I have also worked with a few HCL employees. They aren't incompetent by any means, but I second this totally. They're just average, they do what you tell them to do for the most part. They turn in mistakes just like anybody else, and they get behind schedule just like slow, dumb Americans. They are basically a less flexible, less adaptable, but much less expensive version of their American counterparts. It is total bullshit to say that Americans need to concentrate on better education -- if you want to succeed like HCL, what you really need are people with 6 weeks of boot camp who are willing to do mindless labor in exactly the way you tell them for $20k/yr. We are seeing the IT industry go the way of the Auto industry, and the real complaint here is that colleges are turning out craftsmen (or let's say people who aspire to be craftsmen) instead of people who just want to work the production line.
Maybe that's just inevitable with business, since the goal always seems to be to neatly (and suboptimally) package processes to minimize their expense. It's just sad, because it chases all of the actual passion right out of the industry.
Exactly. Bing isn't going to change my searching habits just by virtue of being 'as good as google'.
Moreover, when I ask myself 'would it be good for me as a consumer if Microsoft acquired Google's market position in search?', the answer in my mind is a long pause followed by '...that's a rhetorical question, right?'.
Not that I speak for the FOSS community or even care at all about this issue, but I just can't ever bring myself to have any sympathy for Microsoft. They worked so hard for so many years to build this reputation for themselves, and they deserve all of the spoils. My only regret is that the cost of their public image couldn't ever hope to outweigh the massive profits they've made through years of bad behavior. It's like seeing a bully get his ass kicked for no reason at all. Maybe he didn't do anything to deserve it (this time), but I'm not a good enough person to want to try and help him. I admit, that's probably some kind of personal failing, but I just don't care.
Re:Mentioned as "Greatest Adventure Games"
on
Vintage Games
·
· Score: 1
Wow.. I haven't thought about Project: Space Station in something like 20 years. If only I could've figured out how to keep my scientists from bickering with each other, I could have been a 9 year old director of the entire space program.
Might be 'Law of the West' for the gunfighting game. There wasn't a lot to do, but I remember it had a catchy tune.
I hate to admit it, but I feel the same way about ITIL. If you've got unlimited time, staff, and budget, you can make a great paperwork factory out of ITIL. But just understanding it, implementing it, and then maintaining the processes you've created takes more time and energy than a lot of businesses are willing to pour into IT, especially when the return on investment is so vaporous to begin with (IT will be 'more efficient', things will 'get done faster', and many other unquantified phrases that translate poorly into dollars saved). I can see it being valuable for large, siloed IT departments with a lot of staff and resources, but when you've got a small, overworked staff that is trying to meet the needs of a small or mid-size business with stretched resources, ITIL is not worth its own overhead.
Re:I am shocked at the suggestions here
on
Documenting a Network?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I also try to stay away from documenting things in static formats. If you ask me, incorrect documentation is even worse than no documentation at all, and the fastest way to get incorrect documentation is to create a process that relies on a person doing all of the updating manually.
I know a lot of people love their spreadsheets and their diagrams, and maybe they update them religiously. Nonetheless, that process is *always* prone to error. And if a technician goes to a document for information and finds out that the document is wrong, the document loses its credibility. If that happens a few times, the technician will simply stop trusting the document, and it will just fade into obscurity.
If you want to document a system, look for ways to make the system document itself. Switches keep real-time lists of the MACs that are connected to them. Routers keep real-time lists of which MACs map to which IP addresses. Routers and switches will always tell you their current configuration if you ask, and you can automate the process of asking and storing and checking for changes. Most servers will tell you their serial numbers automatically if you ask them, so you should automate the process of asking them and storing that information. The same goes for what kind of hardware is in the server, where the server is attached to the network, etc.
So much information can be collected automatically rather than recorded by hand, and when you collect the information automatically, it will always be up to date. It will not matter if a tech decided to re-rack a server in the wrong place -- even if they didn't write it down, your network knows that it moved, and it will tell you if you ask it. So the next time you sit down to write a 200 page document describing the network, you should ask yourself a) how much will it cost in time and effort to keep this document relevant, b) how likely is it that the document will become out of date either through accident or negligence, c) how quickly will people abandon this document if it does become out of date, and d) aren't there huge parts of this document that could be totally dynamic instead of written in static text on a page?
