I am so hearing that. I've wasted (?) more hours of my life on that game than I would care to tally up. It has ruled for many years and still does. The only game I play on a regular basis.
Me too. Civ is the only game I have installed on my home machine (everything else is on the Wii). Been playing it since I was a Uni student back in the early 90's.
I love this game, though I would say that it took me a while to like Civ IV as much as I liked I and III. I imagine I'll be buying V when it comes out too. Sid rocks. Anyone remember the game Colonization? That was cool too.
Amen to that. I've held off getting ebooks for the longest time, as the reading devices were inadequate. This e-ink technology looks the business though and I'm interested for sure. The single biggest advantage? Being able to carry around multiple books on one device. The exact same reason I love my iPod so much (I carry my entire music collection with me wherever I go on a small device with an 80GB HDD).
Interesting article, but I remain unconvinced that any extra effort should be expended encouraging young women into engineering/science than young men. Granted, both fields have exhibited either overt or covert sexism over the years, no argument. However, if I look at my own generation (I graduated high school in 1989 and university in the mid 1990's) and the girls I went to school with, none of them were told that they couldn't or shouldn't pursue a career in the sciences or engineering disciplines. I believe that the current generation of girls will have just as many career choices as boys and that this will continue. There were at least as many girls as boys winning the prizes in maths, physics, chemistry etc, so it's not a matter of gender differences in aptitude. Girls can clearly do this stuff as well as boys.
Yet, many of the girls chose to do a humanities subject at university. Why is that? Could it be that they are more interested in those subjects than mechanical engineering or have they been socially programmed to shy away from the hard sciences? The flip side is that there is a disproportionately high group of females now studying Law and Medicine. In fact, apparently in some Western countries (like Australia, my home), more women than men study these disciplines and there could be a time when they outnumber men in the profession itself. Once again is this a problem and that we should be encouraging more guys to take up law or med? I don't think so...
One thing that was interesting to observe in my time as a HS and then undergrad student was that there were far more Asian girls doing engineering than westerners. In fact of the female population in my eng/sci courses, 95% of them were Malaysian/Sinagporean/Indonesian Chinese (I studied in Australia). Even now, I work in an engineering company and most of the female engineers are of Chinese or Indian origin (we have about 20% female engineer population). The exception are the Scandinavian countries, where there there appears to be a higher proportion of female engineers than in other Western countries. The female engineers I've worked with are no more or less competent than the guys, so once again it's not a matter of aptitude.
I think like any job or vocation, to be any good at it, you have to want to do it and do the hard work associated with it. This applies equally to pursuing a qualification or teaching yourself. If you don't have the passion for it, then you aren't going to have the single minded and borderline anti-social drive to be the best at it you can possibly be. Guys seem to do this more in the technical disciplines, particularly in the after work or school hours. Maybe girls and woman don't have the same passion for it and that their interests lie elsewhere? Should we be coercising girls into be interested in stuff like this? Hell no, in my opinion. If they are interested, they'll gravitate towards it just like some boys do.
At the end of the day, this all starts from early childhood. In modern times, how many rational parents are going to stop girls from playing with trucks or LEGO etc if that's what they like? I'm a parent of a girl and boy (both the same age) and it doesn't worry me in the slightest. If my daughter grows up and becomes an engineer or physicist I'll be just as happy as if she pursues a career in law. She's a smart kid and will most probably be good at either.
DUMP has existed in various incarnations on various O/S's for eons. I used ufsdump/ufsrestore on Solaris just the other day to recover from a failed root disk on one of our old Sun servers. Worked an absolute treat. Boot from the CD or network (if you have Jumpstart): format, newfs, ufsrestore, installboot, reboot, done....
Chris Anderson of Wired magazine describes this as the "Long Tail Effect", where the availability of search engines and easy means to get at obscure material, be it music, books or whatever, opens up previously unavailable markets. He's even written a book about it. It just baffles me why the RIAA and MPAA have pursued the policies they have in terms of very aggressive enforcement against end users, when the technologies these people use have actually led to independent and obscure artists getting more exposure! I am 100% in favour of the artists getting paid for their work, but perhaps it's time for the old media companies to address their business models and move with the times?
