Okay, your department does stuff, right? Break that stuff up into categories. Look at where things can (and do) go wrong. Try to figure out why. Figure out a way to measure success vs. failure. Then apply those measurements.
Some concrete examples.
What percentage of updates to "internet facing" services are applied within a set time frame? Maybe you decide they need to be applied within four business hours, or maybe 12 hours. When a patch is released it is a "moment of truth."
What percentage of help desk calls are resolved (i.e. the employee is back to work) within x minutes (30? 60?). Why aren't they all?
Six Sigma is full of buzzwords, but IMO it has some great potential. If I was a a guy "in the trenches" (sadly, I'm out of the technical field right now) I'd be taking advantage of a Six Sigma push to help my boss (and his boss) feel my "chronic pain." I.e. "The reason we can't resolve 99.992% of help desk calls in 60 min is that we don't have the parts we are supposed to have." or whatever.
PS: Feel free to show this to your boss. Make sure he knows my email address is peter at fpcc net;-) I'm available for consulting, or save a bundle and hire me outright!
Andrew Martin said, "Thank you," and took the seat offered him. He didn't look driven to the last resort, but he had been.
He didn't, actually, look anything, for there was a smooth blankness, to his face, except for the sadness one imagined one saw in his eyes. His hair was smooth, light brown, rather fine; and he had no facial hair. He looked freshly and cleanly shaved. His clothes were distinctly old-fashioned, but neat, and predominantly a velvety red-purple in color.
Facing him from behind the desk was the surgeon The nameplate on the desk included a fully identifying series of letters and numbers which Andrew didn't bother with. To call him Doctor would be quite enough
"When can the operation be carried through, Doctor?" he asked.
Softly, with that certain inalienable note of respect that a robot always used to a human being, the surgeon said, "I am not certain, sir, that I understand how or upon whom such an operation could be performed."
There might have been a look of respectful intransigence on the surgeon's face, if a robot of his sort, in lightly bronzed stainless steel, could have such an expression-or any expression.
Andrew Martin studied the robot's right hand, his cutting hand, as it lay motionless on the desk. The fingers were long and were shaped into artistically metallic, looping curves so -graceful and appropriate that one could imagine a scalpel fitting them and becoming, temporarily, one piece with them. There would be no hesitation in his work, no stumbling, no quivering, no mistakes. That confidence came with specialization, of course, a specialization so fiercely desired by humanity that few robots were, any longer, independently brained. A surgeon, of course, would have to be. But this one, though brained, was so limited in his capacity that he did not recognize Andrew, had probably never heard of him.
"Have you ever thought you would like to be a man?" Andrew asked.
The surgeon hesitated a moment, as though the question fitted nowhere in his allotted positronic pathways. "But I am a robot, sir."
Labor dispute to be settled by the California Raisins.
-Peter
PS: The Supremes are a Motown group AFAIR.
-P
Re:Does Morse not have three codes?
on
DNA Goes Binary
·
· Score: 4, Informative
It's a synchronous protocol. It is also a binary protocol. The line is either high or nominally zero. A dit is a short interval of current. A dah is an interval of current about three times as long as a dit. A dit length pause represents a space between characters, a three dit pause between words, and a seven dit length pause represents a space between sentences.
How long a dit is depends on the skill of the operator(s).
My only qualifications are that 1. I look at a portrait of S. Morse all day* and 2. I can STFW.
-Peter
*Really. I'm currently weathering the tech job crunch as a security guard at First Data Corp, of which Western Union is a subsidiary.
Re:Stop crying and take action!
on
ISP Chief on Spam
·
· Score: 3, Informative
ISPs don't generally run on a huge margin.
What do you think the staffing requirements of ruthlessly enforcing the AUP would be? What kind of attorney's fees do you think bullets one and three would cause an ISP to incur?
I think your suggestions make sense, but fail to take the economics into account.
I work security at a night club on Friday and Saturday nights.
I have to tell you, it is a lot of fun. In a way it is like being able to live out the BOFH fantasy. I work at a pretty swanky place, and I get no end of catharsis through getting in the faces of executive-types.
I guess what I am saying is that variety is the spice of life. It is great that you are doing something that you enjoy doing during the day, but there might be something else you can do that you'd like just as much at night.
I really didn't get the whole thing. First of all, about half of the requests were for the exact same dynamic page over and over, which isn't much of a test, but it is what the customer wanted. The other half were static pages. I don't know what the underlying hardware was, but this was in 2001, so I would expect the system to be able to saturate a 100Mb connection pretty handily under these conditions.
Wrong. According to the customer it locked hard.
The graph was kind of cool though. Nice trend with sudden drops to zero.
