Make user an admin on their own machine if you want to increase the IT staff. Lock down group policies if you are overworked.
I think you meant:
Make a stupid user an admin on their own machine if you want to increase the IT staff. Make a smart user an admin on their own machine if you are overworked. Make everyone an admin on their own machine if you're a contractor, for obvious self-enrichment reasons.
One place I worked in the 90s, about 100K seats, about 10 HD on the phones, about 15 field techs, about 5 WAN guys (myself and 4 others), about about 10 operators / system programmers / unix guys, works out to about 1:2500.
This was an IBM mainframe shop handling about 5% of all retail stock transactions worldwide on "dumb" terminals. If they didn't demand 24x7 coverage to handle worldwide markets, it would have been somewhat cheaper as we often staffed for "just in case". Having someone on pager was unacceptable per the SLAs and marketing, so we had to be on site, so they had to hire more people, even if all we did was read technical manuals all night (IBM had some pretty good textbooks for ATM networking, assembly language, COBOL, and a few others)... The IBM onsite engineer mostly did hardware work, everything was triple to quad redundant, and that redundancy was often tested and the customers never knew...
I guess those pesky PCs need one per 100 to 300 PCs to get an "acceptable level of service", for a PC anyway.
Yep, Midwest snow isn't powdery. It's a very wet snow that sticks to things.
I live in the area discussed in the articles. Snow is just snow. 99% of the time its a nice fluffy powder. The other 1% of the time its more accurately called "freezing rain". If you live within a few feet of the great lakes, then its a little different.
The problem with the lights is they had no engineering constraint to prevent snow accumulation, but they had a huge engineering constraint to make it easy fast and safe for a dude on a ladder to replace the incandescent bulbs that keep burning out.
Someone sold them the idea that all they need to do is swap the bulbs... Turns out its not so simple.
Its trivial to make a light fixture that wont ice up, just make it perfectly smooth and sealed and vaguely concave... In the unlikely event of failure (lightning?) unscrew and replace the entire light unit from the bottom (not the whole pole, just the light box).
You also have the problem in that Engineering degrees are so in demand, our engineering schools have become diploma mills. Self-contained enclaves. There was no effort on the part of my school to connect what we were learning to anything else.
The problem isn't the field takes too long to learn, its the curriculum is designed for incoming folks starting at too low of a level.
There are two ways to teach a curriculum. Assume you're starting at zero skill a completely blank slate, like foreign languages, higher math (calculus), comp sci. Or assume you're starting at an "average high school level" like literature (they assume you already know how to read), math overall (they assume, sometimes incorrectly, that you already know algebra, geometery, etc).
I think it's time to move engineering in general out of the "start at zero class" and over to the "fine tuning class". Or perhaps get rid of the idea of bachelors engineering degrees and switch to a masters level program, much like medical or legal school.
After all engineers are taught to seek out answers, to be rational and logical and not to resort to special pleading (e.g. "it was God's will") when something doesn't work properly.
Actually that description fits the scientists. By quantity, most engineering education is of the "trust us" variety. Here is the equation to memorize for transistor base-emitter junction voltage, now plan around it. Why is a question for the scientists, you should be asking yourself how that impacts the design of a class AB amplifier's biasing circuits, not asking yourself "why".
This applies directly to religious fundamentalism. Here is the "textbook" aka Koran. Try to memorize it to "get an A" aka get into heaven. Now based on what you've memorized, "design something" aka a big ole kaboom.
Every serious military fan boy (or whatever) knows that combat engineers are, overall, the most economically effective soldiers.
Take everything you'd want in a grunt, but invest a little more education so they can use more technology, and that is basically a combat engineer. A super-grunt, the grunt of the future... today.
Per dollar invested by society, per person, per pound, per whatever, combat engineers are simply the most effective soldiers on the planet. There are other groups with "more battlefield power", tac nuke artillery, attack copter pilot, etc, but they invariably require a million to trillion dollar rear echelon and military industrial complex back home, and lack the sustained long term fighting power of a combat engineering group. Anything that can crush ten combat engineering units, has an overall societal cost maybe 1e6 higher than a CE unit, so assuming enough smart enlistees, your overall military power is the highest when you maximize your combat engineers.
