_Principia Discordia_ was published under an anti-copyright. A few years ago, there weren't that many anti-copyrighted popular books out there. For more on his influence, check out the jargon file entry on _Principia Discordia_. Most of my High School friends read the Illuminatus Trilogy, and he also wrote for a number of magazines like Mondo2000 and other 'reality hacker' type stuff.
Robert Anton Wilson has always been entertaining, surreal and though provoking, although his philosophical ideas aren't exactly terribly sophisticated, they are fun. It's hilariously paranoid; and he introduced a lot of kooky ideas to the mainstream. I don't think the movie _National Treasure_ would exist without RAW's writings in Illuminatus. Too bad he got no cameo or piece of that.
His philosophy is solipsistic, and while I prefer to imagine a real external universe as it has more capacity to surprise and educate me, the flip side of his "you create the universe" attitude is personal empowerment and a real enthusiasm for spontaneity and disinhibition. This is the sort of thing Crowley meant when he said "Do What Thou Wilt shall be the whole of the law" except RAW had a sense of kindness and humor Crowley was sorely missing. With RAW, you could never be certain if he was serious or kidding, and he'd probably insist on both at all times.
He's a great kook, tremendously influential on our geek culutre, and now he is in difficult circumstances.
We already use non-lethal methods of crowd control domestically. Since it seems like there's nothing there, let's look at it with our critical thinking skills: Either there is absolutely nothing to see here, or this is a pretext for introducing two things which individually are VERY controversial.
1. Using the military for domestic crowd control. We have police forces because using the military domestically against US citizens isn't OK. If you don't understand why the military is completely separate from the domestic police, I'm not going to bother arguing with you.
2. Microwaving protesters or worse. This introduces the idea of using microwaves (and likely worse, depending on the public response) for crowd control domestically. Again, we already use non-lethal methods of crowd control. They're talking about using microwaves for crowd control. Want to let me microwave _you_ into submission because you're saying something I don't like? Non-lethal weapons aren't harmless. People get killed by rubber bullets, and I'd rather face those than enough microwaves to shut me up.
Hilarious. All those protesters are criminals. Microwave them all, and let God sort them out.
What a great way to shift the dialogue away from the real issues. To everybody who finds this funny: Try to exercise your critical thinking skills in real life, especially on military press releases.
What a turd. Actually, he's more of a turd-polisher.
Release every incremental improvement for the "I'll buy it, but I don't have to like it" crowd (thanks to prior poster for that characterization.)
Of course the originals in this set suck. Of course he's got some lame justification. In a few more years, when the product cycle is right, Our Inexorable Turd-Polisher will sell the miraculous story of the restoration process with the films as add-ons. Best of all, it'll make a Slashdot headline with endless discussion, as if it were surprising.
This is marketing. Features are released in dribs and drabs to maximize product sales. It's true in pharmaceuticals, consumer electronics and obviously in commodity art. This is just an extension of the "director's cut" product cycle. The amazing thing is that he's managed to alienate as many of his sycophants as he has. It's just a tribute to how bad he really is.
He'll keep feeding it to people as long as they'll eat it. Polish that turd, George. You can sell it again.
Can I submit the story now, or do I have to wait for a release date?
You're confusing causation with correlation. Happens a lot here.
The US obesity epidemic (sudden spike, hence use of the term epidemic) is a lot newer than our wide doors. Cultural differences around personal space are a far more likely culprit. Lay it to the size of the country, wild west mentality, or what you will, but Americans expect a larger cushion of personal space than do most other nationalities, and this is old news. More recently, our passageways are also influenced by laws about emergency egress and disabled access, with 3' mandated for wheelchairs in particular.
Considering which came first, it's more valid to suggest our expansive personal space caused our epidemic obesity. Think of it as Manifest Destiny of the self.
Long ago I heard from a vintage car restorer in the midwest that Rolls-Royces suffer a disproportionate amount of hail damage. Why would a Rolls be more likely to be damaged by hail? A ball-peen hammer is cheaper than payments on a Rolls.
I don't mean to imply that the guy in the article was a criminal. I don't have enough info to judge, although I do wonder that the car was recovered at all, since it seem that people professional enough to defeat these systems would have the car disposed of before it was reported stolen.
p.s. Not directed at the parent, but to a larger group: What is more revolting than SUVs? Mocking people for the car they drive. Congratulations! You have picked the single most pointless social protest possible. Thanks for nothing. If you want to feel better, do something besides masturbating and hooting.
You were a funny monkey at first. Now we're just grossed out and tired of the noise.
Disposable lithium cells as described in the article, contain metallic Li. This fellow made a periodic table out of wood with elements and describes how to extract the lithium foil from a disposable battery.
You're getting your head handed to you here and it may seem unfair, but by asking the question the way you did you demonstrate that you have no clue about actual IT responsibilities. Thus, it's impossible to take your idea of "knowledgable user input" serioulsly, much less your diagnosis of IT incompetence. Your IT department may be incompetent, but you have demonstrated that you are in no position to judge at present.
The answer to your question? SLA or Service Level Agreement.
