I am in the technology field. I have an iPad, an iPod and an Android. I use them all (not so much the iPod). But having grown up where there was no TV, no radio, no telephones (except one for the whole community), my POV is that technology like smart phones significantly modifies behavior. People tend to get trained by the technology and lose sight of the practical use cases which in most cases are questionable. For instance, I have seen a group of teenagers sitting together at a table, each one busy texting and no one talking. How many times have you seen someone with a cell phone glued to his ear while attempting to do something else? In my case, I am required to be available pretty much 24/7 and to have access to the servers but the reality is that rarely happens. It annoys me in the extreme when I am having a conversation with someone and their cell phone rings or notifies him/her of a message and the conversation is dropped in favor of the intrusion. The behavior modification is analogous to a dog leash. The main point being: is there often anything so important that it could not wait a few minutes or an hour or a day or more? The portable technology tends to own you

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Having been in the Navy for 14 years I do not see China being able to operate a carrier effectively for a decade at least. First you need to have planes an pilots that can land on one, then you have to be learn how to replenish at sea (*not* an easy task), then you need a grunch of ships and submarines to protect the carrier, not to mention operations for achieving that, and of course the entire logistics and training infrastructure to pull the whole thing off.

I was in much the same position 12 years ago at this company. I am now CIO with 7 people on my team with several business partners to help manage the infrastructure. My advice for what it is worth:

• - Take time every day to assess and analyze the bigger picture before allowing yourself to get drawn into the details.
• - Look at the entire system from a risk mitigation perspective. What areas are most likely to cause "meltdown". Spend the most effort there.
• - What are incremental changes that can be made that improve the overall risk picture? Focus on the biggest bang for the buck.
• - Defer anything that works well enough for the time being.
• - Avoid big bang solutions unless they can be contained and tested well, with the capability of rolling back.
• - Get help where necessary.

...having read the follow-on article suggesting that wiping out mosquitoes might not result in a significant change in the overall environment, I thought of the butterfly effect. It is hubris to expect that we could foresee myriad bad possibilities.

In analyzing the light coming from quasars (active nuclei of distant galaxies), astronomers realized the rays had passed through gas that contained only hydrogen and deuterium, elements that formed minutes after the Big Bang.

The clouds, which are located about 12 billion light-years from Earth...

...a quasar is a compact region in the center of a massive galaxy surrounding its central supermassive black hole.

Wikipedia

Over a long period of time, the slightly denser regions of the nearly uniformly distributed matter gravitationally attracted nearby matter and thus grew even denser, forming gas clouds, stars, galaxies, and the other astronomical structures observable today.

Wikipedia

...so light from "a compact region in the center of a massive galaxy" went through a gas cloud 12 billion years ago. That would mean that if the universe is 13.7 billion years old, the massive galaxy had formed in less than 1.7 billion years... hmmm

We are in the Minneapolis area where a tech recruiter friend of mine emailed me this morning regarding his layoff: "IT unemployment in the Twin Cities is currently at 1.7%, so most of our clients have to use us because they can't come close to finding/recruiting talent on their own." I do not think that my friend will have much trouble in this area.

My friend sent me an email yesterday: "I'm about to go into a meeting where Adobe is laying off my whole team." He had worked on Flash for many years since Macromedia owned the project. After the meeting he said, "Just got out of meeting, I have a job until April 20, paid thru May 15, decent severance, but job will end."

One of the sloppiest, non-informative articles that I have recently read. Coding is the last part of any automation development. What about bad analysis, bad design, poor tool/OS/infrastructure/integration choices? What about the problem of being forced back to the Waterfall development methodology to be able to offshore development? What level of coding are we talking about: embedded systems, business architecture, tools, OS, (etc)? Any security expert would know that code security is the least of the problems regarding overall automation security.

final

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Coming at the end of a series

>Why do you have to have the business explained to you? Does it mean that you don't understand the business you're working in? We generally end up explaining the business to the users. The paradigm that we work in is complicated and the users in one small part do not understand the interactions with another part. The problem, then, is more of a business analysis nature than a pure IT solution one. The request might be "Give me a invoice for all of the natural gas transportation costs for all of our customers." The question back is "Give me the costing rules, rates, tariffs for the 15 pipeline pipelines involved." This is not a matter of "understand the business." The simplistic drivel I see in these threads avoids the truly complicated nature of some businesses. Go find a "Cloud" solution that collects and monitors all of the tariffs, rates, schedules, tax rebates, costing rules, inventory rules and costs, daily balancing rules and the like for all natural gas pipelines in the US and can apply them correctly to each customer invoice for all customers across the US on an agency basis with our own costing rules built in.

The article was mostly sweeping generalization with few specifics to back up the argument. As CIO, I find that the problems regarding delivering relevant, efficient, meaningful automation solutions has much more to do with the business units' inability to articulate a problem statement and business case than with our ability to provide a technical solution. The paradigm is generally "give me one of these". The return question is always "What are you trying to solve?" We try to steer our users to third-party hosted solutions whenever there is one (or two or n) that will fit the problem.

Just wait until your grant account is frozen by PayPal...