Back before AOL violated their own TOS by monitoring private chats, back when IM was new, back when IRC was for nerds (It still is, right?), one of the things I, an adult, loved to do was talk to other people online.
Different races, different cultures, different ages, too, provided new perspectives on life. Talking to a Californian and the O.J. case, talked to a German about the fall of the wall, talking to someone in South Africa about relationships, and even talking to kids about music (or anything else for which I found their fresh, sometimes naive perspective eye-opening) were activities I loved because they gave me a different way of looking at things. I consider polite conversation with as many people who are as different from me as possible to be an essential part of the lifelong process of self-education that we should all relish.
Yes, that means I talked to kids online.
I don't do that any more. I don't even try to talk to new people online anymore. So many of the old haunts were slowly invaded by LEOs blundering their way through silly entrapment schemes ("Hi, I'm 14/f/California. I love cheerleading and gymnastics. Do you want to talk to me? I've been having problems with my boyfriend cuz he wants to sex me and I'd like to know what an older guy thinks" was typical, although I didn't misspell nearly enough words.) that all the fun was sucked out of it.
Now, I talk on forums where the whole world can read what I say. That way, no one can accuse me of grooming. When I made the decision to eschew private conversations with strangers, I thought I was being too paranoid but withdrew, anyway, just to be on the safe side.
It seems I wasn't paranoid at all. There really are people out there who think that if an adult says "Hi" to a kid they don't know, said adult must be up to no good.
To answer the question in the summary - You're kidding, right?
Linux docs are pretty much terrible. I didn't RTFAs but I'm pretty sure I can imagine what they say.
The web forums are disorganized. The plethora of "just different enough that this trick won't work on that one" distros dooms to failure even serious attempts to bring order to this world. The traditional man pages don't have useful examples or appear to have been written as condensed cheat notes formatted for scrawling on the palm of your hand before going into an exam. Yes, you go to google first if you want to have a ghost of a chance of figuring out your problems.
Now, don't get me wrong. There are some stunningly nice examples of Linux docs out there. There's just far too few and they're hidden in the giant haystack of crap, stuff that doesn't apply to your distro, and just plain wrong advice apparently written by griefers.
Interesting timing on this story, though. I ran across a good example last week. I'm having trouble with trying to get video to work in Ubuntu Hardy LTS on a machine with a poorly supported ATI integrated video setup. After much reading, I finally find a few pearls that talk about bypassing X and using framebuffer output. Supposedly VLC and mplayer can both do this.
I'll spare you the gory details. But if you want to test this, I challenge anyone to locate online a reasonable set of command-line examples that show how to start those programs in this mode, examples that can be understood by a reasonably competent user who simply hasn't dealt with this stuff before. The couple (and there were *just* a couple) of command-line examples I was able to locate after hours of searching made all sorts of assumptions about the command-line competence of the reader.
Ultimately, the docs just weren't good enough to do the job. That is way, way too common in Linux-land.
But, hey, it's a hell of a lot better to eat than that thin (albeit tasty) stuff you get in Italy or that thin (made from cardboard and mostly tasteless stuff) you get in New York.
But, in this extraordinary case, that would be asking a lot. Clearly, people must get a formal notification that they're out of a job. The fed doesn't yet fire people by IM or email.
Changing this would require not just changing the statute but a sea-change in mindset across the federal government.
It's possible, of course; I just don't think it could get done during the run-up to the next budget crisis.
They can be shut down without a proper budget, unless you missed the California meltdown, and all of the drama when it came to funding our troops. Budget and government are always very real hurdles.
You're talking about the federal government and, technically, you're right. About every decade-and-a-half or so, Congress gets the budget so fouled up that the President refuses to sign a continuing order to keep the government working. At that point, the government technically stops. All non-essential personnel are let go. It's happened twice during my 27 years with the government.
However, I don't think it'll ever happen again.
Statutorily, to do a shutdown, all employees must receive notice in person and in writing. If the fed is going to shut down tomorrow, every single employee gets contacted today and told to be at the office in the morning to receive their formal notice. The law requires it.
That means that every single Special Agent on stakeout is pulled off of surveillance to come to the office to get their letter. Every Special Officer, Revenue Officer, every sort of officer, agent, analyst, tech, etc., ad infinitum must all show up at the main office at the same time.
The fed employs a huge percentage of people who actually visit their office in the downtown federal building (wherever that may be in your city) just once or twice a year. But at budget shutdown time, they're all there. The halls are packed with people because there's just not enough room for them to all sit down.
Keep in mind that this in-person notification, with everyone at the same place at the same time, is an absolute statutory requirement.