It is reasonable to ask management what you should expect from IT. Find out what the SLA is or help create one. This will be a lot of work. You will encounter resistance, for no more sinister reason than that is hard. Just make sure this SLA takes into account senior management's requirements of IT as well. Perhaps IT incompetence isn't the reason management isn't providing the needed upgrades. An SLA provides some metric for performance. If the SLA is unsatisfactory, that is a matter to be taken up after performance against it is measured, but what amounts to a formal job description is a reasonable starting point.
There's good literature on all of this, and it's easy to find if you are interested in improving IT in your organization, and not just playing Napoleon. If you'd rather just whine and make everything worse, ignore everyone here and stage your little petty revolt. It will be easier, but if management has a clue at all, this will be a career limiting move for you. Cynically, either way, the SLA is the starting point.
I don't deny that IT can be incompetent, but it is rare in my experience. It occured to me that you were a troll, posting here. Regardless, there are others who really think IT is incompent because of their own ignorance, who would benefit from gaining a little insight into what IT is about.
If I worked with you, I probably would tell you this in person, and tell you who might have more insight into the actual priorites set for IT. I've had plenty of similar conversations with people over the years. It's just another part of the usual perception problem for IT.
It comes down to two primary things. Value and experience.
Value: I just spent $50 on a book (Pressman, _Patent it Yourself_) and took the time to find a store where I could pick it up instead of downloading it for the same price. I will have that book as long as I want it, and it will be a valuable reference. I could easily sell it, and recoup half or more of the purchase price. The used price might be a realistic starting point for pricing e-books, but books can be re-sold more than once. Paper books are an expensive proposition, but somehow, e-books don't manage to give any of that savings back to the consumer. Paper, shipping, shelf space and taxes on inventory all have significant impact on the price of books, and are irrelevant to the cost of an e-book, but e-books still generally cost the same. Why bother?
Experience: Pressman's is a large book, but it's still far more convenient than an e-book of the same information. We don't just read books. We browse them, shuffle through them, and dogear them. I have notes inserted between the pages of that book in more than one place. In the book _Cat's Cradle_, a couple describe the subtlties of indexing a book, and make clear how a keyword search is no substitute for an index.* E-books are inconvenient. Laptops aren't very portable, but tiny screens suck.
Even though I am a book geek, I have used e-books. I read a few, as well as reading several out loud to my family, all from project Gutenberg. The self-lighting on my Clie and Zaurus was nice. They worked well for the carpool or train. I bought a couple of technical guides. I never used the O'Reilly books on CD that I bought at LinuxWorld, although I read the bonus physical book that came with them. Even though the value portion of the proposition was met, I couldn't be bothered to interact with the media. In retrospect that's pretty surprising.
I'll be interested to see what gets done with e-paper in the long run. For now though, e-books are almost there.
I think Safari may just work out, but I'm afraid it just ain't for me, since the content isn't for me. The model seems quite workable though, and O'Reilly seem to be able to do things right in the strange world that is publishing.
* Note to the excessively literal: It is entirely possible for an e-book to have a manually composed index, never mind that they often do not. I use the couple (durass, ibid.) to invoke the subtlety of apparently analogous functions in different media.
The way an individual is using the page search is obviously fair use.
As long as Google limits use to small pieces & indexing, but the really interesting thing is the possibility of using the aggregate data in new ways. What makes Google special though? They do interesting things beyond just indexing, bringing up metadata from accumulated resources. While this is fine with the web, with print books, I'm not so sure. For instance with a website, the links are part of the published content, so for google to use those to rank pages is of course fine. The google pagerank is essentially new content created from the existing work.
Offhand I don't have the greatest examples, but lets try something analagous to pagerank. What if google creates some novel content out of the collected bibliographies? Is this still fair use? Of course, you could get bibliographies at the library, but that is uniderectional (i.e. what books does the current work reference?) With a huge collection of works, you could just as easily build a bidirectional bibliography, and easily find at all books that reference the current work, a feat impossible in a library.
Let's say they use this giant scanned library to automate the creation of taxonomies. Probably fine, although the authors of included taxonomies & books on the subject would almost certainly disagree.
Maybe the issue only comes up if Google uses these databases to create content, but that line isn't exactly clear either. As bad as my examples are, I'm not sure, but I'm just not entirely convinced that the really interesting possibilities that such a giant database makes possible still fall under fair use.
Use a multi-beam or acoustic holography technique to deliver destructive ultrasound to specific tissues. That may provide sufficiently selective toxicity. Surgery causes its own tissue damage, and I've even heard the needle biopsy described as creating a stream of metastases along the path the needle is withdrawn.
This is why I was initially apprehensive about diagnostic ultrasound with my kids, but the diagnostic ultrasound process delivers orders of magnitude less energy.
They're still made up of people. People who make decisions. Good, bad, selfish, and altruistic.
If companies can make stupid mistakes, or outright exploit their stockholders & not vanish in a puff of shareholder rage, then they can just as easily be altruistic. They rarely are, but the force towards maximization of profit is not inexorable. It is possible to make money and to be altruistic as well. Personally, I think corporations are inherently amoral, and if they were actually living organisms, would be better described as sociopathic. In spite of this, to pretend they have no choice relieves the people in those companies from the responsibility of acting morally. Sorry, but your responsibility is to make a living and to be a person at the same time. It's not impossible, even if you're a CFO.
