The idea that every business really needs to do basic tasks like payroll and accounting differently than every other business is a foolish one.
The underlying problem with implementing these systems is not lack of software flexibility, it's the fact that companies fail to adapt their business processes to the software. They want to do things their way, and are convinced that their way of doing things is the best way. That may be the case in rare instances, but then don't implement a standardized ERP solution, and don't cry when doing things in a non-standard manor ends up being very expensive.
You might ask why PeopleSoft or Oracle think that companies should do things the way PeopleSoft and Oracle want them to. Because for the most part it will work. If you just take what the vendor delivers and try to adapt your business process to the software, it will work, and usually very well. Politically though this may be very difficult.
I worked at a company that had effectively hundreds of different benefits plans, because they wanted to be 'employee focused'. They'd spend hundreds of thousands customizing the PeopleSoft benefits system so that they could do a specialized benefits payment calculation that resulted in a 10 cent difference from the standard benefit plan. The company could very easily have simplified their benefits offerings and used the delivered system, and provided all of the flexibility employees needed. But such a decision was politically untenable, as the employees (and plan administrators) had grown to cherish the baroque intracacies of the plan.
Building your own in-house system will be just as expensive, if not more so, if your company fails to standardized and simplify it's business processes.
Re:In the land of empty tanks
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 1
He seems to think that as a Windows installation ages, the registry accumulates cruft that eventually makes the system unusable.
The presence of unused registry entries may take up disk space, and slightly slow registry lookups, but it's not going to significantly impact system performance.
I've got systems that have been running on the same windows installation for over 4 years, with plenty of installation/de-installation.
More than likely this guys had a host explorer extensions or system tray applets that he forgot about. The important thing is to vigilantly clear out old services and auto-run entries.
"autoruns", available free at sysinternals.com, will show you every piece of crap that runs automatically when you login. You can use autoruns to delete the entry, or to figure out what programs to de-install. I've also had good success using this tool to whack mal/spyware.
You can also audit your services. Sort the service list by everything that in a "running" status, and stop/disable those services that you know you no longer need.
In my experience, it's the Windows users who don't know what they are doing that are always telling me how they had to "wipe their system and reinstall windows". I've only once met a system that I couldn't repair (a failed Windows XP upgrade).
I am 32. Doubt I am old enough to be your dad. I read Mossberg all the time. I happen to like the WSJ.
His influence on me is about the same as that of most tech journalists, close to none. But this is because I tend to like to evaluate things myself. But Mossberg is in fact one of the best tech journalists out there. I'd recommend him to young and old alike. If you don't have time to evaluate gadgets and software yourself, Mossberg won't steer you wrong.
Actually, every one of those is a valid reason not to use foreign key constraints.
I work with very large, commercially successful applications that code all constraints in the application layer. It works, works well, and allows you a lot more leeway when creating processes that do mass updates and inserts.
Autoruns from sysinternals is about all you need to find and track down most viruses and spyware. When launched it shows every registry entry and folder that a program can use to launch itself at boot or login. If it's not in this list, and you didn't launch it yourself, it's not running on your computer. You can use autoruns to launch regedit and remove the offending entries.
It does take a bit of general widnows knowledge to know what entries should be in there, and what shouldn't, but any idiot can tell that c:\4545$5-ee.exe shouldn't be running at login.
The only thing autoruns can't see is all the crap that get's installed as IE browser extensions. You can either disable extensions in IE, or use firefox.
We have this problem in our datacenters at times. Projects end or people don't need the servers anymore and don't RTS them. Time comes when theres a problem or we need to know who owns a server. When nobody fesses up we just shut it off till somebody screams.
So you let people put crap into your datacenter without getting contact, and backup contact information? One of a datacenter's primary functions should be to keep a complete hardware inventory up to date and accurate.
Astronomers also use a technique called "binning". Adjacent sensor elements are combined to make one pixel. Resolution is reduced but noise/sensetivity is improved. This technique is not possible with the Bayer filter arrangement used in virtually all digital cameras.
If you are referring to having the camera itself gang together picture elements to reduce noise, you are certainly correct, I know of no digicam that does that. But you can certainly obtain a similar result shooting at the highest resolution, then downsampling the image. This will clean up a noisy pic significantly - though no doubt less efficiently than if the sensor did it "in hardware".
Ignore the frequency of email. If you are going to go digging into the details of your subscriber's emails, perform a one way hash on all of the recipient addresses and simply count the number of unique recipients in the last month (storing only the hash ensures privacy). More than 1000 - spammer. No spammer could make much money spamming less than 1000 people.
Granted, this is going to add some processing and storage overhead, but it could be done offline, and the statistics gathered used to suspend accounts once a day.
