Take a bunch of cheapend shared accounts, and you'll get way better ROI, and still, for the most part, do not sacrifice any reliability at all. Cost: Greater setup time, depending upon on several contingency factors.
Are you seriously proposing this as a way to run a business? That strikes me as seriously retarded. I know a lot of people who run a lot of sites, and depending on their bandwidth draw and other needs, they'll rent servers, they'll rent a cabinet and buy bandwidth, or they'll use one of the reasonably priced CDNs. But I've never heard of anybody doing this unless they're running something semi-legal and want to dodge MAFIAA threat letters.
Swapping your shit around between a bunch of cheap hosting accounts strikes me as a) very Fisher-Price, and b) totally pointless. Good sysadmins cost real money, and for all the time spent on jiggery-pokery, it seems like a much better deal to just get a discount CDN or a cheap colo'd pipe, and let the sysadmin spend their time on something useful.
One, access to the code (source, libraries, decompilable libraries, whatever) for a fully functional MMO would be a huge leg-up for competitors attempting to enter the field.
Given some of the in-house code bases out there, it seems just as likely to me that releasing it could sink competitors as they spent months trying to turn a giant WTF-bomb into something that they could actually work on.
My business rule of thumb is that application code bases generally have zero or negative cash value unless they come with the people who wrote them. I'm sure there are some exceptions. But over and over I've seen people take on code bases that had no continuity of personnel, and it seems like they always spend more time rummaging and fixing than it would have taken just to write things again from scratch.
And a clever marketing man would counter that this is an opportunity to achieve lock-in by establishing exclusive access to a large number of datasets.
You did note that these are public datasets, yes? And that you access them by mounting them like any other filesystem? Other than transferring a few hundred gig of data to somewhere else, there's no lock-in barriers.
Of course, that pursuit of openness could just mean that they have an extremely clever marketing person. But I've never met one quite that smart. Well, perhaps that's the wrong word. But all the marketing people I've met, even the ones I like a lot, remind me of the seagulls in Finding Nemo. Everything belongs to them. And if it doesn't, it should.
Can someone make these datasets available to download as aggregate torrents[...]?
That someone could be you! Steps to making this happen:
get an AWS account
start up a virtual machine running Linux
install the torrent software of your choice
poke a hole in the firewall
Attach the dataset of your choice as a block device
Mount the block device
make a torrent
upload the torrent to one of the public trackers
download the torrent to your home computer, and get a couple others to do the same
once you've got a few seeds, shut down the virtual server
If you're serious about doing this and need advice on dealing with the Amazon Web Services stuff, feel free to drop me an email at the address in my profile. If it's one of the smaller datasets, like the 200 GB of the US Census, I'll even be one of the seeders.
Note that on Amazon's website they say that you can only access the data if you're paying them to crunch numbers on their cloud computers. That is, you can't just download the data off their sites, which would be the nice thing to do.
And you know what you can do with a cloud computer, my little rocket scientist? You can set up a frickin' web server. And then you can download anything your precious heart desires.
Yes, but at least now we are all able to do data mining in large databases.
This is absolutely the case.
The web has made vast amounts of information available, so you would think it would play into the "computers will bring about the age of big brother" that was so prominent during the 60s. But it hasn't. Instead, because everybody can afford computers and bandwidth, is had distributed power rather than concentrating it.
The rich and powerful already have access to vast datasets, and the computing and human power necessary to mine them. Things like Google and Wikipedia and blogs have given everybody a taste of that power, and I'm in favor of anything that helps level the playing field.
I say: who vouches for the validity of the data set itself? I understand that some of the sets are already publicly available, but that doesn't mean all.
Did you even look at their public data sets page? Every one of the public data sets they've listed has source information. They are already, at this very moment, providing information on who/where they came from.
The one I looked at also had extensive sets of README files explaining the source and format of the data, and I'd imagine it's true for the others as well.
If the uploaded data is not available for download, but is only available to AWS applications running on Amazon's (paid for) compute service, then Amazon deserves nothing but contempt and an "Up yours" for this.
