You mentioned that you have to have their managed modem. Time Warner has a similar requirement to have a modem that they support. In my case, I was able to buy a basic Motorola DOCCIS 3.0 modem at Target that was on Time Warner's compatibility list. It was less than $100.
Not only does the modem work better, I no longer pay the monthly rental fee.
i7-960 on an Asus board 12GB RAM SSD primary (Evo840) RAID1 7200 SATA secondaries (WD w 64MB cache) GFX660s in SLI
It handled games just fine until Witcher 3. In that game the CPU lag is noticeable to the point where it impacts game play.
I doubt that I will upgrade it any time soon with a baby and new house on the way.
If I need real computing power, I am working on something that I am getting paid for and they are providing the hardware. I am too lame to be doing anything cool in my spare time like security research.
It is okay to say, "I do not know." or "I need to do some research and get back to you."
If you have ANY hesitation about making a change to a production system, DO NOT MAKE IT. We all have shot ourselves in the foot at one time or another. Learn from our mistakes. Do not be that guy (or girl).
Until you get good at estimating how long it takes to complete a task or project, double your estimates when someone asks you how long it will take you. It is better to over estimate and get it done sooner, than to under estimate and have people waiting on you. (BTW - Any non-trivial task will ALWAYS take longer than you think it will.)
Before making any changes, make sure that you have a good backup and that you have tested your ability to restore it. Yes, it will make things take longer but it is better to have a fallback position. This is doubly true in production. NEVER MAKE PRODUCTION CHANGES WITHOUT A BACKUP.
Be humble. The days of being a jack of all trades IT practitioner are dead and gone. There are too many things to know and not enough time to learn them all. By and large, IT people can be cooperative and supportive.... if you are humble. If you act like you know everything and fail to ask for help, you will find everyone lining up to watch you fail and snickering at you when you do. Check your ego at the door, learn from others and when you have the opportunity to, help others out when they ask for it. Do not be that dick who tells everyone to RTFM. Having said that, if someone asks the same question over and over again... feel free to tell them to RTFM. Nothing is worse than a freeloader. We all have jobs to do and while helping new people out is part of the job, doing their job for them is not.
They suffer from a condition called "being human". It causes occasional failures in an otherwise operational controller-human, some very small percentage of the time. Even the highest-quality controller-humans have a non-zero failure rate.
I am certain that every logical person understands and accepts the risk as you explained it.
The fallacy in the argument is that the presence of a camera is going to increase the incidences of failures.
At the core, if being held accountable makes someone perform poorly, they are in the wrong profession and should find another way to earn a living. There are plenty of jobs out there that do not involve a person's actions (or lack of actions) having the potential to detrimentally affect the lives of others.
As an example from the work place, an effective technique for encouraging someone to complete their tasks on time is to setup a regular meeting with them and their peers. Often times I have found that people who seem to always have excuses for why they need just a little bit more time to get something done, all of a sudden, as if by magic, become able to get things done on time if the only alternative is for them to admit to their peers, again, for the umpteenth time, that no... they still aren't done.
While a weekly meeting is not a direct parallel to always on video monitoring, the underlying purpose of providing accountability is the same.
While I have not worked on the rail roads, I do know someone who works for BNSF and he assures me that those engineers have an SOP for everything. Amtrak might not be quite as organized, but they probably have similar training materials. In situations like that, either the engineer is doing things by the book or they are not.
If the engineers' concentration is so fragile that they are going to be distracted by a camera, they are obviously not the right people to be operating complex machinery.
Maybe we should just replace them with automation and run the trains remotely. They could keep one engineer per train to engage the manual override in the event that someone hacks the control infrastructure and tries to do Bad Things(tm) to the trains.
Wanting to crack copy protection and write trainers is what led to me learn x86 assesmbly, specifically 80386 assembly.
That understanding of assembly gave me a solid foundation for the rest of my career. Once you understand interupts and memory registers, you can grasp the basics of everything from applications, to networking to storage systems. Fundamentally they are all doing the same thing.... reading something from one memory register, modifying it with the contents of another memory register, and pushing the results to somewhere else.
The game is setup for a very gradual progression if you just want to quest and explore the world. My wife plays the game just for questing, she hates raiding. The allure of the game for her is the expansive world and having a place to escape to for an hour or two. She never got into the playing for hours at a time and raiding all weekend style of game play. To me, it seems like a waste of time to level characters and never raid, but it keeps her entertained. Different strokes for different folks and all that.
