Posts by Tom 13

Re: @BlueGreen

Reduction in Force (workforce). These days you usually see it as "right-sizing" the company or redundancies.

@BlueGreen

They had better have good, solid, technical reason to believe these guys they hired, else they are bullshittees who hired bullshitters to lay on the bullshit in thick, soothing layers. In which case, management failure.

I'm not usually in the room when those decisions are made. But I had a bird's eye view once. The guy making the decision wasn't a bullshitter. He was in fact, the sort of boss I'd like to work for if all bosses were like him. He wanted to find reasonable technical solutions to business issues, pay everyone a fair salary, and have everyone get along. His technical skills were rusty but he knew his stuff in the day and sometimes it still came in handy. They weren't shiny because he'd been placed in a position where he had to deal too much with people who didn't have his outlook on the business. We interviewed three people for a Help Desk Manager position. One of them bored me to tears and I couldn't remember a thing about him. Governmental functionary type but his accomplishments resume looked good. Another one was bright, energetic, and marked off a couple boxes on the quota sheet. In a different environment I would have hired her in a heartbeat. One problem with her stood out. We didn't have a lot of documented processes. What we had was learned by apprenticeship. And while management was trying to move us more toward an ITIL model it was a hard slog. For almost every question she referred checking the documented processes. She wouldn't have lasted two weeks in our environment. The third person was the one I liked. Sounded like he had come from an environment that started like ours, but made significant progress on documenting the processes and was leaving the company in a better place than he'd found it. He'd survive our environment and might even be able to fix some stuff. The Boss hired the first guy. His thinking was he'd be better able to handle some of the contentious office politics than the other two, and what he really needed was someone to offload that work to so he could focus on the other stuff that he really needed to. His rationale wasn't bad. And during the second interview his skill set sounded like it was going to be a decent fit to where we expected our company to be in a couple of years. I was RIFed about 6 months later (made sense from a purely business perspective, no need for the assistant to the manager when you only have half the people). Through the grapevine I heard that a couple months after that the guy broke his leg skiing, and 6 month after that found himself a new job. Yes, after the hire was made it turned out the guy was a really good BSer. But I don't think my boss was looking to be the bullshitee. And while I'm usually fair at smelling the BS, I didn't recognize how much of it he was laying on myself. It's not necessarily bad intentions, sometimes it is just a bad result.

suggests that this core piece of dosh tracking code was seriously underfunded. If so, who was to blame.

No one. When it was written it wasn't known that it was going to last as long as it did and that 15 years down the road it would be handling that much stuff. It was expected to last the length of a smallish five year contract and that it did quite well. But it got re-used because it existed, and more and more contracts were won and added to it. And until the switch to XP it all just kept on working. Keep in mind were talking about a company trying to make money managing government grants. The government regards that as more of a public service than something a private company should make money from, so margins are always razor thin. It's all well and good to argue that good management would have had a code review every time a contract was added and that all risks would be identified and factored into the cost of the contract. The reality is there are always unknown risks.

If there are no real-world examples of success, it is time to give up on the ideology no matter how right it feels.

I'm not saying I haven't gone off on the exact same rant you are when I've had a bad day. And God it feels good to rant like that. But if good management as described by you succeeded we'd see a hell of a lot more of it than we do.

Re: a TOTAL FAILURE OF PROCESS

If all you have is a college degree in business management (or the equivalent), I can see where you'd believe that. All it takes is a couple years of real world experience to disabuse you of that notion.

The big bosses have all agreed that because of the way the balance sheets work, the merger should go ahead. None of them have a clue about the incompatibility of the systems, but the guys they hired tell them there are technical solutions to those problems. And the deadlines are unrealistic with no one hired to write the documentation (I know I worked in exactly that field before I moved to break/fix deployment side). So you find the inelegant but workable hack that binds the systems together and maybe even have good intentions of coming back later to fix it properly. Except that the next big merger has come along and you're back in the same fix again next year.

Two jobs back we had a kludge of a system one of our divisions depended on. It was written in Delphi 2.0 using the Borland Database Engine 5.03 with some Crystal Reports 7.02 something or other I don't remember any more (not a programmer, just the poor schmuck installing the crap). The sexy language at the time was an early iteration of Visual Studio .Net. Now, we could get the BDE installed without too much trouble (well document on the install and two patches) and even the Delphi 2.0 wasn't a problem. Crystal Reports however turned out to be rather a problem AND rather a serious sticking point. The bit that I can't remember was a very, very, specific version of Crystal. From it you could select a subset of functionality that could be run from the network without actually requiring a Crystal install on the desktop. Apparently the next letter revision undid that bit of uniqueness. But the specific letter revision didn't run on the developers machines when we migrated from Windows 2000 to Windows XP. So we patched it. And 8 months later started getting reports about problems with inconsistencies from the user community. It turned out that whenever a developer updated a module with the new version of Crystal, it broke the inter-operability of that shared store on the network. About 30 employees were using the system, but it was tracking hundreds of millions of dollars in research money that was being distributed by the government to various medical research groups. Yeah, not pretty. They brought in a bunch of people who were going to port the data to a new program they were writing in a modular mode with modern software. About 6 months later I was part of a 50% RIF in the IT department. But the last I heard, the new program wasn't nearly as functional as the old one, and still had issues with inconsistencies in the reports.

