I still watch this movie on a regular basis. The use of singing as a time keeping device. The Candy-Bar crew. Hell, just the concept of a Vatican Secret Service is enough to make one giggle.
Your points are well taken given the data you got from my first message. But you miss the mark. Allow me to explain.
I took a few classes from my Dad, so I do know how he tought, and I know what he expected of his students and I know how hard he worked with his students to help them succeed. So he may have been (or still is) an asshole, but he really cared about his students and that they succeed. He also felt that this was information that his students needed to learn and, since the CompSci dept. at that school wasn't interested, he did it himself.
And there is no nuke-navy thing going on here. My Dad never served in any military outside of ROTC Marching Band when he was an undergrad. It wasn't any macho attitude that made him make his classes difficult. It was respect for the material and respect for what his students were going to be asked to do with thier knowledge once they graduated. Nuclear Engineering is some serious shit. Not to be taken lightly. My Dad may have been an asshole. But students graduating from his department could run circles around graduates from other schools.
Now, as I said before, I went to the same school. The CompSci department was horrible. I know of very few CompScis from that school that learned anything in their classes. Most learned on their own or brought their knowledge with them. And I know even fewer of my friends from school that graduated with a CompSci degree that are still working as CompScis. The profs spent most of their time teaching how to format your code so that it prints nicely and how to use canned routines and other such sillyness.
To give you an example, there was a Numerical Analysis course that was required for most engineers. The did about 5 programs over the course, and it was required that the code be done in FORTRAN using LINPACK. It was trivial. I don't think any of the code that I wrote for that class was longer than 50 lines of FORTRAN. Didn't learn a thing. IMHO, there is no real benefit to doing something like this. It's especially not a semester long course. You just get your 'A' and go on.
And I'm sorry; Gear method is about a 3 day coding project, tops. The freaking pseudo-code is in the textbook fer cryin' out loud. It's not like you are inventing a wheel, just implementing one. If it were a graduate level project, I would assume that there was some research going on there, something interesting or new, not a simple implementation. I agree with you there. But that's not what was implied in the argument I had with the prof. He said that any implementation of the Gear method would be a semester long grad project. And to this day I disagree. Especially since a dozen or so undergrads a year did it in my Dad's course.
My father just retired as a prof in Nuke Engineering . There is just an incredible amount of code that is used in this field, and I have to concur. It's all done from scratch because you can tweak the hell out of it and get the result you want just that much faster.
He taught a course that was called something like 'Applications of Numerical Analysis in Nuclear Reactor Sheild Theory' or something like that. In it, every two weeks, the students coded a different major numerical method that was commonly used in Nuclear Engineering (BTW, the CompSci deptartment at the same school thought that just one of the two-week assignments in this undergrad Nuke class was a semester long graduate level project for a CompSci student. Whatever.).
Anyway, the registrar thought the class name was too long and told my Dad to change the name. So he asked his class what would be a good name. They discussed, and voted, and the new proposed name was sent to the registrar. The name change was denied.
The proposed name? "To Hell and Back".
I think they ended up changing the name to "Reactor Physics II". BORING!
The University of Missouri-Rolla (GO MINERS!) had a cheer that we'd yell at the end of every sports game we lost (and we lost a lot; something like 3 wins in football over the four years I was in marching band):
That's alright! That's OK! You're gonna work for us someday!
And since the UMR Band usually sat behind the opposing teams' bench, we often got some kind of 'Oh yeah? Says who!?' response.
Don't want them to save stuff to their local drives?
Don't let them.
When machines are replaced (either because of disaster or because of planned replacements), reduce the size of their primary partition to 512MB or something else ridiculously small, just enough to hold the OS and any other required business apps.
Then give them a place on the server to put stuff. As someone else already suggested, make their My Documents folders and other such stuff exist on the server.
Connectivity there sucks. Connections can be down for many days at a time and no one there thinks anything strange is going on. Getting any kind of response from the local phone companies can be nightmarish at best. And assuming you partner is large, and they have a dedicated line to the US, then be prepared for a VERY small slice of the bandwidth pie. We're talking 14.4k equivalent.
Be prepared to document more than you've ever documented before. You can't 'wave your hands' and get the point across. You have to do rather formal and complete documentation for any portion of the project that you would ever want them to do. You can't do small-group programming, like when your programming partners are staring over your shoulder, when the rest of your team is 10.5 timezones away. This may seem obvious, but a lot of folks miss this one.
