In a philosophy class I took we went over proofs for the existence of God and why the ones thought up so far don't work (if anyone proves a god exists please tell the people setting the philosophy curriculum and the rest of humanity). 3 or 4 proofs in one of the students said "I prefer using proof x we did last week" and phrased it as though she was justifying her own belief. Logic is wasted on some people.
Harper does not want to be Bush, he is just acting like him and following his policies without the embarrassing gaffes. Dion does the ridiculous gaffes for him (and is retiring early because of them; too bad Bush had less shame).
Giving money to ultra rich people does not stimulate the economy, it creates bubbles in sectors where rich guys try to dump the billions of dollars they don't know what to do with. "Hey, I got $2 billion back from the feds, maybe I should chuck it in a real estate hedge fund" "hey, a bunch of rich idiots want new real estate funds" "hey, why did all these financial thingies we created for no reason tank?"
If the tax cuts had gone to people earning $500K and less there would have been a stimulus. People buy more upscale food, bigger houses, another car, more beer, it works out. When taxes on people earning billions drop by a significant percentage that leaves a small number of people with a lot of money to ship to the Caymans. No spending (the first billion or two sort of takes care of the lifestyle) so no stimulus.
The economy tracks pretty well with taxes on the ultra rich. Taxes go up, the economy does better, taxes go down, recession. The government actually does a pretty good job with the money it takes in.
Funny, I liked his stuff, including cryptonomicon, up until the Baroque cycle. I actually read the whole cycle, and there were some good bits, and some interesting bits, but so much fluff...
I had a friend who went from male nursing to CS. He loved the gender distribution and dated some women he would probably not have had a chance to in a more balanced program, but the low salaries and ridiculous hours (all night shifts, often) in nursing got him out.
Anyone with good marks gets pushed toward science. For people in the top 5% of their field this is OK; people in the 20-25% range would do better going into a business-related program, competing with C students, and making big piles of money while improving business decision making for everybody.
It is relatively easy to go from competitive programs to uncompetitive ones (some of the most successful people I know failed out of competitive science programs and excelled in less competitive non-science programs); going the other way is pretty tough (and usually involves years of school not on the job training and some home reading).
The first thing people get in management school (especially project management) is an ego boost. "As the manager you are the most important team member and you can manage anything." It can be true, many business people view managers as themselves plus their team so even a feeble manager is worth more than any single sub-manager, and, for known and understood fields a manager should be able to step in with no background.
Managing something known, like opening a store, or starting an accounting division, or building a house does not require a manager who knows the field. He can ask a few questions and expect people to know their tasks.
Managing IT is quite different. The field is still relatively young and unstructured (though there are lots of good IT management books out there, and being managed by someone who has read one or two can be relaxing, stuff sort of works out), and few HR departments can hire the right techies (HR generally can't distinguish between a guy who knows his stuff and a guy who lies or writes random acronyms; at best they just eliminate the best candidates in screening, at worst they hire clowns). A good IT manager cannot necessarily code, but he needs to know IT management, to be able to figure out who knows his job, and to know what he should not be assuming and/or messing with.
Many places have a non-technical manager and a team lead, with the manager way above the team lead. This only works if the team lead has no hesitation about saying "no, we are not going to do it like that" to the manager. If the manager has free rein the project will not work out well.
I have seen non-technical managers do very well. They figure out who to listen to, who to push, and who is going to be late, and they make sure everyone knows what they need to know. A good manager says "in two weeks we are going to have an issue because team X has implemented Y wrong, and Team Q will be late with interface R, what can we do to head this off?" A bad manager says something like "I heard the specs changed two weeks ago, and our interfaces with projects J through S will be different, but I only found out today."
The best managed place I worked was an engineering company where everybody, including the top people were engineers. Managers got MBAs. Everyone understood the business and work got done.
In computers (as in anything) there is real security and there is perceived security. Good security people worry about the fundamentals (OK, you have to use a crappy protocol due to element X of your solution, how can we make sure this does not come back and bite us) while bad security people inconvenience users so that they are forced to avoid implementing the security measures and then wash their hands (you need a 32 character password, and the only protocol you can use is our proprietary one that only works with IRIX servers with an O/S from June 1997). Inconveniencing people to make security visible doesn't work. Feuding so that you are overruled by business people does not work either.
