Outsourcing occurs for many reasons. One of the most common is that management in the organization does not have the necessary skills to build an appropriate technology management team. It is easier to purchase this as a service rather than build it if you do not know how. There are only so many good CIOs and CTOs around. If you hire the wrong one you can easily drive a business into the ground.
Another reason could be to shift variable labor costs into a fixed contract fees. Not all dollars are equal, especially if the organization is looking to position their finances to secure external capital or make large purchases.
Of course it could be the case that the IT department is loaded up with seat fillers. If this is the case, just work hard and keep your eye open for possible opportunities both inside and outside of the organization. If you have value to provide it will be identified and rewarded.
In any case, you should ALWAYS keep your resume up to date if for no other reason than as an exercise in reflecting on your own skills, capabilities and weaknesses.
Exactly, sacrifice your happiness and continue to work in a job you do not like for the sake of your family. Take the 8+ hours of stress each day and bring it home to your kids so that they have a better life. Your kids will soon understand the difference between just home from work dad and weekend dad. This will cause no confusion or long term resentment about what life will hold for them. And for gods sake, stick with that job that you do not like and continue to be less the fully engaged forcing your coworkers to deal with your unproductive disposition and take up the slack for you. God knows that people like you are what makes working in IT such a rewarding career. It is not like anybody else could do a better job or enjoy filling your role. Now that you think that your sacrifice is so altruistic, I will be forced to leave my job and find a different company or possibly change careers entirely. I am sure all of these suboptimal decisions will have no material impact on the overall efficiency of our economy. So please do you, your family, me, the community, the country and the entire planet a favor and just keep on doing what your are doing.
Who needs source code? I never write programs and the company I work for is too small to have programmers on staff. What good does it do me to have source code available to the masses? Won't that just mean anybody on the Internet can make changes to the programs I run? And wont that unexpectedly crash my computers? When I install a computer program I want to know that a company thought through the issue and made the best software they could. If the program does not do exactly what I need it to do, or I am on an upgrade treadmill paying for bug fixes or feature I do not really need, I can live with that so long as they meet my most basic needs.
Regarding memory consumption, most OSs have reasonable copy on write [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy-on-write] memory management for both code and data segments. So if you fork a process, only the data blocks that are updated with new information consume additional memory blocks. New data blocks are essentially different web pages or java script which would occupy additional memory anyway. There is a little overhead to manage the pointers and slightly less efficient memory block usage due to the possibility of half empty tails for each process but I think it would be a reasonable trade-off for web page isolation especially when you factor in the instability of plug-ins.
When you think about the amount of interprocess communication that would be necessary between the independent "forked" browsers and the main skin it should be fairly minimal. Most tabs operate independent of each other. Occasionally a web app launches and references interaction on a pop-up pages, but even that amount of communication should be minimal. The heaviest data path would be for the actual web page. With more OSs moving to GL based environments even this could be minimized. A browser process could display to a GL plane and pass the plane ID to the managing skin. All the managing skin has to do at that point to tell the window manager to incorporate the active plane ID and let it do all the heavy lifting.
Threading is much more essential for applications that require significant inter-thread communication or the ability to launch and reap hundreds of threads for many sub tasks. The problem with threads is a bad thread can still take down the entire application.
There is nothing worse than having one bad web app take away all the other work you have opened at that time. This is exactly why I had to move to Firefox as opposed to Mozilla or Seamonkey. With these web browsers a bad web app can also take down your email and any web pages you happen to be editing.
I think instead of multi-threaded, the developers should seriously consider a multi-process model. The front end skin could broker back end processes and provide a display buffer. This would provide free page isolation. If a plug-in goes haywire, bizerk or whatever the kids says these days, the front end can just kill off the process and continue humming along.
This sounds very bunk. I do not deny that the presentation exists, just that the facts do not hold water. In 1998 I deployed a 3,000 workstation enterprise behind a single public IP address with no problems. Active connections were rarely more than 1500 concurrently. Over the years I decided to enforce TCP timeouts because I feared IE's aggressive half open behavior, but even being I never saw the active timeouts reaching more than 5,000 as a high water mark.