I'm familiar with the ideas behind electronic discovery, and I think ultimately it is just going to go away. It is the brainchild of people who want to treat the entire electronic world the same way they treated the paper processing world, and they have no idea how much data they're actually trying to wrangle (much less the costs involved in wrangling it). Entire industries have cropped up to feed off of the eDiscovery nonsense, and you can directly measure how much productivity is being sapped from industry by measuring the wealth being accumulated by all of these eDiscovery Solution Providers. In the long run, I think people will recognize the whole process as an unreasonable burden on industry and find some alternative way to satisfy the random and often pointless legal requests for electronic discovery. If not, I think industry will eventually look at the money they're wasting on complying with the whims of the US legal system and simply decide to move a lot of their operations to places that don't impose the same kind of wasteful overhead.
Second that. I always felt like Unix tools were generally like lego blocks. Once you learn how they go together, you can build pretty much anything you need. Ten years from now, all the lego blocks you've accumulated still work with your new lego blocks, and you can keep using them over and over. By contrast, Windows tools are generally like die cast toys. That matchbox car is pretty awesome at being a little metal car, but if you want an airplane, you just have to save up your allowance and go buy one (well, unless it happens to be the kind of matchbox car where the doors open - then you can pretend they're wings if you have a good imagination).
Windows is all about giving you a fish, and Unix is all about teaching you to fish.
I'm pretty sure I remember him falling into a bunch of canyons and finding a piece of a telephone in one of them, then extending his neck and making sounds like an electric cow so that he could fly back out. But it's been a long time since I saw the movie...
I think the fundamental difference here is that you're free to break the speed limit and suffer the consequences. It is one thing to have a government set laws and enforce them with penalties, because a model like that allows for civil disobedience and hey, one day, maybe even revolution. It is a totally different ballgame to assert a law and then put measures in place that physically prevent people from being able to break it. That is the scary road we're starting down with something like this. Someone might call this kind of technology 'good parenting', but the government may just as well call it 'good governing'.
Raising kids and governing societies isn't like programming computers. You can't design the system so that the bad/wrong thing never happens. People, including kids, need to be free to do the wrong thing, because a) sometimes the wrong thing is really the right thing, and b) that's just how freedom works. Freedom is sub-optimal by definition, so as we try to optimize the world, we make it a lot less free.
All of this makes me more and more convinced that one day, when we realize what technology is really capable of, there is going to be a luddite revolution. I think we're still in the 'wow, cool!' phase of technology. We're just starting to imagine the possibilities now that we have the ability to collect and filter massive amounts of data and exert control over the world in a very granular way.
For example, as mentioned in this thread, the old-tech way of controlling the speed at which people drive is a big metal speed limit sign. That approach imposes a rule that you're expected to follow, although you're free to break the law if you choose to (so long as you're willing to pay the consequences). The new-tech way of controlling the speed at which people drive is much more efficient -- you simply use technology to take away their ability to defy it. This is *way* more efficient, since you don't need to pay police to enforce the law and society doesn't have to deal with the consequences of somebody deciding to break it. When you look at it with cold, hard analysis, it's a no-brainer to go with the new tech, and I think that is how we are making these decisions and will continue to make decisions in the future.
But one day, we'll suddenly realize that having the freedom to break the law or to screw up royally and wrap your dad's car around a telephone pole is far more important than having all of these amazing dials and knobs that let us control in fine detail the things people are and aren't allowed to do. Technology is pretty awesome, I will admit, and it's really a way of life for me and probably a lot of us. Still, things like this make me think that we're so enamored of what we're now capable of doing that we're failing to ask the classic question of 'should we be doing it?'. And the problem is, as technology becomes more and more accessible, the number of people who have to unanimously decide that "no, we shouldn't" in order to keep it from happening gets bigger and bigger.
They are proposing earn-and-spend market model, where the more a user uploads now and the higher the quality of the contributions, the more she would be able to download later and the faster the download speed.
Hey, what gives? The proposed model only allows for women to have future-money! Do these universities think we're stupid or something?!
I have to admit, I've been thinking the same way lately. I wish there were a way to be sure that one party would win the White House and the other would win congress, and frankly, I don't even care which wins which. Everybody talks about legislative gridlock like it's such a bad thing, but I kind of prefer a government that can't screw things up too badly. When the power is divided, neither side can fiat their crazy ideas into place, and both sides have to focus on more moderate legislation. When one branch of the government is just rubber stamping everything the others say, then we lose our checks and balances and wind up in Iraq, pregnant with unwanted, wiretapped babies that can't afford prescription medication (or possibly totally disarmed because gun ownership is illegal and military spending has been slashed to fund tutoring programs to help humpback whales learn how not to swim into SF bay).
I think the article just has a typo. 'Imperceptible' is definitely not how I'd describe 100ms latency on a switched LAN. It's also true that switches do not necessarily have to store and forward, and cut-through switching used to be a lot more popular. I believe it's probably less popular now because store and forward performance is more than adequate, and because it offers a handful of advantages (verify FCS before forwarding, for example).