It is the same thing with the department of homeland (homemade?) security. Oooh, you have to take off your shoes and leave your liquids behind, it's so inconvenient, it must be secure. Only it isn't.
The appearance of security is irrelevant. Real security involves backups so you don't lose data, monitoring so that you find intrusions quickly, and prioritization so that important data stays in high security networks and does not get lost. Real security requires knowledgable security people, not drones who say "well Nessus reports a problem" that they cannot evaluate.
Of course when decisions are taken by business people with no clue, and network and sysadmins are hired by HR departments who can't spell IT much less define it, you have to expect some problems... Especially when said admins are given more work than they can cope with after their department is identified as a cost.
Outsourcing pretty much kills security as well. When you have to let semi-motivated people from countries with minimal IP laws who change jobs every 6 months or so access your network there is no way to save your data.
Not likely. Harper has done very well at staying on message. He will continue to be very reassuring until he gets a majority and can do whatever he likes.
Just like in the US, the tax and spend liberals pay down the debt, the penny-pinching conservatives buy votes. It works very well politically as long as rich people who buy media outlets get to choose the terms to describe both sides.
I'm thrilled with my Samsunb 2251N. It whines if you install the drivers without a USB connection to the printer, but you just have to go and add a TCP/IP port to the printer in the control panel.
It doesn't ship with a mini toner cartridge, either. I'm still on my first after ~ 5000 pages.
I work for a consulting company and I get the same thing. I always say it is because anyone with talent gets sent to work directly for clients, anyone still doing inhouse IT is uncontractable...
Funny, dealing with outside companies is often better, sometimes far better, than dealing with in house IT. Outside companies may be clueless but they have to get stuff done eventually. The in house people know that they have upper management buy in and they don't have to do anything. The delays and incompetence are staggering. Fortunately I don't have to deal with these people too often, or I would have a similar attitude.
Interdepartmentally the IT units charge ridiculous amounts, too. I can remember a senior IT guy getting furious that our price for managing our own servers was near zero (computer room and bandwidth already included in overhead, sysadmins already working on project, automated installs, additional overhead for new servers an hour or two to rack them and two minutes to run the install process (waiting for the install to finish is free)).
Any department with guaranteed work and no accountability stops being useful fast. Complacency breeds uselessness. Nine months sounds pretty crazy, but I'm still waiting for some stuff to be ready for servers that were installed 3 months ago (mostly details), so I can relate.
The only thing I can suggest is to follow up fast, document, and escalate problems. My servers would probably be ready if I had time to yell at the people responsible daily (no response to e-mails). You can often get a response if you send someone senior an e-mail chain with dates spanning months and silly responses to your requests. Of course if the department is crap the chain above them is probably crap because no one good wants to manage useless people.
There is an exact point that differentiates the quantum world from the macro world. I forget the calculation, but at a certain size the probability effects approach/become zero. The calculation is the same for what happens to a cat or an electron but because of size the probability effects that govern an electrons existence/location/"movement" zero out for the cat, and cats occupy a "definite" location in space.
Don't have time to google the formula now, hope I remember this correctly (from one of Feynman's books).
Quantum theory gets much closer to the whys of ordinary life than any other yet has. Stuff happens because of the behavior of the smallest components of stuff, and quantum mechanics goes to a fairly small level. There may be an infinite regression of whys (or at least some further, unknown, levels), but the quantum theory responds more to why than to how. The practical results came long after the theory.
In my Mech eng year there were about 80 guys and about ten girls. We were a pretty close group, everyone knew everyone, and there was no stalking or drooling. The girls who dated within the class generally dated (or rejected) guys who would not have looked at them twice if they were in a more balanced program (nice, good looking, fun guys dating plain girls with major personality defects). I had a girlfriend in college, and I, and others, had female friends as well.
I can think of male friends who took minors in psychology and other easy programs where they could do little work and meet members of the opposite sex. I can think of some fairly geeky guys who would show up at the cafeteria with three or four girls from their classes, they were pretty happy (and doing less competitive programs, more free time). The bad side was having to take subjective courses that tended to have crappy teachers...
