Now, that I think about it, I wonder if these effects are limited to oxygen enriched beer, or if it's just the oxygen itself. If it's just O2, you could have a portable O2 enricher that lets you breath pure O2 for a little while... Or O2 enriched water (oh yay, another way for them to charge more for H20)...
Seems to me I have read before that fighter pilots have been using a shot of O2 to clear up a hangover for a long time. At least since the 80's.
I can add some anecdotal evidence here. I was in the USAF in the 80s, and it wasn't just fighter pilots. We'd all congregate around the environmental support shop (maintained cockpit and ejection life support systems) on Monday mornings and wait our turn to take a hit from the O2 bottle. Worked like a charm -- a couple snorts and you were right as rain.
Booze never "gives" you a hangover. A hangover comes from the lack of water in your system; dehydration. Just make every second of third drink a glass of water, *poof* no hangovers.
absolutely -- dehydration is a big part of the hangover experience. for what it is worth, dying of thirst feels a lot like a hangover for that very reason. Another part of the hangover experience is caused by old-fashioned lack of sleep. a couple of analgesics before you hit the hay (if you aren't too gone to remember) moderates the stress you undergo from the dehydration, allowing you to actually get rested while you sleep.
Science and faith are intrinsically linked. You must have faith to be a scientist in the first place, because faith is what allows you to believe there is order in the universe, and that causality exists. The people who use a personification metaphor to describe the order of the universe are no different from those who use more abstracted and precise language. They still have faith that, even though we might not have a perfect understanding of (the universe/the will of god), it does indeed exist, waiting to be noticed. To not have faith is to genuinely believe that the universe is without order, and there is no point in putting food away for tomorrow, because it might turn into a carnivorous butterfly and eat you before morning anyways for all you know.
Scientists do not need to believe there is order in the universe. To the contrary -- we detect regularities in our observations of nature, but it is only an assumption that those regularities can ever be bound to the actual phenomena in nature -- those regularities may exist in our minds and no where else. Scientists require only that the model be empirically adequate, ie, those phenomenon predicted by the model are observed in nature. The assumption of order in the universe is exactly that -- an assumption. It will be abandoned if observation dictates that it must. When new observations contradict the current model, theories shift as hypotheses are abandoned -- to not have faith. then, is to accept the new observations and to alter one's model of nature accordingly. Faith, on the other hand, is irrational, in that it requires the conscious suppression of reason to operate. A person who abandons an hypothesis in the face of contradictory observations is a rational actor; a person who clings to an hypothesis despite contradictory observations is not.
Skill based systems can be a lot of fun, I'm not saying they're eternally bad. However, I'd love to see a skill-based system that - assuming everyone is trying to play for maximum effectiveness - creates anything even remotely like the flavor and differences between WoW's ten classes and over 30 major specs.
I agree with your post in general, but I don't think that is a safe assumption at all. It is probably true for hard-core raiders and arena teams in WoW, but I don't believe they make up a representative sample of the WoW player base. More generally, a skills-based system would probably not attract many adherents because people don't want to have to think too hard or deeply about something that is supposed to be entertaining. I've been in two WoW guilds where people hung out in Dalaran/Undercity/IF/SW/Silvermoon, did dailies, and flirted with each other. Period. Becoming a more effective player was not why they were paying Blizz $15/month. I guess people are attracted to what makes them feel attractive, or secure, or popular. I'm certainly that way -- during a raid, I love being at the top of the recount meters with my 'lock, so I work at maximizing my dps. I'm fortunate enough to have found a guild where the majority of members share a similar need to compete. The competition is fierce, and we thrive on it. If Blizz introduced a skills-based system to WoW , we would adapt and master it. But I doubt people who are in the game to socialize would care, if they even noticed it at all.
The common theory is that games like World of Warcraft are addictive. But what are the exact qualities that make it so?
I play WoW *a lot* -- six hours/day during the week and 18 hours/day on weekends and holidays -- and I've often wondered how I let this game take over my life so thoroughly. I think the variable rate schedule of rewards theory can explain this addiction. It is something that I learned about in a Management 101 class two decades ago. What makes anything addictive, according to the theory we were taught as nascent managers, is having a variable rate at which rewards are delivered. It is what makes gamblers come back to the dice table again and again, and it is why unions work so hard to establish uniform wage scales. My company introduced "Spot Awards" and the policy governing the awards explicitly states that managers should make sure that the awards are distributed at random intervals. The variable-rate schedule of rewards can produce game-aholics as effectively as it can work-aholics.
