Your companies "only" problem is in bidding and managing the development process?
Isn't that the "only" product you offer?
Hiring qualified staff is reasonably easy (not dead simple, but something that's possible with a little diligence), so why wouldn't your customer do that themselves if you can't offer something more?
Here's the problem as I see it, and I worked for large, small and extremely small consulting companies/custom software houses, the project model of service offering is fundementally flawed.
There are two kinds of customer companies.
1) Those that run their shops well and run their projects themselves because they know their business and can augment staff with freelancers as needed to fill gaps in their knowledge.
2) Companies that can't.
Those that can you will never, or rarely, get project work from. They can do it themselves and not give up the margin to pay your overheads.
Those that can't you will not be able to complete projects successfully with because they can't manage well. That includes managing you, the service provider. It's a catch 22, your only target markets are the ones that, by definition, can't make use of your services effectively. Therefore you end up with broken promises, cost overruns and unhappy customers. You get these things not because anyone was dishonest nor trying to short change the customer, but because of the nature of the beast. You can, after all, lead a horse to water but you can't make him enter the product sub-ID into field 92 to facilitate regression testing on the backend.
I suggest that you convince your management that staff augmentation is a really cool market to be in and doesn't present nearly the headaches that project work does, but does present all the upside.
Well, there is one downside, if you abandon your failed project based business plan you will have to compete with me... Best of luck!:-)
It will be pretty amusing watching this state pay federal taxes, get nothing in return, and have to boast state taxes (be they in the form of income, sales or user) to pay for the roads, et alia, that the feds do today.
Not that the system isn't broken, but this solution is about as likely to succeed as my sons chess team taking on Brazil in the world cup finals.
Hmmm. They're going to opt-out and then try to negotiate better tax rates.
Maybe I'm jaded, but *my* reading of washington (and I read a lot, notice my sig) is that they will happily allow this highly unlikely state to opt out and re-allocate the funding to their own districts then do precisely nothing to lower the federal burden on the LP state.
Ok, thanks for the links. They don't address at all the idea that these are 3,000 *extra* deaths in 30 years though, just that they claim a measurable difference in one kind of death.
I still wonder if the overall picture isn't precisely the opposite.
I'd appreciate a link to that, but it probably won't sway me. After all, what about the thousands who will die because we'd be taking away their benchmark for smoke alarm battery changing...;-)
(Seriously though, a link or two would be cool, google didn't turn up anything interesting so I'm wondering if you got scammed. I only found a single reference to a 7% increase in 'the monday after the april change' traffic accidents, but that certainly wouldn't account for "a few thousand people" nor was the reference any kind of controlled study that would include the costs of increased pollution, kids getting hit in the dark walking to and fro school and the rest of the flavor of thing)
Why is it too much to expect that people turn their brains on, fire a few neurons, and produce cogent thought? DST is yet another example of, "It *feels* good so it must the right thing to do."
Indeed! We should ask those people to get a good nights rest before driving to work Monday morning!
Oh, I guess that's not what you meant. I suppose personal responsibility is only useful when it supports *your* argument.;-)
Smirk. My uncle works in state government in Indiana and I tease him about this from time to time. He's been around long enough to remember the debate on this one and he says that *one* of the reasons that they don't switch is because the drive-in-movie theaters had a strong lobby the last time this was seriously discussed.
That always cracks me up. The entire state is out of step with their neighbors because of theater owners.
They are considering changing to a more conventional (notice I didn't say 'normal', just conventional) system and he says "I don't think that lobby is as strong as it used to be".
Yup, the directv model is awesome. Record two and watch a third. Pretty tight.
Also, by following the links on the directv site you can get your tivo mail order for $200, better than any price I've seen in the chicago area anyway.
I used gnuplot to graph and procmail to manage SA.