Are rude geeks an American thing? Most geeks I know here in Canada are shy but not psychotic (OK, very shy in some cases "no, I could not go to your place I might MEET PEOPLE!").
Ummm, the Poles fought, just not the right people at the right time. Hitler wanted half of Czechoslovakia? Fine with the Polish generals running the country as long as they got the other half, the flat, hard to defend half... The Nazis got the Czech tank factories and used them to build the force that invaded Poland.
Poland fought once they were invaded but that was much too late, and they did not have much to fight with anyway.
The French and British guaranteed the Poles freedom and threatened to invade Czechoslovakia if they did not surrender the mountainous territory Hitler's generals had no idea how to take by force. Sigh.
International stupidity was around long before Bush II.
The wall came down because Gorby would not let the east germans shoot protesters. In a dictatorship (and Russia, like China, North Korea, Cuba et al, was a dictatorship) if you can't shoot people when they get uppity you don't have a dictatorship. One phone call was all it took:
"Hello sir, the people are rioting, we're going to shoot them, be right back. You'll send troops if we need them right?" "You can't shoot them." "What else can we do?" "Glasnost, perestroika, openness, honesty..." "OK, I'm cashing in my bullion, buying a walled estate, and bringing my bodyguards, bye now."
If they had shot protestors the wall would never have come down. It's going back up, but at least the Poles, the Czechs, the Ukrainians etc. are on the outside this time.
China is a good example. Students were asked about Tianamen Square massacre recently and they responded that the state was right to kill students. No sympathy for Zhao, either, even posthumously. They shot people, tyranny continued.
Very simple, if you have a nasty oppressive system you have to able to kill citizens on a whim. If you can't kill POed people the nasty oppressive system collapses. Too bad the USSR collapsed before Enron went down, they might have had a chance at economic succes.
I've also seen an HP support tech pushing as hard as he could for 30 minutes on a system board that still had the plastic caps on until some of us came back to find out what he was doing and took them off (first remove packaging, THEN install). The guy who started working with him had gone catatonic with frustration.
HP phone support is OK, but the techs they send to your site get promoted if they have any brains. The non-promoted techs don't ever get booted or retrained from my experiences with them.
I've worked mainly with smaller companies. No M$ on-site, but HP and Sun still provide good support.
Sun support is fantastic. The techs (not the first line who direct your call) get months of training, they are good, and they help. They've gotten a little more difficult about contracts lately (they used to answer questions first, ask for serial/contract numbers later), which can be tricky if you're doing remote admin, but the support is great.
Red Hat should follow the model. Fix the problem, don't hide behind the fine print.
I wonder if it was the RH tech's first day? Does anyone else have experience with RH support?
People are lining up for manufacturing jobs. Line workers unionized BECAUSE they can be instantly replaced. IT types are not unionizing because they believe (rightly or wrongly) that their skills are special enough that they cannot be replaced and that they can get a good deal without resorting to a union.
IT workers are right if quality is taken into account. When companies are willing to outsource and have a project fail cheaply instead of investing and succeeding more expensively unions start to look good.
Gas stations still do the same thing. So do cable companies, at least here in Canada (you want cable? Buy from company X. Yes Company Y competes, if you want to use their service move to a neighborhood they sell to.
Microsoft went a little beyond pricing (if non-M$ program sleep), but they consistently out marketed superior products. Artificially low prices are nowhere near as critical as the CPU tax for M$ domination. If there were an incentive for stores to sell non-M$ products there might actually be competition.
Considering the tough parts of the technology are tracking and billing how long before it gets Napstered? A handset with wireless plus a SIP server is about all it would take. As it is you should be able to plug a phone into your laptop anywhere wireless is available. Take your home phone wardriving.
There are servers you can run easily on a home linux box. If you have net access there is no need of a phone co.
The tough part is to get a critical mass. Once you have lots of people with phone service approaching free it should snowball. The first guy with a phone with free calls to no one will regret his purchase. Phones sold in pairs might work.
Cheap wireless access is becoming ubiquitous....
ISP's will probably be giving VOIP out free soon, anyway. Or bundled close to free.
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In a philosophy class I took we went over proofs for the existence of God and why the ones thought up so far don't work (if anyone proves a god exists please tell the people setting the philosophy curriculum and the rest of humanity). 3 or 4 proofs in one of the students said "I prefer using proof x we did last week" and phrased it as though she was justifying her own belief. Logic is wasted on some people.
