Anyone who makes their own hardware and the OS at the same time can easily accomplish the task of "standardized hardware monitoring", and anyone that does make both the hardware and the OS, usually do.
They also typically standardize the user interface to that monitoring system.
Studying vb.net alone will make you crazy and/or drive you to distraction without outside help. Don't worry, you'll soon be quite crazy when you see how it's used in real-world "professional" software development shops.
Until they can deliver without a plan for anything other than feature updates (imagine a world where it would be difficult to release a patch because no one had needed to release one in a very long time), most are just code monkeys. And the ones that deserve the "engineer" title because their code always works, are rarely, if ever, commended for it.
Software engineering management culture is broken. Find a way to motivate people to not release bugs, and bugs will drop. Starting with bonuses that aren't tied to releases, but to how many customer complaints/problems are reported, would be an excellent start.
Yeah, the kids will learn about stored procedures (and how they've been around in real RDBMS's for over a decade), someday... and that they have real uses like the ones you mention, amongst others.
$5/mo a "lot"? People used to buy this thing called "TV Guide" and it sat on the end-table next to the sofa, and you had to walk across the room to change the channel.
I'm tired of hearing this phrase from pseudo-economists that companies have no ethics or morals. Companies are run by human beings who DO have ethics and morals, and can either choose to exercise them in the operation of their company, or not.
If the ass-hats running the place choose to run it without ethics and morals, only having the "single minded [sic] goal of making as much money for share holders as possible", and the rest of us outside the company have enough ethics or morals or whatever you want to call it -- to NOT FUCKING BUY THEIR PRODUCTS -- stupid phrases like "companies have no ethics" will finally die.
If we're willing to either ignore their ethical issues and buy the product anyway, or we're too lazy to know what they're up to and buy their products... we've contributed to them getting away with it.
Companies have as much "ethics" as their customers and their peers and sometimes even government regulators, demand. (Example: All U.S. companies have enough "ethics" to not price-fix or be monopolies or they have the SEC knocking at their door.) They respond to social pressures toward ethical/moral solutions when their decisions are brought out in the public spotlight.
Whether you call this ethics or just "good business", doesn't matter. The end result is still ETHICS pushed by outside forces.
Humans. People with real feelings.
Your phrase "companies have no ethics" is horse-shit, unless people aren't running the companies anymore. Companies INHERENTLY reflect the ethics of the people running them.
People that don't need to monitor anything, because they're not responsible for it, wanting a continuous real-time view into data and/or systems scattered all over the organization so they can feel like they have the "pulse" of the company.
Even when they are responsible for it, they're so far up the food chain that they'd better be delegating that task anyway, meaning they could simply just request regular reports on the data/systems from their lackeys, which would be more efficient than having the IT department make up a complex system to show them the data real-time.
So you can't trust Linux and you can't trust Solaris. Fair enough. What do *you* use for large deployments like your examples above, today?
I have also had the "joy" of maintaining large numbers of both Solaris and Linux systems, and generally I'd say that the "normal" levels of "fucked-up-ness" happen on both.
The difference is, when Solaris is fucked up, I always had an 800 number, and two or three Sun people looking at the problem and AGREEING with me that it was FUBAR, which was a lot better to hand to my bosses -- who are trying to run a business -- than some 14 year old in his basement's posting to alt.linux.fucked.up.scsi or whatever.
Sure the bosses *could* pay RedHat for similar support, but never did. They had learned from over-zealous community promoters that the benefit to running Linux was that it was "Free", not understanding the context of the word free, nor that free doesn't come with answers you can give to *your* customers.
We're about to do it again on another product too. Engineering wants "free" Fedora, support division wants paid-for RHEL. Guess who's going to win?
Maybe officers shouldn't be covered under their departments. Doctors typically aren't. Sure, the hospital can get sued but so can the Doctor, thus -- malpractice insurance.
Perhaps the reform that needs to take place is that Police "malpractice" can bankrupt the officer personally -- then less bad cops would find it appealing to mess with people outside of the bounds of clear-cut lawbreaking where they're sure they're doing their jobs, and not just harassing people.
Innovate, bring in or save the company millions... have the same paycheck. Watch the CEO cash out millions in stock options.
You'd think they'd figure out that the problem isn't the lack of innovation, it's the lack of incentives to innovation.
Mostly, if you innovate and make/save the company money -- your only real reason these days is to help the company make enough money to repair the bleeding that is happening elsewhere throughout the organization due to weak management. Not mis-management, just weak.
On top of that, the sales staff selling your innovative product or service will typically make somewhere around 3X your salary.
This swing to giving the benefits/incentives derived from a new "innovative" product or service started in the late 60's in the U.S. (The best Engineers were "heros" and lionized in biographical data and touted as "important" to the company in public documentation back then...)