In a very real way this explains a lot about what is going on in society today. Fundamentally we no longer value thinkers and creators. Instead we value packagers and preachers.
Sure you can transfer data to a fixed location rather cheaply, but with SMS you can send and receive messages anywhere . . . except in extremely rural areas, long stretches of highway along interstate routes even though these are advertised as in service areas, random points along the highway in major metropolitan areas, parking garages, elevators, half my office, most vacation/recreation locations, my kitchen, garage, part of my back yard and one of my bedrooms.
Going into management is not without its headaches, but the one thing I love about being in management is getting to live vicariously through all my engineers while they work on their projects. And I think it is a great bonus to then demonstrate all these projects to executive management. Sure there is a lot of stress, a constant mess of mis-communication and egos out the whazoo, but when you connect with a real corporate problem and are able to uniquely solve the problem there is nothing quite like the recognition you and your team experiences. Having worked for many less than stellar managers, I will take the headache any day.
Oh, and to answer the original question, be a leader and always promote the company's mission first. Other managers will recognize the value you provide and invite you to be a manager. If you have to ask to be considered, either you will not be a good manager or the people making the decisions will not be a good mentor to you. It is critical to find a good manager to follow especially if you want to progress further up within the organization. While most of the catty comments you will read on/. are true, there are many counter examples of great IT managers and executive leadership, they are just more difficult to find. Oh, and for a final thought, I no longer think that BOFH is funny [at least while on the job], especially having had to manage that exact person.
Funny that you mentioned TiVo. Over the holidays while visiting relatives they kept thanking us for introducing them to TiVo. All they could talk about was how great it was. Oddly, they were only using a fraction of its capabilities. My wife kept trying to show them short cuts and advanced feature, but they were content using it their way. It was perfectly logical and the advanced stuff didn't get in their way or complicate things at all. That is good design.
I have an old 800mhz iMac with a bunch of stuff connected to it. MacOS can use everything out of the box except for my Epson scanner, which requires manually installed drivers. For kicks, I downloaded Ubuntu to see how it would run on my Mac. It was 100% functional including the scanner. Any OS that is more functional out of the box than MacOS deserves respect.
Maybe we need to ad bomb the squatters. Most ad companies track click throughs to prevent fraud. The assumption is that if they get a lot of click throughs from the same IP address it must be the customer trying to bolster their ad revenue. So if we cannot raise their costs, we can hit them on the revenue side. We can make it laborious for them to keep their ad accounts.
I had a similar experience but thought to ask about the processes in detail up front. I was on a three week business trip when my hard drive started clunking. Apple would not give me the option of sending my disk to a recovery service or allowing me to buy the replacement--they have strict rules about the warranty processes and doing anything outside of their process voids the warranty for the entire notebook. Being the value of my few weeks worth of work was worth far more than this silly little MacBookPro so I stopped by BestBuy and replaced my clunking 120gig with a 250gig disk sent the old disk off for recovery and got back to work.
The really odd thing is that we are evaluating desktop video conferencing solutions at work and had discussed making a shift to Apples due to the great video integration. When I shared my story Apple's name was immediately removed from the list for being too business hostile.
Even if the market was split evenly there is still an advantage to utilizing two different platforms which the article clearly points out; a single attack is unlikely to take down all systems. This falls in line with the principal of using different platforms between a DMZ and an internal server when providing a service to the Internet. The difference, mathematically speaking, greatly reduces the probability of a successful internal compromise.
You actually have to feel a bit for this administration. I mean really, who are they going to find among their self serving power mongering inner circle with enough empathy to run a deparment like FEMA well. The fundementals are so far out of their base mind set. It must be a really tough situation them.
I can think of a few options that would not require purchaing a carrier or a carrier pigeon as others have suggested.
1) Run all your servers on Linux and use screen via a compressed ssh session. OK, maybe this would require too much re-work, but this is/. so it had to be said.
2) Co-locate a WAN accelerator and connect your computer to this device. You may be able to get the hospital to let you co-locate there if you use it primarily for supporting their systems--or even purchase the thing if you can justify it for other purposes [remote clinics]. I think Riverbed has an installable client. This would reduce latency on some applications and speed up data streams that have repeating bit patterns. It also does a great job of proxying CIFS connections.
