1. The title is a clear violation of Godwin's Law (on my/. setup, we are in fact the end of the thread...). 2. The AC has no idea whether the application has anything to do with the US governments war effort (i.e. maybe its for an Aid Agency ?), yet... 3.the AC rattles off slogans that have less meaning than those used by late night TV Advertorials.
In short, the post lacked sense, humour or technical merit. The tenuous relevance to the original question is diminsihed to nothing by point 2.
In fact the more I type, the more I feel my life slowly wasting away... 5 minutes that have gone for ever, never to return.
I cannot begin to comprehend an organism that can be so wrong in so many ways in such little space.
to take one sentence......American people need to vote this year, so their minds should not dwell on 500+ unnessacery deaths. They should dwell on it, and their responsibilities as Citezens of the US. If the more than 200 million citezens, of the most powerful nation-state currently in existence, ever felt squeamish about the loss of 500 lives, there would be a LOT more wars, a lot more killing and a lot more misery. Or would you rather have Saddam still murdering and starving his people ?
There's so much trouble that could have easily been solved if that energy was put to more urgent matters in short, my answer to your first sentence: The human condition is the need to explore.
BTW, Cobol does have some columnar restrictions. Since it's based on cards, lines can't go past column 72 (or is that 71...) Procedures and other bits start in column 1.
Column 1-6 sequence numbering column 7 - place an asterisk for a comment column 8-11 - labels and identifications (i.e PROCEDURE DIVISION would start in column 8). Also in DATA DIVISION, this was where you had your 01 and 77 for data definitions and switches. column 12-71 procedural statements, field names etc. column 72 - continuation marker column 73 - 80 sequence control
CAVEAT: my last cobol programming was over 15 years ago
A particular cliche attributed to the current british monarch is "We are...." when refering to her self. i.e. "We are not amused", "We are pleased to announce.." etc.
The school is punning on this; His Royal Highness (the parent poster) not only has to pay for himself but also pay fro the extra person(s) implied in "We".
Sire, My apologies to Your Majesty for having the temerity to suggest your joke was so lame that it needed explaination...
For one, a sysadmin does not have to care about understand how to translate an end users business requirements into extendable and robust code.
and if i was nasty, i'd suggest that programmers do not have to care about support. But i'm not nasty, so i'll just point out that it's 11:00 Am on a sunday and i'm installing patches on a production system - just to business requirements (24x7 employee self service for a global corp).
if enough people cared, then he wouldn't have been elected.... Gore may have got 50%+ of those who voted, but he got about 35% of those eligible to vote.
The government is wise to these loopholes, which is why the law allows them to prosecute overseas companies that have assets in the US (or in a country like Australia that has certain reciprocal treaties with them). Do you really think that companies should be able to avoid all forms of taxes and regulations just by incorporating overseas? From the ZDNET article.... He also pointed out that when Australian authorities attempted to prosecute someone in the US the process was generally considered not worth the effort. "It takes so long, we have to get a court order out of Australia, then go to the US and the US has to act on them," said McKimm. "And we do find they tend to drag their feet."
In other words, it would be nice to have two way traffic *S* This isn't about governments, its about large people (or corporations) badgering and bullying little people (or corporations).
Processes are for McDonalds employees (remember section A.6.2 and say "Do you want fries with that?" if customer has only ordered a burger).
Standard Processes let you interface with management / customers / the owners of the system, in terms they understand.
Note that Processes are NOT procedures. The process defines who is repsonsible for what - a Problem Resolution process describes who takes the call, how it gets escalated, how the fix gets tested (depending on the type of problem, the system, the impact of the change etc), and how it gets implemented. In our company, these a fairly high-level, and apply in variuous degrees to applications development, network management, O/S Admin, application administration, process control,....
The procedure is how your team implement your part of the process. The nett effect is demonstarted by the Macca's analogy. One of the few (only ?) virtues of a McD burger is you know what you're getting. Management like answers / solutions they can trust.
Likewise, me and my team look after aprox 19 SAP landscapes. When a customer says "I want xxx", we either say no (and tell them why) or say yes (and tell them how long / much). this has two advantages - 1) Because we have standard procedures, we are accurate (to +/- 10%) 99% of the time. 2) Becauee we've proven ourselves, people believe us.
see Heinlein, "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress". A revolution takes place on the penal colony formerly known as the moon (who said Australia ?). The leaders are, amongst others, a sentient computer known as Mike.
With apporpriate tools and reuse libraries, coding really truly is the least important part of the Software Development Life Cycle.
I work on large scale implementations and upgrades - 12 months, '000s of man-months, multi-million $ budget etc. FWIW, my bible is The Mythical man-Month. It is less relevant, but still usefull, for smaller (say 3 months, 1/2 million labour budget) projects. Plan, Plan, and when you're sick of planning, plan some more. Both you and the customer review the plan, till you both know it off by heart.
