...my predecessor always put things in terms of "time & money" and never considered quality at all...
Then your predecessor didn't do their homework and/or didn't present their CB analysis properly. Quality has value and, as everyone is finding out now, it costs a hell of a lot more on the back-end! (In any CB analysis I've done invariably some bean-counting PHB will start picking it apart and asking why they can't save a few bucks here and there. After a few answers indicating how much more it will cost later on down the road they shut up pretty fast.:)
...the fact is their current application is nothing like what they spec'ed out 3 years ago...
If the specs from 3 years ago are available in written form with somebody higher up's signature on it (a lot higher up) then you've got a fighting chance.
Build a comparison between that spec and the actual work that was done. Find out which powers-that-be signed off on any variances and build a "situation analysis". If the variances were not driven by upper management then you may be screwed - there's a disconnect between organizational levels and you're looking at the cumulative results.
If it was driven by the powers-that-be (hopefully the same ones who signed off on the original!:) then it's "simply" a matter of re-presenting things such that they can understand the whys and wherefors of what happened. Quite likely they will refuse to admit that their actions had anything to do with it (i.e. pushing the blame back down to project managers etc - so you may still be screwed).
Of course I have no idea how complex the structure of the organization is nor the interdepartmental and interdivisional dynamics or even, for that matter, just how important this client is - I try to operate on the principle that one should be able to lose any client at any time!
One thing about this particular client bothers me though - "If she does not have some initiative or new product in development, she has no reason to request funding. Is this as draconian as it sounds, or is it only in reference to the work your team is doing (presumably development of new features/products)...?
WTF?!? When did this Slashcode change get implemented?!?
Submitted Comment Comment Submitted. There will be a delay...[snip] Undoing moderation to Comment #11787951 Undoing moderation to Comment #11787968 Undoing moderation to Comment #11788077 [snip] Re:What about managing customers? (Score:1) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 26, @10:38AM (#11788183)
This is totally OT and moderators can mod me down to the 9th level of hell but your sig "still looking for a wife..." caught my eye.
To wit, if you are looking, you will project that state of being and have little luck.
If instead you become/behave/act/think like a husband your chances will improve greatly!
Could also be software that runs periodically and "chirps" when it's done doing something. Maybe even the motherboard (though so far I've only heard wierd noises from motherboards on boot). Heck, even some tape drives will reset themselves periodically - and the re-homing of the head can make a rather odd noise in some models.
You could try doing a Google on each individual piece of hardware you have and see if anyone else has the same question (or even an answer).
24-hour periodic squeek...Is the problem I have with my power supply. Are you 100% sure it's the power supply? I used to have a client with some wierd off-brand RAID controller that would do a self-test every day and part of the self-test included sounding the alarm for a fraction of a second - so short it didn't sound anything at all like it did when it actually had a failure.
Most "smart" UPSs have periodic self-test functionality as well.
Have you ever USED x10? Their equipment is cheap, the reception is usually only line of sight, and they don't accept returns for any reason.
X-10 the company is crap. X-10 the open standard is not too bad and products supporting it are made by a number of manufacturers including Leviton, RCA etc. (Okay, those are both GE but you get my point...:)
...sensitive market data can be compromised? If it's sensitive to anybody besides your company (e.g. comes under SEC, HIPAA, GLB, SOx, CA1798 etc.) then y'all are going to get crucified in your next audit...
Actually, the Active Directory "system" is an implementation of the X.500 standard. The standard allows all network resources to be accessed by utilizing a virtual directory structure that maps the network and it's resources.
Sigh - If only that were true... How do we prove that AD sucks? Easy! Create a user named Bob Smith in an AD container. Now go create another user in another container with the same name. Whoa! Hey! What's this? An error saying that an object with that name already exists?!? WTF?!? But I'm in a different container fer crissakes!! Hmm, maybe AD isn't quite live up to the marketing hype after all... (Just see what happens when a domain controller on the other side of a WAN link is inaccessible past the AD update TTL - kerwham!! - let's sync the entire fucking directory down a T1!!!)
