"Many IT shops are in financial institutions or other businesses where systems are handling millions or billions of dollars. In that situation you don't want a whole lot of creativity. Every time you change code you introduce risk, and the more money at stake, the more risk-averse you are."
This is silly. "Creativity" does not mean "being a cowboy." A creative solution can be implemented carefully, after thorough testing and validation. On the other hand, a non-creative solution can be implemented in a sloppy and haphazard manner. Handling large amounts of money means you need to be careful and disciplined when you design, test and implement a solution. It doesn't matter if the solution is creative or not.
I disagree with your second point, too. Even if I grant that "the IT industry still has not digested the technology it already has," that doesn't mean that existing technologies solve the problems that people and companies have. It would be nice if they did, but it's just not realistic to think so.
I group arrogant people into roughly two classes.
The first is like the guy you describe--people who are arrogant because they're damn good. Off hand I can immediately think of one guy I work with who completely fits the type. He's a brilliant network engineer, and he never stops letting you know about it. Fortunately he's charming enough to get away with it most of the time.
The second is the guy who tells you how goddamn good he is, but can't back it up. Unfortunately, in my experience people like this outnumber the first group by about ten to one.
I suspect some in the second group are just deluded, and some were actually damn good at one time. If my colleague lets his skills erode without realizing it, there will come a day when he's a real nuisance.
DNS doesn't keep track of subnets and assignments for you, and other miscellaneous information you might need. Yeah, you can kind of backload into it into DNS, but it ain't pretty. "Just ssh to wwww1-bigcustomer-25..." Also, individual departments or customers might have their own needs or desires for DNS. After a while, enough exceptions build up to make DNS much less valuable as a tracking/management system.
We rolled our own IP address management system. Postgres apparently has some IP-specific data types, which allowed us to throw in a bunch of other stuff which we've found very useful.
Radiocarbon dating isn't that unreliable. Yeah, there are situations where it isn't that reliable, but there are ways to calibrate it by using samples which can be dated in other methods (e.g., tree rings).
Although it would be nice if there were something like isochron dating that worked well in the last 100,000 years.
It's actually kind of funny when people change their information to garbage to keep us from tracking them when they bounce payments or something like that.
Do you bother to look through the audit trail when they haven't bounced a payment or done anything dodgy like that? The original poster's stated intent wasn't to cheat anybody, after all.
Even some professional writers are better at proofreading others writing than they are at proofreading their own work. When I wrote years ago, I always had someone proofread what I wrote.
Isn't that what "editors" are for?
I have to say that, between the chief editor and the copy editor, I learned that my spelling and grammar are not nearly as good as I thought they were.
I hate to have to break the news to you, but Canadian beer has fallen behind. I've been going to Canada (primarily Toronto and Stratford) for vacation since I was a kid. In the old days, I preferred Labatts and Molson to any mass-produced American beers. The thing is, that's not saying much.
The American craft brewing/microbrew industry, however, now produces better beer than the mass-produced beer in either country. It's also made larger strides than the Canadian craft brewing industry. Bud, Miller et al still suck, and there are a number of excellent Canadian craft brewers (particularly Unibroue, although it remains to be seen if Sleeman will screw up Unibroue like it did Upper Canada). But the pickings are sparse. I'm not sure what the situation is like in Vancouver or Edmonton, but in Toronto the selection available at the Beer Store or the LCBO is fairly pathetic compared to the selection at several liquor stores and a couple of grocery store chains where I live (near Madison, WI). I'm not all that impressed with the craft brewing/small breweries I've seen in Ontario. I like Creemore, but I'm not so fond of Amsterdam or Steam Whistle.
To be fair, I've never been to British Columbia. Considering the strength of the beer culture in Oregon and Washington, I wouldn't be surprised if craft brewing in British Columbia were in better shape than it is in Toronto. I would love to hear some counter-examples to look for next time I'm in Toronto.
IT makes revenue, there is just no way to properly attribute the revenue to the IT depeartment from other departments. IT is indirectly responsible for the revenue because IT enables these departments to make their money.
The trick is to convince management and the beancounters of that.
My father's advice (possibly misremembered) was to opt for a trial by judge if you were innocent and a trial by jury if you were guilty. Now, he actually was a lawyer, but he was definitely not a trial lawyer, so take that with a very large grain of salt.
A local employer who makes medical software apparently does. They take a look as far back as your high school transcripts. From what I hear it's also not a great place to work--they like to hire 'em young and work 'em as hard as they can for a few years until they burn out.
