Posts by TRT 9611 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Sep 2009
Exactly. As was my point that for research computing, the staff operate on fixed contracts tied into the funding stream. If staff involved in research IT are centralised, then the organisational core takes on responsibility for them, swells, and then leaks as research projects (and funding) end but staff remain and are redeployed.
A down vote without any argument or reason why someone disagrees with what I said. I'm just trying to get to grips with what's going on in UCSF. Is this the start of something? Are there lessons to be learned? Is this the way forwards? Opinion seems to be against outsourcing IT support overseas etc.
"This reorganization is an unfortunate but necessary step to rein in IT costs, which have risen sharply," the UCSF spokesperson said. "The pressure is driven largely by the increased demand for specialized IT services, including the electronic medical record and the use of big data for research aimed at improving diagnostics and care for patients."
Hm. Central IT presumably absorbed the workload of embedded faculty IT from the biotechnology projects. Because if researchers have to provide their own IT, they include the costs of hardware and staff in grant applications, they recruit the workers themselves, they do it on the fixed term contracts associated WITH research grants. Seems a bit fishy to me, or at least something where lessons an be learned.
Being a bit of a 60's/70's/80's TV enthusiast, I can add that whilst TV today is more porn, more gore, more brutality, more in-your-face, the older stuff is more scarier and more nastier by any measure you wish to choose. Threads? The Changes? Even Blake's 7 just killing everyone at the end, bang! Dead, gone. Devil worship at every corner, evils under the bed, and the humanity of the evils... rape, for example, in many James Bond films even.
Perhaps it should just be added to general taxation and funded by the government. Unless you reckon that might affect impartiality of the service; impose constraints, produce murmurings of government tampering.
If you watch television, why not pay towards funding it? I mean, pay more than you do already for commercial channels by paying through marketing and advertising budgets added to the cost of products and services you purchase. Perhaps they could levy a tax on TV advertising... that way a non-commercial channel can be funded by the people who only watch commercial channels! They wouldn't have to pay a license fee then, would they? Although, now I come to think of it... can any way of funding non-commercial channels be really said to be fair? People who don't consume it, don't have to pay towards it. Hm... well, I hardly go to the GP now, and my kids are all grown up, so I guess I shouldn't pay for those either. I mean I *might* need the GP, I suppose, then again I *might* want to watch Dr Who, or Horizon. Or that ballet version of 1984, that was OK. So was that Planet Earth series, that was pretty good. And when the storms were wrecking the UK travel system and the power went, it was handy to turn on my battery powered radio and find a local channel with news and travel and weather on it.
They had two similar storage units.
Why weren't they being cross backed-up?
How many training sessions on data security do they run? Do they issue certificates to say how all their end user services staff and other IT staff have attended training on data security, data protection act etc etc. Compulsory training for all staff? What kind of a bollocking do people get for forgetting their training?
Still unanswered questions here. But on the whole I think the document isn't as much of a whitewash as people were expecting.
If it was a routine firmware update, I'd have left it a few weeks before doing it. But if it was flagged as a critical update, I would have done the update within that working week. Knowing the implications of the patch, HP should have validated the system they were performing a replacement on before doing the replacement. As they said "if this update had been done, none of this would have happened" they must have KNOWN of that vulnerability and the consequences of swapping a component without the update.
HP's EUA etc might protect them from being sued for the full damages, but it does not absolve them entirely.
My fear is that this will be used as an excuse for even more red tape and bureaucracy in an already management heavy system. A massive swelling of the ranks, and the associated expense, and all the ITIL and ISO certifications and training and documentation, but that's all so much fluff on top of getting the actual job done. They'll point the finger firmly at having to support and migrate legacy systems, accelerate the move away from those towards a corporate IT model and make even more people do their own thing. Tying all IT purchasing into a single supplier, for example, would exclude many medical and scientific instruments that come supplied with integrated systems; everything from water purifiers to brain scanners, from chocolate dispensers to air sampling systems, building management systems and audio visual systems. That's the feeling, anyway, I get from the document. Users feel IT don't understand the business, especially in research, IT say they do and you should do things their way for "reasons". Trust them. They are experts. But no-one else is allowed to be.
ISA cards were so much less fiddly, though. Much more space to get your tools in there. And when I had to stick 6 HDDs in a unit with only four IDE device capability on the mobo, very useful that was too. Most cards for disk controllers didn't have switchable addresses, and those that did were eye wateringly expensive.
So you take an IDE controller from the old, old, old days when IDE controllers weren't integrated with the mobo. Grind out a gap in two of the address lines, I forget which ones now, then cross wire them. This swaps the address of the card's controller into an unused segment of the memory map. Bit of a tweak in the PCI address settings in Windows 95 which expected things to be in very defined places and Bob's your uncle.
Like the Statesman oven my landlord had fitted which has a 2.1kW element running at 220V and the internal wiring, which also has a fan and a light on it, is done using a common neutral using 1mm2 steel multi strand like all the other wires inside the thing?
If you do your maths, you'll see that the oven element on its own draws 9.5A, and 1mm2 wire is rated at about the same. One slight juddering stall of the fan motor and the neutral vaporised leaving a hollow PVC tube.
They sell you this shit.
We had one in casualty who "sat on a crate of cucumbers to take off their trousers after they spilled oil down themselves, and the crate gave way and..." which, of course, prompted a call for a procession of specialists and second opinions. If they'd just said they lubed up a cucurbit and shoved it up their arse for thrillz and lulz, nobody would have batted an eyelid.
TWO unprecedented failures not seen by any HPE client internationally. Or is it three? Or four? I've heard the KCL one was down to a faulty IO controller wrecking data combined with a disk failure, does that count as two?
Now, I could understand a common mode failure from which there's a learning outcome leading to a product improvement, that's almost expected, but they make it sounds like there's a number of vulnerabilities in the design.
And wants to use the fantastic features he's been told about. But he can't find any of them on his desktop. He produces his training manual. Excel 2013 on a Windows 8 machine - one version behind the official company build, which is odd seeing as though the course was delivered by a company trainer in a company learning suite.
"Where's the view panel in the ribbon?"
"You don't have one. Use the view menu instead."
"But I want it to be the same as my manual..."
"You have a Mac running Office 2010. The functions are all there, but they will be in slightly different places."
"But why isn't it the same as my training manual?"
"Because you are using a Mac with Office 2010. This is for a Windows 8 PC running Office 2013."
"Oh, Ok. But look at this... I can see all the formulae at once if I just... Where's the alt-key? And where's that key with the little bar with a tail at the right hand end?"
"You're using a Mac. The keyboard has subtle differences."
"But I want it to be like it is in my training manual."
"You're 57 years old. You have a PhD. You have been using a Mac for over 10 years. You have been using Excel for over 10 years. Why did you want to go on a training course to learn how to use Excel?"
"I didn't think I knew enough to be getting the best out of Excel."
"You are currently getting no use out of Excel. You've come back in a worse state than when you went. All the basic ideas and concepts you've learned these last two days are valid. The options are there, but they might be in a slightly different place."
"Why isn't it the same though?"
"Bec... Oh FFS. Here, have a PC."
"I don't want a PC. I like my Mac."
etc etc etc until I was rescued by someone who had managed to remove some wires from the spaghetti explosion behind the videoconferencing unit. Again. And bending over upside down with a torch clamped in my mouth, straining my weakened back muscles and compressing my lunch-filled stomach, whilst reaching into the electronic equivalents of the intestines is far, far preferable to trying to explain why some people shouldn't go on training courses.
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