Now, in this post 9/11 USA, who'd be crazy enough to do this? Any half-assed attempt at setting off a bomb or flying a plane into a building would, at about 8:30 on the morning of a shutdown, kill more badge-toting feds than any normal-day method I can conceive short of a nuclear option.
I really don't think the feds will ever shut down again. Seriously. It's just too crazy to contemplate these days. The last time it happened was well before 9/11 and plenty of people in the government, even during those relaxed times, commented on what a huge and idiotic security risk it was. I sincerely doubt we'll ever do it again.
I put my mom on a ThinkNIC back when they first came out. I thought (and still think) it was a wonderful idea.
However, all attempts at selling such devices have failed miserably. Howevermuch we may think them an elegant solution, the market has decided that such steady-state computers are unwanted. People want more than perfect reliability. They're willing to accept lousy reliability to get it.
A shame, really. I wonder if anybody has done a live CD Linux distro for this purpose? I'd sure like to find one to play with.
I'm not home and can't refer to my research at the moment or I'd be happy to do it for you, but feel free to do some googling for yourself. You won't have to search long to find the cites you seek.
If you dig deep enough, you'll find a lovely quote that accuses the NRA of not wanting to move forward until they can find a "minority lesbian female combat-disabled vet with HIV" complainant. Clued-in gun owners all over the U.S. got tired a long time ago with NRA foot-dragging in these matters. After all, the NRA only stays in the lobbying business as long as these questions remain up in the air.
Why do people want to move away from that which is "antiquated"? Many technologies are antiquated but they're still the best way to do things for most people. In vitro fertilization may be easier to control but I kinda like the old way of doing things. The CZ75 is a fine pistol but the 1911 is still at least as good. And while web forums have their uses, mailing lists and usenet groups are still the best way to simply move information without visual decoration. They also have many wonderful advanced features noted by other respondents.
Consultants employed by this organization turn in products that are on time and of higher quality than the work done by employees.
I work in a U.S. federal LEA. Around here, the quoted statement would prompt loud laughter from nearly everybody except from the one or two would would pronounce you a liar and punch you in the mouth.
Consultants can be fine when their motivations align with the motivations of the entity to which they consult. A private corp and a consultant both want to profit so it's in their interest to work together towards that common goal.
Consultants to the public sector, however, are a problem. Where the hiring entity is not established for reasons of profit but to provide some vital service, bringing in a consultant who only wants to make a profit makes their goals...er..."non-mutual."
The very best works I've ever seen in the public sector were done by dedicated public servants who hired on because they believed in the mission of the agency. They endure the long slog up the chain of timed promotions because they are dedicated to public service, not to short term profit.
There are problems with the public sector. Bureaucracy does not mesh with some personalities, causing them to perform suboptimally. Firing people is hard but it's the price we pay for ditching the spoils system. (You remember the spoils system from high school history class, right? When one party gets elected, they immediately fire everyone who's a member of the other party and vice versa? As bad as the dead weight/slow firing issue is, it's nowhere near the performance killer that a full-blown spoils system is. For an illuminating example, look at the way Chicago city government ran about 100 years ago.)
But bureaucracy is not a curse word. It's the way vital work gets done, day in and day out, without regard to who just got elected or whether the company stock just crashed. It's not efficient, but it's reliable, predictable, and absolutely necessary for vital government services.
I'm sorry you got a bad impression of that work environment. It appears to me you don't understand why things are the way they are and why the way they are is often, despite appearances, the best possible given the mission, resources, and political realities.
Knowing both Finance and IT allows you to... be a proper language bridge between the two depts.
Amen.
At one point in my career, I had several years each admin asst experience in function A, field officer experience in function B, and IT experience. I got put into one of three experimental workgroups with people from all those functions plus a couple of others.
I spent the first six months going to meetings where my biggest contribution was as a translator. The jargon differed so critically between functions (sometime identical acronyms meant completely different things) that the workgroups simply couldn't communicate worth crap when I wasn't there. After the first week, everybody invited me to every meeting, even when I had nothing to do with the work. Thankfully, after 6 months, pretty much everyone was able to talk to everyone else and make themselves understood.
After three years we disbanded. Three groups of a dozen employees each, not one who made over USD$100K per year, times support costs times three years means the total commitment of the organization to the consolidated projects was about USD$20M.
We brought in just over USD$1.3B during that time period.
Sometimes it can be might satisfying and rewarding to be something as simple as a "language bridge."
1. Build a UAV that can carry 20 pounds via a circuitous path to a designated location more than 500 miles away. 2. Go to Mexico. Buy white powder. 3. Execute 15 more steps that should be fairly obvious. 4. Profit!