If they want go after someone, go after the pirated media industry in Asia. I live in SE Asia and I can tell you that it's harder to get a legal copy of a DVD or CD than it is an illegal one. That's arse backwards. They could start by making iTunes and their competitors available here. That might make a difference. And perhaps pressuring the governments to better enforce IP and copyright law (that they have signed international treaties on).
The main advantage I can think of is dual ported drives, where there is a completely redundant path, all the way to disk. But for home or small business use, SATA, SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) or plain old SCSI is probably enough.
All of that is true, *but* if I wanted proper enterprise class file serving, I wouldn't be using software RAID. I'd get an EMC, Sun, HDS, IBM, HP or NetAPP array and do away with the volume manager part. Having said that, VxVM would work OK, or Solstice Disksuite or this fancy new ZFS stuff, which looks very promising, but doesn't have the performance or features that a good quality array has.
Hang on a sec, VxVM is not the same as VCFS. ZFS is analogous to VxVM, whereas VCFS is like the other Sun product: SAM-QFS. I don't think the original requester was looking for clustered FS, but if they were then you are right, VCFS would be a very good choice.
Or, you get OpenSolaris and use ZFS on that same array. It's a filesystem and a volume manager in the same piece of software. Best of all, it's all free and I think the ZFS is open sourced too.
There's a great way to test everyone's theories about how much executives actually do: form your own company. That way, you never have to bitch about how much the CEO makes, because you'll be paying yourself. While there is an old boys network when it comes to the executive jobs to a certain degree, plenty of people have risen to positions of power without it. The tech companies are classic examples of this. It really depends on whether or not you have an entrepneurial/risk taking mind set or nor.
I used to think managers did bugger all until I became one. That was an eye opening experience. A lot of those F500 executives earn every cent in my opinion. I wouldn't have most of their jobs for double what they get paid.
Seymour Cray would be the person you would be thinking of. I also agree about a large number of small machines, versus a small number of large machines. I prefer the latter for system maintenance alone. Reduced complexity means fewer things can go wrong, but the load balanced cluster of small systems has its place too, like in a web server or MTA farm (behind a load balancer like the F5 BigIP).
It depends on which database you are using. With Oracle, you generally use RAC (Real Application Cluster), which is termed "shared everything". That is, the database storage and connects are shared between the compute nodes of the database. Message passing happens between the nodes to maintain consitency of the database, particularly in the event of one or more machines going down for maintenance or a hard crash. This used to be called Oracle Parallel Server (OPS) and necessitated the use of raw devices, rather than filesystems and was pretty ugly to manage. It worked bloody well though. However, you could lose all bar one of your nodes and have the database still completely available.
DB2 and SQLSERVER use a "shared nothing" approach, where the database storage and computing power are partitioned among the various nodes, so each system stores a different part of the database (Oracle can also do this via the use of a master node and DB links). However, you could theoretically lose part of your database if one of the nodes goes down (somebody correct me if I'm wrong here). The benefit is very good scalability, however, as you distributed the load over many nodes.
MySQL offers a clustering option that appears to rely on replication to maintain consistency and redundancy. They say that you can lose a node and keep going. How many transactions are lost between replication intervals is unknown to me.
So the question is: what application are you running and what database are you going to run it on? You basic requirements above are eminently doable on a number of products, but it depends on your performance and failover needs. You need to consider also the admin complexity of any solution. If you have to monitor partitioning and replication logs and don't have good tools to manage it, you can spend a lot of time managing that! I personally prefer the shared disk and a small number of large machines to distribute load and provide fault tolerance at the same time. Added to that, I want the database to handle all of it and abstract it away from the O/S and hardware, so I don't have to worry about it. YMMV though....