My procmailrc contains something like this:
LOGFILE=$HOME/procmail.logfile
SUBJECT=`formail -xSubject: \ | sed -e 's/[;\`\\]//g' \ | expand | sed -e 's/^[ ]*//g' -e 's/[ ]*$//g'`
FROM=`formail -xFrom: \ | sed -e 's/[;\`\\]//g' \ | expand | sed -e 's/^[ ]*//g' -e 's/[ ]*$//g'`
# Backup the last hundred messages.:0 c backup:0 ci | cd backup && rm -f dummy `ls -t msg.* | sed -e 1,100d`:0fw |/home/wellner/bin/SpamAssassin/spamassassin -P -c/home/wellner/bin/SpamAssassin/rules
set timefmt "%m/%d/%y %H:%M" set format x "%m/%d" set title "Distribution of spam values" set xlabel "Date mail arrived" set ylabel "Hit value" set nolabel set xdata time set terminal png color set yrange [-10:50] plot '/home/wellner/email-scores' using 1:3 with points 20, 5 with lines 3, 7 with lines 7, 10 with lines 5
I learned, from years of watching The Simpsons, that these cams are nonesense. Just walk around in a kilt without underwear and there will be dozens of times when the prudes around you are shocked by your Monroe like ability to position yourself in a breeze.
Good judgement though. If you're in public you should expect to have your photo taken. If you are modest, put on some clothes.
I am so sick and tired of people making snide comments like "of all places" when MSNBC reports on a non-windows happening in the world.
People, it's becoming cliche so many of you are making comments like that. For crying out loud, doesn't that mean that maybe your assumptions should be questioned!
Re:Only 7 ammendments left in the Bill of Rights
on
That Link Is Illegal
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Abortion protesters have had to deal with this for some time
Woah, slow down there a second. Abortion protestors are removed from private property regularly, which is fine. They are told they cannot bar entry to a facility regularly, which is fine. They are told they must provide a walkway regularly (typically in the range of a few to a few dozen feet), which is fine.
In no case have they been penned up in a cage 1/2 a mile away from the clinic in a 'free speech zone'.
Ok, maybe I'm just pissy because Poliglut and slashdot do the same exact thing (re-reporting of news) and slashdot is a google news source while I'm not (and, just for the record, I think neither should be) but...
The funniest line in that article had to be: "What savvy publishers of registration-required sites must do, he says, is work with Google in order to be included in their news searches."
Er, savvy? Really. How about not completely brain dead. It doesn't require savvy or any other synonym for smart to realize that google is a big site and that, if your goal is hits, you should be listed there.
Do 'savvy' webmasters register their sites with search engines? No. They are *way* past that 1994 era stumbling block to glory.
If I'm going to call it anything to try and solve *your* problem it would be GPLed/Linux.
If I'm going to try and solve Stallmans (which is related to the 'significance' problem) I'm going to call it openoffice/xfree86/mozilla/linux/gnu in order of importance to my life.
Stallman seems to want to base it on the LOC though, so it would probably be something like openoffice/gnu/xfree86/linux, right?
Or you want to name it only by the essential core, and not applications? Fine.
xfree86/gnu/linux
Well, actually most of the gnu contribution is in command line tools (aka applications), "all they were missing was the kernel".
So maybe it should be just xfree86/linux.
Nah. This is stupid, the kernel itself is the most significant piece of what I'm installing. I think I'll stick with Linux.
I think it's great that you want to be more active. God knows that was my goal when I put together poliglut a couple years ago.
I started out with more of a tech angle, but decided that the problem with the country was a more general lack of education. The people who would seek out your site regarding DMCA and it's ilk are probably going to find out what's going on anyway. So you will be putting out a lot of effort for not so much return.
I would instead encourage you to find a way to put the word out about the importance of those issues in a mainstream web site. This effort is less likely to be wasted as there is an almost total vacuum outside of a few in the tech community concerning tech issues. (which makes sense of course or the legislation wouldn't be written in the first place).
And, of course, you are welcome to write stuff, or republish stuff at poliglut.
First off, there are a sizable number of people who will gladly argue that in fact the 1st Amendment is absolute - that no other perceived right supercedes it. I would be one of them, but this is vastly irrelevant to this ruling.
