According to the article, it has nothing to do with circuit capacity limitations. The user had two different classes of account (home and business) that were going through the same router. The only difference was the accounts, not the hardware.
Novell totally blew it. It was a sad day as I watched NT 4.0 servers creep into our environment. Novell had LDAP based NDS long before Microsoft cobbled together AD. It was a much better solution and they brought it to market way ahead of the competition.
You hear that? That is the 1990s calling. They want their nostalgia back. (I say this as someone who used to be a CNE and who started his career with Netware)
Do you work for the government, either Federal, State or local? That is the only place I see Novell anymore.
The data is irrelevant because EVERY vendor has bad batches from time to time. Once you have been in this game long enough, you will realize that. The author is wise enough to not judge a company by a single bad batch.
There are two vendors out there that I will buy drives from. They are the same vendors that EMC buys drives from. Those guys at EMC are in the business, and they go through A LOT of drives. I absolutely trust them to have done their research, and to go with vendors who have the lowest failure rates. My experience working with SANs has proven that out. Drives in EMC arrays fail significantly less than drives in commodity Dell storage (like the PowerVault line). Not to disparage Dell, they are doing good things with their Compellent arrays in the mid-tier. I would buy them if I did not have the budget, and the need for a few features currently best handled by Symmetrix arrays.
If this article refers to the previous article where the low priced SAN vendor used the lowest priced drives possible, I am not surprised. They touted their low cost, and tried to mask it by stating that "These are the same drives that regular old Joe's buy."
Well surprise! There are bad batches out there. I remember WAY back in the day, the Maxtor 540MB drives (yes kids, that is megabytes, as in about one half of a gigabyte). They had a ridiculously high failure rate. HP was putting them in their Vectra's. It took the better part of two years to clear those out of the channel. These things happen from time to time.
Are we at all surprised that the company that purchases the cheapest drives possible, ended up with a bad batch? I am sure that whoever had those sitting a warehouse was more than happy to sell the entire lot to the SAN vendor.
What I am curious about is how the failure rates affected their bottom line. I wonder what kind of failure rates they predicted. Anyone who has handled a storage array larger than their home computer knows that drives fail, and do so fairly regularly. The difference between a good vendor and a bad vendor is how quickly they can ship spares. In my line of work, if we do not have spares on the shelves, we expect the vendor to deliver them in four hours or less. Given that, failed drives can get costly for a vendor in a hurry if they are storing, processing service tickets, shipping, and in some cases, dispatching techs along with failed drives to replace them. The failure of a $30-50 commodity drive can easily cost the vendor many multiples of that in overhead associated with the replacement and return processes.
That is pretty sexy. When I got my Razr I was in desperate need of a phone and just bought what they had at the Verizon store. I am about to replace the battery in the Razr, but by the time that dies in another year or two, the Droid 5 should be out and be discounted... or there might even be a Droid 6 by that time.
This is one of the traits that I have noticed in highly successful people. Nearly everyone I know who is successful, including myself, is constantly pushing themselves to be better because they believe that they are not good enough. I spent my entire childhood around generally older, higher IQ people (mostly at 2600 meetings, the early Defcons, etc). Because of that, I always saw myself as slightly below average. My perception of average was skewed. (For reference purposes, I never graduated college, but I currently run IT operations for a consulting practice that did over $60 million in revenue last year.)
I am currently 35, and it was not until two years ago that I came to accept and be comfortable with the fact that I outperform most of my peers. I had to check myself and my expectations of others because I expected others to be at my level. In the work place this was creating conflicts. I am fortunate because I get to do IT for a living and I really enjoy what I do. When people enjoy what we do, we tend to be willing to put in "extra effort" because it comes naturally. I would get frustrated when I would have to share responsibility with others, or "even worse", rely on others to perform tasks for me (like configuring servers for example). I have dealt with this by pivoting mentally and adopting a mentoring mentality, even with people at my own level. My challenge is to not come across as condescending and be genuinely interested in helping them.