Novell did utilize the X.500 standard for network management in NetWare. Novell did a hell of a lot more than that!
For Linux to run as an AD Domain Controller, SMB (if that's the software that is chosen to be the server) must support Microsoft's implementation of the X.500 standard. Ah, yes, the MS implementation. OMFG it's nasty! Use yer favorite LDAP tools to pull the data associated with a user account in AD. Instead of a couple of paragraphs with a semi-logical structure and naming conventions like any other LDAP implementation, what you get from AD instead is two or more pages of the nastiest crap you've ever seen!! No wonder it took 3rd party vendors nearly two years after Win2K came out to have functional tools for AD! (You do realise that much of the delay between Win2K and 2003 was AD related!)
The X.400 standard is the brother standard that SMB+LDAP is based on. X.400 is what you see when you look at a NT4 domain and the users/groups within that domain. For those who may not be aware of it, Samba has had AD client functionality (Kerberos/LDAP) since last September (v3.x) with AD server-side functionality undergoing testing right now (to be released in 4.x later this year).
Disclaimer - no, I haven't played with any of the AD functionality in Samba yet so I can't say I know what I'm talking about here...
Hope that this clears up some misinformation that seems prevelant in the "Linux v. AD" world. Um yeah, thanks, I think...
Despite what you say, they are just bouncing off each other.
Additionally, the central location of the poles helps to maintain equilibrium and reduce the range of possible contact points.
(Unlike a round magnet which would have a wider range of effective contact points thus allowing more slop in the bounce cycles with a coincident reduction in tonal quality).
So you may be asking, "What is so controversial about this?"
Um, yeah...? Who cares?
He's making less than $1000 a month for spending some measureable number of hours finding interesting articles and distilling them down to their essence for my (our!) convenience.
I say good for him!
Hey Roland - thanks dude! More power (and money) to ya!:)
She just "has an eye for what will sell" - mostly little figurines and other dust collectors. She cruises garage sales and eBays whatever she finds. She considers it a full-time job and clears about $50k a year. ('Course she lives down on Florida where there's tons of estate sales with collectible stuff from all the retirees croaking...:)
I had doinked a little w/a Commodore-64 but never really got into it (didn't know it could do anything beyond word pocessing) but then a high-school physics teacher was wielding a soldering iron over a defunct full-height 5.25" floppy drive from an old TRS-80 somebody had donated and when he was done it worked! So I asked him, out of idle curiousity, what was wrong with it and he told me - damn him!:)
we put a $20 UPC on a $30 product, but the police report quoted $50 worth of stolen property.
They use the figures given by the store or insurance company, both of which figure labor and other overhead into that quote. (E.g. the time spent talking to the cops etc.)
Hm. Not many cases of people trying to intentionally blind people with marshmallows. Or rocks. Or pebbles...A weapon that does nothing but cause blindness is a terror weapon.
OMG, you are an idiot! (Or a clever troll of course:).
My point is that anything can be a weapon. Similarly most weapons can be very useful tools. E.g. lasers can cut many other things besides eyeballs.
Now I'm going to leave you with that one very specific and relevant example since you're obviously completely incapable of understanding irony, sarcasm, or probably a host of other linguistic nuances. (And I hate feeding trolls, even clever ones!:).
(Egads... Some days I really wonder how the world got to be so screwed up and other days I have no doubt!
Hey...! That'd make a great sig! Off I go to change it!:)
Uhh consulting while on a pension?... does anyone else see a problem with this?
Not at all. Heck I know a guy right now who collects two pensions, both from the US government! (One from when he retired after 20 years in the Marines and the other when he retired again 20 years later from the USPS). It took him a little legal wrangling when they tried to stiff him awhile back but he won in court.
And that's the USG! If his pension is private sector then it's even more legit...
What would you do if you were walking along and suddenly went blind because some heartless bastard pointed one of these into your eyes?...Just imagining what being on the receiving end of such an attack is extremely scary...
OMGWTFBBQ, I hope this is meant to be funny, 'cause if not, you're an idiot! That entire post could have referred to anything from a beach pebble to an assault rifle to a well-aimed overly stale marshmallow.