Is Blizz deliberately using the variable rate schedule of rewards to bind us to the game? Of course they are. In WoW, the variable rate schedule of rewards is easy to see. How does Blizz keep people engaged once they've reached the level cap? The recently added "Achievement" system is one way. Every so often, you will be rewarded with an achievement that can grant you cool stuff -- a new pet, a new mount, a new title. The requirements for the achievements are not uniform, and often depend on the completion of other achievements which also have non-uniform requirements. This insures that the schedule at which one completes an achievement and receives a reward will be effectively random. You keep shelling out $15 every month to keep those rewards coming.
I won't even get started on the total immorality of the concept that the govt grants you or not a "right" to work for a willing employer, grants you or not a "right" to rent a house from a willing landlord, etc.
It is good that you won't get started, because you'd get nowhere.
Societies are built on cooperation. Cooperation requires rules. Governments enforce the rules which make cooperation possible.
By characterizing those rules as moral or immoral you depart from rational discourse into theology. You are certainly free to disagree with the rules. But invoking morality, or the lack thereof, gains you exactly zero traction in a rational debate.
I've been doing 9/80's for ten years in the IT department here at the rocket ranch. This schedule is the best schedule I've ever worked in the 30+ years I've been a wage slave, and I've worked a lot of schedules -- split shift, rotating, days, swings, mids - you name it, I've probably worked it. The number one benefit for me is the three-day weekend that 9/80 generates every other week. With some judicious use of vacation time, I can take a lot of on-Fridays off as well, so that I can have even more three-day weekends, or the occasional four-day weekend by taking a vacation day on the Thursday preceding an off-Friday, or on the Monday following one. 9/80s make taking frequent mini-vacations feasible, which definitely keeps my morale high.
On a related note, working in IT means sometimes being available 24/7, but that goes with the territory. I don't think I'm being abused by management when they require me to be available on my off-Friday. As long as the compensation I receive from the company in return for being available is commensurate with the inconvenience of being on call, I have no problem with it. It is in my best interest, and the company's, to try to make sure that my services aren't needed on that off-Friday. The key here, as I see it, is that when I am on call, I get paid the same whether or not I get called in, and as long as that policy remains, I will remain with the company. I've worked on-call for companies that compensated me only if I actually was called in. My employer makes no distinction between being on call and actually being at work, when it comes to compensation. Recognizing that there is an opportunity cost for an employee on call is very important to me.
Am I insane in thinking that you can see a movie as being a great artwork and still not liking it or viceversa?
No, you are not insane. It's something more subtle than that. Your malady is one shared by all clever, insightful people who are surrounded by unclever clods. Scientists, engineers, musicians, artists, writers -- anybody who thinks abstractly on a routine basis -- will often appear insane or worse to people who can't or won't think abstractly at all. People who can't or won't think abstractly are not able to disconnect their idea of the way things should be from the way things really are. As Chomsky so rightly pointed out, the map is not the territory. When confronted with somebody who, for example, uses conflicting ideas to describe the same object, as you did when you characterized Grave of the Fireflies as a great movie that you never wanted to see again, the result is confusion for people who think great movies should be watched over and over again, and a knowing nod from those few of us whose map of reality can actually handle that apparent contradiction. It would be interesting to try to see if the same statistical methods used to crack the anonymity of the Netflix prize database would be useful in selecting abstraction as a character trait, based perhaps on how often a person deploys conflicting concepts when reviewing books or movies.
So, I'm not sure that WoW is actually a bad leadership training ground.
But unlike in WoW, you can't just start over. The real world doesn't have a reset switch. The only penalty for failure in a game is the time invested, i.e, failure to achieve an objective in a game has zero implications in the real world. If your real world team's objective is to build a bridge, produce a marketable product, or land a robot on Mars, then the consequences of failure are measured in terms of real lives lost, real fortunes squandered, or real reputations trashed.
Until the consequences of failure match those in the real world, I would not put much faith in the training value of a game.
So shoot enough of these in an angry crowd, and now you have a crowd that's (A) angrier, since you just shot at them, (B) manic enough to do dumber things than normally, and (C) a lot less sensitive to pain. Just so, you know, they won't be as deterred by further rubber bullets or tear gas or a police batton. It sounds to me like just what you need to turn some unruly demonstrators into an outright riot. Or an outright riot into hell broken loose.
[/tinfoil hat on]...which would mean they could rationalize switching back to the real ammo to deal with it [/tinfoil hat off]
...I am blown away that with all of our current problems -- homelessness and crime on the home front, war fighting and terrorism abroad -- our government is seriously going to spend this much money on upgrading peoples' televisions."
I am blown away that people are still naive enough to believe government exists for the benefit of the governed, especially after six years of the Current Occupant's administration. Governments exist to enrich their supporters. What is the first rule of politics? Get re-elected. Giving a billion-dollar handout to the people to adapt their analog television sets to receive digital broadcast signals ensures that at least 10 million TV-watching voters are going to think more kindly of the ruling party at the next election.