3) Co-locate a PC and RDP into it. Your screen updates might be a bit slow, but applications should function just fine. You might even try a combination of this and #2. RDP is a rather lean protoco, but you never know.
Good luck, otherwise I might know a realator in your area.:)
Ironically your comments are equally applicable to general drug practices. Many doctors prescribe medicines based on probabilities with little regard to the actual patient. If a medicine has a 60% chance of being beneficial it does not matter that you are in the 40% part of the population. If you have multiple complaints you are likely to get multiple medicines. The doctor will, of course, check for known interactions, but most medicines are not generally cross tested for interactions unless there are deaths involved.
Remember that medically accepted drugs are tested by the drug companies. Setting aside some of the recent controversies, drug companies are not interested in general health, only ailment treatable by patentable products. Think about it, when was the last time you saw an anti-acid commercial that told you to stop eating like a human garbage can. Why would they when instead they can sell you something.
In reality, there are plenty of snake-oil sales and, strictly speaking, unscientific remedies in the homeopathy world, but there is also a disturbing amount of this same activity occurring within the medical community. While I take a number of medically prescribed drugs but I do not dismiss out of hand the entire homeopathic community.
I cannot help but to think this is an attempt to keep Whole Foods from effectively competing with WalMart. If Whole Foods were to acquire WildOats they might actually become 6 billion dollar company, up from the 5.7 billion dollar company they are today. How will 200 billion dollar WalMart compete? It just isn't fair!
What are you talking about? Do you understand the concept of MVCC, real MVCC? You are sorely mistaken if you think PostgreSQL locks then entire database just because it stores all the data for a table in a single file (which btw, it does not).
You are correct, this person must be an idiot. Anybody who goes through all that must have some fundamental flow. At some point you would think he would have stopped accepting refurbished units and only accepted a refund.
Statistically speaking . . . you generally do not count multiple occurrences separately any more than you count the returns as new sales. If you manufacture 10 items and 1 item is a lemon you have a 1% defect rate no matter how many times that one device is returned for repairs. Imagine if that 1 item was returned 11 times. Do you think there would be a 110% failure rate?
There is one major difference, enthusiasts were interested in downloading FF1.0 because they wanted it for their primary browser whereas people are curious about Safari on Windows. You could forward an argument that the same initial million that downloaded FF1.0 are core technologists and wanted to take a peak at Safari. I am sure that many of the curious will continue to use Safari, but there is not the pent-up demand and anticipation for Safari that there was for FF. Now we will have to see how Apple translates this initial surge into a sustained user base.
You may change this software however you like and do whatever you want with the result.
You may not change this software in any way.
You may not change this software in any way, unless you use this license for the resulting software.
The GPL in general is an attempt to restore intellectual freedoms taken away by underlying copyright law. Without copyright laws all published code would be free from the perspective of both BSD or GPL crowds--although compiled code might have to be disassembled first. You may or may not agree with how the GPL accomplishes this "freedom correction," but you cannot argue about the relative freedom a particular license provides without adding the underlying copyright code into the discussion.
The purpose of the GPL is to create a microcosm of code exchange where intellectual freedoms are protected in spite of copyright laws. I believe RMS' hope was that the economic mechanics of the GPL would eventually create sufficient value such that it was easier to participate in the community even for commercial interests than not, thereby further growing the community. Regardless of RMS' intention or you personal view of the GPL, I think that history has demonstrated the power of the GPL to build these communities such that TiVo would opt to use a GPL foundation for their products in the first place.
As for TiVo's ultimate fate, they are much more likely to die due to cable companies and congress mucking around the cable card standards to prevent full interoperability or in some cases even base compatibility than to be hurt of the GPL3. So ironically, TiVo will be killed by the same anti-circumvention laws they are complaining the GPL3 is designed to eliminate. The problem is fundamentally with the law not the license.