Seriously? Or did somebody just put sand in your pancakes this morning?
As an AWS user, I think this is great. It means I don't have to waste time and money copying over a public dataset. When I read about this I fired up a virtual Linux box, attached the census data as/dev/sdb, and spent a couple hours rummaging. Total cost: $0.70. If I had had to copy everything over first, it would have been $20 in bandwidth, plus a long time waiting for the 200 GB to transfer.
You realize that these datasets are public, right? For the census one, you can already download it for free. Do you want Amazon to make it extra-super-free or something?
I presume it's the same for the others. But if not, you should put your money where your very active mouth is. It would take maybe 15 minutes work to get an Amazon server up and running, attach all the public datasets, and set up a web server.
I'm so very tired of people who say "somebody should do X!" but aren't willing to be that somebody.
This just looks like a way to sell there cloud computing services. They provide the free data and you provide the monthly service fee.
I'd bet that's not quite how they think about it.
I once had the fortune to work on a small project for a guy who had built a pretty large software company and then sold it. He said that he always looked to do something interesting first, and then figured out how to make it not lose money, because money-losers aren't sustainable.
I don't know anybody at Amazon anymore, but from my pals who did work there, my guess is that AWS has a similar culture: they seek out the useful and interesting, and actually do the ideas they can make pay for themselves.
If they had a culture that was mainly revenue-focused, I'd expect this idea to get shot down, because some penny-pincher would argue that they'd make more money from people uploading duplicates of these giant data sets over and over.
Incorrect. The US debt actually dropped during the Clinton administration. We could have done the same during this last boom. It's just that the Republicans had higher priorities than fiscal responsibility. Shame, really.
Universities are extremely unlikely to go after previous students for releasing source code without permission.
It depends on the value of what's released. Regardless, they can still unrelease it, and they can fire the employee or give bad references. And given that the original poster was a researcher, presumably he's interested in making a career in academia.
So government "economic stimulus" is like trying to lengthen a blanked by cutting a strip off one end and sewing it onto the other. The blanket not only ends up no longer, but even a bit shorter.
Incorrect. Because the government can borrow during busts and pay it back during booms, a government stimulus during a recession is like borrowing one of your blankets from summer to keep you warmer in winter.
For more on this see the broken window fallacy.
The broken window fallacy only applies when you are spending on something with no value. That would indeed be retarded. But if the government is spending on useful infrastructure or something else that provides value or creates more room for economic growth, then the broken window fallacy would be irrelevant.
Second if you haven't signed a contract that gives your intellectual property / inventions / authorship / works to the University then you own it, plain and simple. You as an individual have to willingly and explicitly relinquish your rights, they can't just take them.
At least in California, and I suspect everywhere in the US, I'm pretty sure this is wrong.
Your average software developer, who gets hired to make software and collects a regular paycheck for doing so, gives up his rights. It's known as a work for hire. Although many jobs make you sign one, I believe no written contract is needed to establish employment.
Whether or not that applies to this guy as a researcher, I dunno; I suspect it depends on whether he's a professor or a minion. But I wouldn't want people to get the idea that they can walk with code that they were paid to write.
Meanwhile just release whatever you want to the public under whatever license you want. If they complain, do what everyone else does and sarcastically feign ignorance and say "well, we never agreed to that".
This might work, but it's dangerous. If you are giving away what is legally somebody else's property, you could be in a boatload of shit if the property's actually worth something. You may also screw the people using the released software under an invalid license.
Even if the property owner doesn't want to go to that much trouble, you still may buy yourself enough ill will that it could harm your career prospects. I'm happy when people release libraries and other non-core IP as open source. But if I ever had somebody release something core under an open-source license, especially if I thought they were doing it dickishly, they would be out the door in a flash, with their coat tossed out after.
These are all very good questions, but you should not be asking Slashdot, you should be asking your attorney. Not having one is no excuse. For something like this, with the ramifications being as big (and permanent) as they are, you need to get one.
He should get an attorney, but there's nothing wrong with asking Slashdot first. A good lawyer will happily charge you $250 an hour or more to teach you about very basic stuff, but that's a waste of money and time.