While working as a *NIX consultant for the now defunct Aperian a customer asked for a load test of a web server. The "technical sales" guy (Who BTW was reasonably technical, quite smart, and not a dick at all. Almost changed my opinion of "technical sales guys.") delivered the marching orders to me.
He said that they wanted a load test in the middle of the night so as to minimize the effect of having customers not be able to access the box. I don't remember all of the instuctions but I remember the phrase "crater it" and "crater the box" were used (by the sales guy).
So, at midnight the cron job dutifully kicked off the Siege. I wasn't being paid overtime for this, so I damn sure wasn't going to babysit it from midnight to three AM. I did get up (briefly) at three to make sure that the Siege had stopped as scheduled.
The next day the customer was livid. As it turns out this was an NT box. I hadn't been told this, and I didn't really think it was relevent to my thrughput numbers. The customer was PISSED because "we kept crashing his box" all night.
I don't know what the moral is. Maybe it is "get in the same room with the sales guy and the customer before doing anything . . . drastic." I don't know.
If any of the old Outernet/Aperian crew are reading this, mail me!
I'm not the original poster, but allow me to answer.
I don't feel obliged to keep guns out of the hands of children. I feel obliged to put guns INTO the hands of children.
You don't see country kids who have been shooting with 'Pa since they were so big doing drive-bys in their Chevy's (Ford's!), do you?
Obviously there is an urban/rural factor here, but the fact is that a well armed, well educated populace is the safest group of people in the world.
Oh, and 17 year olds can't legally posses a handgun unsupervised in most jurisdictions anyway, so gun laws are completely irrelevant. (Oh, an there even more irrelevant since most of these sort of crimes go down in major cities, where no "common citizens" (aka the Sovereign People) may posses any firearm outside his home.)
Oh, but no 17 year old could ever get a handgun if there was "just one more" way in which it was illegal . ..
Got of the point there a bit, but to summarize all of the above: Trying to "keep guns out of the hands of" anyone merely empowers those who flout the law.
Or, in the common, trite form "Outlaw guns and only outlaws will have guns."
A crook once put it this way:
"Gun control? It's the best thing you can do for crooks and gangsters. I want you to have nothing. If I'm a bad guy, I'm always gonna have a gun. Safety locks? You will pull the trigger with a lock on, and I'll pull the trigger. We'll see who wins." -- Sammy "the Bull" Gravano, mafia hit man and informant, in Vanity Fair, August 1999.
So there you are: a computer system for cops in their cars that is better, more flexible, more durable, and a lot less expensive than traditional ones -- all based on a bit of imagination from a couple of sysadmins who are not overwhelmed with reboots and software problems, so they have time to research what the police really need from their in-car data terminals...
I thought we were against digitized cops with access to all our private data.
I haven't heard anyone arguing that they shouldn't have access to their own data. Oustanding warrants, arrest records, statements and reports, etc.
Now, if they were using it to associate people with their library (!) or health records, that would be a different situation. GAFW. (Get A F-ing Warrant)
Perhaps this is some usage of the term "right wing" I'm not familiar with. Does it mean someone who can read and comprehend the English language?
And why rabbis? I don't happen to know the percentage of the members of the JPFO that are rabbis, but I think that it is clear that they aren't the majority. I can't think of any reason you would refer specifically to rabbis that reflects well on you.
there's and NRA man in the white house
Who has done more harm than good to the Bill of Rights. Granted, it is at the will of the people, and he has been handed difficult times (or at least times when it is easy and popular to do the wrong thing for freedom).
And the NRA, frankly, is way off target (if you'll forgive the pun). First, their (our, I am a member) single minded focus on the second amendment is, IMHO, misguided. More importantly, their willingness to barter with our freedoms hardly makes them true defenders of our rights, in fact it would be generous to say that they defend the status quo.
the second amendment is not the part of the Bill of Rights under real attack these days
The second amendment is very much under attack. I may not bear arms at all in the municipality in which I live. What does "infringe" mean in your language?
I don't know all the subtleties of using non-US character sets . . . but there has been a "i18n guy" making SM work with all sorts of languages for a long time.
The only thing that was outstanding when I last checked (which was a while ago) was multi-byte character sets. I don't know what the status is on those.
So, does it work with UTF-8? I'm not completely sure, because I'm not completely sure I'd recognize UTF-8 if I saw him on the street. But it does work with all sorts of extended western character sets, Cyrillic, and several single-byte Asian sets, whatever that means.
Subscribe to the mailing list, or even go out on a limb and install it!
Hrm. The encoding in SM works. I don't know what "brand" the wiki is, but I'll report that page on the list . ..
Have no fear about SM itself, though. I believe that well over half of the SM installations out there are non-english. XS4All.nl was the "biggest" user for a long time, probably still is.