Gee - a sock gnome quandry that actually reaches a logical conclusion. I'm shocked!
(Serious note - Why isn't this being done? If it was, I assume we'd have all heard about it.)
Yes, he got promoted to a higher level of management. At least he's now one step further removed from the actual facilities he manages and can no longer screw things up quite as directly as he did in the past.
...actual feminists...the ones fighting for actual freedom (including the freedom to choose to be a housewife if that's what you really want)...>
It would be easier to agree with self-identified feminists if it were difficult to locate any so zealous as to say that any woman who chooses to be a housewife is some combination of brainwashed and/or simply an inferior human being, incapable of understanding the "real issues" and unworthy of respect.
But it's not.
I have known 3 women who openly held those views. I know two housewives who have told me (and I believe them) that they have been on the receiving end of such sentiments from other women on multiple occasions.
I don't buy the notion that "feminist zealots" are so rare that they should be discounted and that their views should not influence how we view the whole idea of "feminism." In my experience, they are too common to ignore. My experience is limited, of course, and I am a man. For those reasons, feel free to discount my statements. But I don't see objective data that leads me to believe I've seen some sort of skewed sampling over the last 3 decades, so I'll go ahead and hang onto my viewpoint that the publicly stated goals of most mainstream spokeswomen of the "feminist movement" are laudable and good BUT that there enough spite-filled wackjobs in the mix that "the movement" will never progress at the rate it deserves to.
We're going to "re-stack" our server room soon. One of the biggest fights we had was making double-damn sure that the double doors to the server room could be fully opened, locked back, and a pallet and pallet jack rolled into the room. Then we need to be able to close the doors behind the jack and rotate the pallet in any direction. This means we need a few square feet inside the doors to be kept completely clear of walls, equipment, fencing, etc. I couldn't believe the crap we caught over this one. The people who draw floorplans for us thought we were crazy to want to waste that much space. We've prevailed for now. Who knows what the flooplans will look like by the time the work crews arrive?
I'm less concerned with the fine-tuning of the environment for servers than I am with getting the basics right. How many bad server room implementations have you seen?
I'm sitting in one. We used to have a half-dozen built-for-the-purpose Liebert units scattered around the periphery of the room. The space was properly designed and the hardware maintained whatever temp and humidity we chose to set. They were expensive to run and maintain but they did their job and did it right.
About seven years ago, the bean-counting powers-that-be pronounced them "too expensive" and had them ripped out. The replacement central system pumps cold air under the raised floor from one central point. Theoretically, it could work. In practice, it was too humid in here the first day.
And the first week, month, and year. We complained. We did simple things to demonstate to upper management and building management that it was too humid in here, things like storing a box of envelopes in the middle of the room for a week and showing management that they had sealed themselves due to excessive humidity.
We were, in every case, rebuffed.
A few weeks ago, a contractor working on phone lines under the floor complained about the mold. *HE* got listened to. Preliminary studies show both penicillin (relatively harmless) and black (not so harmless) mold in high concentrations. Lift a floor tile near the air input and there's a nice thick coat of fluffy, fuzzy mold on everything. There's mold behind the sheetrock that sometimes bleeds through when the walls sweat. They brought in dehumidifiers that are pulling more than 30 gallons of water out of the air every day. The incoming air, depending on who's doing the measuring, is at 75% to 90% humidity. According to the first independent tester who came in, "Essentially, it's raining" under our floor at the intake.
And the areas where condensation is *supposed* to happen and drain away? Those areas are bone dry.
IOW, our whole system was designed and installed without our input and over our objections by idiots who had no idea what they were doing.
So, my fellow server room denizens, please keep this in mind - When people (especially management types) show up with studies that support the view that the way the environment is controlled in your server room can be altered to save money, be afraid. Be very afraid. It doesn't matter how good the basic research is or how artfully it could be employed to save money without causing problems, by the time the PHBs get ahold of it, it'll be perverted into an excuse to totally screw things up.
I download much more than 10 GB a month. Still, I think I could live with a cap if it were reasonably generous or if there were designated off-peak times that didn't count against the cap.
For example, I signed up for capped service from a usenet provider. They provided (depending on the plan, this could vary) a day per week when my downloads don't count against my cap. So, every Wednesday at about 1 in the morning, I had my usenet client set to fire up and start sucking down every task I had queued up over the previous week. It would saturate my connection for the next 22 hours before I had it set to shut down.
If my ISP capped me except for, say, 1AM to 6AM daily, I could live with that. I'd have to automate quite a few things but that would be no big deal.