On a related subject, one of the core issues with "entitlement programs" like welfare, HUD, Section8 housing, EBT/SNAP and the like is that too many of the recipients feel like they are entitled to those benefits. They have an inflated sense of self worth, because they have never had to work to provide the basics for themselves. They feel like they are doing what they need to be doing in society, and are therefore deserving of the handouts. This is compounded by the challenges of low wages. By that I mean, most of the jobs that young welfare recipients are qualified for do not pay them enough to give them a better quality of life than they already have. They work harder (or even work in the first place), but bring home less. Meanwhile, their peers laugh at them for "doing the right thing" because "that is for suckers".
Agreed. A rooted Android phone with a decent mod on it is as close as you can get to a Unix box in your pocket. The lack of a physical keyboard is a drag, but with a decent stock keyboard replacement like SwiftKey, it is not the end of the world.
I recently put Cyanogenmod on my droid razr and actually got geeked out on my phone again. Everything just works like it should. The ROMs that come from the phone companies are bloated and inefficient. Do not make the mistake of judging the Android ecosystem by what you see in the stores.
There are even some useful utilities for Android. (http://ultimatepeter.com/freakin-cool-hacking-apps-for-android/)
Absolutely. I run legal doc review systems. The systems house everything from standard Office doc types and email, it obscure formats that sometimes require custom viewers to review. Lawyers are like everyone else, they use email to communicate. The only difference is that their email signatures say "privileged and confidential" so that if they are collected during forensic discovery, they can claim attorney client privilege and keep them from being used as evidence (in most cases).
Voting just replaces the public faces. The real problem, especially in DC, is the Congressional staffers who are in there for life. By and large, Congressional Representatives, be they Senators or Representatives, just do what their chief's of staff tell them to do. The staffers are the ones who write the bills and craft the laws that are the foundation of all of the problems we are facing.
This is where the "fusion centers" are supposed to come into play. The NSA is not law enforcement, but the FBI is (was) and so are other Federal and State agencies. As others have pointed out, the NSA should have seen this. They have taps in all of the backbone routers. Surely they have a decent algorithm that highlights data going to (Eastern Europe, China, etc). We know that they are analyzing plain text and decrypting SSL/TLS when plain text is not available.
They should absolutely have a map of legitimate financial networks, payment authorization data flows, etc. Anything outside of that known universe should be flagged and investigated. They are already doing this to combat money laundering, and to enforce the economic sanctions that the State Department and other Federal agencies enact.
The reality is that the NSA is not all about protecting our economy or predicting crime. They are there to uncover and crush any opposition to the government. Sure, they "cannot" catch these massive frauds, or pay attention to intelligence about terrorists planning on blowing up marathons. But trust you me, as soon as any of us start talking about armed insurrection or forcefully removing Senators, we will quickly figure out that the NSA has no problem acting upon what they want to act upon.
You are still way off base. Changes made to a VM with a non-persistent disk are not written to the disk itself. They are written to a temp file and then discarded when the VM is powered off.
The ransomware that you describe cannot persist across reboots. It can encrypt the the hell out of the entire VM, and there will be a large encrypted temp file created, but that file will be dumped as soon as the VM reboots.
It is only a matter of time before the Chinese and/or Russians enforce an alternate currency on the region. PetroKreditz or whatever. Think about it. Their supply lines are shorter, and over land where the Navy cannot project as much force.
People continue to accept the dollar because it can be traded for commodities. Access to those commodities is to some extent governed by the force of the United States armed forces. That is the value of the dollar. People will continue to want dollars because it allows them to obtain what America has access to.
Flame away, but I think the whole trend of digital currencies is stupid. It basically comes down to people tasked their computers with solving math problems. Okay, big deal. Whoopie for those people. Their math problems are not worth anything. The inverse of the old saying, "Nothing of value was lost." fits here. Nothing of value was created.
People want to trade one fiat currency, for another? Okay. What's the point?
