When I started from a home office 7 years ago, I got a high speed color laser printer (Dell 5100cn). The ability to rapidly print documents for review, etc, in full color, has been the critical productivity enabler.
The second thing is a cordless headset. If you're like me, you'll spend a lot of time on telecons, and being able to work unemcumbered (type, walk around, etc) will let you be productive and (e.g. when walking around) keep you sane while working. Of course, make sure you have the headset properly muted if you wander into the bathroom. (Made that mistake once, yuck!!!)
The other thing is Buy A Very Good Chair, since you'll be sitting in it probably a lot more than you'd sit in a drive-to/commute-to office chair. That's the mistake I made when I set the office up.
Finally, don't forget the IT basics, UPSs for everything, backup hard drives, offsite backup if you're not backing up to corporate servers, etc. I have all my networking gear on its own UPS.
That's how it comes across to me. Furthermore, wouldn't this come too close to being an illegal restraint of trade?
What's interesting is that we have 2 classes of subsidies, one from the TELCOS, and the other from the handset (including handset software) makers. Does Mr Brodman include both classes of subsidies in his proposal? How far would this go, would this also preclude 'limited time offers' or 'for the first year' discounts?
And I'll second the recommendations for H. Beam Piper and early Heinlein. Also anything by Glen Cook if you're looking for fantasy, and his "space opera" SF is also very good. Fortunately a lot of Cook's early stuff has been reprinted.
"enterprise productivity tools"? -Basic- word processing. Word processing on structured documents (something MS Word does poorly). Presentations. Spreadsheets, usually to organize structured data or as a very simple single-table database. File sharing (a-la FTP) There's lots of bloat in Microsoft Office that I don't see used in my environment. About the only useful thing in MS Word since Word 5 is Change-bars/diff-marking.
I don't personally use a pad, since I'm a full touch-typist (probably 40-50 WPM). I have friends who use it for most of their work, particularly on the road, though.
Both Apple and Google have alternative office suites that provide the necessary functionality. Your mileage may vary.
Here's an interesting article that says Microsoft (pronounced 'Ballmer') missed the boat: http://minimalmac.com/post/17758177061/microsofts-biggest-miss Tablets in general are proof that Microsoft Office is not 'required' to do useful work. So even if MS could jam Word into a tablet form-factor (e.g. memory and screen footprints), people are now realizing you don't need all that crap to write letters, reports, etc.
(As someone who once spent several months, full-time, evaluating word processors, this is not a surprise to me. MS Word is a mediocre product, in true Microsoft fashion it captured and locked in the market through sales and distribution, not through technical merit.)
Of actually knowing (or predicting) what and when the notoriously secretive Apple will release its next product. Swallow any claims not coming from 1 Infinite Loop with a Large Dose of skepticism.
And it doesn't cost any more money to keep it working. XP is tightly locked down for the few applications and few websites needed by those applications. The primary argument against staying on WinXP appear to be security issues. But if I only visit Symantec, Microsoft, Adobe and US Government sites, I suspect my risks are acceptable.
For everything else, I use MacOS, but that's of course just my opinion.
I don't ask, and I don't WANT, corporate IT in my home office infrastructure. I do my own support, because I give myself much better service than corporate IT. It starts with much more secure and less touch-labor-intensive technologies than the Microsoft-everything approach from Corporate. I have full back-ups, including offsite backups for critical data. I have secure server including VPN to the home network. I have firewalls turned on and I actually pay attention to the logs.
The normal IT approach has been either "we don't do that" or "we won't pay for it." Now my boss, when he hired me, said, "You need to be productive, and we'll buy you what makes you work." Most of the infrastructure in the home office, by the way, was purchased and maintained on my nickel (except for the color laser, a real boon for productivity particularly because they pay for the printer cartridges.)
And the only problems I've had were when I left a test account open, allowing someone to route spam through the DMZ server. Yeah, that was a user configuration error, which I caught and fixed (by both removing the account AND disabling/breaking SMTP on that machine; someone would have to dig deep to find where/how I broke SMTP configuration to reactivate email, if he were to gain access to the machine itself.)
When corporate CIOs start handing out charge numbers for employees to charge -when IT keeps them from doing their jobs-, then I'll start to believe that corporate IT has turned into a real service industry. Instead, it sure seems to me it's more of a jobs/power program for MCSEs, with no accountability for their failure to provide service to end users. I understand the need to protect and provide service to the corporation as a whole; that does not excuse treating the end user community as basically slaves to IT's view of the world.
One of the problems with new languages is that everyone starts out stupid.
I don't think that's really true. There's obviously some learning curve, but its hardly the case that programming knowledge is all (or even mostly) tied to a particular language.
Really? How long do you think it would take you to become proficient in COBOL, RPG2, Ada or LISP, if all you knew was Java and C?
One of the problems with this business is the continuing preference for the "new and shiny" at the expense of proven quality. COBOL is -very good- at a significant class of problems, and there are a lot of geezers who are very good at it.
One of the problems with new languages is that everyone starts out stupid. Think about C. How much experience do you need, beyond an understanding of K&R syntax, to be an effective C programmer?