You really believe that? No speech is ever illegal?
Slander?
Inciting a panic? (e.g. yelling fire in a crowded theater)
There are other examples, but how do you reconcile those two with 'in fact the 1st Amendment is absolute'?
I don't know about rechargable aspect, but running a conventional (i.e. plugged in) electric mower is far more efficient than running a gas powered one. It's simply because a coal powered plant is more efficient than an $80 brigs and straton lawn mower engine.
Lazy teachers use "whole language is better than phonics" as an excuse for not knowing when a phonics-based lesson is appropriate.
I'm sure there are teachers like that somewhere, but I've certainly not met them.
IMHO the only reason this is whole language v phonics thing is a national debate is because of large group of lazy parents who listen to the right wingers rant about the evils of public education too much.
It's been a very weird deal. Seems like someone influential in that community must have had a kid that responded very well to phonics (and there are, of course, kids who only learn, or learn especially well, using solely that mode) and they extrapolated from their experience that every child would respond that way. Intellectual lazyness at nearly its worst. Of course, those who haven't bothered to run the experiment themselves and are instead just showing up for board of education meetings demanding phonics be taught (despite it being part of whole language!) are worse because they don't have even empirical evidence that their child would benefit.
I mentioned my mom before. I think her school has the right approach. Parents come in and bitch because Pat Robertson said that phonics was the right way to teach. They explain that whole language uses phonics. If that isn't enough the school has purchased a couple copies of 'hooked on phonics' that they lend out so parents can try before they buy (it's very expensive considering the content of the product). They haven't had a *single* parent (sample size in the dozens) that didn't return the school copy, thank them for the chance to try it and then decide to save the cash rather than themselves a copy.
So while I resent that the 700 club thinks they are in a good position to dictate national education standards, I think the local schools could do a far better job in many cases in educating the parents as to why right wing education schemes are often built on a crumbly, narrow foundation.
Larry said "We find the same problem in teaching reading to kids. Some people shout "Whole language!" while others shout "Phonics!" Well, guess what, they're both oversimplifying. You have to learn some phonics, and then you learn some larger bits based on that, and some larger bits based on that, and eventually you find that you're intuiting whole language. "
Whole language incoporates phonics as one of it's several learning approaches.
Whole language is, in fact, exactly what you go on to say is the 'right' solution.
(I'm not a teacher by training, but my mum is a reading specialist (with her graduate work focusing on the subject) and I did confirm this with her)
Let me, since the first handful of posters seem to have forgotten, reiterate that the person asking the question wanted something simple! Not an app on a desktop that he can't fit in a briefcase, not a graphing calculator but an available calculator that is just like the one he has.
Yes, I like my TI-89, but that's not what this dude is asking for!
In other words, you need to listen to your own brainwaves, not some random noise or someone else's rhythms.
Wow, harsh criticism. Especially considering it's unfounded.
The article did do what you refer to, but they did nothing to contradict the decades old knowledge concerning noise and brainwaves. Read the first couple posts in this thread. There are several tools available that use binaural beats to attempt to change the state of the brain.
I had one about ten years ago that ran on DOS and found the results to be very convincing.
So, yes, the study in the article used the patients own brainwaves, but that doesn't mean it's the only way to do it. A Didjeridus way well be another way, or may not be, but certainly didn't warrent a "Next time read the article" rant.
most schools offer a seriously REDUCED rate for students purchasing MS Office.
First of all, to be pedantic, it wasn't the school offering it. It was Microsoft.
Second, I wonder if people can confirm that this is still true. My wife went back to school yesterday and, thinking that I'd be able to grab her the latest MS stuff at a good price I checked the bookstore. Microsoft Office Standard was only $10 cheaper than the exact same package from CDW. Something well north of $300.
Is this the standard practice now, or has my bookstore just not gotten their act together? (or perhaps the worst scenario, have they gotten their act together and marked up the software in a manner that would make an Enron exec blush)
Slashdot Mirror
Your companies "only" problem is in bidding and managing the development process?
