Not sure why the first commenter god modded to zero, but as a network engineer I'll second his statement. Routers and switches, server load balancers, firewalls, servers, HVAC, and redundant high-bandwidth links to the Internet constitute significantly more expense than "just electricity".
Of course in aggregate and spread across the cost of many game purchases, there's still savings there over the physical distribution, else it wouldn't be a viable business model. Still, try not to fall into the trap of thinking that it's "practically free" for Xbox Live or Steam or Impulse or D2D to serve your games...
And that right there is why Zuckerburg will keep making millions and the answer to "Can Slashdotters predict where social networking is going?" is "no."
domestic or foreign isn't the point as much as domestic CAPACITY, which decreases dependence on, not use of, foreign oil
Except that if domestic suddenly became less used, that capacity would start to vanish. The companies and workers wouldn't just build new wells and refineries and hang out around them waiting patiently for someone to start buying again. Sure, the oil itself would still be there under the ground, but then if some world event (war, natural disaster, etc) disrupted our source of foreign oil, it would take decades to get new domestic drilling and refining capacity approved and built.
None of this makes wind (or nuclear, or solar, etc) power a bad idea, but trying to sell it with nationalist rhetoric about how it'll make us all strong and independent from those nasty foreigners is silly.
Meanwhile, the problem with the summary is that it's not really a choice between oil and wind (and certainly not between foreign oil vs wind). There's two large scale choices here - oil vs electric for cars, and coal vs wind (or nuclear or solar, etc) for generation. They operate independently. You can keep driving your oil-based car while we reduce our usage of coal, or you can plug your electric car right into our existing coal-based infrastructure.
No, they are not. They might want to, but they're not FORCED to do this.
Yes, they are. If you work for a company with more than 10,000 employees (as I do), and if the company's standard browser (deployed and supported by Desktop services) is IE6 (as it is with us), and they pay you to develop a new internal web application (to go along with the 20 others that are already in use and designed for IE6 only) - well... you make it work with IE6 or you find a new job.
Is this not the kind of situation that a Union would prevent?
Short answer: Yes, it would likely provide that benefit, but with several other large costs, some unforeseen.
Slightly longer: It's all a trade-off, no free lunches, so decreasing workload would require more spending on staff (either more hires as existing ones become less productive, or compensation for overtime, etc) which would either make the service increase in cost or decrease in quality. Unionizing isn't always a win or always a lose - there's some industries/scenarios where it's a good fit and others where it's a bad fit. For many reasons, IT is a poor fit for unions, despite the individual workers' desire to get paid overtime, work 35 hour weeks, and never get fired.
Server OS is not the only thing in the datacenter that needs staffing. Facilities work (cabling, power, cooling, etc), SAN, Network infrastructure, and that's without even getting into the middleware or applications themselves.
Even if your base servers administered themselves, it still takes quite a staff to actually do something with those servers.
I'm a little surprised that didn't make the list. It still irritates me, every time I look down at the PS2 I still have hooked up next to my PS3. Looking at the eBay listings for a $400 used 60 Gig console next to a $300 shiny new 80 Gig console just reinforces it.
As one of the guys who does run the expensive Cisco routers with all those drops connected to them, I would still much rather have them wired - faster, more reliable, and easier to troubleshoot - plus the wired Cisco switches and routers are still cheaper than the Cisco Access Points and controllers plus PoE switches and routers, that you need to provide office-caliber wireless to a floor full of 100+ people.
Well, look at it this way: assuming we're actually worth what we're paid, we help all sorts of "real" productivity down the line... what lets us do our job efficiently, makes us better at letting others do their jobs efficiently. Don't talk down your (our) product... IT matters, and our non-IT bosses know it.
Oh absolutely it does, and I think it's been one of the great drivers of improved productivity in the last 20 years - solitare and web-surfing jokes aside. But many IT workers, starting with the premise of "my work is important", end up frustrated with the demands of the users, and gradually slip into a mindset of "my work is more important than theirs", and this is almost always false.
If you don't lose sight of the fact that you're paid to enable the work of others, you'll find yourself better adjusted and more successful in the long run. Your perfectly implemented Git repository, to which you applied the utmost competence and the latest and greatest of best practices, but which nobody at your company likes to use, is not superior to the Sharepoint that Fred from Accounting set up and everyone loves. Your system does not have intrinsic value. It only exists to serve.