Nail down your code/source/project management tools, and choose ones that can work in a multi-master (when more than one server can maintain data for the same project) or disconnected mode (see note above about connectivity).
I don't know if this is cultural or just a bad experience, but it seemed to me that there was no reguard for schedule or deadlines. Trying to get folks to actually attempt to meet a deadline was difficult most of the time. We had to go to India and sit on some of the people to get anything out of them. What's the ROI on that?
English is one of the official languages of India, but you'll still have language issues. Usually not too bad, but can be humorous at times. I remember once a sever was taken down for 'upgradation'. If you are having them document any of their own code, have it proofread by a US tech writer.
Be prepared to go nocturnal at times. There are times on any project when all folks have to be available at the same time. You will have to match your schedule to theirs.
Isn't this just a re-hashing of the Ergo Brick? It was a 486/Pentium that was just a brick with ports. Sold with the idea that you could afford a second monitor, kbd and mouse at home, and you would just lug this thing back and forth. Was used in some secure environments because you could pop the whole machine in a safe at the end of the day.
Point is, this really isn't a new idea. Not that it's a bad one, but it's definately not original.
My experience (I've run Linux on x86(x=>3), m68k, sparc, and alpha, and am toying with pa-risc and powerpc. I've also done tests with OpenBSD, NetBSD and NT on the above platforms where applicable.) is that, in general, RISC archetectures will just get slower under heavy load, and that CISC arch's will eventually hit a wall and die.
So, your experience is correct. But it may not be the software. It's often the hardware. Of course, YMMV.
In my experience, most non-techies are just fine with cvsweb and cvs, even the command-line version. Teach some classes. The real problem is word/excel/powerpoint/etc. The binary file formats stink for any doc control system. Diff's are nearly impossible to do, so things become really bloated really fast.
If your boss is serious, then use a different system for your docs, something that uses and xml or other tag-based file format for the on-disk storage. HTML is a really nice format for documentation, as is LaTeX (via one of the LaTeX based word processors). Even Word with the Word to HTML converter would be better than native Word.
Ok, first, let me say I'm a father and I was also in the position that Sean was in as a kid. It got so bad, that I would tank tests and homework assignments so that I wouldn't blow the curve for the rest of the class(Not a suggested solution BTW. That tends to create it's own lovely brand of psychological baggage.)
I stuck through H.S., got my lumps, and went to college. College was the best thing that ever happened to me. I was finally around people, who, for the most part, were there because they wanted to learn, not because the law said they had to be there. Those that wanted to drink and party and belittle the educational environment didn't last long. My only reget is that I didn't start college sooner.
Fast forward a few years. I had a co-worker with a son that was having similar problems. She wanted to be sure that her son was not in a bad situation. I had met the boy a few times and he seemed unnaturally reserved, almost depressed (IANAPsyc). I told her about my experiences with H.S. and college and suggested she send her son to the local Junior College that fall. She did, he has, and now he is happy. I understand he is getting decent grades, so his lack of two years of H.S. have not slowed him down.
My point in all this is that this @$%$#^ school may have done your son a favor. Get him out of the bad situation and get him into one that has a chance to be positive. Most colleges will take a student on some kind of probational status even if they have no deploma, or try for a GED. Nobody cares if you don't have a H.S. diploma if you have a B.S or a B.A. in some field. Or, if your son is talented with something that is marketable now, have him get a job if he wants. One of the best IT folks I've had the pleasure to work with is currently 18 years old and never went to H.S.
Another thing you need to do is make your son part of the solution. I don't know you, so this may be obvious to you, so no insult intended. After my sophmore year, my parents asked me if I really wanted to finish H.S. If not, then I could start college that fall. I decided to continue with H.S. I've regretted that decision, but it was my decision, or at least one in which I had some input.
I was working at a large company in their web development group. They had a small server farm that the web group used for testing new stuff and for new development. I was not really in charge of the farm, but people would always come and bug me when they needed help with it. The servers were almost entirely NT.
SysInternals has this really spiffy NT screensaver that looks like the WinNT BSOD, along with a fake reboot, which will then go into a fake disk check, which finds fake errors, and repeats. So, the night before, I wrote a little script that made the BSOD screensaver the default on all of the servers.
The next morning, people kept coming to my cube and...
PERSON: All the servers crashed!!!!
ME: Really? (clickity clickity) I can still ping them. Are you sure they're dead?
PERSON: They look dead. I'll go look again.
Minutes later...
PERSON: Really! All of them! BSOD!
ME: ROFL
Compaq made one of these a while back, around 1995 or so.