Our economic challenge is one of resource scarcity. Coming up with schemes to trade compute time for fiat paper is not doing anyone any good.... With the exception of those few who are fortunate enough to convince some suckers to trade their paper for solutions to complex math problems.
I agree. In my opinion, a technical manager should be able to do some, if not all of what their employees do. The manager should be the manager because they have enough experience doing what those who they are managing, are doing. That might be my own bias because in my own career, I have been fortunate enough to have a number of very good bosses. My own IT experience has been more of a traditional master / apprentice experience where I have been able to learn from people who are very good at what they do.
Similarly, I view my job as a manager to help out my employees, to guide them, to get them training, and to make sure that they are working on projects that are not only good for the company, but also good for their own professional development. It is also a two way street. As a technical manager, it is important to stay up on technology. Even though I grew up on the command line, I have become compliant with the GUI. One of my guys is a rock star programmer and also does everything in Powershell. He has been challenging me to relearn how to do everything in Powershell and it has been good for my career. Conversely, he is not very strong on the infrastructure side of things, so I am teaching him a lot about storage and virtualization.
Most of the developers who I have worked with do not want to deal with all of the process and paperwork (change requests, scheduling pushes (dev to test, dev to prod), etc). In cases like that, the manager is useful because they let the team focus on what they are good at (writing code). The managers are also helpful because they free up the devs from having to deal with the frequent requests for status updates.
Having recently started managing people in an operational capacity, I find that most of my time is now spent making sure that other people understand what their priorities are, making sure that they are getting the work done, and helping to set priorities for the department. The reality of it is that there are only so many hours in a day. While I still get to work on PoCs, and do the more risky technical tasks (like planning migrations, application deployments and upgrades, etc), I now have to "waste" time managing people. I say waste because honestly, it was not until I became a manager that I had to deal with the fact that a lot of people are not motivated. A lot of people need someone there to make sure that have done their homework. That mindset sucks, but I am not sure what to do about it. I enjoy what I do for a living, so I do not mind working. A lot of people out there just want to collect a paycheck. Managing people takes away from time that I would rather spend working with the systems or learning new technology.
I think that I am different from the typical manager because I was given a team to help me handle my work. I had more to do than there was time in the day to get it done with. The tasks that I have to get done directly affect the profitability and operational capabilities of the organization. I know what I need to do and can set my own priorities. Given that, I have been allowed to hire some people to help me out. Therefore managing them is fairly easy because I get to set the priorities and do not have many people above me telling me what they think I should be having my team do.
It is possible to have a good project manager who knows next to nothing about technology. We always joke that one of our PMs could be running an automobile plant just as well as she helps run our projects. She knows practically nothing about what we do, but she can build project plans, set timelines and most importantly, keep people on task. When timelines start to slip, she is great at gathering feedback about why deadlines are being missed. That feedback then helps the rest of the team realign and keep things moving forward. Again, she knows next to nothing about the feedback she is being given, but that is not her job. Her job is to keep everyone in communication with each other, and ensure that everyone has visibility into the status of the project. Lastly, she is a great resource because every project she runs is run in an orderly, predictable kind of way. In the tech world, especially among developers, it is all too common to make things up as you go. (After all, that is what developers do. They develop things that were not there before. An inherently creative process). Our devs know what when they are done with their latest build, it will get pushed into test. They do not have to spend time pushing it to test. They do not have to build the process to push it to test. That process is already there for them. Same thing with soliciting UAT feedback. They do not have to gather the feedback. The PM gathers it, orders it, prioritizes it, and then makes it available to the manager(s) and developer(s) whose code needs to be refined.
How do you balance the cost of spares versus the cost of preventative maintenance? If I am misconstruing your post, my apologies. My understanding is that you are proposing a redundant infrastructure, or at least enough spare parts rebuild the current one quickly, following the inevitable disaster.
My understanding of the power grid is very limited and derived from talking to a couple of guys who do power for a living (3-phase, large commercial building kind of power).