By this time, you and the customer have written the system. Now you just have to translate it into the platform / language of their choice.
to summarise (stolen (sorry -researched- )from The Mythical man Month): 1/3 planning 1/6 coding 1/4 component testing 1/4 system test
there's nothing new about this - my projects fail when I ignore the lessons I've learnt - they work (on budget, on time, on spec) when I follow the lessons I've learnt.
There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum. Which is why they had that spring loaded thingy in the flag, to make it wave and flutter like ol' glory...
Jeez 12 months ? My line was live a week after I emailed the request to my service provider (ozemail).
Quite frankly, comparing your experience with mine, there's something odd going on... Are you on a waiting list in an area that has no ADSL capable exchange, or are you waiting for a line to be available, or are you on a double-pair, or on a RIM ?
BTW, if you don't know about it whirlpool is the ducks guts for the Australian broadband community.
me again.... On reflection, I guess what I was trying to say is that Goals can be limiting. They change, they get met then what etc. Instead, Have a look at what you value, then live your life by those values. I have no idea what and where you'll end up, but you will be happy.
I turned 41 earlier this year. I still don't know hwat I'm going to do when i grow up, but here's my two bucks worth (its aussie currency so its equivalent to 2 cents...)
Some people say work is not everything. If I sleep 8 hours a night (a luxury with 3 kids under 5), then a 40 hour working week becomes 40 / (7 * 16) == 35 % of my waking hours. That doesn't count any time commuting. So you gotta be certain that both the work and the relationships you're in at work that take up 35% + of your life are worth it.
Be prepared to change and enjoy the serendipity of life. For example, the comment about the 100 year flood rings a bell with me. I'd just quit a job with people I didn't like, that required (due to overtime and failings of public transport) a 2 hour commute (each way). I'd just started in a job that required a 1 hour drive each way, and in the 4th week in the job the floods hit.... I couldn't get home from work 2 nights in a row. The missus decided we (her, 1 child and I) should move closer to the job.... so I now live on the NSW south-coast, earn 6 figures AUD, my wife phones to tell me about the whales she's watching from our living room, and on a bad traffic day, I can get out of bed at 8 AM and be at work for a 9 AM meeting. For what its worth the work involves supporting an MVS/DB2/CICS system, and multiple UNIX and NT based ERP systems, lots of vendor, customer and user contact so that's a wide and interesting range of work.
I guess the biggie is attitude. Its a bit Zen, but what goes around comes around. As a friend of mine says "If you want something out of the favour bank, you gotta put something in to the favour bank". You get the interesting work by being known as someone who gos the extra yard, who knows how to wrap up the loose ends....
And remember, its your life, you only get one. Make sure you enjoy it.
How SAP on Oracle works: 1. one offline backup per week (if possible). This means having the DB off line (agian, only if the business allows it). 2. daily online backups. this will include any and all oracle logs from the start to th end of the backup/B>, for recover purposes. 3. seperate backups of SAPs copies of redo logs
I am not a DBA (i work in SAP Admin), but item three is the only way to guarantee up to the minute forward recovery.
And do me a favor. When the young'uns come up to you and ask your opinion on whether they need to get a degree, SAY YES. Elitist bullshit. I've done jobs that weren't even thought of when I left high-school. I've also spent thousands of dollars of money and time (not all paid for by me) on various courses that are now irrelevant to me.
better advice is to go read something like "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance", then attend the church of learning when and where it calls you.
Even better advice is to find something that you enjoy doing, and then do it. be aware of what its costing you, but also be aware of what its giving you. An example is where I live 15 minutes from work, near a beach on the south coast of NSW Australia. I could get an extra 50K per annum by working in Sydney - A 4 hour daily commute, or move back to Sydney. My house cost me (and the bank) less than 300K. I'd pay $1M plus for something similar in size location and proximity to work in Sydney.
And I'd still have to put with big city bullshit....
Slashdot Mirror
"Why do you want to mod it down? I am curious? ""
/. setup, we are in fact the end of the thread...). ...
1. The title is a clear violation of Godwin's Law (on my
2. The AC has no idea whether the application has anything to do with the US governments war effort (i.e. maybe its for an Aid Agency ?), yet
3.the AC rattles off slogans that have less meaning than those used by late night TV Advertorials.
In short, the post lacked sense, humour or technical merit. The tenuous relevance to the original question is diminsihed to nothing by point 2.
In fact the more I type, the more I feel my life slowly wasting away... 5 minutes that have gone for ever, never to return.
thanks, Magoo
i was going to mod this down, but couldn't find '-1 fuckwit' on the dropdown
I cannot begin to comprehend an organism that can be so wrong in so many ways in such little space.