If Fred's five-minute thrown-together system is serving better than yours, don't waste your time complaining about how badly his system scales, or how it's not standards-compliant. Spend your time trying to understand how it's serving better than yours, and if there's a way to bring those strengths to your systems without losing their technical strengths.
I can't speak for your company, but in most companies the non-IT workers far exceed the IT workers, and the non-IT budget vastly exceeds the IT budget. So it's not just "the guy at the end of the hall", and it's not "several thousand times the amount of your salary". As a member of the IT department, I share your desire for systems that I can "actually use, troubleshoot, and modify if necessary" but what's more important in the end is that the systems serve their users well, not that they serve me well. That's why they pay me money, not the other way around.
If Sharepoint, or generally any system, presents functionality easily to users, it will tend to succeed in spite of the frustration it causes the support staff. This is a point rarely conceded by that support staff, but you'll find yourself on the other end of it wherever you're a customer. You're not going to cheer on Verizon's locked down phones, saying "well, at least it makes them easier for their help desk and engineers to support..." And you're not going to be happy when your phone or Internet service is down - "oh good, finally a maintenance window for those engineers to get in some much needed reboots and upgrades!".
At those times, you'll remember that the point of the systems are to serve their users, not their engineers. Your waitress notepad example is a perfect one - that system is even harder to migrate data out of than Sharepoint. But it's simple to learn and quick to implement for the users. If they decide to move up from that, they'll likely move up to a touch-screen system with a backend that's flat-files or MS Access or proprietary app. Because that is what will work best for them. Even though it won't be best practices, or easy to troubleshoot and modify for their technician.
They focus their energy entirely on common CMS features, such as how easy it is to enable search and create a new page.
Right. The rest of us out here, who aren't developers, web designers, or software engineers, we call those features "doing work". The point of the software is to make it easier for the workers to do their jobs. Not to make it easier for the IT staff to interface with.
In my case, we're stuck with Lotus Notes databases as our "collaboration platform", and our lives would all be so much better if it was easy to create a new page or enable search.
Yes, any infrastructure service, be it power or roads or IT, is intentionally uninteresting. "Interesting" means noticeable or memorable, and it's pretty much only the problems that people notice and remember.
I know few people who cry out "Wow, this is really smooth blacktop!" or "OMG, I picked up the phone and it always seems to have a dial-tone!" or "My email server isn't down!" (well okay we have said the last one a few times at IBM, but mostly to make fun of the Domino server guys).
In those rare times where something has broken (and isn't your fault) and you're able to do something really ingenious to fix it, almost nobody else would really understand what you did. If they're nice, they make a big deal about you fixing it, but they wouldn't recognize the difference between using your highly-advanced knowledge to perform a feat of brilliance and simply rebooting a broken system.
There's a lot of jobs this way, it's not a unique problem to IT, but it's fundamentally not a "glory" profession, and I'm not sure why anyone would think it is in the first place...
Great comment, and you mention "I am in awe of people who work in the mental health industry". From seeing the movie and reading the article, I'm also in awe of his wife. From the article:
"I learned my family was the most important thing in my life. My wife moved to every state I was located and came every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday for eight and a half years. Basically, Monday through Thursday I'd be waiting for Friday night, and she'd come all day Saturday and all day Sunday. And I don't mean for an hour or two. I mean from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. That's definitely not the norm. I mean, the divorce rate in prison is 99%, and the divorce rate in society is over 50%. I'm very lucky, and she's really what kept me alive. My wife, she's definitely a trooper." ...
"Well, it was really my wife. She made the decision that if I didn't tell the FBI about the price-fixing, she was going to. So in reality she did the right thing and not me. I see her more the whistleblower than myself. She had the moral compass."
That's pretty awesome, when you think about it. He's lucky to have had her; support like that is really life-changing.
Chances are that good developer could use almost any methodology and/or tool and ship working software.
The rest of your point is correct - Joel tells us again and again: hire the best programmers, don't waste your time with mediocre programmers.