If somebody's charging you $4 a minute, it makes sense go in prepared. And how do you get prepared? Reading about the fundamentals, getting advice from people with similar experiences, making lists of questions to ask, figuring out what to tell the lawyer, and talking about your concerns with peers. And where can he do all of that? Right here. And as a bonus, a bunch of people who will be able to use the knowledge one day will get it for free.
How does withholding computer access correct his behavior, then?
You don't think that he'd see having no internet access as punishment?
Finally, one man's barbarism is another man's pragmatism.
One man, perhaps, might see killing people to save money as reasonable pragmatism. But not a lot more. And thankfully we have laws and cops to keep people like you from acting on your notions.
Making Hans hate himself won't bring Nina back; at this point the only important consideration is minimizing the cost to society. If you want to punish him you might as well execute him. At least then you won't be wasting taxpayer money housing and feeding him for the rest of his life!
The goal of justly administered punishment is to correct behavior and provide deterrence to others, not to encourage self-hate. Neither purpose is well served by giving him permanent room and board to dink around on the Internet.
As an aside, executing people because they fall below some level of benefit/cost ratio is in my view barbaric.
hey need to give Hans an Internet connection in his cell. At least then he can still be of some use to society, and it's not as if his was a computer-related offense..
I'd be opposed to that. Partly because it was never clear to me that he was net productive given the amount of other people's time and goodwill he wasted. But mainly because prison is punishment, and for somebody who spends most of their time on line anyhow, I'd say given them an internet connection is too close to freeing them. I'd rather Hans focus on what he did, and how he became the kind of person who could do that.
The reason I am biased towards blaming it on the "folks above" is because they didn't anticipate such a thing.
Oh, I'd hope they took their share of lumps. Are you familiar with Five Whys? It's a technique for root cause analysis. In this case, the proximate cause was the novice tech doing something dumb. But if you dig deeper, other causes appear.
In applying this, I always try to solve the problem at multiple levels. The guy screwed up, for sure, and he needs to learn. But the managers also screwed up, and they need to learn. Interesting problems come from failures on multiple levels; to prevent more problems, you need to patch on multiple levels.
Well-written rules can do wonders (as long as everyone knows where they are written so that they can read them too).
Possibly. Generally I see rules as an intermediate stage. Two stages, really. The first one is where bosses write rules, treating people as robots. The second is where everybody writes the rules, as reminders of how they've agreed to work together.
Past that comes when people start removing rules that people have internalized or grown beyond. Beyond that is where there are few or no written rules, and the ones that exist are reminders of things that people are currently trying to learn.
Question oriented UI design is a great way to make a good interface.
Hey, that's a great idea. It fits in well with personas, and seems like a nice way to force people to think about the user. I'll try it out next I get the chance.
you could say that for any profession. doctors. rescue personnel. cops. and you would so very wrong each time.
I disagree. I think like any power it should be used wisely and compassionately, but humiliating people doing idiotic things isn't incompatible with that.
Off the top of my head, I'd say that it's best used in peer or near-peer relationships. For example, a team I know have a short meeting first thing every morning. Initially people were late regularly, wasting a lot of time. So they instituted a $1/min late fee, which helps some, and there is also a lot of ribbing of late people, which helps more. "Awww.... Is Steve all sleepy this morning? You need a blankie for the meeting?" Etc.
Sure, they could all be nice and sympathetic about oversleeping. But they've got good relationships and work well as a team, and the mockery works a lot better. It's very rare that somebody's late. And when I'm a guest at their meetings, you bet I'm on time.
I've definitely seen a cop use this power for good. In my teens, a friend of mine was once pulled over for speeding. When the cop asked him why, he said that he was late for something or other. The cop, acid in his voice, said, "And you think that's a good reason to risk an accident?" My friend blushed, looked down, and said, "No sir." And probably because he was ashamed, the cop let him off with a warning.
Sure, the power can be misused. But that doesn't mean it shouldn't ever be used.