I use "AllowGroups blah" in sshd_config. This prevents any account which is not in the blah group from logging in via ssh. This keeps root out (although I turn root logon off anyway, or set it to use SSH keys only), as well as any system accounts. The disadvantage is that it's slightly more trouble to maintain.
One of the things I have always done is to avoid things like drop down menus. I personally don't like them, and I have not found a good implementation that *IS* fully compatible with all the users out in the world.
A lot of Barry's success came despite his team. The Lions' offensive line was never better than mediocre during his entire, and the Lions used six different starting quarterbacks during his career (Gagliano, Peete, Kramer, Krieg, Mitchell, and Batch), none of them better than journeymen.
Contrast this with Emmitt Smith, who ran behind one of the best offensive lines in the NFL for his most productive years and played with a quarterback who may wind up in the Hall of Fame for most of his career, too.
Don't forget that the Lions were also devoted to the run-and-shoot for the better part of his career. I think this contributed to how he was misused as a running back. Had they used him more conventionally at the start of his career, I think he would have performed better.
The scary thing is that Wayne Fontes is still the only Lions coach to win a playoff game in my lifetime.
You know, I vaguely remember reading something many years ago about one of the Leakeys personally demonstrating this with a Wildebeest, which of course I couldn't find in five minutes of googling. I'm pretty happy I found the half-assed journal link.
Name an animal. Go ahead. Try. Problem with your "theory" is that you've neglected to recognize that most, if not all, four-legged animals can run significantly faster than any human (e.g., three to five times faster). In other words, long before you're starting to get tired, you've completely lost sight of the animal and it has had time to stop and have lunch.
Check out "Current Anthropology" from 1984 for some examples. From the abstract: "The energetic cost of running is relatively high in man. In spite of this, humans are adept endurance runners, capable of running down, for example, zebra and kangaroo." Other examples in the first page of the article include deer and wildebeest.
The key thing to remember is that, while most animals can outrun us pretty easily over short distances, humans can outrun many of them over long distances.
Vietnam has one of the highest literacy rates in the world, and the quality of talent is rising every day. To say that the Vietnamese you know don't have a grasp of the English language, and that by extension the rest of the country doesn't is just wrong.
To say that the Vietnamese has a high literacy rate, and that by extension the country has a large population of fluent English speakers, is also just wrong. You may be entirely correct, but you haven't presented any evidence for it.
Meanwhile, the one single most accurate identifying characteristic -- i.e. that all recent terrorist attacks of this kind have been committed by Muslims -- can't be used because it would be 'racist'. Far better to strip-search Italian grandmothers so we can pretend we're not 'discriminating'.
What gives you the idea that terrorists can't game that "most accurate identifying characteristic?" Would this have caught Richard Reid? Would this catch a Chechen who looks Russian? Would this prevent the terrorists from recruiting people who aren't obviously Muslim? Would this have caught the bomb that a Palestinian attempted to smuggle onto a plane 15-20 years ago with his pregnant, Irish girlfiend? Would this have caught my Egyptian co-worker who everybody thought was Mexican? Would this have caught Timothy McVeigh? I won't even get into the fact that you're assuming that terrorists will remain Muslim, which is fine until the ETA or the Tamil Tigers or somebody new gets pissed at us.
There has not been an al-queda attack on american soil since 9/11, this is absolute proof that these new policies of privacy invasion and loss of freedom are working to keep you safe.
Absolutely. And the fact that there were eight years between the first two Al Queda attacks on American soil means nothing.
Why the dollar store. Just every foodstore in good old USA. What do you thing American Budweiser is? A badly done fake imitation of the real Budweiser brewed in the Chech republic for 300+ years now.
Beer is a bad example. Brewing is a trade, and trademarks do not protect beer styles. It's a recipe. There are restrictions on what you can call your beer.
Many of the American brewers who "knocked off" European styles were actually immigrants themselves. Adolphus Busch (who we have to blame for Budweiser) himself was a German immigrant, coming to America when he was around 18 and then marrying Lilly Anhueser. Many of their products were somewhat different than their German equivalents, and based on recipes recovered (such as the Classic American Pilsner were quite good. American brewing didn't become terrible until after Prohibition.
On another note, Bud is--believe it or not--very difficult to brew. It's damn hard to remove all the flavor from the beer like that without showcasing other flaws. This is purely anecdotal, but I can think of at least one ex-Anhueser-Busch brewer who has done quite well after going out on his own. The brewmaster at one of my favorite local breweries used to be a production supervisor at Anhueser-Busch, and he makes excellent, flavorful and award-winning beers.