It seems like you are branching off onto tangents, or trying to solve different problems.
The point I am making is that verifying voter eligibility, recording votes and tallying votes can be done with a system like the financial system. I use the financial system as an example because it has physical locations (ATMs) that are analogous to a voting booth, and they have virtual locations (bank web sites) that are analogous with online voting. The plumbing is already there, and people trust it.
If a vote needs to be truly verified, it cannot be anonymous. If the validity of the vote is questioned, at some point, the person who cast the ballot has to stand up and affirm their choice. If they are not willing to do that, then the problem cannot be solved. The same is true with the current system. As long as people are unwilling to be held accountable for their choice of government, they will continue to get the government that cowards deserve.
I have no problem telling people how I voted and why I voted that way. One of the corner stones of democracy is open dialogue. What we have in America are a bunch of special interest groups using the government as a proxy to implement their need to control others. (See: gay marriage, abortion, the drug war and a whole laundry list of other wedge issues that all come down to one group of people trying to make it difficult for another group of people to do what they want to do.)
With regards to the subject of verifying online votes, the challenge is not just a challenge with online voting. The challenge is inherent in any anonymous system. A person cannot be both anonymous and also verifiable.
Except there is a trail. Voters have to register. They have to present valid ID at the polling booth.
While the actual votes are 'secret' there is no secrecy around who is voting.
For the online system to work, all it has to do is confirm that the total number of votes tallied for any issue are equal to or less than the total number of voters.
The actual content of the vote (yes or no, for or against) does not need to be associated with a voter.
People already trust the financial system. Copy it.
Instead of creating a 'bank account', people would create a 'voter registration'.
Instead of processing debits and withdrawls, the system would process votes.
The solution is elegant because it is simple. By modeling it after the banking system, you inherit the implicit trust in that system. Anyone who challenges the system, has to challenge the global financial system. Who is going to stand up and say, "You can't trust your bank to accurately tally something as simple as vote!" ??? Doing so would open up a whole pandora's box of problems that nobody wants to deal with. "If they can't even tally a vote, can they really accurately track my account balance?" being among the most obvious.
No we will not. ITT is not an isolated example. The amount of bad debt in the student loan market is almost as bad as the bad debt from the housing market crash.
Not surprisingly, Zero Hedge was out ahead of the pack on this topic. (Dated 2012)
Mod this up. THIS right here is the story. After the housing market collapsed, the only way to keep cheap credit flowing into the hands of people was through student loans.
ITT-Tech is likely just the first of what will be at least a few more enforcement actions to come.
It is not for everyone, but when I get tired of doing IT I am going to teach tai chi. I have been training for almost 15 years now and while I am not a master, I have some proficiency with it. Tai chi is good for health and the philosophy behind it is one of the better ways to live a life.
I am not too worried about my job leaving any time soon. Given the average competence of my co-workers and the lack of competence that I have seen from H1Bs, I know that my position is going to be stable for a while. The reality is that there are not that many people who understand IT environments from top to bottom (technically) and who can also work with the business side to transform their needs into working systems that are delivered and managed on budget.
My organization recently migrated to Office365, including Exchange / Outlook 365.
I was impressed with Outlook 365 OWA (outlook.office365.com). My initial thought was that having the entire infrastructure presented through a single portal is a recipe for disaster. Yet as soon as I type in the @company.com portion of my email address, it re-directs to our own authentication infrastructure (Ping in our case). None the less, I am sure that there are people working night and day trying to figure out how to MitM outlook.office365.com
Office 365 OWA and Outlook 2013 are nearly identical in terms of UI layout and functionality. For the average user, I think that they could do without the desktop client and most likely, not notice much if any loss of functionality.
Clutter is working well. I turned it on almost two weeks ago. So far it has done a great job of filtering out of all of the junk emails from the sales drones, while at the same time letting the important emails through. I have not missed any emails that I need to see.
What you described here fits the typical definition of a project manager.
So they had one person, a "manager", keep an eye on people, keep an eye on projects, allocate resources, and basically manage the group
The difference between a project manager and a manager is that a manager has direct reports and is responsible for dealing with all of the human resource issues (hiring, firing, training, reviews, etc.)
In the situation that you described, who took care of those tasks? The boss? The manager?
