There is only one way to justify a cost center (like IT): metrics. Metrics can't be pulled out of thin air on a Friday afternoon, so you need to get them as you work.
The easiest way to do so is to setup a ticket system; there is plenty of free products out there, my favorite on Windows being BTNet. Once you have the system setup, you nicely ask people to send their support requests at at specific email address (which will feed the ticket database -- a built-in feature in most products). And for the users who don't comply, you do it yourself (do not add burden to end user while you start fishing for metrics). As for the stuff you do on your own, create tickets as well, in a specific category.
Once the requests are in the system, make a good follow-up (categories, statuses, notes, etc) and make sure to show this to your end users. This will bring two benefits: on one hand people will happily see your workload and where their request is located in your pipeline (and bugger you less), and on the second hand you can organize your day more efficiently.
After a while, the opening and closing of tickets will provide you with *metrics*; that is, figures that you can show your boss (even charts). Keeping metrics is almost magical, because in a few Excel manipulations you can build a business case, like: "I spend 5 hours a week debugging this printer, if we change it for a new model it will be paid for in X months". This shows your manager that you are a business-wise IT guy, which is a valuable skill.
Then the big splash: build a performance dashboard. A performance dashboard can be as simple as a Excel worksheet where you list your most important metrics: hours spent on end-user supports, average response time, hours spent on hardware maintenance, hours of unplanned downtime, etc. Those metrics are called KPI (Key Performance Indicator) and they can provide a basis for your management to evaluate your work. A good dashboard can be great to make goals (reduce response time by 1/2 over the next three months) or to spot biggest cost centers.
If you provide your boss or the management with a weekly or monthly dashboard they will be able to figure out what you do -- much more than a louse Todo.txt and a "BTW I also do such and such". With solid figures, the management will think of your work as a business item, and that one time when the big boss came by your cubicle and caught you reading comics won't have such a negative impact, because your work is clearly defined in the dashboard.
Of course it is possible that bringing numbers up will show that you are, indeed, redundant. If so, then at least you can use this experience as a great tale for future interview, to display your level of professionalism. And getting a bit of management experience is always good for a resume.
Once you have metrics you can define what is the most critical aspects of your work; this is called a KPI (Key Performance Indicator), and any decent manager will be completely comfortable with a nice Excel dashboard filled with KPI -- much more than with a bunch of Todo.txt files and "BTW I also do X an Y".
The first thing to do is to setup a ticket system. There are plenty available for free; on Windows my favorite one is BugTracker.Net (http://ifdefined.com/bugtrackernet.html).
Customer care basics: communication! Keep your customer aware of what is going when there is a problem, tell him what you do to get it fixed and try to provide an ETA for the resolution. This way the user don't feel like he is kept in the dark and stress level will go down a notch or two. Look at how Tylenol handled the poisoned bottles crisis in the early 80's; this is textbook crisis management.
Google is going the other way: being vague, hiding behind its interpretation of the SLA, etc. They might be very good in the search engine business, but as a service provider, and especially in the customer management area, they suck big time. Their downtime is not the biggest problem; its the nonchalance with which the service disruptions are handled that is unpleasant. Email and groupware services are the lifeblood of many companies, and if Google cannot offer a decent customer service for the money they ask, they should either raise the fees and behave like a responsible provider or get out of the business.
One of our sysadmins called and basically was told that some accounts were temporarily unavailable (duh!), that the problem would be solved as soon as possible, and to check the forums for public announcements. (And yes, we are a premium customer).
That's how you spot crappy support: when you get a list of symptoms (that you already know) and no specific cause or resolution process other than "the engineers are working on it". No valuable info to pass to the end users to calm them.
When Google is down, all you get is access to lousy forums with little or no support, while your end users keep asking for an ETA or at least for an explanation. You end up being a punching bag for the failure of a solution you probably never agreed with and that was forced down your throat by the management.
I guess this is an ok deal for small biz with no technical employees, but as soon as your users headcount goes over 20, Novell Groupwise or Microsoft Small Business Server becomes more interesting. And when hosted locally, it will at least work as internal groupware and allow users to access shared documents while the internet connection is down.
Miro? Laptops? Blackberry? Xbox? You probably have a bigger electromagnetic footprint than the power lines in my backyard...
Do you really need all that Inspector Gadget weaponry? Why don't you coze up with an old AM radio, a bottle of gin and a beat-up deck of cards which has the perfect texture to play Solitaire in a dimly lighted living room? And a simple sheet where you strike or circle states as they are being called officially?