The only reason more combat engineers aren't used, is the quantity of enlistees with the required superior brain power is limited.
In the 70s/80s there was kind of a "revenge of the jocks" doctrinal move toward special forces, etc, but that has pretty much failed, fizzled out, and the combat engineers reign supreme on the battlefield once again...
Non-military folks can pretend to be surprised that a military force would try to recruit engineers for pageviews or whatever, but for those in the business, its no surprise at all.
(And, yes, I was in the Army in the early 90s, and no, I was in Ordnance not combat engineering, and as a supplier we were well aware that the combat engineers have by far the most effective armaments)
In that case I'd ask management to have enough guts to tell you what they really want. If they think you dress like slobs they should tell you so. I have no sympathy at all with gutless management and you shouldn't either.
You may sleep better if you never know.
The answer might be that they never intended to do it. "Oh, all of you hate the idea? I would have never guessed. Well, the good news is I convinced my boss to just skip that idea, we won, yeah for us! Oh and by the way, I forgot to mention, no pay raises or bonuses in IT this year. But, its all good since we won the battle of no uniforms! See, we get a reward sometimes!"
Or they very consciously intended to pull your chain... Need to downsize 10% this year? Make working conditions intolerable until 10% quit. Then suspiciously get rid of the dumb ideas. See, everyones happy no one had to be fired!
When your skills outgrow the help desk - and they should - consider losing the uniform as a perk of advancement.
Or in reverse, wearing the uniform is a punishment. I guess management thinks morale is too high in the department? Maybe you could compromise and they could just verbally insult you, or break out the paddles (thank you sir may I have another).
It just isn't possible. Assuming that, at each city, you have 3 minutes of deceleration, a stop time of 10 minutes, and 5 minutes of acceleration, that's 18*20 = 360 minutes, or 6 hours. That doesn't even include time at full speed. Okay, let's be insane and decelerate in only 1 minute and accelerate in 2 and stop for only 3 minutes, that's now two hours,
Ever ridden in a passenger train? They accelerate and decelerate at a car like pace. The only time they don't, is to save energy if they're on time or ahead of time. Its downright uncomfortable/impossible to stand without holding onto something, hence the hand straps to grab. A super fast train is probably much worse. I find it highly unlikely it would take more than 60 secs to go 0-300 or 300-0. That's actually pretty slow acceleration, compared to a car.
I'm thinking one / one / one, total three mins, times 20 is 60 mins station time, leaving two hours, cruise around 300 MPH, it does all work out. Of course there is always marketing BS, such as not counting station time...
You may be confusing passenger trains with freight trains. A couple million pounds of coal does indeed take awhile to accelerate and decelerate.
It seems to me that when China has some of the best developed infrastructure in the world, it really can't be considered a developing country any more. It is developed. Sure, maybe not all areas of China are fully developed, but you could state the same thing about any country, including the US.
The opposite of a developing nation, like China, is not developed, as in film, but a decaying nation, like the USA.
Once China has a couple unmaintained bridge collapses, maybe a few regional power failures, some abandoned cities like Detroit, then they will no longer be a developing nation.
airports already have the infrastructure like rent a cars and public transportation that will have to be duplicated at a new high speed rail station.
Do you have any idea where Grand Central Station in NYC or Union Station in CHC are located? Beyond obviously, they are in NYC, and CHC, I mean? Obviously the last mile would have to be at the sedate 60 MPH the trains currently cruise at, but thats only one minute...
Another form of infrastructure is best demonstrated by Amtrak MKA station, aka MARS, which is on the airport grounds...
I've been to all three stations... the idea that there is a lack of station transportation infrastructure is laughable.
The good news, is I like the topic, I have fat stacks of cash and am willing to part with it for a good book. Emphasis on the word Good. A direct pipeline into the minds of the insiders, is worth some bucks.
The book credits a number of Rubyists with contributions for each of the sections.
Ah, and then the bad news. Naughty book editor, gimme my money back.
This makes for some noticeable variation in the stylistic presentation from topic to topic.
So, Mr reviewer, what say? You described the battlefield, now which side won? Do the direct insights of the words of the prophets outweigh cruddy editing, or is it too shaky to read? I've got a pocket full of cash and like the bank robber says in the movie Dirty Harry, indecisively struggling asking himself if Harry's revolver is empty or not, "... I gots to know..."