In fact, if better tools were available for scheduling such tasks, I could imagine that it would be possible to substantially "even out" network traffic over time. People could get used to a Firefox add-on, for example, that popped up a window saying "The download you have requested is large. Do you want to proceed now or schedule the download for a period when your internet access is not metered by your ISP?"
But I can't live without at least 4 uncapped hours a day. If I were asked to restrict myself more than that, I'd just have to pony up big bucks for a business account.
You're mostly correct and present some excellent illustrations.
I guess what had me pushing so hard the other way was the notion that politics can and should be read into trivial things. Like games and bowel movements.:-) I really get tired of that. I deal from time to time with people who will exert extreme effort to help disadvantaged people understand the greater context of how they've been put down by a system that's loaded against them...but they can't be arsed (Is that the right brit-ism?) to give those same people a hot meal and some useful job training.
Yes, it's important to pay attention to the way human beings in large groups interact, label that politics, and try to keep it in mind when, for example, building roads.
But I remain unconvinced that it's worth an erg of effort to understand the political influences in computer games.:-)
A big thanks - this has been the most gratifying exchange I've had on slashdot in many a moon.
If you're a sociologist or political activist, yes, these everyday choices may have relevant political context.
And thus we encounter the description of PhDs as people who know everything about nothing. I don't dispute that everyday choices have political context. I dispute that they are relevant to anything of importance.
That it seems mundane and impractical to you means that you have not studied the relevant issues.
Oh, my goodness, no. Quite the reverse. I've studied the relevant issues because I've been forced, from time to time, to deal with people who see racism and sexism and devious political motivations hiding under every rock and behind every bush. I've been a "Prevention of Sexual Harrassment" trainer at my job for nearly two decades now and the insanity of what I've occasionally witnessed has taught me to distinguish between when someone has been damaged and when someone *thinks* they should have been damaged and thus feel compelled by "normalized peer reference group" expectations to raise a stink. Hint: the latter situation is far more common than the former.
It is precisely *because* I've studied the relevant issues that I've concluded the only sane path is to reject these thought processes as impractical and excuse as merely mundane all sorts of situations that twist up the knickers of activist-type folks.
A tacit acceptance of the invisible norms that get you through your day does not mean that they do not, especially in the aggregate with the population as a whole, carry profound consequences.
Basic difference in world view: profound consequences are caused by individual choices. They are not (and our opinions of them are distorted into uselessness if we study them this way) considered "in the aggregate" in any rubber-meets-the-road useful way. A willingness to primarily judge human behavior "in the aggregate" is anathema to the notion that individuals should lead principled lives. Aggregated behavioral norms are usefully studied only as markers to indicate if the individuals of a group are worthy of further examination to determine if they are good people or idiots, evil or moral, etc. Such studies should never fully inform our opinions of whether a particular situation is politically motivated or sexist or racist or whatever. To do so is to abdicate responsibility to make individual judgements in favor of a second cousin of the mob mentality.
There are an infinity of other options, but that these do not even cross your mind is the result of large-scale cultural and political trends/decisions that push you into the normalized behavior for your peer reference group.
They do cross my mind. Then I help them right on out the other side and out of my field of view. If I dwelled on them or accepted them, I might fall prey to the notion that large-scale trends are in any way relevant to how individual humans should live their lives.
And nobody who knows me would ever say that I engage in behavior "...normalized...for...(my)...peer reference group.":-)
Yes, human behavior, because of its social ramifications, is by its nature political.
Agreed. Everything is political to somebody.
Whether analyzing the questions this poses is meaningful to you is something else entirely.
My opinion isn't that the process of analyzing the questions may or may not be meaningful. My opinion is that the questions themselves are, in the overwhelming percentage of cases, meaningless mental masturbation squirted out onto the pages of dissertations, useful for nothing in the real world except fueling the exchange of hot air between various academics, activists, and manipulators who enjoy bloviating on such topics for their own self-centered reasons.
But in the real world, a game is still just a game.
I'm happy that the limit is set at the limit of the largest vehicle generally seen, though it is stupid to put 4 tonne+ trucks and passenger cars on the same limit.
Interesting you should make that observation.
The GP was wrong. Montana never had no speed limit (except, technically, for a short period of time between the court decision and legislative action referenced in the next paragraph). They simply said you could drive as fast as you wanted as long as you stayed "reasonable and prudent". In many jurisdictions, the traffic court judges interpreted that to mean "Don't even think about writing a ticket for anyone going less than a hundred." Nobody, however, would have batted at eye at writing up a semi-trailer for traveling at 90mph. It's not safe.