Do you really see any value in being the first to send a twitter to your pals about such or such result, while everybody on Earth and beyond will be completely aware of the information in a matter of minutes or hours? There is no scoop on election night, only an annoying chase to be first to know.
You want a real scoop? Here is one: while Obama is way up in polls, McCain will be the next president. Because the people that were supposed to vote for Obama were too busy subscribing to RSS feeds and setting up gamma on their webcam so they would be ready to upload their comments on youtube, and they neglected to go on and vote. While the good ol' God fearing folks were first in line at the booth and spent the election night sipping gin and playing Solitaire. That's exactly how Le Pen got so far in the French elections a few years back - not enough people casting their vote because the polls were on their side.
There is just too much gadgets people. Time to pull a few plugs and get in touch with reality, where elections are won by people who get the most votes, not people who get the most Digg or website hits.
The guy who decided to outsource the manufacturing of those batteries should be *fired* (or forced to use one of his own products, which has the same effect).
Seriously, after Mattel, VW and Sony, how many examples do managers need to figure out that low-cost labor can be very costly?
Microsoft OneCare is about 60$/y and includes licenses for 3 PC. It is a pretty good antivirus, but also includes improved anti-spyware, firewall, disk defrag, Windows patches management and backup.
I used to buy Kaspersky, but OneCare has more feature and a smaller footprint. Good value.
I agree, mail clients see GMail labels as folders. But mail clients cannot be used efficiently with GMail because IMAP/POP access is, at best, spotty. I can tell you that, my employer is using Google Partners for email and groupware, and using Thunderbird or any other client is just not possible, too many connections problems. It's ok if you check your email once every hour, but as a sysadmin I receive a lot of emails and IMAP/POP problems suck. (That's not even talking about Google infrastructure problems, delayed emails or mailboxes unavailable for hours at a time).
Maybe I was a bit ranting. Basically all I would need is a simple feature: the number of new mails for every label. Maybe there is a plugin somewhere to do it, I did not find it yet.
would be an *online browser*. Like Google docs. Imagine just how great it would be not to need a browser to go online. History, cookies, bookmarks, all stored on Google servers. Plus it would be incredibly fast since the internet is already on Google servers!
Also that would be very convenient for Google, they could access our private information locally on their servers, no need to "call home". Hell they could even check with our e-bank statements to see how much money we can spend so they could offer really well-targeted ads.
That would be huge. All they need for me to sign up is to throw in some features involving blogs, mashups and Spacebook.
Most of the features are already available in existing browsers (or plugins for Firefox). Speed dial? Come on, it's so 2006.
What I fear is that Google will bring in this browser the lousy "don't sort it, search it" strategy that is so annoying in GMail, and that would become a standard feature in other browsers. What will they mess up? No folders for bookmarks? Random order for tabs so we must search to find a specific one?
They *removed* the concept of folders in their mail client, while adding nothing (we could already do search in other mail clients). Even tags exist in other mail client, often with much more power (like Thunderbird).
My ISP, Videotron, used to have a high-speed (10Mbps) no-limit package for about 75$. With that bandwidth it was possible to download around 80GB per day (especially with an external usenet service like Usenetserver.com or Giganews), but even as a rabid downloader I was cruising around 300GB/month max, not including Tv or VoIP.
Last year with no warning the ISP put a 100GB (total) limit for this same package. Apparently some people were abusing... I called to cancel my account, but they offered me a great deal: a lower-speed connection (8Mbps) with a small cap (20GB) for 45$, but with a ceiling of 30$ for extra monthly transfer, and they threw in a great deal on HPS and Tv (with bandwidth not metered). So basically I pay the same amount and I can top my bandwidth 24x7 for the same price I used to pay, just with 20% less speed.
Videotron is great, service is excellent, there is little or no outages, and when you combine services (internet + tv + HPS + mobile) you get huge rebates. I was a little pissed by the new caps, but overall there is no better deal. There are some fly-by-night ISP selling unlimited DSL for 30$ a month, but Bell Canada is messing with their bandwidth (and does not plan to stop doing it) in order to promote its own DSL. So Bell is the only major alternative, but it is expensive and the service is bad.
When you get the service with Videotron, the technician asks you exactly where in your home you want to put the outlets for tv, phones and computers, and he puts in new cables to fit your requirements. Then he checks if the signal is strong enough, and if it is not, he goes outdoors and drives a new cable from the house to the nearest hub. It is just great. All included in the installation fees of 50$ that are often waived as an incentive to subscribe.
