I just hired a new guy a month ago. It took about two months to fill the position. I interviewed a lot of subpar candidates and extended an offer to one guy who ended up taking a job elsewhere. Within the organization we have hired half a dozen IT positions in the last six months. Over the next year we are going to fill another dozen.
To people who say finding good candidates is easy, while it might be some what true for entry level positions, mid-level to senior positions are hard to fill. Even if you find a candidate with decent tech skills, they might be a socially inept moron who do not fit in with the team. They might have nine years of experience in an irrelevant technology and six months of experience with the position you are hiring for. In my case I found a lot of project management types who were light on tech skills.
The reality of the market place seems to be that if you really have skills, you can command a good salary and work just about anywhere. There are not enough qualified tech people out there.
Why couldn't someone setup a site like Demonoid on Tor, but direct people out to the public internet to actually transfer the torrents? The tracker would exist on the Tor network, but the file sharing would be done on the public network and therefore not saturate the limited bandwidth available via Tor.
Is there something inherent in bittorrent that requires the tracker and the transfer to take place on the same network? Is it so inherent in the application that it could not be separated into two separate components?
Even if you can only offer $5 or $10, that will help. Shadowrun is a great setting for a long term game. The world is rich with lore and the potential for deep stories is definitely there. This project has so much potential, but it is dangerously short of missing the funding goal.
They are set to make a big impact in the mobile market and the way that games are developed. It won't matter what brand of hardware you and your friends have. Everyone can play together.
For all of you Euro readers, the game is being developed in the EU. If you do not support it based on its merits as A. An already good looking game with great long term potential and B. A good game that can be played on Linux, then support it because C. It is NOT made in America.;)
...then start calling in and demanding more. Corporations do not care about the customer, until customers start leaving in droves. Then it takes a while for management to get their act in gear and develop "incentives" to keep people around. Come Christmas time, we should be able to extract some decent concessions from these bums.
"I want a year of your fastest internet for the price I'm currently paying, or I'm going to DSL!"
I offered some off the cuff examples. Better examples might be lightbulbs. Do people not buy lightbulbs because they will eventually burn out? Of course not.
Who cares if a solar panel fails after 5 years, 10 years? If even 50% are still functioning, that is power being fed back into the grid.
This country does not have the willpower, nor the strength of leadership to make the jump into alternative energy. I compare it to the investment that was made during WW2. We did not have industrial capacity to turn out the armaments needed to fight the war. That capacity had to be brought online, and sacrifices had to be made. The same level of unified focus needs to be brought to bear on alternative energy sources.
The government is already spending the money. The Federal Reserve is already printing the dollars. Rather than pissing them into the TBTF financial institutions and praying that they do the right thing and lend (which they won't), the government should just finance a huge solar initiative. The money is going to be "wasted" anyway. It's better to waste it on solar (or other alternate energy products) that will give some benefit to society. The other option is to waste it on lawsuits and bonuses for Wall Street executives.
How long do you really think it would take to train a workforce to install residential / small commercial solar? Two months? Six months? It would just require some vocational courses in basic electrician work and some skilled supervisors to oversee the crews.
As for your statement about disposable income, you must have not grasped the idea of the tax credit. You give property owners a tax credit to offset the cost of the solar install. They are going to have the pay the property tax anyway. You take that burden off of them IF they install solar. That way nobody is out of pocket, other than the tax payers. Which means no one is really out of pocket, because the Federal Reserve just prints the damn money anyway.
What if during the housing boom, there was a mandate in place that all new homes had to be built with solar panels? Imagine how much power those acres upon acres of vacant homes around Vegas would be producing right now.
In order for solar to be viable on a large scale, it needs to be mandated by the government and the utilities need to be coerced into allowing homes to feed back into the grid. During the day when people are at work, their homes can be powering their offices. When they are home at night, they can tap traditional power sources such as gas and nuclear.
There will obviously be challenges managing the transition from day to night. Power plants do not just start and stop at the flick of a switch. They will need better control systems to adjust to dynamically shifting loads, both in any given 24 hour cycle, and seasonally.