We call those people Project Managers. Someone has to keep the timelines, project plans, meeting minutes, and other assorted paper work together. You do not want to waste the time of the people actually doing the work by forcing them to make sure that their co-workers are on task.
In the case of my organization, they are trying to transition to recurring revenue streams by offering technology solutions with predictable, monthly fees. They are hoping to balance out the cyclical and sporadic revenue cycles inherent in traditional consulting engagements. The organizational structure has not yet adjusted to address the realities of employing a skilled technical workforce.
...or would have moved to another job elsewhere that offered an equivalent to a promotion
This is what I see happening in the industry that I am. We compete with the larger consulting firms (KPMG, Deloitte, etc.) and more often than not, people are changing jobs every 2-4 years. For people who have been in the industry long enough, they often times end up going back to a firm that they might have worked at previously.
I do not really understand it because it is counter to my own career progression during which I have spent at least 5 years with each employer and received steady promotions and increased responsibilities. The only thing that I can figure is that those big firms are always hiring the "best and the brightest", overachieving, Type-A personalities. If a person is not getting promoted, they have to constant deal with an influx of new, eager to be overworked, dreamy eyed college grads who will do the same work, for less pay.
Or another way of looking at it is that managers should be so highly skilled that they can do the work of everyone on their team. Those managers should then train their people so that one day, those people can replace the manager.
I know it sounds ideal, but this is exactly what I am doing with my team in my organization. It is working so well that every time I have an open position, I have people on other teams scrambling to apply to the position.
There is a tangential corollary here. Often times employees are expected to do a job / handle the responsibilities of a position for a year or more before they officially given the title and pay that goes along with it. In that way, organizations protect themselves by trying out an employee in a position before promoting them.
While the above is okay, it potentially puts the employee in a disadvantageous position. Unless they are willing to negotiate or leave for another job, they run the risk of getting stuck doing work far above their pay grade without reaping any of the benefits.
Slashdot Mirror
You mentioned that you have to have their managed modem. Time Warner has a similar requirement to have a modem that they support. In my case, I was able to buy a basic Motorola DOCCIS 3.0 modem at Target that was on Time Warner's compatibility list. It was less than $100.
Not only does the modem work better, I no longer pay the monthly rental fee.
Exactly.
I am running a
i7-960 on an Asus board
12GB RAM
SSD primary (Evo840)
RAID1 7200 SATA secondaries (WD w 64MB cache)
GFX660s in SLI
It handled games just fine until Witcher 3. In that game the CPU lag is noticeable to the point where it impacts game play.
I doubt that I will upgrade it any time soon with a baby and new house on the way.
If I need real computing power, I am working on something that I am getting paid for and they are providing the hardware. I am too lame to be doing anything cool in my spare time like security research.
It is okay to say, "I do not know." or "I need to do some research and get back to you."
If you have ANY hesitation about making a change to a production system, DO NOT MAKE IT. We all have shot ourselves in the foot at one time or another. Learn from our mistakes. Do not be that guy (or girl).
Until you get good at estimating how long it takes to complete a task or project, double your estimates when someone asks you how long it will take you. It is better to over estimate and get it done sooner, than to under estimate and have people waiting on you. (BTW - Any non-trivial task will ALWAYS take longer than you think it will.)
Before making any changes, make sure that you have a good backup and that you have tested your ability to restore it. Yes, it will make things take longer but it is better to have a fallback position. This is doubly true in production. NEVER MAKE PRODUCTION CHANGES WITHOUT A BACKUP.
Be humble. The days of being a jack of all trades IT practitioner are dead and gone. There are too many things to know and not enough time to learn them all. By and large, IT people can be cooperative and supportive.... if you are humble. If you act like you know everything and fail to ask for help, you will find everyone lining up to watch you fail and snickering at you when you do. Check your ego at the door, learn from others and when you have the opportunity to, help others out when they ask for it. Do not be that dick who tells everyone to RTFM. Having said that, if someone asks the same question over and over again... feel free to tell them to RTFM. Nothing is worse than a freeloader. We all have jobs to do and while helping new people out is part of the job, doing their job for them is not.
Well played sir.
They suffer from a condition called "being human". It causes occasional failures in an otherwise operational controller-human, some very small percentage of the time. Even the highest-quality controller-humans have a non-zero failure rate.