I don't think anybody anywhere along the chain had bad intentions. But the end result was a serious problem at a midsized company (less than 500 employees, certainly nowhere near the Fortune 10000 in terms of market share). In a company with even longer lines of communications, I don't see things improving any.

Re: in a sort of rapid "job handover" process?

Business use to have a decent planned handover process. Of course there was nothing "rapid" about it, but it worked fairly reliably. The old hand took on an apprentice for a number of years and brought him up to speed. When the old hand retired, the apprentice became the old hand and at some point sought out a new apprentice.

Re: it takes more than 6 month to train a skilled sysadmin

While true, it doesn't mitigate the primary premise: if managers had been valuing the skill they now find to be in short supply, people would have been training for the mainframes.

Here's the thing. I was in high school when the Sinclair and TRS-80s were being released. A friend of my mother's worked at IBM and passed along manuals for some of their stuff to me. Mainframes and minis. At the time people were predicting the demise of mainframes. It still hasn't happened. I don't work on the big iron myself, my area of specialization is on the micros. But I don't foresee the death of mainframes even after 10 years. There are some things they just do better than anything else out there. And the people who are migrating from "old iron" to "modern platforms" will discover that to their dismay.

Re: Well duck me!

That post needs a Kermit the Frog icon.

Re: @ Mad Mike

Your reading comprehension is badly flawed. There is nowhere in the US that you can shoot someone because you feel like it. In Florida you are allowed to stand your ground as opposed to being required to flee when threatened. Which was pretty much the case everywhere back when we had a more polite society.

Re: A: A summary execution.

Seems a bit wasteful. Send them to the organ bank. That way society at least gets some benefit from them.

Either that or summary execution is being fed to the lions in front of a live studio audience.

@ DavCrav

Back in WWII there were problems at shipyards with subs going out to trials and never coming back even though they hadn't been through enemy territory. I think they managed to retrieve one such sub and found the root cause was bad welds. So the military instituted a lottery system. Each welder who worked on a sub had his name put in a hat. One name was drawn from the hat and that person went to see on the maiden voyage of the sub. They very, very, very rarely had issues with welds after the welders lottery was implemented.

In your particular example, I don't see any good reason to limit to one individual. Each of them played a part in it and shares in culpability. Let the chips fall where they may. Or heads as the case may be.

Re: Separation

There are still reasons to throttle. If Netflix is using too much of your bandwidth relative to Pandora, throttling Netflix may be more profitable than building out your network. Especially if you can spread enough FUD that users don't know the provider is the cause of the problem.

In the end, the only thing that keeps them honest is the ability of the consumer to switch to a new service.

Re: Why not call differentiated service a wiretap

Because under the law as written they aren't carriers they are service providers. This is the crux of the Appeals Court decision. And it is also the part which requires Congress to rewrite the law. It cannot legally be done by Executive order or FCC power grab.

@ Matt_Lohr

Good points as far as they go. There's just one problem.

Given the length of the prior government intervention, the incumbents have built up considerable leverage which they probably can use to continue to distort what should have been the natural market. We may need to break up the current oligopoly into smaller groups. Say 10 years during which they cannot merge with any of the smaller groups created by a court overseen breakup. I'd probably count a new group merging with one of the broken up groups as the broken up group for purposes of further mergers within the 10 year period.

Re: The Sony P910 had an external keyboard

BB aren't suing because they attached an external keyboard. They're suing because the external keyboard looks an awful lot like their keypad.

Seacrest claims to have spent millions developing their keypad. BB most likely did too. Sometimes the exact angle for part of a device is the key to how it works. If the sizes of each of the keys and the angles on all of them are the same BB might have a legitimate case if they spent millions to determine that was the best engineering solution. If I were sitting on a jury hearing the case and BB pointed out the similarity of the placement of symbols on the keypad, I would certainly consider that while weighing the evidence. I've used both android and apple tablet type devices and their keyboards are quite different. Quite honestly, apples' is crap as far as I'm concerned, but some people like it.