So, what do you do? You take responsibility for your community, for your culture, for your society, for your nation.
If homelessness is a problem in your area, volunteer at a homeless shelter, or start one if there isn't one.
Don't like crime? Join Neighborhood Watch and go armed.
Don't like the war? Make your voice heard. If your congressional rep voted for it, campaign for a new rep. If she voted against it, campaign to keep her in office.
Worried about terrorism? Study how the Brits dealt with the IRA last century, and how they dealt with the Boers the century before that. Study how Spain dealt with ETA, and support politicians who recognize that Bush's "war on terror" is a stupid waste of human life, and that there are proven strategies for dealing with terrorists. How the hell do you wage war against an abstraction?
Okay, soapbox mode off. The point is, don't wait for the government to solve your problems for you. To misquote Musashi, I respect governments, I do not rely on them. Take responsibility and do what you can with your own resources.
Anyone out there care to share stories of places that are happily running large Samba installations for their file servers? Or not so happy, for that matter -- better to be informed!"
We support about 6500 engineers here at the rocket ranch. Back at the turn of the century, we wanted to migrate everybody from expensive-to-maintain *nix workstations to vastly cheaper Windows PCs, but we had a problem: all our data was on several dozen HP N-class data servers. We do serious 3D CAD and FEA, with engineering data sets measured in dozens of terabytes. We wanted to leverage the performance and economy of fast, cheap X86 boxen while not losing our investment in our storage management infrastructure. My IT masters had never heard of samba, and were amazed when I demonstrated how easy it was to serve out a Pro/E drawing to an engineer working at one of our brand new 1 GHz NT4 PCs (I told you it was at the turn of the century.) We deployed it sitewide in 2000, and even now, seven years later, my users still thank me for making it possible for them to use fast PCs to access their Unix-based data sets. We ran samba on SunOS boxes, because we never could get it to play nice with HPUX. Samba is ridiculously easy to install, manage, and maintain, especially with one of the GUI frontends that are readily available. We used SWAT, and it rocked. Samba was a great intermediate enabler, allowing us to continue to use our N class servers while we were moving our user base to PCs.
In 2003, however, we acquired a bunch of Network Appliance servers, and migrated off our HPUX and Sun data servers. NetApp filers are platform agnostic; if the client is a *nix box, the filer presents the data as an NFS mount. If the client is Windows, it looks like NTFS. NetApps aren't cheap, but they were worth the major investment. If your company doesn't want to shell out for a filer, then samba is very viable and I recommend it highly.
I think Oblivion handled this well, scaling the world as you went and giving you really interesting things to do from the get-go. What other games dodge this bullet? Do you see this timesink as an inevitable part of the RPG genre?
Granted, Oblivion is a game where instant immersion is truly possible, where you can literally choose how you want to explore the world. The quests in the game provide some structure, but you really can just pick a direction and start walking when you begin the game.
But the world scaling backfired, I think. Leveling your character a dozen times and then going back and pummelling that boss is a major part of the fun in an RPG. Getting trounced by the same adversary whether you are level 1 or level 12 is not very fun at all. But that is only part of the reason why I think Oblivion does not address the grind issue very well.
Ironically, the main reason that Oblivion doesn't address the grind is because the developers did too good of a job implementing magic in this world. Without putting out too many spoilers for people who haven't already figured it out, even level 1 characters can create spells that completely unbalance the game, no cheats, no console commands, no mods required. (If you are curious about these spells, checkout http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Useful_Spells) And I don't mean for just spellcasting classes -- magic in Oblivion is so open and customizable that it takes only a little bit of thought to create unstoppable characters of any class. Grinding your way battle after battle through adversaries to level up is boring, but so is blowing right through them.
Have you noticed that there are no longer any classes in things like "citizenship" or "social studies" or anything to do with participating in government? We aren't told the basic truths such as the REAL power of the jury which is to determine if a law itself is bad and get rid of it.
For example, if someone were to be prosecuted under the DMCA and the defendant wanted a trial by jury and the jury decided the DMCA wasn't good law, something could actually be done!
Well, that is a pretty big if. Most states have laws banning fully informed juries. I use my jury duty to remind people that they can vote their conscience when rendering a verdict, encouraging them to acquit if they have the slightest doubt about the law itself. Not that this has been a very effective strategy; I've been excused every time I've opened my mouth on the subject, though one judge pulled me aside and thanked me for my candor after dismissing me. As you rightly point out, the law is (and should be, if the judiciary is to serve as a check against the legislative and executive branches) on trial along with the defendant. I highly recommend Alexis de Toqueville's Democracy in America for a deep look at the checks America's judicial system brings against legislative and executive excesses. It was written 175 years ago, but de Toqueville's basic thesis about the role of the judiciary as a check and balance on the other two branches still holds today, even though that role has been severely weakened by fully informed jury laws.