We have historically high levels of unemployment. The first shots of a major trade war with China have already been fired. We have the Chinese making huge in roads into Africa and the Middle East with an eye on all of the natural resources there. The "cost" of a solar panel is practically irrelevant given the current state of the economy. Rather than pumping billions into the banks and hoping they eventually get around to lending it out, the government could be financing major public works projects. With the right level of tax incentive, we could probably put a solar panel on every private residence in the country within a decade and employ hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people while doing it.
Of course that will never happen. Between the, "But solar can't do it all." whiners and the "Government spending is bad" whiners, the idea of spending "money" (an artificial concept anyway) to improve the lives of everyone never takes off. Instead we stand here static, whining and crying about how our economy sucks.
A few people have brought up the cost of replacing panels. So what? Is that really an argument? Our entire society is disposable. How often to people replace cars? Tires, brakes? Windows on their homes? Clothes? Cellular phones? If only we had the ability to manufacture things.... Oh wait, we do. What the fuck do you think an "economy" is? You make things that society needs. That's the whole fucking point! You find something society needs, you train people to produce it, those people earn a paycheck, that paycheck enables them to buy things, those things need to be made by other people... those other people buy other things....
...When they take the final step and modify their Acceptable Use Policy to include termination for those who violate the policy, and then actively enforce it.
We deal with highly confidential and sensitive information all the time, including personally identifiable information. Everyone understands the consequences of trying to circumvent the controls that have been put in place on the systems. In this economy, the few of us who are fortunate enough to have a job are not going to throw them away.
The only + that you made that is some what relevant is malice. In those cases all you can do is implement logging and review the logs for exceptions. At some point, you have to trust someone to access the data. In those situations, the access needs to be audited. It might not prevent the breach altogether, but it makes it easier to limit the damage.
It is better in Outlook 2010 but still not as good as GMail. In my case it displays some really odd behavior when I am searching for people's names. It will completely leave out emails that I know are in a given folder and from a particular person. It really does not make any sense.
Now that I think about it, the only real improvement is the search speed. It seems like they are building better indexes. Or maybe they're finally using all 8 cores and 12GB of RAM that I have. The results are still pretty sub-par. It is not as if I am trying to search the entire effin internet. I just need to find an email from two weeks ago that I know was sent to me by "firstname lastname"
These guys have been in the ewaste business for a long time, and have developed and patented (I know that's a bad word here on/. but whatever) a lot of processes around extracting value from eWaste.
tl;dr version - the capacity is there. Companies just need to start using it.
In all likelihood, companies will not follow the processes unless mandated to do so by the government. Even then it will only happen after a few of their competitors are hit with multi-million dollar fines for not complying.
(Go ahead and mod this flamebait. I just need to rant)
When I read the replies that always come up in these cloud discussions, I often wonder how many people on this forum are real IT professionals and how many are just people with opinions that were formed in a vacuum. When I read these cloud articles, I think about them in the context of large corporations with many divisions that are consolidating IT operations. I think of application silos, and business continuity/disaster recovery. I think of internal IT provisioning resources to departments and using technology like hardware and storage virtualization to be smarter about how they allocate resources. I think about rapid provisioning of test/dev and QA environments, or rapidly spinning up new servers to meet unanticipated growth or to address seasonal growth trends.
So many of the comments seem to be coming from people whose entire concept of IT revolves around their home music collections, or working in a very small company that handles everything in house. The idea of giving up control to a cloud provider in that context seems reasonable. But there are large uses for "cloud" technologies that far surpass the tiny use cases in the SMB market. Denouncing everything to do with "cloud" shows a really immature understanding of how the technology is being deployed in the real world.
If you are not up to speed on how virtualization and distributed computing environments can improve IT operations, your skills are probably stagnant and you either need to sharpen your skills, or pick another field. Whining about cloud being a buzzword is not doing you any good. It just making you look irrelevant and out of touch. Having said that, I will be the first to admit that it is an annoying buzzword. But pointing it out is lame at this point. Even a broken clock tells the right time twice a day. If you cannot see how cloud technologies are relevant to IT, you are probably in the wrong discipline.