...American people need to vote this year, so their minds should not dwell on 500+ unnessacery deaths.
:
to take one sentence...
They should dwell on it, and their responsibilities as Citezens of the US. If the more than 200 million citezens, of the most powerful nation-state currently in existence, ever felt squeamish about the loss of 500 lives, there would be a LOT more wars, a lot more killing and a lot more misery. Or would you rather have Saddam still murdering and starving his people ?
There's so much trouble that could have easily been solved if that energy was put to more urgent matters
in short, my answer to your first sentence
The human condition is the need to explore.
BTW, Cobol does have some columnar restrictions. Since it's based on cards, lines can't go past column 72 (or is that 71...) Procedures and other bits start in column 1.
Column 1-6 sequence numbering
column 7 - place an asterisk for a comment
column 8-11 - labels and identifications (i.e PROCEDURE DIVISION would start in column 8). Also in DATA DIVISION, this was where you had your 01 and 77 for data definitions and switches.
column 12-71 procedural statements, field names etc.
column 72 - continuation marker
column 73 - 80 sequence control
CAVEAT: my last cobol programming was over 15 years ago
one for the poms...
Any truth to the story I've heard about a new Becks beer ad ? tagline (supposedly) goes
you don't need to be Posh to swallow Becks
A particular cliche attributed to the current british monarch is "We are...." when refering to her self. i.e. "We are not amused", "We are pleased to announce.." etc.
The school is punning on this; His Royal Highness (the parent poster) not only has to pay for himself but also pay fro the extra person(s) implied in "We".
Sire,
My apologies to Your Majesty for having the temerity to suggest your joke was so lame that it needed explaination...
This is not an email virus. It is an RPC exploit.
The virus comes through tcp ports 4444 and 135, UDP port 69. FWIW, win98 and earlier don't use the RPC 'feature'.
they spent most of their time turning bits of Australia (or islands offshore) into radioactive slag
For one, a sysadmin does not have to care about understand how to translate an end users business requirements into extendable and robust code.
and if i was nasty, i'd suggest that programmers do not have to care about support. But i'm not nasty, so i'll just point out that it's 11:00 Am on a sunday and i'm installing patches on a production system - just to business requirements (24x7 employee self service for a global corp).
if enough people cared, then he wouldn't have been elected.... Gore may have got 50%+ of those who voted, but he got about 35% of those eligible to vote.
The government is wise to these loopholes, which is why the law allows them to prosecute overseas companies that have assets in the US (or in a country like Australia that has certain reciprocal treaties with them). Do you really think that companies should be able to avoid all forms of taxes and regulations just by incorporating overseas?
From the ZDNET article....
He also pointed out that when Australian authorities attempted to prosecute someone in the US the process was generally considered not worth the effort. "It takes so long, we have to get a court order out of Australia, then go to the US and the US has to act on them," said McKimm. "And we do find they tend to drag their feet."
In other words, it would be nice to have two way traffic *S* This isn't about governments, its about large people (or corporations) badgering and bullying little people (or corporations).
Processes are for McDonalds employees (remember section A.6.2 and say "Do you want fries with that?" if customer has only ordered a burger).
Standard Processes let you interface with management / customers / the owners of the system, in terms they understand.
Note that Processes are NOT procedures. The process defines who is repsonsible for what - a Problem Resolution process describes who takes the call, how it gets escalated, how the fix gets tested (depending on the type of problem, the system, the impact of the change etc), and how it gets implemented. In our company, these a fairly high-level, and apply in variuous degrees to applications development, network management, O/S Admin, application administration, process control,....
The procedure is how your team implement your part of the process. The nett effect is demonstarted by the Macca's analogy. One of the few (only ?) virtues of a McD burger is you know what you're getting. Management like answers / solutions they can trust.
Likewise, me and my team look after aprox 19 SAP landscapes. When a customer says "I want xxx", we either say no (and tell them why) or say yes (and tell them how long / much). this has two advantages -
1) Because we have standard procedures, we are accurate (to +/- 10%) 99% of the time.
2) Becauee we've proven ourselves, people believe us.
I believe the sequence went
A-bomb dropped on Hiroshima by US (Aug. 6).
USSR declares war on Japan (Aug. 8).
Nagasaki hit by A-bomb (Aug. 9).
see Heinlein, "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress". A revolution takes place on the penal colony formerly known as the moon (who said Australia ?). The leaders are, amongst others, a sentient computer known as Mike.
With apporpriate tools and reuse libraries, coding really truly is the least important part of the Software Development Life Cycle.