The problem with radioactive waste is that its half-life is in the tens of thousands of years. We don't know who's going to be blowing who up even this time next year.
Very little of the waste produced by power plants has this sort of a half life. Even so, the less radioactive a substance, the longer the half-life. Those elements that do lasts tens of thousands of years simply aren't producing that much radiation.
Highly radioactive substances, on the other hand, have shorter half lives, and aren't much of a worry after a few decades.
I don't know if you have EVER use an enterprise applicaiton before.
No, you don't know. I have. I've worked quite extensively on an ERP application called PeopleSoft. It locates all of it's business logic in the middle tier. The SQL it produces is very database agnostic and will run with minor modification on most database platforms.
Even if it IS just select/inserts/deletes for basic GL/AP/AR applications you are talking about people, systems and components requiring gigs to terrabytes of data and hundreds if not THOUSANDS of concurrent users.
Yes, and basic SQL is more than sufficient to support this.
MySQL can't handle flash back transactions, doesn't support load balancing, hot site, and paralell or clustered transactions. I need all of these to support an enterprise environment!
Who said anything about MySQL, I believe the article was about Postgres. Regardless, or production AP/GL application supports hundreds of concurrent users without any of these features (at least not in the database layer) - so you clearly don't need them to support an enterprise environment.
oh well. You have to remember that big business is alot different than hosting a small website or cddb database on your average linux pc:)
Thanks for the lesson. I'll have to leave now because I have a production PeopleSoft issue to troubleshoot on our 10 CPU database server.
But it requires Oracle. Huh. An Open source product that requires the purchase of a proprietary software product. Kinda defeats the purpose. No?
Personally though I don't understand why application developers use a database for anything other than storage. If all you are doing is simple inserts, selects, updates and deletes it should be very easy, if not trivial to make the application database independent.
Stored procs, triggers, etc, are evil as they spread your application logic all over the place and there are no standards for how they are implemented by different vendors. It's hard enough to find a relatively standard subset of SQL semantics.
-josh
Re:Batteries really, really, really suck. For now.
on
The End of the Oil Age
·
· Score: 1
Hydrogen is 39kwH/kg. Notice the "k" in the second one? Yes, it's roughly a thousand times more energy-dense than a lead-acid battery*.
So what volume exactly does a kilogram of hydrogen occupy? Exactly. You need a big, heavy assed pressure take to store an appreciable amount of it. Just like you need a big heavy-assed battery to store an appreciable amount of electrons. Comparing the weight of the storage medium of one technology, to the weight of the energy carrier of a different technology makes no sense.
In reality it comes down to how much weight and volume is required to store, convert and use the energy in an autonomous vehicle. When you include the weight and volume of the pressure tank and fuel cells, the weight of batteries is not that bad in comparison.
- As many people have pointed out, Apple has indeed written software for the PC, not a lot, but some. Brain fart on my part. Quicktime is the obvious one. Some people suggested Filemaker pro - the company that makes it is a subsidiary of Apple, so I imagine that counts.
- iTunes does not, repeat does not, leave your music where it was when you import it. It re-arranges song locations based on Author - not too big a deal unless you have a lot of compilations. A friend of my found his compliation CDs split into multiple directories based on author, and then album. I don't have many compilations, so this is not an issue for me. There is no obvious way of getting the files back together in the same directories. Strangely, when you rip a compilation CD using iTunes, it puts it into a 'Compilations' directory, storing all of the tracks together. Not sure why the import functionality can't do the same thing.
- Previews on iTMS are 30 seconds, not 20 seconds.
- DVD burning is supposed to work on Windows according to Apple.
- Many people seemed to find the performance of iTunes much less acceptable than I did. My impressions of performance may be a bit skewed, as I have a dual processor box with a lot of memory and a fast harddrive. A friend of mine just installed it on a newer uniprocessor Dell, and it seemed to perform well. YMMV.
I can clearly hear the morse code beeps. With some head phones (if I knew morse code) - I could decode this using only the world's most powerful real-time signal processing and pattern recognition device - the human brain.
Just write your own web server, in whatever language. You will become intimately familiar with the HTTP protocol. That is if you implement form processing, cookies, and multi-part encodings and such.
Slashdot Mirror
The idea that every business really needs to do basic tasks like payroll and accounting differently than every other business is a foolish one.
The underlying problem with implementing these systems is not lack of software flexibility, it's the fact that companies fail to adapt their business processes to the software. They want to do things their way, and are convinced that their way of doing things is the best way. That may be the case in rare instances, but then don't implement a standardized ERP solution, and don't cry when doing things in a non-standard manor ends up being very expensive.