The Montana situation fell apart when an edge case cropped up. A driver was ticketed for doing 90 mph, was convicted, and appealed. He prevailed at the state supreme court level because the court held that the a speed limit law that only specifed "reasonable and prudent" was simply too vague to be constitutional. The state responded by setting speed limits.
Slashdot Mirror
Back before AOL violated their own TOS by monitoring private chats, back when IM was new, back when IRC was for nerds (It still is, right?), one of the things I, an adult, loved to do was talk to other people online.
Different races, different cultures, different ages, too, provided new perspectives on life. Talking to a Californian and the O.J. case, talked to a German about the fall of the wall, talking to someone in South Africa about relationships, and even talking to kids about music (or anything else for which I found their fresh, sometimes naive perspective eye-opening) were activities I loved because they gave me a different way of looking at things. I consider polite conversation with as many people who are as different from me as possible to be an essential part of the lifelong process of self-education that we should all relish.
Yes, that means I talked to kids online.
I don't do that any more. I don't even try to talk to new people online anymore. So many of the old haunts were slowly invaded by LEOs blundering their way through silly entrapment schemes ("Hi, I'm 14/f/California. I love cheerleading and gymnastics. Do you want to talk to me? I've been having problems with my boyfriend cuz he wants to sex me and I'd like to know what an older guy thinks" was typical, although I didn't misspell nearly enough words.) that all the fun was sucked out of it.
Now, I talk on forums where the whole world can read what I say. That way, no one can accuse me of grooming. When I made the decision to eschew private conversations with strangers, I thought I was being too paranoid but withdrew, anyway, just to be on the safe side.
It seems I wasn't paranoid at all. There really are people out there who think that if an adult says "Hi" to a kid they don't know, said adult must be up to no good.
Sad.
Really, really sad.
Straight, user-directed thinking. Amazing. Ya don't see much of that nowadays.
Somebody modded this insightful? WTF?
To answer the question in the summary - You're kidding, right?
Linux docs are pretty much terrible. I didn't RTFAs but I'm pretty sure I can imagine what they say.
The web forums are disorganized. The plethora of "just different enough that this trick won't work on that one" distros dooms to failure even serious attempts to bring order to this world. The traditional man pages don't have useful examples or appear to have been written as condensed cheat notes formatted for scrawling on the palm of your hand before going into an exam. Yes, you go to google first if you want to have a ghost of a chance of figuring out your problems.
Now, don't get me wrong. There are some stunningly nice examples of Linux docs out there. There's just far too few and they're hidden in the giant haystack of crap, stuff that doesn't apply to your distro, and just plain wrong advice apparently written by griefers.
Interesting timing on this story, though. I ran across a good example last week. I'm having trouble with trying to get video to work in Ubuntu Hardy LTS on a machine with a poorly supported ATI integrated video setup. After much reading, I finally find a few pearls that talk about bypassing X and using framebuffer output. Supposedly VLC and mplayer can both do this.
I'll spare you the gory details. But if you want to test this, I challenge anyone to locate online a reasonable set of command-line examples that show how to start those programs in this mode, examples that can be understood by a reasonably competent user who simply hasn't dealt with this stuff before. The couple (and there were *just* a couple) of command-line examples I was able to locate after hours of searching made all sorts of assumptions about the command-line competence of the reader.
Ultimately, the docs just weren't good enough to do the job. That is way, way too common in Linux-land.
It's some sort of sausage/pasta/tomato casserole.
But, hey, it's a hell of a lot better to eat than that thin (albeit tasty) stuff you get in Italy or that thin (made from cardboard and mostly tasteless stuff) you get in New York.
Yes, statutes can be changed.
But, in this extraordinary case, that would be asking a lot. Clearly, people must get a formal notification that they're out of a job. The fed doesn't yet fire people by IM or email.
Changing this would require not just changing the statute but a sea-change in mindset across the federal government.
It's possible, of course; I just don't think it could get done during the run-up to the next budget crisis.
You're talking about the federal government and, technically, you're right. About every decade-and-a-half or so, Congress gets the budget so fouled up that the President refuses to sign a continuing order to keep the government working. At that point, the government technically stops. All non-essential personnel are let go. It's happened twice during my 27 years with the government.
However, I don't think it'll ever happen again.
Statutorily, to do a shutdown, all employees must receive notice in person and in writing. If the fed is going to shut down tomorrow, every single employee gets contacted today and told to be at the office in the morning to receive their formal notice. The law requires it.
That means that every single Special Agent on stakeout is pulled off of surveillance to come to the office to get their letter. Every Special Officer, Revenue Officer, every sort of officer, agent, analyst, tech, etc., ad infinitum must all show up at the main office at the same time.