My limited understanding is that the grid is woefully out of date and the power companies are on a continual upgrade cycle. They are basically staying one step ahead of a shutdown by upgrading things as quickly as they can. Given that resources are finite and capital has to be accounted for, where do the spares come from? Do you buy spares for the old equipment that is already slated for upgrade? Do you buy spares for the new equipment that you just upgraded? If so, how do you justify holding it back as a "spare part" when there is plenty of old equipment out there that still needs to be replaced?
Given that the current system is barely running as is, how could we even conceive of standing up a completely redundant, secondary system "just in case"?
"Choose a job you love and you will never work a day in your life." For those of us who are fortunate, IT is a hobby that turned into a career. We do it because we like it. Because we like it, we naturally put in "extra" time, outside of "work".
When I look for employees, I look for these kinds of people. When people in interviews tell me that it is my job to make sure that we have a training budget to keep their skills up to date, I pass them up. We do have a training budget ($3000-5000 per employee, per year). I do help people keep their skills up to date. But if people think it is their employer's job to keep them employable, I do not want them working for me.
I used to think this, and then I got a good job with a stable company where I get regular raises and bonuses. I had to consider quitting once because my work load was impossible to maintain, but since then I have been allowed to hire three people.
Having said that, the exception does prove the rule. Most often the only way to get a raise or to move up is to change jobs. I just interviewed a guy who is very likely going to be my fourth employee, and he is looking to leave his current position because they are not taking care of him over there. Their loss is my gain.
The trick when asking for pay increases is to focus on the future and not to remind your employer of everything that you have already done. The only time I bring up the past is within the context of, "You know that you can count on me to continue to deliver results, based on my past track record." Even though, the focus is on the future results, projects in the pipeline, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
According to the article, it has nothing to do with circuit capacity limitations. The user had two different classes of account (home and business) that were going through the same router. The only difference was the accounts, not the hardware.
Oh, wait... wrong gender.
Novell totally blew it. It was a sad day as I watched NT 4.0 servers creep into our environment. Novell had LDAP based NDS long before Microsoft cobbled together AD. It was a much better solution and they brought it to market way ahead of the competition.
*ring* *ring* *ring*
You hear that? That is the 1990s calling. They want their nostalgia back. (I say this as someone who used to be a CNE and who started his career with Netware)
Do you work for the government, either Federal, State or local? That is the only place I see Novell anymore.
I have an i7-960 (3.2GHz) and the ESO beta was pushing it pretty hard, averaging 30-40%.
The data is irrelevant because EVERY vendor has bad batches from time to time. Once you have been in this game long enough, you will realize that. The author is wise enough to not judge a company by a single bad batch.
There are two vendors out there that I will buy drives from. They are the same vendors that EMC buys drives from. Those guys at EMC are in the business, and they go through A LOT of drives. I absolutely trust them to have done their research, and to go with vendors who have the lowest failure rates. My experience working with SANs has proven that out. Drives in EMC arrays fail significantly less than drives in commodity Dell storage (like the PowerVault line). Not to disparage Dell, they are doing good things with their Compellent arrays in the mid-tier. I would buy them if I did not have the budget, and the need for a few features currently best handled by Symmetrix arrays.
If this article refers to the previous article where the low priced SAN vendor used the lowest priced drives possible, I am not surprised. They touted their low cost, and tried to mask it by stating that "These are the same drives that regular old Joe's buy."
Well surprise! There are bad batches out there. I remember WAY back in the day, the Maxtor 540MB drives (yes kids, that is megabytes, as in about one half of a gigabyte). They had a ridiculously high failure rate. HP was putting them in their Vectra's. It took the better part of two years to clear those out of the channel. These things happen from time to time.
Are we at all surprised that the company that purchases the cheapest drives possible, ended up with a bad batch? I am sure that whoever had those sitting a warehouse was more than happy to sell the entire lot to the SAN vendor.
