Thank you! I thought the exact same thing! Ahhh.. the good old days of spending hours on end dutifully typing in programs from the pages of Antic! saving the results to cassette... It was what got me into the minimal programming I do today.

and yeah.. get off my lawn, I'm reminiscing here, and you're getting in the way!

I've covered a lot of this in my "THANKS!" below, but wanted to reply to you specifically. If I hadn't replied below, I would absolutely mod you up. I started in TV back in 1992. I'm not so terribly old, but I ran plenty of shows from 2' machines, 3/4', beta (I can still make a betacart walk and talk, if you can find one still in use anywhere ;-) I was lucky enough to get in right as the first digital commercial insertion systems were coming out. I trained MCOs on FastTrack, at another station, we were beta-testers for Avid's first system. I left TV, and went into computer support, working my way up from call center hell to sysadmin for a small company. I got a couple of certifications as employers required, but I'm proud of the fact that I got the real world experience first, then the certs later (and pretty much just to make HR happy) When I came back to TV (~2005) everything was moving, or had moved to computer, so It worked out quite well! (and FastTrack had been bought out by Sundance, and Sundance was bought by Avid, oddly enough...) That combination of broadcast experience and IT experience is one of the main reasons I got the position I have now. It is also perhaps one of the reasons I can see the different needs (and where they overlap as well) between "general IT" and the broadcast chain. I know the fine line I'll have to walk, but feel certain in my ability to do it.... Just need some clarity on how to start the ball rolling with the rest of the management.

Just thought I'd do something I don't ever see enough of here, and give a quick "THANK YOU!" for all the replies.Yes, even the bashing replies are valuable (in some way). If nothing else, they make me realize that I could run into some of the same attitudes along the way here.

To give a bit more detail (I wanted to try to be relatively brief when asking the question):
I actually feel very lucky. I work with a great group of very smart, and reasonably sensible people. I have over 10 years in the broadcasting industry. I also have about another 5 years as sysadmin in a small shop. I am currently the entire IT staff at this station, and the position was pretty much created just for me. The engineers here realized that the "general IT needs" were consuming too much of their time, and were suffering from lack of attention. When I came in, virus outbreaks were common (the AV server had been disabled in a previous virus outbreak, and never brought back online... Might have had something to do with it!), AD was in a shambles, growth had been handled by daisy chaining another switch (whatever was on sale at Best Buy) wherever they needed another port... The engineers who "ran" the domain didn't trust it enough to have their own workstations joined into it...I'm sure many of you know the situation. Again, most of this happened not out of complete ignorance or ineptitude.. or even out of much in the way of budgetary constraints... It was all because of neglect. The engineers had higher (and other) priorities, and usually took the shortest, cheapest, simplest route to "fixing" the immediate need without any long term vision of how the pieces should fit together

Since I was brought in about a year ago, I have basically rebuilt the network from the inside out, with negligible downtime. We're on Gigabit everywhere, all on good quality managed switches. All the tangles have been taken out of the topology, servers, GPOs, AD, etc have all been whipped back into shape, and the virus rate has dropped to less than one instance per month, all of which were automatically caught by the now up to date AV software on the workstations. We have redundant WAN connections, redundant DCs, regular backups...I have built standard images for each of the major departments, all the workstations are up to date, documentation for everything not only exists, but is organized and easily found...

I am lucky that this is a small enough organization that I know everyone by name. I make it a point to regularly, if they are having any trouble, if there is anything I can do to help. I have taken the time to learn the different software in use in each department, to learn how they work, and why, and have done many things to simplify and streamline those workflows. Again, I am very lucky that this is a small enough organization that I have the ability to do all of those things.

I'm (rightfully, I think) proud of what I ave accomplished here, and I know I could not have gotten it done without the support of the company and the managers who know enough to know that it needed to be done. I have proven my worth, in other words, and yes, have been rewarded for my efforts. Now, I feel it is time to start the process of getting the other 4 stations out of the same hole we were in last year. Within this specific station, I actually like and appreciate being under the Engineering department's umbrella. But when it comes to extending my successes here to the other stations, it gets more complex, and that is where the separate IT department becomes more needed.