The fed employs a huge percentage of people who actually visit their office in the downtown federal building (wherever that may be in your city) just once or twice a year. But at budget shutdown time, they're all there. The halls are packed with people because there's just not enough room for them to all sit down.
Keep in mind that this in-person notification, with everyone at the same place at the same time, is an absolute statutory requirement.
Now, in this post 9/11 USA, who'd be crazy enough to do this? Any half-assed attempt at setting off a bomb or flying a plane into a building would, at about 8:30 on the morning of a shutdown, kill more badge-toting feds than any normal-day method I can conceive short of a nuclear option.
I really don't think the feds will ever shut down again. Seriously. It's just too crazy to contemplate these days. The last time it happened was well before 9/11 and plenty of people in the government, even during those relaxed times, commented on what a huge and idiotic security risk it was. I sincerely doubt we'll ever do it again.
Double Cola > *everything else* (including Jolt)
I put my mom on a ThinkNIC back when they first came out. I thought (and still think) it was a wonderful idea.
However, all attempts at selling such devices have failed miserably. Howevermuch we may think them an elegant solution, the market has decided that such steady-state computers are unwanted. People want more than perfect reliability. They're willing to accept lousy reliability to get it.
A shame, really. I wonder if anybody has done a live CD Linux distro for this purpose? I'd sure like to find one to play with.
Sounds like it's time to transition your support job to the next generation.
Man, I miss GeoWorks. Especially that pushpin on menus. Anybody else remember and miss that?
I'm not home and can't refer to my research at the moment or I'd be happy to do it for you, but feel free to do some googling for yourself. You won't have to search long to find the cites you seek.
If you dig deep enough, you'll find a lovely quote that accuses the NRA of not wanting to move forward until they can find a "minority lesbian female combat-disabled vet with HIV" complainant. Clued-in gun owners all over the U.S. got tired a long time ago with NRA foot-dragging in these matters. After all, the NRA only stays in the lobbying business as long as these questions remain up in the air.
Why do people want to move away from that which is "antiquated"? Many technologies are antiquated but they're still the best way to do things for most people. In vitro fertilization may be easier to control but I kinda like the old way of doing things. The CZ75 is a fine pistol but the 1911 is still at least as good. And while web forums have their uses, mailing lists and usenet groups are still the best way to simply move information without visual decoration. They also have many wonderful advanced features noted by other respondents.
I work in a U.S. federal LEA. Around here, the quoted statement would prompt loud laughter from nearly everybody except from the one or two would would pronounce you a liar and punch you in the mouth.
Consultants can be fine when their motivations align with the motivations of the entity to which they consult. A private corp and a consultant both want to profit so it's in their interest to work together towards that common goal.
Consultants to the public sector, however, are a problem. Where the hiring entity is not established for reasons of profit but to provide some vital service, bringing in a consultant who only wants to make a profit makes their goals...er..."non-mutual."
The very best works I've ever seen in the public sector were done by dedicated public servants who hired on because they believed in the mission of the agency. They endure the long slog up the chain of timed promotions because they are dedicated to public service, not to short term profit.
There are problems with the public sector. Bureaucracy does not mesh with some personalities, causing them to perform suboptimally. Firing people is hard but it's the price we pay for ditching the spoils system. (You remember the spoils system from high school history class, right? When one party gets elected, they immediately fire everyone who's a member of the other party and vice versa? As bad as the dead weight/slow firing issue is, it's nowhere near the performance killer that a full-blown spoils system is. For an illuminating example, look at the way Chicago city government ran about 100 years ago.)
But bureaucracy is not a curse word. It's the way vital work gets done, day in and day out, without regard to who just got elected or whether the company stock just crashed. It's not efficient, but it's reliable, predictable, and absolutely necessary for vital government services.
I'm sorry you got a bad impression of that work environment. It appears to me you don't understand why things are the way they are and why the way they are is often, despite appearances, the best possible given the mission, resources, and political realities.
Amen.
At one point in my career, I had several years each admin asst experience in function A, field officer experience in function B, and IT experience. I got put into one of three experimental workgroups with people from all those functions plus a couple of others.
I spent the first six months going to meetings where my biggest contribution was as a translator. The jargon differed so critically between functions (sometime identical acronyms meant completely different things) that the workgroups simply couldn't communicate worth crap when I wasn't there. After the first week, everybody invited me to every meeting, even when I had nothing to do with the work. Thankfully, after 6 months, pretty much everyone was able to talk to everyone else and make themselves understood.