If someone "above" ordered him to do this - they are to be held responsible.
If he was so "french fry cheap", why was he allowed access to such an important part of the system and allowed to make such dramatic changes?
Why wasn't there someone to supervise him and review his plans before implementing them?
You make a common error. You talk as if blame or responsibility is something that only one person could have.
Yes, the person who ordered him to do this, and the person who gave him access beyond his skills also screwed up.
However, he could well have told both of them that he knew what he was doing. And regardless, he was the one who took the actions. He is at least equally responsible, and probably more so.
To be honest, I don't see him that guilty; after all, he was just following orders (see the documentary on human behaviour based on an experiment by Milgram).
If your main conclusion from the Milgram experiments is that people who "just follow orders" aren't really very guilty, then you have missed an important lesson of them. Yes, many complied, but many also didn't. We all have a tendency to follow orders, so we all must guard against that.
Professionals know how to say no. If you're willing to totally fubar a network because somebody "orders" you to do something that is incompatible with a smoothly running network, then you aren't a professional network administrator, you're some guy who read a router manual.
The same goes for software. If you let a boss bully you into writing shitty software because of his imaginary deadline, then you're not a professional. And probably a chump, too, as it's probably not the boss who will take the blame for the bugs and cleanup time.
Yes. He was abusive when he deliberately humiliated a coworker for no apparent reason other than having a laugh with the other smugs.
How do you know the coworker could hear? According to the text, the person who took the call was on mute.
I imagine it got back to him eventually, but that's only my imagination.
Would you have learned MORE if some senior dickhead made you restore from backup. Naked. In the rain. While he laughed with his friends? The situation you describe sounds to me like you learned from your mistakes, I believe that is different from learning from pain, but maybe I'm just nitpicking:)
There was also mocking involved in my case, although not to that level. I agree it can be taken too far, but on a number of occasions where I've been insufficiently clueful to be properly embarrassed, friends have been kind enough to help me out.
I've seen my share of abusive system administrators, it annoyes me every single time.
Would you say this guy was abusive? If so, how?
People don't learn anything useful from pain,
I disagree.
Long ago, when I was a wee student, I accidentally formatted a drive. A boot drive for a workstation. A drive with a lot of people's files on it. What with one thing and another, it took me 28 hours to put things right again from backups. 28 hours in a row.
I definitely learned both from that pain, and from the entirely deserved ribbing I took from all concerned. I certainly learned caution. That was the very last time I lost other people's data through carelessness.
System administrators must provide (as everybody in IT) vertical support for the entire organization, not the other way around. Many system administrators don't realize this. Instead they only accept one truth. Their own.
I agree, and I agree that some sysadmins are dicks when it's not necessary or deserved. I'm not in favor of that either.
If he were a total ass, he wouldn't have done this just to a room-full of techs and muted the mic. He would have left the mic open so the guy could hear everybody laugh at him. And for bonus points, he would have recorded it and let it get forwarded around through the company.
Having the guy repeat himself once is only mildly dickish.
you're a dick. given that this guy is low salary he probably doesn't have a lot of experience. you could have shown him the error of his ways, instead you publicly embarrass him in front of the whole company. glad I don't work with you.
On the one hand, you're right. Embarrassing the idiot was clearly a dick move.
On the other hand, this is a very useful bit of dickishness. The idiot didn't just make a mistake; he made a mistake with major consequences to a lot of people, and he made a mess that his betters had to clean up.
In my experience, about 98% of the time, there are only two ways we learn. One is through pain. The network breaker, among many flaws, had insufficient caution, but I'm sure the pain of humiliation here taught him some. (That's one of the skills he'll need if he ever wants to be a highly paid admin.) The other way is through observing the pain of others. By making a semi-public example of the yutz, a room-full of network engineers (and I'm sure, a lot of their friends) got a great example of how not to behave. You can bet that at least some minor fuckups were avoided thanks to this.
Sysadmins are often dicks to fools for a reason: it helps a lot in their work. I didn't like hating everybody all the time, so now I'm a recovering sysadmin. Bitch all you want, but however unforgiving sysadmins are, the machines they run are far less so.
