If you are so worried about it then have them sign a contract that stipulates they won't do what you're worried about them doing. I've done consulting for the SMB market. We did the majority of our support remotely. We were constantly busy taking care of clients and didn't have the time or the inclination to try to steal from our clients. Look at it this way, if your consultant leaks your super duper secrets to your competitor, and you go out of business, where does that leave them?
Can you offer some links to back up your assertions? Where I work my employer caps our vacation time. After we've accumulated a certain amount of time we either have to use the excess before the end of the year, or lose it. I'd like to see something in writing that says the practice is illegal.
I always ask two questions. If the position is an already established position I will ask why it is vacant and why the previous employee left. You can learn a lot about the company you are going to work for based on the way that they answer that question. I also ask how senior management views IT's role in the organization. Specifically, are they simply a cost to be controlled, or does senior management view IT as a fundamental part of their business and are they willing to fund it accordingly? That question will let you know if you're going to be relegated to the wings of the organization and marginalized, or if you are going to have a seat at the table with everyone else when it comes time to make business decisions.
How can you say the bug is resolved when I dealt with last week? Monsters get stuck in terrain and randomly attack people. It rarely happens twice in the same place, and server reboots "fix" the issue until it happens some where else. Given the thousands of players on server, and who knows how many randomly spawned monsters (hundreds of thousands?), its not like such things are unexpected. With the way applications leak memory and with multiple processes all sharing memory space, those kinds of glitches are bound to happen.
The only time I ran into problems with the old games was when I was having hardware problems. I used to get a lot of lock ups with Dynamax games (Red Baron, Aces of the Pacific) and it turned out to be my RAM. The only game I ever had to have patched was Kings Quest IV from Sierra. I remember that each game pretty much required a custom boot disk with tweaked config.sys and autoexec.bat files. Once there was enough of the initial 640k cleared up and the appropriate files were all properly loaded into high mem, the games ran great.
Maybe my experience was colored by only buying games from big names at the time like Microprose, Sierra, SSI, Lucas Arts and the like. But even when I was into the warez scene and playing just about everything under the sun, I never ran into any problems with games crashing because of bad code that needed to be patched, or problems with serious game play disturbing bugs.
Lets talk about Zimbra. I've tried to bring up the following subjects on the Zimbra forum but can't get straight answers. What is disaster recovery on Zimbra like? Does it have single mailbox / single message restore functionality? For example, if dumb user Jane tells me that she deleted the super duper important email that she absolutely needs to have, do I need to restore the entire mail database, or can I go into the most recent backup of Jane's mailbox and restore the single email that she deleted? Is their Blackberry connector 100% complete and bug free yet?
How does Zimbra handle Public Folders? Last I heard there were some sort of "work arounds" where you had to create special folders, and hack together something that was kind of like public folders but not really.
How does Zimbra do in multi-site deployments where users are separated by relatively slow WAN links and need to maintain mail databases on separate servers, but share things like Public Folders, Global Address Lists and the like?
Last but not least, how does Zimbra do with granting shared permissions to mailboxes? For example, the secretary who needs to access portions of her boss' mailbox but not all of it. For example, she needs to be able to accept meeting requests for the boss and create / update contacts, but not see the main inbox.
A lot of things are backwards here in the People's Republik of Kalifornia, but at least our merchants aren't allowed to sell gift certificates that expire.
Are you talking about the same WoW beta that other people played? I avoided the beta but I had a lot of friends who played it. I'm a casual WoW player (down to about 8 hours a week) and I still come across unresolved bugs in it. The most common one involves getting attacked by monsters that you can't attack and they are invisible (odds are they're stuck in some piece of terrain nearby). The only way to deal with it is to flee. Another common bug involves coming across monsters that are evasion bugged. They are standing there, you can target and attack them, but every strike results in an Evaded message.
I'm not saying that the bugs are major bugs because they aren't. They aren't system crashing bugs, or even game wrecking bugs. On the other hand, they are persistent. I've been playing WoW since a few months before Burning Crusade came out, and the same two bugs that I mentioned above were present back then.
If anything, games have been getting more and more buggy as time goes on. I remember as a kid, I only ever once played a game that required me to contact the manufacture to obtain new disks with a more recent version of the game. Back in the day, you installed a game and it worked. The graphics sucked, the game play was horrible, but it worked. How many bugs were there in Wing Commander, or Mech Warrior, or the original Civilization, or Sim City? There weren't any because there wasn't any way to fix them if there were, so the publishers made sure that they were bug free.