But I think his issue here is that any good developer can write good software, but many of them become fixated with trying to turn it into great software before shipping it. His point is that once you've written some good software, SHIP IT! Turn it into great software later, if at all. Even within the subset of good developers, it takes a certain mindset to "ship good now" rather than "make it great now, ship it later".
As much as the latter seems more admirable and pure, the former usually wins in business.
And today's environment is even more forgiving of "cool new features right now, patch it later" than ever before. Nearly all mainstream products these days are self-auto-updating, so if (Google Chrome / iPhone OS / latest PS3 game) is buggy on Wednesday, most people have forgotten it by Saturday because it was patched on Thursday or Friday.
[facepalm] He's not talking about a boycott. He's talking about simply not buying games that cost more than you're willing to pay for them. Let's say you only kind of want Modern Warfare 2. But they're charging $70, ZOMG. Do you: A. Buy it, but complain to all your friends about how expensive it is? B. Organize a boycott, in an attempt to let them know you really love the game but think they're evil facists and it's your RIGHT to have their game for $50. C. Simply not buy it, until the price comes down to $30. If the price never comes down to $30, never buy it. After all, you only kind of want it. If you really, really wanted it, then it would be worth $70 to you.
Well, my experience is the opposite of your anecdata - our remote sites often experience grid power failures and the building UPS keeps the equipment running the whole time. However, those are smaller sites, not full size datacenters I'm talking about.
I will however say this about "high availability is hard": Often the redundancy mechanisms themselves are the source of outages. Not just power, but equipment, software, protocols... Maybe your RAID controller fails, instead of the drive. Maybe the HSRP/VRRP on your routers flaps or goes active/active or standby/standby. Maybe the technician servicing your generator/UPS/PDU kills the power on the floor.
The step up from "no redundancy systems" to "some redundancy systems" doesn't necessarily take you from 2-nines to 3 or 4. Sometimes it takes you from 3-nines down to 2. If you really want high availability, it's a question of approach and procedures as much as it is hardware and systems.
Your proposed solution would only make sense if people were forced to watch a completely random selection of movies. Once you factor in the fact that people are allowed to select which movies they want to watch, it makes sense that their ratings would cluster towards the high end of the spectrum. That is, in fact, the whole point of this ratings prediction system: to tell you, in advance, which movies you will like. If it worked perfectly, you'd never have to rate a movie below average, because you could avoid ever renting a movie which you wouldn't like.
Massive online game requires massive ammount of servers, bandwidth and people to maintain.....
And a follow-up story at 12 - This just in: Computer nerds find massive amounts of servers, bandwidth, and people maintaining systems to be interesting. Some of them like hearing the details in success stories of large scale infrastructure. Even more so when the company itself is prominent or interesting.
Tune in tomorrow for our shocking revelation that some nerds also feel the need to mock these stories as uninteresting, yet are willing to take the time to post comments about just what a waste of time it is.
Your comment made me curious, and I went looking for some sort of mission statement, the official "this is what Wikipedia is supposed to be" and couldn't find it, which strikes me as odd.
I'm sure it exists somewhere, but it shouldn't be hard to find...
If your goal is to determine "How big is the market out there which can play my discs?" then PS3 has to count towards that number. Even if a PS3-owner hasn't purchased a Blu-ray movie today, they're a potential buyer. When a particular movie comes out, or they upgrade their sound system, or they talk with a buddy at work, and now they suddenly want to watch Transformers 5 in HD, their barrier to entry is the cost of the disc, not a player.
If your goal instead is to determine the size of the active, disc-purchasing market (let's call it "likely customers" rather than "potential customers") then you're wasting your time measuring player stats. Look at the disc stats. Look at total number of BD vs HD-DVD movies sold, or compare a recent hit title on both formats, or something like that. If this is what you're trying to measure, then player counts are a bad way to measure it. If the guys who love HD-DVD are the type of guys who have money to burn and want to replace their entire movie collection with new discs pronto, while your Blu-ray customers shrug and only buy a new movie or two, then it doesn't matter what the install base number is.
Either way, clearly HD discs of both formats are still a newer, more expensive technology experiencing slow adoption.
Re:Why do people make things hard for themselves?
on
Documenting a Network?