I used to say that the company I worked for would grind me up & sell the meat if they could get away with it and make more money at it. I don't believe that anymore. They aren't volunteering to send my kids to college, but they have treated me better than they might have.
The rules are the same everywhere. Behave well. Act like a person and expect others to do the same. They'll surprise you by doing so more often than you might expect. Don't accept or make excuses. This is all Golden Rule stuff ultimately, and it works.
On-topic momentarily, it's unfortunate that Google's offerings wouldn't be damaged much by being slowed down anyway. Because I'd like to see what happened to BS if they hosed Google. Perot's phrase "a great sucking sound" comes to mind.
Google delivers a relatively small number of packets with minimal QOS requirements. It's not like voice where latency is your unqualified enemy, and a certain amount of bandwidth is an absolute necessity. I'm glad they made their point, and I'm happy to say that I expected them to stand up to BS. Too bad that as fine a moral statement as it is, it won't punish BS for their BS.
Don't accept the lie that they have to maximize their profits. They don't. No corporation is held to that high a standard, or there would have been no need for Sarbanes-Oxley.
There is no Nobel prize for math. Maybe he was atoning for something, but he still hated math. Talking about altruism and human nature is much more interesting.
What I have found to make the difference is relationships.
If you know someone closer to your end of things, and you can work with that person, you will get far better service. In support, it's the guy who says "here's my pager number in case you have trouble with this" even if he doesn't want you to call him every time you have trouble. The flip side of this is that eventually you know which guys break more than they fix, or close tickets without even calling. Knowing the local service manager or dispatcher is a real help here, or more accurately, the more people you know, the better it gets.
In sales, you need a Rep who will work with you, and has some power. I mean the guy who says "I'll get you some of those tomorrow" and you may not even see a bill for them (although you also might be billed at the real value - you NEEDED those, right?) This is the guy you buy your redundant supplies from when things are calm, so you don't always have to rely on him dropping everything for you. This is not the guy who won't lift a finger without a signed PO.
Contracts aren't worth as much as you'd like.
I found IBM four hour turnaround time to be an exception even in the early nineties, and it hasn't gotten better. Admittedly, we were the low end of the market, but we still had a four hour contract with IBM, and it was honored almost exclusively in the breach. I have not seen anyone significantly better since then either. It just doesn't happen. I have occasionally gotten stellar support from IBM, Dell, HP, Compaq and Cisco, but that was always completely localized, never reliable with any single vendor. FedEx has built their reputation on promptness and reliability, not becasue it's easy or common, but rather because it's difficult and rare.
Let's not talk about contractors. Some kind souls cannot be bought or bound by a piece of paper. Those things only enable them to help you, as demonstrated by random arbitrary work interruptions. You may not see them for weeks at a time in the middle of an urgent job, but remember that these kind souls, martyrs really, help you stave off catastrophe out of the goodness of their hearts alone.
Ultimately, it's the people who make it happen, like the FedEx driver who scanned my package at 6:04 last night as he got into his truck, and waited while I went inside to get a piece of tape from the the counter guy who told me I was too late.
I hope you get lots of good recommendations for companies that will deliver quickly and reliably, and I'll keep an eye on this thread to see what people have to say. Meanwhile, be nice to your office manager.
(defun function metareview (content-free)
(un-grammar-spell (metareview (irony (content-free))))) ; Function has unpredictable side effects on humor ; due to interaction with functions irony and un-grammar-spell ; Run-time only limited by side-effect on interest
The primary problem here: Improper exposure reduces the amount of information on the negative. Contrast adjustments can help, but only so much.
If a picture is improperly exposed you aren't using the full range of the film, since everything is moved towards white (overexposed) or black (underexposed) so you lose detail. If you take a low contrast image (dark or light) & adjust it to normal brightness, the low contrast will make it look washed out. Postprocessing of contrast can help, but you still are missing a considerable amount of information from the picture. It may not exactly look washed out, but it won't look quite right (although often more than good enough.) This goes back to what another poster said about fixing the source by learning photographic techniques.
With film, you tend to lose less information to underexposure than to overexposure but I think this is an artifact of the responsiveness curves of film, and less true of digital images.
An analagous situation is a picture taken at a low resolution. If you blow it up too much, it will look pixellated (not pixilated.) You can play with bluring & sharpening edges, but it'll never look like a picture taken at a higher resolution. I saw this in my pre-digital photo class with film. The difference between images taken with 35mm versus a 4x5 large format camera was astonishing. The textures were amazing in the prints from large format negatives.
I thought that I had conceded that point in my initial statment.
Notice that the law does not define that duty as exclusive to all others, and in fact the quoted example uses the phrase "with a view to" which isn't exactly strong language. Thus that duty is not to make the most money possible at all possible (other) costs, as is the usual argument I am disputing.
The best support for my argument would be the rarity of civil suits based on _duty to make money_ laws. As far as I can tell, it happens very rarely. For example, are the shareholders even going after Enron or MCI's execs? I don't think so (although I admit I am not certain) yet they are egregious violators. This tells me that obeying conscience and the law in executing the duty to make money for the shareholders won't be prosecuted either.
