like most other finery, etc) are donated, right? Hell, I worked for a company that donated nearly 2400 solar panels to the Vatican (enough for 300kWh peak output), and all the trimmings to convert it to AC power.
Seriously - it's one thing to pick on instances of actual snobbery and imperial trappings, but quite another to infer it from the donations.
I know the next argument - "sell it to the poor!" Well okay, but who would buy a shitload of used solar panels, a pair of red shoes of a specific size, or etc? Sell the Sistine Chapel? Okay - so how much do you sell a priceless historical treasure slathered with Michelangelo's artwork for?
I guess it's the problem with having an institution that's been around for longer than any existing political entity... you tend to gather up a lot of stuff.
Err, what extortion?
The majority of catholics online just go to vatican.va for anything out of the Vatican, and studiously ignore the rest, if they even bother to go at all.
Seriously - even if every one of those squatted domain names pointed to lemonparty, it would make exactly zero difference to the laity. QED, no financial gain to be had. Overall, it's sort of like saying that the Vatican should have somehow snapped up any and all variations of @Pontifex on Twitter, when there's really no need.
I guess the confusion comes from thinking that the Catholic Church is like some sort of commercial entity, where brand recognition and trademark protection online trumps all. Fact is, it doesn't - the Church has been around administratively since Constantinople was a living human being, and has had to put up with a hell of a lot more defamation and disparagement over the millennia than a bunch of wannabe blackmailers holding GoDaddy accounts can muster.
Time to start getting rid of them. ;)
...and that would solve their problem, right there.
Of course, I don't mean get rid of them in the execution sense, but more in the "you're fired - pack your shit and get out while the security guard escorts you." sense.
Find the most obvious slackers, fire them publicly and loudly, blackball the crap out of them using factual evidence (this isn't the US - good luck suing), and you may be impressed with how quickly the other doctors fall in line.
Err, bad news... I doubt the shutdown was religiously motivated.
Even outright atheists in government would happily close the site. Why? Because government doesn't get the huge 'vig' off of it, like they do with lotteries and suchlike. Now state lotteries on the other hand (especially as they expand into casino territory, with "video lottery" slot machines, keno, etc)? Well, the governments get their take in way bigger chunks. This in turn raises a huge incentive to keep competition from private industry to a minimum.
After all, if folks are going to gamble anyway, you may as well make it a levy on idiocy while funding government coffers at the same time...
While this is true, nowadays they tend to restrict their raids to organizations where they get evidence or a tip that teenage girls are being 'married' to adult men, and usually charge the perpetrators with statutory rape, sex with a minor, or suchlike (depending on state laws, etc). The organization itself also gets slapped with aiding/abetting and similar.
Your specific cite occurred in 1953, which was probably the last time they could simply tear into a polygamist group just on that one charge alone. (the April 2010 raid was on misuse of public funds, not polygamy).
I suspect nowadays that if they tried making arrests on mere polygamy charges, it would wind up in the Supreme Court, which would likely strike it down (and open a somewhat smallish can of worms). Another part of it is the loopholes (legal marriage versus "spiritual" marriage) that polygamists use to skirt the law. As further evidence I present that stupid 'reality' TV show Sister Wives, where that behavior is paraded openly on television.
Cute joke, but I recall having a realtime manufacturing BI system that was programmed so all production at two sites would come to a halt if any node computer was more than 30 seconds off-time from the rest.
Took a hell of an NTP architecture, which is what I would answer TFA submitter with: NTP is nearly universal platform/OS-wise, and it saves you from having to worry about whatever standard a given computing device uses.
Even Windows (which has a pretty crap set-up IMHO) can be tweaked to behave time-wise with the right registry settings.
Politics and penis-waving aside (though Whitehead lived in Connecticut when he built it, but anyway...)
Given the image, I'd love to see if someone actually managed to reconstruct the thing and see if it actually can fly... ah, wait - someone managed it )
So in other words, EA is saying: "we're sorry you discovered that our product is complete DRM-ridden shit, so we want to allow you to download any of our outdated examples of complete DRM-ridden shit from our online catalog!"
I'm thinking that a lot of otherwise unconcerned folks are discovering the hard way that maybe DRM is a bad idea?
Nah - too much to hope for.
You asked for one special right, I provided it. Just because you were proven wrong by fact does not make me anything, and your resort to name-calling only proves you to be defeated in debate.
PS: What color is my skin? You don't know, and likely never will. Welcome to the Internet. ;)
We'll just start here...
(OTOH, I find it hilarious that I get more calls when I declare my race as "Other" (as though the HR machinery seems to completely ignore the fact that I put "Human" in the descriptor field. Go figure.)