Or to put it another way - it's a real world out there. [shock]
(Still chuckling...:)
You guys are weird. *I* make a page in IE, then it takes forever to get it working in Netscape.
I quit bothering with Netscape years ago. I actually use Adobe GoLive as a site manager/editor but I test under Opera initially because it's so damn picky. FireFox gets tested in parallel with Opera just because of the development oriented extensions that are so damn handy.:)
Once the page is "correct" in development terms then I add the code for working around bugs in other browsers.
The main reason for this is so that 5 years from now when nobody is using any of these browsers it'll be easy for the next poor schmuck (or me:) to understand what I've done and add/remove/change bug-specific code vs actual content.
[shrug] Different perspectives on the same problem...
On a Windows system, find a graphic file. Any file, like c:\winnt\pyramid.bmp Next, place this file path as an URL. Check the page. It doesn't break, but you will see a pyramid on your screen in MSIE and an ugly no-image in Firefox.
This didn't work in the early versions of IE either. It was added when IE was "integrated" with the Windows file explorer.
Ironically, it is IE's ability to do this which has resulted in at least a couple of exploits.:)
No website I've created in the past three years or so has rendered correctly in Internet Explorer without a good deal of hacking.
No kidding! I design for FireFox/Opera first because that lets me work on the page and how I want it to look without any extra crap.
Only after the page itself is done do I then proceed to spend an equal amount of time getting it to look right in other browsers.
And lemme tell you, most of that time is spent futzing around with bugs in IE!
If you're running Win2K/XP, have at least 512Meg of RAM, lots of free disk space, no other apps running, only ever have one IE window open, never copy and paste, never print, and only ever go to a small number of IE-friendly sites then yeah, it probably won't ever crash.
But you're part of less than 1% of the IE-using population of the world.:)
Slashdot Mirror
...my predecessor always put things in terms of "time & money" and never considered quality at all...
:)
...the fact is their current application is nothing like what they spec'ed out 3 years ago...
:) then it's "simply" a matter of re-presenting things such that they can understand the whys and wherefors of what happened. Quite likely they will refuse to admit that their actions had anything to do with it (i.e. pushing the blame back down to project managers etc - so you may still be screwed).
Then your predecessor didn't do their homework and/or didn't present their CB analysis properly. Quality has value and, as everyone is finding out now, it costs a hell of a lot more on the back-end! (In any CB analysis I've done invariably some bean-counting PHB will start picking it apart and asking why they can't save a few bucks here and there. After a few answers indicating how much more it will cost later on down the road they shut up pretty fast.
If the specs from 3 years ago are available in written form with somebody higher up's signature on it (a lot higher up) then you've got a fighting chance.
Build a comparison between that spec and the actual work that was done. Find out which powers-that-be signed off on any variances and build a "situation analysis". If the variances were not driven by upper management then you may be screwed - there's a disconnect between organizational levels and you're looking at the cumulative results.
If it was driven by the powers-that-be (hopefully the same ones who signed off on the original!
Of course I have no idea how complex the structure of the organization is nor the interdepartmental and interdivisional dynamics or even, for that matter, just how important this client is - I try to operate on the principle that one should be able to lose any client at any time!
One thing about this particular client bothers me though - "If she does not have some initiative or new product in development, she has no reason to request funding. Is this as draconian as it sounds, or is it only in reference to the work your team is doing (presumably development of new features/products)...?
WTF?!? When did this Slashcode change get implemented?!?
Submitted Comment
Comment Submitted. There will be a delay...[snip]
Undoing moderation to Comment #11787951
Undoing moderation to Comment #11787968
Undoing moderation to Comment #11788077
[snip]
Re:What about managing customers? (Score:1)
by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 26, @10:38AM (#11788183)
This is totally OT and moderators can mod me down to the 9th level of hell but your sig "still looking for a wife..." caught my eye.
To wit, if you are looking, you will project that state of being and have little luck.
If instead you become/behave/act/think like a husband your chances will improve greatly!