I am certain that every logical person understands and accepts the risk as you explained it.
The fallacy in the argument is that the presence of a camera is going to increase the incidences of failures.
At the core, if being held accountable makes someone perform poorly, they are in the wrong profession and should find another way to earn a living. There are plenty of jobs out there that do not involve a person's actions (or lack of actions) having the potential to detrimentally affect the lives of others.
As an example from the work place, an effective technique for encouraging someone to complete their tasks on time is to setup a regular meeting with them and their peers. Often times I have found that people who seem to always have excuses for why they need just a little bit more time to get something done, all of a sudden, as if by magic, become able to get things done on time if the only alternative is for them to admit to their peers, again, for the umpteenth time, that no... they still aren't done.
While a weekly meeting is not a direct parallel to always on video monitoring, the underlying purpose of providing accountability is the same.
While I have not worked on the rail roads, I do know someone who works for BNSF and he assures me that those engineers have an SOP for everything. Amtrak might not be quite as organized, but they probably have similar training materials. In situations like that, either the engineer is doing things by the book or they are not.
If the engineers' concentration is so fragile that they are going to be distracted by a camera, they are obviously not the right people to be operating complex machinery.
Maybe we should just replace them with automation and run the trains remotely. They could keep one engineer per train to engage the manual override in the event that someone hacks the control infrastructure and tries to do Bad Things(tm) to the trains.
Wanting to crack copy protection and write trainers is what led to me learn x86 assesmbly, specifically 80386 assembly.
That understanding of assembly gave me a solid foundation for the rest of my career. Once you understand interupts and memory registers, you can grasp the basics of everything from applications, to networking to storage systems. Fundamentally they are all doing the same thing.... reading something from one memory register, modifying it with the contents of another memory register, and pushing the results to somewhere else.
The game is setup for a very gradual progression if you just want to quest and explore the world. My wife plays the game just for questing, she hates raiding. The allure of the game for her is the expansive world and having a place to escape to for an hour or two. She never got into the playing for hours at a time and raiding all weekend style of game play. To me, it seems like a waste of time to level characters and never raid, but it keeps her entertained. Different strokes for different folks and all that.
What is your solution for preserving anonymity but verifying the vote?
You just re-iterated what I said.
It seems like you are branching off onto tangents, or trying to solve different problems.
The point I am making is that verifying voter eligibility, recording votes and tallying votes can be done with a system like the financial system. I use the financial system as an example because it has physical locations (ATMs) that are analogous to a voting booth, and they have virtual locations (bank web sites) that are analogous with online voting. The plumbing is already there, and people trust it.
If a vote needs to be truly verified, it cannot be anonymous. If the validity of the vote is questioned, at some point, the person who cast the ballot has to stand up and affirm their choice. If they are not willing to do that, then the problem cannot be solved. The same is true with the current system. As long as people are unwilling to be held accountable for their choice of government, they will continue to get the government that cowards deserve.
I have no problem telling people how I voted and why I voted that way. One of the corner stones of democracy is open dialogue. What we have in America are a bunch of special interest groups using the government as a proxy to implement their need to control others. (See: gay marriage, abortion, the drug war and a whole laundry list of other wedge issues that all come down to one group of people trying to make it difficult for another group of people to do what they want to do.)
With regards to the subject of verifying online votes, the challenge is not just a challenge with online voting. The challenge is inherent in any anonymous system. A person cannot be both anonymous and also verifiable.
Except there is a trail. Voters have to register. They have to present valid ID at the polling booth.
While the actual votes are 'secret' there is no secrecy around who is voting.
For the online system to work, all it has to do is confirm that the total number of votes tallied for any issue are equal to or less than the total number of voters.
The actual content of the vote (yes or no, for or against) does not need to be associated with a voter.
This problem has already been solved.
People already trust the financial system. Copy it.
Instead of creating a 'bank account', people would create a 'voter registration'.
Instead of processing debits and withdrawls, the system would process votes.
The solution is elegant because it is simple. By modeling it after the banking system, you inherit the implicit trust in that system. Anyone who challenges the system, has to challenge the global financial system. Who is going to stand up and say, "You can't trust your bank to accurately tally something as simple as vote!" ??? Doing so would open up a whole pandora's box of problems that nobody wants to deal with. "If they can't even tally a vote, can they really accurately track my account balance?" being among the most obvious.
