| New Hires... what should you learn? Return to WHAT SHOULD STUDENTS LEARN? |
| George recommends... GEORGE… some of these notes might help some of my students…. =============================== What do you look for in a new employee? Young males seem to have a problem with authority. I know all about that. I was young once, too. Do what you’re told Don’t make a case about it but ... figure out a way to get things done... Work with the team. Make a case about why I shout hire you. Dress up Show a portfolio of projects you’ve been involved with Show your work skills Out of my team of 7 people, two are women and they are 1 and 2 in order of usefulnees. They don’t know the most about the technology, but they get the most done. They make things happen. They help the beam’s objectives. Guys tend to look around and select the least boring tasks, while Gail looks around and asks, “What needs to be done next? We need someone to go through the trip wire logs.” A tirp wire “trips” or sets off a report when a record is altered. It’s usually an authorized change but a hacker getting int o the computer system would have the same effect. So someone has to evaluate each trip wire and decide whether the trip is worth worrying about. Boring but necessary. So Gail gets it done. My hotshot techie, who knows the most, won’t waste his time on such matters. Intrusion is a serious problem for disaster prevention, but he’s not interested. “I want to get into SCSI connectivity” and it might be something to look into, but it’s not where the hospital’s system is at right now. There are pressing problems that need to be solved now… My techie wants to make things BETTER, but Gail makes things HAPPEN. When we were buying new equipment, we made a decision on one set of equipment. My hotshot techie sneered and suggested a more state-of-the-art approach and I let him pursue the quotation… but nothing was really decided and nothing happened, like the process was more important than just getting the decision made and behind us. We ended up installing the original choice and we wasted 2 months… Gail wouldn’t have done that. She does what’s best for the team, not what is necessarily interesting for her. What’s valuable for the group. So, in summary, young men especially need to learn how to do as they’re asked. Get the job done. That’s why a stint in the military is so good. It was good for me. I had a problem with authority, so it was the best thing for me. Disaster Recovery: It makes sense to have storage off-site. It’s amazing but true: most data was not lost when WTC went down. There was backup off site. Ask yourself. What is the cost of the system being down? I figured that in the hospital where I work the cost is around $20,000 an hour and an incident lasting 2 weeks would cost the company around $5 milllion. That seems high, so I calculated just with salaries around $9,000. That meant that a One week downtime for the system would cost the hospital about 2 million. I wanted the equipment (which costs $300K) and I could justify it with a lost of system of just two days. The exercise was very useful… Every busyiness should figure out what the true cost of a loss of system actually costs… Prognosis for future: Last time a lot of equipment was installed was in 2000 to prepare for the Y2k “problem”… and though most businesses work on a 5-year replacement schedule for equipment, in tech it’s more like 3 year cycles. SO this year should be an uptick for IT people. |
| What should a school do with its old computers? Make a SUPERCOMPUTER Notes from a discussion with George H. Here’s a project that any school with OLD PCs can engage in… Link the old PCS into a super computer. The concept involved parallel computing, with one brain coordinating the computing on several computers at once. It’s like sending a message with 12 segments which are computed simultaneously, instead of one after another. Not sequential, but rather SIMULTANEOUS… George used words like “skunkworks” Students could learn to run a system The system could be offline, unconnected to the actual Aiglon server, so practice and mistakes oculd be made. In fact, multiple separate networks could be set up and, once running smoothly, could be linked to create a super computer. Expertise for students Students could gain experience that could be included in portfolios for university acceptance: “Look what we created using unwanted computers.” Extended Network of processors Through the internet, students could “borrow” unused hard drive space on other computers throughout the world. EXPENSE BY THE SCHOOL For less than is spent on running an art department, an advisor could coordinate this student super computer (SSC). Teams of students could be responsible for aspects of network development, maintenance and leasing of the computers’ processing power. Students under supervision could lease out the system’s power for use by companies wanting offsite data storage. Candidate computers: anything made since 1995, 100 Megahertz Pentium II… slow, but perfect when properly linked for parallel computing. Students would learn to build a network, piece by piece. Students would learn the difference between the testing department and the production department. Yes, creation of data space is a form of “virtual” production, since what wasn’t handling data suddenly is… VALUES TAUGHT Make use of something considered worthless or “too old to be useful.” Flexibility, ingenuity, administration, time schedules, project-centered curriculum, learning how to backup, the dangers of “del a:*.*” and vocabulary like “exchange servers” and “proof of concept.” What is the cost of downtime? Learning how to sell a service (“We can offer your company reliable data backup.”) How to burn a CD… |