I work on large scale implementations and upgrades - 12 months, '000s of man-months, multi-million $ budget etc. FWIW, my bible is The Mythical man-Month. It is less relevant, but still usefull, for smaller (say 3 months, 1/2 million labour budget) projects.
Plan, Plan, and when you're sick of planning, plan some more. Both you and the customer review the plan, till you both know it off by heart.
By this time, you and the customer have written the system. Now you just have to translate it into the platform / language of their choice.
to summarise (stolen (sorry -researched- )from The Mythical man Month):
1/3 planning
1/6 coding
1/4 component testing
1/4 system test
there's nothing new about this - my projects fail when I ignore the lessons I've learnt - they work (on budget, on time, on spec) when I follow the lessons I've learnt.
Look at the Bourne Identity, the original printing of the Ludlum book was in '75.
there was a tv movie in 1988 - Richard Chamberlain is all i remember. Is all I NEED to remember to know how bad it was.
There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.
Which is why they had that spring loaded thingy in the flag, to make it wave and flutter like ol' glory...
Anyone got a tip for which horse is going to win this year?
Aussie horses have been winning NZs biggest horse race for too long.... Apart from that whine, is Brew nominated again this year ?
"Nullabor" apparently translates as "Nothing" from the local Aboriginal dialect...
It's actually latin for no trees.
Jeez 12 months ? My line was live a week after I emailed the request to my service provider (ozemail).
Quite frankly, comparing your experience with mine, there's something odd going on...
Are you on a waiting list in an area that has no ADSL capable exchange, or are you waiting for a line to be available, or are you on a double-pair, or on a RIM ?
BTW, if you don't know about it whirlpool is the ducks guts for the Australian broadband community.
me again....
On reflection, I guess what I was trying to say is that Goals can be limiting. They change, they get met then what etc.
Instead, Have a look at what you value, then live your life by those values.
I have no idea what and where you'll end up, but you will be happy.
I turned 41 earlier this year. I still don't know hwat I'm going to do when i grow up, but here's my two bucks worth (its aussie currency so its equivalent to 2 cents...)
.... I couldn't get home from work 2 nights in a row. The missus decided we (her, 1 child and I) should move closer to the job....
Some people say work is not everything. If I sleep 8 hours a night (a luxury with 3 kids under 5), then a 40 hour working week becomes 40 / (7 * 16) == 35 % of my waking hours. That doesn't count any time commuting. So you gotta be certain that both the work and the relationships you're in at work that take up 35% + of your life are worth it.
Be prepared to change and enjoy the serendipity of life. For example, the comment about the 100 year flood rings a bell with me. I'd just quit a job with people I didn't like, that required (due to overtime and failings of public transport) a 2 hour commute (each way). I'd just started in a job that required a 1 hour drive each way, and in the 4th week in the job the floods hit
so I now live on the NSW south-coast, earn 6 figures AUD, my wife phones to tell me about the whales she's watching from our living room, and on a bad traffic day, I can get out of bed at 8 AM and be at work for a 9 AM meeting. For what its worth the work involves supporting an MVS/DB2/CICS system, and multiple UNIX and NT based ERP systems, lots of vendor, customer and user contact so that's a wide and interesting range of work.
I guess the biggie is attitude. Its a bit Zen, but what goes around comes around. As a friend of mine says "If you want something out of the favour bank, you gotta put something in to the favour bank". You get the interesting work by being known as someone who gos the extra yard, who knows how to wrap up the loose ends....
And remember, its your life, you only get one.
Make sure you enjoy it.
How SAP on Oracle works:
1. one offline backup per week (if possible). This means having the DB off line (agian, only if the business allows it).
2. daily online backups. this will include any and all oracle logs from the start to th end of the backup/B>, for recover purposes.
3. seperate backups of SAPs copies of redo logs
I am not a DBA (i work in SAP Admin), but item three is the only way to guarantee up to the minute forward recovery.
"thou shalt keep thy dirty hands off children"?
Duh, do you really think that needs to be spelt out ?
Get a degree.
And do me a favor. When the young'uns come up to you and ask your opinion on whether they need to get a degree, SAY YES.
Elitist bullshit. I've done jobs that weren't even thought of when I left high-school. I've also spent thousands of dollars of money and time (not all paid for by me) on various courses that are now irrelevant to me.
better advice is to go read something like "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance", then attend the church of learning when and where it calls you.
Even better advice is to find something that you enjoy doing, and then do it. be aware of what its costing you, but also be aware of what its giving you. An example is where I live 15 minutes from work, near a beach on the south coast of NSW Australia. I could get an extra 50K per annum by working in Sydney - A 4 hour daily commute, or move back to Sydney. My house cost me (and the bank) less than 300K. I'd pay $1M plus for something similar in size location and proximity to work in Sydney.
And I'd still have to put with big city bullshit....