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Outsourcing occurs for many reasons. One of the most common is that management in the organization does not have the necessary skills to build an appropriate technology management team. It is easier to purchase this as a service rather than build it if you do not know how. There are only so many good CIOs and CTOs around. If you hire the wrong one you can easily drive a business into the ground.
Another reason could be to shift variable labor costs into a fixed contract fees. Not all dollars are equal, especially if the organization is looking to position their finances to secure external capital or make large purchases.
Of course it could be the case that the IT department is loaded up with seat fillers. If this is the case, just work hard and keep your eye open for possible opportunities both inside and outside of the organization. If you have value to provide it will be identified and rewarded.
In any case, you should ALWAYS keep your resume up to date if for no other reason than as an exercise in reflecting on your own skills, capabilities and weaknesses.
Exactly, sacrifice your happiness and continue to work in a job you do not like for the sake of your family. Take the 8+ hours of stress each day and bring it home to your kids so that they have a better life. Your kids will soon understand the difference between just home from work dad and weekend dad. This will cause no confusion or long term resentment about what life will hold for them. And for gods sake, stick with that job that you do not like and continue to be less the fully engaged forcing your coworkers to deal with your unproductive disposition and take up the slack for you. God knows that people like you are what makes working in IT such a rewarding career. It is not like anybody else could do a better job or enjoy filling your role. Now that you think that your sacrifice is so altruistic, I will be forced to leave my job and find a different company or possibly change careers entirely. I am sure all of these suboptimal decisions will have no material impact on the overall efficiency of our economy. So please do you, your family, me, the community, the country and the entire planet a favor and just keep on doing what your are doing.
Who needs source code? I never write programs and the company I work for is too small to have programmers on staff. What good does it do me to have source code available to the masses? Won't that just mean anybody on the Internet can make changes to the programs I run? And wont that unexpectedly crash my computers? When I install a computer program I want to know that a company thought through the issue and made the best software they could. If the program does not do exactly what I need it to do, or I am on an upgrade treadmill paying for bug fixes or feature I do not really need, I can live with that so long as they meet my most basic needs.
** There are some interesting parallels **
Regarding memory consumption, most OSs have reasonable copy on write [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy-on-write] memory management for both code and data segments. So if you fork a process, only the data blocks that are updated with new information consume additional memory blocks. New data blocks are essentially different web pages or java script which would occupy additional memory anyway. There is a little overhead to manage the pointers and slightly less efficient memory block usage due to the possibility of half empty tails for each process but I think it would be a reasonable trade-off for web page isolation especially when you factor in the instability of plug-ins.
When you think about the amount of interprocess communication that would be necessary between the independent "forked" browsers and the main skin it should be fairly minimal. Most tabs operate independent of each other. Occasionally a web app launches and references interaction on a pop-up pages, but even that amount of communication should be minimal. The heaviest data path would be for the actual web page. With more OSs moving to GL based environments even this could be minimized. A browser process could display to a GL plane and pass the plane ID to the managing skin. All the managing skin has to do at that point to tell the window manager to incorporate the active plane ID and let it do all the heavy lifting.
Threading is much more essential for applications that require significant inter-thread communication or the ability to launch and reap hundreds of threads for many sub tasks. The problem with threads is a bad thread can still take down the entire application.
There is nothing worse than having one bad web app take away all the other work you have opened at that time. This is exactly why I had to move to Firefox as opposed to Mozilla or Seamonkey. With these web browsers a bad web app can also take down your email and any web pages you happen to be editing.
Hope this helps.
I think instead of multi-threaded, the developers should seriously consider a multi-process model. The front end skin could broker back end processes and provide a display buffer. This would provide free page isolation. If a plug-in goes haywire, bizerk or whatever the kids says these days, the front end can just kill off the process and continue humming along.
This sounds very bunk. I do not deny that the presentation exists, just that the facts do not hold water. In 1998 I deployed a 3,000 workstation enterprise behind a single public IP address with no problems. Active connections were rarely more than 1500 concurrently. Over the years I decided to enforce TCP timeouts because I feared IE's aggressive half open behavior, but even being I never saw the active timeouts reaching more than 5,000 as a high water mark.