Slashdot Mirror
Take a bunch of cheapend shared accounts, and you'll get way better ROI, and still, for the most part, do not sacrifice any reliability at all. Cost: Greater setup time, depending upon on several contingency factors.
Are you seriously proposing this as a way to run a business? That strikes me as seriously retarded. I know a lot of people who run a lot of sites, and depending on their bandwidth draw and other needs, they'll rent servers, they'll rent a cabinet and buy bandwidth, or they'll use one of the reasonably priced CDNs. But I've never heard of anybody doing this unless they're running something semi-legal and want to dodge MAFIAA threat letters.
Swapping your shit around between a bunch of cheap hosting accounts strikes me as a) very Fisher-Price, and b) totally pointless. Good sysadmins cost real money, and for all the time spent on jiggery-pokery, it seems like a much better deal to just get a discount CDN or a cheap colo'd pipe, and let the sysadmin spend their time on something useful.
One, access to the code (source, libraries, decompilable libraries, whatever) for a fully functional MMO would be a huge leg-up for competitors attempting to enter the field.
Given some of the in-house code bases out there, it seems just as likely to me that releasing it could sink competitors as they spent months trying to turn a giant WTF-bomb into something that they could actually work on.
My business rule of thumb is that application code bases generally have zero or negative cash value unless they come with the people who wrote them. I'm sure there are some exceptions. But over and over I've seen people take on code bases that had no continuity of personnel, and it seems like they always spend more time rummaging and fixing than it would have taken just to write things again from scratch.
And a clever marketing man would counter that this is an opportunity to achieve lock-in by establishing exclusive access to a large number of datasets.
You did note that these are public datasets, yes? And that you access them by mounting them like any other filesystem? Other than transferring a few hundred gig of data to somewhere else, there's no lock-in barriers.
Of course, that pursuit of openness could just mean that they have an extremely clever marketing person. But I've never met one quite that smart. Well, perhaps that's the wrong word. But all the marketing people I've met, even the ones I like a lot, remind me of the seagulls in Finding Nemo. Everything belongs to them. And if it doesn't, it should.
Can someone make these datasets available to download as aggregate torrents[...]?
That someone could be you! Steps to making this happen:
If you're serious about doing this and need advice on dealing with the Amazon Web Services stuff, feel free to drop me an email at the address in my profile. If it's one of the smaller datasets, like the 200 GB of the US Census, I'll even be one of the seeders.
Note that on Amazon's website they say that you can only access the data if you're paying them to crunch numbers on their cloud computers.
That is, you can't just download the data off their sites, which would be the nice thing to do.
And you know what you can do with a cloud computer, my little rocket scientist? You can set up a frickin' web server. And then you can download anything your precious heart desires.
Yes, but at least now we are all able to do data mining in large databases.
This is absolutely the case.
The web has made vast amounts of information available, so you would think it would play into the "computers will bring about the age of big brother" that was so prominent during the 60s. But it hasn't. Instead, because everybody can afford computers and bandwidth, is had distributed power rather than concentrating it.
The rich and powerful already have access to vast datasets, and the computing and human power necessary to mine them. Things like Google and Wikipedia and blogs have given everybody a taste of that power, and I'm in favor of anything that helps level the playing field.
I say: who vouches for the validity of the data set itself? I understand that some of the sets are already publicly available, but that doesn't mean all.
Did you even look at their public data sets page? Every one of the public data sets they've listed has source information. They are already, at this very moment, providing information on who/where they came from.
The one I looked at also had extensive sets of README files explaining the source and format of the data, and I'd imagine it's true for the others as well.
If the uploaded data is not available for download, but is only available to AWS applications running on Amazon's (paid for) compute service, then Amazon deserves nothing but contempt and an "Up yours" for this.
Seriously? Or did somebody just put sand in your pancakes this morning?