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· Score: 1
Why not use an automated too?
And encapsulated in this single sentence, you have also demonstrated the failure of an automated tool (spell check) in place of a manual one (proof read).
The point doesn't seem to be recovering that $200 or so billion dollars (although that's a good thing in and of itself) the point seems to stop jobs from going overseas.
Except in the example cited - 18,000 US companies officially housed in a building in the Cayman Islands - clearly the jobs haven't gone overseas. Only the technical registration, for tax purposes. We refer to them as "18,000 US companies" because their executives and large amounts of staff are here in the US, their stocks are listed on US exchanges, etc. The whole point of this example was that the jobs aren't overseas in this Cayman building. You can't then turn around and claim you're doing this to bring the jobs back from the Caymans, after pointing out that they weren't really there to begin with.
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure why the first commenter god modded to zero, but as a network engineer I'll second his statement.
Routers and switches, server load balancers, firewalls, servers, HVAC, and redundant high-bandwidth links to the Internet constitute significantly more expense than "just electricity".
Of course in aggregate and spread across the cost of many game purchases, there's still savings there over the physical distribution, else it wouldn't be a viable business model. Still, try not to fall into the trap of thinking that it's "practically free" for Xbox Live or Steam or Impulse or D2D to serve your games...
And that right there is why Zuckerburg will keep making millions and the answer to "Can Slashdotters predict where social networking is going?" is "no."
Except that if domestic suddenly became less used, that capacity would start to vanish. The companies and workers wouldn't just build new wells and refineries and hang out around them waiting patiently for someone to start buying again. Sure, the oil itself would still be there under the ground, but then if some world event (war, natural disaster, etc) disrupted our source of foreign oil, it would take decades to get new domestic drilling and refining capacity approved and built.
None of this makes wind (or nuclear, or solar, etc) power a bad idea, but trying to sell it with nationalist rhetoric about how it'll make us all strong and independent from those nasty foreigners is silly.
Meanwhile, the problem with the summary is that it's not really a choice between oil and wind (and certainly not between foreign oil vs wind). There's two large scale choices here - oil vs electric for cars, and coal vs wind (or nuclear or solar, etc) for generation. They operate independently. You can keep driving your oil-based car while we reduce our usage of coal, or you can plug your electric car right into our existing coal-based infrastructure.
Yes, they are. If you work for a company with more than 10,000 employees (as I do), and if the company's standard browser (deployed and supported by Desktop services) is IE6 (as it is with us), and they pay you to develop a new internal web application (to go along with the 20 others that are already in use and designed for IE6 only) - well... you make it work with IE6 or you find a new job.
It is a hell of an accomplishment, but worth clarifying - the Nature study references science articles, not all articles.
Short answer: Yes, it would likely provide that benefit, but with several other large costs, some unforeseen.
Slightly longer: It's all a trade-off, no free lunches, so decreasing workload would require more spending on staff (either more hires as existing ones become less productive, or compensation for overtime, etc) which would either make the service increase in cost or decrease in quality. Unionizing isn't always a win or always a lose - there's some industries/scenarios where it's a good fit and others where it's a bad fit. For many reasons, IT is a poor fit for unions, despite the individual workers' desire to get paid overtime, work 35 hour weeks, and never get fired.
Server OS is not the only thing in the datacenter that needs staffing. Facilities work (cabling, power, cooling, etc), SAN, Network infrastructure, and that's without even getting into the middleware or applications themselves.
Even if your base servers administered themselves, it still takes quite a staff to actually do something with those servers.
It's a trap.
I'm a little surprised that didn't make the list. It still irritates me, every time I look down at the PS2 I still have hooked up next to my PS3. Looking at the eBay listings for a $400 used 60 Gig console next to a $300 shiny new 80 Gig console just reinforces it.
As one of the guys who does run the expensive Cisco routers with all those drops connected to them, I would still much rather have them wired - faster, more reliable, and easier to troubleshoot - plus the wired Cisco switches and routers are still cheaper than the Cisco Access Points and controllers plus PoE switches and routers, that you need to provide office-caliber wireless to a floor full of 100+ people.
