Go talk to the Product Manger? Don't have a product manager? Who is responsible for talking to customers, prioritising features, and drawing up the product roadmap? This is the person you need to talk to.
Don't have product manger? As someone has said, find a new job. Developers by their nature spend most of their time looking at code, someone needs to spend most of their time talking to customers.
I would say the vast majority of Australian Muslims are horrified how this turned out, if only because it makes their lives so much harder. Most of them want to get on with their jobs and raise their families somewhere safe.
If "Christians" are capable of sitting on both sites of the immigration debate, why can't Muslems.
Of course, the obvious thing to point our are groups like the LRA, or those operating in the Central African Republic. You will probably be quick to deny that these people are Christians, in just the same way many Australian Muslims are saying the Martin Pl The siege is un-Islamic.
1) standard practice to re-screen if someone has bypassed screening
2) this has happened several times before (see links below)
The only thing that made this relevant for slashdot was the presence of an iPad (Ah Ha! A technology angle!). That said, the exit from T3 isn't that secure, but it is a domestic terminal. The domestic terminals use pretty standard x-ray of belongings and a metal detector. In other words, just like getting into an office building in downtown New York. The security is nothing like the international terminals which are about the same level as at US airports.
Ignoring the joke answers this is probably the best answer here.
We work in support services - unless you are an IT service provider you aren't part of the business that makes money. You support the business, but you aren't the business. Think about all those other support functions, HR, finance, legal, office facilities - they are all needed too but I don't often hear them asking to be appreciated by management.
To the OP - What is your objective? You say you want management to "appreciate the hard work that an IT department does?" - but why?
* Job security?
* Pay/conditions?
* To make yourself feel good?
Turn the question around and ask "What does management appreciate?" - Face it, you aren't going to change your your boss but you can change the way you communicate, or better still, change the way you do things.
Do they value cost control? Show how you did your job on a budget - grab some analyst papers and show how you do it cheaper then comparable industry segments. If you start reporting on this then it will also drive yourself to manage costs well, so you should be able to report on cost savings and improvements. Be honest about who YOUR competitors are - your should be benchmarking yourself against outsourcers and "cloud" vendors. Again, this drive behaviour, make the cost comparison and deliver what management really wants.
If you have management that hates downtime, but you have trouble showing the hard work you do to maintain that - rethink what you are doing. You aren't keeping the systems up, you are addressing things that could go wrong. Do you maintain an operational risk matrix? Start formally recording and tracking what could go wrong, use it to focus you work appropriately and summarise this to management to demonstrate all the monsters under the bed you are chasing out that they never see. It is also a great way to get funding if you report on something in the risk matrix for 18 month as a future issue.. You have the opportunity to forecast things like hardware refreshes and forced software upgrades to management - presented in terms that are meaningful to them (e.g. "medium risks of downtime costing >$250,000 revenue can be resolved for $75,000") and you are able to report on all the risks you have removed? Are you working on things that aren't in the risk matrix? Why? Either get it on the risk matrix, start reporting it as project work (that someone else can justify the value of) or stop doing it.
Excuse the cynicism, but while it is possible that you are doing a great job you management would love if they knew, the fact you are asking the question highlights that you don't understand what senior management values. If you don't understand, how do you know you really are doing a valuable job? Sure you are working hard, but that isn't the same. I have seen technically competent hardworking people loose their jobs to outsourcers because they weren't delivering what senior management expected. Unless you are prepared to re-think your priorities to you are not going to get the results you want.
There seems to be an assumption that you can "keep an eye" on an on-site network administrator, and that's why you can trust them.
How would you tell if they were up to no good? Will you be looking over their shoulder constantly? I have worked in medium size IT shops (appro 100 people), and have seen the system admin team all stand around a computer as they go through their manager's CV (they had left it on there home drive). This was practically outside the manager's office, but you can't be everywhere at once.
Maybe you assume that you will only hire trustworthy people, but how can you tell if you can trust someone just by working with them?
Personally, I think the bigger risk to your operation will be if you hire a bad sysadmin.
Sucks for you. I get 20 days PTO + 8 holidays + 2 floats. In the three years at my company, I've taken one sick day. I'm thankful that my sickdays come out of vacation, otherwise, I'd have 2 weeks vacation and 2 weeks of wasted sick days a year.