There were a few gem updates which were not compatible with the code in the book. The twitter gem in particular had non-backward compatible changes to authentication (to support OAuth). I was able to get the example working with a few minutes of Google
Time for my usual Slashdot book review rant. Why buy this book, if the review states its mostly a list of inspirational google searches?
MOST technical books are little more than edited concatenated google searches... However it is possible to write a technical book that is better than that, or at least different from that. For example, the "little schemer" series is certainly unique.
Yea but you just cant play the coulda woulda shoulda game, it didn't work when I was 5, and its not gonna work when corporations do it now.
OK, but you fail to give a logical argument why it won't, other than, "cwix says so".
Yes, everyone knows there is a difference between wild daydreams and signed legal contract obligations. I think the article is more about the latter than the former.
You cannot budget money you don't have yet, not reliably. Sometimes money thats supposed to show up doesn't for whatever reason, and blaming it on IT workers, and selling your service as an IT expert smacks of
smacks of breaking a signed legal contract for IT services with a failure to perform penalty of a specified # of dollars, which is going to have a realistically calculable dollar impact on other areas of the company and other company projects.
And that makes it bunk.
Not really, it just makes it a continuous process instead of a batch process. Here's the standard slashdot car analogy. Using your rules, a miner would dig iron ore out of the ground, and chill out doing nothing and until the car was sold, at which point, depending on how much he was finally payed, he'd decide if he would invest the time in digging out the next car's worth of iron ore and await payment. Most modern business is conducted on a somewhat more continuous basis involving budgets and planning and estimates and such.
To actually quote the dude in entirety instead of one small part:
When thinking about indirect costs, you need to include the costs of replacing the failed system, the disruption costs to your business, the lost revenue because of the failed system, the lost opportunity costs on what that lost revenue could have driven, the costs to your customers, lost market share, and on and on.
You're claiming that his "the lost opportunity costs on what that lost revenue could have driven" is bogus. However, thats only a small part of his otherwise pretty good argument, so overally, not too bad.
Also, at least some times, its pretty easy to calculate a lost cost revenue cost... Imagine you've got a signed contract to deliver product A, yielding a profit, and you fail. You needed that profit to grease the wheels for totally independent project B. Now, instead of using "free" cash, you'll be hitting the line of credit at the bank, which has some very easily measured costs, or you'll be failing project B, which had its own precisely defined profit... That sounds like a "lost opportunity cost on what the lost revenue could have driven".
I only use a total of several minutes per month. Cell phone are not designed or marketed towards customers like me.
Same here. You're looking at the wrong marketing. Check out the "prepaid" providers like virginmobile. I went from paying Verizon around fifty dollars per month to paying virginmobile about ten dollars per month.
Now, realize virgin mobile marketing material is heavily and exclusively oriented toward the "young ignorant urban minority poor" demographic group, so most other demographics (such as my own, being roughly the exact opposite) will find their marketing campaign to be repulsive if not downright offensive. But that has nothing to do with the phone hardware, or their billing system, both of which work quite well.
It seems just to be a bunch of vague educational programs wrapped in sweet talk without any specific outcomes intended.
Hasn't that been the American way of education for the past century? We turned out better than they turned out, maybe they should pragmatically give our method a try? An amazing amount of effort has been applied to avoid making that frank admission.
Now, perhaps the idea is to be a complete paper replacement, but IMO, a lack of physical keyboard just hinders a computer it for any serious use.
Hmm. For the past 3000 years, we've been told the key to education is reading. For the past 30 years, we've been told the key to education is memorizing the UI for a recent version of Excel.
No keyboard means no ability to write, but despite the best daydreams of bloggers around the world, until you're educated you probably have nothing useful to write about anyway...
Slashdot Mirror
Brilliant explanation, astounding logical arguments, couldn't agree with you more. Bravo!
Make user an admin on their own machine if you want to increase the IT staff. Lock down group policies if you are overworked.
I think you meant:
Make a stupid user an admin on their own machine if you want to increase the IT staff. Make a smart user an admin on their own machine if you are overworked. Make everyone an admin on their own machine if you're a contractor, for obvious self-enrichment reasons.