Understood, but that perception of favoritism is going to be the same no matter what we're talking about - pay, promotions, etc. There's no escaping that when you're talking about a civilian corporation (and to be honest, there's a lot of talk/rumor/worse about favoritism in military organizations as well).
As long as you set a published standard, and anyone who qualifies gets the bennies, you can at least diminish it somewhat.
Never said I was special, or that I would simply rely on one thing to do it. However, it wouldn't take a whole lot of work to pass muster, yet still slack off.
Here's why:
In a company as ginormous as Yahoo, they would have to rely on automation and algorithm to check the metrics of any one employee. BI can only do so much. If you can simulate an average day's work (with some randomness thrown in), you don't pop up on the radar. Since you would be one of many, the logistics required to 'catch' every slacker with a careful human analysis would be prohibitively expensive. To top that off, since you'd have to do some actual work on occasion, there's a bit of randomness thrown in atop whatever you already have scripted and running. T
All that said, the point wasn't to make a perfect slacking system, but to point out that mere data metrics off a VPN line can be easily fooled, and are a crappy way to measure employee performance.
Note that atop all of that, these metrics can't tell the boss about the time I saved a pissed-off client from quitting their contract. They can't describe how I caught and fixed a developer's mistake before it snowballed out of control and took down a client's 80,000-user financial website. They definitely do not tell the boss a damned thing about how I came up with a better solution to securely automate financial data batch transmissions. At the summit of fail that grading-by-VPN-metrics represents, the very fact that they would have to sniff packets represents a potential point of security breach (albeit an internal one) for sensitive data, sicne they'd have to sniff packets to know anything more than the usual source/destination/port/duration.
Sort of... but you can always force the non-performers to come in daily, while the top performers are allowed to work remotely as a benefit/perk.
Well, you do... but it takes a few high-profile firings, a few pay cuts for management types (for non-performance), some new blood set off in the right direction, and a few boots in asses on occasion.
Trust me - when the other managers start seeing metaphorical heads set on on pikes, they become supremely interested in keeping their own jobs, and will do whatever it takes to make sure they're not next. Unlike blue-collar jobs where there's potential union considerations, with white-collar workers you can do this at will and whim (contractual obligations depending).
It's still an imperfect metric.
I can make a script to randomly send data to and from servers, then delete the data once it arrives at the destination. If I uploaded, oh, a geolocation IP file to random servers, that's 250MB each go. If you're just measuring MB/GB, I could be a top performer in less than a week by stint of a simple script. ;)
In order to reliably measure employee productivity remotely, you have to do one of two things:
1) install a keylogger and mouse tracker on every employee's remote laptop, some BI bits to the VPN connections and mail servers, then have teams combing through the resulting data. Be prepared to add FTE slots, disk space, a server or so, and a lot of budget for this.
2) allow only the people who are known to perform well in the office to telecommute, and insure they work on deadline-driven projects with measurable goals and milestones. As an alternative, insure that they have definitive SLA's to meet if their job is problem/solution-driven as opposed to project-driven. Also insure that they come in to work on a periodic basis, distance permitting. Be certain you have competent managers in place to insure, refine, and tweak as needed.
Obviously one of these is easier to do, save for that last bit. ;)
That's the problem using any metric, really...
If I wanted to slack off and pretend to work (like the rest of the team would ever let that happen!), I'd simply fire up the VPN, then have some small program randomly open and close certain binaries on the remote servers, etc.
At work? Meh - I could slack off very easily by simply walking around a lot carrying papers, chatting with friends, or whatever. Far too many ways to slack off in a cube farm.
Problem is, when I was telecommuting? I was too busy on the phone in conferences w/ remote company clients, had deadlines to meet, and in IM sessions with other team members helping them out (and getting help). Because I worked on the servers, I had VPN open from 8am to 6pm on most days... working. Now, I show up at 8, then leave at 5.
Not angry about it... I actually find it funny.
It's sixes, given that OSS was the target for Ballmer's ire:
"Ballmer was trying to articulate his concern, whether real or imagined, that limited recourse to the GNU GPL requires that all software be made open source.
"The way the license is written, if you use any open-source software, you have to make the rest of your software open source,"
ref: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_cancer/
Perhaps, but the company that once called it a "cancer" is going to have a hard time reconciling its culture to it - especially since Microsoft relies on proprietary software for its very existence. Sure they do make (and mostly give away) some FOSS software, but it's very little and you really have to look for it.
I suspect that the best Microsoft could do is to try and hijack existing FOSS projects and slather on a proprietary UI, or some sort of glue to tie to loosely to products they already make.
Incidentally, Microsoft tried this gambit before with its 'me too!' 'shared source' licensing (and similar). I wonder how many projects not hosted/sponsored/funded by Microsoft actually use those?