My current top five would have to be Super Mario World, Half-Life 2, World of Warcraft, God of War, and Civilization IV. What are yours?
Civ I, Quake and Angband. After my frustration level hits the saturation point in Oblivion, thanks to that wonderfully stupid leveling system, it's nice to actually play games where I can get a sense of progress. What kind of RPG levels the monsters with you? What is the point in gaining levels if the orc vampire that trashed you with one swing at level one can do the same thing at level 20?. With Civ, Quake, and Angband, I at least get a sense of accomplishment after the grindage.
And, just for fun, the group created an anonymous surveillance system that uses face-recognition software to place a black stripe over the eyes of people whose images are recorded.
Replace the black stripe with the laughing man logo from Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex...technology blurring fiction and reality once again.
Keep in mind that this is a small town and I don't think we can count on any big time sysadmins, like most of yourselves, being on staff.
Perhaps I'm missing the point of your question, but why does your network security sysadmin have to be on staff? Or even local? Or even on the same side of the planet as you? It seems to me that you could contract this firewall function out to any network security firm for less than the amount you were quoted.
...analysts and users of current thin client deployments still see an uphill battle ahead for the technology.
Deploying an enterprise thin-client solution is certainly a very difficult thing to do -- expensive and time-consuming even when the deployment is well-planned and goes off smoothly. But if I was a sysadmin who wanted to deploy a thin client solution in my company, I would not try to do it everywhere at the same time. I would find an area where thin clients address well-known issues that are easily identifiable to management, and start there.
For example, here at the rocket ranch, security is an issue (and I mean the kind of security that includes steely-eyed types with assault weapons roaming the cube farms.) Declassification procedures on thin clients like NCDs and Neoware boxes basically amount to frobbing the power switch. Declassing workstations with non-volatile memory, otoh, is a bureaucratic nightmare. Thin clients give us the ability to instantly redeploy hardware as various contracts ramp up and close down.
Here's another example, one that I'm currently working on in real life. While we definitely have lots of rocket scientists on the payroll (roughly 6000 of our 10,000 employees at this site), not everybody on the payroll needs to have a rocket-scientist-level workstation on their desk. We have engineers, and we have non-engineers, and their needs for CPU cycles in their cubes are significantly different. Yet we put the same or similar kinds of boxes on each of our ten thousand employees' desks. While an engineer running monte carlos on her flight control algorithms needs lots of cpu cycles, a manager who just checks his email and does his expense account spreadsheet doesn't. A thin client solution will allow us to leverage these differences. With thin clients for the non-engineers, we may have to hire some more IT staff and retask others, but the savings of just one month of support costs on 4000 workstations will fund the yearly salaries of 4 new sysadmins plus fund all the thin client hardware (including servers) and still save the company $3M the first year.
I think thin clients have a very viable future. To motivate the need for change to thin clients, though, you have to use language that managers understand: ROI, TCO, cost-reduction, etc. And that means thin clients will have to be deployed where you can demonstrate good ROI, low TCO, and significant cost-reduction, so you really must pick your battles when it comes to deploying thin clients.
Ask your management how much it is costing on a per employee basis for office space, and then ask for some percentage of that amount. If they don't want to share that info with you, look it up in their publically available tax filings. Having knowledge of what they are spending to give you an office will give you a good idea of where to start negotiations.
I do not think there is a one-size-fits-all methodology for project management in IT operations. There are constants, I guess, which I think motivate each new round of IT management mythologies, but these constants are abstract, prone to severe disconnects from reality when implemented in a specific project.
With that said, I work in IT infrastructure support for a major defense contractor. For the past 4 years, we've been implementing a project management methodology called 6 Sigma, which has its roots in quality control. It is fairly effective for identifying and minimizing sources of variation in a process-driven environment like manufacturing, but making it work in an event-driven environment like IT is not easy. However, we have had some notable successes using 6 Sigma in IT, including infrastucture operations, so I'll give you a capsule view of the basic processes involved.
The 6 Sigma process can be summarized as visualize, commit, prioritize, characterize, improve, and achieve. Here is the 50,000 foot view of each part of the process.
Visualize: Ask yourself "What are you trying to accomplish?" or "What is your vision of the future?" Then ask yourself, "How am I going to get there?" The idea here is to document exactly what the end state is supposed to look like, and the approach you are going to take. For example, "I spend too much time installing and updating applications. I want to reduce the time I spend at a user's desk installing and updating applications software. I think I need a better way to deploy applications to my users."