One place I worked in the 90s, about 100K seats, about 10 HD on the phones, about 15 field techs, about 5 WAN guys (myself and 4 others), about about 10 operators / system programmers / unix guys, works out to about 1:2500.
This was an IBM mainframe shop handling about 5% of all retail stock transactions worldwide on "dumb" terminals. If they didn't demand 24x7 coverage to handle worldwide markets, it would have been somewhat cheaper as we often staffed for "just in case". Having someone on pager was unacceptable per the SLAs and marketing, so we had to be on site, so they had to hire more people, even if all we did was read technical manuals all night (IBM had some pretty good textbooks for ATM networking, assembly language, COBOL, and a few others)... The IBM onsite engineer mostly did hardware work, everything was triple to quad redundant, and that redundancy was often tested and the customers never knew...
I guess those pesky PCs need one per 100 to 300 PCs to get an "acceptable level of service", for a PC anyway.
Yep, Midwest snow isn't powdery. It's a very wet snow that sticks to things.
I live in the area discussed in the articles. Snow is just snow. 99% of the time its a nice fluffy powder. The other 1% of the time its more accurately called "freezing rain". If you live within a few feet of the great lakes, then its a little different.
The problem with the lights is they had no engineering constraint to prevent snow accumulation, but they had a huge engineering constraint to make it easy fast and safe for a dude on a ladder to replace the incandescent bulbs that keep burning out.
Someone sold them the idea that all they need to do is swap the bulbs... Turns out its not so simple.
Its trivial to make a light fixture that wont ice up, just make it perfectly smooth and sealed and vaguely concave... In the unlikely event of failure (lightning?) unscrew and replace the entire light unit from the bottom (not the whole pole, just the light box).
You also have the problem in that Engineering degrees are so in demand, our engineering schools have become diploma mills. Self-contained enclaves. There was no effort on the part of my school to connect what we were learning to anything else.
The problem isn't the field takes too long to learn, its the curriculum is designed for incoming folks starting at too low of a level.
There are two ways to teach a curriculum. Assume you're starting at zero skill a completely blank slate, like foreign languages, higher math (calculus), comp sci. Or assume you're starting at an "average high school level" like literature (they assume you already know how to read), math overall (they assume, sometimes incorrectly, that you already know algebra, geometery, etc).
I think it's time to move engineering in general out of the "start at zero class" and over to the "fine tuning class". Or perhaps get rid of the idea of bachelors engineering degrees and switch to a masters level program, much like medical or legal school.
After all engineers are taught to seek out answers, to be rational and logical and not to resort to special pleading (e.g. "it was God's will") when something doesn't work properly.
Actually that description fits the scientists. By quantity, most engineering education is of the "trust us" variety. Here is the equation to memorize for transistor base-emitter junction voltage, now plan around it. Why is a question for the scientists, you should be asking yourself how that impacts the design of a class AB amplifier's biasing circuits, not asking yourself "why".
This applies directly to religious fundamentalism. Here is the "textbook" aka Koran. Try to memorize it to "get an A" aka get into heaven. Now based on what you've memorized, "design something" aka a big ole kaboom.
Every serious military fan boy (or whatever) knows that combat engineers are, overall, the most economically effective soldiers.
Take everything you'd want in a grunt, but invest a little more education so they can use more technology, and that is basically a combat engineer. A super-grunt, the grunt of the future ... today.
Per dollar invested by society, per person, per pound, per whatever, combat engineers are simply the most effective soldiers on the planet. There are other groups with "more battlefield power", tac nuke artillery, attack copter pilot, etc, but they invariably require a million to trillion dollar rear echelon and military industrial complex back home, and lack the sustained long term fighting power of a combat engineering group. Anything that can crush ten combat engineering units, has an overall societal cost maybe 1e6 higher than a CE unit, so assuming enough smart enlistees, your overall military power is the highest when you maximize your combat engineers.
The only reason more combat engineers aren't used, is the quantity of enlistees with the required superior brain power is limited.
In the 70s/80s there was kind of a "revenge of the jocks" doctrinal move toward special forces, etc, but that has pretty much failed, fizzled out, and the combat engineers reign supreme on the battlefield once again...
Non-military folks can pretend to be surprised that a military force would try to recruit engineers for pageviews or whatever, but for those in the business, its no surprise at all.