On the other hand, when you get the service with Bell, nobody is coming, they ship you a shitty starter kit, and only if you request it after a while a technician will come, and if the "problem" is inside your house you get billed 100$+. Plus the installation fees. And the minibar price whenever you exceed your allowed bandwidth.
So in the end I don't mind a limit on my monthly transfer, as long as I get a good service and the fees are not ridiculous.
... is the three fingers salute. A "standard mechanism allowing end users to terminate faulty operating system processes without having the possibility to save their current work".
> Steven Wright has a line about "I bought a humidifier and a dehumidifier and put them together in a room to fight it out."
This reminds me of the "Iceland Express": a 25-gallon trash bin with the lid upside-down and covered with holes, on which an intern was tasked to maintain a huge pile of convenience-store crushed ice until the A/C was fixed. Add three hi-speed fans and a 30$ dehumidifier and you get maybe 27 Celsius in a small room. It was one of those "hey it works" moment.
I have a portable unit, brand is NOMA (found in most hardware stores in Canada). Paid around 500$. What is great is there is no bucket to empty, the humidity is kinda vaporized and pushed out the heat exhaust (no dripping). It's been running steady at "Low Speed" for the last 4 months or so, and it keeps a 250 sq/f room with two full racks and two huge monitors around 23 Celsius. I simply taped the exhaust to the existing air duct (yeah, using duct tape on duct!), there is no water drip.
I like this model because the room is cool and there is no humidity. It is portable but it's big, like those mini-fridge in hotel rooms.
The best security consultant I met was not a super geek able to hack my Checkpoint installation. He was a very kind, easy going guy, who started by explaining that absolute security was impossible. He asked the management what was the most important stuff to protect, and against who. In a single meeting, less than one hour, he understood our business and our needs, and instead of freaking the management with catastrophe scenarios, he built a security architecture in layers around our most valuable assets.
He did not try to draw suspicion on employees at large. He asked simple questions like: what if an employee in such position is not as competent or as honest as you thought, or what if an employee in this other position starts having problems at home and this lead him to lower his standards at work? Or what if this key employee was injured and could not even communicate with his replacement for weeks?
Other good questions he asked: did you see the graffiti in the parking lot? (yes). Do you think the company or someone here was directly targeted? (No). Then why did someone make this graffiti? (Because he had a can of spray and too much time). Anybody here has a teenager at home with unsupervised access to high-speed internet? (Silence). Anybody here has a teenager at home with unsupervised access to the computer where you have your VPN client installed? (More silence).
In the end that guy provided us with an excellent audit, and a very cost-effective implementation plan for a security upgrade. I don't think he left the building feeling bad for his pessimism; instead I am pretty sure he left with a smile, knowing he helped his customers to get what they needed. Maybe the NSA or some expert hacker can find a backdoor in some obscure network appliance, but our biggest concerns, getting our product specifications stolen by the competition or our CRM database plundered by a disgruntled employee, is not gonna happen.
With so many Apple customers acting like cult members and refusing to acknowledge that Apple products can be faulty, I wonder how many broken phones there are out there.
> Those running more expensive versions of Vista...
-and not using their soundcard simultaneously (network slowdown!) -and not having problem with Windows Activation... -and not living in China (where only 244 copies of Vista were purchased)
For sure that's a web server log that won't take time to analyze in Splunk!
Facebook being more popular than mySpace has nothing to do with the database back-end. If you need more big customers for SQL Server 2005, they are easy to find: Barnes & Nobles, HMV online music store, NASDAQ (over 5000 transactions/sec).
So basically your statement that SQL Server is a toy database might have attracted a few claps 6 or 7 years ago on Slashdot, but the reality is that SQL Server is a robust product finding its way in many markets. As one could say: "2001 just called, they want their SQL Server rant back".
> And DB2 is the granddaddy that is being trusted by ALL banks.
I do not have data about banks and database, however I suspect that since many smaller banks are still using OS/400, there must be a lot of DB2 out there. For the bigger banks, I sincerely doubt there is any RDBMS laying around, except for OLAP or e-banking, in which case DB2 won't be in the contenders (e-banking is the land of Oracle, SQL Server and sadly Interbase). For the real backbone, big money usually sticks to big iron, which usually means hierarchical databases.
According to Gartner, the current market share is the following: Oracle 47%, IBM 21%, Microsoft 17%, with Microsoft closing the gap on IBM every year. And let's not forget that IBM's 21% includes Informix/Cheetah, Cloudscape, etc, not only DB2.
> And banks are the most thorough corporate IT customers.