It got pushed into the high security niche. We deal with a lot of financial institutions and they want the TPM chip activated and the drives encrypted with the encryption keyed to the chip. It adds an extra layer of administration, but it is a pretty solid solution.
FWIW - I cannot think of anything else that I would rather be doing. I feel blessed to have been able to turn a hobby into a career. I started when I was young. Went to 2600 meetings. Went to the first half dozen Defcons and then got "lame" and got a real job. IT is one of the few careers left in this country where you can make a decent living. It is one of the few professions that has the master / apprentice dynamic. If you like it, stick with it. Just make sure that you stay focused on what the needs of the business are. It's really easy to fall in love with tech for the sake of tech and lose sight of what you are being paid to do. In 99% of the cases, you are being paid to make everyone else's life easier. That position comes with responsbility, but it also comes with power. Do not under value yourself. Always keep your skills up to date and your resume in circulation. It will probably take you a few job changes before you get into a position with any sort of autonomy.
I have seen similar behaviors in every single organization that I have been a part of. I am struggling with it in my own career and I feel fortunate to have seen it happen in the past so that I know how to deal with it.
Technology works in cycles. One of the memes we see here on/. is the thin vs thick clients, or centralized versus distributed computing. What is old is new again. Once you've been through enough cycles, it gets boring. "Great, another version of Windows. Oh wow. Look, a new multi-tier application backed by SQL with a web front end... never seen that before. Special, a major version upgrade of the application our entire business runs on. I wonder how many new bugs I am going to get to squash."
There are only so many applications that a typical enterprise needs. There are only so many best ways to develop those applications. There are only so many ways to migrate data from one application to another. Etc.
Once you have been around for a while, it all gets old. After a while you start to get jaded because all systems have their strengths and weaknesses. You get tired of new systems that are worse than the old systems. That is on the tech side.
Then there is the organizational (people) side of IT. There is the "IT is a cost center" discussion where organizations justify not spending money on IT systems because it does not generate any money for the business. Even in businesses that are IT businesses, it is hard to get money sometimes. The battle I'm fighting right now involves purchasing SAN space. "What do you mean we have to buy 50% more disk space than we can account for right now in order to position us to grow? You only have $xx million in the pipeline. Why are we buying space to support $xxx million?" Trying to talk to financial people about exponential data growth is frustrating. On one hand, they are frustrated that we are constantly asking for more disk space. "Why didn't you do a better job of projecting this ahead of time?" On the other hand, they do not want to "over spend" on business that (in their opinion) might never materialize. When you are part of a practice that is generating millions of dollars in revenue a month, and one of the only players in a market that involves Fortune 50 corporations and huge financial institutions, it gets frustrating when people are crying about a few million dollars worth of SAN disk.
There are the VP of (whatever) department who minored in Information Systems 15 years ago, and now because they have had a conversation with a sales guy they think they are in the position to dictate which application the organization uses to support their department. In a previous job we dealt with this in the form of a VP of Manufacturing. He knew how to write some queries in Access so he felt confident that he could dictate the requirements for the manufacturing and accounting systems. It was a mess, and a common situations in smaller shops that cannot afford the luxury of full blown ITIL or ISO 27002 compliant IT infrastructures.
After 15-20 years of doing ANYTHING, people tend to want change. It does not even have to do with IT specifically. Do you know anyone who has done anything for 15 years? IT people get pigeon holed sometimes. "You are a DBA. You are a sysadmin. You are a..." At first it is cool because you are a competent specialist and subject matter expert. After long enough, you just do not want to write another freaking SQL query and you are going to stab the next person who writes a SELECT statement that joins the three largest tables in the DB and exhausts the RAM on the server. I will bet you a $1000 that 90%+ of the "mobile application developers" today are going to be doing something different in ten years.