This is just stupid. There are open source products out there that are clearly good enough to be used in "enterprise" settings and OpenSSH is one of them (Apache, Perl, Linux being some others). I've looked at what commercial SSH vs OpenSSH offers and I honestly can't think of a reason to use the commercial product. I agree (for once) with Theo and ask if it's not "enterprise class", why would O/S vendors include it in their products (Sun, Redhat etc)? For the record, all of my Solaris systems run OpenSSH supplied by Blastwave and the Linux machines have it already. It's all about the right tool for the job and open vs commercial is a secondary consideration (IMHO) over utility. In this case, the open source offering is at least as good as the commercial product.
What extra features do you need out of SSH anyway? I ask not to be a smart arse, but as a genuine inquiry.
I would beg to differ on fidelity. The best turntables with good cartridges have fabulous sound quality (Linn Sondek, Rega etc). I have a Project 1.2e that sounds excellent, particularly with the Ortofon cartidge and it didn't cost me that much. The real problem is with the LP's themselves. They get dusty, scratches etc. This makes it harder to enjoy the sound, particularly if you are used to listening to CDs. I enjoy both analogue and digital, but lean towards digital for convenience more than sound quality (though to my ears there is little difference). Vinyl is like owning an Italian sports car, great fun and pleasurable, but be prepared for the high maintenance.
When talking about stuff like this, you get into the world of cost-plus versus value based pricing. The cost-plus pricing, as you alluded to, is based on the question: "how much does it cost me to engineer this widget, plus the cost of supporting it over time?". You calculate that cost and add markup to it to calculate the price you will charge. In a competitve market place, you will be under pressure to lower prices to win business, which eats into your margin. So you are then left with either reducing your engineering costs or accepting lower margins. That is, unless you are cheaper than your competition and then you get to preserve your margins.
The other way to do it is to work out how much value this widget creates for the customer. You ask yourself the question: "how much will this widget do one of: lower operational cost, increase productivity, enable new opportunities or reduce risk?". If the numbers are substantial, you charge a proportion of that value as your price (you better be able to demonstrate that, otherwise noone will buy it). In my experience, value based pricing is higher than cost-plus.
Which way you go depends on how much of a commodity your product is. For stuff that anyone can make, you have little chance of using the value based model, given a high rate of competition. For highly specialised areas, the opportunity is greater. However, most widgets become commodities in the end. Engineering practices become more efficient and the market widens for all but the most specialised of products (thereby increasing the volume but often lowering the price). You also have other players moving into the market and spotting an inefficiency they can exploit by being more efficient etc (Dell are the classic example of this).
The firm I work for wrestles with this choice daily. Our tools are very specialised and often create enormous value for the customer (last week, one tool saved the customer over USD 1M, but we charged a fraction of that and still made excellent money). At the same time, the market is competitve, preventing massive price hikes.
In terms of your question: I don't think there is an ethical paradox here. You simply decide which of the models you can use and charge accordingly. Assuming you are not in a monopoly situation, the free market will tell you if you are right or wrong with the pricing. I do, however, think that in a monopoly situation, the potential for market distortion and underhand dealings by suppliers becomes almost a certainty.
Re:As a woman in IT, I somewhat agree with the par
on
Women Leaving I.T.
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· Score: 2, Interesting
A very interesting comment. I would say roughly half of the people I've had working for me over the past few years have been women. Some were hard core Unix geeks (one was a Unix geek and held a Masters in Geology to boot) some liked networks, others were into programming. I really didn't (and still don't) make a distinction with gender when hiring new people or managing existing ones. I'm only interested in those folks who can do the job and work well in a team. Gender, ethnicity, religion etc etc I could care less about to be honest. What I did notice, however, is that *all* of the females working for me have come from other fields (Geology, Biochemistry, Neuroscience to name a few), whereas the fellas all came directly through CS or Engineering degrees. I'm not sure what that says about them or me, but it's a data point I guess. What all of the folks had in common (once again, regardless of gender) was that they were (and are) sharp as tacks. That has value.
