This sort of thing always happens. You should read some of the nasty things theater critics said about early movies; they called 'em debased, shallow, puerile, and definitely not art.
Now we're dealing with the same crap from their descendants. It's no surprise. People are crappy at handling change.
I'd welcome some exercise myself. If they had a little commuter treadmill near the train, I'd hop on it, and toss 'em some free energy off my flabby ass. Seriously, do you begrudge them the double chocolate donut that you shouldn't have eaten, that is even now making you faintly nauseous? They can have that donut!
It's a benefit to society in two ways...A little free energy, and a little healthier population.
See, the question is, "Why would Ebert bother to comment on gaming if he doesn't actually care about gaming?"
The answer is simple. We see it here every day. Why do people put inflammatory crap on their websites? To drive traffic.
Ebert's not an idiot. He is, however, largely irrelevant in terms of the internet...Movie reviewers are a dime a dozen here. Anyone ever been to his site for anything else? I never have.
But with one clever piece of pure flamebait, he drove his web traffic through the roof. Read his article...No, actually don't, just read someone else who's quoted it...No more traffic for you! Not yours! It's pure flamebait, right down to ad hominems and poop jokes at the expense of his target.
So let the irrelevant blowhard pass on by. By even caring about his hilariously irrelevant opinion, you're giving him what he wants.
I think sarcasm is by far the best reason to use an emoticon. Without one, you have to hope the person on the other end has a sufficiently refined sarcasm detector and won't get offended...Not something you want to count on in a work environment.
I hate all styling past the very most basic, and have all my email clients set up to display text only, no pictures, etc.
Anything else is just making my life more difficult...The whole point of email in the first place is quick, simple communication. If you need more than that, pick up the damn phone, or do a face-to-face.
This is true, as far as it goes, but when we're engaging in face to face conversation, we don't tend to hugely overstate our expressions in order to convey our feelings. An emoticon is a one-note emotional ejaculation (yea haha, I said...nevermind), and doesn't really convey anything except that you don't really mean what you're saying the way it sounds.
In an informal context, sure, a few emoticons are acceptable. In a formal situation, you need to take the time to make sure your writing accurately conveys your opinions and feelings, even if you have to spell it out more than you would in person.
The only times I really feel the need to use a smiley is when I'm being sarcastic or ironic, and that has no place in formal communication anyway.
The gist of the article seems to be, "This is the way it is now, so it's acceptable." I don't really agree.
It's an informal style, so sure, where informality is allowed, sure, why not? If you feel comfortable dropping your boss a joke email, then there is no reason you shouldn't throw in a random emoticon in routine correspondence, but I would seriously recommend against using the "unhappy face" to deliver any sort of bad news, or adding in random emoticons on anything resembling official correspondence, or anything that might get passed on up the line.
I have to agree. Administration is the smallest part of my job, but one of the biggest headaches; dealing with people who think the world revolves around them and the sun shines out of their ass...People who flat lie about systems stability to excuse their poor performance, people who do mindlessly stupid things for no reason at all. Having to execute poor management descisions, reverse them, execute them again.
Even at the upper levels, there is always some moron who makes it through your minions to bother you when you don't need to be bothered.
Happens I am a designer...I know, I know, how is it possible that someone who can code is not also helpless at the server level? Just gifted I guess.
The real truth of it is that all the things that are produced by all those different people do not play well together, and that a person who can take poorly documented, often poorly written, pieces of code, often with conflicting system requirements, and make them live together happily in the same environment is far more valuable than a prima donna who always insists that the host of errors produced whenever the program he crapped out is executed are all the fault of the person who is running it, and in no way the fault of the programmer, and who would gladly show you how to install it correctly only your system isn't configured the way he likes it, and he has an appointment to get his nails done.
I've worked both sides of the fence...Hell, right now I'm working both sides at the same time, because no one appreciates the value of a dedicated admin enough to actually budget for one. And I'll tell you, the administration part of the job is where all the pain comes from. My code breaks? Big deal. I wrote it, I can fix it in minutes; I've dictated code fixes over the fricking phone while lying on the beach to people who don't know what a compiler does.
