"I'm laughing because you'd set up our moral rules for society as a sort of majority-rules caucus."
Do you really thing it is anything else but that?
Do you really think the feeling that killing some 1200 people by throwing a plane to a skyscrapper is good but killing some 12000 people by starting a war to liberate a country is bad while at the same time, some few thousands miles away from that place the conversely is the accepted truth is nothing but the expression of ethics by means of a sort of positively feedbacked majority-rules caucus?
"Did you read it [the article about homosexuality predominance among species]? The point of the study was to construct normative statements for humans from the behavior of the studied animals."
I did it. It wasn't.
"[The development of an ethical sense of existance *is* based on the self feelings of disgust or acceptabilit] it is an incomprehensibly stupid basis for moral law. "
No one said otherwise. I didn't speculated about the value of that but I stated the fact that that's the way ethics arise.
"In bizzaro-world, maybe"
Please first define what "bizzaro-world" means and then show me the one we live in is not such a "bizzaro-world".
"One million Frenchmen can't be wrong, right?"
You can bet they are not wrong from the point of view of such million Frenchmen. Which happens to be what ethics is about.
"Our system of respect for natural rights of humanity, and humanism in general, is the result of Christian thought."
I claim bullshit on that. In fact, the conversely is nearer the truth. The Greek/Roman system of natural rights of humanity is what modelled the Christian thought to be what it happened to be.
On the other hand, that kind of basic assumptions about proper social ordering has happened to appear with minor variations in societies and philosophers all around the world obviously non connected to Christian tradition. Ockham would tell you that the "Christian" part of the equation is the one that should be taken out unless strong evidences for it can be brought to the table (evidences that AFAIK are not produced).
"God keeps getting smaller and smaller as there are fewer gaps to put him in"
Not in fact. Because it is not only the "god of the gaps" but the "true scotchman" falacy at the same time.
So the Universe wasn't built in seven days? Well, it really doesn't matter because the *truly* important part is that His Almightyness created all the creatures at its proper moment to fullfill His Plan.
Oh! so there's evolution and God didn't create the living things the way there are at some point in time? Well, it really doesn't matter because the *truly* important part is that He created Man and Woman to His own image.
Oh! so evolution does affect tho human beings too? Well, it really doesn't matter because the *truly* important part is that He instills an immortal soul right after conception.
And so the show must go on.
"Talk about a losing strategy!"
Well, not exactly. In the end, science is about the whats and hows, but not about the whys. In this realm religions will fight against phylosophy which is "just" a matter of opinions too, so that part of the war they can fight on more or less equal grounds.
"If he's a Catholic, he asks a priest (who asks his superiors, until you get to the Pope, who asks God and then tells everyone what he thinks God said). If he's a protestant, he makes his own mind up, and forms a new flavour of Christianity if he disagrees too strongly with the existing ones..."
Quite nicely stated. Yes, that's what he would do. And then it shows itself to be quite far from any reasonable definition of "reveled truth" that is on the basis of any theist religion.
How do you prefer me to state it? "rationalizing prejudices" or "cognitive dissonance"?
"And yet pick up a random SciAm or read over the comments on Slashdot, and you'll be able to find this fallacy at work. Homosexuality in animals is often used to inform debate on homosexuality in humans "
Which, again, is a logical fallacy on your side: Presence of property X in a subset of Y allows to make the assumption that property X not only can't be discounted in a different subset X' of Y unless probed that X and X' must be disjointed with regards of property Y but offers a better point of start that any other random Y' property. So, yes, animal homosexuality can be used to throw light to the understandment of human homosexuality. What it won't be is a probatory means of that. And I challenge you to find otherwise. Certainly your citation doesn't do that and it dangerously put you near the "plain troll" position, since the article thesis is "Homosexuality is a social phenomenon and is most widespread among animals with a complex herd life" which for all that we know is hardly either a novel or disputed fact.
"So we're using "feelings of disgust" (which will presumably be measured scientifically) to create ethical laws?"
The devolopment of an ethical sense of existance *is* based on the self feelings of disgust or acceptability. What else did you thing it was?
"LOL. That'll create a wonderful world to live in."
That *has* created the wonderful world you in fact live in.
"The ability to control the result is much more limited then (absolute) omnipotency, but for all desired intents and purposes it is as close as one could reasonably get. I don't think the term omnipotency is meant to be taken as an absolute ability but more as a relative ability so that whatever else happens, god has the ability to control the *end result* regardless of *the path* we decide to follow towards it?"