"And BTW, they WILL do evil if that makes stocks go up!"
Aw crap. Does anybody but confused fourteen year olds with idle CEO fantasies actually believe this stuff? "They have no choice but to maximize profits."
And I guess Dilbert is entertaining because it represents a fantasy world with no relationship to our own. The market is perfect and right in all cases, as is corporate management which is also single-minded.
Nope. That's the cool thing about people. We have freedom of choice. I think companies like Google where the majority is still held by a couple of principals are in a better position to behave well, but even that isn't neccessary for a company to do the right thing.
Statements like that end up rationalizing bad behavior, as if it is always neccessary to maximize profit at all costs, and this is inexorable. That somehow if they don't, their competition will magically wipe them from the face of the earth by taking advantage of their momentary weakness.
It ain't so. People make various decisions, suffer the consequences, and survive. Businesses are even astonishingly incompetent, and still muddle along, because the market and their competitors are also less than perfect. An astonishing number of them are around because of "right place, right time" or similar luck alone.
Logically, this argument reduces to "If I didn't do it somebody else would have" and that dog don't hunt. (Obvious answer: "Yeah, but you're still the one who's going to get the chair.")
People get to act like people. We have the luxury of doing what we believe is right most of the time, making mistakes, or even acting badly, and living with the consequences. In fact, to argue otherwise is immoral, merely rationalizing bad behavior, unless we are truly no more than trustees at a concentration camp.
Why do I need 99/100 columns? Perhaps a poor example, but the obvious answer is: Because some nitwit built this database and I just have to live with it.
Do you think most SQL queries are executed by people who created the database in the first place, or even have any control over how it is designed? Don't be silly. It's the usual problem with software. Computers are so flexible, and commercial software is so inflexible, that a huge amount of energy is expended trying to get data from point A to point B when there is no direct route. Hence Perl.
Oracle: The company that sold the state of California more licenses than its entire work force. *
I had fun when I bought an Oracle license for our developers, and got a follow-up call from a sales rep explaining why I hadn't actually bought a valid license. After I explained exactly how we were testing and considering deploying Oracle, he went into hilarious detail about how much the licenses we needed would cost. Actually, at first he just alluded to all the different aspects of licensing we needed to worry about, but I pressed him for a quote, and he got back to me a few days later with a quote that took him a while to explain. All of this for the smallest possible dev environment.
I began this saying that I had fun. The fun part was saying truthfully, "Obviously then, we won't be developing any product with Oracle. There are other databases that will meet our needs."
I'll bet their salesmen get a lot of un-sales that way.
And maybe a remote. OK, cheapest known brand. My eighty dollar 10,000 BTU Panasonic AC would probably work well. The fact that it's overspecified should translate into reliability, and the thermostat means that you won't be running it all the time. Generally, larger units tend to be more efficient, so you should be saving money everywhere. If the noise troubles you, you might locate it remotely with ducting, which you'll need anyway (although since there was a furnace in there, you should have some ducting already in place. Again, if it's overspecified, you may be able to run it at a lower setting so that it's quieter than a smaller unit moving the same number of Calories around.
The remote wouldn't hurt if it wasn't in the most convenient place, either.
Window AC units can be very reliable. My grandparents had one that was older than me, and ran all summer, struggling to cool a space too large for it. At least it ran until it iced up on a humid day, & had to be turned off for awhile to defrost.
Those damn inductive devices are dangerous, but recharge without surgery is important, since most people won't tolerate a plug. I have an alcohol fuel cell that resides in my stomach to power my pacemaker, and I don't get so many DUIs now. You can recognize us by our copious CO2 belches. It's a lot better than the old days when I had to swallow the extension cord & then plug it all in.
So, to buy into this hysteria you have to accept two postulates:
1. All our real life efforts to put ourselves into chosen situations and circumstances, the effective methods of preference expression that we choose or fall into, are so ineffective as to be negligible. The evolution of our various cultures & subcultures, received or chosen, is trivial.
2. "If recommenders online were perfect..." Perfect software. The phrase defies mockery. That may be the biggest handwave ever.
So this isn't a social problem, it's a premise for a sci-fi story, in the same vein as grey goo. The real problem is that we gladly confuse our hubris with an actual ability to create perfection, while we trivialize the vast complexity of the real world.
People seem to confuse power with public trust. If Google were a government entity, they would need to ensure that their reponse was measured, and that no conflict of interest existed. Google is a private entity, and while they have a responsibility to the public, it is only being served by their actions. I see no conflict of interest here, and in fact, Google news relies on some degree of cooperation from content providers just like Zdnet. If anything, Google is making things harder on themselves by their actions.
ZDnet's actions were unconscionable. I try to avoid dealing with people I don't like, and I pay the costs. If I were a public servant, my right to do so would be curtailed, and reasonably so. Being a cop could be an appealing career choice if I didn't have to deal with the scum of the earth (in addition to everyone else.) As it is, I'm free to avoid violent people as much as I can.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, it's a free book and funny as hell. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tilt/principia/
_Principia Discordia_ was published under an anti-copyright. A few years ago, there weren't that many anti-copyrighted popular books out there. For more on his influence, check out the jargon file entry on _Principia Discordia_. Most of my High School friends read the Illuminatus Trilogy, and he also wrote for a number of magazines like Mondo2000 and other 'reality hacker' type stuff.