But rebuilding a system from scratch after a hardware meltdown, a system to run legacy code or a proprietary app? That's fucking hard. There are a million things that you have to know, seriously special purpose knowledge that you have to have memorized because it's not included in the instruction books, and if you don't know it your only other option is to post your problem on a developer list, and hope they know what the hell you're talking about.
The only satisfaction that you really get as a sysadmin is the sure and certain knowledge that the guy who downsizes you will be paying you or someone just like you 500 dollars an hour to "consult" the next time any significant system craps itself.
Sysadmin is a pretty general term these days, but I fall into that category on a number of critical systems. It means that I perform maintenance, upgrades, patches. Means I check the logs on a daily basis, run down obscure errors. I do backup restores, to make sure the guy who is in charge of the backups is doing his job correctly.
If nothing ever goes wrong, then no one knows I exist. Something explodes, and I work Friday night to Monday at 2:00am getting everything back up, and no one even knows that there was a problem on Monday. Then I go on vacation, and something breaks and they call support, and support fixes it and bills them 25,000 dollars because they decided "per incident" support was enough for anyone, and the support guys take a day to fix a problem I could fix in an hour.
So yea, I love it when people who are completely helpless when my systems go down tell me I don't do anything special. I love sitting around at the company meetings where some jerkoff who made 10,000 dollars over his sales goal gets employee of the month, while my jury-rigged failover backup that I put together out of spare parts, which kept the whole company running for 5 days, goes completely unrecognized.
If it weren't for people like me, you'd be using a typewriter and a can phone.
Nope. Every consultant gig I ever had was the IT equivalent of janitorial work. Fix our database, fix our application, fix our network.
They never maintain the database, so it's corrupt and overflowing with crap. Fix it up, and collect a check.
They have a program written by some other consultant who they now hate, and they want it to change, and so I have to wade through purposefully hard to maintain code, fix it, and then collect a check.
Their network infrastructure was designed by a toddler. Map it, subcontract some gnomes to recable it, haggle eternally over the types and brands of security appliances they need/don't need. Collect a check.
A consultant is basically the guy you hire to do something that needs to be done, that you don't want to hire a qualified full time employee to do.
Yea, I remember a story about a guy who left a timebomb worm in the system to wipe out the data, and when it ran, it popped up a window saying there was a data error in the database, and please insert a previous backup for a rebuild...The backup guy (a junior employee) inserts tape, worm blanks tape, pops up another insert different tape message...Made it through 2 weeks of tapes before he got suspicious and called his boss.
So no system is perfect. I'm not a big fan of tape myself, but I am a huge fan of backing up to removable media. There is no reason you couldn't store a zillion backup images or archive files or whatever in your second data center, and that would work fine, but it makes my feet itch a little...Makes me feel like all my eggs are in one basket.
Eh. One of the things you have to take into account for a real backup system is the possibility of fraud or slow sabotage.
Al plants a worm that screws up a couple hundred entries each day, and it doesn't get caught for 2 months. How do you restore when your only backup is "yesterday"?
Bob steals $1,000,000 over the course of two years, rewrites the accounts to show a $1,000,000 loss to account for the money, and walks. How do you find which accounts he changed?
You could very easily end up with two corrupted datasets and no way of reconstructing the actual data. The only time I've ever seen that type of backup used exclusively is when people are subcontracting out their backup plan, and the people they're subcontracting to always have some way of dumping to removable media.
Heh. Maybe it was the intern they fired for refusing to do what he was told because he knew it was idiotic. You'd make some money, and prove your point all at the same time.
Yea, that's kinda what I was thinking wrt the "Tech savviness of the modern criminal."