That's quite a good definition for a god but certainly it is not what omnipotency means within Christian realms.
Your definition of omnipotency is one that even Ancient Greek gods owned as described by the concept of "fate" from the Greek tragedies. For the Christian, omnipotent literally means all-mighty. There has been theologists dealing with the obvious logical problems that come out of this with no valid solution but the standard one when everything else fails: don't try to understand it; it's just the way things are, you just need faith to believe it.
"What if we define omnipotence as "can do anything that is logically possible"?"
Then it's not omnipotence in the sense of "can do anything".
But even then, being the god hypothese illogical and non-falsable, you can go out of it with ease: "of course god can create a rock so heavy he can't lift it and even then lift it. It's only that your limited mind doesn't understand it" and gone with it.
"it is a very common, and very incorrect reduction that some scientists apply - "humans are animals, therefore humans are no different from other animals"."
Who is making false claims here? Of course any person can make mistaken arguments but since they are demonstrably false they won't make their way into science, not for long at least. Since "humans are animals, therefore humans are no different from other animals" is an obvious logical fallacy -the part for the whole, there's no way it will be accepted. As it can't be accepted your argument since it's an obvious logical fallacy too: a strawman proposal.
Oh, and it within science ability to show you why you -and I, feel infecting twins with smallpox to be a bad thing: it's the realm of ethology of great primates so yes, I know why I feel in disgust about somebody infecting twins with smallpox and why somebody will try that so I should impose legal rules to avoid it -everything out of scientific knowledge.
Yes, you don't want to admit it even to yourself but yours is still the god of the gaps.
"one Christian when reading creation story believes in it as a parable"
Still, when one Christian reads that Christ is the very Son of God and God Himself, because God is One and Three, he things that's absolutly -albeit misteriously, true.
What makes him read a phrase in the Bible stated as a fact and say to himself "that's a parable" or "that's the reveled truth"?
Quite convenient deciding 'post facto' what your corpus of believes will be but that's rationalizing your prejudices, not religion.
"I find it curious that for all the backwards stuff the Catholic Church does, evolution doesn't seem to bother them in the slightest."
You shouldn't. A basis of all (thocratic) religions is that it explains a lot of things but demonstrates nothing.
Now, a "clever" religion (and the Catholic one has evolutioned itself in this regard as a mean to survive -as a civil corporation) can explain everything while still demostrating nothing.
Some examples: * Some religion guru comes with the idea that his god woke up some day and decided that his almigtyness would create life, intelligence and everything; so the guru writes the Genesis and so be it. * After a lot of years the modern gurus of that religion see that they are losing ground because science made obvious the Genesis can't be nothing but a child's tale. No problem.
What do evidences support? Well, it seems that there were a big bang. What can't science demonstrate, at least today? How it was that the big bang happened. No problem: there were a big bang and God made it happen.
What do evidences support? Well, it seems that living beings evolution by means of selective pressure on random mutations. No problem: living beings evolution by means of pressure on mutations but there are not really random but directed by God almightiness so they only seem to be random but working in accord to His plan.
What can't science demonstrate? That there's a soul that survives after death. No problem: that's God's realm: there *is* an indetectable soul that lifes eternally.
You see, if you are intelligent enough and work on a hypothese unfalsable and that doesn't demonstrate anything you can rework your model without resigning to your main tenets all you want.
"Put all your eggs in one basket -- what could possibly go wrong?"
Well, I remember Bellovin (the "father" of the computer firewall) saying something to the meaning of "the claver will say ' don't put all your eggs in one basket' but the wise will tell you 'put all your eggs in one basket and watch very carefully that basket'".
"You're missing the GP's point that big iron is more efficient. So, yah, it costs more and is more reliable, and more efficient."
It's only that no, that's not his point. My previous grandparent post says nothing about efficiency, just reliability.
Yes, his grandparent (the linux geek) does talk about efficiency, only his claim is unstated by any fact.
Yes, a big box should be more energy efficient but it is? Even more, is it to the point of being economically savvy?
Big vendor provided boxes are not just "bigger" but bigger for the most part in uneeded ways (I don't need big backplanes or expensive RAID controllers if I don't even think of attaching hard disks; the same goes with redundant or hot pluggable power units, CPU, RAM, etc. if my system is tolerant to a node's failure). And then, it's the software issue: specially open source "usual" programs are not really so deeply tested on really high loads, so why should I be the one hitting nasty bugs when I can simply add few more machines and get them under "usual" loads where they just go humming OK?