Re: FAST flashes its knickers

I'm not sure I'd even go that far. Given his prior position this looks like M$ shafting another consumer group that advanced a consumer policy they didn't like. Holding up the other producers and saying it is for them could simply be part of their FUD campaign.

Re: either they knew or didn't.

Almost, but not quite that simple. WHEN they knew is also important.

If they found out after the sale was completed that's one set of circumstances. I'll make a small allowance for them not announcing it as soon as someone reported it to them. At that point it is still an allegation, and there's a fiduciary responsibility to the stockholders to avoid spooking the market without good justification. Not sure that is a full year's allowance, but I expect they need some time to determine what the actual facts are.

If they had any knowledge, even a hint, BEFORE the sale was completed, they are in a world of hurt from investor lawsuits.

Re: Caveat emptor

Not oversimplified, but you did leave out one possibility in the universe of all possibilities:

4) HP knew about the improprieties BEFORE the purchase.

So far nobody is suggesting that. It would be quite a game changer if it enters the equation.

Re: Resulting in big company having lost all the expertise they acquired.

If Autonomy were improperly recording revenues before they were purchased by HP, seems to me that's not the sort of expertise you want in your company in the first place.

Re: 1 billion Indians want visas for the USA

Not what the article says. It says the rejection rate is up because of the pending immigration legislation. Which it probably is. I don't want it passed because it will make our sieve even more of a joke than the UK immigration sieve. Ironically, we both have the same problem: neither of our countries are likely to let someone from the other immigrate, but they are happy to let in just about anyone from anywhere else.

Re: At least somewhere has entry criteria.

Yes, but only while the immigration bill is temporarily on hold. Once it passes everything will go back to SNAFU.

Re: 50% rejected? In the name of sanity it should be 100%.

I don't have a problem with hiring from outside the country if there really isn't someone inside the country who has the qualifications to perform the work. Problem is, as Tata seems to be admitting, this has nothing to do with there not being anyone here who is available and can do the work. I think the same thing should apply to every country: hire from your own ranks first, then seek additional help from elsewhere when you run out of qualified people.

Re: 50% Rejection Not Bad

Yeah, but that's only 50% on India Indians. For Mexicans it is -50% (that it, we import 50% more than we're legally permitted).

Re: duty cycle and usage hasn't really been taken into consideration.

I think that may be a moot point in real world context.

Yes, Enterprise drives might have a longer life in the duty cycled described. But does that matter if for the most part drives aren't used in what we think of as a classical HPC environment? If 90% of real world applications look more like Backblaze than a classic HPC does the duty cycle actually matter to the purchaser of the hard drives?

And I don't really accept the argument about the small sample size. An additional 2 spindles not failing sounds small, but when you're supposed to be talking six sigmas or better on your engineering quality, that's a huge number. Put in another context, in order to get to the 4.2 failure rate given 17 hard drives failed, you'd need to add another 103 drives to the mix before you'd expect to achieve an experimental 4.2 failure rate if the true failure rate is 4.2. (4.2463). That is, I'm assuming the true rate is 4.2, and we only see the true rate of failure over the next 103 drives without any variation.

Re: Interest

I wouldn't force them to spend an hour a week for each year of school on coding. But I think it would be worth spending an hour a week on a few key conceptual areas once students have the prerequisites for the material.

* How an early processor handled its computations.

* Simple cash register program. Total less than ten items, make change from cash tendered. Do both intereactive and data sets.

* Address Book (for string handling purposes)

* Blackjack game

* Same day birthday bet simulation (How many people do you need before there's more than a 50% chance two of them were born on the same day of the year)

Similar work should been done for other non-standard but technical areas of study.

The offer additional optional classes.

Re: Not the first time

Actually these days you'll find a fair number of PhD chemists working for cosmetics manufacturers, especially in the R&D departments. Maybe because of precisely those past issues.

Not a big user of them myself, but at least I know a smidgen about the industry.

Re: customers will get access to updates

Fiddlesticks!

I use to work in a screwdriver shop (going on 15 years back now). Most of our clients were small businesses with no tech knowledge whatsoever. They were willing to pay $75/hr on the occasion when they needed it to have someone come out and apply the appropriate updates. HP were charging at least twice that. We'd go out, check the parts, the serial numbers, and the download sites, then download the appropriate bits and apply them. HP are trying to outlaw the $75/hr guy doing the work.

Re: Some really strange things have occurred.

Don't Panic!

I believe we have established that those were all the work of a certain Dent, Arthur Dent.

Re: Aren't these couple of loons...

http://baltimore.cbslocal.com/2014/02/14/storm-was-mid-atlantic-regions-9th-biggest/

http://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2014/02/13/snow-totals-piling-up-fast/

Oh noes! An ice age is coming! An ice age is coming!