Finally, 300+ years? Budvar has been brewing for much longer than that, but their beers were nothing like they are now . The first pilsners (like Budweiser Budvar) weren't brewed until the 1840s. As an aside, brewers all over the world (including Germany, of course) quickly imitated the first pilsners produced.
But you're right, Budwar Budweiser is a hell of a lot better than Anhueser-Busch Budweiser.
The jury is out on how well the automatic dust removal systems work. For instance, on Canon's new 400D early reports are that it helps but that it isn't terribly effective. This isn't to say that they won't solve the problem, but I think it'll be a while yet.
The problems seems to vary a bit. I've talked with people who've had a fair amount of problems with sensor dust on one model, and very few problems on other models.
Oracle has the money and can certainly buy the necessary expertise. That does not mean they will succeed. Microsoft can buy all the expertise they need, too, and look at some of the products they've produced.
Oracle management knows databases. They don't know operating systems. They may, or may not, be willing to put the time and energy into designing a product which works well. There are any number of ways in which they could sabotage themselves and turn this into a fiasco.
Personally, I wouldn't bet one way or the other. Should be interesting to see, though.
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This is silly. "Creativity" does not mean "being a cowboy." A creative solution can be implemented carefully, after thorough testing and validation. On the other hand, a non-creative solution can be implemented in a sloppy and haphazard manner. Handling large amounts of money means you need to be careful and disciplined when you design, test and implement a solution. It doesn't matter if the solution is creative or not.
I disagree with your second point, too. Even if I grant that "the IT industry still has not digested the technology it already has," that doesn't mean that existing technologies solve the problems that people and companies have. It would be nice if they did, but it's just not realistic to think so.
Your third point, though, is right on the money.
I group arrogant people into roughly two classes. The first is like the guy you describe--people who are arrogant because they're damn good. Off hand I can immediately think of one guy I work with who completely fits the type. He's a brilliant network engineer, and he never stops letting you know about it. Fortunately he's charming enough to get away with it most of the time. The second is the guy who tells you how goddamn good he is, but can't back it up. Unfortunately, in my experience people like this outnumber the first group by about ten to one. I suspect some in the second group are just deluded, and some were actually damn good at one time. If my colleague lets his skills erode without realizing it, there will come a day when he's a real nuisance.
It's all over everywhere. I first saw it linked in a blog post somewhere linking to the Wall Street Journal.
We rolled our own IP address management system. Postgres apparently has some IP-specific data types, which allowed us to throw in a bunch of other stuff which we've found very useful.
What's the problem? I thought that was their business model.
Although it would be nice if there were something like isochron dating that worked well in the last 100,000 years.
Don't remind me. Our goddamn billing app relies on it for client access. Fortunately it's heavily firewalled and not running on Solaris.
Do you bother to look through the audit trail when they haven't bounced a payment or done anything dodgy like that? The original poster's stated intent wasn't to cheat anybody, after all.
Isn't that what "editors" are for?
I have to say that, between the chief editor and the copy editor, I learned that my spelling and grammar are not nearly as good as I thought they were.
I hate to have to break the news to you, but Canadian beer has fallen behind. I've been going to Canada (primarily Toronto and Stratford) for vacation since I was a kid. In the old days, I preferred Labatts and Molson to any mass-produced American beers. The thing is, that's not saying much. The American craft brewing/microbrew industry, however, now produces better beer than the mass-produced beer in either country. It's also made larger strides than the Canadian craft brewing industry. Bud, Miller et al still suck, and there are a number of excellent Canadian craft brewers (particularly Unibroue, although it remains to be seen if Sleeman will screw up Unibroue like it did Upper Canada). But the pickings are sparse. I'm not sure what the situation is like in Vancouver or Edmonton, but in Toronto the selection available at the Beer Store or the LCBO is fairly pathetic compared to the selection at several liquor stores and a couple of grocery store chains where I live (near Madison, WI). I'm not all that impressed with the craft brewing/small breweries I've seen in Ontario. I like Creemore, but I'm not so fond of Amsterdam or Steam Whistle. To be fair, I've never been to British Columbia. Considering the strength of the beer culture in Oregon and Washington, I wouldn't be surprised if craft brewing in British Columbia were in better shape than it is in Toronto. I would love to hear some counter-examples to look for next time I'm in Toronto.
The trick is to convince management and the beancounters of that.
My father's advice (possibly misremembered) was to opt for a trial by judge if you were innocent and a trial by jury if you were guilty. Now, he actually was a lawyer, but he was definitely not a trial lawyer, so take that with a very large grain of salt.