At this point in my career I have delivered enough solutions on all levels of the OSI model that I can be a competent manager. I can lead teams and take ownership of applications and business processes. I worked as a consultant so I under
That is true. The larger point I was trying to address is that we should resist any steps that consolidate the Internet into the hands of a global body. That is the final piece of the puzzle for total control. As long as individual countries are able to do what they will (think the Pirate Party in Sweden), we will still have some semblance of the Internet as the founders intended it. Once we have a global body in charge of it, kiss it goodbye. It will be a generation before every gets an IPv6 address at birth along with their Social Security number, but it is coming.
"Want to be a digital citizen? Better use your approved IPv6 address for all interactions, otherwise you're a subversive terrorist."
I can see the marketing already. It will be like phone number portability. "Do not be beholden to a single carrier. Take your ID with you where ever you go!"
Ron Paul is championing internet freedom as a key tenant of individual liberty in the 21st century. The UN is declaring internet freedom a basic right.
Large portions of the population of the United States do not trust the government. The "two party system" is broken.
Solution? Give more power to a one world government. Trust the UN to do what the corrupt US government, beholden to their corporate masters cannot/will not do.
Something stinks here. Control over the internet is one of the only levers of power that America has left. With the dollar on the way out, governance over the internet is the last thing (besides an insanely huge military) that gives the United States any control over the rest of the world.
As scary as having the US control the internet might be, the idea of UN doing it is even worse. This is the same body that cannot speak with a unified voice on Syria. That is a serious issue where people are dying in large numbers. How well are they really going to handle issues like censorship and intellectual property?
"Please tech savvy/. demographic, do not crap on our new product. Look, it has so much potential!! You guys mostly all hate Apple anyway, so since we are Google we deserve time to get it right. And oh yeah, it was made here in the USA (rah rah rah!), so do not mind the price tag that is significantly more than similar products from our competitors."
In the context of health, preventative maintenance is absolutely free. Drink nothing but water. Get exercise. Do not over eat. Simple and free.
Your car analogy speaks volumes about your attitude towards self responsibility. You'll let your vehicle get to the point where it can catastrophically fail on a public road and just deal with the consequences then, rather than be proactive about it and be a responsible driver. That's real mature of you.
Must be nice being part of the 1% who can afford to post a $300k bond.
Maybe we can just have everyone earning $8 an hour post a $300k bond to cover their potential health costs too. Or maybe give them a bulk discount, $500k for health and auto.
It's instead about momentum and branding. Winning these cases is PR that says, we are the leaders in smartphone technology, we are the innovators.
It has nothing to do with PR. It has everything to do with frightening your competitors and locking new entrants out of the marketplace. These IPO litigations are expensive. On a slightly deeper level they are about trying to establish revenue streams based around licensing agreements.
I have spent a large amount of time defending the company here, not because I'm an employee or shill, but simply because I use their software and support it. Given what I have seen with Windows 8, I cannot in good faith support the company anymore. They are heading the wrong direction. They finally got the UI right with Windows 7. Sure, I am running it on an i7-960 with a good video card, but even on a Core2Duo with an AGP card it ran very well, especially when using a flash drive for the ReadyBoost cache.
They seem to be ditching all of the great UI elements that make Win7 so good simply so that they can target the lowest common computing denominator, the smartphone. Maybe the desktop really is dead. Maybe the idea of actually owning your own computer and being able to do what you want with it are on the way out. Working on the inside, I see it. Between governmental regulations that corporations have to comply with, and the various DRM schemes that media companies are coming up with, there is simply too much liability for anyone who enables data leakages or piracy. The answers are technologies like VDI and walled app gardens. Devices like the douche pad with zero external media connectivity.
All we need now is IPv6 so that every device can have a unique address, and the coffin will be nailed shut. Even a Linux box won't save you because the upstream routers are already part of the matrix. Who needs to bar code people when most everyone will voluntarily own a smartphone or some other always on, always connected device?
Slashdot Mirror
I just hired a new guy a month ago. It took about two months to fill the position. I interviewed a lot of subpar candidates and extended an offer to one guy who ended up taking a job elsewhere. Within the organization we have hired half a dozen IT positions in the last six months. Over the next year we are going to fill another dozen.