This is an urban legend. Banks are not even the most conservative IT customers. I've been involved in three e-banking projects, and it amazed me how careless those people can be with data integrity and maintenance.
The most impressive IT customers I met are insurance companies and space industry companies (not defense contractors). I've seen my way in many datacenters, and only in insurance companies did I see figures about the heat dissipation of network cable.
> The problem is that sql lets you put statments inside of statments. Putting those in the wrong places can be devistating in performance. The rule is pretty easy. You can put select statments in the select clause or where clause areas but be prepared for it to take awhile to finish. Put them in the FROM clause where they belong.
The SQL optimizer will actually do that for you. It can replace a correlated subquery by a JOIN if this appears to me more optimal.
> When I have a perf issue I almost always start with the disk reads/writes which is almost always an index is messed. THEN I move to logic.
I completely agree. But that does not mean that the OP tool is pointless, it is just not suited for performance analysis. Hence my point: use it to review the logic of a query, then move to the physical layer with other tools. In most IT companies those two steps are not done by the same people anyway.
> I too in my day have written the big crazy statment. This tool probably would help disect what something like that does. But that is NOT MAINTAINABLE. If you need a tool to tell you what it is doing then your doing it wrong. I usually take a step back and break it down into a bunch of smaller simpler statments.
I agree. In the ideal situation, this is what one should do. Sadly we do not live in an ideal world, and sometimes one must deal with huge queries. For those sad moments, the OP tool is good. That's the point.
> I think you might've missed the point. > The term SELECT statement generally refers to the whole statement, including FROM, WHERE, HAVING, etc clauses.
I did not miss the point: >> For long queries with complex joins (like recursion), a diagram tool for SELECT can be very helpful
I simply disagree that the product is useless without knowing about the indices. Before one should start reviewing query plans and figuring out what index is important, one must make sure the query makes sense. Logical before physical.
A good example of this is a query with a LEFT JOIN. Applying filters in the JOIN or in the WHERE clause might look similar (it is with INNER JOIN), but you may get very different results with LEFT since the non-matching rows from the left table are added to the result AFTER the filter on the JOIN is applied. With a graphical tool, you can see it immediately and reformulate your query accordingly.
> Any tool that only looks at the SELECT statement, without knowing about the indices or what the optimizer is doing, is nearly useless.
This is wrong. The indices or optimizer have very little to do with the SELECT; at the time of processing the SELECT clause, most database engines already are done with the FROM, JOIN, WHERE, GROUP and HAVING clauses. At this point there will be little gain to add/drop indices from the query plan, unless the platform does support included fields. As such, SELECT is like ORDER BY, a final operation that has little weight in the overall plan (unless there is a huge amount of fields, but even then...)
For long queries with complex joins (like recursion), a diagram tool for SELECT can be very helpful, because it can help you validate that you actually get what you ask for. I would see this product as a logical optimization tool, not a physical one.
> We're geographically dispersed, and most of the users who need to connect to servers are not technical (if that matters).
This is the most important thing about your situation. I would suggest you the following:
-Use sequence numbers for the actual host names (S01, S02, etc.) for maintenance/sysadmin purpose, and put a bright sticker with this name on every machine so it's easy to get a lambda user to find on which power button he should push when your are providing support on the phone -Use DNS self-explaining aliases in zones matching the geographical area (www.michigan.yourcompany.com, accounting.wisconsin.yourcompany.com, etc) -Make a webpage in your intranet (or a memo) to explain what is an alias, then create a simple web page where power users can add/remove aliases for servers (while not being allowed to remove your records or to use existing names). This is easy to do in both Linux and Windows. -Make sure to configure the default domain extension for the workstations so people can access *their* WWW without having to type the FQDN, or if you are on Windows use WINS
At first people might mess up things a bit, but after a while they will actually get things working very well. And what is interesting is that people from various areas will find very different solutions; some will use planet names (lamers!), other will use user names, etc. To each his own.
In the end, what matters is that the end users can find the machine.
Slashdot Mirror
There is only one way to justify a cost center (like IT): metrics. Metrics can't be pulled out of thin air on a Friday afternoon, so you need to get them as you work.
The easiest way to do so is to setup a ticket system; there is plenty of free products out there, my favorite on Windows being BTNet. Once you have the system setup, you nicely ask people to send their support requests at at specific email address (which will feed the ticket database -- a built-in feature in most products). And for the users who don't comply, you do it yourself (do not add burden to end user while you start fishing for metrics). As for the stuff you do on your own, create tickets as well, in a specific category.
