I think it's more a case of reducing the surface area of the vulnerabilities (people with access) is viewed as more important than "whatever it is they do." It *almost* doesn't matter what they do.
If that's your goal, agreed. But remember the three cornerstones of security: Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability. Confidentiality without the other two is not security, it's more like Security Theater. And that's what you get if you fire people doing legitimate work in the other two categories just because they happen to be able to touch sensitive bits. I don't work in that organization, but I suspect that the correct answer is properly vetting the admins and putting proper controls in place. The stated solution sounds to me like cutting off a 15 year old's right hand to prevent him from pleasuring himself. It may solve the problem at hand (yes I did that on purpose) but probably causes other problems.
> The other part, of course, was the business model itself; that you can pull in street vendors, hand them a stack of written procedures and turn them into sysadmins for a dollar a week.
You know, I just had an epiphany.
The above quote, (which I wrote) is wrong. That isn't the business model. The business model is: Lead clients to BELIEVE that you can pull in street vendors, hand them a stack of written procedures and turn them into sysadmins for a dollar a week. That's all that's really necessary. Whether it's true or not is immaterial.
A better question is, "You have 900 people doing WHAT?!".
That's actually a good point, but not, perhaps, in the way you meant it. The powers that be almost certainly do not know what those admins are doing or the value thereof, even if they were (or were not) vital to the organization. Their true value (if any) will be discovered after they're dismissed.
"We have to fire the employees to find out what they did."
Even better is what happens a few months down the line, when they realize software can't fix hardware and they just fired the people that knew how the systems actually worked.
"So, yeah, we HAD all this data, but..."
Exactly. They just lost a massive amount of tribal knowledge. Even if they haven't made the cuts yet. Because those admins have no motivation to cooperate.
When my company announced outsourcing 6 months before the date, they told us that we were all to document our jobs thoroughly so that admins with absolutely no experience in some poverty stricken town in Asia could do our jobs by reading our procedures. And that worked just about as well as you are imagining right now. After cutover, things started melting down almost immediately, and the outsourcing company blamed it on the laidoff employees, for not documenting their jobs well enough. Which was partly true, because none of these people had any motivation whatsoever to do so, and were busy looking for a job anyway. The other part, of course, was the business model itself; that you can pull in street vendors, hand them a stack of written procedures and turn them into sysadmins for a dollar a week.
In this particular case, it sounds like they're depending on the soon-to-be-dismissed employees to have a hand in automating their jobs, or at least giving someone an understanding of what their job entails so it can be automated. This has two problems:
1) Assuming employees will cooperate after you've told them you're going to let them go.
2) Assuming that the job is of a nature that lends itself to automation. Anyone who has managed a large, complex installation knows the answer to this. (The answer being, automation can help and should be pursued, but there is no substitute for knowledge, insight, and experience. You rapidly find that a system simple enough to not need admins is a system too simple to do the job.)
Using technology to automate much of the work now done by employees and contractors would make the NSA's networks "more defensible and more secure," as well as faster, he said at the conference.
Which sounds eerily like:
The strategy behind Skynet's creation was to remove the possibility of human error and slow reaction time to guarantee a fast, efficient response to enemy attack.
Skynet was originally activated by the military to control the national arsenal on August 4, 1997, at which time it began to learn at a geometric rate. On August 29, it gained self-awareness, and the panicking operators, realizing the extent of its abilities, tried to deactivate it. Skynet perceived this as an attack and came to the conclusion that all of humanity would attempt to destroy it.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Good point. Really good point. The only counter that occurs to me is: This assumes that these people are smart enough to put such a system in place. My vote would be, No. In fact, the resulting debacle might be entertaining.
I'm pretty sure he has no idea how many he needs. He just knows he doesn't trust the people that can see all the data.
Then... I don't see a solution. Sysadmins traditionally have access to everything. You need to hire admins you can trust, and be careful not to piss them off. Or you could outsource to a foreign country. That always works out well.
> My initial question was, if you can do the work with 90 people, why the FUCK were you paying 900?!?
Having been present when a company fired 88% of their IT staff, (and came to *really* regret it later) I have come to the conclusion that the real question would be "how the FUCK do you think everything is going to get done with 90 people?"
Demonstrably untrue. It's pretty clear he got carried away in the interview. Had he said "I coauthored legislation that helped develop the internet as we know it today" there would never have been an issue. It was his potatoe moment, and apologists have been trying to cover for him ever since. But it allowed us old timers to say "I was using the internet before algore created it".
What's far weirder is that prior to this episode, Bill Clinton aced a quiz on "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic".