To people who say finding good candidates is easy, while it might be some what true for entry level positions, mid-level to senior positions are hard to fill. Even if you find a candidate with decent tech skills, they might be a socially inept moron who do not fit in with the team. They might have nine years of experience in an irrelevant technology and six months of experience with the position you are hiring for. In my case I found a lot of project management types who were light on tech skills.
The reality of the market place seems to be that if you really have skills, you can command a good salary and work just about anywhere. There are not enough qualified tech people out there.
...the stock market is run by robots that react to Twitter feeds.
"Just secured 1 gazillion dollar line of credit from JP Morgan" @dave562
Woo hoo... my personal stock is up 10% bitchez!!!!
/me admits to knowing.
Why couldn't someone setup a site like Demonoid on Tor, but direct people out to the public internet to actually transfer the torrents? The tracker would exist on the Tor network, but the file sharing would be done on the public network and therefore not saturate the limited bandwidth available via Tor.
Is there something inherent in bittorrent that requires the tracker and the transfer to take place on the same network? Is it so inherent in the application that it could not be separated into two separate components?
The title says it all.
Even if you can only offer $5 or $10, that will help. Shadowrun is a great setting for a long term game. The world is rich with lore and the potential for deep stories is definitely there. This project has so much potential, but it is dangerously short of missing the funding goal.
They are set to make a big impact in the mobile market and the way that games are developed. It won't matter what brand of hardware you and your friends have. Everyone can play together.
For all of you Euro readers, the game is being developed in the EU. If you do not support it based on its merits as A. An already good looking game with great long term potential and B. A good game that can be played on Linux, then support it because C. It is NOT made in America. ;)
...then start calling in and demanding more. Corporations do not care about the customer, until customers start leaving in droves. Then it takes a while for management to get their act in gear and develop "incentives" to keep people around. Come Christmas time, we should be able to extract some decent concessions from these bums.
"I want a year of your fastest internet for the price I'm currently paying, or I'm going to DSL!"
I offered some off the cuff examples. Better examples might be lightbulbs. Do people not buy lightbulbs because they will eventually burn out? Of course not.
Who cares if a solar panel fails after 5 years, 10 years? If even 50% are still functioning, that is power being fed back into the grid.
This country does not have the willpower, nor the strength of leadership to make the jump into alternative energy. I compare it to the investment that was made during WW2. We did not have industrial capacity to turn out the armaments needed to fight the war. That capacity had to be brought online, and sacrifices had to be made. The same level of unified focus needs to be brought to bear on alternative energy sources.
The government is already spending the money. The Federal Reserve is already printing the dollars. Rather than pissing them into the TBTF financial institutions and praying that they do the right thing and lend (which they won't), the government should just finance a huge solar initiative. The money is going to be "wasted" anyway. It's better to waste it on solar (or other alternate energy products) that will give some benefit to society. The other option is to waste it on lawsuits and bonuses for Wall Street executives.
How long do you really think it would take to train a workforce to install residential / small commercial solar? Two months? Six months? It would just require some vocational courses in basic electrician work and some skilled supervisors to oversee the crews.
As for your statement about disposable income, you must have not grasped the idea of the tax credit. You give property owners a tax credit to offset the cost of the solar install. They are going to have the pay the property tax anyway. You take that burden off of them IF they install solar. That way nobody is out of pocket, other than the tax payers. Which means no one is really out of pocket, because the Federal Reserve just prints the damn money anyway.
Touche!
What if during the housing boom, there was a mandate in place that all new homes had to be built with solar panels? Imagine how much power those acres upon acres of vacant homes around Vegas would be producing right now.
In order for solar to be viable on a large scale, it needs to be mandated by the government and the utilities need to be coerced into allowing homes to feed back into the grid. During the day when people are at work, their homes can be powering their offices. When they are home at night, they can tap traditional power sources such as gas and nuclear.
There will obviously be challenges managing the transition from day to night. Power plants do not just start and stop at the flick of a switch. They will need better control systems to adjust to dynamically shifting loads, both in any given 24 hour cycle, and seasonally.