I hope they got 'it' right, though. I fear this thingie will suffer from the 'El Camino' effect. In trying to be both a car and a truck, or in this case, a notebook and a tablet, it fails at doing either well enough, so it becomes neither.
Neat idea, though...
What we need is error correction!
on
eLection '04
·
· Score: 1
To me, at least, punch cards are not all that bad. They are simple, and to ensure an accurate vote, simplicity is paramount. All this talk about smartcards and smartbuttons and smartbeltbuckles is silly to me. It will just complicate things. Remember, there are still people out there who have never even owned a credit card, let alone used and ATM or other such electronic system.
So, to me, what we need is error correction. Some way of having the vote confirmed as being countable. Either the voter has the ability to run the card through a machine which shows the person who the punchcard says they voted for, and then they have the option to go and get a new ballot if they don't like it. This could also check for 'double punched' ballots, so people have a chance to fix it.
This would at least solve the most glaring issues of this whole butterfly ballot thing. It would also fix the problem of incorrectly filled out ballots.
If you have gotten off your butt to go to the polls and vote, it should count. Period. It should be the job of the election officials to make sure that your vote counts. Currently, they are doing a lousy job. And adding something like this could be so simple. It's a shame it isn't yet available.
Point out the benefits of a legally licensed, preinstalled operating system. Customers have the original CD so they can reload the software. They also have a manual for everyday troubleshooting, and a GPL/BSD style license proves the software is legal. In short, protect your customer and your good name. Sell your PCs fully equipped with legally licensed operating systems preinstalled. Otherwise, who knows what you're leaving your customers-and yourself-open to?
Think about it; what self respecting cracker would use NT for an attack of this magnitude? After the NT box is compromised, and the attack deamon has been installed, you can't very well take down a major Internet site when half of your attackers are GPF'ing, BSOD'ing, or just rebooting every hour for 'recommended maintenance'?
It's been a while since I delt with Solaris licensing, but doesn't Sun charge extra for the development tools? Someone who is more up to speed please comment on this...
Slashdot Mirror
I still watch this movie on a regular basis. The use of singing as a time keeping device. The Candy-Bar crew. Hell, just the concept of a Vatican Secret Service is enough to make one giggle.
Bunnie! Ball Ball!
Your points are well taken given the data you got from my first message. But you miss the mark. Allow me to explain.
I took a few classes from my Dad, so I do know how he tought, and I know what he expected of his students and I know how hard he worked with his students to help them succeed. So he may have been (or still is) an asshole, but he really cared about his students and that they succeed. He also felt that this was information that his students needed to learn and, since the CompSci dept. at that school wasn't interested, he did it himself.
And there is no nuke-navy thing going on here. My Dad never served in any military outside of ROTC Marching Band when he was an undergrad. It wasn't any macho attitude that made him make his classes difficult. It was respect for the material and respect for what his students were going to be asked to do with thier knowledge once they graduated. Nuclear Engineering is some serious shit. Not to be taken lightly. My Dad may have been an asshole. But students graduating from his department could run circles around graduates from other schools.
Now, as I said before, I went to the same school. The CompSci department was horrible. I know of very few CompScis from that school that learned anything in their classes. Most learned on their own or brought their knowledge with them. And I know even fewer of my friends from school that graduated with a CompSci degree that are still working as CompScis. The profs spent most of their time teaching how to format your code so that it prints nicely and how to use canned routines and other such sillyness.
To give you an example, there was a Numerical Analysis course that was required for most engineers. The did about 5 programs over the course, and it was required that the code be done in FORTRAN using LINPACK. It was trivial. I don't think any of the code that I wrote for that class was longer than 50 lines of FORTRAN. Didn't learn a thing. IMHO, there is no real benefit to doing something like this. It's especially not a semester long course. You just get your 'A' and go on.
And I'm sorry; Gear method is about a 3 day coding project, tops. The freaking pseudo-code is in the textbook fer cryin' out loud. It's not like you are inventing a wheel, just implementing one. If it were a graduate level project, I would assume that there was some research going on there, something interesting or new, not a simple implementation. I agree with you there. But that's not what was implied in the argument I had with the prof. He said that any implementation of the Gear method would be a semester long grad project. And to this day I disagree. Especially since a dozen or so undergrads a year did it in my Dad's course.
My father just retired as a prof in Nuke Engineering . There is just an incredible amount of code that is used in this field, and I have to concur. It's all done from scratch because you can tweak the hell out of it and get the result you want just that much faster.