You have to accept that the same kind of criminal who is going to bust your window to steal crap out of your car is going to snag a few tapes, contents unknown, on the principle that he can sell it to someone? Even if the stuff turns out to be valuable, he won't make any real money off of it because (assuming he actually knows of someone who would buy SSNs) the buyer would be free to misrepresent the value.
I'd say this is a targeted theft by someone who knew damn well that those tapes would be going home with someone...Easy information to have because you know that, as many consultants as they've cycled through that place, tons of people knew their policy.
He's 22! If someone handed me a stack of backup tapes to take home when I was 16 I might have done it, but not at 22! Anything you take home from work is a risk, you should know that by that point.
That being said, yea, the organization is primarily at fault. This is their offsite storage method, according to their disaster of a recovery plan. That it hasn't bitten them in the ass before this is nothing more than luck.
Our tape rotation is as follows: All tapes in a tape safe, all Monday tapes go off site for 2 months, all quarterly tapes are stored for 2 years off site, and all yearly tapes are stored offsite for 5 years. The tapes are transported by an employee whose job is to move various papers, tapes, etc, back and forth on a daily basis.
It's easy, sensible, reasonably secure. The offsite location is a satellite office, they have a locking tape safe in which they store the tapes. If the tapes were stolen, most of the data is not encrypted...With the exception of Credit Card Numbers, Bank Account Numbers, and Social Security Numbers.
The system that contains this sensitive data was originally installed in 1982; it's a MPE/iX based accounting system written primarily in Cobol. A fossil, basically, but clearly superior to what Ohio uses. Maybe one day the state of Ohio will move technologically forward to the 80's.
"So what did you learn interning this summer?" "DIAF."
I'm forever amazed at how often people seem to be willing to snag a stack of backup media out of the back of someone's car. The criminal element seems to be quite tech savvy these days; I just wish some of that would pass to the rest of the population.
I live in the south, and "media left in a car" is not really a problem here; leaving tapes in the back seat of a car in the summertime is what we do when the incinerator is out of order...Works even at night!
Who the hell would send an intern out with backup tapes anyway? Makes no sense. Is that their offsite storage procedure? Send the tapes home with an intern, and hope he brings 'em back? Reading the PDF report, that turns out to be exactly what their procedure was...They even had it in their disaster plan, which makes me think it was more disaster and less plan. What the hell? Does the state of Ohio have so few buildings that they have to send the tapes home with people?
Fricking consultants. By the "You get what you pay for" scale you'd think $125-an-hour would buy you more than a huge pain in the ass like this. Sounds like the whole organization was rotten though, so it's hard to blame them.
No worries. I didn't express myself as well as I would have liked...I'm pretty good with using the more common word, unfortunately I tend to use three when I should only use two, or none at all.
Yea, I think he was really pushing a bluff, and the other guy cottoned to the fact that it was a bluff, and then suddenly it wasn't a bluff anymore and he got schooled.
Saw one once where a guy was standing on a suited pair and had nothing but garbage until the last card dropped, at which point he had a straight flush. Cleaned out his opponent because the guy was just damn sure that there was no way an intelligent person would have stood on the two cards that he would have needed to stand on to make a straight flush.
I thought the loser was going to start a fight when he left the table. Entertaining. One of the things about humanity is that we're willing to take a chance on long odds sometimes. It's not the "smart" thing to do, but we do it anyway in our hope and foolishness.
I don't think it's "dumbing down" to try and convey your idea in a form that will be understood by the majority of people...That's the goal, right? I don't have to shoehorn in a big word if I can convey the same idea with two more common words. The worst is when the larger word is actually less appropriate to your meaning than the smaller word (as in the summary), so you're actually warping your idea just so you can use a big word.
In a situation where there really is one word that really conveys the exact meaning, and there is no other word that will do in that situation, you've got to use the big word.
Slashdot Mirror
This sort of thing always happens. You should read some of the nasty things theater critics said about early movies; they called 'em debased, shallow, puerile, and definitely not art.
Now we're dealing with the same crap from their descendants. It's no surprise. People are crappy at handling change.
