Her government? I seriously doubt that the Chinese government would have knowingly done this. Yes, they tried to cover up, but the person at fault is likely the girl's coach. It is an embarrassment China doesn't need. Not like their team experiences a shortage of gold medals. But Americans keep on digging and keep on bringing up this issue in the news and the broadcasts of the game. This is ridiculous. It embarrasses the US more than is does China. Rules and rules, yes. But sometimes one should know when to pipe down or risk looking like a whiny bitch.
I think Americans should put this issue to rest and stop whining about being beat by a fourteen-year-old. Even if the girl or her coach lied about her age, have some dignity, people. She won the competition at such a young age and that's even more impressive.
Hang my head in shame. Exactly. And then I'll try to figure out a way to get you back. Taking a prankster to court is admission of stupidity and powerlessness - a shameful way out and a last resort.
I don't know what's more humiliating: being stupid enough to fall for an obvious prank, or putting your stupidity on public display by taking the prankster to court. Some people just need to accept the fact that life's a bitch if your IQ is 80 and no judge will change this.
The point is, buggy SQL code running on a powerful production server with a huge database may manifest itself in a completely different way, as opposed to when running on a slow dev box in a minimal db environment. With growing volumes of data and shrinking IT budgets sometimes even the largest companies find themselves with inadequate testing and staging hardware.
SQL code is usually developed on some small server or the DBA's own workstation. The dev database is representative of the prod version only in structure and not in size. So this type of errors sometimes go unnoticed until the code is migrated to the prod environment. The effect of such errors vary depending on server architecture. The most sensitive are HA cluster environments, where the clustering engine overreacts and starts failing things over, exacerbating the problem.
The company I work for has over 150,000 employees. Is this big enough of a pond to bust your theory? If I had better people skills, I would probably be a manager by now. But why would I want to be one? I already make more money than by boss or even his boss, doing the job that I actually like. Sure, I have to work with nincompoops on occasion, but then who doesn't? As a Unix lead I am sure I can get them canned quite easily, but, like I said, I stay out of office politics as much as possible and there is always plenty of monkey work to have everyone contributing in a meaningful way. What do I do with all the time and energy I save by staying out of people's hair? I get a few consulting gigs in my free time so I can buy a bigger boat. This just works for me, I guess. You may have other priorities in life. Like, maybe, being famous around the office for the great jokes your tell in the coffee room.
I doubt the contract will contain a definition of "rummaging". If you submit a service request to your hosting provider saying that your customers are unable to read the ebook, I think the support analyst will have every right to open the file and view the contents. It is possible, afterall, the file is corrupt or has an unsupported format. The bottom line is: if you don't want admins "rummaging" through your data, either don't ask them to fix your problems or - even better - encrypt any sensitive data you put on a server over which you have no control.
If, for example, some of your customers' confidential information leaks out because of a nosy sysadmin, your customers will have an issue with you and not with your hosting provider. It's important to keep this in mind when you decide on your hosting options. If you choose to entrust your data to a hosting company you have no reason to trust, then you have only yourself to blame for any security leaks.
And yet, when something breaks, customers come see me and not any of my more, ehm, sociable colleagues. I wonder why this is. Perhaps they enjoy my company afterall. Or, maybe, its because they think I can fix their problem. I guess we'll never know.
The agreement with hosting provider would not specifically prohibit them from accessing your data. On the contrary, you should expect them to access your data for the purposes of backups and troubleshooting. In the question above, the support staff accessed the dude's MySQL database in response to his support query. Unless the contract specifically bars them from accessing customer data (which is highly unlikely), they are perfectly within their rights. The situation is the same when you own your own servers and hire a sysadmin to support them. You know he will have full access to your unencrypted data, which means you trust him.
It is precisely the job of a sysadmin to ensure system productivity despite the software and hardware flaws. It is generally assumed that there are bugs and defects and that nothing will perform entirely up to spec all the time. This is why there are things like HA clusters, RAID, multipathing, etc. My job is technical in nature and that's the way I like it. If, at some point, I get a manager who values "people skills" above technical expertise, I will not embarrass myself by working with him. I don't plan on dying in my current office anyway, and so I will have no problem leaving if I feel that's the best option. My job is stressful enough without the drama of office politics.