He taught a course that was called something like 'Applications of Numerical Analysis in Nuclear Reactor Sheild Theory' or something like that. In it, every two weeks, the students coded a different major numerical method that was commonly used in Nuclear Engineering (BTW, the CompSci deptartment at the same school thought that just one of the two-week assignments in this undergrad Nuke class was a semester long graduate level project for a CompSci student. Whatever.).
Anyway, the registrar thought the class name was too long and told my Dad to change the name. So he asked his class what would be a good name. They discussed, and voted, and the new proposed name was sent to the registrar. The name change was denied.
The proposed name? "To Hell and Back".
I think they ended up changing the name to "Reactor Physics II". BORING!
The University of Missouri-Rolla (GO MINERS!) had a cheer that we'd yell at the end of every sports game we lost (and we lost a lot; something like 3 wins in football over the four years I was in marching band):
That's alright!
That's OK!
You're gonna work for us someday!
And since the UMR Band usually sat behind the opposing teams' bench, we often got some kind of 'Oh yeah? Says who!?' response.
Don't count those Studebakers short. Have you ever tried to get laid in a Ferrari or a Porsche? Personally, I'm just not that much of a contortionist.
Am I the only one who read this and thought that Apple was releasing a special version of their OS for Asian markets?
Really, I think that Peculiar, MO may be most appropriate...
Doesn't anyone here play Command and Conquer?
Oh, that's easy. Martha Stewart.
I'll just post a link on /. and burn down your web server....
Don't let them.
When machines are replaced (either because of disaster or because of planned replacements), reduce the size of their primary partition to 512MB or something else ridiculously small, just enough to hold the OS and any other required business apps.
Then give them a place on the server to put stuff. As someone else already suggested, make their My Documents folders and other such stuff exist on the server.
You mean it's over? Done? No more X-Files?!?
Damnit! And in the subject, too! Right on the bloddy front page even!
Why'd you have to tell me that?!?!?!?!
Connectivity there sucks. Connections can be down for many days at a time and no one there thinks anything strange is going on. Getting any kind of response from the local phone companies can be nightmarish at best. And assuming you partner is large, and they have a dedicated line to the US, then be prepared for a VERY small slice of the bandwidth pie. We're talking 14.4k equivalent.
Be prepared to document more than you've ever documented before. You can't 'wave your hands' and get the point across. You have to do rather formal and complete documentation for any portion of the project that you would ever want them to do. You can't do small-group programming, like when your programming partners are staring over your shoulder, when the rest of your team is 10.5 timezones away. This may seem obvious, but a lot of folks miss this one.
Nail down your code/source/project management tools, and choose ones that can work in a multi-master (when more than one server can maintain data for the same project) or disconnected mode (see note above about connectivity).
I don't know if this is cultural or just a bad experience, but it seemed to me that there was no reguard for schedule or deadlines. Trying to get folks to actually attempt to meet a deadline was difficult most of the time. We had to go to India and sit on some of the people to get anything out of them. What's the ROI on that?
English is one of the official languages of India, but you'll still have language issues. Usually not too bad, but can be humorous at times. I remember once a sever was taken down for 'upgradation'. If you are having them document any of their own code, have it proofread by a US tech writer.
Be prepared to go nocturnal at times. There are times on any project when all folks have to be available at the same time. You will have to match your schedule to theirs.
Good luck.
But do they come with the cool sound effects like Col. Steve Austin?
Do-to-to-to-to-to-to-to-to-to-to-to....
Isn't this just a re-hashing of the Ergo Brick? It was a 486/Pentium that was just a brick with ports. Sold with the idea that you could afford a second monitor, kbd and mouse at home, and you would just lug this thing back and forth. Was used in some secure environments because you could pop the whole machine in a safe at the end of the day.
Point is, this really isn't a new idea. Not that it's a bad one, but it's definately not original.
is a sign pointing at the Earth stating 'You are here.'
My experience (I've run Linux on x86(x=>3), m68k, sparc, and alpha, and am toying with pa-risc and powerpc. I've also done tests with OpenBSD, NetBSD and NT on the above platforms where applicable.) is that, in general, RISC archetectures will just get slower under heavy load, and that CISC arch's will eventually hit a wall and die.
So, your experience is correct. But it may not be the software. It's often the hardware. Of course, YMMV.
In my experience, most non-techies are just fine with cvsweb and cvs, even the command-line version. Teach some classes. The real problem is word/excel/powerpoint/etc. The binary file formats stink for any doc control system. Diff's are nearly impossible to do, so things become really bloated really fast.
