>I've had pizza all over the world and nothing >gets close to real Neapolitan pizza in Italy

Yeah, Naples style pizza is fantastic. I had it in Sorrento and once I ate one, that is what I ordered from there on out.

I wish I could get it in the US.

However, the best pizza I ever ate was Chicago Deep Dish pizza. I forget the name of the place - it was a few block walk from the downtown area where I was staying. It was worth the walk.

Completely different style from Neapolitan style.

>a new manager essentially told me that I have to move into a different role oriented towards

If you "have to", I guess you know the answer already.

The question then is "are you happy doing management stuff instead of technical stuff?"

Years ago, I accepted a management promotion (at the time, it was the only way to get more money from that company). I discovered that I hated all the budget/review/meetings stuff. I ended up keeping all the technical stuff (I never replaced myself) and just did both jobs. But that didn't really work out and I ended up moving to a new company for a tech only job. It did teach me that I didn't like management positions much and since then I only do tech work.

As far as oncall goes, the last couple companies I worked at had the official policy of "your oncall 24x7, 365". But if you work at a decent shop, there aren't that many calls to begin with and if you have decent co-workers, it is easy enough to cover each other (either officially thru rotating oncall or unofficially by telling the person calling you to call coworker X instead if you are unavailable/busy).

But I agree with previous posters - it sounds like your company is planning on outsourcing/offshoring the tech groups and will only retain the managers...

>Development, Test, Operations. I'm on development >side so I check builds and docs into the source >code control system.

Sounds like your an application dude and not a sysadmin/sysprog. You get source from Vendors and log that into your "source code control system"? Microsoft gives you the source to Windows so you can log the changes Microsoft makes to Windows? Who maintains this "source code control system" and who implements changes into that? Another source code control system to manage the 1st source code control system?

The vendor fixes I get are all object code and need special software to install them - SMP/E For IBM PTFS, Smitty for AIX, etc.

I've worked for Fortune 100 companies and I've never seen a set of "development" sysadmins/sysprogs and another set for Test and another set for Operations. Way too expensive to spend all that money paying people to do the exact same work.

I understand it completely and it doesn't happen in the real world in real IT depts. First, we aren't coding anything - we are implementing PTFS, hotfixes, new software releases, etc. And every place I've worked, the guy that gets the fix, tests it and implements it himself. There is no Change Control group for the sysadmins/sysprogs.

To do that you would need to have 2 separate groups - one that downloads, installs and tests on test servers and another that just implements changes into production.

  Duplication of effort and just pure overhead. Also when dealing with complex products -DB2, SQL Server, IMS, CICS etc, companies can not afford to have multiple people with that knowledge not doing real work. Small companies have 1 guy with many, many hats. Larger companies are lucky if they have multiple people that can back each other up - but they don't have time to do each others work.

You deal with the midnight cowboy dude by firing him.

>I have worked for large companies in the past, and SOX is seriously undermining the ability to make changes, >or indeed for rational process to take place in the daily operation of IT.

Absolutely agree. Although the smart companies are now just giving SOX lip service and ignoring it pretty much entirely. The company I work for now, has all kinds of memos issued saying they support SOX, hotlines, etc but it doesn’t impact real work.

When SOX hit, the company I worked at, the Accounting dept came out with the required SOX doc and it was non negotiable. They had worked with an auditor that knew nothing of IT and it showed. I had to attend a week long class on how to fill out the dozens of new SOX forms (all manual paper forms) that were to be kept in notebooks!

    I was told that ALL CHANGES had to go on the CEO change calendar and that we would become very familiar with the assistant that scheduled the CEO change meetings. All changes had to have the 10 pounds of forms and 10+ signatures before you could implement. There also had to be “separation of duty” which meant if you were making the change, someone else had to implement it I said “great, your gonna hire another IT group – one to implement and another to install and test”. Of course, they never did this and this “separation of duty” was never followed.

