There is a question on LinkedIn by Bill Gates.
How can we do more to encourage young people to pursue careers in science and technology?
An excellent question. I decided to answer and so I did, but once I submitted it, I decided I wanted to add more to the answer, so i deleted it and once I was done editing, I tried to submit it again. Unfortunately, LinkedIn didn’t notice that I had deleted by previous answer and told me I couldn’t answer the same question twice. This being the case, I’m going to blog my answer here.
The continual shift and evolution of the collective mindset and public memes will inevitably reach a phase where careers and lives dedicated to science and technology are not only attractive pursuits for young individuals but are also universally admired and appreciated as the gears of progress in the machinery of human existence and are respected as such.
One traditional field that has already settled its distinguished position is medicine. A career in this field is often encouraged (or at least mentioned as a suggestion) by parents. Key in this advice is not only the monetary considerations of the parent for the child’s future, but a career in medicine is universally viewed as being respectable, noble and beneficial. Simplifying this anthropologically; being the (parent of) the doctor in your tribe has obvious benefits.
The speed at which our culture and the ideas in it evolve is dynamic and manipulable. In order to popularize careers in science and technology, these avenues of opportunity must be presented as beneficial, respectable and attractive in our collective consciousness. This can be done through popular media (sitcoms, TV ads, movies) on school campuses but is also influenced by decisions made by governments and the language used by our political leaders.
A minor request
If you are a decider; If you decide how people do their work; If you are in the IT industry; If you manage a team of developers, scripters, sequencers, packagers, administrators or network monitors; for the love of everything you may claim to hold holy or good, please, never ask of your people to develop or do any kind of productive work that takes longer than 10 minutes on a remote desktop connection with just one monitor per workstation.
Spare your potentially cheerful workforce the agony and frustration of being gears in an impractical paradigm that is nothing more than a misunderstood and faulty application of the remote service delivery business model.
Remote service delivery is a great way to manage and administer server farms, deliver first and second level support services to clients and that is basically it. Managers often confuse the potentials of the technology with the potentials of the service. The technology in this case are protocols such as RDP, VNC, AIP, etc that facilitate remote control capabilities for clients and servers. The service is the convenience of managing your client’s infrastructure remotely from the comfort of your own HQ, branch office or minion cellar. This is when some people get confused.
Cut it out, already!
Let me explain what can go wrong with this philosophy by utilizing an analogy: A baker offers you the service of baking a cake. He’s also offering you the remote service of calling you when the cake is done and maybe drive by to drop the cake off at your house. That would be the alpha and omega of this service. He bakes the cake in his kitchen (in-house development) and gives you a ring when it’s done (a remote service). Now imagine a baker that offers you remote baking services. You, as a client may be curious as to what he’s up to, so you play along and see where he’s going with this. The baker comes in your house, installs a room sized arm robot in your kitchen and leaves. He then goes back to his own kitchen and using a laptop and a joystick starts remotely controlling the robot in your kitchen to make you your cake….very slowly…and he dropped some eggs. He will blame that on your pans.
There seems to be a steady growing trend of IT corporations offering application packaging, sequencing, development and general productive services remotely. This initially evolved from the trend of outsourcing IT services to 3rd party suppliers (core business isolation) but has now taken grotesque forms and dimensions. Entire corporations following each other like religious lemmings thinking outsourcing and remote services is the answer to all ails that saves a buck at the end of the fiscal year.
Development is either done in-house or on-site. Doing it remotely will just increase your client’s TCO per workplace, produce late results and in the long run could cost you your clients.
You may choose to do everything remotely….but you shouldn’t. Seriously…..cut it out!
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Since application virtualization is my current field of expertise, I might as well blog about it, right? OK!
The above noted gem of an error usually occurs in messy environments (Yes, I’m pointing a finger at you!) when someone tries to save sequencing or deployment time by editing or replacing OSD information in a live system. You end up with multiple SFT files with the same GUID and DC information that references to obsolete paths. In short, human error. Add to that a load distribution/balancing system that someone wrote in the spur of the moment and you end up with a number of very confusing problems to swim through.
Resolution
The best way I found to fix this was to test the sequence in an environment I trusted to be stable. Once it was confirmed that the sequence was fine, I removed the offending package (including clones and test versions) and applications from the SoftGrid Console. Verified the rights on the content source path, verified path information in the project (sprj) and OSD files and added the applications back to the system using the Import Applications function.
Mind you, if you choose to walk this path, make sure you test with a clean (enough) system. Clear any reference to the old package from the registry, unload and remove applications, clear the OSD cache (manually) and restart the SoftGrid Virtual Service Agent on the workstation before launching to test.
http://obama.senate.gov/speech/060628-call_to_renewal/index.php
“For one, they need to understand the critical role that the separation of church and state has played in preserving not only our democracy, but the robustness of our religious practice. Folks tend to forget that during our founding, it wasn’t the atheists or the civil libertarians who were the most effective champions of the First Amendment. It was the persecuted minorities, it was Baptists like John Leland who didn’t want the established churches to impose their views on folks who were getting happy out in the fields and teaching the scripture to slaves. It was the forbearers of the evangelicals who were the most adamant about not mingling government with religious, because they did not want state-sponsored religion hindering their ability to practice their faith as they understood it.
Moreover, given the increasing diversity of America’s population, the dangers of sectarianism have never been greater. Whatever we once were, we are no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.
And even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools? Would we go with James Dobson’s, or Al Sharpton’s? Which passages of Scripture should guide our public policy? Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is ok and that eating shellfish is abomination? How about Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount - a passage that is so radical that it’s doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application? So before we get carried away, let’s read our bibles. Folks haven’t been reading their bibles.
This brings me to my second point. Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God’s will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.”