Go up a couple of levels. You get 22 days a year (excluing public holidays) if you aren't sick.
I get 20 days a year if I'm not sick. If I do get sick, I will still have still have 20 days of paid leave. Over three years, you end up ahead by 5 days. If you catch a bad flu shortly, we break even.
Your lucky not to have been sick, things changed for me when I had kids.
I realise that you are not beign a troll, but I really have to reply to that.
You site Combodia as an example, I site Gaza. Whatever your polictical believfs are, you have to admit the presence of large numebrs of firearms, and even rockets, did little to prevent a heavily armed military from doing basically whatever they liked.
Do you honestly think your community could stand up against the US army? Because that is what you are sugesting.
In the 1700's both sides were armed with primitive firearms, relatively simple to make, with low range. Today, they can send a missile onto your house, bomb from high altitude, shell you from a tank, use a sniper, or even if you could get close enough you are just up against profesional traind soldiers, with bullet proof vests, and machine guns.
The same goes for calling CO2 pollution. You might as well call oxygen pollution.
This is a valid point, the word "pollution" is relative, in a similar way to the way the word "terrorist" depends on your point of view (if you a buying or selling cell phones for example).
Carbon Dioxide is a naturally occurring substance in the atmosphere, but the proportion of the atmosphere that it occupies has increased dramatically. The graph on this page shows the measured changes, but to be fair the graph on the top does not start from zero.
To make an analogy, there is a difference between some one talking on a telephone quietly on the other side of an empty room, and being in an elevator with a dozen other people all shooting into their cell phones.
The trouble with Kanji is, it is not phonetic. Think about it, and try to compare it to English again
It might be a minor point, but there are a number of things in english that are not phonetic. Is "c" preonounced "see" or "k", think of all the silent letters, and odd spellings that abound.
BOFH excuse #38: secretary plugged hairdryer into UPS.
That is where you got the idea for that post, right?
This may sound stupid, but it happens.
I was once helping to move the computer of the CIO's PA, and I she had a little 2000Kw heater under her desk. Of course, she didn't know that there was a difference between the red power points and the white ones. She was quite surprised when I explained that the red points are reliable power, and are generator backed, she had just used the closest point. (Which was red).
In another company the generator runs were performed over a weekend, with advance notice given to staff. So food left in the fridge wouldn't go off people would simply plug the fridge into reliable power rather then clean it out for the weekend.
There are other stupid things, like running the Aircon off the UPS rather then just the generator (if the generator doesn't start you will drain the UPS before the room gets too hot). You may have UPS power, but will your door entry system work? Getthing power right can be hard.
This is probably more of a commercial decision as opposed to a moral one.
BigPond is the ISP run by Australia's largest Telco, Telstra, which in a previous life was the government owned telecom monopoly.
Telstra is sponsoring Australian Idol so they have a vested interest in its success. If people are hitting a porn site instead of the official website then they aren't going to get value for their sponsorship dollar. I'll also hazard a guess that bigpond is providing the.au website.
However some one in a different state does have the ability so tell you what to do. They can vote at a national level and the national government that is elected can impose laws on all states. So some one in North Carolina has a say on what is legal in California. This isn't me telling you how I think it should be, I'm telling you how it is.
Name an example of this? At a national level, these things appear on a National ballot, and get voted on Nationally. I can't think of anything like what you have just suggested happening.
An example off the top of my head. People voted for Bill Clinton. I believe Clinton signed in a law that expired recently about guns, banning certain type of weapons. This law was binding on people in states that didn't vote for Clinton. Please understand I don't want to discuss the right and wrongs of the law, only that there was the ability to pass it.
Democracy is the will of the people. What you are suggesting might maybe work on a global scale, but I doubt it. Look at the attempts so far. The League of Nations, and then the current dismal result, the United Nations.
One of the biggest issues facing the UN is that countries are unwilling to give up their national sovereignty. They don't like the idea of a "foreigner" being able to have a say in what they can and cannot do. My argument is that if the principal of democracy is valid, then a foreigner has as much say as to what you are allowed to do as your next door neighbour.