It was COMPLETE AND TOTAL NONSENSE designed by people who had no clue what they were doing or what the real world was like. Yeah, I need to put a hotfix on a server to fix a problem – I’m gonna wait 2-3 months to get on the CEO change calendar and have a meeting with the CEO But trying to talk to the accounting morons was useless – they insisted every change had to follow their written in stone procedure

After a few weeks of complaining, the process was “refined” by having Small, Medium and Large changes and Large changes were only the changes had to go thru the above process. The difference being the number of “elements” in the change – but “element” wasn’t defined by the accounting/auditing people. The solution became that all IT changes were SMALL since there was only 1 datacenter so 1 element changing!

The fact is that SOX was doomed to fail because you can’t impose rigorous rules on US companies if foreign companies don’t have to follow the same rules – it is a Global world out there and adding huge overhead to your domestic companies just mean more outsourcing and more domestic bankruptcies as they can’t compete with slimmer/trimmer overseas companies.

Is the UI customizable (like WOW) or fixed (like COH)? Wow spoiled me for MMOs - I want to be able to customize it as I want it.

Does it follow the Champions ruleset or completey dumbed down (like COH which was also supposedly based on Champions)?

Pretty much wrong. JRRT sold the movie rights while he was alive and got a nice dollar amount from it (for the times). Also if you read "The Letters of JRRT" you will see that he was involved a number of times with proposals to make movies from his stuff - animated movies back then. JRRT had no objection to someone making movies from his books.

The problem is the nuclear decommissioning costs aren't clearly understood.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_decommissioning

This I've heard is the real problem with Nuclear power - not the waste issue. The plants can only operate so long before they have to be decomissioned and the costs of decommissioning so far have been tremendously low. France has spent 500 million EU just trying to decomission a single plant:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brennilis_Nuclear_Power_Plant

If they can solve the decommissioning problem, then I'd be in favor of more nuclear power. But building more plants that might cost billions to decommission doesn't sound too good to me.

"But what about the old stuff? If zones are changing, wouldn't that mean some of the old content is gone and lost forever? To live only in my memory? Will Black rock Depths be wiped out with a volcanic eruption?"

If they use their "phasing" technology - both zones will exist. Pre-80 you will see the old BRD and post 80 (the Cataclysm event), the wiped out one. This allows them to have their cake and eat it too...

If you LOVE computers and programming then go for the degree. If you are only getting the degee
to "find a job" or "make money" then do something else.

As far as ageism, I haven't noticed it much but I work on mainframes which are an Old Mans game.

It is far more likely that your possible job will be outsourced to India, Eastern Europe, etc than not
being able to find one because you are 35. That is the danger of getting the CS degree today.

But even as recently as the Internet Boom and Y2K booms in Data processing, I met many people
who didn't like programming or computers and just thought they could make a lot of money.
Almost all of those people now are gone doing other things - real estate, etc. Whatever the
lastest money making fad is.

So it is pretty simple - if you love it then persue it otherwise don't.

>Stardock isn't handing out loans amounting to hundreds of times more money than the assets of the whole company

How do you know? You have copies of auditor reports? Please post them.

>We're talking about software development companies, here - not unregulated banks.

unregulated software development companies.

>I expect Sun, IBM, Microsoft, Blizzard, Stardock, and Valve to be around for a while yet

Sun won't exist a couple of months from now.

Yahoo still exists but its music customers are SOL so the company still existing is
meaningless on whether your DRM product still works.

http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/07/drm-still-sucks-yahoo-music-going-dark-taking-keys-with-it.ars

>And no, this is no strawman. The rough periods in which dinosaurs and humans lived are so far apart >and clearly established,

That would be where you get the arguments. A very good friend of mine is very religious and is a
creationist. We have had this discussion before. The creationists do not accept uniformitarianism nor do they believe in carbon-14 dating (you can't prove that carbon didn't decay faster 200 years ago because no one was measuring it back then. So if carbon decay is faster then all those carbon-14 dates are way off...).

She is also very smart - has a masters in math, probably could easily answer trivia like how much of the Earth is covered in water. But she is firm in her beliefs and faith is always > reason.

>You're incorrect - you cannot get a refund on software that has been opened from most stores.

Yes. And if you sue the store, you will win. There is even prior case law supporting your
lawsuit (do a search on Best Buy lawsuit). The problem is that it costs like 35 bucks to sue someone in small claims court. Most software isn't expensive enough to go thru the time, hassle
and cost to sue the store.