Harper does not want to be Bush, he is just acting like him and following his policies without the embarrassing gaffes. Dion does the ridiculous gaffes for him (and is retiring early because of them; too bad Bush had less shame).
I was thinking of the earlier, and misdirected tax cuts, not the more recent (and much smaller) stimulus. Oops.
Giving money to ultra rich people does not stimulate the economy, it creates bubbles in sectors where rich guys try to dump the billions of dollars they don't know what to do with. "Hey, I got $2 billion back from the feds, maybe I should chuck it in a real estate hedge fund" "hey, a bunch of rich idiots want new real estate funds" "hey, why did all these financial thingies we created for no reason tank?" If the tax cuts had gone to people earning $500K and less there would have been a stimulus. People buy more upscale food, bigger houses, another car, more beer, it works out. When taxes on people earning billions drop by a significant percentage that leaves a small number of people with a lot of money to ship to the Caymans. No spending (the first billion or two sort of takes care of the lifestyle) so no stimulus. The economy tracks pretty well with taxes on the ultra rich. Taxes go up, the economy does better, taxes go down, recession. The government actually does a pretty good job with the money it takes in.
Funny, I liked his stuff, including cryptonomicon, up until the Baroque cycle. I actually read the whole cycle, and there were some good bits, and some interesting bits, but so much fluff...
I had a friend who went from male nursing to CS. He loved the gender distribution and dated some women he would probably not have had a chance to in a more balanced program, but the low salaries and ridiculous hours (all night shifts, often) in nursing got him out.
Anyone with good marks gets pushed toward science. For people in the top 5% of their field this is OK; people in the 20-25% range would do better going into a business-related program, competing with C students, and making big piles of money while improving business decision making for everybody. It is relatively easy to go from competitive programs to uncompetitive ones (some of the most successful people I know failed out of competitive science programs and excelled in less competitive non-science programs); going the other way is pretty tough (and usually involves years of school not on the job training and some home reading).
The first thing people get in management school (especially project management) is an ego boost. "As the manager you are the most important team member and you can manage anything." It can be true, many business people view managers as themselves plus their team so even a feeble manager is worth more than any single sub-manager, and, for known and understood fields a manager should be able to step in with no background. Managing something known, like opening a store, or starting an accounting division, or building a house does not require a manager who knows the field. He can ask a few questions and expect people to know their tasks. Managing IT is quite different. The field is still relatively young and unstructured (though there are lots of good IT management books out there, and being managed by someone who has read one or two can be relaxing, stuff sort of works out), and few HR departments can hire the right techies (HR generally can't distinguish between a guy who knows his stuff and a guy who lies or writes random acronyms; at best they just eliminate the best candidates in screening, at worst they hire clowns). A good IT manager cannot necessarily code, but he needs to know IT management, to be able to figure out who knows his job, and to know what he should not be assuming and/or messing with. Many places have a non-technical manager and a team lead, with the manager way above the team lead. This only works if the team lead has no hesitation about saying "no, we are not going to do it like that" to the manager. If the manager has free rein the project will not work out well. I have seen non-technical managers do very well. They figure out who to listen to, who to push, and who is going to be late, and they make sure everyone knows what they need to know. A good manager says "in two weeks we are going to have an issue because team X has implemented Y wrong, and Team Q will be late with interface R, what can we do to head this off?" A bad manager says something like "I heard the specs changed two weeks ago, and our interfaces with projects J through S will be different, but I only found out today."
The best managed place I worked was an engineering company where everybody, including the top people were engineers. Managers got MBAs. Everyone understood the business and work got done.
In computers (as in anything) there is real security and there is perceived security. Good security people worry about the fundamentals (OK, you have to use a crappy protocol due to element X of your solution, how can we make sure this does not come back and bite us) while bad security people inconvenience users so that they are forced to avoid implementing the security measures and then wash their hands (you need a 32 character password, and the only protocol you can use is our proprietary one that only works with IRIX servers with an O/S from June 1997). Inconveniencing people to make security visible doesn't work. Feuding so that you are overruled by business people does not work either.