As an AWS user, I think this is great. It means I don't have to waste time and money copying over a public dataset. When I read about this I fired up a virtual Linux box, attached the census data as /dev/sdb, and spent a couple hours rummaging. Total cost: $0.70. If I had had to copy everything over first, it would have been $20 in bandwidth, plus a long time waiting for the 200 GB to transfer.
You realize that these datasets are public, right? For the census one, you can already download it for free. Do you want Amazon to make it extra-super-free or something?
I presume it's the same for the others. But if not, you should put your money where your very active mouth is. It would take maybe 15 minutes work to get an Amazon server up and running, attach all the public datasets, and set up a web server.
I'm so very tired of people who say "somebody should do X!" but aren't willing to be that somebody.
This just looks like a way to sell there cloud computing services. They provide the free data and you provide the monthly service fee.
I'd bet that's not quite how they think about it.
I once had the fortune to work on a small project for a guy who had built a pretty large software company and then sold it. He said that he always looked to do something interesting first, and then figured out how to make it not lose money, because money-losers aren't sustainable.
I don't know anybody at Amazon anymore, but from my pals who did work there, my guess is that AWS has a similar culture: they seek out the useful and interesting, and actually do the ideas they can make pay for themselves.
If they had a culture that was mainly revenue-focused, I'd expect this idea to get shot down, because some penny-pincher would argue that they'd make more money from people uploading duplicates of these giant data sets over and over.
Incorrect. The US debt actually dropped during the Clinton administration. We could have done the same during this last boom. It's just that the Republicans had higher priorities than fiscal responsibility. Shame, really.
Universities are extremely unlikely to go after previous students for releasing source code without permission.
It depends on the value of what's released. Regardless, they can still unrelease it, and they can fire the employee or give bad references. And given that the original poster was a researcher, presumably he's interested in making a career in academia.
So government "economic stimulus" is like trying to lengthen a blanked by cutting a strip off one end and sewing it onto the other. The blanket not only ends up no longer, but even a bit shorter.
Incorrect. Because the government can borrow during busts and pay it back during booms, a government stimulus during a recession is like borrowing one of your blankets from summer to keep you warmer in winter.
For more on this see the broken window fallacy.
The broken window fallacy only applies when you are spending on something with no value. That would indeed be retarded. But if the government is spending on useful infrastructure or something else that provides value or creates more room for economic growth, then the broken window fallacy would be irrelevant.
Second if you haven't signed a contract that gives your intellectual property / inventions / authorship / works to the University then you own it, plain and simple. You as an individual have to willingly and explicitly relinquish your rights, they can't just take them.
At least in California, and I suspect everywhere in the US, I'm pretty sure this is wrong.
Your average software developer, who gets hired to make software and collects a regular paycheck for doing so, gives up his rights. It's known as a work for hire. Although many jobs make you sign one, I believe no written contract is needed to establish employment.
Whether or not that applies to this guy as a researcher, I dunno; I suspect it depends on whether he's a professor or a minion. But I wouldn't want people to get the idea that they can walk with code that they were paid to write.
Meanwhile just release whatever you want to the public under whatever license you want. If they complain, do what everyone else does and sarcastically feign ignorance and say "well, we never agreed to that".
This might work, but it's dangerous. If you are giving away what is legally somebody else's property, you could be in a boatload of shit if the property's actually worth something. You may also screw the people using the released software under an invalid license.
Even if the property owner doesn't want to go to that much trouble, you still may buy yourself enough ill will that it could harm your career prospects. I'm happy when people release libraries and other non-core IP as open source. But if I ever had somebody release something core under an open-source license, especially if I thought they were doing it dickishly, they would be out the door in a flash, with their coat tossed out after.
These are all very good questions, but you should not be asking Slashdot, you should be asking your attorney. Not having one is no excuse. For something like this, with the ramifications being as big (and permanent) as they are, you need to get one.
He should get an attorney, but there's nothing wrong with asking Slashdot first. A good lawyer will happily charge you $250 an hour or more to teach you about very basic stuff, but that's a waste of money and time.