You might ask why PeopleSoft or Oracle think that companies should do things the way PeopleSoft and Oracle want them to. Because for the most part it will work. If you just take what the vendor delivers and try to adapt your business process to the software, it will work, and usually very well. Politically though this may be very difficult.
I worked at a company that had effectively hundreds of different benefits plans, because they wanted to be 'employee focused'. They'd spend hundreds of thousands customizing the PeopleSoft benefits system so that they could do a specialized benefits payment calculation that resulted in a 10 cent difference from the standard benefit plan. The company could very easily have simplified their benefits offerings and used the delivered system, and provided all of the flexibility employees needed. But such a decision was politically untenable, as the employees (and plan administrators) had grown to cherish the baroque intracacies of the plan.
Building your own in-house system will be just as expensive, if not more so, if your company fails to standardized and simplify it's business processes.
Mmmmmm... Gasoline fed beef
Read the rest of the stories on this site. It's obvious it's somehow been hijacked.
He seems to think that as a Windows installation ages, the registry accumulates cruft that eventually makes the system unusable.
The presence of unused registry entries may take up disk space, and slightly slow registry lookups, but it's not going to significantly impact system performance.
I've got systems that have been running on the same windows installation for over 4 years, with plenty of installation/de-installation.
More than likely this guys had a host explorer extensions or system tray applets that he forgot about. The important thing is to vigilantly clear out old services and auto-run entries.
"autoruns", available free at sysinternals.com, will show you every piece of crap that runs automatically when you login. You can use autoruns to delete the entry, or to figure out what programs to de-install. I've also had good success using this tool to whack mal/spyware.
You can also audit your services. Sort the service list by everything that in a "running" status, and stop/disable those services that you know you no longer need.
In my experience, it's the Windows users who don't know what they are doing that are always telling me how they had to "wipe their system and reinstall windows". I've only once met a system that I couldn't repair (a failed Windows XP upgrade).
I am 32. Doubt I am old enough to be your dad. I read Mossberg all the time. I happen to like the WSJ.
His influence on me is about the same as that of most tech journalists, close to none. But this is because I tend to like to evaluate things myself. But Mossberg is in fact one of the best tech journalists out there. I'd recommend him to young and old alike. If you don't have time to evaluate gadgets and software yourself, Mossberg won't steer you wrong.
Actually, every one of those is a valid reason not to use foreign key constraints.
I work with very large, commercially successful applications that code all constraints in the application layer. It works, works well, and allows you a lot more leeway when creating processes that do mass updates and inserts.
-josh
Autoruns from sysinternals is about all you need to find and track down most viruses and spyware. When launched it shows every registry entry and folder that a program can use to launch itself at boot or login. If it's not in this list, and you didn't launch it yourself, it's not running on your computer. You can use autoruns to launch regedit and remove the offending entries.
It does take a bit of general widnows knowledge to know what entries should be in there, and what shouldn't, but any idiot can tell that c:\4545$5-ee.exe shouldn't be running at login.
The only thing autoruns can't see is all the crap that get's installed as IE browser extensions. You can either disable extensions in IE, or use firefox.
Hmmm, or you could just beam the energy back down to the surface of the planet and leave fusion to the sun.
-josh
I know a lot of people complained about the price, but given the fact that they've now sold out, Apple would have been stupid to set a lower price.
The onion is rarely this prescient: http://www.theonion.com/onion3123/hawkingexo.html
This is way off, you've somehow killed the little red, white, and blue flag on the arm.
We have this problem in our datacenters at times. Projects end or people don't need the servers anymore and don't RTS them. Time comes when theres a problem or we need to know who owns a server. When nobody fesses up we just shut it off till somebody screams.
So you let people put crap into your datacenter without getting contact, and backup contact information? One of a datacenter's primary functions should be to keep a complete hardware inventory up to date and accurate.
-josh
Astronomers also use a technique called "binning". Adjacent sensor elements are combined to make one pixel. Resolution is reduced but noise/sensetivity is improved. This technique is not possible with the Bayer filter arrangement used in virtually all digital cameras.
If you are referring to having the camera itself gang together picture elements to reduce noise, you are certainly correct, I know of no digicam that does that. But you can certainly obtain a similar result shooting at the highest resolution, then downsampling the image. This will clean up a noisy pic significantly - though no doubt less efficiently than if the sensor did it "in hardware".
-josh
Ignore the frequency of email. If you are going to go digging into the details of your subscriber's emails, perform a one way hash on all of the recipient addresses and simply count the number of unique recipients in the last month (storing only the hash ensures privacy). More than 1000 - spammer. No spammer could make much money spamming less than 1000 people.
Granted, this is going to add some processing and storage overhead, but it could be done offline, and the statistics gathered used to suspend accounts once a day.