Robert Anton Wilson has always been entertaining, surreal and though provoking, although his philosophical ideas aren't exactly terribly sophisticated, they are fun. It's hilariously paranoid; and he introduced a lot of kooky ideas to the mainstream. I don't think the movie _National Treasure_ would exist without RAW's writings in Illuminatus. Too bad he got no cameo or piece of that.
His philosophy is solipsistic, and while I prefer to imagine a real external universe as it has more capacity to surprise and educate me, the flip side of his "you create the universe" attitude is personal empowerment and a real enthusiasm for spontaneity and disinhibition. This is the sort of thing Crowley meant when he said "Do What Thou Wilt shall be the whole of the law" except RAW had a sense of kindness and humor Crowley was sorely missing. With RAW, you could never be certain if he was serious or kidding, and he'd probably insist on both at all times.
He's a great kook, tremendously influential on our geek culutre, and now he is in difficult circumstances.
We already use non-lethal methods of crowd control domestically. Since it seems like there's nothing there, let's look at it with our critical thinking skills: Either there is absolutely nothing to see here, or this is a pretext for introducing two things which individually are VERY controversial.
1. Using the military for domestic crowd control. We have police forces because using the military domestically against US citizens isn't OK. If you don't understand why the military is completely separate from the domestic police, I'm not going to bother arguing with you.
2. Microwaving protesters or worse. This introduces the idea of using microwaves (and likely worse, depending on the public response) for crowd control domestically. Again, we already use non-lethal methods of crowd control. They're talking about using microwaves for crowd control. Want to let me microwave _you_ into submission because you're saying something I don't like? Non-lethal weapons aren't harmless. People get killed by rubber bullets, and I'd rather face those than enough microwaves to shut me up.
Hilarious. All those protesters are criminals. Microwave them all, and let God sort them out.
What a great way to shift the dialogue away from the real issues. To everybody who finds this funny: Try to exercise your critical thinking skills in real life, especially on military press releases.
What a turd. Actually, he's more of a turd-polisher.
Release every incremental improvement for the "I'll buy it, but I don't have to like it" crowd (thanks to prior poster for that characterization.)
Of course the originals in this set suck.
Of course he's got some lame justification.
In a few more years, when the product cycle is right, Our Inexorable Turd-Polisher will sell the miraculous story of the restoration process with the films as add-ons. Best of all, it'll make a Slashdot headline with endless discussion, as if it were surprising.
This is marketing. Features are released in dribs and drabs to maximize product sales. It's true in pharmaceuticals, consumer electronics and obviously in commodity art. This is just an extension of the "director's cut" product cycle. The amazing thing is that he's managed to alienate as many of his sycophants as he has. It's just a tribute to how bad he really is.
He'll keep feeding it to people as long as they'll eat it. Polish that turd, George. You can sell it again.
Can I submit the story now, or do I have to wait for a release date?
AT&T are the ones who need the ISS.
You're confusing causation with correlation. Happens a lot here.
The US obesity epidemic (sudden spike, hence use of the term epidemic) is a lot newer than our wide doors. Cultural differences around personal space are a far more likely culprit. Lay it to the size of the country, wild west mentality, or what you will, but Americans expect a larger cushion of personal space than do most other nationalities, and this is old news. More recently, our passageways are also influenced by laws about emergency egress and disabled access, with 3' mandated for wheelchairs in particular.
Considering which came first, it's more valid to suggest our expansive personal space caused our epidemic obesity. Think of it as Manifest Destiny of the self.
Long ago I heard from a vintage car restorer in the midwest that Rolls-Royces suffer a disproportionate amount of hail damage. Why would a Rolls be more likely to be damaged by hail? A ball-peen hammer is cheaper than payments on a Rolls.
I don't mean to imply that the guy in the article was a criminal. I don't have enough info to judge, although I do wonder that the car was recovered at all, since it seem that people professional enough to defeat these systems would have the car disposed of before it was reported stolen.
p.s.
Not directed at the parent, but to a larger group: What is more revolting than SUVs? Mocking people for the car they drive. Congratulations! You have picked the single most pointless social protest possible. Thanks for nothing. If you want to feel better, do something besides masturbating and hooting.
You were a funny monkey at first. Now we're just grossed out and tired of the noise.
http://www.theodoregray.com/PeriodicTable/Stories/ 003.2/index.html
D'oh! this fellow
Disposable lithium cells as described in the article, contain metallic Li. This fellow made a periodic table out of wood with elements and describes how to extract the lithium foil from a disposable battery.
You're getting your head handed to you here and it may seem unfair, but by asking the question the way you did you demonstrate that you have no clue about actual IT responsibilities. Thus, it's impossible to take your idea of "knowledgable user input" serioulsly, much less your diagnosis of IT incompetence. Your IT department may be incompetent, but you have demonstrated that you are in no position to judge at present.
The answer to your question? SLA or Service Level Agreement.