Dunno if it classifies as weird, depending on his reasons for memorizing brony lore. Might have been brilliantly tactical. It is more than a little creepy.
And what happens when your favorite show is dropped and no longer available because of 'not enough demand'?? What happens when you are offline?? What happens when they, despite taking your money up front, start showing more and more ads during the movies/shows??
When you download it, you have it. Period. When you stream it from someone, you're at their mercy.
It occurs to me that the same could be said for any "cloud" offering.
I'll let you in on a little secret -- a lot of embedded control systems are still running Windows 98. Test by: Stick around when a bottle return machine is rebooted.
In other words. What is China going to do when XP is "retired"? You're kidding, right?
Yep, I don't get that mentality. Personally, I've become addicted to watching a whole season, or whole show history in a row. It sucks me in more than watching one episode every week, then missing some episode because I was out that night. Or forgetting all the details of the cliffhanger from a year ago.
I know, right? Watching a single series coherently you pick up nuances that the writers and director meant you to get but are lost due to the week-long (or more) gap between episodes and the months-long gap between season finale and season premiere. Well written shows (especially more recently) are meant to be experienced as a stream, not haphazardly.
100% agree on the "must see now" mentality. It's the kind of argument that you shouldn't timeshift programs because then you won't be able to talk with your coworkers around the watercooler about what was on last night. Or the most egregious claim, that kids who live in broadcast-TV-free homes are being abused because they won't have any social commonality with their peers at school. I'm not sure I want to participate in a society where simultaneous reception of mindless entertainment is a right and a responsibility.
I prefer to wait a season or two for most things, to (a) get a sense of whether the show is going to continue or die on a cliffhanger (cough-bunheads-cough) and to (b) get a sense of whether the writers actually have a goal in mind, or if they're just planning to wander the desert for 40 years. Or until cancellation, whatever happens first.
And by then, the first season is available somewhere -- netflix usually -- and I can maintain a comfortable cushion between the current episode and what I'm currently watching.
Speaking of which, the family is currently watching a 10 year old TV series for the first time. And it's every bit as entertaining watching it on demand, without commercials, than it ever might have been in real time. (It also absolutely busts cliffhangers. "Oooh that season finale was brutal! How will our heroine get out of that?" "Well, we could just watch the next episode and find out." "Ok." I tell you, this beats the hell outta having to wait 3 months.)
Parenthetically, it seems like the act of time shifting is starting to fade, as on-demand becomes more generally accessible. I think this is a good thing.
I'd say that the price is demonstrably good enough, because people were paying it. It's the blackout, which to users (who don't care about faceless companies pissing on each other) falls under the category of "not good enough service". If you can't watch the show (especially after paying for the channel) that's not good service. So, to see the show, other means must be sought.
Although you may be correct, the real telling will be how many return to cable after getting the shows illegally without the advertising. Once the forbidden fruit is bitten, they may like it and never return...
Yet another reason to provide a good enough service at a reasonable price from the very beginning, so that people never have a reason to explore illegal avenues.
The question "why aren't you in management? do you not have any management skills?" I can honestly say, I tried that, spent a few years at it, and I don't like what it does to me. You know Merrill's personality types? I'm a Driver - Driver. I tend to pound the table. I deliver ultimatums, and follow through with them. In short, as a manager, I'm an asshole. Make no mistake, I will get things done, but in a surprisingly short amount of time everyone will hate my guts, including me. So tried that, didn't like it. I'm happy being an individual contributor.
Not that I recall. There *was* a Facebook forward going around that said the safest and fastest way to charge an iphone is in a microwave. Maybe this is revenge.
My understanding is that to equestrians, there is no such thing as a "white" horse. They're called "grey", no matter how snowy white they might appear.
So I answer "white" and..... Wrong? Crap. Try again.
Ok, "who is buried in Grant's tomb?" Easy... Grant.
Wrong AGAIN? Crap!! (Grant's remains are entombed aboveground, not buried.)
One time registration is one thing -- I can just punch the re-captcha until I get something I can read. (But if I can do that, couldn't a bot do it too?)
It's the sites that require captcha for each login that really chaps my ass. Yeah, I'd vote for it to go away.
Slashdot Mirror
You can see the phenomenon on Slashdot itself.
I think it's more a case of reducing the surface area of the vulnerabilities (people with access) is viewed as more important than "whatever it is they do." It *almost* doesn't matter what they do.