Once the requests are in the system, make a good follow-up (categories, statuses, notes, etc) and make sure to show this to your end users. This will bring two benefits: on one hand people will happily see your workload and where their request is located in your pipeline (and bugger you less), and on the second hand you can organize your day more efficiently.
After a while, the opening and closing of tickets will provide you with *metrics*; that is, figures that you can show your boss (even charts). Keeping metrics is almost magical, because in a few Excel manipulations you can build a business case, like: "I spend 5 hours a week debugging this printer, if we change it for a new model it will be paid for in X months". This shows your manager that you are a business-wise IT guy, which is a valuable skill.
Then the big splash: build a performance dashboard. A performance dashboard can be as simple as a Excel worksheet where you list your most important metrics: hours spent on end-user supports, average response time, hours spent on hardware maintenance, hours of unplanned downtime, etc. Those metrics are called KPI (Key Performance Indicator) and they can provide a basis for your management to evaluate your work. A good dashboard can be great to make goals (reduce response time by 1/2 over the next three months) or to spot biggest cost centers.
If you provide your boss or the management with a weekly or monthly dashboard they will be able to figure out what you do -- much more than a louse Todo.txt and a "BTW I also do such and such". With solid figures, the management will think of your work as a business item, and that one time when the big boss came by your cubicle and caught you reading comics won't have such a negative impact, because your work is clearly defined in the dashboard.
Of course it is possible that bringing numbers up will show that you are, indeed, redundant. If so, then at least you can use this experience as a great tale for future interview, to display your level of professionalism. And getting a bit of management experience is always good for a resume.
Once you have metrics you can define what is the most critical aspects of your work; this is called a KPI (Key Performance Indicator), and any decent manager will be completely comfortable with a nice Excel dashboard filled with KPI -- much more than with a bunch of Todo.txt files and "BTW I also do X an Y".
The first thing to do is to setup a ticket system. There are plenty available for free; on Windows my favorite one is BugTracker.Net (http://ifdefined.com/bugtrackernet.html).
Customer care basics: communication! Keep your customer aware of what is going when there is a problem, tell him what you do to get it fixed and try to provide an ETA for the resolution. This way the user don't feel like he is kept in the dark and stress level will go down a notch or two. Look at how Tylenol handled the poisoned bottles crisis in the early 80's; this is textbook crisis management.
Google is going the other way: being vague, hiding behind its interpretation of the SLA, etc. They might be very good in the search engine business, but as a service provider, and especially in the customer management area, they suck big time. Their downtime is not the biggest problem; its the nonchalance with which the service disruptions are handled that is unpleasant. Email and groupware services are the lifeblood of many companies, and if Google cannot offer a decent customer service for the money they ask, they should either raise the fees and behave like a responsible provider or get out of the business.
One of our sysadmins called and basically was told that some accounts were temporarily unavailable (duh!), that the problem would be solved as soon as possible, and to check the forums for public announcements. (And yes, we are a premium customer).
That's how you spot crappy support: when you get a list of symptoms (that you already know) and no specific cause or resolution process other than "the engineers are working on it". No valuable info to pass to the end users to calm them.
When Google is down, all you get is access to lousy forums with little or no support, while your end users keep asking for an ETA or at least for an explanation. You end up being a punching bag for the failure of a solution you probably never agreed with and that was forced down your throat by the management.
I guess this is an ok deal for small biz with no technical employees, but as soon as your users headcount goes over 20, Novell Groupwise or Microsoft Small Business Server becomes more interesting. And when hosted locally, it will at least work as internal groupware and allow users to access shared documents while the internet connection is down.
Miro? Laptops? Blackberry? Xbox? You probably have a bigger electromagnetic footprint than the power lines in my backyard...
Do you really need all that Inspector Gadget weaponry? Why don't you coze up with an old AM radio, a bottle of gin and a beat-up deck of cards which has the perfect texture to play Solitaire in a dimly lighted living room? And a simple sheet where you strike or circle states as they are being called officially?
Do you really see any value in being the first to send a twitter to your pals about such or such result, while everybody on Earth and beyond will be completely aware of the information in a matter of minutes or hours? There is no scoop on election night, only an annoying chase to be first to know.
You want a real scoop? Here is one: while Obama is way up in polls, McCain will be the next president. Because the people that were supposed to vote for Obama were too busy subscribing to RSS feeds and setting up gamma on their webcam so they would be ready to upload their comments on youtube, and they neglected to go on and vote. While the good ol' God fearing folks were first in line at the booth and spent the election night sipping gin and playing Solitaire. That's exactly how Le Pen got so far in the French elections a few years back - not enough people casting their vote because the polls were on their side.