:-)
Isn't that the "only" product you offer?
Hiring qualified staff is reasonably easy (not dead simple, but something that's possible with a little diligence), so why wouldn't your customer do that themselves if you can't offer something more?
Here's the problem as I see it, and I worked for large, small and extremely small consulting companies/custom software houses, the project model of service offering is fundementally flawed.
There are two kinds of customer companies.
1) Those that run their shops well and run their projects themselves because they know their business and can augment staff with freelancers as needed to fill gaps in their knowledge.
2) Companies that can't.
Those that can you will never, or rarely, get project work from. They can do it themselves and not give up the margin to pay your overheads.
Those that can't you will not be able to complete projects successfully with because they can't manage well. That includes managing you, the service provider. It's a catch 22, your only target markets are the ones that, by definition, can't make use of your services effectively. Therefore you end up with broken promises, cost overruns and unhappy customers. You get these things not because anyone was dishonest nor trying to short change the customer, but because of the nature of the beast. You can, after all, lead a horse to water but you can't make him enter the product sub-ID into field 92 to facilitate regression testing on the backend.
I suggest that you convince your management that staff augmentation is a really cool market to be in and doesn't present nearly the headaches that project work does, but does present all the upside.
Well, there is one downside, if you abandon your failed project based business plan you will have to compete with me... Best of luck!
Yup.
It will be pretty amusing watching this state pay federal taxes, get nothing in return, and have to boast state taxes (be they in the form of income, sales or user) to pay for the roads, et alia, that the feds do today.
Not that the system isn't broken, but this solution is about as likely to succeed as my sons chess team taking on Brazil in the world cup finals.
Oh, and we covered this topic a long time ago at Poliglut.
/. shouldn't, just that politically minded folk might find a politcally oriented site a better resource than /. for politics.
Not that
Hmmm. They're going to opt-out and then try to negotiate better tax rates.
Maybe I'm jaded, but *my* reading of washington (and I read a lot, notice my sig) is that they will happily allow this highly unlikely state to opt out and re-allocate the funding to their own districts then do precisely nothing to lower the federal burden on the LP state.
Ok, thanks for the links. They don't address at all the idea that these are 3,000 *extra* deaths in 30 years though, just that they claim a measurable difference in one kind of death.
I still wonder if the overall picture isn't precisely the opposite.
I'd appreciate a link to that, but it probably won't sway me. After all, what about the thousands who will die because we'd be taking away their benchmark for smoke alarm battery changing... ;-)
;-)
(Seriously though, a link or two would be cool, google didn't turn up anything interesting so I'm wondering if you got scammed. I only found a single reference to a 7% increase in 'the monday after the april change' traffic accidents, but that certainly wouldn't account for "a few thousand people" nor was the reference any kind of controlled study that would include the costs of increased pollution, kids getting hit in the dark walking to and fro school and the rest of the flavor of thing)
Why is it too much to expect that people turn their brains on, fire a few neurons, and produce cogent thought? DST is yet another example of, "It *feels* good so it must the right thing to do."
Indeed! We should ask those people to get a good nights rest before driving to work Monday morning!
Oh, I guess that's not what you meant. I suppose personal responsibility is only useful when it supports *your* argument.
confuse the cows
Smirk. My uncle works in state government in Indiana and I tease him about this from time to time. He's been around long enough to remember the debate on this one and he says that *one* of the reasons that they don't switch is because the drive-in-movie theaters had a strong lobby the last time this was seriously discussed.
That always cracks me up. The entire state is out of step with their neighbors because of theater owners.
They are considering changing to a more conventional (notice I didn't say 'normal', just conventional) system and he says "I don't think that lobby is as strong as it used to be".
Yup, the directv model is awesome. Record two and watch a third. Pretty tight.
Also, by following the links on the directv site you can get your tivo mail order for $200, better than any price I've seen in the chicago area anyway.