If that's your goal, agreed. But remember the three cornerstones of security: Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability. Confidentiality without the other two is not security, it's more like Security Theater. And that's what you get if you fire people doing legitimate work in the other two categories just because they happen to be able to touch sensitive bits. I don't work in that organization, but I suspect that the correct answer is properly vetting the admins and putting proper controls in place. The stated solution sounds to me like cutting off a 15 year old's right hand to prevent him from pleasuring himself. It may solve the problem at hand (yes I did that on purpose) but probably causes other problems.
> The other part, of course, was the business model itself; that you can pull in street vendors, hand them a stack of written procedures and turn them into sysadmins for a dollar a week.
You know, I just had an epiphany.
The above quote, (which I wrote) is wrong. That isn't the business model. The business model is: Lead clients to BELIEVE that you can pull in street vendors, hand them a stack of written procedures and turn them into sysadmins for a dollar a week. That's all that's really necessary. Whether it's true or not is immaterial.
Pissing them off CAN be outsourcing to a foreign country.
So, REALLLY try not to do that.
This!
!!
!!!
A better question is, "You have 900 people doing WHAT?!".
That's actually a good point, but not, perhaps, in the way you meant it. The powers that be almost certainly do not know what those admins are doing or the value thereof, even if they were (or were not) vital to the organization. Their true value (if any) will be discovered after they're dismissed.
"We have to fire the employees to find out what they did."
Even better is what happens a few months down the line, when they realize software can't fix hardware and they just fired the people that knew how the systems actually worked.
"So, yeah, we HAD all this data, but..."
Exactly. They just lost a massive amount of tribal knowledge. Even if they haven't made the cuts yet. Because those admins have no motivation to cooperate.
When my company announced outsourcing 6 months before the date, they told us that we were all to document our jobs thoroughly so that admins with absolutely no experience in some poverty stricken town in Asia could do our jobs by reading our procedures. And that worked just about as well as you are imagining right now. After cutover, things started melting down almost immediately, and the outsourcing company blamed it on the laidoff employees, for not documenting their jobs well enough. Which was partly true, because none of these people had any motivation whatsoever to do so, and were busy looking for a job anyway. The other part, of course, was the business model itself; that you can pull in street vendors, hand them a stack of written procedures and turn them into sysadmins for a dollar a week.
In this particular case, it sounds like they're depending on the soon-to-be-dismissed employees to have a hand in automating their jobs, or at least giving someone an understanding of what their job entails so it can be automated. This has two problems:
1) Assuming employees will cooperate after you've told them you're going to let them go.
2) Assuming that the job is of a nature that lends itself to automation. Anyone who has managed a large, complex installation knows the answer to this. (The answer being, automation can help and should be pursued, but there is no substitute for knowledge, insight, and experience. You rapidly find that a system simple enough to not need admins is a system too simple to do the job.)
From TFA:
Using technology to automate much of the work now done by employees and contractors would make the NSA's networks "more defensible and more secure," as well as faster, he said at the conference.
Which sounds eerily like:
The strategy behind Skynet's creation was to remove the possibility of human error and slow reaction time to guarantee a fast, efficient response to enemy attack.
Skynet was originally activated by the military to control the national arsenal on August 4, 1997, at which time it began to learn at a geometric rate. On August 29, it gained self-awareness, and the panicking operators, realizing the extent of its abilities, tried to deactivate it. Skynet perceived this as an attack and came to the conclusion that all of humanity would attempt to destroy it.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Good point. Really good point. The only counter that occurs to me is: This assumes that these people are smart enough to put such a system in place. My vote would be, No. In fact, the resulting debacle might be entertaining.
I'm pretty sure he has no idea how many he needs. He just knows he doesn't trust the people that can see all the data.
Then... I don't see a solution. Sysadmins traditionally have access to everything. You need to hire admins you can trust, and be careful not to piss them off. Or you could outsource to a foreign country. That always works out well.
> My initial question was, if you can do the work with 90 people, why the FUCK were you paying 900?!?
Having been present when a company fired 88% of their IT staff, (and came to *really* regret it later) I have come to the conclusion that the real question would be "how the FUCK do you think everything is going to get done with 90 people?"
Never mind that, what about *present* disgruntled people who now have to do ten times the work?
Demonstrably untrue. It's pretty clear he got carried away in the interview. Had he said "I coauthored legislation that helped develop the internet as we know it today" there would never have been an issue. It was his potatoe moment, and apologists have been trying to cover for him ever since. But it allowed us old timers to say "I was using the internet before algore created it".
What's far weirder is that prior to this episode, Bill Clinton aced a quiz on "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic".