I'm opposed to it. It's not the federal government's job to make it hard for kids to search for porn on the internet. It's also not their job to make sure kids eat the right food and avoid playing violent video games. And that's coming from a guy who leans left.
I couldn't agree more. There's nothing about SOX that has any meaningful impact on security. We could easily be secure and not be SOX-compliant, and we could just as easily be insecure and be totally SOX-compliant. Trying to legislate information assurance from Capitol Hill is a complete joke, and the auditors are eating it up. I just hope this garbage gets repealed before it wraps the entire industry in thick, red government-issue tape.
There's a lot of people living in the gutter right now leading miserable, hellish lives in America.
That's certainly true, and there will be plenty more when all of our money is overseas and we have nothing to export to bring it back. Tattered though it may be, there is at least a safety net for American citizens who are poor. But even that's only there as long as there's enough wealth to maintain it. When the only things you export are money and jobs, a global economy can be a pretty frightening place.
I tried repeating it, but I guess I still don't believe it. The problem is that human happiness doesn't equate to individual happiness, and making 10,000 people you've never met a little wealthier at the expense of being able to pay your own rent isn't what many Americans consider an economic win. So repeat after me until you believe:
'Aggregate human happiness is 100% compatible with me living in a gutter'
It's okay to root for completely even global distribution of wealth, just so long as you a) are ready to surrender your quality of life, and b) don't expect anybody in the US to actually agree with you.
That's true, but they're getting exactly what they deserve for making crap for so long. The fact that they're suffering so much now (and rightfully so, even though quality is much better than it was) should be an important lesson to businesses everywhere that you reap what you sow. If there hadn't been a backlash against the poor quality of American cars, they'd still suck just as much today, and Ford/GM/etc wouldn't mind a bit. Now, if they can afford to pony up and make great cars year after year without driving up the cost to the consumer, they will eventually work off that bad reputation. If they die trying... well, that's just the cost of doing bad business.
Slashdot Mirror
Look, do you want the knob back or not?
I have also worked with a few HCL employees. They aren't incompetent by any means, but I second this totally. They're just average, they do what you tell them to do for the most part. They turn in mistakes just like anybody else, and they get behind schedule just like slow, dumb Americans. They are basically a less flexible, less adaptable, but much less expensive version of their American counterparts. It is total bullshit to say that Americans need to concentrate on better education -- if you want to succeed like HCL, what you really need are people with 6 weeks of boot camp who are willing to do mindless labor in exactly the way you tell them for $20k/yr. We are seeing the IT industry go the way of the Auto industry, and the real complaint here is that colleges are turning out craftsmen (or let's say people who aspire to be craftsmen) instead of people who just want to work the production line.
Maybe that's just inevitable with business, since the goal always seems to be to neatly (and suboptimally) package processes to minimize their expense. It's just sad, because it chases all of the actual passion right out of the industry.
Try it this way:
"If you don't know what Google is, just Bing it."
Now imagine a world of people saying things like that. How could you ever hope to keep from punching all of them?
Exactly. Bing isn't going to change my searching habits just by virtue of being 'as good as google'. Moreover, when I ask myself 'would it be good for me as a consumer if Microsoft acquired Google's market position in search?', the answer in my mind is a long pause followed by '...that's a rhetorical question, right?'.
Not that I speak for the FOSS community or even care at all about this issue, but I just can't ever bring myself to have any sympathy for Microsoft. They worked so hard for so many years to build this reputation for themselves, and they deserve all of the spoils. My only regret is that the cost of their public image couldn't ever hope to outweigh the massive profits they've made through years of bad behavior. It's like seeing a bully get his ass kicked for no reason at all. Maybe he didn't do anything to deserve it (this time), but I'm not a good enough person to want to try and help him. I admit, that's probably some kind of personal failing, but I just don't care.
Wow.. I haven't thought about Project: Space Station in something like 20 years. If only I could've figured out how to keep my scientists from bickering with each other, I could have been a 9 year old director of the entire space program.
Might be 'Law of the West' for the gunfighting game. There wasn't a lot to do, but I remember it had a catchy tune.
I hate to admit it, but I feel the same way about ITIL. If you've got unlimited time, staff, and budget, you can make a great paperwork factory out of ITIL. But just understanding it, implementing it, and then maintaining the processes you've created takes more time and energy than a lot of businesses are willing to pour into IT, especially when the return on investment is so vaporous to begin with (IT will be 'more efficient', things will 'get done faster', and many other unquantified phrases that translate poorly into dollars saved). I can see it being valuable for large, siloed IT departments with a lot of staff and resources, but when you've got a small, overworked staff that is trying to meet the needs of a small or mid-size business with stretched resources, ITIL is not worth its own overhead.