@begin(flamebait) Frankly, I think the base topic here, the argument for new languages over improvements to existing languages, is to make everyone equally -incompetent-. Many studies show the "10x difference" between good programmers and bad programmers. Some (significant) part of that difference comes with expertise with tools including programming languages. @end(flamebait)
p.s. if you recognize above as Scribe mark-up, good for you! Do you really think Microsoft Word is an improvement over Scribe?
Basically, as long as competitors' smartphones and tablets bear no resemblance to smartphones and tablets, everything's cool. But that's just recognition that Apple has completely defined 2 new categories. It's worth noting, of course, that Palm had smartphones well before Apple, but those look -nothing like- today's Smartphones, a category basically taken over by the introduction of the iPhone.
I'm looking forward to someone/some company doing something truly original. I don't think the iPhone is the last word in "smartphones" (I hope not, although I'm on my second iPhone there are things I really don't like about it.) But so far I've seen very little that is new or truly innovative.
Why should I pay increasing amounts for channels I don't want to watch under bundling arrangements, just to get the 2 or 3 channels (and half-dozen programs) I do watch? Why am I restricted to what my particular cable provider wants to give me?
Seems to me we need to look at TV 'signals' like the Internet, and separate bandwidth providers from content providers.
So I guess it would be a big surprise to these people, or at least their agents, to know that there are actually people who live outside of The City and don't read the NY Times.
An ad opposing legislation posted in the New York Times strikes me, at least, as posturing to the media. After all, Congress is located in Washington DC. An ad in the Washington Post would be much more likely to be read by the Congressperson him/herself. If they were serious about this, the ad should have appeared in the Washington Post and probably LA Times, too.
Slashdot Mirror
LaTeX without the ugliness... Still my favorite document production system.
No, a real expert uses VI.
Nice try though.
True. To edit the makefile for Emacs when it's not resident on a new machine. :-)
basically sucks. See, for example: http://www.fiercegovernmentit.com/story/dod-cancels-jtrs-gmr-long-live-jtrs-gmr/2011-10-17
When I started from a home office 7 years ago, I got a high speed color laser printer (Dell 5100cn). The ability to rapidly print documents for review, etc, in full color, has been the critical productivity enabler.
The second thing is a cordless headset. If you're like me, you'll spend a lot of time on telecons, and being able to work unemcumbered (type, walk around, etc) will let you be productive and (e.g. when walking around) keep you sane while working. Of course, make sure you have the headset properly muted if you wander into the bathroom. (Made that mistake once, yuck!!!)
The other thing is Buy A Very Good Chair, since you'll be sitting in it probably a lot more than you'd sit in a drive-to/commute-to office chair. That's the mistake I made when I set the office up.
Finally, don't forget the IT basics, UPSs for everything, backup hard drives, offsite backup if you're not backing up to corporate servers, etc. I have all my networking gear on its own UPS.
That's how it comes across to me. Furthermore, wouldn't this come too close to being an illegal restraint of trade?
What's interesting is that we have 2 classes of subsidies, one from the TELCOS, and the other from the handset (including handset software) makers. Does Mr Brodman include both classes of subsidies in his proposal? How far would this go, would this also preclude 'limited time offers' or 'for the first year' discounts?
And I'll second the recommendations for H. Beam Piper and early Heinlein. Also anything by Glen Cook if you're looking for fantasy, and his "space opera" SF is also very good. Fortunately a lot of Cook's early stuff has been reprinted.
IANAL - but the core point is "this existed before Rumblefish existed, so Rumblefish has no claim to this as an unique piece of work."
You can use them if you choose to fight this in court to establish both "prior art" or "not the unique property of Rumblefish".
"enterprise productivity tools"? -Basic- word processing. Word processing on structured documents (something MS Word does poorly). Presentations. Spreadsheets, usually to organize structured data or as a very simple single-table database. File sharing (a-la FTP) There's lots of bloat in Microsoft Office that I don't see used in my environment. About the only useful thing in MS Word since Word 5 is Change-bars/diff-marking.
I don't personally use a pad, since I'm a full touch-typist (probably 40-50 WPM). I have friends who use it for most of their work, particularly on the road, though.
Both Apple and Google have alternative office suites that provide the necessary functionality. Your mileage may vary.
Slashdot is proof that some people can't conceive of anything outside of their own narrow existence.
Here's an interesting article that says Microsoft (pronounced 'Ballmer') missed the boat: http://minimalmac.com/post/17758177061/microsofts-biggest-miss Tablets in general are proof that Microsoft Office is not 'required' to do useful work. So even if MS could jam Word into a tablet form-factor (e.g. memory and screen footprints), people are now realizing you don't need all that crap to write letters, reports, etc.
(As someone who once spent several months, full-time, evaluating word processors, this is not a surprise to me. MS Word is a mediocre product, in true Microsoft fashion it captured and locked in the market through sales and distribution, not through technical merit.)
> "[E]vidence to sustain such dire warnings is conspicuously absent."