You see, in the end Facebook opted for home-grown boxes but, even then, they went the "big bunch of commodity machines": less cost, less testing, less risk if something goes nuts. All of this must be balanced against those untested efficiency claims for bigger boxes.
"smartphones have been around long enough that a hospital IT department being unable to support them would be an indicator that the IT department is not very professional."
Yes. Or heavily underbudgeted, or in the middle of a war at the board of directors' level to outsource it for peanuts, or iron-fisted from the HR dpt. so they can hire only morons, or managed by the CEO's nephew which some time ago did an ms office course.
Certainly, as experience dictates, when a department is underperformant the culprit is usually the low ranked people being unprofessional, not the management or the corporate culture... or is it?
"When Mr. jddorian needs a service from IT that is not currently provided, the usual answer is "we don't have anything that matches your needs". The answer is not "we will research the market for an appropriate option" or "we'll study a way to provide this service, even if currently unavailable in the market". If he insists, his requests fall on/dev/null."
And what else would you expect?
Was Mr. jddorian talking to the IT head or some IT minion? If I talk to the IT head from a position of being his equal I'd certainly expect and answer in line with "I'll see what can be done" (probably followed by "but I must tell you my alotted budget is already compromised till summer, 2025"). If I talk to some IT minion I think reasonable to expect something in the lines of "that's against the procedures my boss stablished for me".
"Mr. jddorian ignores (in the sense that he doesn't know about it) HIPAA and IT had not mentioned it at any time."
Mr. jddorian is the head of a clinical division. He should know better, both about HIPAA and about how things go in any hierarchical organization.
Mr. jddorian probably would find "funny" if the IT head plugged an extension cord to the electrical source of "his" PET machine because he needed it for the computer he produced for the new internal issue tracking service.
" A chronic problem in the Admin field is the belief that admins are their to keep the network running."
Maybe it's because when the network it's not running they get fired.
"their real job of making sure the users have what they need to do their jobs."
Sorry, but you are utterly wrong. The *CTOs* work (or whatever the equivalent role in your organization) is making sure the users have what they need to do their job. The IT minions work is doing as the CTO says, which usually means, let the services, systems and networks go humming.
And even then, the CTOs role is make sure the users have what they *need* to do their jobs, not whatever they *think* they need to do their job, and do it at the face of limited budget and conflicting interests.
"Seriously, I'm tired of IT departments that only support Windows and Office and anything else is not their problem. These guys are just trying to increase productivity and came up with a potential solution on their own"
Since you seem to know about business management, let me ask you some questions:
Given that IT is probably considered a cost center with fixed budget and non-negotiable head count well below the support needs of a non-standardized environment, how do you propose to achieve the conflicting goals of supporting whatever you happen to come with versus any semi-decent SLA for the systems already in place?
Given that IT will be considered responsible, maybe even criminally responsible, for whatever legal violations or misbehaviours (HIPAA, SoX... you name it) from any system within their reach, no matter if managed or not by them, how do you propose to achieve the conflicting goals of being legally abiding and responsible and allowing whatever you come with in the network?
You seem not to be working in IT; let's presume you are a doctor for the sake of the discussion (it could be anything else). You said "If it were me, I'd want to let IT take over support and move the software to their server - as you say, it's their job." Would you accept for a patient jumping over the queue because "it's your job to attend him" or would you make him wait a time amount directly dependant on your current queue and work load? Would you consider fair from your patient to assume -as you did about IT people, that no work at all were done unless you take care about him? That since you were not immediately taking care of him it was implied that you were just hand over hand doing nothing? Would you accept your patient's solution about a treatment or surgical technic or would you insist things are done your way or no way? Why do you thing it should be different in the case of IT, then?
Look: for the most part, people serving people just want the people they serve to be satisfied with the service they provide (the Maslow pyramid thingie), so please consider if even for a second that if IT people are not satisfying you it might be the case it's not because of their black souls but because of things well beyond their reach, like stupidly insufficient budget and head count, misaligned priorities stablished well beyond their heads, or just plain old bad management.
"they've grown in a culture of commodity PCs and think everything is equally unreliable, so why spend more money on big-iron if it's going to fail at the same rate?"
I don't think that's exactly their point.