I'd welcome some exercise myself. If they had a little commuter treadmill near the train, I'd hop on it, and toss 'em some free energy off my flabby ass. Seriously, do you begrudge them the double chocolate donut that you shouldn't have eaten, that is even now making you faintly nauseous? They can have that donut!
It's a benefit to society in two ways...A little free energy, and a little healthier population.
See, the question is, "Why would Ebert bother to comment on gaming if he doesn't actually care about gaming?"
The answer is simple. We see it here every day. Why do people put inflammatory crap on their websites? To drive traffic.
Ebert's not an idiot. He is, however, largely irrelevant in terms of the internet...Movie reviewers are a dime a dozen here. Anyone ever been to his site for anything else? I never have.
But with one clever piece of pure flamebait, he drove his web traffic through the roof. Read his article...No, actually don't, just read someone else who's quoted it...No more traffic for you! Not yours! It's pure flamebait, right down to ad hominems and poop jokes at the expense of his target.
So let the irrelevant blowhard pass on by. By even caring about his hilariously irrelevant opinion, you're giving him what he wants.
I think sarcasm is by far the best reason to use an emoticon. Without one, you have to hope the person on the other end has a sufficiently refined sarcasm detector and won't get offended...Not something you want to count on in a work environment.
I hate all styling past the very most basic, and have all my email clients set up to display text only, no pictures, etc.
Anything else is just making my life more difficult...The whole point of email in the first place is quick, simple communication. If you need more than that, pick up the damn phone, or do a face-to-face.
This is true, as far as it goes, but when we're engaging in face to face conversation, we don't tend to hugely overstate our expressions in order to convey our feelings. An emoticon is a one-note emotional ejaculation (yea haha, I said...nevermind), and doesn't really convey anything except that you don't really mean what you're saying the way it sounds.
In an informal context, sure, a few emoticons are acceptable. In a formal situation, you need to take the time to make sure your writing accurately conveys your opinions and feelings, even if you have to spell it out more than you would in person.
The only times I really feel the need to use a smiley is when I'm being sarcastic or ironic, and that has no place in formal communication anyway.
The gist of the article seems to be, "This is the way it is now, so it's acceptable." I don't really agree.
It's an informal style, so sure, where informality is allowed, sure, why not? If you feel comfortable dropping your boss a joke email, then there is no reason you shouldn't throw in a random emoticon in routine correspondence, but I would seriously recommend against using the "unhappy face" to deliver any sort of bad news, or adding in random emoticons on anything resembling official correspondence, or anything that might get passed on up the line.
It's just not professional.
Anyone else notice it's almost all Anonymous Cowards who are anti-sysadmin?
Do not meddle in the affairs of System Administrators, for they are quick to anger, and have no need of subtlety.
I have to agree. Administration is the smallest part of my job, but one of the biggest headaches; dealing with people who think the world revolves around them and the sun shines out of their ass...People who flat lie about systems stability to excuse their poor performance, people who do mindlessly stupid things for no reason at all. Having to execute poor management descisions, reverse them, execute them again.
Even at the upper levels, there is always some moron who makes it through your minions to bother you when you don't need to be bothered.
Happens I am a designer...I know, I know, how is it possible that someone who can code is not also helpless at the server level? Just gifted I guess.
The real truth of it is that all the things that are produced by all those different people do not play well together, and that a person who can take poorly documented, often poorly written, pieces of code, often with conflicting system requirements, and make them live together happily in the same environment is far more valuable than a prima donna who always insists that the host of errors produced whenever the program he crapped out is executed are all the fault of the person who is running it, and in no way the fault of the programmer, and who would gladly show you how to install it correctly only your system isn't configured the way he likes it, and he has an appointment to get his nails done.
I've worked both sides of the fence...Hell, right now I'm working both sides at the same time, because no one appreciates the value of a dedicated admin enough to actually budget for one. And I'll tell you, the administration part of the job is where all the pain comes from. My code breaks? Big deal. I wrote it, I can fix it in minutes; I've dictated code fixes over the fricking phone while lying on the beach to people who don't know what a compiler does.