Commit: Get buy-in from your collegues, your management, and your customers. Create a list of deliverables. Sticking with our example above, your deliverable could be:
Implement an application deployment process that will reduce the amount of time sysadmins spend at users' desks installing and updating applications
Prioritize: Look at your deliverable and start thinking about what you need to do to, and who you need to do it.
Characterize: Document the as is condition, and its undesireable effects, and your plan for improvement. You want to generate metrics that you can point to that will show you made an improvement. Getting these metrics and using them to validate your solution is the essence of the 6 Sigma process. So, our example metric might be the time sysadmins spends installing apps, upgrading apps, patching apps, etc, and your plan for improvement might look like:
1. Identify automated application packaging and delivery systems. 2. Down select to three systems and conduct bake off. 3. Announce winner 4. Train sysadmins on use of system 5. Create Deployment process
Improve: This is where you monitor your improvement plan, making sure that it is staying on schedule. This part of the 6 sigma process is staight-forward management. It will test your ability as a leader and a manager. It has little to do with the actual improvement process, but almost everything to do with its success as a project. When you've implemented your plan, you need to look at those metrics you came up with and see if you really did improve anything.
Achieve: My 6 sigma coach called this the party-time part of project management. Essentially, with your metrics in one hand and your expense sheet in the other, you go to your management and show them that your project was a success, and they buy you and your team lunch.
I apologize for the length of this post - it actually needs to be longer, because I've just skimmed the surface of 6 Sigma. I will happily entertain any questions about 6 Sigma if you want to email me.
Another issue is that there is no tracking, and no way to hold someone accountable in case of abuse.
I'm not sure you *can* maintain accountability using anon published apps in Citrix. If you want accountability, you need to know who was doing what, and when they were doing it. Citrix will log routine connection stuff like the host name and date/time of any client making an ICA connection to the farm, if you have logging enabled. But that really isn't granular enough to be useful for accountability. We had to solve a problem similar to yours when our corporate IT types decided to implement an IE-based solution for time accounting, not realizing that 20 percent of the engineers at our location have unix workstations, not PCs. We set up a Citrix farm, and published IE in a seamless window, and required authentication against our NT domain to use IE. Their IE session data (including favorites) is stored on their terminal services user profile path, which in our case is a directory on a separate server and is locked down with add+read NTFS permissions. This worked well for us and meets our very strict customer-mandated logging and auditing requirements.
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Seems to me I have read before that fighter pilots have been using a shot of O2 to clear up a hangover for a long time. At least since the 80's.
I can add some anecdotal evidence here. I was in the USAF in the 80s, and it wasn't just fighter pilots. We'd all congregate around the environmental support shop (maintained cockpit and ejection life support systems) on Monday mornings and wait our turn to take a hit from the O2 bottle. Worked like a charm -- a couple snorts and you were right as rain.
Booze never "gives" you a hangover. A hangover comes from the lack of water in your system; dehydration. Just make every second of third drink a glass of water, *poof* no hangovers.
absolutely -- dehydration is a big part of the hangover experience. for what it is worth, dying of thirst feels a lot like a hangover for that very reason. Another part of the hangover experience is caused by old-fashioned lack of sleep. a couple of analgesics before you hit the hay (if you aren't too gone to remember) moderates the stress you undergo from the dehydration, allowing you to actually get rested while you sleep.
Science and faith are intrinsically linked. You must have faith to be a scientist in the first place, because faith is what allows you to believe there is order in the universe, and that causality exists. The people who use a personification metaphor to describe the order of the universe are no different from those who use more abstracted and precise language. They still have faith that, even though we might not have a perfect understanding of (the universe/the will of god), it does indeed exist, waiting to be noticed. To not have faith is to genuinely believe that the universe is without order, and there is no point in putting food away for tomorrow, because it might turn into a carnivorous butterfly and eat you before morning anyways for all you know.
Scientists do not need to believe there is order in the universe. To the contrary -- we detect regularities in our observations of nature, but it is only an assumption that those regularities can ever be bound to the actual phenomena in nature -- those regularities may exist in our minds and no where else. Scientists require only that the model be empirically adequate, ie, those phenomenon predicted by the model are observed in nature. The assumption of order in the universe is exactly that -- an assumption. It will be abandoned if observation dictates that it must. When new observations contradict the current model, theories shift as hypotheses are abandoned -- to not have faith. then, is to accept the new observations and to alter one's model of nature accordingly. Faith, on the other hand, is irrational, in that it requires the conscious suppression of reason to operate. A person who abandons an hypothesis in the face of contradictory observations is a rational actor; a person who clings to an hypothesis despite contradictory observations is not.