It is reasonable to ask management what you should expect from IT. Find out what the SLA is or help create one. This will be a lot of work. You will encounter resistance, for no more sinister reason than that is hard. Just make sure this SLA takes into account senior management's requirements of IT as well. Perhaps IT incompetence isn't the reason management isn't providing the needed upgrades. An SLA provides some metric for performance. If the SLA is unsatisfactory, that is a matter to be taken up after performance against it is measured, but what amounts to a formal job description is a reasonable starting point.
There's good literature on all of this, and it's easy to find if you are interested in improving IT in your organization, and not just playing Napoleon. If you'd rather just whine and make everything worse, ignore everyone here and stage your little petty revolt. It will be easier, but if management has a clue at all, this will be a career limiting move for you. Cynically, either way, the SLA is the starting point.
I don't deny that IT can be incompetent, but it is rare in my experience. It occured to me that you were a troll, posting here. Regardless, there are others who really think IT is incompent because of their own ignorance, who would benefit from gaining a little insight into what IT is about.
If I worked with you, I probably would tell you this in person, and tell you who might have more insight into the actual priorites set for IT. I've had plenty of similar conversations with people over the years. It's just another part of the usual perception problem for IT.
It comes down to two primary things. Value and experience.
Value: I just spent $50 on a book (Pressman, _Patent it Yourself_) and took the time to find a store where I could pick it up instead of downloading it for the same price. I will have that book as long as I want it, and it will be a valuable reference. I could easily sell it, and recoup half or more of the purchase price. The used price might be a realistic starting point for pricing e-books, but books can be re-sold more than once. Paper books are an expensive proposition, but somehow, e-books don't manage to give any of that savings back to the consumer. Paper, shipping, shelf space and taxes on inventory all have significant impact on the price of books, and are irrelevant to the cost of an e-book, but e-books still generally cost the same. Why bother?
Experience: Pressman's is a large book, but it's still far more convenient than an e-book of the same information. We don't just read books. We browse them, shuffle through them, and dogear them. I have notes inserted between the pages of that book in more than one place. In the book _Cat's Cradle_, a couple describe the subtlties of indexing a book, and make clear how a keyword search is no substitute for an index.* E-books are inconvenient. Laptops aren't very portable, but tiny screens suck.
Even though I am a book geek, I have used e-books. I read a few, as well as reading several out loud to my family, all from project Gutenberg. The self-lighting on my Clie and Zaurus was nice. They worked well for the carpool or train. I bought a couple of technical guides. I never used the O'Reilly books on CD that I bought at LinuxWorld, although I read the bonus physical book that came with them. Even though the value portion of the proposition was met, I couldn't be bothered to interact with the media. In retrospect that's pretty surprising.
I'll be interested to see what gets done with e-paper in the long run. For now though, e-books are almost there.
I think Safari may just work out, but I'm afraid it just ain't for me, since the content isn't for me. The model seems quite workable though, and O'Reilly seem to be able to do things right in the strange world that is publishing.
* Note to the excessively literal: It is entirely possible for an e-book to have a manually composed index, never mind that they often do not. I use the couple (durass, ibid.) to invoke the subtlety of apparently analogous functions in different media.
The way an individual is using the page search is obviously fair use.
As long as Google limits use to small pieces & indexing, but the really interesting thing is the possibility of using the aggregate data in new ways. What makes Google special though? They do interesting things beyond just indexing, bringing up metadata from accumulated resources. While this is fine with the web, with print books, I'm not so sure. For instance with a website, the links are part of the published content, so for google to use those to rank pages is of course fine. The google pagerank is essentially new content created from the existing work.
Offhand I don't have the greatest examples, but lets try something analagous to pagerank. What if google creates some novel content out of the collected bibliographies? Is this still fair use? Of course, you could get bibliographies at the library, but that is uniderectional (i.e. what books does the current work reference?) With a huge collection of works, you could just as easily build a bidirectional bibliography, and easily find at all books that reference the current work, a feat impossible in a library.
Let's say they use this giant scanned library to automate the creation of taxonomies. Probably fine, although the authors of included taxonomies & books on the subject would almost certainly disagree.
Maybe the issue only comes up if Google uses these databases to create content, but that line isn't exactly clear either. As bad as my examples are, I'm not sure, but I'm just not entirely convinced that the really interesting possibilities that such a giant database makes possible still fall under fair use.
Use a multi-beam or acoustic holography technique to deliver destructive ultrasound to specific tissues. That may provide sufficiently selective toxicity. Surgery causes its own tissue damage, and I've even heard the needle biopsy described as creating a stream of metastases along the path the needle is withdrawn.
This is why I was initially apprehensive about diagnostic ultrasound with my kids, but the diagnostic ultrasound process delivers orders of magnitude less energy.
They're still made up of people. People who make decisions. Good, bad, selfish, and altruistic.
If companies can make stupid mistakes, or outright exploit their stockholders & not vanish in a puff of shareholder rage, then they can just as easily be altruistic. They rarely are, but the force towards maximization of profit is not inexorable. It is possible to make money and to be altruistic as well. Personally, I think corporations are inherently amoral, and if they were actually living organisms, would be better described as sociopathic. In spite of this, to pretend they have no choice relieves the people in those companies from the responsibility of acting morally. Sorry, but your responsibility is to make a living and to be a person at the same time. It's not impossible, even if you're a CFO.