Sadly, so did I, thinking that they finally left Leeds and discovered the existence of Amsterdam.
1) I'm not a software engineer, but a sysadmin who happens to be on deck for building up complete one-off infrastructures used by financial institutions (be they hosted by my employer, or provided by the client - in the client's case the rules differ greatly since it's their property). I work with dev teams to insure they have what they need, and to get in and help tune it where necessary. Your assumptions are irrelevant.
2) Documentation for all changes (including things like connectivity) is required along the way, and all of mine is actually included in the repository along with the code. If it isn't there and up to date, I'm not doing my job.
3) A single laptop VM is impossible to use for troubleshooting inter-server communications. Multiple laptop VMs are impossible to use for performance testing of the overall system. When you're building an environment and custom software where components (and users!) expect sub-second response times in a banking application suite? Pray tell how a VirtualBox instance on a laptop is going to provide what is needed.
4) If it isn't in production yet, just provide what is asked and get the hell out of the way. I've done this myself in a provider role, and if the dev/admin/whoever blows it all up, I simply restore from snapshot (and/or cut off the connections to said firewall) until the problem is fixed. Takes less than 10 minutes, and since it is isolated, the problem stays there.
5) Those devs (and those like myself) are your customers. If you cannot provide in a timely manner (to the point of your department being the biggest burden to the effing project timeline, as has happened numerous times), then yeah - get your ass to the unemployment line and make way for someone who can.
Clearly you haven't worked in a joint big enough to benefit from something we call: Controls. Labs as small as a hundred machines benefit from strict IT controls.
Ah, but I have - if we were talking about shared firewalls, you would have had a solid point. However, when the environment I'm building up has its own firewalls, and has its own auditing sweeps, one would think that I could simply make the changes I need. If my opening port 443 from $extIP to $serverIP blows things up, it would be my problem (and my ass if done irresponsibly), and no other environment would be affected (which is why I worded the post exactly as I did up there). Of course, that ain't how things work in a division that is more interested in job security than in providing competent infrastructure. Meanwhile, I get to inform the client that their new 3rd-party provider connection will have to wait a week and may possibly put the overall deadline at risk. Yay?
"A lot of people on slashdot think that anyone who is not a software developer is just dead wood"
To set things straight, I'm not one of those people. Each department does have a role to play (esp. ones not mentioned, such as Payroll, Accounting, etc).
However, I do find it a problem to see Sales people who aren't selling, HR folks who aren't hiring/firing people directly, Accountants who aren't involved with keeping the books, and IT folks who aren't doing something with applications, DBs, infrastructure, etc. I guess I'm one of those odd folks who think that if you're going to work in a department, you should either get in the trenches and get your hands dirty, produce/provide something that actually contributes a recognizeable value to the company, or you should be managing enough people/projects to be somewhat busy on average.
When (real example here- ) you have six people tending all of the servers, desktops, DBs, networking, etc for the whole company (1500 employees total), but three managers (PM, Operations Mgr, IT Director), and a CIO above all that? Am I the only one seeing a massive problem with paying four people sizable salaries to manage and direct the output of six workers?
Oh, it's not just managers and deadwood/slackers... too many corporate departments have specialized and bloated-out unnecessarily (Note: at risk of being called troll, IT is admittedly included to an extent - depending on company/practices.)
We can start with "Human Resources" - I'm willing to wager that you can easily chop or outsource (to computer or external service) 90% of what an HR specialist does, and still run the company just fine. Seriously - how many effing times does one have to sit through company-wide mandatory sex-harassment or diversity-appreciation classes? Fire any SOB who crosses the line, call it good. It's not as if anyone can claim ignorance of the law, for heaven's sake.
That's just the biggest one that comes to mind for me, but I'm very sure that any sales department whose members aren't actually selling the company's product? Yeah - bloat. IT departments with members that aren't getting their hands into desktops, servers, networks, or actual code, etc? Ditto.
'course, I'm also of a mind that unless the company is sufficiently large enough (e.g. Fortune 500-sized), middle managers shouldn't even exist.
Finally, there's redundant positions. If I'm a Systems Engineer who deals with building whole environments for clients, why do I need dedicated server engineers helping me put together my company's hosted solutions? Cut me out a few VMs in their own subnet, point me to the internal website/share where the approved software lives, tell me what IP my own virtual firewall lives at, then get the hell out of my way. Need Change-Management/ITIL? Okay - but keep it to a minimum and save it for anything after production-stage. No need for projects to be hung up by internal SLAs, no waiting a literal week on someone with almost the same skillset to change some setting for me that I could have done five minutes after recognizing the need for it, etc. (Mind you, that last example exists in the real world... hence the justification for, you know, cutting the $#@! fat out.)