Skill based systems can be a lot of fun, I'm not saying they're eternally bad. However, I'd love to see a skill-based system that - assuming everyone is trying to play for maximum effectiveness - creates anything even remotely like the flavor and differences between WoW's ten classes and over 30 major specs.
I agree with your post in general, but I don't think that is a safe assumption at all. It is probably true for hard-core raiders and arena teams in WoW, but I don't believe they make up a representative sample of the WoW player base. More generally, a skills-based system would probably not attract many adherents because people don't want to have to think too hard or deeply about something that is supposed to be entertaining. I've been in two WoW guilds where people hung out in Dalaran/Undercity/IF/SW/Silvermoon, did dailies, and flirted with each other. Period. Becoming a more effective player was not why they were paying Blizz $15/month. I guess people are attracted to what makes them feel attractive, or secure, or popular. I'm certainly that way -- during a raid, I love being at the top of the recount meters with my 'lock, so I work at maximizing my dps. I'm fortunate enough to have found a guild where the majority of members share a similar need to compete. The competition is fierce, and we thrive on it. If Blizz introduced a skills-based system to WoW , we would adapt and master it. But I doubt people who are in the game to socialize would care, if they even noticed it at all.
I play WoW *a lot* -- six hours/day during the week and 18 hours/day on weekends and holidays -- and I've often wondered how I let this game take over my life so thoroughly. I think the variable rate schedule of rewards theory can explain this addiction. It is something that I learned about in a Management 101 class two decades ago. What makes anything addictive, according to the theory we were taught as nascent managers, is having a variable rate at which rewards are delivered. It is what makes gamblers come back to the dice table again and again, and it is why unions work so hard to establish uniform wage scales. My company introduced "Spot Awards" and the policy governing the awards explicitly states that managers should make sure that the awards are distributed at random intervals. The variable-rate schedule of rewards can produce game-aholics as effectively as it can work-aholics.
Is Blizz deliberately using the variable rate schedule of rewards to bind us to the game? Of course they are. In WoW, the variable rate schedule of rewards is easy to see. How does Blizz keep people engaged once they've reached the level cap? The recently added "Achievement" system is one way. Every so often, you will be rewarded with an achievement that can grant you cool stuff -- a new pet, a new mount, a new title. The requirements for the achievements are not uniform, and often depend on the completion of other achievements which also have non-uniform requirements. This insures that the schedule at which one completes an achievement and receives a reward will be effectively random. You keep shelling out $15 every month to keep those rewards coming.
Might not be on a level with Newton's Principia, but it could provide you a framework in which set all these great works that people are recommending.
I won't even get started on the total immorality of the concept that the govt grants you or not a "right" to work for a willing employer, grants you or not a "right" to rent a house from a willing landlord, etc.
It is good that you won't get started, because you'd get nowhere. Societies are built on cooperation. Cooperation requires rules. Governments enforce the rules which make cooperation possible. By characterizing those rules as moral or immoral you depart from rational discourse into theology. You are certainly free to disagree with the rules. But invoking morality, or the lack thereof, gains you exactly zero traction in a rational debate.
I've been doing 9/80's for ten years in the IT department here at the rocket ranch. This schedule is the best schedule I've ever worked in the 30+ years I've been a wage slave, and I've worked a lot of schedules -- split shift, rotating, days, swings, mids - you name it, I've probably worked it. The number one benefit for me is the three-day weekend that 9/80 generates every other week. With some judicious use of vacation time, I can take a lot of on-Fridays off as well, so that I can have even more three-day weekends, or the occasional four-day weekend by taking a vacation day on the Thursday preceding an off-Friday, or on the Monday following one. 9/80s make taking frequent mini-vacations feasible, which definitely keeps my morale high.
On a related note, working in IT means sometimes being available 24/7, but that goes with the territory. I don't think I'm being abused by management when they require me to be available on my off-Friday. As long as the compensation I receive from the company in return for being available is commensurate with the inconvenience of being on call, I have no problem with it. It is in my best interest, and the company's, to try to make sure that my services aren't needed on that off-Friday. The key here, as I see it, is that when I am on call, I get paid the same whether or not I get called in, and as long as that policy remains, I will remain with the company. I've worked on-call for companies that compensated me only if I actually was called in. My employer makes no distinction between being on call and actually being at work, when it comes to compensation. Recognizing that there is an opportunity cost for an employee on call is very important to me.