(And, yes, I was in the Army in the early 90s, and no, I was in Ordnance not combat engineering, and as a supplier we were well aware that the combat engineers have by far the most effective armaments)
Most military uniforms come with either a modern pistol/rifle or a ceremonial sword.
So, do you get the BOFH shotgun or the ninja katana sword?
In that case I'd ask management to have enough guts to tell you what they really want. If they think you dress like slobs they should tell you so. I have no sympathy at all with gutless management and you shouldn't either.
You may sleep better if you never know.
The answer might be that they never intended to do it. "Oh, all of you hate the idea? I would have never guessed. Well, the good news is I convinced my boss to just skip that idea, we won, yeah for us! Oh and by the way, I forgot to mention, no pay raises or bonuses in IT this year. But, its all good since we won the battle of no uniforms! See, we get a reward sometimes!"
Or they very consciously intended to pull your chain... Need to downsize 10% this year? Make working conditions intolerable until 10% quit. Then suspiciously get rid of the dumb ideas. See, everyones happy no one had to be fired!
They're also the lowest paid of the bunch.
I think you've found the goal. Hope you weren't planning on a pay raise this year.
what about star trek uniforms?
If your female coworkers look like 7 of 9 or Deanna, thats a major win. If your coworkers look more like Rosanne, well...
When your skills outgrow the help desk - and they should - consider losing the uniform as a perk of advancement.
Or in reverse, wearing the uniform is a punishment. I guess management thinks morale is too high in the department? Maybe you could compromise and they could just verbally insult you, or break out the paddles (thank you sir may I have another).
"Didn't I tell you to call me Ernie, or Big Ern?"
Perhaps you have him confused with his brother Phil McCracken?
No person in their right mind would do such a thing.
Which makes me all the more surprised that no one has tried.
It just isn't possible. Assuming that, at each city, you have 3 minutes of deceleration, a stop time of 10 minutes, and 5 minutes of acceleration, that's 18*20 = 360 minutes, or 6 hours. That doesn't even include time at full speed. Okay, let's be insane and decelerate in only 1 minute and accelerate in 2 and stop for only 3 minutes, that's now two hours,
Ever ridden in a passenger train? They accelerate and decelerate at a car like pace. The only time they don't, is to save energy if they're on time or ahead of time. Its downright uncomfortable/impossible to stand without holding onto something, hence the hand straps to grab. A super fast train is probably much worse. I find it highly unlikely it would take more than 60 secs to go 0-300 or 300-0. That's actually pretty slow acceleration, compared to a car.
I'm thinking one / one / one, total three mins, times 20 is 60 mins station time, leaving two hours, cruise around 300 MPH, it does all work out. Of course there is always marketing BS, such as not counting station time...
You may be confusing passenger trains with freight trains. A couple million pounds of coal does indeed take awhile to accelerate and decelerate.
It seems to me that when China has some of the best developed infrastructure in the world, it really can't be considered a developing country any more. It is developed. Sure, maybe not all areas of China are fully developed, but you could state the same thing about any country, including the US.
The opposite of a developing nation, like China, is not developed, as in film, but a decaying nation, like the USA.
Once China has a couple unmaintained bridge collapses, maybe a few regional power failures, some abandoned cities like Detroit, then they will no longer be a developing nation.
airports already have the infrastructure like rent a cars and public transportation that will have to be duplicated at a new high speed rail station.
Do you have any idea where Grand Central Station in NYC or Union Station in CHC are located? Beyond obviously, they are in NYC, and CHC, I mean? Obviously the last mile would have to be at the sedate 60 MPH the trains currently cruise at, but thats only one minute...
Another form of infrastructure is best demonstrated by Amtrak MKA station, aka MARS, which is on the airport grounds...
I've been to all three stations... the idea that there is a lack of station transportation infrastructure is laughable.
The good news, is I like the topic, I have fat stacks of cash and am willing to part with it for a good book. Emphasis on the word Good. A direct pipeline into the minds of the insiders, is worth some bucks.
The book credits a number of Rubyists with contributions for each of the sections.
Ah, and then the bad news. Naughty book editor, gimme my money back.
This makes for some noticeable variation in the stylistic presentation from topic to topic.
