On a daily basis I browse about a half-dozen different sources for news ranging on topics from politics to science and technology and among those sites two in particular provide forums for the outlet of the readers to voice there opinions. The posts range from flames and trolling to down right solid intelectual arguments.
Back Sometime earlier this year I decided to start collecting the gems of these posts and stashing them away in a little text file. Since I’ve started this I can think of three distinct occassions where I have actually been able to use some of the snippets I cut and pasted from Slashdot and Digg.(After checking sources and accuracy of course)
Being as both of the sites are highly technology related most of the comments center around IT, but I thought I’d share them anyway. Most of the notes are in the context of a thread, meaning a post and a response. The majority of which the topics in discussion can easily be discerned, but if not I’ll include comments in italics.
Some time in February:
Them:
“The IT department at my company (approximately some 500 people) is showing signs of incompetence, and has been ignoring knowledgeable user input for about a year. Additionally, they haven’t been able to sell needed changes to senior management. Unacceptable server down time, maxed network storage, and no backups systems have hit the bottom line, and those on top are starting to notice. We users are staging a revolt to make IT more responsive to users by creating a group from the company divisions and IT to discuss needs and solutions.”
Us:
“The non-IT employees at my company (approximately some 5,000,000,000 people) are showing signs of incompetence, and have been ignoring knowledgeable technology input for about a year. Additionally, they haven’t been able to accept needed changes to senior management. Unacceptable computer usage, maxed bandwidth usage, and no common sense have hit the bottom line, and those on top are starting to notice. We geeks are staging a revolt to make users more responsable to IT by creating a group from the company divisions to discuss needs and solutions. What would you put in our meeting room to beat as many people as possible?”
Sometime in early March:
=== If there is work to be done, then I’d like to dial up the local expert/employee and know that the problem will be fixed *quickly* and efficiently. ===<
Only the fire department and the Marine Corps keep enough people on standby to handle any problem presented to them immediately (and even the Marines are a bit tied up at the moment). Every other entity queues, prioritizes, and triages. Your IT department *could* maintain enough knowledgable experts to answer your difficult questions in depth whenever you picked up the phone – I once worked with one that did. That department lasted a little less than 2 years; once senior management figured out how much it was costing they terminated it and replaced it with an outsourcer at 1/3 the cost. 1/5 the level of service, but that was not senior management’s concern (and perhaps rightly so).
My recommendation: stop demanding Five 9′s of service and stop expecting services to never reboot or need maintenance if you aren’t going to fund it. Stop dicking around at being a business and spend money to make money. Otherwise, save everyone time and bend over to your competition now. You can recommend all the fantastic new upgrades and services, but if your company doesn’t recognize the value of improved infrastructure services, and an educated staff, you don’t deserve to stay in business and sooner or later Darwin will rear his ugly
Many supposed IT problems should actually be solved by HR with a good talking to about abuse of company resources and how that might limit your career.
Calling IT when you forget your password for the 5th time that month or with some dumb question because you are too lazy to crack open a manual is no better than stealing office supplies or equipment. It’s all just stealing resources.
20% of the users create 80% of the work for IT.
3/27/06
I’d call the guy a “dumbass”, but he’s not necessarily stupid, just ignorant and bullheaded. Of course, ignorant and bullheaded do a very good impersonation of stupid when combined.
5/22/06
Now it gets hairy: If I grant for a moment that there’s no such thing as absolute computer security, then all these unsecured windows boxes out there are just the low-hanging fruit. Viruses and worms are only as smart as they need to be to pick those. This is fine with me as it means I merely have to have my fruit hanging higher than everybody else’s. My house doesn’t have to be absolutely burglar-proof — just harder to break into than my neighbors. I’ll never be perfectly termite-safe, but as long as I’m more termite-safe than my neighbors, they will attract all the termites. You get the picture.
If geeks succeede in training the masses in making their machines “more secure” it only means that the malware will become “more clever” and thus that my machine will be less secure than it is now. This is not in my interest. It is not in the interest of anybody who knows a bit of computers that those who don’t become computer-savvy. If I were working at MS, I wouldn’t have any incentive to make the sheeple’s computers “more secure”: it wouldn’t make me any additional money and it would make my own computer relatively less secure. So why would I?
6/20/06
Dont they have an “Complete Moron” clause somewhere that says idiots cant sue for being terminally stupid.
6/22/06
All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind – Aristotle
6/30/06
Right after our servers crashed I happend across this little snippet and fell out of my chair laughing.
To the beetles “yesterday”
Yesterday,
All those backups seemed a waste of pay.
Now my database has gone away.
Oh I believe in yesterday.
Suddenly,
There’s not half the files there used to be,
And there’s a milestone hanging over me
The system crashed so suddenly.
I pushed something wrong
What it was I could not say.
Now all my data’s gone and I long for yesterday-ay-ay-ay.
Yesterday,
Need for backup seemed so far away.
Seemed my data were all here to stay,
Now I believe in yesterday.
7/14/06
Schneier’s Law: “any person can invent a security
system so clever that she or he can’t think of how to break it.”
This means that the only experimental methodology for discovering
if you’ve made mistakes in your cipher is to tell all the smart
people you can about it and ask them to think of ways to break
it. Without this critical step, you’ll eventually end up living
in a fool’s paradise
7/17/06
“It’s a paradox of abundance,’ said Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of culture and communication at New York University. If people aren’t pressured to see a movie in a specific time frame, he said, viewers tend to put it lower on their priority list. ‘When you have every choice in front of you, you have less urgency about any particular choice.’”
-Why Netflix makes money