I'd like some of the anti-nanny state conservatives here to answer something - why are you guys so much in favor of antidrug laws? These are the worst of nanny state laws. Why should my employer have any say in anything that doesn't affect my job performance? Why should the government have any say over what I put in my body so long as it doesn't endanger anyone else? I'm against impaired driving, as that puts me at risk, but so long as you don't drive or go bow hunting while stoned it doesn't affect anyone.
You bring up something that leads to a point I've been trying to make to everyone who will listen (hello/. readers!). There are laws against just about all of the 'bad' things that happen 'because of drugs'. It's illegal to beat someone up, its illegal to rob someone, its illegal to kill someone, etc. There is a bullshit meme floating around that one of the primary reasons to have laws against 'drugs' is because drugs = 'bad things happening'. The pretense is 98% false. I'm not so naive to say that people don't do stupid things while on drugs from time to time. However there are large portions of the drug using population who seem to be able to handle their drugs just fine. If someone who is 'on drugs' does something stupid, lock them up and prosecute them for doing something stupid. Don't lock everyone else up because they might do something stupid.
In California, there are 'special circumstances' charges used by the courts. Often times the special circumstances have to do with gang members. For example, if a gang member kills someone else 'to further the interests of their gang', they get a harsher sentence than they would have if they weren't doing it to help their gang. There can be special circumstances related to drugs. Increase the sentence by 50% if the person tests positive for drugs. If a robbery charge carries a five year sentence, a robbery done by a drug user will be a seven and a half year sentence.
Once DT started up Black Hat, all of the real technical content left DefCon and never really came back. DefCon became the social scene for the hacker community. I went to the first five and have only been to a couple since then. I almost went this year but the flu kept me home. I wasn't planning on going for all of the elite hackerness of it. I was planning on going to see friends I hadn't seen in years.
There are some "smart" parking meters in downtown LA. I watched a bum mess them up with a paper clip. He just put a paper clip in the slot, wiggled it around and then the meter read "Out of Service".
From a technical standpoint it might not be that hard to fork and start over. The issue seems to be a personnel problem. There isn't anyone involved with CentOS who has up until now even taken the time to think about these things. What that tells me, and this is just conjecture on my part, is that there isn't anyone involved with CentOS who particularly cares enough to start over. As far as the community was concerned, some guy named Lance was on the ball and nobody thought it necessary to consider what to do in the event that Lance ever dropped the ball.
From everything I've been able to see, maintaining a Linux distribution is a labor of love. It takes a certain personality type to take on all of that pain and find pleasure in it. People with that personality type aren't very common. It's possible that there might be another person out there who can pick up the CentOS torch and run with it, but I doubt there are a bunch of them waiting in the wings. There are probably a few people who will give it a shot, but in a few months they will release what an epic undertaking it really is, and they too will bow out, albeit a little more gracefully.
The best hope that CentOS has is for someone in the CentOS community to realize that no one single person can take over. Hopefully that person will have the charisma and character to convince people to form a senior committee of sorts, and then the people on that committee will be open to having tasks delegated to them. Every cloud has a silver lining, and in this situation, the CentOS community might come out of this far better off than they were when they started. Unfortunately given the lack of strong leaders (not just in the Linux community, but in life in general), the odds are stacked in favor of CentOS limping along for a little while and then crumbling within the next 12 to 18 months.
Its a corporate culture problem. Given a close to 20% real unemployment rate in this country, there isn't any excuse for having a non/poorly trained fool handling sensitive customer information. I'm sure that there are plenty of unemployed people who could do the task in question without messing it up. The sad thing is that they'd probably jump at the opportunity to make the peanuts worth of pay that McAfee was probably paying the person who screwed it up.
When will McAfee just shrivel up and die? Their software sucks and it seems like this is at least the second or third seriously high profile mistake on their part. Does anyone really buy McAfee security products, or do they simply scrape by with the revenue from renewals on OEM pre-installs? I don't know a single IT person who looks at McAfee software when considering corporate security products.
I saw this trend really picking up steam while I was consulting. When I first started working for the firm I worked with in 2000, we did most of our work onsite. We were working in the SMB market, taking care of companies with 1-50 servers and 5-500 employees. By 2005-6, most of the work was done remotely via VPN. We did standard IT work and some development projects. When I left in 2007, unless the problem was hardware related, I never had to visit client sites. The clients appreciated it because we billed for drive time and mileage. I didn't like it so much because I lost that revenue, but on the other hand, I could also handle more clients at the same time so it some what balanced out.