The point is more "why spend more money on big-iron if it's going to eventually fail anyway?" If it's going to fail eventually, you'll have to program-around the failure mode, but once you properly program-around system failure why going with the more expensive equiment? Go with the cheaper one and allow it to fail more frequently, since it really doesn't matter now.
"Having it as an option is great, but for non-sensitive data (e.g., source code that I'm already making available to the world) I'll take the protocol with the lower overhead."
I would do that too.
But to me, the lower overhead doesn't come from FTP but from SCP. It's just like Telnet.
More and more, the expensive part of the equation is the labour hours; since FTP is more or less the same than SCP (or SSH the same as Telnet), I prefer knowing and using one tool better than two.
"it's different to outsourcing in that the idea is to give it to someone who has better facilities or can just manage servers flat out better"
As in "oh, I wouldn't even think to outsource a service in order to give it to someone who has better facilities or can just manage the outsourced service flat out better"?
"rather than just shovelling work off to someone who can do it cheaper."
As in "oh, I wouldn't even think to move to the cloud just in order for my IT running cheaper"?
"not every company should be running their own datacentre."
Probably not. Last I checked that was what "managed services & infrastructure" was for.
"Why would anyone want to store their contents on a remote server where they are at the mercy of a third party."
Why would anyone want to store their money virtualized and on a remote server where they are at the mercy of a third party?
You will laugh at it, but that's exactly the proposition I heard about the other day. I think to remember the guy proposed to name his business offer "bank".
Ha! good luck trying to convince people to pass control of their hard earned money away to a "bank". *That's* hard, not some bits and bytes.
Slashdot Mirror
"Competent hosting companies monitor for this abuse. Amazon doesn't, and turns a blind eye towards it"
Just like competent gun makers will monitor for gun abuses? Is this the "Colt should pay for murderings produced using its weapons" argument?
"One's session cookie itself is sensitive data, as any Firesheep user can snoop it and use it."
Ok, so someone snoops a cookie and hijacks your for-demonstration-purposes website.
So what?
"I'm laughing because you'd set up our moral rules for society as a sort of majority-rules caucus."
Do you really thing it is anything else but that?
Do you really think the feeling that killing some 1200 people by throwing a plane to a skyscrapper is good but killing some 12000 people by starting a war to liberate a country is bad while at the same time, some few thousands miles away from that place the conversely is the accepted truth is nothing but the expression of ethics by means of a sort of positively feedbacked majority-rules caucus?
"Did you read it [the article about homosexuality predominance among species]? The point of the study was to construct normative statements for humans from the behavior of the studied animals."
I did it. It wasn't.
"[The development of an ethical sense of existance *is* based on the self feelings of disgust or acceptabilit] it is an incomprehensibly stupid basis for moral law. "
No one said otherwise. I didn't speculated about the value of that but I stated the fact that that's the way ethics arise.
"In bizzaro-world, maybe"
Please first define what "bizzaro-world" means and then show me the one we live in is not such a "bizzaro-world".
"One million Frenchmen can't be wrong, right?"
You can bet they are not wrong from the point of view of such million Frenchmen. Which happens to be what ethics is about.
"Our system of respect for natural rights of humanity, and humanism in general, is the result of Christian thought."
I claim bullshit on that. In fact, the conversely is nearer the truth. The Greek/Roman system of natural rights of humanity is what modelled the Christian thought to be what it happened to be.
On the other hand, that kind of basic assumptions about proper social ordering has happened to appear with minor variations in societies and philosophers all around the world obviously non connected to Christian tradition. Ockham would tell you that the "Christian" part of the equation is the one that should be taken out unless strong evidences for it can be brought to the table (evidences that AFAIK are not produced).
"God keeps getting smaller and smaller as there are fewer gaps to put him in"
Not in fact. Because it is not only the "god of the gaps" but the "true scotchman" falacy at the same time.
So the Universe wasn't built in seven days? Well, it really doesn't matter because the *truly* important part is that His Almightyness created all the creatures at its proper moment to fullfill His Plan.
Oh! so there's evolution and God didn't create the living things the way there are at some point in time? Well, it really doesn't matter because the *truly* important part is that He created Man and Woman to His own image.
Oh! so evolution does affect tho human beings too? Well, it really doesn't matter because the *truly* important part is that He instills an immortal soul right after conception.
And so the show must go on.
"Talk about a losing strategy!"