What I am curious about is how the failure rates affected their bottom line. I wonder what kind of failure rates they predicted. Anyone who has handled a storage array larger than their home computer knows that drives fail, and do so fairly regularly. The difference between a good vendor and a bad vendor is how quickly they can ship spares. In my line of work, if we do not have spares on the shelves, we expect the vendor to deliver them in four hours or less. Given that, failed drives can get costly for a vendor in a hurry if they are storing, processing service tickets, shipping, and in some cases, dispatching techs along with failed drives to replace them. The failure of a $30-50 commodity drive can easily cost the vendor many multiples of that in overhead associated with the replacement and return processes.
That is pretty sexy. When I got my Razr I was in desperate need of a phone and just bought what they had at the Verizon store. I am about to replace the battery in the Razr, but by the time that dies in another year or two, the Droid 5 should be out and be discounted... or there might even be a Droid 6 by that time.
Thanks for the heads up!
This is one of the traits that I have noticed in highly successful people. Nearly everyone I know who is successful, including myself, is constantly pushing themselves to be better because they believe that they are not good enough. I spent my entire childhood around generally older, higher IQ people (mostly at 2600 meetings, the early Defcons, etc). Because of that, I always saw myself as slightly below average. My perception of average was skewed. (For reference purposes, I never graduated college, but I currently run IT operations for a consulting practice that did over $60 million in revenue last year.)
I am currently 35, and it was not until two years ago that I came to accept and be comfortable with the fact that I outperform most of my peers. I had to check myself and my expectations of others because I expected others to be at my level. In the work place this was creating conflicts. I am fortunate because I get to do IT for a living and I really enjoy what I do. When people enjoy what we do, we tend to be willing to put in "extra effort" because it comes naturally. I would get frustrated when I would have to share responsibility with others, or "even worse", rely on others to perform tasks for me (like configuring servers for example). I have dealt with this by pivoting mentally and adopting a mentoring mentality, even with people at my own level. My challenge is to not come across as condescending and be genuinely interested in helping them.
On a related subject, one of the core issues with "entitlement programs" like welfare, HUD, Section8 housing, EBT/SNAP and the like is that too many of the recipients feel like they are entitled to those benefits. They have an inflated sense of self worth, because they have never had to work to provide the basics for themselves. They feel like they are doing what they need to be doing in society, and are therefore deserving of the handouts. This is compounded by the challenges of low wages. By that I mean, most of the jobs that young welfare recipients are qualified for do not pay them enough to give them a better quality of life than they already have. They work harder (or even work in the first place), but bring home less. Meanwhile, their peers laugh at them for "doing the right thing" because "that is for suckers".
Agreed. A rooted Android phone with a decent mod on it is as close as you can get to a Unix box in your pocket. The lack of a physical keyboard is a drag, but with a decent stock keyboard replacement like SwiftKey, it is not the end of the world.
I recently put Cyanogenmod on my droid razr and actually got geeked out on my phone again. Everything just works like it should. The ROMs that come from the phone companies are bloated and inefficient. Do not make the mistake of judging the Android ecosystem by what you see in the stores.
There are even some useful utilities for Android. (http://ultimatepeter.com/freakin-cool-hacking-apps-for-android/)
Absolutely. I run legal doc review systems. The systems house everything from standard Office doc types and email, it obscure formats that sometimes require custom viewers to review. Lawyers are like everyone else, they use email to communicate. The only difference is that their email signatures say "privileged and confidential" so that if they are collected during forensic discovery, they can claim attorney client privilege and keep them from being used as evidence (in most cases).
You would be surprised how easy it is to filter out noise with a computer.
Some of the references at the bottom of this article will get you going in the right direction if you care to know any more about it
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noisy_text_analytics
Voting just replaces the public faces. The real problem, especially in DC, is the Congressional staffers who are in there for life. By and large, Congressional Representatives, be they Senators or Representatives, just do what their chief's of staff tell them to do. The staffers are the ones who write the bills and craft the laws that are the foundation of all of the problems we are facing.