Guess the Wired.com authors live in a different world than I do:
http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-02-nortel-penetrated-hackers-decade.html
http://articles.latimes.com/2008/aug/17/opinion/ed-cyberwar17
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_cyberattacks_on_Estonia
http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/10/rsa-details-march-cyber-attack-blames-nation-state-for-securid-breach.ars
http://www.commandfive.com/research.html
http://www.darkreading.com/database-security/167901020/security/attacks-breaches/229700229/targeted-attacks-on-u-s-defense-contractors-fallout-from-rsa-breach.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet
I'm concerned about the response, but the threat is real.
Of actually knowing (or predicting) what and when the notoriously secretive Apple will release its next product. Swallow any claims not coming from 1 Infinite Loop with a Large Dose of skepticism.
Someone with points Mod Parent up Funny!
But I don't enter my computers in hacking contests. It's interesting how this has not manifested itself in the wild.
> ...OS X was compromised faster than Windows...
Source please? That's not my experience, nor does it match what my friends say or what I've read in the press.
And it doesn't cost any more money to keep it working. XP is tightly locked down for the few applications and few websites needed by those applications. The primary argument against staying on WinXP appear to be security issues. But if I only visit Symantec, Microsoft, Adobe and US Government sites, I suspect my risks are acceptable.
For everything else, I use MacOS, but that's of course just my opinion.
I don't ask, and I don't WANT, corporate IT in my home office infrastructure. I do my own support, because I give myself much better service than corporate IT. It starts with much more secure and less touch-labor-intensive technologies than the Microsoft-everything approach from Corporate. I have full back-ups, including offsite backups for critical data. I have secure server including VPN to the home network. I have firewalls turned on and I actually pay attention to the logs.
The normal IT approach has been either "we don't do that" or "we won't pay for it." Now my boss, when he hired me, said, "You need to be productive, and we'll buy you what makes you work." Most of the infrastructure in the home office, by the way, was purchased and maintained on my nickel (except for the color laser, a real boon for productivity particularly because they pay for the printer cartridges.)
And the only problems I've had were when I left a test account open, allowing someone to route spam through the DMZ server. Yeah, that was a user configuration error, which I caught and fixed (by both removing the account AND disabling/breaking SMTP on that machine; someone would have to dig deep to find where/how I broke SMTP configuration to reactivate email, if he were to gain access to the machine itself.)
When corporate CIOs start handing out charge numbers for employees to charge -when IT keeps them from doing their jobs-, then I'll start to believe that corporate IT has turned into a real service industry. Instead, it sure seems to me it's more of a jobs/power program for MCSEs, with no accountability for their failure to provide service to end users. I understand the need to protect and provide service to the corporation as a whole; that does not excuse treating the end user community as basically slaves to IT's view of the world.
That piece will certainly be a collector's item!
I don't think that's really true. There's obviously some learning curve, but its hardly the case that programming knowledge is all (or even mostly) tied to a particular language.
Really? How long do you think it would take you to become proficient in COBOL, RPG2, Ada or LISP, if all you knew was Java and C?
Programming peaked with COBOL and has been in a downward spiral since.
Exactly! See http://developers.slashdot.org/story/11/12/09/1533252/java-apps-have-the-most-flaws-cobol-the-least
One of the problems with this business is the continuing preference for the "new and shiny" at the expense of proven quality. COBOL is -very good- at a significant class of problems, and there are a lot of geezers who are very good at it.
One of the problems with new languages is that everyone starts out stupid. Think about C. How much experience do you need, beyond an understanding of K&R syntax, to be an effective C programmer?
@begin(flamebait)
Frankly, I think the base topic here, the argument for new languages over improvements to existing languages, is to make everyone equally -incompetent-. Many studies show the "10x difference" between good programmers and bad programmers. Some (significant) part of that difference comes with expertise with tools including programming languages.
@end(flamebait)
p.s. if you recognize above as Scribe mark-up, good for you! Do you really think Microsoft Word is an improvement over Scribe?
Basically, as long as competitors' smartphones and tablets bear no resemblance to smartphones and tablets, everything's cool.
But that's just recognition that Apple has completely defined 2 new categories. It's worth noting, of course, that Palm had smartphones well before Apple, but those look -nothing like- today's Smartphones, a category basically taken over by the introduction of the iPhone.
I'm looking forward to someone/some company doing something truly original. I don't think the iPhone is the last word in "smartphones" (I hope not, although I'm on my second iPhone there are things I really don't like about it.) But so far I've seen very little that is new or truly innovative.
Why should I pay increasing amounts for channels I don't want to watch under bundling arrangements, just to get the 2 or 3 channels (and half-dozen programs) I do watch? Why am I restricted to what my particular cable provider wants to give me?
Seems to me we need to look at TV 'signals' like the Internet, and separate bandwidth providers from content providers.
So I guess it would be a big surprise to these people, or at least their agents, to know that there are actually people who live outside of The City and don't read the NY Times.
An ad opposing legislation posted in the New York Times strikes me, at least, as posturing to the media. After all, Congress is located in Washington DC. An ad in the Washington Post would be much more likely to be read by the Congressperson him/herself. If they were serious about this, the ad should have appeared in the Washington Post and probably LA Times, too.