It is the same thing with the department of homeland (homemade?) security. Oooh, you have to take off your shoes and leave your liquids behind, it's so inconvenient, it must be secure. Only it isn't.
The appearance of security is irrelevant. Real security involves backups so you don't lose data, monitoring so that you find intrusions quickly, and prioritization so that important data stays in high security networks and does not get lost. Real security requires knowledgable security people, not drones who say "well Nessus reports a problem" that they cannot evaluate.
Of course when decisions are taken by business people with no clue, and network and sysadmins are hired by HR departments who can't spell IT much less define it, you have to expect some problems... Especially when said admins are given more work than they can cope with after their department is identified as a cost.
Outsourcing pretty much kills security as well. When you have to let semi-motivated people from countries with minimal IP laws who change jobs every 6 months or so access your network there is no way to save your data.
Bush lite... Harper stays on message, says what people want to hear, does nasty stuff. Just wait until he has a majority.
Not likely. Harper has done very well at staying on message. He will continue to be very reassuring until he gets a majority and can do whatever he likes.
Just like in the US, the tax and spend liberals pay down the debt, the penny-pinching conservatives buy votes. It works very well politically as long as rich people who buy media outlets get to choose the terms to describe both sides.
Not the best, just the greediest. It's not like they make pocket change here.
I'm thrilled with my Samsunb 2251N. It whines if you install the drivers without a USB connection to the printer, but you just have to go and add a TCP/IP port to the printer in the control panel.
It doesn't ship with a mini toner cartridge, either. I'm still on my first after ~ 5000 pages.
I work for a consulting company and I get the same thing. I always say it is because anyone with talent gets sent to work directly for clients, anyone still doing inhouse IT is uncontractable...
Funny, dealing with outside companies is often better, sometimes far better, than dealing with in house IT. Outside companies may be clueless but they have to get stuff done eventually. The in house people know that they have upper management buy in and they don't have to do anything. The delays and incompetence are staggering. Fortunately I don't have to deal with these people too often, or I would have a similar attitude.
Interdepartmentally the IT units charge ridiculous amounts, too. I can remember a senior IT guy getting furious that our price for managing our own servers was near zero (computer room and bandwidth already included in overhead, sysadmins already working on project, automated installs, additional overhead for new servers an hour or two to rack them and two minutes to run the install process (waiting for the install to finish is free)).
Any department with guaranteed work and no accountability stops being useful fast. Complacency breeds uselessness. Nine months sounds pretty crazy, but I'm still waiting for some stuff to be ready for servers that were installed 3 months ago (mostly details), so I can relate.
The only thing I can suggest is to follow up fast, document, and escalate problems. My servers would probably be ready if I had time to yell at the people responsible daily (no response to e-mails). You can often get a response if you send someone senior an e-mail chain with dates spanning months and silly responses to your requests. Of course if the department is crap the chain above them is probably crap because no one good wants to manage useless people.
There is an exact point that differentiates the quantum world from the macro world. I forget the calculation, but at a certain size the probability effects approach/become zero. The calculation is the same for what happens to a cat or an electron but because of size the probability effects that govern an electrons existence/location/"movement" zero out for the cat, and cats occupy a "definite" location in space.
Don't have time to google the formula now, hope I remember this correctly (from one of Feynman's books).
Quantum theory gets much closer to the whys of ordinary life than any other yet has. Stuff happens because of the behavior of the smallest components of stuff, and quantum mechanics goes to a fairly small level. There may be an infinite regression of whys (or at least some further, unknown, levels), but the quantum theory responds more to why than to how. The practical results came long after the theory.
In my Mech eng year there were about 80 guys and about ten girls. We were a pretty close group, everyone knew everyone, and there was no stalking or drooling. The girls who dated within the class generally dated (or rejected) guys who would not have looked at them twice if they were in a more balanced program (nice, good looking, fun guys dating plain girls with major personality defects). I had a girlfriend in college, and I, and others, had female friends as well.
I can think of male friends who took minors in psychology and other easy programs where they could do little work and meet members of the opposite sex. I can think of some fairly geeky guys who would show up at the cafeteria with three or four girls from their classes, they were pretty happy (and doing less competitive programs, more free time). The bad side was having to take subjective courses that tended to have crappy teachers...