This is where the "fusion centers" are supposed to come into play. The NSA is not law enforcement, but the FBI is (was) and so are other Federal and State agencies. As others have pointed out, the NSA should have seen this. They have taps in all of the backbone routers. Surely they have a decent algorithm that highlights data going to (Eastern Europe, China, etc). We know that they are analyzing plain text and decrypting SSL/TLS when plain text is not available.
They should absolutely have a map of legitimate financial networks, payment authorization data flows, etc. Anything outside of that known universe should be flagged and investigated. They are already doing this to combat money laundering, and to enforce the economic sanctions that the State Department and other Federal agencies enact.
The reality is that the NSA is not all about protecting our economy or predicting crime. They are there to uncover and crush any opposition to the government. Sure, they "cannot" catch these massive frauds, or pay attention to intelligence about terrorists planning on blowing up marathons. But trust you me, as soon as any of us start talking about armed insurrection or forcefully removing Senators, we will quickly figure out that the NSA has no problem acting upon what they want to act upon.
You are still way off base. Changes made to a VM with a non-persistent disk are not written to the disk itself. They are written to a temp file and then discarded when the VM is powered off.
The ransomware that you describe cannot persist across reboots. It can encrypt the the hell out of the entire VM, and there will be a large encrypted temp file created, but that file will be dumped as soon as the VM reboots.
http://virtualization-tips.blogspot.com/2013/01/persistent-and-non-persistent.html
You have a creative mind, but this has already been solved by non-persistent disks.
It is only a matter of time before the Chinese and/or Russians enforce an alternate currency on the region. PetroKreditz or whatever. Think about it. Their supply lines are shorter, and over land where the Navy cannot project as much force.
People continue to accept the dollar because it can be traded for commodities. Access to those commodities is to some extent governed by the force of the United States armed forces. That is the value of the dollar. People will continue to want dollars because it allows them to obtain what America has access to.
Flame away, but I think the whole trend of digital currencies is stupid. It basically comes down to people tasked their computers with solving math problems. Okay, big deal. Whoopie for those people. Their math problems are not worth anything. The inverse of the old saying, "Nothing of value was lost." fits here. Nothing of value was created.
People want to trade one fiat currency, for another? Okay. What's the point?
Our economic challenge is one of resource scarcity. Coming up with schemes to trade compute time for fiat paper is not doing anyone any good.... With the exception of those few who are fortunate enough to convince some suckers to trade their paper for solutions to complex math problems.
I agree. In my opinion, a technical manager should be able to do some, if not all of what their employees do. The manager should be the manager because they have enough experience doing what those who they are managing, are doing. That might be my own bias because in my own career, I have been fortunate enough to have a number of very good bosses. My own IT experience has been more of a traditional master / apprentice experience where I have been able to learn from people who are very good at what they do.
Similarly, I view my job as a manager to help out my employees, to guide them, to get them training, and to make sure that they are working on projects that are not only good for the company, but also good for their own professional development. It is also a two way street. As a technical manager, it is important to stay up on technology. Even though I grew up on the command line, I have become compliant with the GUI. One of my guys is a rock star programmer and also does everything in Powershell. He has been challenging me to relearn how to do everything in Powershell and it has been good for my career. Conversely, he is not very strong on the infrastructure side of things, so I am teaching him a lot about storage and virtualization.
Most of the developers who I have worked with do not want to deal with all of the process and paperwork (change requests, scheduling pushes (dev to test, dev to prod), etc). In cases like that, the manager is useful because they let the team focus on what they are good at (writing code). The managers are also helpful because they free up the devs from having to deal with the frequent requests for status updates.
Having recently started managing people in an operational capacity, I find that most of my time is now spent making sure that other people understand what their priorities are, making sure that they are getting the work done, and helping to set priorities for the department. The reality of it is that there are only so many hours in a day. While I still get to work on PoCs, and do the more risky technical tasks (like planning migrations, application deployments and upgrades, etc), I now have to "waste" time managing people. I say waste because honestly, it was not until I became a manager that I had to deal with the fact that a lot of people are not motivated. A lot of people need someone there to make sure that have done their homework. That mindset sucks, but I am not sure what to do about it. I enjoy what I do for a living, so I do not mind working. A lot of people out there just want to collect a paycheck. Managing people takes away from time that I would rather spend working with the systems or learning new technology.