Could also be software that runs periodically and "chirps" when it's done doing something. Maybe even the motherboard (though so far I've only heard wierd noises from motherboards on boot). Heck, even some tape drives will reset themselves periodically - and the re-homing of the head can make a rather odd noise in some models.
You could try doing a Google on each individual piece of hardware you have and see if anyone else has the same question (or even an answer).
24-hour periodic squeek...Is the problem I have with my power supply.
Are you 100% sure it's the power supply? I used to have a client with some wierd off-brand RAID controller that would do a self-test every day and part of the self-test included sounding the alarm for a fraction of a second - so short it didn't sound anything at all like it did when it actually had a failure.
Most "smart" UPSs have periodic self-test functionality as well.
Have you ever USED x10? Their equipment is cheap, the reception is usually only line of sight, and they don't accept returns for any reason.
:)
X-10 the company is crap.
X-10 the open standard is not too bad and products supporting it are made by a number of manufacturers including Leviton, RCA etc. (Okay, those are both GE but you get my point...
...sensitive market data can be compromised?
If it's sensitive to anybody besides your company (e.g. comes under SEC, HIPAA, GLB, SOx, CA1798 etc.) then y'all are going to get crucified in your next audit...
Actually, the Active Directory "system" is an implementation of the X.500 standard. The standard allows all network resources to be accessed by utilizing a virtual directory structure that maps the network and it's resources.
Sigh - If only that were true... How do we prove that AD sucks? Easy! Create a user named Bob Smith in an AD container. Now go create another user in another container with the same name. Whoa! Hey! What's this? An error saying that an object with that name already exists?!? WTF?!? But I'm in a different container fer crissakes!! Hmm, maybe AD isn't quite live up to the marketing hype after all... (Just see what happens when a domain controller on the other side of a WAN link is inaccessible past the AD update TTL - kerwham!! - let's sync the entire fucking directory down a T1!!!)
Novell did utilize the X.500 standard for network management in NetWare.
Novell did a hell of a lot more than that!
For Linux to run as an AD Domain Controller, SMB (if that's the software that is chosen to be the server) must support Microsoft's implementation of the X.500 standard.
Ah, yes, the MS implementation. OMFG it's nasty! Use yer favorite LDAP tools to pull the data associated with a user account in AD. Instead of a couple of paragraphs with a semi-logical structure and naming conventions like any other LDAP implementation, what you get from AD instead is two or more pages of the nastiest crap you've ever seen!! No wonder it took 3rd party vendors nearly two years after Win2K came out to have functional tools for AD! (You do realise that much of the delay between Win2K and 2003 was AD related!)
The X.400 standard is the brother standard that SMB+LDAP is based on. X.400 is what you see when you look at a NT4 domain and the users/groups within that domain.
For those who may not be aware of it, Samba has had AD client functionality (Kerberos/LDAP) since last September (v3.x) with AD server-side functionality undergoing testing right now (to be released in 4.x later this year).
Disclaimer - no, I haven't played with any of the AD functionality in Samba yet so I can't say I know what I'm talking about here...
Hope that this clears up some misinformation that seems prevelant in the "Linux v. AD" world.
Um yeah, thanks, I think...
Despite what you say, they are just bouncing off each other.
Additionally, the central location of the poles helps to maintain equilibrium and reduce the range of possible contact points.
(Unlike a round magnet which would have a wider range of effective contact points thus allowing more slop in the bounce cycles with a coincident reduction in tonal quality).
Mod parent Funny/Underrated!!! :)
So you may be asking, "What is so controversial about this?"
:)
Um, yeah...? Who cares?
He's making less than $1000 a month for spending some measureable number of hours finding interesting articles and distilling them down to their essence for my (our!) convenience.
I say good for him!
Hey Roland - thanks dude! More power (and money) to ya!
(And somebody please mod the parent troll...)