Well, not exactly. In the end, science is about the whats and hows, but not about the whys. In this realm religions will fight against phylosophy which is "just" a matter of opinions too, so that part of the war they can fight on more or less equal grounds.
"If he's a Catholic, he asks a priest (who asks his superiors, until you get to the Pope, who asks God and then tells everyone what he thinks God said). If he's a protestant, he makes his own mind up, and forms a new flavour of Christianity if he disagrees too strongly with the existing ones..."
Quite nicely stated. Yes, that's what he would do. And then it shows itself to be quite far from any reasonable definition of "reveled truth" that is on the basis of any theist religion.
How do you prefer me to state it? "rationalizing prejudices" or "cognitive dissonance"?
"And yet pick up a random SciAm or read over the comments on Slashdot, and you'll be able to find this fallacy at work. Homosexuality in animals is often used to inform debate on homosexuality in humans "
Which, again, is a logical fallacy on your side: Presence of property X in a subset of Y allows to make the assumption that property X not only can't be discounted in a different subset X' of Y unless probed that X and X' must be disjointed with regards of property Y but offers a better point of start that any other random Y' property. So, yes, animal homosexuality can be used to throw light to the understandment of human homosexuality. What it won't be is a probatory means of that. And I challenge you to find otherwise. Certainly your citation doesn't do that and it dangerously put you near the "plain troll" position, since the article thesis is "Homosexuality is a social phenomenon and is most widespread among animals with a complex herd life" which for all that we know is hardly either a novel or disputed fact.
"So we're using "feelings of disgust" (which will presumably be measured scientifically) to create ethical laws?"
The devolopment of an ethical sense of existance *is* based on the self feelings of disgust or acceptability. What else did you thing it was?
"LOL. That'll create a wonderful world to live in."
That *has* created the wonderful world you in fact live in.
"The ability to control the result is much more limited then (absolute) omnipotency, but for all desired intents and purposes it is as close as one could reasonably get. I don't think the term omnipotency is meant to be taken as an absolute ability but more as a relative ability so that whatever else happens, god has the ability to control the *end result* regardless of *the path* we decide to follow towards it?"
That's quite a good definition for a god but certainly it is not what omnipotency means within Christian realms.
Your definition of omnipotency is one that even Ancient Greek gods owned as described by the concept of "fate" from the Greek tragedies. For the Christian, omnipotent literally means all-mighty. There has been theologists dealing with the obvious logical problems that come out of this with no valid solution but the standard one when everything else fails: don't try to understand it; it's just the way things are, you just need faith to believe it.
"What if we define omnipotence as "can do anything that is logically possible"?"
Then it's not omnipotence in the sense of "can do anything".
But even then, being the god hypothese illogical and non-falsable, you can go out of it with ease: "of course god can create a rock so heavy he can't lift it and even then lift it. It's only that your limited mind doesn't understand it" and gone with it.
"it is a very common, and very incorrect reduction that some scientists apply - "humans are animals, therefore humans are no different from other animals"."
Who is making false claims here? Of course any person can make mistaken arguments but since they are demonstrably false they won't make their way into science, not for long at least. Since "humans are animals, therefore humans are no different from other animals" is an obvious logical fallacy -the part for the whole, there's no way it will be accepted. As it can't be accepted your argument since it's an obvious logical fallacy too: a strawman proposal.
Oh, and it within science ability to show you why you -and I, feel infecting twins with smallpox to be a bad thing: it's the realm of ethology of great primates so yes, I know why I feel in disgust about somebody infecting twins with smallpox and why somebody will try that so I should impose legal rules to avoid it -everything out of scientific knowledge.
Yes, you don't want to admit it even to yourself but yours is still the god of the gaps.
"one Christian when reading creation story believes in it as a parable"
Still, when one Christian reads that Christ is the very Son of God and God Himself, because God is One and Three, he things that's absolutly -albeit misteriously, true.
What makes him read a phrase in the Bible stated as a fact and say to himself "that's a parable" or "that's the reveled truth"?
Quite convenient deciding 'post facto' what your corpus of believes will be but that's rationalizing your prejudices, not religion.
"I find it curious that for all the backwards stuff the Catholic Church does, evolution doesn't seem to bother them in the slightest."
You shouldn't. A basis of all (thocratic) religions is that it explains a lot of things but demonstrates nothing.
Now, a "clever" religion (and the Catholic one has evolutioned itself in this regard as a mean to survive -as a civil corporation) can explain everything while still demostrating nothing.