They may choose not to dictate anything, in the same way that many in the US are happy to let things be decided at the state level. But at the same time they may feel so strongly about it that they do with to have a blanket prohibition. I do not want to go into the right and wrongs of this issue, but Bush seems prepared to try and get something banning gay marriage at a national level. Yes, I know there are more steps to getting that passes, but those extra steps are there because the nation as a whole didn't decide to remove them.
An effective way to make the United Nations more global would be to have elections in each member country. And the Sec. General would have to campaign in all the member countries, etc, etc. I for one would feel more "connected" to the United Nations then. Feel like I was a part of it. Right now it seems an aloof, corrupt thing.
Now you are getting down to the mechanisms of democracy, and things such as a representational democracy like we have now. You do realise that when you vote for president you are voting for a member of the electoral college, and not the president directly. That member could turn around at the last minute and vote for some one else.
In a more realistic light, you do not get to vote on every single bill. Did you vote for the PATRIOT act? You may not have but the odds are some one you voted for did (unless you didn't vote). Do you want to vote on every bill that passes through the Senate, the state legislator, the county office, every decision made by every elected official.
There are all sorts of other discussions such as First past the post voting versus instant runoff voting. Compulsory voting, voting eligibility, campaign finance and disclosure, that are all contentions but very important issues. Personally I think the most important decision is whether we truly want democracy above the national level. Once we make that decision, we can argue about the rest.
In California this year, there is a proposition on the ballot that you can vote for to raise the taxes of people making more than a million dollars a year! That is so wrong, I can't even believe it!
One group of people get to vote to take money away from another group.
What? You think we should allow Europeans and other countries in on our elections????
I don't think that the EU or any other country should have a say in the US election, any more then a resident of one state should have a say in an election in a different state.
However some one in a different state does have the ability so tell you what to do. They can vote at a national level and the national government that is elected can impose laws on all states. So some one in North Carolina has a say on what is legal in California. This isn't me telling you how I think it should be, I'm telling you how it is.
Step back a bit, what is so special about a nation? I mean, why should democracy stop at the level of a country. Why shouldn't some one in China, or Spain, or Nigeria, or for that matter outer Mongolia have some say with what happens in the US. Maybe not a big say, but its their world to. After all, what does democracy mean to you?
Ok, fair enough. But look, if he was facing a threat of invasion, then why didn't he just allow them to go in? Answer me that?
He did, but only at the last minute. And then he was refused. G.W.B. went in anyway, getting some 1000 US soldiers killed (aren't there only like 100,000 in Iraq?) and some huge number of locals.
More importantly, heattacked another country without being attacked or about to be attacked. And he went without UN approval.
I find it amusing that while in the process of holding an election, there is no movement to set up a democracy that will let the rest of the world have a say with what happens in the US. Its like someone saying "I don't like the current government, so I am not bound by the laws of this country".
As an aussie, I took it to be a reverence to the current leader of the main opposition party referring to our current leader as an "Arse licker" in the way he deals with G.W.B. SMH article.
I understand he also said G.W.B. was the most dangerous and incompetent US president in living memory, but I can't be certain those were his exact words. ABC news item
I'm not much of a fan of Mark Latham myself. In fact, these two comments are about the only thing that makes me like him. Oh yeah, he was the best chance of getting rit of the lying rodent we have now. To bad he couldn't win the election.
If you fire a warning shot, you become the aggressor. The attacker is now justified in killing you because they are (rightfully) in fear for their life.
Sorry, but if you are holding a gun, or hell, even if you are carrying a gun, I am rightfully in fear of my life. None of this "if you fire a warning shot".
I'm from a different culture, but at least if I have a car accident I know to a high degree of certanty that the other party will not have a gun in the glovebox. In fact, I can't think of any situation I have been in where I have had to ever ask myself "is this person armed". Only with police, military and some provate security personal, and then they are in uniform and the gun is on display.
The first Chinese man in space didn't see the wall, and this article says that the Chinese government has ordered the publisher of a text book to stop printing untill they correct the "falsehood".
What the public wants now is quality, better reception, and higher reliability
Until my battery started dying on me, I was pretty happy with the reception and quality. I have problems in some buildings, but you have to expect a couple of meters of reinforced concrete to interfere with radio/microwaves. I can take my phone overseas with me and it still works, and if you do a little research on the providers in the country you are visiting, doesn't even cost that much. I suppose the problem with the battery could be called a reliability issue, but after 2 1/2 years I expect something to give.