I used gnuplot to graph and procmail to manage SA.
/g' \
/g' \
:0 c :0 ci :0fw /home/wellner/bin/SpamAssassin/spamassassin -P -c /home/wellner/bin/SpamAssassin/rules
/g' \
:0:
My procmailrc contains something like this:
LOGFILE=$HOME/procmail.logfile
SUBJECT=`formail -xSubject: \
| sed -e 's/[;\`\\]/
| expand | sed -e 's/^[ ]*//g' -e 's/[ ]*$//g'`
FROM=`formail -xFrom: \
| sed -e 's/[;\`\\]/
| expand | sed -e 's/^[ ]*//g' -e 's/[ ]*$//g'`
# Backup the last hundred messages.
backup
| cd backup && rm -f dummy `ls -t msg.* | sed -e 1,100d`
|
SPAM_STATUS=`grep X-Spam-Status |cut -d' ' -f3|cut -d'=' -f2 |sort -n`
MESSAGE_ID=`formail -xMessage-ID:: \
| sed -e 's/[;\`\\]/
| expand | sed -e 's/^[ ]*//g' -e 's/[ ]*$//g'`
DATE=`date +"%m/%d/%y %H:%M"`
nada=`echo $DATE $SPAM_STATUS $MESSAGE_ID >> $HOME/email-scores`
* ^X-Spam-Status: Yes
caughtspam
and my gnuplot file is:
set timefmt "%m/%d/%y %H:%M"
set format x "%m/%d"
set title "Distribution of spam values"
set xlabel "Date mail arrived"
set ylabel "Hit value"
set nolabel
set xdata time
set terminal png color
set yrange [-10:50]
plot '/home/wellner/email-scores' using 1:3 with points 20, 5 with lines 3, 7 with lines 7, 10 with lines 5
have fun.
That graph shows almost 30K spams and probably 5-10K legit emails.
Within the 30K spams I estimate (based on sampling) that there are probably about 30 legit emails.
Here's my mail log.
Everything above 5 on the graph is better than 99% likely to be spam.
I'm rich!
(BTW, I use spamssassin, it's wonderful)
Idiot
Idiot?
Obviously highly educated repartee aside(*), I'm not the one wearing a skirt and then complaining that people can look up it.
Let's take a little bit of personal responsibility here folks.
(*) See also, irony
I learned, from years of watching The Simpsons, that these cams are nonesense. Just walk around in a kilt without underwear and there will be dozens of times when the prudes around you are shocked by your Monroe like ability to position yourself in a breeze.
Good judgement though. If you're in public you should expect to have your photo taken. If you are modest, put on some clothes.
I am so sick and tired of people making snide comments like "of all places" when MSNBC reports on a non-windows happening in the world.
People, it's becoming cliche so many of you are making comments like that. For crying out loud, doesn't that mean that maybe your assumptions should be questioned!
Abortion protesters have had to deal with this for some time
Woah, slow down there a second. Abortion protestors are removed from private property regularly, which is fine. They are told they cannot bar entry to a facility regularly, which is fine. They are told they must provide a walkway regularly (typically in the range of a few to a few dozen feet), which is fine.
In no case have they been penned up in a cage 1/2 a mile away from the clinic in a 'free speech zone'.
Let's keep a sense of scale about this.
Ok, maybe I'm just pissy because Poliglut and slashdot do the same exact thing (re-reporting of news) and slashdot is a google news source while I'm not (and, just for the record, I think neither should be) but...
The funniest line in that article had to be:
"What savvy publishers of registration-required sites must do, he says, is work with Google in order to be included in their news searches."
Er, savvy? Really. How about not completely brain dead. It doesn't require savvy or any other synonym for smart to realize that google is a big site and that, if your goal is hits, you should be listed there.
Do 'savvy' webmasters register their sites with search engines? No. They are *way* past that 1994 era stumbling block to glory.
This is no different.
Say it! GNU/Linux. Be part of the soultion.
No way.
If I'm going to call it anything to try and solve *your* problem it would be GPLed/Linux.