For desktop and laptops, the service is fine. For servers, however, their support stinks. They send out techs who know only how to replace a part and nothing about hardware troubleshooting or any of that stuff I have become used to with Sun, SGI, IBM, HP et al. Pay peanuts and get monkeys, I guess. We used to buy Dell servers but have switched to HPQ these days. The hardware is better quality and the after sales services is pretty good too.
My dealings with UPS has been overwhelmingly good. We have the same UPS guy deliver to our apartment building every day at nearly the same time. This is cool for a couple of reasons: he knows us and our neighbours, so won't give our package to the wrong person and if we have an idea that he'll be coming at a certain time, we can be home to receive the parcel. Added to that, the guy is nice to deal with.
See, I think that's bullshit too. I haven't seen any evidence to support that argument in any workplace I've been in (my anecdotal evidence doesn't constitute the whole, obviously). I'm sure it goes on, but I wouldn't say women are any more or less predisposed to the behaviour you describe.
I stand by my statement about "lefties". A good number of people on Slashdot espouse socialist ideals -- that makes them left leaning, IMHO. Your characterisation of the board room is also completely off base. How is it that when the board and CEO make decisions, that they don't matter? It matters an awful lot in the case of things like M&A, executive compensation, shareholder returns (e.g. share buybacks, dividends) decisions on expanding (or contracting) in certain markets and a host of other strategic decisions. It's like saying that decisions made in the White House, Downing Street or other heads of states offices aren't important to taxpayers.
You need both people with technical and business expertise to survive and prosper. If you are really fortunate, or very clueful when recruiting people, you get people who have both sets of skills. There are many great engineering companies who have had tech oriented CEOs who had no clue how to run a business, likewise there are MBA's who have no clue about tech. The good organisations know they need both and actively seek out those skills. A lot of these same succesful companies promote from within, so the folks running the show have an intimate knowledge of the business and the technical side.
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Oracle's Enterprise Manager used to do this (maybe still does). I agree, it's a great feature.
Totally agree with this recommendation. I have the book and love it.
I am so hearing that. I've wasted (?) more hours of my life on that game than I would care to tally up. It has ruled for many years and still does. The only game I play on a regular basis.
Me too. Civ is the only game I have installed on my home machine (everything else is on the Wii). Been playing it since I was a Uni student back in the early 90's. I love this game, though I would say that it took me a while to like Civ IV as much as I liked I and III. I imagine I'll be buying V when it comes out too. Sid rocks. Anyone remember the game Colonization? That was cool too.
Amen to that. I've held off getting ebooks for the longest time, as the reading devices were inadequate. This e-ink technology looks the business though and I'm interested for sure. The single biggest advantage? Being able to carry around multiple books on one device. The exact same reason I love my iPod so much (I carry my entire music collection with me wherever I go on a small device with an 80GB HDD).
Interesting article, but I remain unconvinced that any extra effort should be expended encouraging young women into engineering/science than young men. Granted, both fields have exhibited either overt or covert sexism over the years, no argument. However, if I look at my own generation (I graduated high school in 1989 and university in the mid 1990's) and the girls I went to school with, none of them were told that they couldn't or shouldn't pursue a career in the sciences or engineering disciplines. I believe that the current generation of girls will have just as many career choices as boys and that this will continue. There were at least as many girls as boys winning the prizes in maths, physics, chemistry etc, so it's not a matter of gender differences in aptitude. Girls can clearly do this stuff as well as boys.
Yet, many of the girls chose to do a humanities subject at university. Why is that? Could it be that they are more interested in those subjects than mechanical engineering or have they been socially programmed to shy away from the hard sciences? The flip side is that there is a disproportionately high group of females now studying Law and Medicine. In fact, apparently in some Western countries (like Australia, my home), more women than men study these disciplines and there could be a time when they outnumber men in the profession itself. Once again is this a problem and that we should be encouraging more guys to take up law or med? I don't think so...