A local employer who makes medical software apparently does. They take a look as far back as your high school transcripts. From what I hear it's also not a great place to work--they like to hire 'em young and work 'em as hard as they can for a few years until they burn out.
I use "AllowGroups blah" in sshd_config. This prevents any account which is not in the blah group from logging in via ssh. This keeps root out (although I turn root logon off anyway, or set it to use SSH keys only), as well as any system accounts. The disadvantage is that it's slightly more trouble to maintain.
And for this alone, I salute you.
A lot of Barry's success came despite his team. The Lions' offensive line was never better than mediocre during his entire, and the Lions used six different starting quarterbacks during his career (Gagliano, Peete, Kramer, Krieg, Mitchell, and Batch), none of them better than journeymen.
Contrast this with Emmitt Smith, who ran behind one of the best offensive lines in the NFL for his most productive years and played with a quarterback who may wind up in the Hall of Fame for most of his career, too.
Don't forget that the Lions were also devoted to the run-and-shoot for the better part of his career. I think this contributed to how he was misused as a running back. Had they used him more conventionally at the start of his career, I think he would have performed better.
The scary thing is that Wayne Fontes is still the only Lions coach to win a playoff game in my lifetime.
You know, I vaguely remember reading something many years ago about one of the Leakeys personally demonstrating this with a Wildebeest, which of course I couldn't find in five minutes of googling. I'm pretty happy I found the half-assed journal link.
Check out "Current Anthropology" from 1984 for some examples. From the abstract: "The energetic cost of running is relatively high in man. In spite of this, humans are adept endurance runners, capable of running down, for example, zebra and kangaroo." Other examples in the first page of the article include deer and wildebeest.
The key thing to remember is that, while most animals can outrun us pretty easily over short distances, humans can outrun many of them over long distances.
To say that the Vietnamese has a high literacy rate, and that by extension the country has a large population of fluent English speakers, is also just wrong. You may be entirely correct, but you haven't presented any evidence for it.
What gives you the idea that terrorists can't game that "most accurate identifying characteristic?" Would this have caught Richard Reid? Would this catch a Chechen who looks Russian? Would this prevent the terrorists from recruiting people who aren't obviously Muslim? Would this have caught the bomb that a Palestinian attempted to smuggle onto a plane 15-20 years ago with his pregnant, Irish girlfiend? Would this have caught my Egyptian co-worker who everybody thought was Mexican? Would this have caught Timothy McVeigh? I won't even get into the fact that you're assuming that terrorists will remain Muslim, which is fine until the ETA or the Tamil Tigers or somebody new gets pissed at us.
Absolutely. And the fact that there were eight years between the first two Al Queda attacks on American soil means nothing.
For older samples, other types of radiometric dating are used. For example, take a look at isochron dating.
Beer is a bad example. Brewing is a trade, and trademarks do not protect beer styles. It's a recipe. There are restrictions on what you can call your beer.
Many of the American brewers who "knocked off" European styles were actually immigrants themselves. Adolphus Busch (who we have to blame for Budweiser) himself was a German immigrant, coming to America when he was around 18 and then marrying Lilly Anhueser. Many of their products were somewhat different than their German equivalents, and based on recipes recovered (such as the Classic American Pilsner were quite good. American brewing didn't become terrible until after Prohibition.
On another note, Bud is--believe it or not--very difficult to brew. It's damn hard to remove all the flavor from the beer like that without showcasing other flaws. This is purely anecdotal, but I can think of at least one ex-Anhueser-Busch brewer who has done quite well after going out on his own. The brewmaster at one of my favorite local breweries used to be a production supervisor at Anhueser-Busch, and he makes excellent, flavorful and award-winning beers.
Finally, 300+ years? Budvar has been brewing for much longer than that, but their beers were nothing like they are now . The first pilsners (like Budweiser Budvar) weren't brewed until the 1840s. As an aside, brewers all over the world (including Germany, of course) quickly imitated the first pilsners produced.
But you're right, Budwar Budweiser is a hell of a lot better than Anhueser-Busch Budweiser.
The problems seems to vary a bit. I've talked with people who've had a fair amount of problems with sensor dust on one model, and very few problems on other models.
Oracle management knows databases. They don't know operating systems. They may, or may not, be willing to put the time and energy into designing a product which works well. There are any number of ways in which they could sabotage themselves and turn this into a fiasco.
Personally, I wouldn't bet one way or the other. Should be interesting to see, though.