If your boss is serious, then use a different system for your docs, something that uses and xml or other tag-based file format for the on-disk storage. HTML is a really nice format for documentation, as is LaTeX (via one of the LaTeX based word processors). Even Word with the Word to HTML converter would be better than native Word.
Ok, first, let me say I'm a father and I was also in the position that Sean was in as a kid. It got so bad, that I would tank tests and homework assignments so that I wouldn't blow the curve for the rest of the class(Not a suggested solution BTW. That tends to create it's own lovely brand of psychological baggage.)
I stuck through H.S., got my lumps, and went to college. College was the best thing that ever happened to me. I was finally around people, who, for the most part, were there because they wanted to learn, not because the law said they had to be there. Those that wanted to drink and party and belittle the educational environment didn't last long. My only reget is that I didn't start college sooner.
Fast forward a few years. I had a co-worker with a son that was having similar problems. She wanted to be sure that her son was not in a bad situation. I had met the boy a few times and he seemed unnaturally reserved, almost depressed (IANAPsyc). I told her about my experiences with H.S. and college and suggested she send her son to the local Junior College that fall. She did, he has, and now he is happy. I understand he is getting decent grades, so his lack of two years of H.S. have not slowed him down.
My point in all this is that this @$%$#^ school may have done your son a favor. Get him out of the bad situation and get him into one that has a chance to be positive. Most colleges will take a student on some kind of probational status even if they have no deploma, or try for a GED. Nobody cares if you don't have a H.S. diploma if you have a B.S or a B.A. in some field. Or, if your son is talented with something that is marketable now, have him get a job if he wants. One of the best IT folks I've had the pleasure to work with is currently 18 years old and never went to H.S.
Another thing you need to do is make your son part of the solution. I don't know you, so this may be obvious to you, so no insult intended. After my sophmore year, my parents asked me if I really wanted to finish H.S. If not, then I could start college that fall. I decided to continue with H.S. I've regretted that decision, but it was my decision, or at least one in which I had some input.
Best of luck to you.
I did this one last year.
I was working at a large company in their web development group. They had a small server farm that the web group used for testing new stuff and for new development. I was not really in charge of the farm, but people would always come and bug me when they needed help with it. The servers were almost entirely NT.
SysInternals has this really spiffy NT screensaver that looks like the WinNT BSOD, along with a fake reboot, which will then go into a fake disk check, which finds fake errors, and repeats. So, the night before, I wrote a little script that made the BSOD screensaver the default on all of the servers.
The next morning, people kept coming to my cube and...
PERSON: All the servers crashed!!!!
ME: Really? (clickity clickity) I can still ping them. Are you sure they're dead?
PERSON: They look dead. I'll go look again.
Minutes later...
PERSON: Really! All of them! BSOD!
ME: ROFL
I caught 3 different people that morning.
Compaq made one of these a while back, around 1995 or so.
I hope they got 'it' right, though. I fear this thingie will suffer from the 'El Camino' effect. In trying to be both a car and a truck, or in this case, a notebook and a tablet, it fails at doing either well enough, so it becomes neither.
Neat idea, though...
So, to me, what we need is error correction. Some way of having the vote confirmed as being countable. Either the voter has the ability to run the card through a machine which shows the person who the punchcard says they voted for, and then they have the option to go and get a new ballot if they don't like it. This could also check for 'double punched' ballots, so people have a chance to fix it.
This would at least solve the most glaring issues of this whole butterfly ballot thing. It would also fix the problem of incorrectly filled out ballots.
If you have gotten off your butt to go to the polls and vote, it should count. Period. It should be the job of the election officials to make sure that your vote counts. Currently, they are doing a lousy job. And adding something like this could be so simple. It's a shame it isn't yet available.
Ok, here's my edit:
Point out the benefits of a legally licensed, preinstalled operating system. Customers have the original CD so they can reload the software. They also have a manual for everyday troubleshooting, and a GPL/BSD style license proves the software is legal. In short, protect your customer and your good name. Sell your PCs fully equipped with legally licensed operating systems preinstalled. Otherwise, who knows what you're leaving your customers-and yourself-open to?
Ah, much better...
Think about it; what self respecting cracker would use NT for an attack of this magnitude? After the NT box is compromised, and the attack deamon has been installed, you can't very well take down a major Internet site when half of your attackers are GPF'ing, BSOD'ing, or just rebooting every hour for 'recommended maintenance'?