Some examples:
* Some religion guru comes with the idea that his god woke up some day and decided that his almigtyness would create life, intelligence and everything; so the guru writes the Genesis and so be it.
* After a lot of years the modern gurus of that religion see that they are losing ground because science made obvious the Genesis can't be nothing but a child's tale. No problem.
What do evidences support? Well, it seems that there were a big bang. What can't science demonstrate, at least today? How it was that the big bang happened. No problem: there were a big bang and God made it happen.
What do evidences support? Well, it seems that living beings evolution by means of selective pressure on random mutations. No problem: living beings evolution by means of pressure on mutations but there are not really random but directed by God almightiness so they only seem to be random but working in accord to His plan.
What can't science demonstrate? That there's a soul that survives after death. No problem: that's God's realm: there *is* an indetectable soul that lifes eternally.
You see, if you are intelligent enough and work on a hypothese unfalsable and that doesn't demonstrate anything you can rework your model without resigning to your main tenets all you want.
"But where is the death certificate?"
Ehuhh... I think it's enough if Netcraft confirms it.
"Put all your eggs in one basket -- what could possibly go wrong?"
Well, I remember Bellovin (the "father" of the computer firewall) saying something to the meaning of "the claver will say ' don't put all your eggs in one basket' but the wise will tell you 'put all your eggs in one basket and watch very carefully that basket'".
"You're missing the GP's point that big iron is more efficient. So, yah, it costs more and is more reliable, and more efficient."
It's only that no, that's not his point. My previous grandparent post says nothing about efficiency, just reliability.
Yes, his grandparent (the linux geek) does talk about efficiency, only his claim is unstated by any fact.
Yes, a big box should be more energy efficient but it is? Even more, is it to the point of being economically savvy?
Big vendor provided boxes are not just "bigger" but bigger for the most part in uneeded ways (I don't need big backplanes or expensive RAID controllers if I don't even think of attaching hard disks; the same goes with redundant or hot pluggable power units, CPU, RAM, etc. if my system is tolerant to a node's failure). And then, it's the software issue: specially open source "usual" programs are not really so deeply tested on really high loads, so why should I be the one hitting nasty bugs when I can simply add few more machines and get them under "usual" loads where they just go humming OK?
You see, in the end Facebook opted for home-grown boxes but, even then, they went the "big bunch of commodity machines": less cost, less testing, less risk if something goes nuts. All of this must be balanced against those untested efficiency claims for bigger boxes.
"smartphones have been around long enough that a hospital IT department being unable to support them would be an indicator that the IT department is not very professional."
Yes. Or heavily underbudgeted, or in the middle of a war at the board of directors' level to outsource it for peanuts, or iron-fisted from the HR dpt. so they can hire only morons, or managed by the CEO's nephew which some time ago did an ms office course.
Certainly, as experience dictates, when a department is underperformant the culprit is usually the low ranked people being unprofessional, not the management or the corporate culture... or is it?
"When Mr. jddorian needs a service from IT that is not currently provided, the usual answer is "we don't have anything that matches your needs". The answer is not "we will research the market for an appropriate option" or "we'll study a way to provide this service, even if currently unavailable in the market". If he insists, his requests fall on /dev/null."
And what else would you expect?
Was Mr. jddorian talking to the IT head or some IT minion? If I talk to the IT head from a position of being his equal I'd certainly expect and answer in line with "I'll see what can be done" (probably followed by "but I must tell you my alotted budget is already compromised till summer, 2025"). If I talk to some IT minion I think reasonable to expect something in the lines of "that's against the procedures my boss stablished for me".
"Mr. jddorian ignores (in the sense that he doesn't know about it) HIPAA and IT had not mentioned it at any time."
Mr. jddorian is the head of a clinical division. He should know better, both about HIPAA and about how things go in any hierarchical organization.
Mr. jddorian probably would find "funny" if the IT head plugged an extension cord to the electrical source of "his" PET machine because he needed it for the computer he produced for the new internal issue tracking service.
"I've worked at 4 colleges, and the IT departments were invariably mouth breathing morons at all of them."
Why you blame the IT department then, instead of the real culprit, which is the HR department?
" A chronic problem in the Admin field is the belief that admins are their to keep the network running."
Maybe it's because when the network it's not running they get fired.
"their real job of making sure the users have what they need to do their jobs."