One thing that was interesting to observe in my time as a HS and then undergrad student was that there were far more Asian girls doing engineering than westerners. In fact of the female population in my eng/sci courses, 95% of them were Malaysian/Sinagporean/Indonesian Chinese (I studied in Australia). Even now, I work in an engineering company and most of the female engineers are of Chinese or Indian origin (we have about 20% female engineer population). The exception are the Scandinavian countries, where there there appears to be a higher proportion of female engineers than in other Western countries. The female engineers I've worked with are no more or less competent than the guys, so once again it's not a matter of aptitude.
I think like any job or vocation, to be any good at it, you have to want to do it and do the hard work associated with it. This applies equally to pursuing a qualification or teaching yourself. If you don't have the passion for it, then you aren't going to have the single minded and borderline anti-social drive to be the best at it you can possibly be. Guys seem to do this more in the technical disciplines, particularly in the after work or school hours. Maybe girls and woman don't have the same passion for it and that their interests lie elsewhere? Should we be coercising girls into be interested in stuff like this? Hell no, in my opinion. If they are interested, they'll gravitate towards it just like some boys do.
At the end of the day, this all starts from early childhood. In modern times, how many rational parents are going to stop girls from playing with trucks or LEGO etc if that's what they like? I'm a parent of a girl and boy (both the same age) and it doesn't worry me in the slightest. If my daughter grows up and becomes an engineer or physicist I'll be just as happy as if she pursues a career in law. She's a smart kid and will most probably be good at either.
DUMP has existed in various incarnations on various O/S's for eons. I used ufsdump/ufsrestore on Solaris just the other day to recover from a failed root disk on one of our old Sun servers. Worked an absolute treat. Boot from the CD or network (if you have Jumpstart): format, newfs, ufsrestore, installboot, reboot, done....
Chris Anderson of Wired magazine describes this as the "Long Tail Effect", where the availability of search engines and easy means to get at obscure material, be it music, books or whatever, opens up previously unavailable markets. He's even written a book about it. It just baffles me why the RIAA and MPAA have pursued the policies they have in terms of very aggressive enforcement against end users, when the technologies these people use have actually led to independent and obscure artists getting more exposure! I am 100% in favour of the artists getting paid for their work, but perhaps it's time for the old media companies to address their business models and move with the times?
If they want go after someone, go after the pirated media industry in Asia. I live in SE Asia and I can tell you that it's harder to get a legal copy of a DVD or CD than it is an illegal one. That's arse backwards. They could start by making iTunes and their competitors available here. That might make a difference. And perhaps pressuring the governments to better enforce IP and copyright law (that they have signed international treaties on).
The main advantage I can think of is dual ported drives, where there is a completely redundant path, all the way to disk. But for home or small business use, SATA, SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) or plain old SCSI is probably enough.
All of that is true, *but* if I wanted proper enterprise class file serving, I wouldn't be using software RAID. I'd get an EMC, Sun, HDS, IBM, HP or NetAPP array and do away with the volume manager part. Having said that, VxVM would work OK, or Solstice Disksuite or this fancy new ZFS stuff, which looks very promising, but doesn't have the performance or features that a good quality array has.
Hang on a sec, VxVM is not the same as VCFS. ZFS is analogous to VxVM, whereas VCFS is like the other Sun product: SAM-QFS. I don't think the original requester was looking for clustered FS, but if they were then you are right, VCFS would be a very good choice.
Or, you get OpenSolaris and use ZFS on that same array. It's a filesystem and a volume manager in the same piece of software. Best of all, it's all free and I think the ZFS is open sourced too.
There's a great way to test everyone's theories about how much executives actually do: form your own company. That way, you never have to bitch about how much the CEO makes, because you'll be paying yourself. While there is an old boys network when it comes to the executive jobs to a certain degree, plenty of people have risen to positions of power without it. The tech companies are classic examples of this. It really depends on whether or not you have an entrepneurial/risk taking mind set or nor.