There is just too much gadgets people. Time to pull a few plugs and get in touch with reality, where elections are won by people who get the most votes, not people who get the most Digg or website hits.
The guy who decided to outsource the manufacturing of those batteries should be *fired* (or forced to use one of his own products, which has the same effect).
Seriously, after Mattel, VW and Sony, how many examples do managers need to figure out that low-cost labor can be very costly?
On workstations and laptops there is certainly no noticeable difference if you have a good FDE software (and *recent* PGP software is quite good).
Even on servers I would not worry. I remember a customer having FDE on a very busy database server and it was fine.
FDE is your friend, and can even save you some jail time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Boucher
Microsoft OneCare is about 60$/y and includes licenses for 3 PC. It is a pretty good antivirus, but also includes improved anti-spyware, firewall, disk defrag, Windows patches management and backup.
I used to buy Kaspersky, but OneCare has more feature and a smaller footprint. Good value.
I agree, mail clients see GMail labels as folders. But mail clients cannot be used efficiently with GMail because IMAP/POP access is, at best, spotty. I can tell you that, my employer is using Google Partners for email and groupware, and using Thunderbird or any other client is just not possible, too many connections problems. It's ok if you check your email once every hour, but as a sysadmin I receive a lot of emails and IMAP/POP problems suck. (That's not even talking about Google infrastructure problems, delayed emails or mailboxes unavailable for hours at a time).
Maybe I was a bit ranting. Basically all I would need is a simple feature: the number of new mails for every label. Maybe there is a plugin somewhere to do it, I did not find it yet.
would be an *online browser*. Like Google docs. Imagine just how great it would be not to need a browser to go online. History, cookies, bookmarks, all stored on Google servers. Plus it would be incredibly fast since the internet is already on Google servers!
Also that would be very convenient for Google, they could access our private information locally on their servers, no need to "call home". Hell they could even check with our e-bank statements to see how much money we can spend so they could offer really well-targeted ads.
That would be huge. All they need for me to sign up is to throw in some features involving blogs, mashups and Spacebook.
Most of the features are already available in existing browsers (or plugins for Firefox). Speed dial? Come on, it's so 2006.
What I fear is that Google will bring in this browser the lousy "don't sort it, search it" strategy that is so annoying in GMail, and that would become a standard feature in other browsers. What will they mess up? No folders for bookmarks? Random order for tabs so we must search to find a specific one?
They *removed* the concept of folders in their mail client, while adding nothing (we could already do search in other mail clients). Even tags exist in other mail client, often with much more power (like Thunderbird).
I've had it with Google search.
My ISP, Videotron, used to have a high-speed (10Mbps) no-limit package for about 75$. With that bandwidth it was possible to download around 80GB per day (especially with an external usenet service like Usenetserver.com or Giganews), but even as a rabid downloader I was cruising around 300GB/month max, not including Tv or VoIP.
Last year with no warning the ISP put a 100GB (total) limit for this same package. Apparently some people were abusing... I called to cancel my account, but they offered me a great deal: a lower-speed connection (8Mbps) with a small cap (20GB) for 45$, but with a ceiling of 30$ for extra monthly transfer, and they threw in a great deal on HPS and Tv (with bandwidth not metered). So basically I pay the same amount and I can top my bandwidth 24x7 for the same price I used to pay, just with 20% less speed.
Videotron is great, service is excellent, there is little or no outages, and when you combine services (internet + tv + HPS + mobile) you get huge rebates. I was a little pissed by the new caps, but overall there is no better deal. There are some fly-by-night ISP selling unlimited DSL for 30$ a month, but Bell Canada is messing with their bandwidth (and does not plan to stop doing it) in order to promote its own DSL. So Bell is the only major alternative, but it is expensive and the service is bad.
When you get the service with Videotron, the technician asks you exactly where in your home you want to put the outlets for tv, phones and computers, and he puts in new cables to fit your requirements. Then he checks if the signal is strong enough, and if it is not, he goes outdoors and drives a new cable from the house to the nearest hub. It is just great. All included in the installation fees of 50$ that are often waived as an incentive to subscribe.
On the other hand, when you get the service with Bell, nobody is coming, they ship you a shitty starter kit, and only if you request it after a while a technician will come, and if the "problem" is inside your house you get billed 100$+. Plus the installation fees. And the minibar price whenever you exceed your allowed bandwidth.