Next we'll hear how ITT was an isolated example.
No we will not. ITT is not an isolated example. The amount of bad debt in the student loan market is almost as bad as the bad debt from the housing market crash.
Not surprisingly, Zero Hedge was out ahead of the pack on this topic. (Dated 2012)
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/...
Mod this up. THIS right here is the story. After the housing market collapsed, the only way to keep cheap credit flowing into the hands of people was through student loans.
ITT-Tech is likely just the first of what will be at least a few more enforcement actions to come.
It is not for everyone, but when I get tired of doing IT I am going to teach tai chi. I have been training for almost 15 years now and while I am not a master, I have some proficiency with it. Tai chi is good for health and the philosophy behind it is one of the better ways to live a life.
I am not too worried about my job leaving any time soon. Given the average competence of my co-workers and the lack of competence that I have seen from H1Bs, I know that my position is going to be stable for a while. The reality is that there are not that many people who understand IT environments from top to bottom (technically) and who can also work with the business side to transform their needs into working systems that are delivered and managed on budget.
Defcon 2, Sahara Hotel. 1 of 5.
My organization recently migrated to Office365, including Exchange / Outlook 365.
I was impressed with Outlook 365 OWA (outlook.office365.com). My initial thought was that having the entire infrastructure presented through a single portal is a recipe for disaster. Yet as soon as I type in the @company.com portion of my email address, it re-directs to our own authentication infrastructure (Ping in our case). None the less, I am sure that there are people working night and day trying to figure out how to MitM outlook.office365.com
Office 365 OWA and Outlook 2013 are nearly identical in terms of UI layout and functionality. For the average user, I think that they could do without the desktop client and most likely, not notice much if any loss of functionality.
Clutter is working well. I turned it on almost two weeks ago. So far it has done a great job of filtering out of all of the junk emails from the sales drones, while at the same time letting the important emails through. I have not missed any emails that I need to see.
+1 to this. Having to switch into edit mode to work on every single document that someone sends me is annoying.
First results from a good search for "project manager job description"
http://hrcouncil.ca/hr-toolkit...
What you described here fits the typical definition of a project manager.
So they had one person, a "manager", keep an eye on people, keep an eye on projects, allocate resources, and basically manage the group
The difference between a project manager and a manager is that a manager has direct reports and is responsible for dealing with all of the human resource issues (hiring, firing, training, reviews, etc.)
In the situation that you described, who took care of those tasks? The boss? The manager?
We call those people Project Managers. Someone has to keep the timelines, project plans, meeting minutes, and other assorted paper work together. You do not want to waste the time of the people actually doing the work by forcing them to make sure that their co-workers are on task.
In the case of my organization, they are trying to transition to recurring revenue streams by offering technology solutions with predictable, monthly fees. They are hoping to balance out the cyclical and sporadic revenue cycles inherent in traditional consulting engagements. The organizational structure has not yet adjusted to address the realities of employing a skilled technical workforce.
...or would have moved to another job elsewhere that offered an equivalent to a promotion
This is what I see happening in the industry that I am. We compete with the larger consulting firms (KPMG, Deloitte, etc.) and more often than not, people are changing jobs every 2-4 years. For people who have been in the industry long enough, they often times end up going back to a firm that they might have worked at previously.
I do not really understand it because it is counter to my own career progression during which I have spent at least 5 years with each employer and received steady promotions and increased responsibilities. The only thing that I can figure is that those big firms are always hiring the "best and the brightest", overachieving, Type-A personalities. If a person is not getting promoted, they have to constant deal with an influx of new, eager to be overworked, dreamy eyed college grads who will do the same work, for less pay.
Or another way of looking at it is that managers should be so highly skilled that they can do the work of everyone on their team. Those managers should then train their people so that one day, those people can replace the manager.
I know it sounds ideal, but this is exactly what I am doing with my team in my organization. It is working so well that every time I have an open position, I have people on other teams scrambling to apply to the position.
There is a tangential corollary here. Often times employees are expected to do a job / handle the responsibilities of a position for a year or more before they officially given the title and pay that goes along with it. In that way, organizations protect themselves by trying out an employee in a position before promoting them.
While the above is okay, it potentially puts the employee in a disadvantageous position. Unless they are willing to negotiate or leave for another job, they run the risk of getting stuck doing work far above their pay grade without reaping any of the benefits.