We have historically high levels of unemployment. The first shots of a major trade war with China have already been fired. We have the Chinese making huge in roads into Africa and the Middle East with an eye on all of the natural resources there. The "cost" of a solar panel is practically irrelevant given the current state of the economy. Rather than pumping billions into the banks and hoping they eventually get around to lending it out, the government could be financing major public works projects. With the right level of tax incentive, we could probably put a solar panel on every private residence in the country within a decade and employ hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people while doing it.
Of course that will never happen. Between the, "But solar can't do it all." whiners and the "Government spending is bad" whiners, the idea of spending "money" (an artificial concept anyway) to improve the lives of everyone never takes off. Instead we stand here static, whining and crying about how our economy sucks.
A few people have brought up the cost of replacing panels. So what? Is that really an argument? Our entire society is disposable. How often to people replace cars? Tires, brakes? Windows on their homes? Clothes? Cellular phones? If only we had the ability to manufacture things.... Oh wait, we do. What the fuck do you think an "economy" is? You make things that society needs. That's the whole fucking point! You find something society needs, you train people to produce it, those people earn a paycheck, that paycheck enables them to buy things, those things need to be made by other people... those other people buy other things....
...When they take the final step and modify their Acceptable Use Policy to include termination for those who violate the policy, and then actively enforce it.
We deal with highly confidential and sensitive information all the time, including personally identifiable information. Everyone understands the consequences of trying to circumvent the controls that have been put in place on the systems. In this economy, the few of us who are fortunate enough to have a job are not going to throw them away.
The only + that you made that is some what relevant is malice. In those cases all you can do is implement logging and review the logs for exceptions. At some point, you have to trust someone to access the data. In those situations, the access needs to be audited. It might not prevent the breach altogether, but it makes it easier to limit the damage.
It is better in Outlook 2010 but still not as good as GMail. In my case it displays some really odd behavior when I am searching for people's names. It will completely leave out emails that I know are in a given folder and from a particular person. It really does not make any sense.
Now that I think about it, the only real improvement is the search speed. It seems like they are building better indexes. Or maybe they're finally using all 8 cores and 12GB of RAM that I have. The results are still pretty sub-par. It is not as if I am trying to search the entire effin internet. I just need to find an email from two weeks ago that I know was sent to me by "firstname lastname"
These guys have been in the ewaste business for a long time, and have developed and patented (I know that's a bad word here on /. but whatever) a lot of processes around extracting value from eWaste.
http://redemtech.com/
tl;dr version - the capacity is there. Companies just need to start using it.
In all likelihood, companies will not follow the processes unless mandated to do so by the government. Even then it will only happen after a few of their competitors are hit with multi-million dollar fines for not complying.
(Go ahead and mod this flamebait. I just need to rant)
When I read the replies that always come up in these cloud discussions, I often wonder how many people on this forum are real IT professionals and how many are just people with opinions that were formed in a vacuum. When I read these cloud articles, I think about them in the context of large corporations with many divisions that are consolidating IT operations. I think of application silos, and business continuity/disaster recovery. I think of internal IT provisioning resources to departments and using technology like hardware and storage virtualization to be smarter about how they allocate resources. I think about rapid provisioning of test/dev and QA environments, or rapidly spinning up new servers to meet unanticipated growth or to address seasonal growth trends.
So many of the comments seem to be coming from people whose entire concept of IT revolves around their home music collections, or working in a very small company that handles everything in house. The idea of giving up control to a cloud provider in that context seems reasonable. But there are large uses for "cloud" technologies that far surpass the tiny use cases in the SMB market. Denouncing everything to do with "cloud" shows a really immature understanding of how the technology is being deployed in the real world.
If you are not up to speed on how virtualization and distributed computing environments can improve IT operations, your skills are probably stagnant and you either need to sharpen your skills, or pick another field. Whining about cloud being a buzzword is not doing you any good. It just making you look irrelevant and out of touch. Having said that, I will be the first to admit that it is an annoying buzzword. But pointing it out is lame at this point. Even a broken clock tells the right time twice a day. If you cannot see how cloud technologies are relevant to IT, you are probably in the wrong discipline.