So in the end I don't mind a limit on my monthly transfer, as long as I get a good service and the fees are not ridiculous.
... is the three fingers salute. A "standard mechanism allowing end users to terminate faulty operating system processes without having the possibility to save their current work".
Ok it's an easy one.
> Steven Wright has a line about "I bought a humidifier and a dehumidifier and put them together in a room to fight it out."
This reminds me of the "Iceland Express": a 25-gallon trash bin with the lid upside-down and covered with holes, on which an intern was tasked to maintain a huge pile of convenience-store crushed ice until the A/C was fixed. Add three hi-speed fans and a 30$ dehumidifier and you get maybe 27 Celsius in a small room. It was one of those "hey it works" moment.
I have a portable unit, brand is NOMA (found in most hardware stores in Canada). Paid around 500$. What is great is there is no bucket to empty, the humidity is kinda vaporized and pushed out the heat exhaust (no dripping). It's been running steady at "Low Speed" for the last 4 months or so, and it keeps a 250 sq/f room with two full racks and two huge monitors around 23 Celsius. I simply taped the exhaust to the existing air duct (yeah, using duct tape on duct!), there is no water drip.
I like this model because the room is cool and there is no humidity. It is portable but it's big, like those mini-fridge in hotel rooms.
The best security consultant I met was not a super geek able to hack my Checkpoint installation. He was a very kind, easy going guy, who started by explaining that absolute security was impossible. He asked the management what was the most important stuff to protect, and against who. In a single meeting, less than one hour, he understood our business and our needs, and instead of freaking the management with catastrophe scenarios, he built a security architecture in layers around our most valuable assets.
He did not try to draw suspicion on employees at large. He asked simple questions like: what if an employee in such position is not as competent or as honest as you thought, or what if an employee in this other position starts having problems at home and this lead him to lower his standards at work? Or what if this key employee was injured and could not even communicate with his replacement for weeks?
Other good questions he asked: did you see the graffiti in the parking lot? (yes). Do you think the company or someone here was directly targeted? (No). Then why did someone make this graffiti? (Because he had a can of spray and too much time). Anybody here has a teenager at home with unsupervised access to high-speed internet? (Silence). Anybody here has a teenager at home with unsupervised access to the computer where you have your VPN client installed? (More silence).
In the end that guy provided us with an excellent audit, and a very cost-effective implementation plan for a security upgrade. I don't think he left the building feeling bad for his pessimism; instead I am pretty sure he left with a smile, knowing he helped his customers to get what they needed. Maybe the NSA or some expert hacker can find a backdoor in some obscure network appliance, but our biggest concerns, getting our product specifications stolen by the competition or our CRM database plundered by a disgruntled employee, is not gonna happen.
With so many Apple customers acting like cult members and refusing to acknowledge that Apple products can be faulty, I wonder how many broken phones there are out there.
In the end they will probably blame the telcos anyway... Seriously, I've seen it:
"Don't discount AT&T's role in this. They are Windows programmers, therefore used to users having to tell the computer what to do rather than the computer doing things for people."
http://venturebeat.com/2008/07/11/the-great-iphone-3g-ifail-a-retrospective-with-videos/#comment-873332
> Those running more expensive versions of Vista...
-and not using their soundcard simultaneously (network slowdown!)
-and not having problem with Windows Activation...
-and not living in China (where only 244 copies of Vista were purchased)
For sure that's a web server log that won't take time to analyze in Splunk!
> myspace.com has been supplated by Facebook.
Facebook being more popular than mySpace has nothing to do with the database back-end. If you need more big customers for SQL Server 2005, they are easy to find: Barnes & Nobles, HMV online music store, NASDAQ (over 5000 transactions/sec).
So basically your statement that SQL Server is a toy database might have attracted a few claps 6 or 7 years ago on Slashdot, but the reality is that SQL Server is a robust product finding its way in many markets. As one could say: "2001 just called, they want their SQL Server rant back".
> And DB2 is the granddaddy that is being trusted by ALL banks.
I do not have data about banks and database, however I suspect that since many smaller banks are still using OS/400, there must be a lot of DB2 out there. For the bigger banks, I sincerely doubt there is any RDBMS laying around, except for OLAP or e-banking, in which case DB2 won't be in the contenders (e-banking is the land of Oracle, SQL Server and sadly Interbase). For the real backbone, big money usually sticks to big iron, which usually means hierarchical databases.