So, either set up your own mailserver (like a real man!) or find a provider that uses SquirrelMail. I use Fairplay Communications here in Colorado. They rock, and provide SquirrelMail. (And the only affiliation I have with them is that I am a paying customer.)
SquirrelMail is where it's at. (But I am a little biased;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, your department does stuff, right? Break that stuff up into categories. Look at where things can (and do) go wrong. Try to figure out why. Figure out a way to measure success vs. failure. Then apply those measurements.
;-) I'm available for consulting, or save a bundle and hire me outright!
Some concrete examples.
What percentage of updates to "internet facing" services are applied within a set time frame? Maybe you decide they need to be applied within four business hours, or maybe 12 hours. When a patch is released it is a "moment of truth."
What percentage of help desk calls are resolved (i.e. the employee is back to work) within x minutes (30? 60?). Why aren't they all?
Six Sigma is full of buzzwords, but IMO it has some great potential. If I was a a guy "in the trenches" (sadly, I'm out of the technical field right now) I'd be taking advantage of a Six Sigma push to help my boss (and his boss) feel my "chronic pain." I.e. "The reason we can't resolve 99.992% of help desk calls in 60 min is that we don't have the parts we are supposed to have." or whatever.
PS: Feel free to show this to your boss. Make sure he knows my email address is peter at fpcc net
-Peter
I though web browsers and OSes were the same thing.
-Peter
Full text at http://madogre.com/Interviews/Library/Bicentennia
Obviously they fucked up, but I think that your assumption about what Hemos meant is out of whack.
Most "pulp tech" articles are 1. about windows and 2. assume that the only system that you, the reader, are aware of is windows.
So, if an article of this type doesn't specifiy a system (which this one, of course, did) one would assume that it is about windows.
Make sense?
God, I can't belive that I am defending Hemos with his "iln".
-Peter
Labor dispute to be settled by the California Raisins.
-Peter
PS: The Supremes are a Motown group AFAIR.
-P
It's a synchronous protocol. It is also a binary protocol. The line is either high or nominally zero. A dit is a short interval of current. A dah is an interval of current about three times as long as a dit. A dit length pause represents a space between characters, a three dit pause between words, and a seven dit length pause represents a space between sentences.
How long a dit is depends on the skill of the operator(s).
My only qualifications are that 1. I look at a portrait of S. Morse all day* and 2. I can STFW.
-Peter
*Really. I'm currently weathering the tech job crunch as a security guard at First Data Corp, of which Western Union is a subsidiary.
ISPs don't generally run on a huge margin.
What do you think the staffing requirements of ruthlessly enforcing the AUP would be? What kind of attorney's fees do you think bullets one and three would cause an ISP to incur?
I think your suggestions make sense, but fail to take the economics into account.
-Peter
Forbes discovery of using a "slide show" to cram 85 ads down a single users throat in a single "story".
I work security at a night club on Friday and Saturday nights.
I have to tell you, it is a lot of fun. In a way it is like being able to live out the BOFH fantasy. I work at a pretty swanky place, and I get no end of catharsis through getting in the faces of executive-types.
I guess what I am saying is that variety is the spice of life. It is great that you are doing something that you enjoy doing during the day, but there might be something else you can do that you'd like just as much at night.
Good luck!
-Peter
Let me get this straight.
Until recently you didn't believe in CRT burn-in, but you became a believer while looking for freaking space-men?
Your system of beliefs is totally fucked.
-Peter
ta-ra-ra-boom-deeyay
Is that (hasty) Entish?
-peter
I guess.
I really didn't get the whole thing. First of all, about half of the requests were for the exact same dynamic page over and over, which isn't much of a test, but it is what the customer wanted. The other half were static pages. I don't know what the underlying hardware was, but this was in 2001, so I would expect the system to be able to saturate a 100Mb connection pretty handily under these conditions.
Wrong. According to the customer it locked hard.
The graph was kind of cool though. Nice trend with sudden drops to zero.
-Peter
While working as a *NIX consultant for the now defunct Aperian a customer asked for a load test of a web server. The "technical sales" guy (Who BTW was reasonably technical, quite smart, and not a dick at all. Almost changed my opinion of "technical sales guys.") delivered the marching orders to me.
He said that they wanted a load test in the middle of the night so as to minimize the effect of having customers not be able to access the box. I don't remember all of the instuctions but I remember the phrase "crater it" and "crater the box" were used (by the sales guy).
So, at midnight the cron job dutifully kicked off the Siege. I wasn't being paid overtime for this, so I damn sure wasn't going to babysit it from midnight to three AM. I did get up (briefly) at three to make sure that the Siege had stopped as scheduled.
The next day the customer was livid. As it turns out this was an NT box. I hadn't been told this, and I didn't really think it was relevent to my thrughput numbers. The customer was PISSED because "we kept crashing his box" all night.