I don't own a PDA, I don't see it as cost justified. Something to remind me of appointments, tell me the time, do simple calculations, that would be useful. Most phones can almost to these to an almost acceptable level, and these are features I will look for when buying my next phone. As a phone the current products work well, but a phone could do the most useful (to me) functions of a PDA would be a great time saver. Why should I carry around multiple gadgets? Why not have one that does it all?
I've been in one company where a big HA cluster was less reliable than the previous non-HA environment they replaced.
Not an uncommon story. High Availability clusters are great in theory, but they introduce complexity. If you have a system 5 components, and a failure of any one of them would stop your system from working, is that worse then a system of 100 components, of which any two failures would have the same impact?
This is an extreme example, but quite often you will have more failures caused by the clustering then are saved.
Of course when it all works it is beautiful. The feeling when you ring a user up and ask if they have just had any problems and having them say no, when you know full well that a server has just rebooted.
The closing ); is just my preference, I just find it easier to terminate a vertical list this way. It adds a line, but I find it easier and faster to read then putting the list terminator on the same line as the last element. Feel free to make up your own mind.
Slashdot Mirror
Go talk to the Product Manger? Don't have a product manager? Who is responsible for talking to customers, prioritising features, and drawing up the product roadmap? This is the person you need to talk to.
Don't have product manger? As someone has said, find a new job. Developers by their nature spend most of their time looking at code, someone needs to spend most of their time talking to customers.
I would say the vast majority of Australian Muslims are horrified how this turned out, if only because it makes their lives so much harder. Most of them want to get on with their jobs and raise their families somewhere safe.
#illridewithyou
It depends on your definition of a crime.
Staging a sit-in prayer meeting in Julie Bishop's office is arguably a crime, yet what they were protesting about is apparently not.
http://www.watoday.com.au/wa-n...
If "Christians" are capable of sitting on both sites of the immigration debate, why can't Muslems.
Of course, the obvious thing to point our are groups like the LRA, or those operating in the Central African Republic. You will probably be quick to deny that these people are Christians, in just the same way many Australian Muslims are saying the Martin Pl The siege is un-Islamic.
Not news for 2 reasons
1) standard practice to re-screen if someone has bypassed screening
2) this has happened several times before (see links below)
The only thing that made this relevant for slashdot was the presence of an iPad (Ah Ha! A technology angle!). That said, the exit from T3 isn't that secure, but it is a domestic terminal. The domestic terminals use pretty standard x-ray of belongings and a metal detector. In other words, just like getting into an office building in downtown New York. The security is nothing like the international terminals which are about the same level as at US airports.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/201...
http://www.theaustralian.com.a...
Ignoring the joke answers this is probably the best answer here.
We work in support services - unless you are an IT service provider you aren't part of the business that makes money. You support the business, but you aren't the business. Think about all those other support functions, HR, finance, legal, office facilities - they are all needed too but I don't often hear them asking to be appreciated by management.
To the OP - What is your objective? You say you want management to "appreciate the hard work that an IT department does?" - but why?
* Job security?
* Pay/conditions?
* To make yourself feel good?
Turn the question around and ask "What does management appreciate?" - Face it, you aren't going to change your your boss but you can change the way you communicate, or better still, change the way you do things.
Do they value cost control? Show how you did your job on a budget - grab some analyst papers and show how you do it cheaper then comparable industry segments. If you start reporting on this then it will also drive yourself to manage costs well, so you should be able to report on cost savings and improvements. Be honest about who YOUR competitors are - your should be benchmarking yourself against outsourcers and "cloud" vendors. Again, this drive behaviour, make the cost comparison and deliver what management really wants.
If you have management that hates downtime, but you have trouble showing the hard work you do to maintain that - rethink what you are doing. You aren't keeping the systems up, you are addressing things that could go wrong. Do you maintain an operational risk matrix? Start formally recording and tracking what could go wrong, use it to focus you work appropriately and summarise this to management to demonstrate all the monsters under the bed you are chasing out that they never see. It is also a great way to get funding if you report on something in the risk matrix for 18 month as a future issue.. You have the opportunity to forecast things like hardware refreshes and forced software upgrades to management - presented in terms that are meaningful to them (e.g. "medium risks of downtime costing >$250,000 revenue can be resolved for $75,000") and you are able to report on all the risks you have removed? Are you working on things that aren't in the risk matrix? Why? Either get it on the risk matrix, start reporting it as project work (that someone else can justify the value of) or stop doing it.