According to Gartner, the current market share is the following: Oracle 47%, IBM 21%, Microsoft 17%, with Microsoft closing the gap on IBM every year. And let's not forget that IBM's 21% includes Informix/Cheetah, Cloudscape, etc, not only DB2.
> And banks are the most thorough corporate IT customers.
This is an urban legend. Banks are not even the most conservative IT customers. I've been involved in three e-banking projects, and it amazed me how careless those people can be with data integrity and maintenance.
The most impressive IT customers I met are insurance companies and space industry companies (not defense contractors). I've seen my way in many datacenters, and only in insurance companies did I see figures about the heat dissipation of network cable.
> The problem is that sql lets you put statments inside of statments. Putting those in the wrong places can be devistating in performance. The rule is pretty easy. You can put select statments in the select clause or where clause areas but be prepared for it to take awhile to finish. Put them in the FROM clause where they belong.
The SQL optimizer will actually do that for you. It can replace a correlated subquery by a JOIN if this appears to me more optimal.
> When I have a perf issue I almost always start with the disk reads/writes which is almost always an index is messed. THEN I move to logic.
I completely agree. But that does not mean that the OP tool is pointless, it is just not suited for performance analysis. Hence my point: use it to review the logic of a query, then move to the physical layer with other tools. In most IT companies those two steps are not done by the same people anyway.
> I too in my day have written the big crazy statment. This tool probably would help disect what something like that does. But that is NOT MAINTAINABLE. If you need a tool to tell you what it is doing then your doing it wrong. I usually take a step back and break it down into a bunch of smaller simpler statments.
I agree. In the ideal situation, this is what one should do. Sadly we do not live in an ideal world, and sometimes one must deal with huge queries. For those sad moments, the OP tool is good. That's the point.
> I think you might've missed the point.
> The term SELECT statement generally refers to the whole statement, including FROM, WHERE, HAVING, etc clauses.
I did not miss the point:
>> For long queries with complex joins (like recursion), a diagram tool for SELECT can be very helpful
I simply disagree that the product is useless without knowing about the indices. Before one should start reviewing query plans and figuring out what index is important, one must make sure the query makes sense. Logical before physical.
A good example of this is a query with a LEFT JOIN. Applying filters in the JOIN or in the WHERE clause might look similar (it is with INNER JOIN), but you may get very different results with LEFT since the non-matching rows from the left table are added to the result AFTER the filter on the JOIN is applied. With a graphical tool, you can see it immediately and reformulate your query accordingly.
> What the heck are you doing with MS-SQL Server? Don't you know its for developers and kids?
You should call Myspace.com and let them know that they made a stupid database choice.
Seriously, DB2 is so 1992.
> Any tool that only looks at the SELECT statement, without knowing about the indices or what the optimizer is doing, is nearly useless.
This is wrong. The indices or optimizer have very little to do with the SELECT; at the time of processing the SELECT clause, most database engines already are done with the FROM, JOIN, WHERE, GROUP and HAVING clauses. At this point there will be little gain to add/drop indices from the query plan, unless the platform does support included fields. As such, SELECT is like ORDER BY, a final operation that has little weight in the overall plan (unless there is a huge amount of fields, but even then...)
For long queries with complex joins (like recursion), a diagram tool for SELECT can be very helpful, because it can help you validate that you actually get what you ask for. I would see this product as a logical optimization tool, not a physical one.
> We're geographically dispersed, and most of the users who need to connect to servers are not technical (if that matters).
This is the most important thing about your situation. I would suggest you the following:
-Use sequence numbers for the actual host names (S01, S02, etc.) for maintenance/sysadmin purpose, and put a bright sticker with this name on every machine so it's easy to get a lambda user to find on which power button he should push when your are providing support on the phone
-Use DNS self-explaining aliases in zones matching the geographical area (www.michigan.yourcompany.com, accounting.wisconsin.yourcompany.com, etc)
-Make a webpage in your intranet (or a memo) to explain what is an alias, then create a simple web page where power users can add/remove aliases for servers (while not being allowed to remove your records or to use existing names). This is easy to do in both Linux and Windows.
-Make sure to configure the default domain extension for the workstations so people can access *their* WWW without having to type the FQDN, or if you are on Windows use WINS
At first people might mess up things a bit, but after a while they will actually get things working very well. And what is interesting is that people from various areas will find very different solutions; some will use planet names (lamers!), other will use user names, etc. To each his own.
In the end, what matters is that the end users can find the machine.
Write a script to send a "I'm stolen" email to the FBI and the FCC. Execute the script in a endless loop. At some point, someone will notice...