So yes, to an extent, this is about positioning myself to be that IT director over all of the stations. It is also about doing what I honestly feel is in the best interests of the company, as they ave been good to me, and I see no reason not to return the favor. So again, thank you for all of the input, good and bad, it has helped!

We all know that SOPA is all about the money (I'll ignore the "everything is" argument, for now). Money the *IAAs feel they are losing, money the politicians have accepted in campaign contributions... Even the advertisements trying to drum up support for SOPA are about all the jobs (money) that will be lost if this doesn't become law...

Every argument I've heard has been about ideals and technology... We all know how politicians and corporations feel about ideals. Freedom of speech, Impossible to implement, Would break the very foundation of the web, etc... All meaningless to these people without a dollar sign attached to them.

This is the first argument I have heard that directly turns the tables. "Pass SOPA, and we will no longer trust any software produced by a US company." This would affect many more than just MS, Apple, and Google... How many PCs will Dell, (or HP, or Acer, or...) sell outside of the US if they are not allowed to sell them with (or without) Windows? If Dell et. al. are forced into producing computers with Windows installed for the US market, and %NotWindows% for the rest of the world, how long before they decide it isn't worth the effort, and just pick their favorite %NotWindows% for the entire line? How many jobs will be lost if no one in Europe is allowed to use Photoshop, MS Office, iTunes, AutoCAD,... The list goes on and on.

Do I think this is likely to happen? Not really.. But it makes for a good advertising campaign against SOPA.

You are thinking too small. To be truly effective, each of these sites should have a total blackout for one day. Coordinate, and choose one day that they actively refuse every connection made to any of their servers. 24 house for the entire world to see what it will be like to have no Google, no YouTube, No Gmail, no Facebook, No Zynga (kinda redundant with no Facebook, I know...) Heck, cut off all those useful Android utilities while you are at it.

24 hours worth of profits to most of these companies is chump change... 24 hours of profits lost by those other companies who rely on these services though would make a huge impact. One that could not be ignored.

While I have family on the outer banks in NC, and I wish everyone the best... I can't help but think that poor Irene doesn't have a chance of living up to the media coverage... The sad part isn't that the media has latched onto it and is hyping it to no end. (We're used to that, after all...) But that it really is a prime example of "The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf". Hype it up and it fails to meet expectations, and nobody will believe you next time... When it IS that bad.

To play devil's advocate here... Aren't these same "competitive mechanisms" the same arguments that are regularly cited as the reason open source software is better than closed source? Whoever makes the best product or implementation wins? The only difference being that it is somehow assumed that profit is never a motive for any open source project. (Easily proven false, but that is always the assumption...)

I agree that the article is in fact standard issue Forbes free market trolling.. but you should really come up with a better argument for it. OSS proves that competitive mechanisms don't always favor groups that cut costs, reduce quality or undercut "higher quality" competitors. Or at least that they don't HAVE to favor those things.

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Amen to this whole thread!

I'm IT director for a TV station. I spend all day buying, installing, troubleshooting, configuring, fixing, and explaining everything from video servers to telephones... Most of the servers are Linux based (a couple of Windows thrown in to keep things interesting) Most of the desktops are Windows based (with a couple of Macs and one Linux system thrown in for good measure) and the phones.. don't get me started on that end of things!

When I go home.. I just want my stuff to work. I want it to connect to all the stuff AT work that DOESN'T work, and I want have to work on it as little as possible. Mac, OSX all the way.

And to put in my bit with the ongoing car analogy... Yes, it is always a good thing to know how stuff works, and how to fix it when it doesn't.. A little knowledge goes a long way. But when you want a reliable car, you go ask the mechanic what he drives. Sure, they might have a project car to tinker with (and brag about how much horsepower and how much over it is bored and how much torque and how many PSI of boost etc...) But Odds are the car they drive 90% of the time is the one they don't have to mess with constantly to keep running...

I work at a TV station... We're running 5 streams.. I put in about 45 hours/week.. At home, It's all boxee/netflix/DVD, so only add about 5 hours/week there.. gives me a rough guess total of...230 hours of TV/week...

I'd hope that puts me pretty well to the right of the bell curve...