In a very real way this explains a lot about what is going on in society today. Fundamentally we no longer value thinkers and creators. Instead we value packagers and preachers.
So you agree that Mr. Limbaugh was wrong. According to your post and proof Fox did not exaggerate his Parkinson symptoms, he merely exposed them.
Sure you can transfer data to a fixed location rather cheaply, but with SMS you can send and receive messages anywhere . . . except in extremely rural areas, long stretches of highway along interstate routes even though these are advertised as in service areas, random points along the highway in major metropolitan areas, parking garages, elevators, half my office, most vacation/recreation locations, my kitchen, garage, part of my back yard and one of my bedrooms.
Going into management is not without its headaches, but the one thing I love about being in management is getting to live vicariously through all my engineers while they work on their projects. And I think it is a great bonus to then demonstrate all these projects to executive management. Sure there is a lot of stress, a constant mess of mis-communication and egos out the whazoo, but when you connect with a real corporate problem and are able to uniquely solve the problem there is nothing quite like the recognition you and your team experiences. Having worked for many less than stellar managers, I will take the headache any day.
/. are true, there are many counter examples of great IT managers and executive leadership, they are just more difficult to find. Oh, and for a final thought, I no longer think that BOFH is funny [at least while on the job], especially having had to manage that exact person.
Oh, and to answer the original question, be a leader and always promote the company's mission first. Other managers will recognize the value you provide and invite you to be a manager. If you have to ask to be considered, either you will not be a good manager or the people making the decisions will not be a good mentor to you. It is critical to find a good manager to follow especially if you want to progress further up within the organization. While most of the catty comments you will read on
Funny that you mentioned TiVo. Over the holidays while visiting relatives they kept thanking us for introducing them to TiVo. All they could talk about was how great it was. Oddly, they were only using a fraction of its capabilities. My wife kept trying to show them short cuts and advanced feature, but they were content using it their way. It was perfectly logical and the advanced stuff didn't get in their way or complicate things at all. That is good design.
I have an old 800mhz iMac with a bunch of stuff connected to it. MacOS can use everything out of the box except for my Epson scanner, which requires manually installed drivers. For kicks, I downloaded Ubuntu to see how it would run on my Mac. It was 100% functional including the scanner. Any OS that is more functional out of the box than MacOS deserves respect.
Maybe we need to ad bomb the squatters. Most ad companies track click throughs to prevent fraud. The assumption is that if they get a lot of click throughs from the same IP address it must be the customer trying to bolster their ad revenue. So if we cannot raise their costs, we can hit them on the revenue side. We can make it laborious for them to keep their ad accounts.
I had a similar experience but thought to ask about the processes in detail up front. I was on a three week business trip when my hard drive started clunking. Apple would not give me the option of sending my disk to a recovery service or allowing me to buy the replacement--they have strict rules about the warranty processes and doing anything outside of their process voids the warranty for the entire notebook. Being the value of my few weeks worth of work was worth far more than this silly little MacBookPro so I stopped by BestBuy and replaced my clunking 120gig with a 250gig disk sent the old disk off for recovery and got back to work.
The really odd thing is that we are evaluating desktop video conferencing solutions at work and had discussed making a shift to Apples due to the great video integration. When I shared my story Apple's name was immediately removed from the list for being too business hostile.
Even if the market was split evenly there is still an advantage to utilizing two different platforms which the article clearly points out; a single attack is unlikely to take down all systems. This falls in line with the principal of using different platforms between a DMZ and an internal server when providing a service to the Internet. The difference, mathematically speaking, greatly reduces the probability of a successful internal compromise.
You actually have to feel a bit for this administration. I mean really, who are they going to find among their self serving power mongering inner circle with enough empathy to run a deparment like FEMA well. The fundementals are so far out of their base mind set. It must be a really tough situation them.
Do not forget about the three $125k managers required to figure out excatly which license fees apply and how to track compliance.
I can think of a few options that would not require purchaing a carrier or a carrier pigeon as others have suggested. 1) Run all your servers on Linux and use screen via a compressed ssh session. OK, maybe this would require too much re-work, but this is /. so it had to be said.