If being a competitive jerk results in less work and more money, I'll be the biggest jerk in town. Money is the only reason why I work. I am not interested in mentoring, building relationships, engaging in water cooler conversations or doing any such nonsense. I always do my job and, as long as my co-workers do theirs, we will get along just fine. What I can't tolerate is incompetence, but only because at the end of the day it's up to me to make sure everything is done right.
Job security is not the issue here. I take my salary and divide it by the number of hours I worked. If tutoring a co-worker increases this ratio by eventually allowing me to do less work, then I will give all the help I can. If at some point my boss decides to replace me, I won't even need to pack my stuff: my desk is completely empty. I have enough consulting gigs on the side to keep me going.
I guess I am trying to make two points here. First, I don't live to work. Second, I deeply dislike incompetence. If someone claims in his resume to be an experienced Unix sysadmin, and later this turns out not to be the case, I will most definitely not raise a finger to help him out.
The company I work for should have no difficulty hiring competent sysadmins. The company has the budget, extensive HR staff, and experienced managers. Instead, my employer chooses to hire underqualified individuals for low pay. I don't have a slightest desire wasting my personal time training amateurs. There is a difference between sharing technical tips and training complete newbs.
You would think, but I've been working where I am working for over ten years. Apparently, the problems my bosses have with my teamwork attitude (of which, as you correctly noted, they are well aware) are outweighed by their appreciation of (or dependence on) my technical abilities. And it is a technical job after all. All this "teamwork" nonsense is just a way incompetent sysadmins avoid personal responsibility.
The reason some people are not upgrading their browsers may be the insufficiently robust upgrade mechanism that leads to data and productivity losses. Several months ago I installed the pre-release version of Firefox 3 alongside my existing v. 2 installation. During installation Firefox 3 created a copy of my settings and bookmarks. I only used this version briefly, since it had a few annoying bugs eventually corrected in the final release.
A few weeks ago I upgraded to the newly-released production version of Firefox 3. The installation replaced my existing Firefox 2, which was what I wanted, but for whatever reason it copied all the settings and bookmarks from the v.3 beta installation. Of course by then those settings and bookmarks were several months out of date. So I lost my current bookmarks file - not a terrible tragedy, but it did cause me to disable automatic checking for updates in Firefox.
This was an obvious oversight on the part of the developers of Firefox. Issues like these cause users to think twice before upgrading their applications.
They don't pay me for tutoring my colleagues. I really wouldn't mind sharing access and explaining a few things, if I see that the person has a good understanding of the basics. At some point my employer decided that hiring competent sysadmins was a luxury they could no longer afford. I don't have a slightest desire to remedy the situation at the expense of my free time. When I eventually decide to move on, I will gladly share all the configuration details with anybody my manager designates as my replacement. And then I'll change my phone number.
It seems that both his co-workers and his management recognized his considerable expertise. So, if he thought that he was working with incompetent freeloaders, then he probably was right. This has nothing to do with primadonna status. The problem here is workload and responsibility.
I support several hundred servers and two of my backups are telecommuting from the west coast. Their Unix expertise is limited to creating user accounts, pushing power buttons, and sending me emails with stupid questions. I don't go so far as to lock them out of "my" servers, but I do my best to keep these two characters busy in their sandbox.
This has nothing to do with my (admittedly very considerable) ego, but has everything to do with me being able to enjoy weekends without being called to fix various problems. When something breaks, the ops calls me and not the two clowns in California. Any problem - big or small - they will find me, wake me up, drag me into a telecon, where I would have to fix the problem while simultaneously explaining to them how I did it and answering "are we there yet" questions from various random managers who couldn't sleep at night.
I would love to have a colleague whom I can trust to do upgrades and architectural changes, so I can spend more time fishing. The way things are right now, I am forced to keep other sysadmins at an arm's length just so I don't have to work even more hours (for which I am not being paid) to clean up their messes.
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Her government? I seriously doubt that the Chinese government would have knowingly done this. Yes, they tried to cover up, but the person at fault is likely the girl's coach. It is an embarrassment China doesn't need. Not like their team experiences a shortage of gold medals. But Americans keep on digging and keep on bringing up this issue in the news and the broadcasts of the game. This is ridiculous. It embarrasses the US more than is does China. Rules and rules, yes. But sometimes one should know when to pipe down or risk looking like a whiny bitch.
