It's not like it's the Accounting department or HR. I have my own open source lab in my home.

print "DEBUG: This is not a comment\n";

As long as you manage expectations and, make management aware of the costs vs. risk.

There are a lot of factors that determine the manpower needed:

1) Are backups of files required by all users or just a few users (ie CEO, finance, hr etc)
3) What is the expected work hours 24/7? or 8/5?
4) How much redundancy is built into the servers? If they are in pairs then one can go down and be fixed during regular work hours.
5) How is your storage set up ? Disk drives fail so you will need RAID, mirroring etc
6) Have the servers been properly maintained ? A lot of times applications are put on servers without correct startup and shutdown scripts. If there is a power outage and the servers are cycled they should come up correctly with all applications.
7) Do you have a monitoring system in place to try to catch problems before they become catastrophic failures.
8) Do you have good configuration management so that the systems are as identical as possible.
9) Do you have routine maintenance items automated - this is easier if you have item 8 above.

All of these have cost and risk associated with them so it is important to go over them with management. You can explain how if you don't have a decent backup plan then data can get "lost."

If you are a one man IT shop then you can control your own work flow. Keep cryptic notes and todo lists in notebook in a journal style. File emails in different folders. It is funny but it works like a dynamic priority system. The hot projects will pop up any you will not have trouble remembering what to do. The repetative housecleaning tasks are good to do when you get tired of the 10 other things you need to do. One of the most rewarding things is going back through your notebook and cross of completed tasks. If you are good and can produce a lot of results then the management will not try to impose a "Time Management" system on you.

Doesn't the Declaration of Independents and Constitution imply that there is no Utopia hence we need checks and balances.

Is Dystopia the same as Non-Utopia?

Whenever someone (or some group) thinks they know what Utopia is, they try to force everybody down the same path.

Everything that ever is or was, was on Star Trek

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Corbomite

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/index.html?curid=413875

... to Palm's Pre emptive strike

Mcidasium

In regards to the "This argument before" let me clarify. One of the things I mentioned was that once when I was having a conversation about AGW at work I was asked that if I believe that the world is flat (ie insinuating that I am a "Flat Earther") somehow equating any skepticism with anti-science. I am not at all anti-science I love math and science.

So that I guess that shilly's argument is that if mathematical models can predict the position of the stars many centuries into the future then we should be able to predict climate. I bet that the models used to predict star locations are based on Newton's laws and, these can be checked with observations such as using red shift to determine how fast the stars are moving etc. Then you can use gravity, mass, acceleration etc to see how stars in the milky way are orbiting center of the galaxy over thousands of years (a blip in cosmic time). This can be done with a computer model and you can see how the constellations will change. So the argument is that since this scenario is predictable then climate is predictable using mathematical and computer models. I do not think that this is the case, and I used weather and economics as an example.

Even if we had a (nearly) infinite sized computer and could model every atom, electron, photon, on and in the planet we could not predict the weather very far into the future. Even if we could model every penny spent in the economy we still could not predict what the Dow Jones average will be in 2010. These are dynamical systems that have the Chaos Theory attribute of 'sensitivity to initial conditions. This has more or less discounted the clockwork model of physical reality. Then we are faced with uncertainty. People hate uncertainty.

As far as the difference between climate and weather, isn't just a matter of time scale? Climate is temperature, humidity averaged out over a longer time scale. One aspect of Chaos Theory is similarity across different scales or orders of magnitude. Like how sand dunes from satellite photos look like sand ripples on the beach.

Al Gore is a politician right? I really don't like all the "talking points" labels like "Global Warming Denier" or "Global Warming Skeptic" these are just thrown out for debating points and don't really add anything of value to the discussion. Also the endless accusations of being under the influence of Big Oil etc are getting kind of tired (I'm not). I don't care about Exxon. I do care about our "addiction" to foreign oil, cleaning up pollution, environment and science. I just would like to be able to discuss the issue without the name-calling. Can't we just "disagree without being disagreeable".

I've seen this argument before and I also have been asked if I believe the earth is flat since I question the validity of climatology findings. Climate is more like economics and we know how easy it is to predict economic fluctuations :) If you read some books on complexity and chaos theory you will find that chaotic systems have a high degree of unpredictability. One of the best books on the subject is The Essence of Chaos by Edward Lorenz (a meteorologist) Comparing climatology science to Newton's discovery of orbital mechanics is a bit of a stretch. The planets orbits can be observed and checked in a few days. Climate predictions would need how long to prove? 10 years, 100? Climate is probably more like weather. We have lots of weather models and a big incentive to predict the weather but we can not reliably predict the weather more than 10 days into the future. How can we then say that we can predict the future climate? I also think that politics has muddied the water my insisting that man made CO2 is the main factor driving climate change. Of course I would like us to get off of foreign oil so I would be content with "Global Warming" being a "Convenient Myth" instead of an "Inconvenient Truth"