Are rude geeks an American thing? Most geeks I know here in Canada are shy but not psychotic (OK, very shy in some cases "no, I could not go to your place I might MEET PEOPLE!").
Ummm, the Poles fought, just not the right people at the right time. Hitler wanted half of Czechoslovakia? Fine with the Polish generals running the country as long as they got the other half, the flat, hard to defend half... The Nazis got the Czech tank factories and used them to build the force that invaded Poland.
Poland fought once they were invaded but that was much too late, and they did not have much to fight with anyway.
The French and British guaranteed the Poles freedom and threatened to invade Czechoslovakia if they did not surrender the mountainous territory Hitler's generals had no idea how to take by force. Sigh.
International stupidity was around long before Bush II.
The wall came down because Gorby would not let the east germans shoot protesters. In a dictatorship (and Russia, like China, North Korea, Cuba et al, was a dictatorship) if you can't shoot people when they get uppity you don't have a dictatorship. One phone call was all it took:
"Hello sir, the people are rioting, we're going to shoot them, be right back. You'll send troops if we need them right?"
"You can't shoot them."
"What else can we do?"
"Glasnost, perestroika, openness, honesty..."
"OK, I'm cashing in my bullion, buying a walled estate, and bringing my bodyguards, bye now."
If they had shot protestors the wall would never have come down. It's going back up, but at least the Poles, the Czechs, the Ukrainians etc. are on the outside this time.
China is a good example. Students were asked about Tianamen Square massacre recently and they responded that the state was right to kill students. No sympathy for Zhao, either, even posthumously. They shot people, tyranny continued.
Very simple, if you have a nasty oppressive system you have to able to kill citizens on a whim. If you can't kill POed people the nasty oppressive system collapses. Too bad the USSR collapsed before Enron went down, they might have had a chance at economic succes.
Funny, from the quality of his English I thought it must be his second or third language. I guess I was wrong.
I've also seen an HP support tech pushing as hard as he could for 30 minutes on a system board that still had the plastic caps on until some of us came back to find out what he was doing and took them off (first remove packaging, THEN install). The guy who started working with him had gone catatonic with frustration.
HP phone support is OK, but the techs they send to your site get promoted if they have any brains. The non-promoted techs don't ever get booted or retrained from my experiences with them.
I've worked mainly with smaller companies. No M$ on-site, but HP and Sun still provide good support.
Sun support is fantastic. The techs (not the first line who direct your call) get months of training, they are good, and they help. They've gotten a little more difficult about contracts lately (they used to answer questions first, ask for serial/contract numbers later), which can be tricky if you're doing remote admin, but the support is great.
Red Hat should follow the model. Fix the problem, don't hide behind the fine print.
I wonder if it was the RH tech's first day? Does anyone else have experience with RH support?
People are lining up for manufacturing jobs. Line workers unionized BECAUSE they can be instantly replaced. IT types are not unionizing because they believe (rightly or wrongly) that their skills are special enough that they cannot be replaced and that they can get a good deal without resorting to a union.
IT workers are right if quality is taken into account. When companies are willing to outsource and have a project fail cheaply instead of investing and succeeding more expensively unions start to look good.
Gas stations still do the same thing. So do cable companies, at least here in Canada (you want cable? Buy from company X. Yes Company Y competes, if you want to use their service move to a neighborhood they sell to.
Microsoft went a little beyond pricing (if non-M$ program sleep), but they consistently out marketed superior products. Artificially low prices are nowhere near as critical as the CPU tax for M$ domination. If there were an incentive for stores to sell non-M$ products there might actually be competition.
Considering the tough parts of the technology are tracking and billing how long before it gets Napstered? A handset with wireless plus a SIP server is about all it would take. As it is you should be able to plug a phone into your laptop anywhere wireless is available. Take your home phone wardriving.
There are servers you can run easily on a home linux box. If you have net access there is no need of a phone co.
The tough part is to get a critical mass. Once you have lots of people with phone service approaching free it should snowball. The first guy with a phone with free calls to no one will regret his purchase. Phones sold in pairs might work.
Cheap wireless access is becoming ubiquitous....
ISP's will probably be giving VOIP out free soon, anyway. Or bundled close to free.