It got pushed into the high security niche. We deal with a lot of financial institutions and they want the TPM chip activated and the drives encrypted with the encryption keyed to the chip. It adds an extra layer of administration, but it is a pretty solid solution.
FWIW - I cannot think of anything else that I would rather be doing. I feel blessed to have been able to turn a hobby into a career. I started when I was young. Went to 2600 meetings. Went to the first half dozen Defcons and then got "lame" and got a real job. IT is one of the few careers left in this country where you can make a decent living. It is one of the few professions that has the master / apprentice dynamic. If you like it, stick with it. Just make sure that you stay focused on what the needs of the business are. It's really easy to fall in love with tech for the sake of tech and lose sight of what you are being paid to do. In 99% of the cases, you are being paid to make everyone else's life easier. That position comes with responsbility, but it also comes with power. Do not under value yourself. Always keep your skills up to date and your resume in circulation. It will probably take you a few job changes before you get into a position with any sort of autonomy.
I have seen similar behaviors in every single organization that I have been a part of. I am struggling with it in my own career and I feel fortunate to have seen it happen in the past so that I know how to deal with it.
Technology works in cycles. One of the memes we see here on /. is the thin vs thick clients, or centralized versus distributed computing. What is old is new again. Once you've been through enough cycles, it gets boring. "Great, another version of Windows. Oh wow. Look, a new multi-tier application backed by SQL with a web front end... never seen that before. Special, a major version upgrade of the application our entire business runs on. I wonder how many new bugs I am going to get to squash."
There are only so many applications that a typical enterprise needs. There are only so many best ways to develop those applications. There are only so many ways to migrate data from one application to another. Etc.
Once you have been around for a while, it all gets old. After a while you start to get jaded because all systems have their strengths and weaknesses. You get tired of new systems that are worse than the old systems. That is on the tech side.
Then there is the organizational (people) side of IT. There is the "IT is a cost center" discussion where organizations justify not spending money on IT systems because it does not generate any money for the business. Even in businesses that are IT businesses, it is hard to get money sometimes. The battle I'm fighting right now involves purchasing SAN space. "What do you mean we have to buy 50% more disk space than we can account for right now in order to position us to grow? You only have $xx million in the pipeline. Why are we buying space to support $xxx million?" Trying to talk to financial people about exponential data growth is frustrating. On one hand, they are frustrated that we are constantly asking for more disk space. "Why didn't you do a better job of projecting this ahead of time?" On the other hand, they do not want to "over spend" on business that (in their opinion) might never materialize. When you are part of a practice that is generating millions of dollars in revenue a month, and one of the only players in a market that involves Fortune 50 corporations and huge financial institutions, it gets frustrating when people are crying about a few million dollars worth of SAN disk.
There are the VP of (whatever) department who minored in Information Systems 15 years ago, and now because they have had a conversation with a sales guy they think they are in the position to dictate which application the organization uses to support their department. In a previous job we dealt with this in the form of a VP of Manufacturing. He knew how to write some queries in Access so he felt confident that he could dictate the requirements for the manufacturing and accounting systems. It was a mess, and a common situations in smaller shops that cannot afford the luxury of full blown ITIL or ISO 27002 compliant IT infrastructures.
After 15-20 years of doing ANYTHING, people tend to want change. It does not even have to do with IT specifically. Do you know anyone who has done anything for 15 years? IT people get pigeon holed sometimes. "You are a DBA. You are a sysadmin. You are a ..." At first it is cool because you are a competent specialist and subject matter expert. After long enough, you just do not want to write another freaking SQL query and you are going to stab the next person who writes a SELECT statement that joins the three largest tables in the DB and exhausts the RAM on the server. I will bet you a $1000 that 90%+ of the "mobile application developers" today are going to be doing something different in ten years.