-josh
I wouldn't classify U235 as highly radioactive.
If something takes 700 million years for half of it's atoms to decay, there is not much of it decaying at any one time.
-josh
The problem with radioactive waste is that its half-life is in the tens of thousands of years.
We don't know who's going to be blowing who up even this time next year.
Very little of the waste produced by power plants has this sort of a half life. Even so, the less radioactive a substance, the longer the half-life. Those elements that do lasts tens of thousands of years simply aren't producing that much radiation.
Highly radioactive substances, on the other hand, have shorter half lives, and aren't much of a worry after a few decades.
-josh
I don't know if you have EVER use an enterprise applicaiton before.
:)
No, you don't know. I have. I've worked quite extensively on an ERP application called PeopleSoft. It locates all of it's business logic in the middle tier. The SQL it produces is very database agnostic and will run with minor modification on most database platforms.
Even if it IS just select/inserts/deletes for basic GL/AP/AR applications you are talking about people, systems and components requiring gigs to terrabytes of data and hundreds if not THOUSANDS of concurrent users.
Yes, and basic SQL is more than sufficient to support this.
MySQL can't handle flash back transactions, doesn't support load balancing, hot site, and paralell or clustered transactions. I need all of these to support an enterprise environment!
Who said anything about MySQL, I believe the article was about Postgres. Regardless, or production AP/GL application supports hundreds of concurrent users without any of these features (at least not in the database layer) - so you clearly don't need them to support an enterprise environment.
oh well. You have to remember that big business is alot different than hosting a small website or cddb database on your average linux pc
Thanks for the lesson. I'll have to leave now because I have a production PeopleSoft issue to troubleshoot on our 10 CPU database server.
But it requires Oracle. Huh. An Open source product that requires the purchase of a proprietary software product. Kinda defeats the purpose. No?
Personally though I don't understand why application developers use a database for anything other than storage. If all you are doing is simple inserts, selects, updates and deletes it should be very easy, if not trivial to make the application database independent.
Stored procs, triggers, etc, are evil as they spread your application logic all over the place and there are no standards for how they are implemented by different vendors. It's hard enough to find a relatively standard subset of SQL semantics.
-josh
Hydrogen is 39kwH/kg. Notice the "k" in the second one? Yes, it's roughly a thousand times more energy-dense than a lead-acid battery*.
So what volume exactly does a kilogram of hydrogen occupy? Exactly. You need a big, heavy assed pressure take to store an appreciable amount of it. Just like you need a big heavy-assed battery to store an appreciable amount of electrons. Comparing the weight of the storage medium of one technology, to the weight of the energy carrier of a different technology makes no sense.
In reality it comes down to how much weight and volume is required to store, convert and use the energy in an autonomous vehicle. When you include the weight and volume of the pressure tank and fuel cells, the weight of batteries is not that bad in comparison.
-josh
- As many people have pointed out, Apple has indeed written software for the PC, not a lot, but some. Brain fart on my part. Quicktime is the obvious one. Some people suggested Filemaker pro - the company that makes it is a subsidiary of Apple, so I imagine that counts.
- iTunes does not, repeat does not, leave your music where it was when you import it. It re-arranges song locations based on Author - not too big a deal unless you have a lot of compilations. A friend of my found his compliation CDs split into multiple directories based on author, and then album. I don't have many compilations, so this is not an issue for me. There is no obvious way of getting the files back together in the same directories. Strangely, when you rip a compilation CD using iTunes, it puts it into a 'Compilations' directory, storing all of the tracks together. Not sure why the import functionality can't do the same thing.
- Previews on iTMS are 30 seconds, not 20 seconds.
- DVD burning is supposed to work on Windows according to Apple.
- Many people seemed to find the performance of iTunes much less acceptable than I did. My impressions of performance may be a bit skewed, as I have a dual processor box with a lot of memory and a fast harddrive. A friend of mine just installed it on a newer uniprocessor Dell, and it seemed to perform well. YMMV.
Ok, sorry about that - had a massive brain fart.
-josh
No, I could hear the signal from the very beginning of the wav file. Very faint, but it was there.
-josh
I can clearly hear the morse code beeps. With some head phones (if I knew morse code) - I could decode this using only the world's most powerful real-time signal processing and pattern recognition device - the human brain.
-josh
And how would you approach that?
Coding at random until all user agents worked with it.
First, reading something about the protocols.
Read the book AND write a web server. The two in combination will result in a much deeper understanding of the protocol.
Myself I just rooted around in specs and RFCs from the early 90s - took a little longer, but it got the job done.
-josh
Just write your own web server, in whatever language. You will become intimately familiar with the HTTP protocol. That is if you implement form processing, cookies, and multi-part encodings and such.
-josh