It seems like certain IT tasks are better suited to remote/offsite work than others. Development projects seem like the best candidate. So long as you meet your deadlines, it doesn't really matter where or when you produce your code and applications. Of course you have to be around for meetings, or arrange teleconferences, video conferences, whatever. A lot of support can be done remotely, but when something goes physically wrong you have to be there to work with the hardware.
In past versions of the OS, pretty much every application's Help functionality was provided with IE. Did they standardize the API and make it so that other browsers will still properly render the help files?
The state, or anybody for that matter, doesn't have any legal right to audit a private corporation. The state can audit the contracts, and audit the bills and audit the expenses. They cannot audit the operations of the private contractor or in any other way determine just exactly what it costs that private contractor to provide the services that they provide to the state. On the other hand, if the state is running the data center they know exactly how much the servers cost, how much the software costs, what the electrical costs are, internet costs, personnel costs, etc. A private contractor is making money reselling services. If they are being charged X for bandwidth from their ISP, they are going to charge the state X+Y where Y is enough to cover their costs and turn a profit. On the other hand, the state simply has to pay for X if they are running their own operation.
It's pretty simple math really. On a timeline of X number of months, will the state spend more doing in themselves or would it be more cost effective to outsource it? The private datacenter has the benefit of having already invested in the infrastructure. The state has to pay for their own infrastructure. Paying for their own infrastructure is an initial fixed cost. Going with a private data center is a fluctuating cost that will always go up. I'm not a finance guy, but I work with them when doing IT planning. Often times we consider a server life time of five years, and do our ROI projections based on a five year time frame. When considering outsourcing, it's pretty simple math to add up all of the fixed costs, and then compare those with the cost of a five year contract with a service provider.
I'd imagine that given the size of a state information technology department, they are on close to equal footing with a data center when it comes to negotiating the cost of hardware and software purchases. Being the state, they probably get some really good rates on their utility bills too.
On a related tangent, there are optimal times of day for practicing qi gong and tai chi. I wonder if the amount of light emitted correlates to those times of the day.
Don't believe everything that you read in the papers. At the individual department level, the costs are controlled pretty stringently (at least in California). They can't spend money that they don't have a budget line item for. Any purchase orders submitted that exceed the amount of funds available are rejected.
This presents an interesting situation without an easy, clear cut answer. As a tax payer, I'm not sure what makes more sense. Do I want the government spending my money with a private company like Microsoft or Google, or do I want them spending my money developing their own infrastructure. On one hand, it could be argued that a large corporation that faces competitive pressures in the marketplace would be forced to keep costs down. On the other hand, by having a government run datacenter, costs can be controlled through the bugetary process. If the state runs their own datacenter, they don't have to worry about their "cloud" provider raising the rates every time the contract comes due.
The politican who came out against the datacenter says that he favors transparency. It seems to me that if he wants transparency, the state should run their own datacenter because then they will be able to completely audit all of the costs associated with it. If the IT services are outsourced into the cloud, it becomes more difficult to account for exactly how the dollars are spent. As you mentioned, a private entity needs to make a profit. A public entity simply needs to cover their costs, and in fact it is quite common for legislation to contain verbage that makes it illegal for a public entity to attempt to turn a profit by charging more for services than required to cover the costs involved.
From what I know of public sector workers (my girl friend works for the state of California), they are proud of their jobs and what they do. Of course there are always antecdotes about lazy DMV workers, or life time employees who get by doing the least possible as they look forward to their pension. However by and large, most public sector work environments have a strong sense of community pride that comes from knowing that they have a job for life (budget crisises aside). They know what their jobs are and they get them done. The large majority of the delay comes from the legislatively mandated proceedures that they have to follow... the reams of paperwork that they have to fill out to do the simplest thing. The jobs aren't the best paying jobs, but they are stable.
I can almost guarantee that sense of pride would shine through with the state of Washington IT services department. That would be "their" datacenter, and they would be providing services directly to the people of the state. There will be people working in that datacenter for 20 plus years. How long do you think people stick around a typical datacenter?
I'm with you, and my ancestors were with yours. They came from the Scotish low lands, and having done some research, it seems like their primary reason for living was reiving. http://www.rampantscotland.com/clans/blclanarmstrong.htm Damn the English!
I thought that you were allowed to obtain your credit REPORT for free once or twice a year. The credit SCORE is considered proprietary information and therefore subject to a fee. I think it's a load of crap. If there was justice in the world, ANY information that ANYBODY uses as part of a process to determine how they interact with and treat you, should be freely available to you.