I used to say that the company I worked for would grind me up & sell the meat if they could get away with it and make more money at it. I don't believe that anymore. They aren't volunteering to send my kids to college, but they have treated me better than they might have.
The rules are the same everywhere. Behave well. Act like a person and expect others to do the same. They'll surprise you by doing so more often than you might expect. Don't accept or make excuses. This is all Golden Rule stuff ultimately, and it works.
On-topic momentarily, it's unfortunate that Google's offerings wouldn't be damaged much by being slowed down anyway. Because I'd like to see what happened to BS if they hosed Google. Perot's phrase "a great sucking sound" comes to mind.
Google delivers a relatively small number of packets with minimal QOS requirements. It's not like voice where latency is your unqualified enemy, and a certain amount of bandwidth is an absolute necessity. I'm glad they made their point, and I'm happy to say that I expected them to stand up to BS. Too bad that as fine a moral statement as it is, it won't punish BS for their BS.
Don't accept the lie that they have to maximize their profits. They don't. No corporation is held to that high a standard, or there would have been no need for Sarbanes-Oxley.
There is no Nobel prize for math. Maybe he was atoning for something, but he still hated math. Talking about altruism and human nature is much more interesting.
What I have found to make the difference is relationships.
If you know someone closer to your end of things, and you can work with that person, you will get far better service. In support, it's the guy who says "here's my pager number in case you have trouble with this" even if he doesn't want you to call him every time you have trouble. The flip side of this is that eventually you know which guys break more than they fix, or close tickets without even calling. Knowing the local service manager or dispatcher is a real help here, or more accurately, the more people you know, the better it gets.
In sales, you need a Rep who will work with you, and has some power. I mean the guy who says "I'll get you some of those tomorrow" and you may not even see a bill for them (although you also might be billed at the real value - you NEEDED those, right?) This is the guy you buy your redundant supplies from when things are calm, so you don't always have to rely on him dropping everything for you. This is not the guy who won't lift a finger without a signed PO.
Contracts aren't worth as much as you'd like.
I found IBM four hour turnaround time to be an exception even in the early nineties, and it hasn't gotten better. Admittedly, we were the low end of the market, but we still had a four hour contract with IBM, and it was honored almost exclusively in the breach. I have not seen anyone significantly better since then either. It just doesn't happen. I have occasionally gotten stellar support from IBM, Dell, HP, Compaq and Cisco, but that was always completely localized, never reliable with any single vendor. FedEx has built their reputation on promptness and reliability, not becasue it's easy or common, but rather because it's difficult and rare.
Let's not talk about contractors. Some kind souls cannot be bought or bound by a piece of paper. Those things only enable them to help you, as demonstrated by random arbitrary work interruptions. You may not see them for weeks at a time in the middle of an urgent job, but remember that these kind souls, martyrs really, help you stave off catastrophe out of the goodness of their hearts alone.
Ultimately, it's the people who make it happen, like the FedEx driver who scanned my package at 6:04 last night as he got into his truck, and waited while I went inside to get a piece of tape from the the counter guy who told me I was too late.
I hope you get lots of good recommendations for companies that will deliver quickly and reliably, and I'll keep an eye on this thread to see what people have to say. Meanwhile, be nice to your office manager.
(defun function metareview (content-free)
(un-grammar-spell (metareview (irony (content-free)))))
; Function has unpredictable side effects on humor
; due to interaction with functions irony and un-grammar-spell
; Run-time only limited by side-effect on interest
Conversely -
(No one but Americans has trouble with deadpan sarcasm.)
The primary problem here: Improper exposure reduces the amount of information on the negative. Contrast adjustments can help, but only so much.
If a picture is improperly exposed you aren't using the full range of the film, since everything is moved towards white (overexposed) or black (underexposed) so you lose detail. If you take a low contrast image (dark or light) & adjust it to normal brightness, the low contrast will make it look washed out. Postprocessing of contrast can help, but you still are missing a considerable amount of information from the picture. It may not exactly look washed out, but it won't look quite right (although often more than good enough.) This goes back to what another poster said about fixing the source by learning photographic techniques.
With film, you tend to lose less information to underexposure than to overexposure but I think this is an artifact of the responsiveness curves of film, and less true of digital images.
An analagous situation is a picture taken at a low resolution. If you blow it up too much, it will look pixellated (not pixilated.) You can play with bluring & sharpening edges, but it'll never look like a picture taken at a higher resolution. I saw this in my pre-digital photo class with film. The difference between images taken with 35mm versus a 4x5 large format camera was astonishing. The textures were amazing in the prints from large format negatives.
Yes but...
I thought that I had conceded that point in my initial statment.
Notice that the law does not define that duty as exclusive to all others, and in fact the quoted example uses the phrase "with a view to" which isn't exactly strong language. Thus that duty is not to make the most money possible at all possible (other) costs, as is the usual argument I am disputing.
The best support for my argument would be the rarity of civil suits based on _duty to make money_ laws. As far as I can tell, it happens very rarely. For example, are the shareholders even going after Enron or MCI's execs? I don't think so (although I admit I am not certain) yet they are egregious violators. This tells me that obeying conscience and the law in executing the duty to make money for the shareholders won't be prosecuted either.