After three years we disbanded. Three groups of a dozen employees each, not one who made over USD$100K per year, times support costs times three years means the total commitment of the organization to the consolidated projects was about USD$20M.
We brought in just over USD$1.3B during that time period.
Sometimes it can be might satisfying and rewarding to be something as simple as a "language bridge."
1. Build a UAV that can carry 20 pounds via a circuitous path to a designated location more than 500 miles away.
2. Go to Mexico. Buy white powder.
3. Execute 15 more steps that should be fairly obvious.
4. Profit!
Gee - a sock gnome quandry that actually reaches a logical conclusion. I'm shocked!
(Serious note - Why isn't this being done? If it was, I assume we'd have all heard about it.)
Yes, he got promoted to a higher level of management. At least he's now one step further removed from the actual facilities he manages and can no longer screw things up quite as directly as he did in the past.
It would be easier to agree with self-identified feminists if it were difficult to locate any so zealous as to say that any woman who chooses to be a housewife is some combination of brainwashed and/or simply an inferior human being, incapable of understanding the "real issues" and unworthy of respect.
But it's not.
I have known 3 women who openly held those views. I know two housewives who have told me (and I believe them) that they have been on the receiving end of such sentiments from other women on multiple occasions.
I don't buy the notion that "feminist zealots" are so rare that they should be discounted and that their views should not influence how we view the whole idea of "feminism." In my experience, they are too common to ignore. My experience is limited, of course, and I am a man. For those reasons, feel free to discount my statements. But I don't see objective data that leads me to believe I've seen some sort of skewed sampling over the last 3 decades, so I'll go ahead and hang onto my viewpoint that the publicly stated goals of most mainstream spokeswomen of the "feminist movement" are laudable and good BUT that there enough spite-filled wackjobs in the mix that "the movement" will never progress at the rate it deserves to.
We're going to "re-stack" our server room soon. One of the biggest fights we had was making double-damn sure that the double doors to the server room could be fully opened, locked back, and a pallet and pallet jack rolled into the room. Then we need to be able to close the doors behind the jack and rotate the pallet in any direction. This means we need a few square feet inside the doors to be kept completely clear of walls, equipment, fencing, etc. I couldn't believe the crap we caught over this one. The people who draw floorplans for us thought we were crazy to want to waste that much space. We've prevailed for now. Who knows what the flooplans will look like by the time the work crews arrive?
I'm less concerned with the fine-tuning of the environment for servers than I am with getting the basics right. How many bad server room implementations have you seen?
I'm sitting in one. We used to have a half-dozen built-for-the-purpose Liebert units scattered around the periphery of the room. The space was properly designed and the hardware maintained whatever temp and humidity we chose to set. They were expensive to run and maintain but they did their job and did it right.
About seven years ago, the bean-counting powers-that-be pronounced them "too expensive" and had them ripped out. The replacement central system pumps cold air under the raised floor from one central point. Theoretically, it could work. In practice, it was too humid in here the first day.
And the first week, month, and year. We complained. We did simple things to demonstate to upper management and building management that it was too humid in here, things like storing a box of envelopes in the middle of the room for a week and showing management that they had sealed themselves due to excessive humidity.
We were, in every case, rebuffed.
A few weeks ago, a contractor working on phone lines under the floor complained about the mold. *HE* got listened to. Preliminary studies show both penicillin (relatively harmless) and black (not so harmless) mold in high concentrations. Lift a floor tile near the air input and there's a nice thick coat of fluffy, fuzzy mold on everything. There's mold behind the sheetrock that sometimes bleeds through when the walls sweat. They brought in dehumidifiers that are pulling more than 30 gallons of water out of the air every day. The incoming air, depending on who's doing the measuring, is at 75% to 90% humidity. According to the first independent tester who came in, "Essentially, it's raining" under our floor at the intake.
And the areas where condensation is *supposed* to happen and drain away? Those areas are bone dry.
IOW, our whole system was designed and installed without our input and over our objections by idiots who had no idea what they were doing.
So, my fellow server room denizens, please keep this in mind - When people (especially management types) show up with studies that support the view that the way the environment is controlled in your server room can be altered to save money, be afraid. Be very afraid. It doesn't matter how good the basic research is or how artfully it could be employed to save money without causing problems, by the time the PHBs get ahold of it, it'll be perverted into an excuse to totally screw things up.
Because they got caught. It wouldn't do to have a good time and then be unapologetic about it. We live in more enlightnened times, now, doncha know?
I download much more than 10 GB a month. Still, I think I could live with a cap if it were reasonably generous or if there were designated off-peak times that didn't count against the cap.