So, Mr reviewer, what say? You described the battlefield, now which side won? Do the direct insights of the words of the prophets outweigh cruddy editing, or is it too shaky to read? I've got a pocket full of cash and like the bank robber says in the movie Dirty Harry, indecisively struggling asking himself if Harry's revolver is empty or not, "... I gots to know ..."
There were a few gem updates which were not compatible with the code in the book. The twitter gem in particular had non-backward compatible changes to authentication (to support OAuth). I was able to get the example working with a few minutes of Google
Time for my usual Slashdot book review rant. Why buy this book, if the review states its mostly a list of inspirational google searches?
MOST technical books are little more than edited concatenated google searches... However it is possible to write a technical book that is better than that, or at least different from that. For example, the "little schemer" series is certainly unique.
So, why buy this book?
Yea but you just cant play the coulda woulda shoulda game, it didn't work when I was 5, and its not gonna work when corporations do it now.
OK, but you fail to give a logical argument why it won't, other than, "cwix says so".
Yes, everyone knows there is a difference between wild daydreams and signed legal contract obligations. I think the article is more about the latter than the former.
You cannot budget money you don't have yet, not reliably. Sometimes money thats supposed to show up doesn't for whatever reason, and blaming it on IT workers, and selling your service as an IT expert smacks of
smacks of breaking a signed legal contract for IT services with a failure to perform penalty of a specified # of dollars, which is going to have a realistically calculable dollar impact on other areas of the company and other company projects.
And that makes it bunk.
Not really, it just makes it a continuous process instead of a batch process. Here's the standard slashdot car analogy. Using your rules, a miner would dig iron ore out of the ground, and chill out doing nothing and until the car was sold, at which point, depending on how much he was finally payed, he'd decide if he would invest the time in digging out the next car's worth of iron ore and await payment. Most modern business is conducted on a somewhat more continuous basis involving budgets and planning and estimates and such.
To actually quote the dude in entirety instead of one small part:
When thinking about indirect costs, you need to include the costs of replacing the failed system, the disruption costs to your business, the lost revenue because of the failed system, the lost opportunity costs on what that lost revenue could have driven, the costs to your customers, lost market share, and on and on.
You're claiming that his "the lost opportunity costs on what that lost revenue could have driven" is bogus. However, thats only a small part of his otherwise pretty good argument, so overally, not too bad.
Also, at least some times, its pretty easy to calculate a lost cost revenue cost... Imagine you've got a signed contract to deliver product A, yielding a profit, and you fail. You needed that profit to grease the wheels for totally independent project B. Now, instead of using "free" cash, you'll be hitting the line of credit at the bank, which has some very easily measured costs, or you'll be failing project B, which had its own precisely defined profit... That sounds like a "lost opportunity cost on what the lost revenue could have driven".
I only use a total of several minutes per month. Cell phone are not designed or marketed towards customers like me.
Same here. You're looking at the wrong marketing. Check out the "prepaid" providers like virginmobile. I went from paying Verizon around fifty dollars per month to paying virginmobile about ten dollars per month.
Now, realize virgin mobile marketing material is heavily and exclusively oriented toward the "young ignorant urban minority poor" demographic group, so most other demographics (such as my own, being roughly the exact opposite) will find their marketing campaign to be repulsive if not downright offensive. But that has nothing to do with the phone hardware, or their billing system, both of which work quite well.
It seems just to be a bunch of vague educational programs wrapped in sweet talk without any specific outcomes intended.
Hasn't that been the American way of education for the past century? We turned out better than they turned out, maybe they should pragmatically give our method a try? An amazing amount of effort has been applied to avoid making that frank admission.
Now, perhaps the idea is to be a complete paper replacement, but IMO, a lack of physical keyboard just hinders a computer it for any serious use.
Hmm. For the past 3000 years, we've been told the key to education is reading. For the past 30 years, we've been told the key to education is memorizing the UI for a recent version of Excel.
No keyboard means no ability to write, but despite the best daydreams of bloggers around the world, until you're educated you probably have nothing useful to write about anyway...
Nobody is going to wan to hop around amongst a bunch of giant beer cans with a wrench in their hand.
Beer and wenches always go together... Oh, you said "wrench"