Oh absolutely it does, and I think it's been one of the great drivers of improved productivity in the last 20 years - solitare and web-surfing jokes aside. But many IT workers, starting with the premise of "my work is important", end up frustrated with the demands of the users, and gradually slip into a mindset of "my work is more important than theirs", and this is almost always false.
If you don't lose sight of the fact that you're paid to enable the work of others, you'll find yourself better adjusted and more successful in the long run. Your perfectly implemented Git repository, to which you applied the utmost competence and the latest and greatest of best practices, but which nobody at your company likes to use, is not superior to the Sharepoint that Fred from Accounting set up and everyone loves. Your system does not have intrinsic value. It only exists to serve.
If Fred's five-minute thrown-together system is serving better than yours, don't waste your time complaining about how badly his system scales, or how it's not standards-compliant. Spend your time trying to understand how it's serving better than yours, and if there's a way to bring those strengths to your systems without losing their technical strengths.
I can't speak for your company, but in most companies the non-IT workers far exceed the IT workers, and the non-IT budget vastly exceeds the IT budget. So it's not just "the guy at the end of the hall", and it's not "several thousand times the amount of your salary". As a member of the IT department, I share your desire for systems that I can "actually use, troubleshoot, and modify if necessary" but what's more important in the end is that the systems serve their users well, not that they serve me well. That's why they pay me money, not the other way around.
If Sharepoint, or generally any system, presents functionality easily to users, it will tend to succeed in spite of the frustration it causes the support staff. This is a point rarely conceded by that support staff, but you'll find yourself on the other end of it wherever you're a customer. You're not going to cheer on Verizon's locked down phones, saying "well, at least it makes them easier for their help desk and engineers to support..." And you're not going to be happy when your phone or Internet service is down - "oh good, finally a maintenance window for those engineers to get in some much needed reboots and upgrades!".
At those times, you'll remember that the point of the systems are to serve their users, not their engineers. Your waitress notepad example is a perfect one - that system is even harder to migrate data out of than Sharepoint. But it's simple to learn and quick to implement for the users. If they decide to move up from that, they'll likely move up to a touch-screen system with a backend that's flat-files or MS Access or proprietary app. Because that is what will work best for them. Even though it won't be best practices, or easy to troubleshoot and modify for their technician.
Right. The rest of us out here, who aren't developers, web designers, or software engineers, we call those features "doing work". The point of the software is to make it easier for the workers to do their jobs. Not to make it easier for the IT staff to interface with.
In my case, we're stuck with Lotus Notes databases as our "collaboration platform", and our lives would all be so much better if it was easy to create a new page or enable search.
Yes, any infrastructure service, be it power or roads or IT, is intentionally uninteresting. "Interesting" means noticeable or memorable, and it's pretty much only the problems that people notice and remember.
I know few people who cry out "Wow, this is really smooth blacktop!" or "OMG, I picked up the phone and it always seems to have a dial-tone!" or "My email server isn't down!" (well okay we have said the last one a few times at IBM, but mostly to make fun of the Domino server guys).
In those rare times where something has broken (and isn't your fault) and you're able to do something really ingenious to fix it, almost nobody else would really understand what you did. If they're nice, they make a big deal about you fixing it, but they wouldn't recognize the difference between using your highly-advanced knowledge to perform a feat of brilliance and simply rebooting a broken system.
There's a lot of jobs this way, it's not a unique problem to IT, but it's fundamentally not a "glory" profession, and I'm not sure why anyone would think it is in the first place...
That's pretty awesome, when you think about it. He's lucky to have had her; support like that is really life-changing.
The rest of your point is correct - Joel tells us again and again: hire the best programmers, don't waste your time with mediocre programmers.
But I think his issue here is that any good developer can write good software, but many of them become fixated with trying to turn it into great software before shipping it. His point is that once you've written some good software, SHIP IT! Turn it into great software later, if at all. Even within the subset of good developers, it takes a certain mindset to "ship good now" rather than "make it great now, ship it later".
As much as the latter seems more admirable and pure, the former usually wins in business.
And today's environment is even more forgiving of "cool new features right now, patch it later" than ever before. Nearly all mainstream products these days are self-auto-updating, so if (Google Chrome / iPhone OS / latest PS3 game) is buggy on Wednesday, most people have forgotten it by Saturday because it was patched on Thursday or Friday.