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If you are so worried about it then have them sign a contract that stipulates they won't do what you're worried about them doing. I've done consulting for the SMB market. We did the majority of our support remotely. We were constantly busy taking care of clients and didn't have the time or the inclination to try to steal from our clients. Look at it this way, if your consultant leaks your super duper secrets to your competitor, and you go out of business, where does that leave them?
Also don't count on your employer being too keen on you siphoning their power at work.
Thanks! I was about to reply to my own post with the exact same link but you beat me to it.
Can you offer some links to back up your assertions? Where I work my employer caps our vacation time. After we've accumulated a certain amount of time we either have to use the excess before the end of the year, or lose it. I'd like to see something in writing that says the practice is illegal.
I always ask two questions. If the position is an already established position I will ask why it is vacant and why the previous employee left. You can learn a lot about the company you are going to work for based on the way that they answer that question. I also ask how senior management views IT's role in the organization. Specifically, are they simply a cost to be controlled, or does senior management view IT as a fundamental part of their business and are they willing to fund it accordingly? That question will let you know if you're going to be relegated to the wings of the organization and marginalized, or if you are going to have a seat at the table with everyone else when it comes time to make business decisions.
How can you say the bug is resolved when I dealt with last week? Monsters get stuck in terrain and randomly attack people. It rarely happens twice in the same place, and server reboots "fix" the issue until it happens some where else. Given the thousands of players on server, and who knows how many randomly spawned monsters (hundreds of thousands?), its not like such things are unexpected. With the way applications leak memory and with multiple processes all sharing memory space, those kinds of glitches are bound to happen.
The only time I ran into problems with the old games was when I was having hardware problems. I used to get a lot of lock ups with Dynamax games (Red Baron, Aces of the Pacific) and it turned out to be my RAM. The only game I ever had to have patched was Kings Quest IV from Sierra. I remember that each game pretty much required a custom boot disk with tweaked config.sys and autoexec.bat files. Once there was enough of the initial 640k cleared up and the appropriate files were all properly loaded into high mem, the games ran great.
Maybe my experience was colored by only buying games from big names at the time like Microprose, Sierra, SSI, Lucas Arts and the like. But even when I was into the warez scene and playing just about everything under the sun, I never ran into any problems with games crashing because of bad code that needed to be patched, or problems with serious game play disturbing bugs.
Lets talk about Zimbra. I've tried to bring up the following subjects on the Zimbra forum but can't get straight answers. What is disaster recovery on Zimbra like? Does it have single mailbox / single message restore functionality? For example, if dumb user Jane tells me that she deleted the super duper important email that she absolutely needs to have, do I need to restore the entire mail database, or can I go into the most recent backup of Jane's mailbox and restore the single email that she deleted? Is their Blackberry connector 100% complete and bug free yet?
How does Zimbra handle Public Folders? Last I heard there were some sort of "work arounds" where you had to create special folders, and hack together something that was kind of like public folders but not really.
How does Zimbra do in multi-site deployments where users are separated by relatively slow WAN links and need to maintain mail databases on separate servers, but share things like Public Folders, Global Address Lists and the like?
Last but not least, how does Zimbra do with granting shared permissions to mailboxes? For example, the secretary who needs to access portions of her boss' mailbox but not all of it. For example, she needs to be able to accept meeting requests for the boss and create / update contacts, but not see the main inbox.
A lot of things are backwards here in the People's Republik of Kalifornia, but at least our merchants aren't allowed to sell gift certificates that expire.
Are you talking about the same WoW beta that other people played? I avoided the beta but I had a lot of friends who played it. I'm a casual WoW player (down to about 8 hours a week) and I still come across unresolved bugs in it. The most common one involves getting attacked by monsters that you can't attack and they are invisible (odds are they're stuck in some piece of terrain nearby). The only way to deal with it is to flee. Another common bug involves coming across monsters that are evasion bugged. They are standing there, you can target and attack them, but every strike results in an Evaded message.
I'm not saying that the bugs are major bugs because they aren't. They aren't system crashing bugs, or even game wrecking bugs. On the other hand, they are persistent. I've been playing WoW since a few months before Burning Crusade came out, and the same two bugs that I mentioned above were present back then.