But rebuilding a system from scratch after a hardware meltdown, a system to run legacy code or a proprietary app? That's fucking hard. There are a million things that you have to know, seriously special purpose knowledge that you have to have memorized because it's not included in the instruction books, and if you don't know it your only other option is to post your problem on a developer list, and hope they know what the hell you're talking about.
The only satisfaction that you really get as a sysadmin is the sure and certain knowledge that the guy who downsizes you will be paying you or someone just like you 500 dollars an hour to "consult" the next time any significant system craps itself.
Blah blah.
Nice to see the trolls out in force.
Sysadmin is a pretty general term these days, but I fall into that category on a number of critical systems. It means that I perform maintenance, upgrades, patches. Means I check the logs on a daily basis, run down obscure errors. I do backup restores, to make sure the guy who is in charge of the backups is doing his job correctly.
If nothing ever goes wrong, then no one knows I exist. Something explodes, and I work Friday night to Monday at 2:00am getting everything back up, and no one even knows that there was a problem on Monday. Then I go on vacation, and something breaks and they call support, and support fixes it and bills them 25,000 dollars because they decided "per incident" support was enough for anyone, and the support guys take a day to fix a problem I could fix in an hour.
So yea, I love it when people who are completely helpless when my systems go down tell me I don't do anything special. I love sitting around at the company meetings where some jerkoff who made 10,000 dollars over his sales goal gets employee of the month, while my jury-rigged failover backup that I put together out of spare parts, which kept the whole company running for 5 days, goes completely unrecognized.
If it weren't for people like me, you'd be using a typewriter and a can phone.
Nope. Every consultant gig I ever had was the IT equivalent of janitorial work. Fix our database, fix our application, fix our network.
They never maintain the database, so it's corrupt and overflowing with crap. Fix it up, and collect a check.
They have a program written by some other consultant who they now hate, and they want it to change, and so I have to wade through purposefully hard to maintain code, fix it, and then collect a check.
Their network infrastructure was designed by a toddler. Map it, subcontract some gnomes to recable it, haggle eternally over the types and brands of security appliances they need/don't need. Collect a check.
A consultant is basically the guy you hire to do something that needs to be done, that you don't want to hire a qualified full time employee to do.
Yea, I remember a story about a guy who left a timebomb worm in the system to wipe out the data, and when it ran, it popped up a window saying there was a data error in the database, and please insert a previous backup for a rebuild...The backup guy (a junior employee) inserts tape, worm blanks tape, pops up another insert different tape message...Made it through 2 weeks of tapes before he got suspicious and called his boss.
So no system is perfect. I'm not a big fan of tape myself, but I am a huge fan of backing up to removable media. There is no reason you couldn't store a zillion backup images or archive files or whatever in your second data center, and that would work fine, but it makes my feet itch a little...Makes me feel like all my eggs are in one basket.
Eh. One of the things you have to take into account for a real backup system is the possibility of fraud or slow sabotage.
Al plants a worm that screws up a couple hundred entries each day, and it doesn't get caught for 2 months. How do you restore when your only backup is "yesterday"?
Bob steals $1,000,000 over the course of two years, rewrites the accounts to show a $1,000,000 loss to account for the money, and walks. How do you find which accounts he changed?
You could very easily end up with two corrupted datasets and no way of reconstructing the actual data. The only time I've ever seen that type of backup used exclusively is when people are subcontracting out their backup plan, and the people they're subcontracting to always have some way of dumping to removable media.
Heh. Maybe it was the intern they fired for refusing to do what he was told because he knew it was idiotic. You'd make some money, and prove your point all at the same time.
The data should be encrypted, so when it's backed up, it will be a back up of encrypted data.
That's been good policy for decades, and that state governments are still not getting it is pathetic.
Yea, that's kinda what I was thinking wrt the "Tech savviness of the modern criminal."