Today, the incentives to innovate only lie in leaving the company and selling your wares yourself, which seems like "The American Way". But it wasn't, many years ago.
Three to four decades ago, an engineer would pitch an "innovative" idea to the boss, with no expectation that they could keep the technological idea to themselves -- and the boss would actually UNDERSTAND it (that's important too, and more rare these days than it should be). If it were sound business to do so, the company would form a strategy and give the engineer an appropriate budget and tight timeline to get it built so they could take it to market.
And here's where the big differences start: If the project/product were successful, the Engineer who created it could reasonably expect a significant bonus, a very large one, and in many cases it would push them toward an almost "tenured" position within the company, and they'd be asked to do it again.
Today, the engineer gets his/her small piece of the bonus "plan" money, no matter who made the product/service that made or saved the corporation money, and watches the salespeople sell it a huge profit, much of which goes in the sales staff's pocket.
As an anecdotal way to "prove" this, look at the play "Death of a Salesman". Seen any sales people in that dire of straights today? Or are the ones you work with driving Cadillacs, Hummers, and living in houses about three times the price of your own?
One step further... how many millions has your CxO team made this year alone? If you're working for a public company, the SEC filings tell the tale. One million? Five? Ten? What will you make if you create the absolute best, most INNOVATIVE product ever made in your industry and do it through your company? Will you get a nice plaque and an atta-boy? Will you get a free dinner out on the town? Will you even see $1000 for your efforts?
Time to fix the INCENTIVES. People don't work for nothing, but most companies today have major problems with their incentives, if they want INNOVATION. CxO's, quit bitching... quit pulling millions of dollars of value out of the organization every year (learn to spend some money on pure R&D, and less on your lifestyle), and pull back some of the sales commission for paying the INNOVATOR directly.
ISP's are paid by the packet. Spammers make all ISP's money, either by paying them to be hosted, or by causing your bandwidth use to go up, so there's no financial incentive to remove them, permanently.
In fact, your ISP probably loves it if a spammer pushes you over a quota or forces you to buy a bigger pipe.
Only once large corporations put big pressure on their upstreams to go find out where the traffic is coming from and stop it, because they refuse to pay for spam to be delivered over their big pipes... will it ever end.
There has to be a monetary incentive to stop spam. Contact your upstream and send them a bill for your upgrade costs. Tell them they need to be actively stopping the traffic from known spam hosters.
Ludicrous? Yes. If everyone did it? Great stuff would happen. It's ALL about the money, and if spam is costing you money, you need to find a way to make that cost move upstream to the backbones.
Problem is... the backbones make as much money from the spammers as they'd lose to you. Far more, actually. So they won't respond.
So you're attempting to argue that CSR's at cable companies getting tons of training to handle internal inefficient broken systems is supposed to be a comfort to those of us stuck at the end of the phone line, wasting our time, waiting for the overworked CSR who knows how to 10-key well...?
The same CSR who's so overloaded they don't know anything about how their own network works, and can't figure out how to actually handle our problem? A problem that we're sure others have had, and the company could train the CSR's on?
This isn't just cable companies. Many companies have deployed internal data systems that are so bloody inefficient and require so much data entry, that people tasked with "customer service" as a title are really "CRM drivers who might also know something about what the customer wants".
What you've described is a sweatshop, not a true customer service environment.
And when did I need the Gentoo wiki the worst? During the installation process.
You either have two computers, or you end up with a screwed up install. This is not a good way to introduce average people to "Linux". Not that Gentoo ever was intended for that.
... how to make up bullshit metrics yet, that actually have some basis in reality, you haven't been working as a sysadmin long enough.
Most long-time sysadmins can create mountains of "metrics" that actually look useful, that really aren't.
The really good admins not only have "metrics" but automated systems to create those metrics. (e.g. The bean-counter will be very happy that you've port-scanned all the external systems THREE times this month instead of the usual two, right around review time. Of course, your port-scanning script fires up nmap and nessus, does its thing, and generates a pretty PDF and stashes it somewhere you can retrieve it every time it runs from cron.)
At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is:
- Did I do work worth what the company paid me today?
And:
- Did I generate or save revenue for the company today?
Bonus points for the last one being somewhere around 6 figures or more.
Document THAT for your next review so they can offer you a piddly 3% increase while the "leadership" cashes out millions worth of stock options, and then lays you off when the stock price plummets for a single quarter.
Slashdot Mirror
You missed AIX, HP-UX, and a number of others.
Anyone who makes their own hardware and the OS at the same time can easily accomplish the task of "standardized hardware monitoring", and anyone that does make both the hardware and the OS, usually do.
They also typically standardize the user interface to that monitoring system.
Haven't you figured out how to ssh tunnel from work to your home net connection to read Slashdot yet, newbie?
Studying vb.net alone will make you crazy and/or drive you to distraction without outside help. Don't worry, you'll soon be quite crazy when you see how it's used in real-world "professional" software development shops.