I used to think managers did bugger all until I became one. That was an eye opening experience. A lot of those F500 executives earn every cent in my opinion. I wouldn't have most of their jobs for double what they get paid.
Seymour Cray would be the person you would be thinking of. I also agree about a large number of small machines, versus a small number of large machines. I prefer the latter for system maintenance alone. Reduced complexity means fewer things can go wrong, but the load balanced cluster of small systems has its place too, like in a web server or MTA farm (behind a load balancer like the F5 BigIP).
It depends on which database you are using. With Oracle, you generally use RAC (Real Application Cluster), which is termed "shared everything". That is, the database storage and connects are shared between the compute nodes of the database. Message passing happens between the nodes to maintain consitency of the database, particularly in the event of one or more machines going down for maintenance or a hard crash. This used to be called Oracle Parallel Server (OPS) and necessitated the use of raw devices, rather than filesystems and was pretty ugly to manage. It worked bloody well though. However, you could lose all bar one of your nodes and have the database still completely available.
DB2 and SQLSERVER use a "shared nothing" approach, where the database storage and computing power are partitioned among the various nodes, so each system stores a different part of the database (Oracle can also do this via the use of a master node and DB links). However, you could theoretically lose part of your database if one of the nodes goes down (somebody correct me if I'm wrong here). The benefit is very good scalability, however, as you distributed the load over many nodes.
MySQL offers a clustering option that appears to rely on replication to maintain consistency and redundancy. They say that you can lose a node and keep going. How many transactions are lost between replication intervals is unknown to me.
So the question is: what application are you running and what database are you going to run it on? You basic requirements above are eminently doable on a number of products, but it depends on your performance and failover needs. You need to consider also the admin complexity of any solution. If you have to monitor partitioning and replication logs and don't have good tools to manage it, you can spend a lot of time managing that! I personally prefer the shared disk and a small number of large machines to distribute load and provide fault tolerance at the same time. Added to that, I want the database to handle all of it and abstract it away from the O/S and hardware, so I don't have to worry about it. YMMV though....
Yep, that would be handy, I agree...
This is just stupid. There are open source products out there that are clearly good enough to be used in "enterprise" settings and OpenSSH is one of them (Apache, Perl, Linux being some others). I've looked at what commercial SSH vs OpenSSH offers and I honestly can't think of a reason to use the commercial product. I agree (for once) with Theo and ask if it's not "enterprise class", why would O/S vendors include it in their products (Sun, Redhat etc)? For the record, all of my Solaris systems run OpenSSH supplied by Blastwave and the Linux machines have it already. It's all about the right tool for the job and open vs commercial is a secondary consideration (IMHO) over utility. In this case, the open source offering is at least as good as the commercial product.
What extra features do you need out of SSH anyway? I ask not to be a smart arse, but as a genuine inquiry.
I would beg to differ on fidelity. The best turntables with good cartridges have fabulous sound quality (Linn Sondek, Rega etc). I have a Project 1.2e that sounds excellent, particularly with the Ortofon cartidge and it didn't cost me that much. The real problem is with the LP's themselves. They get dusty, scratches etc. This makes it harder to enjoy the sound, particularly if you are used to listening to CDs. I enjoy both analogue and digital, but lean towards digital for convenience more than sound quality (though to my ears there is little difference). Vinyl is like owning an Italian sports car, great fun and pleasurable, but be prepared for the high maintenance.
When talking about stuff like this, you get into the world of cost-plus versus value based pricing. The cost-plus pricing, as you alluded to, is based on the question: "how much does it cost me to engineer this widget, plus the cost of supporting it over time?". You calculate that cost and add markup to it to calculate the price you will charge. In a competitve market place, you will be under pressure to lower prices to win business, which eats into your margin. So you are then left with either reducing your engineering costs or accepting lower margins. That is, unless you are cheaper than your competition and then you get to preserve your margins.