For example, I signed up for capped service from a usenet provider. They provided (depending on the plan, this could vary) a day per week when my downloads don't count against my cap. So, every Wednesday at about 1 in the morning, I had my usenet client set to fire up and start sucking down every task I had queued up over the previous week. It would saturate my connection for the next 22 hours before I had it set to shut down.
If my ISP capped me except for, say, 1AM to 6AM daily, I could live with that. I'd have to automate quite a few things but that would be no big deal.
In fact, if better tools were available for scheduling such tasks, I could imagine that it would be possible to substantially "even out" network traffic over time. People could get used to a Firefox add-on, for example, that popped up a window saying "The download you have requested is large. Do you want to proceed now or schedule the download for a period when your internet access is not metered by your ISP?"
But I can't live without at least 4 uncapped hours a day. If I were asked to restrict myself more than that, I'd just have to pony up big bucks for a business account.
You're mostly correct and present some excellent illustrations.
I guess what had me pushing so hard the other way was the notion that politics can and should be read into trivial things. Like games and bowel movements. :-) I really get tired of that. I deal from time to time with people who will exert extreme effort to help disadvantaged people understand the greater context of how they've been put down by a system that's loaded against them...but they can't be arsed (Is that the right brit-ism?) to give those same people a hot meal and some useful job training.
Yes, it's important to pay attention to the way human beings in large groups interact, label that politics, and try to keep it in mind when, for example, building roads.
But I remain unconvinced that it's worth an erg of effort to understand the political influences in computer games. :-)
A big thanks - this has been the most gratifying exchange I've had on slashdot in many a moon.
And thus we encounter the description of PhDs as people who know everything about nothing. I don't dispute that everyday choices have political context. I dispute that they are relevant to anything of importance.
Oh, my goodness, no. Quite the reverse. I've studied the relevant issues because I've been forced, from time to time, to deal with people who see racism and sexism and devious political motivations hiding under every rock and behind every bush. I've been a "Prevention of Sexual Harrassment" trainer at my job for nearly two decades now and the insanity of what I've occasionally witnessed has taught me to distinguish between when someone has been damaged and when someone *thinks* they should have been damaged and thus feel compelled by "normalized peer reference group" expectations to raise a stink. Hint: the latter situation is far more common than the former.
It is precisely *because* I've studied the relevant issues that I've concluded the only sane path is to reject these thought processes as impractical and excuse as merely mundane all sorts of situations that twist up the knickers of activist-type folks.
Basic difference in world view: profound consequences are caused by individual choices. They are not (and our opinions of them are distorted into uselessness if we study them this way) considered "in the aggregate" in any rubber-meets-the-road useful way. A willingness to primarily judge human behavior "in the aggregate" is anathema to the notion that individuals should lead principled lives. Aggregated behavioral norms are usefully studied only as markers to indicate if the individuals of a group are worthy of further examination to determine if they are good people or idiots, evil or moral, etc. Such studies should never fully inform our opinions of whether a particular situation is politically motivated or sexist or racist or whatever. To do so is to abdicate responsibility to make individual judgements in favor of a second cousin of the mob mentality.
They do cross my mind. Then I help them right on out the other side and out of my field of view. If I dwelled on them or accepted them, I might fall prey to the notion that large-scale trends are in any way relevant to how individual humans should live their lives.
And nobody who knows me would ever say that I engage in behavior "...normalized...for...(my)...peer reference group." :-)
Agreed. Everything is political to somebody.
My opinion isn't that the process of analyzing the questions may or may not be meaningful. My opinion is that the questions themselves are, in the overwhelming percentage of cases, meaningless mental masturbation squirted out onto the pages of dissertations, useful for nothing in the real world except fueling the exchange of hot air between various academics, activists, and manipulators who enjoy bloviating on such topics for their own self-centered reasons.
But in the real world, a game is still just a game.
Interesting you should make that observation.
The GP was wrong. Montana never had no speed limit (except, technically, for a short period of time between the court decision and legislative action referenced in the next paragraph). They simply said you could drive as fast as you wanted as long as you stayed "reasonable and prudent". In many jurisdictions, the traffic court judges interpreted that to mean "Don't even think about writing a ticket for anyone going less than a hundred." Nobody, however, would have batted at eye at writing up a semi-trailer for traveling at 90mph. It's not safe.
The Montana situation fell apart when an edge case cropped up. A driver was ticketed for doing 90 mph, was convicted, and appealed. He prevailed at the state supreme court level because the court held that the a speed limit law that only specifed "reasonable and prudent" was simply too vague to be constitutional. The state responded by setting speed limits.