I hear the KDE team is working on kdawsonscreek next. Watch out.
Amen, bro. Software "engineers", aren't.
Until they can deliver without a plan for anything other than feature updates (imagine a world where it would be difficult to release a patch because no one had needed to release one in a very long time), most are just code monkeys. And the ones that deserve the "engineer" title because their code always works, are rarely, if ever, commended for it.
Software engineering management culture is broken. Find a way to motivate people to not release bugs, and bugs will drop. Starting with bonuses that aren't tied to releases, but to how many customer complaints/problems are reported, would be an excellent start.
Isn't Frontier also profitable?
Say hello to video conferencing taking off in a big way and more airlines dying.
I stick with User Friendly and "Meh."
Yeah, the kids will learn about stored procedures (and how they've been around in real RDBMS's for over a decade), someday... and that they have real uses like the ones you mention, amongst others.
$5/mo a "lot"? People used to buy this thing called "TV Guide" and it sat on the end-table next to the sofa, and you had to walk across the room to change the channel.
Sheesh.
Damn, I should have known. Alex was just Eliza in disguise!
Better than most, that's for sure.
I'm tired of hearing this phrase from pseudo-economists that companies have no ethics or morals. Companies are run by human beings who DO have ethics and morals, and can either choose to exercise them in the operation of their company, or not.
If the ass-hats running the place choose to run it without ethics and morals, only having the "single minded [sic] goal of making as much money for share holders as possible", and the rest of us outside the company have enough ethics or morals or whatever you want to call it -- to NOT FUCKING BUY THEIR PRODUCTS -- stupid phrases like "companies have no ethics" will finally die.
If we're willing to either ignore their ethical issues and buy the product anyway, or we're too lazy to know what they're up to and buy their products... we've contributed to them getting away with it.
Companies have as much "ethics" as their customers and their peers and sometimes even government regulators, demand. (Example: All U.S. companies have enough "ethics" to not price-fix or be monopolies or they have the SEC knocking at their door.) They respond to social pressures toward ethical/moral solutions when their decisions are brought out in the public spotlight.
Whether you call this ethics or just "good business", doesn't matter. The end result is still ETHICS pushed by outside forces.
Humans. People with real feelings.
Your phrase "companies have no ethics" is horse-shit, unless people aren't running the companies anymore. Companies INHERENTLY reflect the ethics of the people running them.
And "Dashboards"... what a joke.
People that don't need to monitor anything, because they're not responsible for it, wanting a continuous real-time view into data and/or systems scattered all over the organization so they can feel like they have the "pulse" of the company.
Even when they are responsible for it, they're so far up the food chain that they'd better be delegating that task anyway, meaning they could simply just request regular reports on the data/systems from their lackeys, which would be more efficient than having the IT department make up a complex system to show them the data real-time.
Yep, works well.
e _conference_room/rpx_hd.html
:-)
http://www.polycom.com/usa/en/products/video/larg
Other companies also make them, but [disclaimer] I work for PLCM, so why advertise for the other guys?
So you can't trust Linux and you can't trust Solaris. Fair enough. What do *you* use for large deployments like your examples above, today?
I have also had the "joy" of maintaining large numbers of both Solaris and Linux systems, and generally I'd say that the "normal" levels of "fucked-up-ness" happen on both.
The difference is, when Solaris is fucked up, I always had an 800 number, and two or three Sun people looking at the problem and AGREEING with me that it was FUBAR, which was a lot better to hand to my bosses -- who are trying to run a business -- than some 14 year old in his basement's posting to alt.linux.fucked.up.scsi or whatever.
Sure the bosses *could* pay RedHat for similar support, but never did. They had learned from over-zealous community promoters that the benefit to running Linux was that it was "Free", not understanding the context of the word free, nor that free doesn't come with answers you can give to *your* customers.
We're about to do it again on another product too. Engineering wants "free" Fedora, support division wants paid-for RHEL. Guess who's going to win?
Maybe officers shouldn't be covered under their departments. Doctors typically aren't. Sure, the hospital can get sued but so can the Doctor, thus -- malpractice insurance.
Perhaps the reform that needs to take place is that Police "malpractice" can bankrupt the officer personally -- then less bad cops would find it appealing to mess with people outside of the bounds of clear-cut lawbreaking where they're sure they're doing their jobs, and not just harassing people.
Innovate, bring in or save the company millions... have the same paycheck. Watch the CEO cash out millions in stock options.
You'd think they'd figure out that the problem isn't the lack of innovation, it's the lack of incentives to innovation.
Mostly, if you innovate and make/save the company money -- your only real reason these days is to help the company make enough money to repair the bleeding that is happening elsewhere throughout the organization due to weak management. Not mis-management, just weak.
On top of that, the sales staff selling your innovative product or service will typically make somewhere around 3X your salary.