If anything, games have been getting more and more buggy as time goes on. I remember as a kid, I only ever once played a game that required me to contact the manufacture to obtain new disks with a more recent version of the game. Back in the day, you installed a game and it worked. The graphics sucked, the game play was horrible, but it worked. How many bugs were there in Wing Commander, or Mech Warrior, or the original Civilization, or Sim City? There weren't any because there wasn't any way to fix them if there were, so the publishers made sure that they were bug free.
You bring up something that leads to a point I've been trying to make to everyone who will listen (hello /. readers!). There are laws against just about all of the 'bad' things that happen 'because of drugs'. It's illegal to beat someone up, its illegal to rob someone, its illegal to kill someone, etc. There is a bullshit meme floating around that one of the primary reasons to have laws against 'drugs' is because drugs = 'bad things happening'. The pretense is 98% false. I'm not so naive to say that people don't do stupid things while on drugs from time to time. However there are large portions of the drug using population who seem to be able to handle their drugs just fine. If someone who is 'on drugs' does something stupid, lock them up and prosecute them for doing something stupid. Don't lock everyone else up because they might do something stupid.
In California, there are 'special circumstances' charges used by the courts. Often times the special circumstances have to do with gang members. For example, if a gang member kills someone else 'to further the interests of their gang', they get a harsher sentence than they would have if they weren't doing it to help their gang. There can be special circumstances related to drugs. Increase the sentence by 50% if the person tests positive for drugs. If a robbery charge carries a five year sentence, a robbery done by a drug user will be a seven and a half year sentence.
That's why they threaten you with jail and then give you probation. You end up paying the fines AND probation fees.
Once DT started up Black Hat, all of the real technical content left DefCon and never really came back. DefCon became the social scene for the hacker community. I went to the first five and have only been to a couple since then. I almost went this year but the flu kept me home. I wasn't planning on going for all of the elite hackerness of it. I was planning on going to see friends I hadn't seen in years.
There are some "smart" parking meters in downtown LA. I watched a bum mess them up with a paper clip. He just put a paper clip in the slot, wiggled it around and then the meter read "Out of Service".
From a technical standpoint it might not be that hard to fork and start over. The issue seems to be a personnel problem. There isn't anyone involved with CentOS who has up until now even taken the time to think about these things. What that tells me, and this is just conjecture on my part, is that there isn't anyone involved with CentOS who particularly cares enough to start over. As far as the community was concerned, some guy named Lance was on the ball and nobody thought it necessary to consider what to do in the event that Lance ever dropped the ball.
From everything I've been able to see, maintaining a Linux distribution is a labor of love. It takes a certain personality type to take on all of that pain and find pleasure in it. People with that personality type aren't very common. It's possible that there might be another person out there who can pick up the CentOS torch and run with it, but I doubt there are a bunch of them waiting in the wings. There are probably a few people who will give it a shot, but in a few months they will release what an epic undertaking it really is, and they too will bow out, albeit a little more gracefully.
The best hope that CentOS has is for someone in the CentOS community to realize that no one single person can take over. Hopefully that person will have the charisma and character to convince people to form a senior committee of sorts, and then the people on that committee will be open to having tasks delegated to them. Every cloud has a silver lining, and in this situation, the CentOS community might come out of this far better off than they were when they started. Unfortunately given the lack of strong leaders (not just in the Linux community, but in life in general), the odds are stacked in favor of CentOS limping along for a little while and then crumbling within the next 12 to 18 months.
Its a corporate culture problem. Given a close to 20% real unemployment rate in this country, there isn't any excuse for having a non/poorly trained fool handling sensitive customer information. I'm sure that there are plenty of unemployed people who could do the task in question without messing it up. The sad thing is that they'd probably jump at the opportunity to make the peanuts worth of pay that McAfee was probably paying the person who screwed it up.
When will McAfee just shrivel up and die? Their software sucks and it seems like this is at least the second or third seriously high profile mistake on their part. Does anyone really buy McAfee security products, or do they simply scrape by with the revenue from renewals on OEM pre-installs? I don't know a single IT person who looks at McAfee software when considering corporate security products.
I saw this trend really picking up steam while I was consulting. When I first started working for the firm I worked with in 2000, we did most of our work onsite. We were working in the SMB market, taking care of companies with 1-50 servers and 5-500 employees. By 2005-6, most of the work was done remotely via VPN. We did standard IT work and some development projects. When I left in 2007, unless the problem was hardware related, I never had to visit client sites. The clients appreciated it because we billed for drive time and mileage. I didn't like it so much because I lost that revenue, but on the other hand, I could also handle more clients at the same time so it some what balanced out.