At this point in my career I have delivered enough solutions on all levels of the OSI model that I can be a competent manager. I can lead teams and take ownership of applications and business processes. I worked as a consultant so I under
That is true. The larger point I was trying to address is that we should resist any steps that consolidate the Internet into the hands of a global body. That is the final piece of the puzzle for total control. As long as individual countries are able to do what they will (think the Pirate Party in Sweden), we will still have some semblance of the Internet as the founders intended it. Once we have a global body in charge of it, kiss it goodbye. It will be a generation before every gets an IPv6 address at birth along with their Social Security number, but it is coming.
"Want to be a digital citizen? Better use your approved IPv6 address for all interactions, otherwise you're a subversive terrorist."
I can see the marketing already. It will be like phone number portability. "Do not be beholden to a single carrier. Take your ID with you where ever you go!"
Ron Paul is championing internet freedom as a key tenant of individual liberty in the 21st century. The UN is declaring internet freedom a basic right.
Large portions of the population of the United States do not trust the government. The "two party system" is broken.
Solution? Give more power to a one world government. Trust the UN to do what the corrupt US government, beholden to their corporate masters cannot/will not do.
Something stinks here. Control over the internet is one of the only levers of power that America has left. With the dollar on the way out, governance over the internet is the last thing (besides an insanely huge military) that gives the United States any control over the rest of the world.
As scary as having the US control the internet might be, the idea of UN doing it is even worse. This is the same body that cannot speak with a unified voice on Syria. That is a serious issue where people are dying in large numbers. How well are they really going to handle issues like censorship and intellectual property?
"Please tech savvy /. demographic, do not crap on our new product. Look, it has so much potential!! You guys mostly all hate Apple anyway, so since we are Google we deserve time to get it right. And oh yeah, it was made here in the USA (rah rah rah!), so do not mind the price tag that is significantly more than similar products from our competitors."
In the context of health, preventative maintenance is absolutely free. Drink nothing but water. Get exercise. Do not over eat. Simple and free.
Your car analogy speaks volumes about your attitude towards self responsibility. You'll let your vehicle get to the point where it can catastrophically fail on a public road and just deal with the consequences then, rather than be proactive about it and be a responsible driver. That's real mature of you.
Must be nice being part of the 1% who can afford to post a $300k bond.
Maybe we can just have everyone earning $8 an hour post a $300k bond to cover their potential health costs too. Or maybe give them a bulk discount, $500k for health and auto.
It's instead about momentum and branding. Winning these cases is PR that says, we are the leaders in smartphone technology, we are the innovators.
It has nothing to do with PR. It has everything to do with frightening your competitors and locking new entrants out of the marketplace. These IPO litigations are expensive. On a slightly deeper level they are about trying to establish revenue streams based around licensing agreements.
What are you talking about? My 286 had a reset button on the front of the machine, long before Windows 3.x was out.
Therapists have been doing this Neuro-Linguistic Programming for decades at this point.
What is old is new again?
Win7 file copy performance is good. You can use a tool like HD Speed to measure I/O. I doubt that you will see much difference between XP and 7.
It does not matter how fast the bus is, or what OS you are using. Copying a terabyte of data is going to take hours.
I have spent a large amount of time defending the company here, not because I'm an employee or shill, but simply because I use their software and support it. Given what I have seen with Windows 8, I cannot in good faith support the company anymore. They are heading the wrong direction. They finally got the UI right with Windows 7. Sure, I am running it on an i7-960 with a good video card, but even on a Core2Duo with an AGP card it ran very well, especially when using a flash drive for the ReadyBoost cache.
They seem to be ditching all of the great UI elements that make Win7 so good simply so that they can target the lowest common computing denominator, the smartphone. Maybe the desktop really is dead. Maybe the idea of actually owning your own computer and being able to do what you want with it are on the way out. Working on the inside, I see it. Between governmental regulations that corporations have to comply with, and the various DRM schemes that media companies are coming up with, there is simply too much liability for anyone who enables data leakages or piracy. The answers are technologies like VDI and walled app gardens. Devices like the douche pad with zero external media connectivity.
All we need now is IPv6 so that every device can have a unique address, and the coffin will be nailed shut. Even a Linux box won't save you because the upstream routers are already part of the matrix. Who needs to bar code people when most everyone will voluntarily own a smartphone or some other always on, always connected device?