If you pit a bunch of 12-14 years old against a group of 16+, and compare the results, the 16+ will get -trashed-.
This is nonsense. If it wasn't, I am sure you would have provided a source in support of your assertion. Give me an example.
I think Americans should put this issue to rest and stop whining about being beat by a fourteen-year-old. Even if the girl or her coach lied about her age, have some dignity, people. She won the competition at such a young age and that's even more impressive.
I'm an Orthodox Christian ;)
Hang my head in shame. Exactly. And then I'll try to figure out a way to get you back. Taking a prankster to court is admission of stupidity and powerlessness - a shameful way out and a last resort.
I don't know what's more humiliating: being stupid enough to fall for an obvious prank, or putting your stupidity on public display by taking the prankster to court. Some people just need to accept the fact that life's a bitch if your IQ is 80 and no judge will change this.
Or "vapple", as it will become known.
The point is, buggy SQL code running on a powerful production server with a huge database may manifest itself in a completely different way, as opposed to when running on a slow dev box in a minimal db environment. With growing volumes of data and shrinking IT budgets sometimes even the largest companies find themselves with inadequate testing and staging hardware.
SQL code is usually developed on some small server or the DBA's own workstation. The dev database is representative of the prod version only in structure and not in size. So this type of errors sometimes go unnoticed until the code is migrated to the prod environment. The effect of such errors vary depending on server architecture. The most sensitive are HA cluster environments, where the clustering engine overreacts and starts failing things over, exacerbating the problem.
The company I work for has over 150,000 employees. Is this big enough of a pond to bust your theory? If I had better people skills, I would probably be a manager by now. But why would I want to be one? I already make more money than by boss or even his boss, doing the job that I actually like. Sure, I have to work with nincompoops on occasion, but then who doesn't? As a Unix lead I am sure I can get them canned quite easily, but, like I said, I stay out of office politics as much as possible and there is always plenty of monkey work to have everyone contributing in a meaningful way. What do I do with all the time and energy I save by staying out of people's hair? I get a few consulting gigs in my free time so I can buy a bigger boat. This just works for me, I guess. You may have other priorities in life. Like, maybe, being famous around the office for the great jokes your tell in the coffee room.
I doubt the contract will contain a definition of "rummaging". If you submit a service request to your hosting provider saying that your customers are unable to read the ebook, I think the support analyst will have every right to open the file and view the contents. It is possible, afterall, the file is corrupt or has an unsupported format. The bottom line is: if you don't want admins "rummaging" through your data, either don't ask them to fix your problems or - even better - encrypt any sensitive data you put on a server over which you have no control. If, for example, some of your customers' confidential information leaks out because of a nosy sysadmin, your customers will have an issue with you and not with your hosting provider. It's important to keep this in mind when you decide on your hosting options. If you choose to entrust your data to a hosting company you have no reason to trust, then you have only yourself to blame for any security leaks.
And yet, when something breaks, customers come see me and not any of my more, ehm, sociable colleagues. I wonder why this is. Perhaps they enjoy my company afterall. Or, maybe, its because they think I can fix their problem. I guess we'll never know.
The agreement with hosting provider would not specifically prohibit them from accessing your data. On the contrary, you should expect them to access your data for the purposes of backups and troubleshooting. In the question above, the support staff accessed the dude's MySQL database in response to his support query. Unless the contract specifically bars them from accessing customer data (which is highly unlikely), they are perfectly within their rights. The situation is the same when you own your own servers and hire a sysadmin to support them. You know he will have full access to your unencrypted data, which means you trust him.
It is precisely the job of a sysadmin to ensure system productivity despite the software and hardware flaws. It is generally assumed that there are bugs and defects and that nothing will perform entirely up to spec all the time. This is why there are things like HA clusters, RAID, multipathing, etc. My job is technical in nature and that's the way I like it. If, at some point, I get a manager who values "people skills" above technical expertise, I will not embarrass myself by working with him. I don't plan on dying in my current office anyway, and so I will have no problem leaving if I feel that's the best option. My job is stressful enough without the drama of office politics.