Excuse the cynicism, but while it is possible that you are doing a great job you management would love if they knew, the fact you are asking the question highlights that you don't understand what senior management values. If you don't understand, how do you know you really are doing a valuable job? Sure you are working hard, but that isn't the same. I have seen technically competent hardworking people loose their jobs to outsourcers because they weren't delivering what senior management expected. Unless you are prepared to re-think your priorities to you are not going to get the results you want.
There seems to be an assumption that you can "keep an eye" on an on-site network administrator, and that's why you can trust them.
How would you tell if they were up to no good? Will you be looking over their shoulder constantly?
I have worked in medium size IT shops (appro 100 people), and have seen the system admin team all stand around a computer as they go through their manager's CV (they had left it on there home drive). This was practically outside the manager's office, but you can't be everywhere at once.
Maybe you assume that you will only hire trustworthy people, but how can you tell if you can trust someone just by working with them?
Personally, I think the bigger risk to your operation will be if you hire a bad sysadmin.
Owen.
Go up a couple of levels. You get 22 days a year (excluing public holidays) if you aren't sick.
I get 20 days a year if I'm not sick. If I do get sick, I will still have still have 20 days of paid leave. Over three years, you end up ahead by 5 days. If you catch a bad flu shortly, we break even.
Your lucky not to have been sick, things changed for me when I had kids.
I realise that you are not beign a troll, but I really have to reply to that.
You site Combodia as an example, I site Gaza. Whatever your polictical believfs are, you have to admit the presence of large numebrs of firearms, and even rockets, did little to prevent a heavily armed military from doing basically whatever they liked.
Do you honestly think your community could stand up against the US army? Because that is what you are sugesting.
In the 1700's both sides were armed with primitive firearms, relatively simple to make, with low range. Today, they can send a missile onto your house, bomb from high altitude, shell you from a tank, use a sniper, or even if you could get close enough you are just up against profesional traind soldiers, with bullet proof vests, and machine guns.
I believe it is roughly equivalent to the Federal Reserve in the US.
This is a valid point, the word "pollution" is relative, in a similar way to the way the word "terrorist" depends on your point of view (if you a buying or selling cell phones for example).
Carbon Dioxide is a naturally occurring substance in the atmosphere, but the proportion of the atmosphere that it occupies has increased dramatically. The graph on this page shows the measured changes, but to be fair the graph on the top does not start from zero.
To make an analogy, there is a difference between some one talking on a telephone quietly on the other side of an empty room, and being in an elevator with a dozen other people all shooting into their cell phones.
It might be a minor point, but there are a number of things in english that are not phonetic. Is "c" preonounced "see" or "k", think of all the silent letters, and odd spellings that abound.
This may sound stupid, but it happens.
I was once helping to move the computer of the CIO's PA, and I she had a little 2000Kw heater under her desk. Of course, she didn't know that there was a difference between the red power points and the white ones. She was quite surprised when I explained that the red points are reliable power, and are generator backed, she had just used the closest point. (Which was red).
In another company the generator runs were performed over a weekend, with advance notice given to staff. So food left in the fridge wouldn't go off people would simply plug the fridge into reliable power rather then clean it out for the weekend.
There are other stupid things, like running the Aircon off the UPS rather then just the generator (if the generator doesn't start you will drain the UPS before the room gets too hot). You may have UPS power, but will your door entry system work? Getthing power right can be hard.
This is probably more of a commercial decision as opposed to a moral one.
.au website.
BigPond is the ISP run by Australia's largest Telco, Telstra, which in a previous life was the government owned telecom monopoly.
Telstra is sponsoring Australian Idol so they have a vested interest in its success. If people are hitting a porn site instead of the official website then they aren't going to get value for their sponsorship dollar. I'll also hazard a guess that bigpond is providing the
An example off the top of my head. People voted for Bill Clinton. I believe Clinton signed in a law that expired recently about guns, banning certain type of weapons. This law was binding on people in states that didn't vote for Clinton. Please understand I don't want to discuss the right and wrongs of the law, only that there was the ability to pass it.