I think that I am different from the typical manager because I was given a team to help me handle my work. I had more to do than there was time in the day to get it done with. The tasks that I have to get done directly affect the profitability and operational capabilities of the organization. I know what I need to do and can set my own priorities. Given that, I have been allowed to hire some people to help me out. Therefore managing them is fairly easy because I get to set the priorities and do not have many people above me telling me what they think I should be having my team do.
It is possible to have a good project manager who knows next to nothing about technology. We always joke that one of our PMs could be running an automobile plant just as well as she helps run our projects. She knows practically nothing about what we do, but she can build project plans, set timelines and most importantly, keep people on task. When timelines start to slip, she is great at gathering feedback about why deadlines are being missed. That feedback then helps the rest of the team realign and keep things moving forward. Again, she knows next to nothing about the feedback she is being given, but that is not her job. Her job is to keep everyone in communication with each other, and ensure that everyone has visibility into the status of the project. Lastly, she is a great resource because every project she runs is run in an orderly, predictable kind of way. In the tech world, especially among developers, it is all too common to make things up as you go. (After all, that is what developers do. They develop things that were not there before. An inherently creative process). Our devs know what when they are done with their latest build, it will get pushed into test. They do not have to spend time pushing it to test. They do not have to build the process to push it to test. That process is already there for them. Same thing with soliciting UAT feedback. They do not have to gather the feedback. The PM gathers it, orders it, prioritizes it, and then makes it available to the manager(s) and developer(s) whose code needs to be refined.
How do you balance the cost of spares versus the cost of preventative maintenance? If I am misconstruing your post, my apologies. My understanding is that you are proposing a redundant infrastructure, or at least enough spare parts rebuild the current one quickly, following the inevitable disaster.
My understanding of the power grid is very limited and derived from talking to a couple of guys who do power for a living (3-phase, large commercial building kind of power).
My limited understanding is that the grid is woefully out of date and the power companies are on a continual upgrade cycle. They are basically staying one step ahead of a shutdown by upgrading things as quickly as they can. Given that resources are finite and capital has to be accounted for, where do the spares come from? Do you buy spares for the old equipment that is already slated for upgrade? Do you buy spares for the new equipment that you just upgraded? If so, how do you justify holding it back as a "spare part" when there is plenty of old equipment out there that still needs to be replaced?
Given that the current system is barely running as is, how could we even conceive of standing up a completely redundant, secondary system "just in case"?
+1 for wondering why Samsung was not included.
"Choose a job you love and you will never work a day in your life." For those of us who are fortunate, IT is a hobby that turned into a career. We do it because we like it. Because we like it, we naturally put in "extra" time, outside of "work".
When I look for employees, I look for these kinds of people. When people in interviews tell me that it is my job to make sure that we have a training budget to keep their skills up to date, I pass them up. We do have a training budget ($3000-5000 per employee, per year). I do help people keep their skills up to date. But if people think it is their employer's job to keep them employable, I do not want them working for me.
I used to think this, and then I got a good job with a stable company where I get regular raises and bonuses. I had to consider quitting once because my work load was impossible to maintain, but since then I have been allowed to hire three people.
Having said that, the exception does prove the rule. Most often the only way to get a raise or to move up is to change jobs. I just interviewed a guy who is very likely going to be my fourth employee, and he is looking to leave his current position because they are not taking care of him over there. Their loss is my gain.
The trick when asking for pay increases is to focus on the future and not to remind your employer of everything that you have already done. The only time I bring up the past is within the context of, "You know that you can count on me to continue to deliver results, based on my past track record." Even though, the focus is on the future results, projects in the pipeline, etc.