If somebody's charging you $4 a minute, it makes sense go in prepared. And how do you get prepared? Reading about the fundamentals, getting advice from people with similar experiences, making lists of questions to ask, figuring out what to tell the lawyer, and talking about your concerns with peers. And where can he do all of that? Right here. And as a bonus, a bunch of people who will be able to use the knowledge one day will get it for free.
How does withholding computer access correct his behavior, then?
You don't think that he'd see having no internet access as punishment?
Finally, one man's barbarism is another man's pragmatism.
One man, perhaps, might see killing people to save money as reasonable pragmatism. But not a lot more. And thankfully we have laws and cops to keep people like you from acting on your notions.
Making Hans hate himself won't bring Nina back; at this point the only important consideration is minimizing the cost to society. If you want to punish him you might as well execute him. At least then you won't be wasting taxpayer money housing and feeding him for the rest of his life!
The goal of justly administered punishment is to correct behavior and provide deterrence to others, not to encourage self-hate. Neither purpose is well served by giving him permanent room and board to dink around on the Internet.
As an aside, executing people because they fall below some level of benefit/cost ratio is in my view barbaric.
hey need to give Hans an Internet connection in his cell. At least then he can still be of some use to society, and it's not as if his was a computer-related offense..
I'd be opposed to that. Partly because it was never clear to me that he was net productive given the amount of other people's time and goodwill he wasted. But mainly because prison is punishment, and for somebody who spends most of their time on line anyhow, I'd say given them an internet connection is too close to freeing them. I'd rather Hans focus on what he did, and how he became the kind of person who could do that.
The reason I am biased towards blaming it on the "folks above" is because they didn't anticipate such a thing.
Oh, I'd hope they took their share of lumps. Are you familiar with Five Whys? It's a technique for root cause analysis. In this case, the proximate cause was the novice tech doing something dumb. But if you dig deeper, other causes appear.
In applying this, I always try to solve the problem at multiple levels. The guy screwed up, for sure, and he needs to learn. But the managers also screwed up, and they need to learn. Interesting problems come from failures on multiple levels; to prevent more problems, you need to patch on multiple levels.
Well-written rules can do wonders (as long as everyone knows where they are written so that they can read them too).
Possibly. Generally I see rules as an intermediate stage. Two stages, really. The first one is where bosses write rules, treating people as robots. The second is where everybody writes the rules, as reminders of how they've agreed to work together.
Past that comes when people start removing rules that people have internalized or grown beyond. Beyond that is where there are few or no written rules, and the ones that exist are reminders of things that people are currently trying to learn.
Question oriented UI design is a great way to make a good interface.
Hey, that's a great idea. It fits in well with personas, and seems like a nice way to force people to think about the user. I'll try it out next I get the chance.
you could say that for any profession. doctors. rescue personnel. cops.
and you would so very wrong each time.
I disagree. I think like any power it should be used wisely and compassionately, but humiliating people doing idiotic things isn't incompatible with that.
Off the top of my head, I'd say that it's best used in peer or near-peer relationships. For example, a team I know have a short meeting first thing every morning. Initially people were late regularly, wasting a lot of time. So they instituted a $1/min late fee, which helps some, and there is also a lot of ribbing of late people, which helps more. "Awww.... Is Steve all sleepy this morning? You need a blankie for the meeting?" Etc.
Sure, they could all be nice and sympathetic about oversleeping. But they've got good relationships and work well as a team, and the mockery works a lot better. It's very rare that somebody's late. And when I'm a guest at their meetings, you bet I'm on time.
I've definitely seen a cop use this power for good. In my teens, a friend of mine was once pulled over for speeding. When the cop asked him why, he said that he was late for something or other. The cop, acid in his voice, said, "And you think that's a good reason to risk an accident?" My friend blushed, looked down, and said, "No sir." And probably because he was ashamed, the cop let him off with a warning.
Sure, the power can be misused. But that doesn't mean it shouldn't ever be used.
You misunderstood.
No, that's how I understood it all along. Which is why I didn't think it was abusive all along.
I'm sure the quote got back to the guy eventually, though.
If someone "above" ordered him to do this - they are to be held responsible.