"And BTW, they WILL do evil if that makes stocks go up!"
Aw crap. Does anybody but confused fourteen year olds with idle CEO fantasies actually believe this stuff? "They have no choice but to maximize profits."
And I guess Dilbert is entertaining because it represents a fantasy world with no relationship to our own. The market is perfect and right in all cases, as is corporate management which is also single-minded.
Nope. That's the cool thing about people. We have freedom of choice. I think companies like Google where the majority is still held by a couple of principals are in a better position to behave well, but even that isn't neccessary for a company to do the right thing.
Statements like that end up rationalizing bad behavior, as if it is always neccessary to maximize profit at all costs, and this is inexorable. That somehow if they don't, their competition will magically wipe them from the face of the earth by taking advantage of their momentary weakness.
It ain't so. People make various decisions, suffer the consequences, and survive. Businesses are even astonishingly incompetent, and still muddle along, because the market and their competitors are also less than perfect. An astonishing number of them are around because of "right place, right time" or similar luck alone.
Logically, this argument reduces to "If I didn't do it somebody else would have" and that dog don't hunt. (Obvious answer: "Yeah, but you're still the one who's going to get the chair.")
People get to act like people. We have the luxury of doing what we believe is right most of the time, making mistakes, or even acting badly, and living with the consequences. In fact, to argue otherwise is immoral, merely rationalizing bad behavior, unless we are truly no more than trustees at a concentration camp.
Why do I need 99/100 columns? Perhaps a poor example, but the obvious answer is: Because some nitwit built this database and I just have to live with it.
Do you think most SQL queries are executed by people who created the database in the first place, or even have any control over how it is designed? Don't be silly. It's the usual problem with software. Computers are so flexible, and commercial software is so inflexible, that a huge amount of energy is expended trying to get data from point A to point B when there is no direct route. Hence Perl.
Oracle: The company that sold the state of California more licenses than its entire work force. *
I had fun when I bought an Oracle license for our developers, and got a follow-up call from a sales rep explaining why I hadn't actually bought a valid license. After I explained exactly how we were testing and considering deploying Oracle, he went into hilarious detail about how much the licenses we needed would cost. Actually, at first he just alluded to all the different aspects of licensing we needed to worry about, but I pressed him for a quote, and he got back to me a few days later with a quote that took him a while to explain. All of this for the smallest possible dev environment.
I began this saying that I had fun. The fun part was saying truthfully, "Obviously then, we won't be developing any product with Oracle. There are other databases that will meet our needs."
I'll bet their salesmen get a lot of un-sales that way.
* Turns out that California was not unusual. http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-923127.html
And maybe a remote. OK, cheapest known brand. My eighty dollar 10,000 BTU Panasonic AC would probably work well. The fact that it's overspecified should translate into reliability, and the thermostat means that you won't be running it all the time. Generally, larger units tend to be more efficient, so you should be saving money everywhere. If the noise troubles you, you might locate it remotely with ducting, which you'll need anyway (although since there was a furnace in there, you should have some ducting already in place. Again, if it's overspecified, you may be able to run it at a lower setting so that it's quieter than a smaller unit moving the same number of Calories around.
The remote wouldn't hurt if it wasn't in the most convenient place, either.
Window AC units can be very reliable. My grandparents had one that was older than me, and ran all summer, struggling to cool a space too large for it. At least it ran until it iced up on a humid day, & had to be turned off for awhile to defrost.
Those damn inductive devices are dangerous, but recharge without surgery is important, since most people won't tolerate a plug. I have an alcohol fuel cell that resides in my stomach to power my pacemaker, and I don't get so many DUIs now. You can recognize us by our copious CO2 belches. It's a lot better than the old days when I had to swallow the extension cord & then plug it all in.
Patent pending.
So, to buy into this hysteria you have to accept two postulates:
1. All our real life efforts to put ourselves into chosen situations and circumstances, the effective methods of preference expression that we choose or fall into, are so ineffective as to be negligible. The evolution of our various cultures & subcultures, received or chosen, is trivial.
2. "If recommenders online were perfect..." Perfect software. The phrase defies mockery. That may be the biggest handwave ever.
So this isn't a social problem, it's a premise for a sci-fi story, in the same vein as grey goo. The real problem is that we gladly confuse our hubris with an actual ability to create perfection, while we trivialize the vast complexity of the real world.
People seem to confuse power with public trust. If Google were a government entity, they would need to ensure that their reponse was measured, and that no conflict of interest existed. Google is a private entity, and while they have a responsibility to the public, it is only being served by their actions. I see no conflict of interest here, and in fact, Google news relies on some degree of cooperation from content providers just like Zdnet. If anything, Google is making things harder on themselves by their actions.
ZDnet's actions were unconscionable. I try to avoid dealing with people I don't like, and I pay the costs. If I were a public servant, my right to do so would be curtailed, and reasonably so. Being a cop could be an appealing career choice if I didn't have to deal with the scum of the earth (in addition to everyone else.) As it is, I'm free to avoid violent people as much as I can.