No, you are not insane. It's something more subtle than that. Your malady is one shared by all clever, insightful people who are surrounded by unclever clods. Scientists, engineers, musicians, artists, writers -- anybody who thinks abstractly on a routine basis -- will often appear insane or worse to people who can't or won't think abstractly at all. People who can't or won't think abstractly are not able to disconnect their idea of the way things should be from the way things really are. As Chomsky so rightly pointed out, the map is not the territory. When confronted with somebody who, for example, uses conflicting ideas to describe the same object, as you did when you characterized Grave of the Fireflies as a great movie that you never wanted to see again, the result is confusion for people who think great movies should be watched over and over again, and a knowing nod from those few of us whose map of reality can actually handle that apparent contradiction. It would be interesting to try to see if the same statistical methods used to crack the anonymity of the Netflix prize database would be useful in selecting abstraction as a character trait, based perhaps on how often a person deploys conflicting concepts when reviewing books or movies.
I am blown away that people are still naive enough to believe government exists for the benefit of the governed, especially after six years of the Current Occupant's administration. Governments exist to enrich their supporters. What is the first rule of politics? Get re-elected. Giving a billion-dollar handout to the people to adapt their analog television sets to receive digital broadcast signals ensures that at least 10 million TV-watching voters are going to think more kindly of the ruling party at the next election.
So, what do you do? You take responsibility for your community, for your culture, for your society, for your nation.
If homelessness is a problem in your area, volunteer at a homeless shelter, or start one if there isn't one.
Don't like crime? Join Neighborhood Watch and go armed.
Don't like the war? Make your voice heard. If your congressional rep voted for it, campaign for a new rep. If she voted against it, campaign to keep her in office.
Worried about terrorism? Study how the Brits dealt with the IRA last century, and how they dealt with the Boers the century before that. Study how Spain dealt with ETA, and support politicians who recognize that Bush's "war on terror" is a stupid waste of human life, and that there are proven strategies for dealing with terrorists. How the hell do you wage war against an abstraction?
Okay, soapbox mode off. The point is, don't wait for the government to solve your problems for you. To misquote Musashi, I respect governments, I do not rely on them. Take responsibility and do what you can with your own resources.
We support about 6500 engineers here at the rocket ranch. Back at the turn of the century, we wanted to migrate everybody from expensive-to-maintain *nix workstations to vastly cheaper Windows PCs, but we had a problem: all our data was on several dozen HP N-class data servers. We do serious 3D CAD and FEA, with engineering data sets measured in dozens of terabytes. We wanted to leverage the performance and economy of fast, cheap X86 boxen while not losing our investment in our storage management infrastructure. My IT masters had never heard of samba, and were amazed when I demonstrated how easy it was to serve out a Pro/E drawing to an engineer working at one of our brand new 1 GHz NT4 PCs (I told you it was at the turn of the century.) We deployed it sitewide in 2000, and even now, seven years later, my users still thank me for making it possible for them to use fast PCs to access their Unix-based data sets. We ran samba on SunOS boxes, because we never could get it to play nice with HPUX. Samba is ridiculously easy to install, manage, and maintain, especially with one of the GUI frontends that are readily available. We used SWAT, and it rocked. Samba was a great intermediate enabler, allowing us to continue to use our N class servers while we were moving our user base to PCs.
In 2003, however, we acquired a bunch of Network Appliance servers, and migrated off our HPUX and Sun data servers. NetApp filers are platform agnostic; if the client is a *nix box, the filer presents the data as an NFS mount. If the client is Windows, it looks like NTFS. NetApps aren't cheap, but they were worth the major investment. If your company doesn't want to shell out for a filer, then samba is very viable and I recommend it highly.
Granted, Oblivion is a game where instant immersion is truly possible, where you can literally choose how you want to explore the world. The quests in the game provide some structure, but you really can just pick a direction and start walking when you begin the game.
But the world scaling backfired, I think. Leveling your character a dozen times and then going back and pummelling that boss is a major part of the fun in an RPG. Getting trounced by the same adversary whether you are level 1 or level 12 is not very fun at all. But that is only part of the reason why I think Oblivion does not address the grind issue very well.
Ironically, the main reason that Oblivion doesn't address the grind is because the developers did too good of a job implementing magic in this world. Without putting out too many spoilers for people who haven't already figured it out, even level 1 characters can create spells that completely unbalance the game, no cheats, no console commands, no mods required. (If you are curious about these spells, checkout http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Useful_Spells) And I don't mean for just spellcasting classes -- magic in Oblivion is so open and customizable that it takes only a little bit of thought to create unstoppable characters of any class. Grinding your way battle after battle through adversaries to level up is boring, but so is blowing right through them.
lim f(CS)=MIS
GPA->0
'Nuff said.
Perhaps I'm missing the point of your question, but why does your network security sysadmin have to be on staff? Or even local? Or even on the same side of the planet as you? It seems to me that you could contract this firewall function out to any network security firm for less than the amount you were quoted.