If he was so "french fry cheap", why was he allowed access to such an important part of the system and allowed to make such dramatic changes?
Why wasn't there someone to supervise him and review his plans before implementing them?
You make a common error. You talk as if blame or responsibility is something that only one person could have.
Yes, the person who ordered him to do this, and the person who gave him access beyond his skills also screwed up.
However, he could well have told both of them that he knew what he was doing. And regardless, he was the one who took the actions. He is at least equally responsible, and probably more so.
To be honest, I don't see him that guilty; after all, he was just following orders (see the documentary on human behaviour based on an experiment by Milgram).
If your main conclusion from the Milgram experiments is that people who "just follow orders" aren't really very guilty, then you have missed an important lesson of them. Yes, many complied, but many also didn't. We all have a tendency to follow orders, so we all must guard against that.
Professionals know how to say no. If you're willing to totally fubar a network because somebody "orders" you to do something that is incompatible with a smoothly running network, then you aren't a professional network administrator, you're some guy who read a router manual.
The same goes for software. If you let a boss bully you into writing shitty software because of his imaginary deadline, then you're not a professional. And probably a chump, too, as it's probably not the boss who will take the blame for the bugs and cleanup time.
Yes. He was abusive when he deliberately humiliated a coworker for no apparent reason other than having a laugh with the other smugs.
How do you know the coworker could hear? According to the text, the person who took the call was on mute.
I imagine it got back to him eventually, but that's only my imagination.
Would you have learned MORE if some senior dickhead made you restore from backup. Naked. In the rain. While he laughed with his friends? :)
The situation you describe sounds to me like you learned from your mistakes, I believe that is different from learning from pain, but maybe I'm just nitpicking
There was also mocking involved in my case, although not to that level. I agree it can be taken too far, but on a number of occasions where I've been insufficiently clueful to be properly embarrassed, friends have been kind enough to help me out.
I've seen my share of abusive system administrators, it annoyes me every single time.
Would you say this guy was abusive? If so, how?
People don't learn anything useful from pain,
I disagree.
Long ago, when I was a wee student, I accidentally formatted a drive. A boot drive for a workstation. A drive with a lot of people's files on it. What with one thing and another, it took me 28 hours to put things right again from backups. 28 hours in a row.
I definitely learned both from that pain, and from the entirely deserved ribbing I took from all concerned. I certainly learned caution. That was the very last time I lost other people's data through carelessness.
System administrators must provide (as everybody in IT) vertical support for the entire organization, not the other way around. Many system administrators don't realize this. Instead they only accept one truth. Their own.
I agree, and I agree that some sysadmins are dicks when it's not necessary or deserved. I'm not in favor of that either.
If he were a total ass, he wouldn't have done this just to a room-full of techs and muted the mic. He would have left the mic open so the guy could hear everybody laugh at him. And for bonus points, he would have recorded it and let it get forwarded around through the company.
Having the guy repeat himself once is only mildly dickish.
you're a dick. given that this guy is low salary he probably doesn't have a lot of experience. you could have shown him the error of his ways, instead you publicly embarrass him in front of the whole company. glad I don't work with you.
On the one hand, you're right. Embarrassing the idiot was clearly a dick move.
On the other hand, this is a very useful bit of dickishness. The idiot didn't just make a mistake; he made a mistake with major consequences to a lot of people, and he made a mess that his betters had to clean up.
In my experience, about 98% of the time, there are only two ways we learn. One is through pain. The network breaker, among many flaws, had insufficient caution, but I'm sure the pain of humiliation here taught him some. (That's one of the skills he'll need if he ever wants to be a highly paid admin.) The other way is through observing the pain of others. By making a semi-public example of the yutz, a room-full of network engineers (and I'm sure, a lot of their friends) got a great example of how not to behave. You can bet that at least some minor fuckups were avoided thanks to this.
Sysadmins are often dicks to fools for a reason: it helps a lot in their work. I didn't like hating everybody all the time, so now I'm a recovering sysadmin. Bitch all you want, but however unforgiving sysadmins are, the machines they run are far less so.