Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!sci34hub!gary From: gary@sci34hub.UUCP (Gary Heston) Newsgroups: news.groups Subject: Re: Results of sci.aquaria vote Summary: This all depends upon your viewpoint... Message-ID: <414@sci34hub.UUCP> Date: 25 Nov 89 01:35:31 GMT References: <21910@gryphon.COM> <3329@watale.waterloo.edu> <5805@unix.SRI.COM> <5971@unix.SRI.COM> Lines: 82 In article <5971@unix.SRI.COM>, maslak@unix.SRI.COM (Valerie Maslak) writes: > In article <410@sci34hub.UUCP> gary@sci34hub.UUCP (Gary Heston) writes: > >transfer traffic sort of on the sly. Above me are five levels of > > [.....] > Gary, all that is well and good, but is what is going on your > hobby, or a benefit for the employees of the place you work? Please clarify whose opinion you want on that...a) mine, b) the users, c) my supervisors, d) our VPs, or e) the chairman of the boards? Responses will vary from "very useful and valuable, a great resource" to "I don't care if we've already paid for the line time". > If it's the former, how is what you're doing any different from > stealing computer time? If I were the only one reading news, and refusing to make it available to anyone else, I'd be stealing computer and phone time. > If it's the latter, then the benefit has to be perceived as one by > most employees, or maybe you SHOULDN'T be providing it at company > expense. [begin break] Perception of what is a benefit and what is not varies greatly from employee to upper management. Employees around here consider a workstation to design gate arrays a desperate need. Upper management considers it an unnecessary expense. We don't have a workstation in this entire division. (Our government div has a few--the cheapest and most under-equipped that they could get.) > [end break] Also, if your exercise of privilege as SA ends up being > discriminatory, or even severely unfair, don't you think other > employees should have the right to some recourse, without the threat > (express or implied) that they will harm USENET? If my boss tells me to stop receiving anything except comp.all, news.all, and control, I'd consider that severely unfair. I'll also stop receiving talk.all, rec.all, sci.all, etc. If anyone around here has problems with what I do, they have the recourse of sci34hub!oscar. So far, the only complaints have been when I've lost a few things to do in the overload, and those were promptly fixed. I have a responsibility to ALL the users to keep any one from crashing the system, damaging someone elses' file, and so on. Whether or not I like someone doesn't determine their access to system resources. I'm also not going to dedicate a 300MB drive to one user just so they can archive the rec groups, when the software development machine runs around 80% of capacity all the time; I'd put the drive in there. There are things I HAVE to do as an admin. I have to keep everything up. I have to fix it as quickly as possible when it breaks. If someone keeps causing problems, I have to step on their access privledges. If I were to put someone in a restricted shell because they beat me in contract bridge at lunch, I wouldn't be an admin for long. > At some point, folks, USENET is either going to join the real > world and come out of the shadows and play by real rules, or > it's going to stay a hackers heaven and be useless to most people. > > The "it's just our little secret" policy imposes some limits, you > know.... Yeah, right. The chairman of the board hasn't designed anything in 25 years. Explain to him why the AMD29000 is more suited to your application than the Intel 80960 (or whatever they call it), even though we do more business with Intel. Explain what CASE is, and why you want to spend $20K for a good package to do it. While you're at it, explain it to the corporate counsel, too. Sorry, but the top brass is so out of touch with the technical world, all they'll see is the number with the $ in front of it. You're getting by without it now, so you don't really need it. (Improved efficiency has been explained many times, without success. We get what we can how we can, and don't send them a memo whenever we find a workaround that lets us get something useful done.) > Valerie Maslak -- Gary Heston { uunet!sci34hub!gary } System Mismanager SCI Technology, Inc. OEM Products Department (i.e., computers) Hestons' First Law: I qualify virtually everything I say.