Sorry, but you are utterly wrong. The *CTOs* work (or whatever the equivalent role in your organization) is making sure the users have what they need to do their job. The IT minions work is doing as the CTO says, which usually means, let the services, systems and networks go humming.
And even then, the CTOs role is make sure the users have what they *need* to do their jobs, not whatever they *think* they need to do their job, and do it at the face of limited budget and conflicting interests.
"Seriously, I'm tired of IT departments that only support Windows and Office and anything else is not their problem. These guys are just trying to increase productivity and came up with a potential solution on their own"
Since you seem to know about business management, let me ask you some questions:
Given that IT is probably considered a cost center with fixed budget and non-negotiable head count well below the support needs of a non-standardized environment, how do you propose to achieve the conflicting goals of supporting whatever you happen to come with versus any semi-decent SLA for the systems already in place?
Given that IT will be considered responsible, maybe even criminally responsible, for whatever legal violations or misbehaviours (HIPAA, SoX... you name it) from any system within their reach, no matter if managed or not by them, how do you propose to achieve the conflicting goals of being legally abiding and responsible and allowing whatever you come with in the network?
You seem not to be working in IT; let's presume you are a doctor for the sake of the discussion (it could be anything else). You said "If it were me, I'd want to let IT take over support and move the software to their server - as you say, it's their job." Would you accept for a patient jumping over the queue because "it's your job to attend him" or would you make him wait a time amount directly dependant on your current queue and work load? Would you consider fair from your patient to assume -as you did about IT people, that no work at all were done unless you take care about him? That since you were not immediately taking care of him it was implied that you were just hand over hand doing nothing? Would you accept your patient's solution about a treatment or surgical technic or would you insist things are done your way or no way? Why do you thing it should be different in the case of IT, then?
Look: for the most part, people serving people just want the people they serve to be satisfied with the service they provide (the Maslow pyramid thingie), so please consider if even for a second that if IT people are not satisfying you it might be the case it's not because of their black souls but because of things well beyond their reach, like stupidly insufficient budget and head count, misaligned priorities stablished well beyond their heads, or just plain old bad management.
"However"
However? Let's see.
"music also trains students to be diligent"
Exactly like chess.
"that it takes effort to be good at something"
Exactly like chess.
"that you can be good at something if you put in enough effort"
Exactly like chess.
"It gives immediate and constant feedback on progress"
Exactly like chess.
"It helps them form the connection that diligence and success are related"
Exactly like chess.
So there's no "however" after all.
"they've grown in a culture of commodity PCs and think everything is equally unreliable, so why spend more money on big-iron if it's going to fail at the same rate?"
I don't think that's exactly their point.
The point is more "why spend more money on big-iron if it's going to eventually fail anyway?" If it's going to fail eventually, you'll have to program-around the failure mode, but once you properly program-around system failure why going with the more expensive equiment? Go with the cheaper one and allow it to fail more frequently, since it really doesn't matter now.
"Having it as an option is great, but for non-sensitive data (e.g., source code that I'm already making available to the world) I'll take the protocol with the lower overhead."
I would do that too.
But to me, the lower overhead doesn't come from FTP but from SCP. It's just like Telnet.
More and more, the expensive part of the equation is the labour hours; since FTP is more or less the same than SCP (or SSH the same as Telnet), I prefer knowing and using one tool better than two.
"I mean no offense, but as a student of history, aren't FUD and Microsoft synonymous?"
As a student of history you should know that FUD was an IBM invention, Microsoft is just an advanced student.
"it's different to outsourcing in that the idea is to give it to someone who has better facilities or can just manage servers flat out better"
As in "oh, I wouldn't even think to outsource a service in order to give it to someone who has better facilities or can just manage the outsourced service flat out better"?
"rather than just shovelling work off to someone who can do it cheaper."
As in "oh, I wouldn't even think to move to the cloud just in order for my IT running cheaper"?
"not every company should be running their own datacentre."
Probably not. Last I checked that was what "managed services & infrastructure" was for.
"Why would anyone want to store their contents on a remote server where they are at the mercy of a third party."
Why would anyone want to store their money virtualized and on a remote server where they are at the mercy of a third party?
You will laugh at it, but that's exactly the proposition I heard about the other day. I think to remember the guy proposed to name his business offer "bank".
Ha! good luck trying to convince people to pass control of their hard earned money away to a "bank". *That's* hard, not some bits and bytes.