One of the biggest issues facing the UN is that countries are unwilling to give up their national sovereignty. They don't like the idea of a "foreigner" being able to have a say in what they can and cannot do. My argument is that if the principal of democracy is valid, then a foreigner has as much say as to what you are allowed to do as your next door neighbour.
They may choose not to dictate anything, in the same way that many in the US are happy to let things be decided at the state level. But at the same time they may feel so strongly about it that they do with to have a blanket prohibition. I do not want to go into the right and wrongs of this issue, but Bush seems prepared to try and get something banning gay marriage at a national level. Yes, I know there are more steps to getting that passes, but those extra steps are there because the nation as a whole didn't decide to remove them.
Now you are getting down to the mechanisms of democracy, and things such as a representational democracy like we have now. You do realise that when you vote for president you are voting for a member of the electoral college, and not the president directly. That member could turn around at the last minute and vote for some one else.
In a more realistic light, you do not get to vote on every single bill. Did you vote for the PATRIOT act? You may not have but the odds are some one you voted for did (unless you didn't vote). Do you want to vote on every bill that passes through the Senate, the state legislator, the county office, every decision made by every elected official.
There are all sorts of other discussions such as First past the post voting versus instant runoff voting. Compulsory voting, voting eligibility, campaign finance and disclosure, that are all contentions but very important issues. Personally I think the most important decision is whether we truly want democracy above the national level. Once we make that decision, we can argue about the rest.
From the article
What sort of punishment would you expect for a $400,000 fraud? It was probably more then this, as this was presumably just their best month.
Sounds like democracy.
I don't think that the EU or any other country should have a say in the US election, any more then a resident of one state should have a say in an election in a different state.
However some one in a different state does have the ability so tell you what to do. They can vote at a national level and the national government that is elected can impose laws on all states. So some one in North Carolina has a say on what is legal in California. This isn't me telling you how I think it should be, I'm telling you how it is.
Step back a bit, what is so special about a nation? I mean, why should democracy stop at the level of a country. Why shouldn't some one in China, or Spain, or Nigeria, or for that matter outer Mongolia have some say with what happens in the US. Maybe not a big say, but its their world to. After all, what does democracy mean to you?
He did, but only at the last minute. And then he was refused. G.W.B. went in anyway, getting some 1000 US soldiers killed (aren't there only like 100,000 in Iraq?) and some huge number of locals.
More importantly, heattacked another country without being attacked or about to be attacked. And he went without UN approval.
I find it amusing that while in the process of holding an election, there is no movement to set up a democracy that will let the rest of the world have a say with what happens in the US. Its like someone saying "I don't like the current government, so I am not bound by the laws of this country".
Think about the real meaning of democracy.
As an aussie, I took it to be a reverence to the current leader of the main opposition party referring to our current leader as an "Arse licker" in the way he deals with G.W.B. SMH article
I understand he also said G.W.B. was the most dangerous and incompetent US president in living memory, but I can't be certain those were his exact words. ABC news item
I'm not much of a fan of Mark Latham myself. In fact, these two comments are about the only thing that makes me like him. Oh yeah, he was the best chance of getting rit of the lying rodent we have now. To bad he couldn't win the election.
Sorry, but if you are holding a gun, or hell, even if you are carrying a gun, I am rightfully in fear of my life. None of this "if you fire a warning shot".
I'm from a different culture, but at least if I have a car accident I know to a high degree of certanty that the other party will not have a gun in the glovebox. In fact, I can't think of any situation I have been in where I have had to ever ask myself "is this person armed". Only with police, military and some provate security personal, and then they are in uniform and the gun is on display.
The first Chinese man in space didn't see the wall, and this article says that the Chinese government has ordered the publisher of a text book to stop printing untill they correct the "falsehood".
This is an extreme example, but quite often you will have more failures caused by the clustering then are saved.
Of course when it all works it is beautiful. The feeling when you ring a user up and ask if they have just had any problems and having them say no, when you know full well that a server has just rebooted.
some_function(
parm,
other_parm,
one_more_parm
);
The closing ); is just my preference, I just find it easier to terminate a vertical list this way. It adds a line, but I find it easier and faster to read then putting the list terminator on the same line as the last element. Feel free to make up your own mind.