Looks like we finally have a challenger for "break my windows" :)
Deploying an enterprise thin-client solution is certainly a very difficult thing to do -- expensive and time-consuming even when the deployment is well-planned and goes off smoothly. But if I was a sysadmin who wanted to deploy a thin client solution in my company, I would not try to do it everywhere at the same time. I would find an area where thin clients address well-known issues that are easily identifiable to management, and start there.
For example, here at the rocket ranch, security is an issue (and I mean the kind of security that includes steely-eyed types with assault weapons roaming the cube farms.) Declassification procedures on thin clients like NCDs and Neoware boxes basically amount to frobbing the power switch. Declassing workstations with non-volatile memory, otoh, is a bureaucratic nightmare. Thin clients give us the ability to instantly redeploy hardware as various contracts ramp up and close down.
Here's another example, one that I'm currently working on in real life. While we definitely have lots of rocket scientists on the payroll (roughly 6000 of our 10,000 employees at this site), not everybody on the payroll needs to have a rocket-scientist-level workstation on their desk. We have engineers, and we have non-engineers, and their needs for CPU cycles in their cubes are significantly different. Yet we put the same or similar kinds of boxes on each of our ten thousand employees' desks. While an engineer running monte carlos on her flight control algorithms needs lots of cpu cycles, a manager who just checks his email and does his expense account spreadsheet doesn't. A thin client solution will allow us to leverage these differences. With thin clients for the non-engineers, we may have to hire some more IT staff and retask others, but the savings of just one month of support costs on 4000 workstations will fund the yearly salaries of 4 new sysadmins plus fund all the thin client hardware (including servers) and still save the company $3M the first year.
I think thin clients have a very viable future. To motivate the need for change to thin clients, though, you have to use language that managers understand: ROI, TCO, cost-reduction, etc. And that means thin clients will have to be deployed where you can demonstrate good ROI, low TCO, and significant cost-reduction, so you really must pick your battles when it comes to deploying thin clients.
Ask your management how much it is costing on a per employee basis for office space, and then ask for some percentage of that amount. If they don't want to share that info with you, look it up in their publically available tax filings. Having knowledge of what they are spending to give you an office will give you a good idea of where to start negotiations.
I do not think there is a one-size-fits-all methodology for project management in IT operations. There are constants, I guess, which I think motivate each new round of IT management mythologies, but these constants are abstract, prone to severe disconnects from reality when implemented in a specific project.
With that said, I work in IT infrastructure support for a major defense contractor. For the past 4 years, we've been implementing a project management methodology called 6 Sigma, which has its roots in quality control. It is fairly effective for identifying and minimizing sources of variation in a process-driven environment like manufacturing, but making it work in an event-driven environment like IT is not easy. However, we have had some notable successes using 6 Sigma in IT, including infrastucture operations, so I'll give you a capsule view of the basic processes involved.
The 6 Sigma process can be summarized as visualize, commit, prioritize, characterize, improve, and achieve. Here is the 50,000 foot view of each part of the process.
Visualize: Ask yourself "What are you trying to accomplish?" or "What is your vision of the future?" Then ask yourself, "How am I going to get there?" The idea here is to document exactly what the end state is supposed to look like, and the approach you are going to take. For example, "I spend too much time installing and updating applications. I want to reduce the time I spend at a user's desk installing and updating applications software. I think I need a better way to deploy applications to my users."
Commit: Get buy-in from your collegues, your management, and your customers. Create a list of deliverables. Sticking with our example above, your deliverable could be:
Implement an application deployment process that will reduce the amount of time sysadmins spend at users' desks installing and updating applications
Prioritize: Look at your deliverable and start thinking about what you need to do to, and who you need to do it.
Characterize: Document the as is condition, and its undesireable effects, and your plan for improvement. You want to generate metrics that you can point to that will show you made an improvement. Getting these metrics and using them to validate your solution is the essence of the 6 Sigma process. So, our example metric might be the time sysadmins spends installing apps, upgrading apps, patching apps, etc, and your plan for improvement might look like:
1. Identify automated application packaging and delivery systems.
2. Down select to three systems and conduct bake off.
3. Announce winner
4. Train sysadmins on use of system
5. Create Deployment process
Improve: This is where you monitor your improvement plan, making sure that it is staying on schedule. This part of the 6 sigma process is staight-forward management. It will test your ability as a leader and a manager. It has little to do with the actual improvement process, but almost everything to do with its success as a project. When you've implemented your plan, you need to look at those metrics you came up with and see if you really did improve anything.
Achieve: My 6 sigma coach called this the party-time part of project management. Essentially, with your metrics in one hand and your expense sheet in the other, you go to your management and show them that your project was a success, and they buy you and your team lunch.
I apologize for the length of this post - it actually needs to be longer, because I've just skimmed the surface of 6 Sigma. I will happily entertain any questions about 6 Sigma if you want to email me.