2) Co-locate a WAN accelerator and connect your computer to this device. You may be able to get the hospital to let you co-locate there if you use it primarily for supporting their systems--or even purchase the thing if you can justify it for other purposes [remote clinics]. I think Riverbed has an installable client. This would reduce latency on some applications and speed up data streams that have repeating bit patterns. It also does a great job of proxying CIFS connections.
3) Co-locate a PC and RDP into it. Your screen updates might be a bit slow, but applications should function just fine. You might even try a combination of this and #2. RDP is a rather lean protoco, but you never know.
Good luck, otherwise I might know a realator in your area. :)
Ironically your comments are equally applicable to general drug practices. Many doctors prescribe medicines based on probabilities with little regard to the actual patient. If a medicine has a 60% chance of being beneficial it does not matter that you are in the 40% part of the population. If you have multiple complaints you are likely to get multiple medicines. The doctor will, of course, check for known interactions, but most medicines are not generally cross tested for interactions unless there are deaths involved.
Remember that medically accepted drugs are tested by the drug companies. Setting aside some of the recent controversies, drug companies are not interested in general health, only ailment treatable by patentable products. Think about it, when was the last time you saw an anti-acid commercial that told you to stop eating like a human garbage can. Why would they when instead they can sell you something.
In reality, there are plenty of snake-oil sales and, strictly speaking, unscientific remedies in the homeopathy world, but there is also a disturbing amount of this same activity occurring within the medical community. While I take a number of medically prescribed drugs but I do not dismiss out of hand the entire homeopathic community.
I cannot help but to think this is an attempt to keep Whole Foods from effectively competing with WalMart. If Whole Foods were to acquire WildOats they might actually become 6 billion dollar company, up from the 5.7 billion dollar company they are today. How will 200 billion dollar WalMart compete? It just isn't fair!
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/mar20What are you talking about? Do you understand the concept of MVCC, real MVCC? You are sorely mistaken if you think PostgreSQL locks then entire database just because it stores all the data for a table in a single file (which btw, it does not).
http://www.developer.com/open/article.php/877181
You are correct, this person must be an idiot. Anybody who goes through all that must have some fundamental flow. At some point you would think he would have stopped accepting refurbished units and only accepted a refund.
Statistically speaking . . . you generally do not count multiple occurrences separately any more than you count the returns as new sales. If you manufacture 10 items and 1 item is a lemon you have a 1% defect rate no matter how many times that one device is returned for repairs. Imagine if that 1 item was returned 11 times. Do you think there would be a 110% failure rate?
There is one major difference, enthusiasts were interested in downloading FF1.0 because they wanted it for their primary browser whereas people are curious about Safari on Windows. You could forward an argument that the same initial million that downloaded FF1.0 are core technologists and wanted to take a peak at Safari. I am sure that many of the curious will continue to use Safari, but there is not the pent-up demand and anticipation for Safari that there was for FF. Now we will have to see how Apple translates this initial surge into a sustained user base.
The GPL in general is an attempt to restore intellectual freedoms taken away by underlying copyright law. Without copyright laws all published code would be free from the perspective of both BSD or GPL crowds--although compiled code might have to be disassembled first. You may or may not agree with how the GPL accomplishes this "freedom correction," but you cannot argue about the relative freedom a particular license provides without adding the underlying copyright code into the discussion.
The purpose of the GPL is to create a microcosm of code exchange where intellectual freedoms are protected in spite of copyright laws. I believe RMS' hope was that the economic mechanics of the GPL would eventually create sufficient value such that it was easier to participate in the community even for commercial interests than not, thereby further growing the community. Regardless of RMS' intention or you personal view of the GPL, I think that history has demonstrated the power of the GPL to build these communities such that TiVo would opt to use a GPL foundation for their products in the first place.
As for TiVo's ultimate fate, they are much more likely to die due to cable companies and congress mucking around the cable card standards to prevent full interoperability or in some cases even base compatibility than to be hurt of the GPL3. So ironically, TiVo will be killed by the same anti-circumvention laws they are complaining the GPL3 is designed to eliminate. The problem is fundamentally with the law not the license.