[facepalm]
He's not talking about a boycott. He's talking about simply not buying games that cost more than you're willing to pay for them. Let's say you only kind of want Modern Warfare 2. But they're charging $70, ZOMG. Do you:
A. Buy it, but complain to all your friends about how expensive it is?
B. Organize a boycott, in an attempt to let them know you really love the game but think they're evil facists and it's your RIGHT to have their game for $50.
C. Simply not buy it, until the price comes down to $30. If the price never comes down to $30, never buy it. After all, you only kind of want it. If you really, really wanted it, then it would be worth $70 to you.
The answer we're looking for here is C.
Well, my experience is the opposite of your anecdata - our remote sites often experience grid power failures and the building UPS keeps the equipment running the whole time. However, those are smaller sites, not full size datacenters I'm talking about.
I will however say this about "high availability is hard": Often the redundancy mechanisms themselves are the source of outages. Not just power, but equipment, software, protocols... Maybe your RAID controller fails, instead of the drive. Maybe the HSRP/VRRP on your routers flaps or goes active/active or standby/standby. Maybe the technician servicing your generator/UPS/PDU kills the power on the floor.
The step up from "no redundancy systems" to "some redundancy systems" doesn't necessarily take you from 2-nines to 3 or 4. Sometimes it takes you from 3-nines down to 2. If you really want high availability, it's a question of approach and procedures as much as it is hardware and systems.
Your proposed solution would only make sense if people were forced to watch a completely random selection of movies. Once you factor in the fact that people are allowed to select which movies they want to watch, it makes sense that their ratings would cluster towards the high end of the spectrum. That is, in fact, the whole point of this ratings prediction system: to tell you, in advance, which movies you will like. If it worked perfectly, you'd never have to rate a movie below average, because you could avoid ever renting a movie which you wouldn't like.
And a follow-up story at 12 - This just in: Computer nerds find massive amounts of servers, bandwidth, and people maintaining systems to be interesting. Some of them like hearing the details in success stories of large scale infrastructure. Even more so when the company itself is prominent or interesting.
Tune in tomorrow for our shocking revelation that some nerds also feel the need to mock these stories as uninteresting, yet are willing to take the time to post comments about just what a waste of time it is.
Your comment made me curious, and I went looking for some sort of mission statement, the official "this is what Wikipedia is supposed to be" and couldn't find it, which strikes me as odd.
I'm sure it exists somewhere, but it shouldn't be hard to find...
If your goal is to determine "How big is the market out there which can play my discs?" then PS3 has to count towards that number. Even if a PS3-owner hasn't purchased a Blu-ray movie today, they're a potential buyer. When a particular movie comes out, or they upgrade their sound system, or they talk with a buddy at work, and now they suddenly want to watch Transformers 5 in HD, their barrier to entry is the cost of the disc, not a player.
If your goal instead is to determine the size of the active, disc-purchasing market (let's call it "likely customers" rather than "potential customers") then you're wasting your time measuring player stats. Look at the disc stats. Look at total number of BD vs HD-DVD movies sold, or compare a recent hit title on both formats, or something like that. If this is what you're trying to measure, then player counts are a bad way to measure it. If the guys who love HD-DVD are the type of guys who have money to burn and want to replace their entire movie collection with new discs pronto, while your Blu-ray customers shrug and only buy a new movie or two, then it doesn't matter what the install base number is.
Either way, clearly HD discs of both formats are still a newer, more expensive technology experiencing slow adoption.
And encapsulated in this single sentence, you have also demonstrated the failure of an automated tool (spell check) in place of a manual one (proof read).
Except in the example cited - 18,000 US companies officially housed in a building in the Cayman Islands - clearly the jobs haven't gone overseas. Only the technical registration, for tax purposes. We refer to them as "18,000 US companies" because their executives and large amounts of staff are here in the US, their stocks are listed on US exchanges, etc. The whole point of this example was that the jobs aren't overseas in this Cayman building. You can't then turn around and claim you're doing this to bring the jobs back from the Caymans, after pointing out that they weren't really there to begin with.