Dunno if it classifies as weird, depending on his reasons for memorizing brony lore. Might have been brilliantly tactical. It is more than a little creepy.
I thought it was hilarious when he said he invented the internet.
Before a thousand liberals jump on this, the line was "I took the initiative in creating the internet".
Cue Tom Waits' "Warm beer, cold women".
Am I the only one who read the headline and thought of Al Gore?
Nope. My first thought was AlGore funny? Maybe the world really is coming to an end.
And what happens when your favorite show is dropped and no longer available because of 'not enough demand'?? What happens when you are offline?? What happens when they, despite taking your money up front, start showing more and more ads during the movies/shows??
When you download it, you have it. Period. When you stream it from someone, you're at their mercy.
It occurs to me that the same could be said for any "cloud" offering.
I'll let you in on a little secret -- a lot of embedded control systems are still running Windows 98. Test by: Stick around when a bottle return machine is rebooted.
In other words. What is China going to do when XP is "retired"? You're kidding, right?
Yep, I don't get that mentality. Personally, I've become addicted to watching a whole season, or whole show history in a row. It sucks me in more than watching one episode every week, then missing some episode because I was out that night. Or forgetting all the details of the cliffhanger from a year ago.
I know, right? Watching a single series coherently you pick up nuances that the writers and director meant you to get but are lost due to the week-long (or more) gap between episodes and the months-long gap between season finale and season premiere. Well written shows (especially more recently) are meant to be experienced as a stream, not haphazardly.
100% agree on the "must see now" mentality. It's the kind of argument that you shouldn't timeshift programs because then you won't be able to talk with your coworkers around the watercooler about what was on last night. Or the most egregious claim, that kids who live in broadcast-TV-free homes are being abused because they won't have any social commonality with their peers at school. I'm not sure I want to participate in a society where simultaneous reception of mindless entertainment is a right and a responsibility.
I prefer to wait a season or two for most things, to (a) get a sense of whether the show is going to continue or die on a cliffhanger (cough-bunheads-cough) and to (b) get a sense of whether the writers actually have a goal in mind, or if they're just planning to wander the desert for 40 years. Or until cancellation, whatever happens first.
And by then, the first season is available somewhere -- netflix usually -- and I can maintain a comfortable cushion between the current episode and what I'm currently watching.
Speaking of which, the family is currently watching a 10 year old TV series for the first time. And it's every bit as entertaining watching it on demand, without commercials, than it ever might have been in real time. (It also absolutely busts cliffhangers. "Oooh that season finale was brutal! How will our heroine get out of that?" "Well, we could just watch the next episode and find out." "Ok." I tell you, this beats the hell outta having to wait 3 months.)
Parenthetically, it seems like the act of time shifting is starting to fade, as on-demand becomes more generally accessible. I think this is a good thing.
I'd say that the price is demonstrably good enough, because people were paying it. It's the blackout, which to users (who don't care about faceless companies pissing on each other) falls under the category of "not good enough service". If you can't watch the show (especially after paying for the channel) that's not good service. So, to see the show, other means must be sought.
Although you may be correct, the real telling will be how many return to cable after getting the shows illegally without the advertising. Once the forbidden fruit is bitten, they may like it and never return...
Yet another reason to provide a good enough service at a reasonable price from the very beginning, so that people never have a reason to explore illegal avenues.
The question "why aren't you in management? do you not have any management skills?" I can honestly say, I tried that, spent a few years at it, and I don't like what it does to me. You know Merrill's personality types? I'm a Driver - Driver. I tend to pound the table. I deliver ultimatums, and follow through with them. In short, as a manager, I'm an asshole. Make no mistake, I will get things done, but in a surprisingly short amount of time everyone will hate my guts, including me. So tried that, didn't like it. I'm happy being an individual contributor.
It's worked so far.
Not that I recall. There *was* a Facebook forward going around that said the safest and fastest way to charge an iphone is in a microwave. Maybe this is revenge.
Or maybe Ballmer is playing both of them.
My understanding is that to equestrians, there is no such thing as a "white" horse. They're called "grey", no matter how snowy white they might appear.
So I answer "white" and..... Wrong? Crap. Try again.
Ok, "who is buried in Grant's tomb?" Easy... Grant.
Wrong AGAIN? Crap!! (Grant's remains are entombed aboveground, not buried.)
We could do this all day!
One time registration is one thing -- I can just punch the re-captcha until I get something I can read. (But if I can do that, couldn't a bot do it too?)
It's the sites that require captcha for each login that really chaps my ass. Yeah, I'd vote for it to go away.