She just "has an eye for what will sell" - mostly little figurines and other dust collectors. She cruises garage sales and eBays whatever she finds. She considers it a full-time job and clears about $50k a year. ('Course she lives down on Florida where there's tons of estate sales with collectible stuff from all the retirees croaking... :)
I had doinked a little w/a Commodore-64 but never really got into it (didn't know it could do anything beyond word pocessing) but then a high-school physics teacher was wielding a soldering iron over a defunct full-height 5.25" floppy drive from an old TRS-80 somebody had donated and when he was done it worked! So I asked him, out of idle curiousity, what was wrong with it and he told me - damn him! :)
we put a $20 UPC on a $30 product, but the police report quoted $50 worth of stolen property.
They use the figures given by the store or insurance company, both of which figure labor and other overhead into that quote. (E.g. the time spent talking to the cops etc.)
Hm. Not many cases of people trying to intentionally blind people with marshmallows. Or rocks. Or pebbles...A weapon that does nothing but cause blindness is a terror weapon.
:). :).
:)
OMG, you are an idiot! (Or a clever troll of course
My point is that anything can be a weapon. Similarly most weapons can be very useful tools. E.g. lasers can cut many other things besides eyeballs.
Now I'm going to leave you with that one very specific and relevant example since you're obviously completely incapable of understanding irony, sarcasm, or probably a host of other linguistic nuances. (And I hate feeding trolls, even clever ones!
(Egads... Some days I really wonder how the world got to be so screwed up and other days I have no doubt!
Hey...! That'd make a great sig! Off I go to change it!
Uhh consulting while on a pension?... does anyone else see a problem with this?
Not at all. Heck I know a guy right now who collects two pensions, both from the US government! (One from when he retired after 20 years in the Marines and the other when he retired again 20 years later from the USPS). It took him a little legal wrangling when they tried to stiff him awhile back but he won in court.
And that's the USG! If his pension is private sector then it's even more legit...
What would you do if you were walking along and suddenly went blind because some heartless bastard pointed one of these into your eyes?...Just imagining what being on the receiving end of such an attack is extremely scary...
:)
OMGWTFBBQ, I hope this is meant to be funny, 'cause if not, you're an idiot! That entire post could have referred to anything from a beach pebble to an assault rifle to a well-aimed overly stale marshmallow.
Or to put it another way - it's a real world out there. [shock]
(Still chuckling...
...terroristic activites.
:)
Is that you Dubya?
...logic is inarguable
VIKI actually said, "My logic is undeniable."
Alright, for the sake of argument, here's a simpler equation:
:)
smoker=secondhand smoke
IE=secondhand spam
'nuf said...
You guys are weird. *I* make a page in IE, then it takes forever to get it working in Netscape.
:) :) to understand what I've done and add/remove/change bug-specific code vs actual content.
I quit bothering with Netscape years ago. I actually use Adobe GoLive as a site manager/editor but I test under Opera initially because it's so damn picky. FireFox gets tested in parallel with Opera just because of the development oriented extensions that are so damn handy.
Once the page is "correct" in development terms then I add the code for working around bugs in other browsers.
The main reason for this is so that 5 years from now when nobody is using any of these browsers it'll be easy for the next poor schmuck (or me
[shrug] Different perspectives on the same problem...
On a Windows system, find a graphic file. Any file, like c:\winnt\pyramid.bmp Next, place this file path as an URL. Check the page. It doesn't break, but you will see a pyramid on your screen in MSIE and an ugly no-image in Firefox.
:)
This didn't work in the early versions of IE either. It was added when IE was "integrated" with the Windows file explorer.
Ironically, it is IE's ability to do this which has resulted in at least a couple of exploits.
Parent is not Redundant.
Moderators need to check timestamps...
No website I've created in the past three years or so has rendered correctly in Internet Explorer without a good deal of hacking.
No kidding! I design for FireFox/Opera first because that lets me work on the page and how I want it to look without any extra crap.
Only after the page itself is done do I then proceed to spend an equal amount of time getting it to look right in other browsers.
And lemme tell you, most of that time is spent futzing around with bugs in IE!
If you're running Win2K/XP, have at least 512Meg of RAM, lots of free disk space, no other apps running, only ever have one IE window open, never copy and paste, never print, and only ever go to a small number of IE-friendly sites then yeah, it probably won't ever crash. :)
But you're part of less than 1% of the IE-using population of the world.