The other way to do it is to work out how much value this widget creates for the customer. You ask yourself the question: "how much will this widget do one of: lower operational cost, increase productivity, enable new opportunities or reduce risk?". If the numbers are substantial, you charge a proportion of that value as your price (you better be able to demonstrate that, otherwise noone will buy it). In my experience, value based pricing is higher than cost-plus.
Which way you go depends on how much of a commodity your product is. For stuff that anyone can make, you have little chance of using the value based model, given a high rate of competition. For highly specialised areas, the opportunity is greater. However, most widgets become commodities in the end. Engineering practices become more efficient and the market widens for all but the most specialised of products (thereby increasing the volume but often lowering the price). You also have other players moving into the market and spotting an inefficiency they can exploit by being more efficient etc (Dell are the classic example of this).
The firm I work for wrestles with this choice daily. Our tools are very specialised and often create enormous value for the customer (last week, one tool saved the customer over USD 1M, but we charged a fraction of that and still made excellent money). At the same time, the market is competitve, preventing massive price hikes.
In terms of your question: I don't think there is an ethical paradox here. You simply decide which of the models you can use and charge accordingly. Assuming you are not in a monopoly situation, the free market will tell you if you are right or wrong with the pricing. I do, however, think that in a monopoly situation, the potential for market distortion and underhand dealings by suppliers becomes almost a certainty.
A very interesting comment. I would say roughly half of the people I've had working for me over the past few years have been women. Some were hard core Unix geeks (one was a Unix geek and held a Masters in Geology to boot) some liked networks, others were into programming. I really didn't (and still don't) make a distinction with gender when hiring new people or managing existing ones. I'm only interested in those folks who can do the job and work well in a team. Gender, ethnicity, religion etc etc I could care less about to be honest. What I did notice, however, is that *all* of the females working for me have come from other fields (Geology, Biochemistry, Neuroscience to name a few), whereas the fellas all came directly through CS or Engineering degrees. I'm not sure what that says about them or me, but it's a data point I guess. What all of the folks had in common (once again, regardless of gender) was that they were (and are) sharp as tacks. That has value.
For desktop and laptops, the service is fine. For servers, however, their support stinks. They send out techs who know only how to replace a part and nothing about hardware troubleshooting or any of that stuff I have become used to with Sun, SGI, IBM, HP et al. Pay peanuts and get monkeys, I guess. We used to buy Dell servers but have switched to HPQ these days. The hardware is better quality and the after sales services is pretty good too.
My dealings with UPS has been overwhelmingly good. We have the same UPS guy deliver to our apartment building every day at nearly the same time. This is cool for a couple of reasons: he knows us and our neighbours, so won't give our package to the wrong person and if we have an idea that he'll be coming at a certain time, we can be home to receive the parcel. Added to that, the guy is nice to deal with.
See, I think that's bullshit too. I haven't seen any evidence to support that argument in any workplace I've been in (my anecdotal evidence doesn't constitute the whole, obviously). I'm sure it goes on, but I wouldn't say women are any more or less predisposed to the behaviour you describe.
I stand by my statement about "lefties". A good number of people on Slashdot espouse socialist ideals -- that makes them left leaning, IMHO. Your characterisation of the board room is also completely off base. How is it that when the board and CEO make decisions, that they don't matter? It matters an awful lot in the case of things like M&A, executive compensation, shareholder returns (e.g. share buybacks, dividends) decisions on expanding (or contracting) in certain markets and a host of other strategic decisions. It's like saying that decisions made in the White House, Downing Street or other heads of states offices aren't important to taxpayers.
You need both people with technical and business expertise to survive and prosper. If you are really fortunate, or very clueful when recruiting people, you get people who have both sets of skills. There are many great engineering companies who have had tech oriented CEOs who had no clue how to run a business, likewise there are MBA's who have no clue about tech. The good organisations know they need both and actively seek out those skills. A lot of these same succesful companies promote from within, so the folks running the show have an intimate knowledge of the business and the technical side.