I also try to stay away from documenting things in static formats. If you ask me, incorrect documentation is even worse than no documentation at all, and the fastest way to get incorrect documentation is to create a process that relies on a person doing all of the updating manually.
I know a lot of people love their spreadsheets and their diagrams, and maybe they update them religiously. Nonetheless, that process is *always* prone to error. And if a technician goes to a document for information and finds out that the document is wrong, the document loses its credibility. If that happens a few times, the technician will simply stop trusting the document, and it will just fade into obscurity.
If you want to document a system, look for ways to make the system document itself. Switches keep real-time lists of the MACs that are connected to them. Routers keep real-time lists of which MACs map to which IP addresses. Routers and switches will always tell you their current configuration if you ask, and you can automate the process of asking and storing and checking for changes. Most servers will tell you their serial numbers automatically if you ask them, so you should automate the process of asking them and storing that information. The same goes for what kind of hardware is in the server, where the server is attached to the network, etc.
So much information can be collected automatically rather than recorded by hand, and when you collect the information automatically, it will always be up to date. It will not matter if a tech decided to re-rack a server in the wrong place -- even if they didn't write it down, your network knows that it moved, and it will tell you if you ask it. So the next time you sit down to write a 200 page document describing the network, you should ask yourself a) how much will it cost in time and effort to keep this document relevant, b) how likely is it that the document will become out of date either through accident or negligence, c) how quickly will people abandon this document if it does become out of date, and d) aren't there huge parts of this document that could be totally dynamic instead of written in static text on a page?
I'm familiar with the ideas behind electronic discovery, and I think ultimately it is just going to go away. It is the brainchild of people who want to treat the entire electronic world the same way they treated the paper processing world, and they have no idea how much data they're actually trying to wrangle (much less the costs involved in wrangling it). Entire industries have cropped up to feed off of the eDiscovery nonsense, and you can directly measure how much productivity is being sapped from industry by measuring the wealth being accumulated by all of these eDiscovery Solution Providers. In the long run, I think people will recognize the whole process as an unreasonable burden on industry and find some alternative way to satisfy the random and often pointless legal requests for electronic discovery. If not, I think industry will eventually look at the money they're wasting on complying with the whims of the US legal system and simply decide to move a lot of their operations to places that don't impose the same kind of wasteful overhead.
I'm going to be an astronaut^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H fireman!!
Second that. I always felt like Unix tools were generally like lego blocks. Once you learn how they go together, you can build pretty much anything you need. Ten years from now, all the lego blocks you've accumulated still work with your new lego blocks, and you can keep using them over and over. By contrast, Windows tools are generally like die cast toys. That matchbox car is pretty awesome at being a little metal car, but if you want an airplane, you just have to save up your allowance and go buy one (well, unless it happens to be the kind of matchbox car where the doors open - then you can pretend they're wings if you have a good imagination).
Windows is all about giving you a fish, and Unix is all about teaching you to fish.
I'm pretty sure I remember him falling into a bunch of canyons and finding a piece of a telephone in one of them, then extending his neck and making sounds like an electric cow so that he could fly back out. But it's been a long time since I saw the movie...
I hope they at least have the foresight to research actual fruit-bearing money trees instead of the kind that just grow worthless American dollars.
I think the fundamental difference here is that you're free to break the speed limit and suffer the consequences. It is one thing to have a government set laws and enforce them with penalties, because a model like that allows for civil disobedience and hey, one day, maybe even revolution. It is a totally different ballgame to assert a law and then put measures in place that physically prevent people from being able to break it. That is the scary road we're starting down with something like this. Someone might call this kind of technology 'good parenting', but the government may just as well call it 'good governing'.
Raising kids and governing societies isn't like programming computers. You can't design the system so that the bad/wrong thing never happens. People, including kids, need to be free to do the wrong thing, because a) sometimes the wrong thing is really the right thing, and b) that's just how freedom works. Freedom is sub-optimal by definition, so as we try to optimize the world, we make it a lot less free.
All of this makes me more and more convinced that one day, when we realize what technology is really capable of, there is going to be a luddite revolution. I think we're still in the 'wow, cool!' phase of technology. We're just starting to imagine the possibilities now that we have the ability to collect and filter massive amounts of data and exert control over the world in a very granular way.
