Been there, done that.

I was invited into a company that was going through bankruptcy, and the previous C-level folks had already been indited for federal crimes.

I was given a short list of people to invite to leave, and full control to clear the slate of the entire IT staff, should I decide to.. Basically, I was to cut them all loose and start over, which as we all know is suicide. When I was ready for those who weren't team players, and detrimental to the company, the CEO said no. Hrm.

I was given laundry lists of things to do, and no budget to do it with. Some were little things like, desktops that were a decade old. Servers that were past EOL by any standards. I presented very reasonable plans for both, which were indefinitely delayed until they were almost too late.

I kept things mostly moving forward for the duration. When the bankruptcy was done, I was promised lots of things. Eventually, the new owner cut loose everyone that was not primarily at the home office. That was directly contrary to the CEO's continued assurances.

That night, I drank heavily and celebrated.

Now I'm doing SysAdmin work again. I get stuff done. I don't have to make grand decisions. I don't do presentations for company changing projects. I don't even have to hire or fire anyone. I understand more of the crap that management goes through, even though I do my best to isolate myself away from office politics. I have the luxury of going home when the work is done, and no one bothers me until the next work morning.

I won't argue with that. Well, the only thing I will point out is the same as I pointed out in another discussion elsewhere.

The government and military spying, both on enemies and your own people, has been going on since the invention of governments and militaries.

You can only assign blame specific incidents. The general idea has been around for an awful long time.

As long as we're somewhere on the sane side of McCarthyism and the Salem Witch Trials, I think we're mostly ok.. And for the record, I'm not a communist nor a witch.

Most of this stuff dates back to the Bush Jr. administration... But hey, go ahead and blame the black guy.

The same could be said or implied of the Steubenville hackers. Maybe there's a general grudge against schools, jocks, or a general belief that the state's investigators are inept.

Of course, the public statements now are for the preservation of evidence, and assistance of the victim and the courts.

"I have my home wired up like a datacenter. Everyone else should want a huge amount of network capacity and capability so that it makes my already extravagant costs slightly cheaper."

What's wrong with building out your home network like a datacenter? :) I'm perfectly happy with GigE. It handles the servers, iSCSI to the SAN, and an isolated branch for the desktops. It's the uplink speeds we have to work on.. I could upgrade to 10GigE, but when will the uplinks even get close? I'm putting my change order in for 100MB/s down next week. It'll be a long time before we see even 1GB/s uplink speeds for the home..

I really miss having my stuff hosted in a good Tier 1 DC, where I really did have GigE uplinks that could support the speeds. I could transfer stuff very nicely there, and then copy it to the laptop to bring home. Sneakernet has always been faster than residential speeds for large transfers.

And it can come back just as quickly and easily. I'll use AWS as a shortcut because I'm lazy and it is representative of the wider market.

For smaller businesses, AWS does have economies of scale that ease significant portions of the cost. These businesses mostly have quite fragile IT services and moving them to AWS in a naive way is no big loss. With a marginal amount of skill, they can even gain some significant gain in robustness due to ease of getting instances in distinct availability zones. They still won't be 'enterprise grade', but still.

For larger businesses, they bring their own economies of scale. In this case, to do it just like AWS does it, it is necessarily possible to do it cheaper than AWS (AWS is after all, a for profit endeavor). This is not to say a business should not pay attention to AWS and size it, as it is a good indication of whether they are doing things right or not. If AWS *is* cheaper than internal IT, that org should look inward and understand why they are more expensive as a break-even endeavor than an external company is at a for-profit endeavor. It could be that Amazon is doing things that they can't consider (e.g. letting instances fall over pretty easily). It could be that the company should consider doing certain things more like Amazon. It could also be that they assume cost reductions that won't be realized (e.g. work that will still need to be tended to in-house on the external instances. The company may incur increase costs/skills needs to accomodate the AWS model. As an example of the last, looking at netflix's technical blog, it's clear they have more skills than the average enterprise IT shop. They seem to have to work pretty hard to keep their infrastructure working as it does. Despite that skillset, netflix pretty commonly locks out an individual client, or fails to kick off a video. They also seem to have at least one or two multi-hour total outages in a given year due to AWS failing in some way that even their design cannot tolerate.

    I'm only surprised that I don't get frequent visits from O2STK.

    At least I'm sure they're entertained by my phone calls, emails, and risque pictures.

... and it seems to be accurate.

user@host:~$ ntpdate ntp0.bbc.co.uk && ntpdate uk.pool.ntp.org
  6 Jun 21:14:58 ntpdate[14686]: adjust time server 132.185.132.130 offset -0.072700 sec
  6 Jun 21:15:05 ntpdate[14687]: adjust time server 178.79.191.28 offset -0.074760 sec

It took a few seconds for each to respond, being I'm on the wrong side of the pond and all.

So they appear to participate in the centralized time system, that understands UTC, I don't see where their big problem is. 100 days to program a javascript clock to use their servers instead of the client machine?

I am surprised that they still do have a clock on there. Well, I never noticed when I went, but I wasn't really going to the BBC to check the time. Most people took clocks off of their web pages back in the late 90's, right along with dancing babies and blinking text.

echo "Starting time:" `date`
echo "fixing ntp.conf"
echo "server 0.uk.pool.ntp.org" >> /etc/ntp.conf
echo "server 1.uk.pool.ntp.org" >> /etc/ntp.conf
echo "server 2.uk.pool.ntp.org" >> /etc/ntp.conf
echo "server 3.uk.pool.ntp.org" >> /etc/ntp.conf
service ntpd restart
 
echo "forcing time update to now"
ntpdate -b uk.pool.ntp.org
echo "Ending time:" `date`

Servers taken care of. What's the BBC billing address? :)

    On your previous message, you got what the news failed to. The cars were all Honda, Acura being a division of Honda.

    Really, I wouldn't be surprised if it's what you're thinking. It may not be the trigger detection, but all kinds of other pesky things. It does seem to take close proximity to the passenger door handle. Otherwise, they'd just roll through parking lots to see which cars unlock.

    It would be really embarrassing for Honda if it turned out to be a simple ultrasonic emitter would trip up a sensor and unlock the door. :)

Don't forget the consulting and speaking fees! Those are critical.

It doesn't matter what you call your process, many development teams will devolve into this behavior. The fact of the matter is that 'agile' has the distinct honor of being the most 'hip' thing, and as such it is the set of labels of choice used to hide behind.

Of course. most of the terminology about agile stems from a host of BS that seems more infomercial than useful. The original 'manifesto' was a collection of straightforward statements that are pretty sensible, though mind numbingly obvious. It has mutated to be a large set of vocabulary generally hijacked at will.

In my experience, Impress's biggest problem is that their stock templates are pretty amateurish. Given a good professional template, it can do everything that really is necessary for presestation software to do. Excessive use of the bells and whistles in my mind takes away from a presentation rather than adds anything. Having to endure presentations where a speaker pauses to allow his bullshit aimation to finish is mind numbing.

I will say that MS is the *only* platform that doesn't have the modal dialog brought above the window being blocked. In MS I have to hunt for the dialog when I notice something doesn't work, other platforms make it far more prominent.