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Admin
Ehm, I'm not American, so maybe I got the wrong impression over the last four decades, but isn't that all still the norm in the US to this day if you replace the word energy with tech? The whole tech sector is either monopolized or quasi monopolized by cartels, companies are greedy than never before and finally I just mention Ex-Twitter, sorry X-Twitter.
Admin
After this:
BEGIN-SARCASM
I totally didn't see this coming:
END-SARCASM
Admin
Typical MBA: think of all the sale people that could work under the raised floor!
Admin
How I loathe that "other departments charge for services as though they were independent companies" horseshit. Probably the single worst thing to ever happen to businesses.
Admin
Nah. The single worst thing was when they stopped whipping the involuntary unpaid interns. It all went downhill from there.
Admin
Well, if you want to make your business into an internal market, then the right thing to do would be for IT to raise their billing rate in order to cover the rent for the server room. Which means facilities would have to pay more for IT support, which means they would charge more on the rooms, and round and round until the company bankrupts because they tried to treat a monopolistic environment like a competitive market economy.
TRWTF is these folks who spend so much money on school yet fail to learn basic economics.
Admin
The obvious solution to reduce cost would be to make the servers and cables dangle from the ceiling, remove the entire floor of the computer room, and put a few narrow gangplanks instead.
And make sure the people from facilities are invited to come and inspect the floor (or more accurately the lack thereof) for billing purpose. Of course, it'd be unfortunate if any of them were to accidentally fall from a gangplank, but that'd just be natural selection keeping the business agile.
Admin
You're not wrong. The root cause of today's issues is, at least in part, Robert Bork was the Attorney General under Reagan, and decided that he just wouldn't enforce anti-trust laws anymore, because "monopolies were efficient". And, well.. everybody ever since has just followed in his footsteps.
Admin
During Reagan’s presidency Bork was a U.S. circuit court judge, not attorney general. If you can’t get such a basic and easily checkable fact correct, what does that say about your judgment as to his theories and practices?
Admin
@Brian, at the time, the company we're calling IniOil had no IT department. Each department had its own computers. The mainframes had been there long enough they were built into the infrastructure, and the microcomputers didn't need raised floors, so only the chemical analysis branch got hit with this double rent.
Admin
A piece of history that is missing from the story is that a corporate raider named T. Boone Pickens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._Boone_Pickens was terrorizing the industry by threatening hostile takeovers if companies didn't drastically cut their expenses. The company we're calling IniOil had treated its employees very well up until that time.
Admin
Star Wars architecture suddenly makes sense now.
Admin
I think what you actually hate are budgets; departments as vertical organization units are fine (better and more efficient than horizontal organization structures) but when you start assigning random amounts of money to them, things quickly become absurd and ends up being like the children game where one chair is missing.
Admin
I got my order of operations wrong- AG under Nixon, published the consumer welfare doctrine in 78, then judged under Reagan. The key point is Bork is the guy who gutted anti-trust.
Admin
...and we've been paying for it ever since.
Admin
"...make the servers and cables dangle from the ceiling...." But then they'd notice the ceiling tiles and use that to justify the extra floor space.
Admin
The raised floor in computer rooms as I know them is more than a space to run cables; it's also an air conditioning plenum. The monster A/C unit in one corner draws hot air from the top and blows cold air out under the floor, the computer equipment (open on the bottom) receives its cooling air from underneath, and vents out the warm air at the back. Ripping out the raised floor not only introduces tripping hazards, but makes equipment cooling less efficient.
Admin
An audit in our institute called for prompt removal of one of our locations because of "too high exploitation costs per square meter". Rightly, this locationhosted our administration and therefore all power, network and maintenance bills were addressed to this site.
Admin
Also, one gets the impression that OSHA doesn't exist in sci-fi universes. It's not just Star Wars. Bare wires, loose steam hoses, catwalks without rails... and, presumably, chompers.
Admin
Huh, learn something new every day. I'm too young (and on the wrong continent) for US Supreme Court judges, I had assumed it was the usual nerd thing: you break it (and maybe you're not a native speaker), now it's broked. You have too much coffee trying to fix it, but all that does is that it's still borked, you just can't type porperly anymore.
(And FWIW: in a situation where the higher-ups have already foolishly committed to virtual bills for facilities, and the minions who need to actually do that think square footage is a good approximation – well it is, for sufficiently homogenous office space – until they find that there's this one place with UPS and emergency generators and fancy HVAC … honestly, "we're just giving you a fudge factor because you have special circumstances and we don't want to count every power outlet in the entire company" isn't the worst solution. They just found it by accident.)
Admin
Exploding instrument panels :-)
Admin
The AT&T break up happened in 1982. Just sayin'
Admin
When I worked as a software developer on an IBM mainframe in the 1970’s, every computer job you ran, a compilation, or test, they printed the “cost” of that run, based on a billing algorithm that computed cpu seconds used, memory used, disk and tape transfers, IBM cards read, etc. These “costs” were then “charged” to the project you were working on. The computer was costing the project more money than our salaries, so we were encouraged to spend more time “debugging” our software by staring at it rather than running it on the computer. But the computer cost the company the same regardless of whether anybody was using it or not, so when it was idle, the company still had to pay for it.
Admin
Well, smartass, I've actually read Bork's "The Antitrust Paradox" so I will say on that authority that Bork was a stooge.
His specific recommendation in that book was that the government should be hands-off as long as there are two significant competitors in an industry, and today that's what we see in business after business: two companies each squeezing margins for all they can, comfortable in the knowledge that the other competitor is doing the same thing.
Admin
ps: driving margins, not squeezing them
Admin
That's interesting. I've heard about the days when IBM required programmers to work offline and it was justified as a way to promote "thoughtfulness" a la Harlan Mills. An economic incentive was never mentioned.
Admin
What IBM required of their dev employees and what IBM's customers required of their dev employees are two different things. Opposite ends of a telescope in some sense.
Admin
Working in local gov I now have the misfortune of dealing with internal billing. Costs that absolutely have to be paid and upper management spends hours bickering over which department's budget it's billed to. Laptops sitting unused and new ones being order, because the unused ones belong to department A and it's department B that has new staff. And so on.
Admin
In the 80's I worked at a company with the same billing scheme, which led to bizarre results. Unfortunately, every business made a profit but one - sales. Sales had to "buy" the machines it sold from manufacturing. Meanwhile, the bosses all condensed their workspaces to tiny little overcrowded islands that were difficult to move through. Our VP started looking through our file cabinets, ordering us to condense them all so he could sell the rest. We generated a lot of paper and the policy made no sense as in a month we wouldn't have had room for new files. So we stored our printer and copier paper in the file cabinets along with sacrificial files. Then the VP wanted to do the same thing to our fileservers so we countered by storing sacrificial files on the servers. We were probably the only company to run fileservers at 95% or better and all the additional work just made all our processes run slower. Because our mainframes were charging, business units found it more economical to use real dollars to buy minicomputers. The company finally closed its doors in '97, it's last machine, at some obscure Canadian college, was turned off in '99.
Admin
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