My mom is the queen of england.
Monty Python is about as funny as the queen of england.
If being a competitive jerk results in less work and more money, I'll be the biggest jerk in town. Money is the only reason why I work. I am not interested in mentoring, building relationships, engaging in water cooler conversations or doing any such nonsense. I always do my job and, as long as my co-workers do theirs, we will get along just fine. What I can't tolerate is incompetence, but only because at the end of the day it's up to me to make sure everything is done right.
Job security is not the issue here. I take my salary and divide it by the number of hours I worked. If tutoring a co-worker increases this ratio by eventually allowing me to do less work, then I will give all the help I can. If at some point my boss decides to replace me, I won't even need to pack my stuff: my desk is completely empty. I have enough consulting gigs on the side to keep me going.
I guess I am trying to make two points here. First, I don't live to work. Second, I deeply dislike incompetence. If someone claims in his resume to be an experienced Unix sysadmin, and later this turns out not to be the case, I will most definitely not raise a finger to help him out.
The company I work for should have no difficulty hiring competent sysadmins. The company has the budget, extensive HR staff, and experienced managers. Instead, my employer chooses to hire underqualified individuals for low pay. I don't have a slightest desire wasting my personal time training amateurs. There is a difference between sharing technical tips and training complete newbs.
You would think, but I've been working where I am working for over ten years. Apparently, the problems my bosses have with my teamwork attitude (of which, as you correctly noted, they are well aware) are outweighed by their appreciation of (or dependence on) my technical abilities. And it is a technical job after all. All this "teamwork" nonsense is just a way incompetent sysadmins avoid personal responsibility.
The reason some people are not upgrading their browsers may be the insufficiently robust upgrade mechanism that leads to data and productivity losses. Several months ago I installed the pre-release version of Firefox 3 alongside my existing v. 2 installation. During installation Firefox 3 created a copy of my settings and bookmarks. I only used this version briefly, since it had a few annoying bugs eventually corrected in the final release.
A few weeks ago I upgraded to the newly-released production version of Firefox 3. The installation replaced my existing Firefox 2, which was what I wanted, but for whatever reason it copied all the settings and bookmarks from the v.3 beta installation. Of course by then those settings and bookmarks were several months out of date. So I lost my current bookmarks file - not a terrible tragedy, but it did cause me to disable automatic checking for updates in Firefox.
This was an obvious oversight on the part of the developers of Firefox. Issues like these cause users to think twice before upgrading their applications.
Looks like HP should invent itself some envelopes.
Seems that the only outbreak in Iraq is rabies. Figures. Must be Al Qaeda.
They don't pay me for tutoring my colleagues. I really wouldn't mind sharing access and explaining a few things, if I see that the person has a good understanding of the basics. At some point my employer decided that hiring competent sysadmins was a luxury they could no longer afford. I don't have a slightest desire to remedy the situation at the expense of my free time. When I eventually decide to move on, I will gladly share all the configuration details with anybody my manager designates as my replacement. And then I'll change my phone number.
It seems that both his co-workers and his management recognized his considerable expertise. So, if he thought that he was working with incompetent freeloaders, then he probably was right. This has nothing to do with primadonna status. The problem here is workload and responsibility.
I support several hundred servers and two of my backups are telecommuting from the west coast. Their Unix expertise is limited to creating user accounts, pushing power buttons, and sending me emails with stupid questions. I don't go so far as to lock them out of "my" servers, but I do my best to keep these two characters busy in their sandbox.
This has nothing to do with my (admittedly very considerable) ego, but has everything to do with me being able to enjoy weekends without being called to fix various problems. When something breaks, the ops calls me and not the two clowns in California. Any problem - big or small - they will find me, wake me up, drag me into a telecon, where I would have to fix the problem while simultaneously explaining to them how I did it and answering "are we there yet" questions from various random managers who couldn't sleep at night.
I would love to have a colleague whom I can trust to do upgrades and architectural changes, so I can spend more time fishing. The way things are right now, I am forced to keep other sysadmins at an arm's length just so I don't have to work even more hours (for which I am not being paid) to clean up their messes.
And I say, enough pussyfooting around the problem. The ISPs should strike at the heart of the issue: TCP/IP. That's what needs to be blocked!