For example, as mentioned in this thread, the old-tech way of controlling the speed at which people drive is a big metal speed limit sign. That approach imposes a rule that you're expected to follow, although you're free to break the law if you choose to (so long as you're willing to pay the consequences). The new-tech way of controlling the speed at which people drive is much more efficient -- you simply use technology to take away their ability to defy it. This is *way* more efficient, since you don't need to pay police to enforce the law and society doesn't have to deal with the consequences of somebody deciding to break it. When you look at it with cold, hard analysis, it's a no-brainer to go with the new tech, and I think that is how we are making these decisions and will continue to make decisions in the future.
But one day, we'll suddenly realize that having the freedom to break the law or to screw up royally and wrap your dad's car around a telephone pole is far more important than having all of these amazing dials and knobs that let us control in fine detail the things people are and aren't allowed to do. Technology is pretty awesome, I will admit, and it's really a way of life for me and probably a lot of us. Still, things like this make me think that we're so enamored of what we're now capable of doing that we're failing to ask the classic question of 'should we be doing it?'. And the problem is, as technology becomes more and more accessible, the number of people who have to unanimously decide that "no, we shouldn't" in order to keep it from happening gets bigger and bigger.
I absolutely will not eat cloned meat, because I am afraid that it may cause my children to be clones.
They are proposing earn-and-spend market model, where the more a user uploads now and the higher the quality of the contributions, the more she would be able to download later and the faster the download speed.
Hey, what gives? The proposed model only allows for women to have future-money! Do these universities think we're stupid or something?!
I have to admit, I've been thinking the same way lately. I wish there were a way to be sure that one party would win the White House and the other would win congress, and frankly, I don't even care which wins which. Everybody talks about legislative gridlock like it's such a bad thing, but I kind of prefer a government that can't screw things up too badly. When the power is divided, neither side can fiat their crazy ideas into place, and both sides have to focus on more moderate legislation. When one branch of the government is just rubber stamping everything the others say, then we lose our checks and balances and wind up in Iraq, pregnant with unwanted, wiretapped babies that can't afford prescription medication (or possibly totally disarmed because gun ownership is illegal and military spending has been slashed to fund tutoring programs to help humpback whales learn how not to swim into SF bay).
I think the article just has a typo. 'Imperceptible' is definitely not how I'd describe 100ms latency on a switched LAN. It's also true that switches do not necessarily have to store and forward, and cut-through switching used to be a lot more popular. I believe it's probably less popular now because store and forward performance is more than adequate, and because it offers a handful of advantages (verify FCS before forwarding, for example).
I'm opposed to it. It's not the federal government's job to make it hard for kids to search for porn on the internet. It's also not their job to make sure kids eat the right food and avoid playing violent video games. And that's coming from a guy who leans left.
I couldn't agree more. There's nothing about SOX that has any meaningful impact on security. We could easily be secure and not be SOX-compliant, and we could just as easily be insecure and be totally SOX-compliant. Trying to legislate information assurance from Capitol Hill is a complete joke, and the auditors are eating it up. I just hope this garbage gets repealed before it wraps the entire industry in thick, red government-issue tape.
As of Windows 2003 R2, there is a capability to do a VSS type of thing over the network to a remote server.
I'm a little ashamed that I know that, but it's true.
There's a lot of people living in the gutter right now leading miserable, hellish lives in America.
That's certainly true, and there will be plenty more when all of our money is overseas and we have nothing to export to bring it back. Tattered though it may be, there is at least a safety net for American citizens who are poor. But even that's only there as long as there's enough wealth to maintain it. When the only things you export are money and jobs, a global economy can be a pretty frightening place.
I tried repeating it, but I guess I still don't believe it. The problem is that human happiness doesn't equate to individual happiness, and making 10,000 people you've never met a little wealthier at the expense of being able to pay your own rent isn't what many Americans consider an economic win. So repeat after me until you believe:
'Aggregate human happiness is 100% compatible with me living in a gutter'
It's okay to root for completely even global distribution of wealth, just so long as you a) are ready to surrender your quality of life, and b) don't expect anybody in the US to actually agree with you.
That's true, but they're getting exactly what they deserve for making crap for so long. The fact that they're suffering so much now (and rightfully so, even though quality is much better than it was) should be an important lesson to businesses everywhere that you reap what you sow. If there hadn't been a backlash against the poor quality of American cars, they'd still suck just as much today, and Ford/GM/etc wouldn't mind a bit. Now, if they can afford to pony up and make great cars year after year without driving up the cost to the consumer, they will eventually work off that bad reputation. If they die trying... well, that's just the cost of doing bad business.