It seems like certain IT tasks are better suited to remote/offsite work than others. Development projects seem like the best candidate. So long as you meet your deadlines, it doesn't really matter where or when you produce your code and applications. Of course you have to be around for meetings, or arrange teleconferences, video conferences, whatever. A lot of support can be done remotely, but when something goes physically wrong you have to be there to work with the hardware.
In past versions of the OS, pretty much every application's Help functionality was provided with IE. Did they standardize the API and make it so that other browsers will still properly render the help files?
The state, or anybody for that matter, doesn't have any legal right to audit a private corporation. The state can audit the contracts, and audit the bills and audit the expenses. They cannot audit the operations of the private contractor or in any other way determine just exactly what it costs that private contractor to provide the services that they provide to the state. On the other hand, if the state is running the data center they know exactly how much the servers cost, how much the software costs, what the electrical costs are, internet costs, personnel costs, etc. A private contractor is making money reselling services. If they are being charged X for bandwidth from their ISP, they are going to charge the state X+Y where Y is enough to cover their costs and turn a profit. On the other hand, the state simply has to pay for X if they are running their own operation.
It's pretty simple math really. On a timeline of X number of months, will the state spend more doing in themselves or would it be more cost effective to outsource it? The private datacenter has the benefit of having already invested in the infrastructure. The state has to pay for their own infrastructure. Paying for their own infrastructure is an initial fixed cost. Going with a private data center is a fluctuating cost that will always go up. I'm not a finance guy, but I work with them when doing IT planning. Often times we consider a server life time of five years, and do our ROI projections based on a five year time frame. When considering outsourcing, it's pretty simple math to add up all of the fixed costs, and then compare those with the cost of a five year contract with a service provider.
I'd imagine that given the size of a state information technology department, they are on close to equal footing with a data center when it comes to negotiating the cost of hardware and software purchases. Being the state, they probably get some really good rates on their utility bills too.
On a related tangent, there are optimal times of day for practicing qi gong and tai chi. I wonder if the amount of light emitted correlates to those times of the day.
Don't believe everything that you read in the papers. At the individual department level, the costs are controlled pretty stringently (at least in California). They can't spend money that they don't have a budget line item for. Any purchase orders submitted that exceed the amount of funds available are rejected.
This presents an interesting situation without an easy, clear cut answer. As a tax payer, I'm not sure what makes more sense. Do I want the government spending my money with a private company like Microsoft or Google, or do I want them spending my money developing their own infrastructure. On one hand, it could be argued that a large corporation that faces competitive pressures in the marketplace would be forced to keep costs down. On the other hand, by having a government run datacenter, costs can be controlled through the bugetary process. If the state runs their own datacenter, they don't have to worry about their "cloud" provider raising the rates every time the contract comes due.
The politican who came out against the datacenter says that he favors transparency. It seems to me that if he wants transparency, the state should run their own datacenter because then they will be able to completely audit all of the costs associated with it. If the IT services are outsourced into the cloud, it becomes more difficult to account for exactly how the dollars are spent. As you mentioned, a private entity needs to make a profit. A public entity simply needs to cover their costs, and in fact it is quite common for legislation to contain verbage that makes it illegal for a public entity to attempt to turn a profit by charging more for services than required to cover the costs involved.
From what I know of public sector workers (my girl friend works for the state of California), they are proud of their jobs and what they do. Of course there are always antecdotes about lazy DMV workers, or life time employees who get by doing the least possible as they look forward to their pension. However by and large, most public sector work environments have a strong sense of community pride that comes from knowing that they have a job for life (budget crisises aside). They know what their jobs are and they get them done. The large majority of the delay comes from the legislatively mandated proceedures that they have to follow... the reams of paperwork that they have to fill out to do the simplest thing. The jobs aren't the best paying jobs, but they are stable.
I can almost guarantee that sense of pride would shine through with the state of Washington IT services department. That would be "their" datacenter, and they would be providing services directly to the people of the state. There will be people working in that datacenter for 20 plus years. How long do you think people stick around a typical datacenter?
I'm with you, and my ancestors were with yours. They came from the Scotish low lands, and having done some research, it seems like their primary reason for living was reiving. http://www.rampantscotland.com/clans/blclanarmstrong.htm Damn the English!
I thought that you were allowed to obtain your credit REPORT for free once or twice a year. The credit SCORE is considered proprietary information and therefore subject to a fee. I think it's a load of crap. If there was justice in the world, ANY information that ANYBODY uses as part of a process to determine how they interact with and treat you, should be freely available to you.