This swing to giving the benefits/incentives derived from a new "innovative" product or service started in the late 60's in the U.S. (The best Engineers were "heros" and lionized in biographical data and touted as "important" to the company in public documentation back then...)
Today, the incentives to innovate only lie in leaving the company and selling your wares yourself, which seems like "The American Way". But it wasn't, many years ago.
Three to four decades ago, an engineer would pitch an "innovative" idea to the boss, with no expectation that they could keep the technological idea to themselves -- and the boss would actually UNDERSTAND it (that's important too, and more rare these days than it should be). If it were sound business to do so, the company would form a strategy and give the engineer an appropriate budget and tight timeline to get it built so they could take it to market.
And here's where the big differences start: If the project/product were successful, the Engineer who created it could reasonably expect a significant bonus, a very large one, and in many cases it would push them toward an almost "tenured" position within the company, and they'd be asked to do it again.
Today, the engineer gets his/her small piece of the bonus "plan" money, no matter who made the product/service that made or saved the corporation money, and watches the salespeople sell it a huge profit, much of which goes in the sales staff's pocket.
As an anecdotal way to "prove" this, look at the play "Death of a Salesman". Seen any sales people in that dire of straights today? Or are the ones you work with driving Cadillacs, Hummers, and living in houses about three times the price of your own?
One step further... how many millions has your CxO team made this year alone? If you're working for a public company, the SEC filings tell the tale. One million? Five? Ten? What will you make if you create the absolute best, most INNOVATIVE product ever made in your industry and do it through your company? Will you get a nice plaque and an atta-boy? Will you get a free dinner out on the town? Will you even see $1000 for your efforts?
Time to fix the INCENTIVES. People don't work for nothing, but most companies today have major problems with their incentives, if they want INNOVATION. CxO's, quit bitching... quit pulling millions of dollars of value out of the organization every year (learn to spend some money on pure R&D, and less on your lifestyle), and pull back some of the sales commission for paying the INNOVATOR directly.
You haven't learned by now to keep your monitor facing you in a direction away from the entrance to your work area?! :-)
Thus, my sig...
ISP's are paid by the packet. Spammers make all ISP's money, either by paying them to be hosted, or by causing your bandwidth use to go up, so there's no financial incentive to remove them, permanently.
In fact, your ISP probably loves it if a spammer pushes you over a quota or forces you to buy a bigger pipe.
Only once large corporations put big pressure on their upstreams to go find out where the traffic is coming from and stop it, because they refuse to pay for spam to be delivered over their big pipes... will it ever end.
There has to be a monetary incentive to stop spam. Contact your upstream and send them a bill for your upgrade costs. Tell them they need to be actively stopping the traffic from known spam hosters.
Ludicrous? Yes. If everyone did it? Great stuff would happen. It's ALL about the money, and if spam is costing you money, you need to find a way to make that cost move upstream to the backbones.
Problem is... the backbones make as much money from the spammers as they'd lose to you. Far more, actually. So they won't respond.
So you're attempting to argue that CSR's at cable companies getting tons of training to handle internal inefficient broken systems is supposed to be a comfort to those of us stuck at the end of the phone line, wasting our time, waiting for the overworked CSR who knows how to 10-key well...?
The same CSR who's so overloaded they don't know anything about how their own network works, and can't figure out how to actually handle our problem? A problem that we're sure others have had, and the company could train the CSR's on?
This isn't just cable companies. Many companies have deployed internal data systems that are so bloody inefficient and require so much data entry, that people tasked with "customer service" as a title are really "CRM drivers who might also know something about what the customer wants".
What you've described is a sweatshop, not a true customer service environment.
And when did I need the Gentoo wiki the worst? During the installation process.
You either have two computers, or you end up with a screwed up install. This is not a good way to introduce average people to "Linux". Not that Gentoo ever was intended for that.
... how to make up bullshit metrics yet, that actually have some basis in reality, you haven't been working as a sysadmin long enough.
Most long-time sysadmins can create mountains of "metrics" that actually look useful, that really aren't.
The really good admins not only have "metrics" but automated systems to create those metrics. (e.g. The bean-counter will be very happy that you've port-scanned all the external systems THREE times this month instead of the usual two, right around review time. Of course, your port-scanning script fires up nmap and nessus, does its thing, and generates a pretty PDF and stashes it somewhere you can retrieve it every time it runs from cron.)
At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is:
- Did I do work worth what the company paid me today?
And:
- Did I generate or save revenue for the company today?
Bonus points for the last one being somewhere around 6 figures or more.
Document THAT for your next review so they can offer you a piddly 3% increase while the "leadership" cashes out millions worth of stock options, and then lays you off when the stock price plummets for a single quarter.
How well does "Season Pass" work on your Cox DVR? (In other words, everything I've read says that it doesn't.)