I don't know what the moral is. Maybe it is "get in the same room with the sales guy and the customer before doing anything . . . drastic." I don't know.
If any of the old Outernet/Aperian crew are reading this, mail me!
-Peter
I don't feel obliged to keep guns out of the hands of children. I feel obliged to put guns INTO the hands of children.
You don't see country kids who have been shooting with 'Pa since they were so big doing drive-bys in their Chevy's (Ford's!), do you?
Obviously there is an urban/rural factor here, but the fact is that a well armed, well educated populace is the safest group of people in the world.
Oh, and 17 year olds can't legally posses a handgun unsupervised in most jurisdictions anyway, so gun laws are completely irrelevant. (Oh, an there even more irrelevant since most of these sort of crimes go down in major cities, where no "common citizens" (aka the Sovereign People) may posses any firearm outside his home.)
Oh, but no 17 year old could ever get a handgun if there was "just one more" way in which it was illegal . .
Got of the point there a bit, but to summarize all of the above: Trying to "keep guns out of the hands of" anyone merely empowers those who flout the law.
Or, in the common, trite form "Outlaw guns and only outlaws will have guns."
A crook once put it this way:
-Peter
I haven't heard anyone arguing that they shouldn't have access to their own data. Oustanding warrants, arrest records, statements and reports, etc.
Now, if they were using it to associate people with their library (!) or health records, that would be a different situation. GAFW. (Get A F-ing Warrant)
-Peter
right wing pistol packing rabbis
Perhaps this is some usage of the term "right wing" I'm not familiar with. Does it mean someone who can read and comprehend the English language?
And why rabbis? I don't happen to know the percentage of the members of the JPFO that are rabbis, but I think that it is clear that they aren't the majority. I can't think of any reason you would refer specifically to rabbis that reflects well on you.
there's and NRA man in the white house
Who has done more harm than good to the Bill of Rights. Granted, it is at the will of the people, and he has been handed difficult times (or at least times when it is easy and popular to do the wrong thing for freedom).
And the NRA, frankly, is way off target (if you'll forgive the pun). First, their (our, I am a member) single minded focus on the second amendment is, IMHO, misguided. More importantly, their willingness to barter with our freedoms hardly makes them true defenders of our rights, in fact it would be generous to say that they defend the status quo.
the second amendment is not the part of the Bill of Rights under real attack these days
The second amendment is very much under attack. I may not bear arms at all in the municipality in which I live. What does "infringe" mean in your language?
-Peter
I would have prefered to email you, but . . .
Anyway, that's a really great post. Are you a member of the JPFO? They are the greatest defenders of the Bill of Right that we have, AFAICT.
Also, are you aware that your next post will be your 2^10th? Make it count!
-Peter
Freedom zero is exactly that.
The GPL implements this freedom by stating:
in section 0., which discusses aplicibilty.
So, are you trolling? Or just ignorant?
The license that you mention that forbids using the software to engage in violating human rights is not a Free Software license.
Please peddle your FUD elseware.
-Peter
I hope that the irony of the fact that the contents of that E2 page were snarfed from the Jargon File isn't lost on you.
-Peter
Consider releasing your course materials under the FDL.
(So I can snarf them!)
-Peter
Old fasioned "print format" porn is almost as good, and much more portable and, uh, fault tolerant.
-Peter
So someone tipped you off to filter Jon Katz before you ever saw one of his "Features?"
-Peter
Bear in mind that it is a wiki . . .
I don't know all the subtleties of using non-US character sets . . . but there has been a "i18n guy" making SM work with all sorts of languages for a long time.
The only thing that was outstanding when I last checked (which was a while ago) was multi-byte character sets. I don't know what the status is on those.
So, does it work with UTF-8? I'm not completely sure, because I'm not completely sure I'd recognize UTF-8 if I saw him on the street. But it does work with all sorts of extended western character sets, Cyrillic, and several single-byte Asian sets, whatever that means.
Subscribe to the mailing list, or even go out on a limb and install it!
-Peter
Hrm. The encoding in SM works. I don't know what "brand" the wiki is, but I'll report that page on the list . . .
Have no fear about SM itself, though. I believe that well over half of the SM installations out there are non-english. XS4All.nl was the "biggest" user for a long time, probably still is.
-Peter
SquirrelMail has handled this for years.
;-)
It is totally paranoid about HTML email.
Even comes with a bunch of translations.
So, either set up your own mailserver (like a real man!) or find a provider that uses SquirrelMail. I use Fairplay Communications here in Colorado. They rock, and provide SquirrelMail. (And the only affiliation I have with them is that I am a paying customer.)
SquirrelMail is where it's at. (But I am a little biased
-Peter