You have to accept that the same kind of criminal who is going to bust your window to steal crap out of your car is going to snag a few tapes, contents unknown, on the principle that he can sell it to someone? Even if the stuff turns out to be valuable, he won't make any real money off of it because (assuming he actually knows of someone who would buy SSNs) the buyer would be free to misrepresent the value.
I'd say this is a targeted theft by someone who knew damn well that those tapes would be going home with someone...Easy information to have because you know that, as many consultants as they've cycled through that place, tons of people knew their policy.
Crap. Replied to the wrong post. Sorry about that. Puppy needs more coffee.
He's 22! If someone handed me a stack of backup tapes to take home when I was 16 I might have done it, but not at 22! Anything you take home from work is a risk, you should know that by that point.
That being said, yea, the organization is primarily at fault. This is their offsite storage method, according to their disaster of a recovery plan. That it hasn't bitten them in the ass before this is nothing more than luck.
Our tape rotation is as follows: All tapes in a tape safe, all Monday tapes go off site for 2 months, all quarterly tapes are stored for 2 years off site, and all yearly tapes are stored offsite for 5 years. The tapes are transported by an employee whose job is to move various papers, tapes, etc, back and forth on a daily basis.
It's easy, sensible, reasonably secure. The offsite location is a satellite office, they have a locking tape safe in which they store the tapes. If the tapes were stolen, most of the data is not encrypted...With the exception of Credit Card Numbers, Bank Account Numbers, and Social Security Numbers.
The system that contains this sensitive data was originally installed in 1982; it's a MPE/iX based accounting system written primarily in Cobol. A fossil, basically, but clearly superior to what Ohio uses. Maybe one day the state of Ohio will move technologically forward to the 80's.
"So what did you learn interning this summer?"
"DIAF."
I'm forever amazed at how often people seem to be willing to snag a stack of backup media out of the back of someone's car. The criminal element seems to be quite tech savvy these days; I just wish some of that would pass to the rest of the population.
I live in the south, and "media left in a car" is not really a problem here; leaving tapes in the back seat of a car in the summertime is what we do when the incinerator is out of order...Works even at night!
Who the hell would send an intern out with backup tapes anyway? Makes no sense. Is that their offsite storage procedure? Send the tapes home with an intern, and hope he brings 'em back? Reading the PDF report, that turns out to be exactly what their procedure was...They even had it in their disaster plan, which makes me think it was more disaster and less plan. What the hell? Does the state of Ohio have so few buildings that they have to send the tapes home with people?
Fricking consultants. By the "You get what you pay for" scale you'd think $125-an-hour would buy you more than a huge pain in the ass like this. Sounds like the whole organization was rotten though, so it's hard to blame them.
No worries. I didn't express myself as well as I would have liked...I'm pretty good with using the more common word, unfortunately I tend to use three when I should only use two, or none at all.
Yea, I think he was really pushing a bluff, and the other guy cottoned to the fact that it was a bluff, and then suddenly it wasn't a bluff anymore and he got schooled.
Saw one once where a guy was standing on a suited pair and had nothing but garbage until the last card dropped, at which point he had a straight flush. Cleaned out his opponent because the guy was just damn sure that there was no way an intelligent person would have stood on the two cards that he would have needed to stand on to make a straight flush.
I thought the loser was going to start a fight when he left the table. Entertaining. One of the things about humanity is that we're willing to take a chance on long odds sometimes. It's not the "smart" thing to do, but we do it anyway in our hope and foolishness.
I don't think it's "dumbing down" to try and convey your idea in a form that will be understood by the majority of people...That's the goal, right? I don't have to shoehorn in a big word if I can convey the same idea with two more common words. The worst is when the larger word is actually less appropriate to your meaning than the smaller word (as in the summary), so you're actually warping your idea just so you can use a big word.
In a situation where there really is one word that really conveys the exact meaning, and there is no other word that will do in that situation, you've got to use the big word.
But that doesn't happen very often.