If I'm going to try and solve Stallmans (which is related to the 'significance' problem) I'm going to call it openoffice/xfree86/mozilla/linux/gnu in order of importance to my life.
Stallman seems to want to base it on the LOC though, so it would probably be something like openoffice/gnu/xfree86/linux, right?
Or you want to name it only by the essential core, and not applications? Fine.
xfree86/gnu/linux
Well, actually most of the gnu contribution is in command line tools (aka applications), "all they were missing was the kernel".
So maybe it should be just xfree86/linux.
Nah. This is stupid, the kernel itself is the most significant piece of what I'm installing. I think I'll stick with Linux.
I think it's great that you want to be more active. God knows that was my goal when I put together poliglut a couple years ago.
I started out with more of a tech angle, but decided that the problem with the country was a more general lack of education. The people who would seek out your site regarding DMCA and it's ilk are probably going to find out what's going on anyway. So you will be putting out a lot of effort for not so much return.
I would instead encourage you to find a way to put the word out about the importance of those issues in a mainstream web site. This effort is less likely to be wasted as there is an almost total vacuum outside of a few in the tech community concerning tech issues. (which makes sense of course or the legislation wouldn't be written in the first place).
And, of course, you are welcome to write stuff, or republish stuff at poliglut.
First off, there are a sizable number of people who will gladly argue that in fact the 1st Amendment is absolute - that no other perceived right supercedes it. I would be one of them, but this is vastly irrelevant to this ruling.
You really believe that? No speech is ever illegal?
Slander?
Inciting a panic? (e.g. yelling fire in a crowded theater)
There are other examples, but how do you reconcile those two with 'in fact the 1st Amendment is absolute'?
No need to be a jerk about it, eh?
I don't know about rechargable aspect, but running a conventional (i.e. plugged in) electric mower is far more efficient than running a gas powered one. It's simply because a coal powered plant is more efficient than an $80 brigs and straton lawn mower engine.
Lazy teachers use "whole language is better than phonics" as an excuse for not knowing when a phonics-based lesson is appropriate.
I'm sure there are teachers like that somewhere, but I've certainly not met them.
IMHO the only reason this is whole language v phonics thing is a national debate is because of large group of lazy parents who listen to the right wingers rant about the evils of public education too much.
It's been a very weird deal. Seems like someone influential in that community must have had a kid that responded very well to phonics (and there are, of course, kids who only learn, or learn especially well, using solely that mode) and they extrapolated from their experience that every child would respond that way. Intellectual lazyness at nearly its worst. Of course, those who haven't bothered to run the experiment themselves and are instead just showing up for board of education meetings demanding phonics be taught (despite it being part of whole language!) are worse because they don't have even empirical evidence that their child would benefit.
I mentioned my mom before. I think her school has the right approach. Parents come in and bitch because Pat Robertson said that phonics was the right way to teach. They explain that whole language uses phonics. If that isn't enough the school has purchased a couple copies of 'hooked on phonics' that they lend out so parents can try before they buy (it's very expensive considering the content of the product). They haven't had a *single* parent (sample size in the dozens) that didn't return the school copy, thank them for the chance to try it and then decide to save the cash rather than themselves a copy.
So while I resent that the 700 club thinks they are in a good position to dictate national education standards, I think the local schools could do a far better job in many cases in educating the parents as to why right wing education schemes are often built on a crumbly, narrow foundation.
Larry said "We find the same problem in teaching reading to kids. Some people shout "Whole language!" while others shout "Phonics!" Well, guess what, they're both oversimplifying. You have to learn some phonics, and then you learn some larger bits based on that, and some larger bits based on that, and eventually you find that you're intuiting whole language. "
Whole language incoporates phonics as one of it's several learning approaches.
Whole language is, in fact, exactly what you go on to say is the 'right' solution.
(I'm not a teacher by training, but my mum is a reading specialist (with her graduate work focusing on the subject) and I did confirm this with her)
Let me, since the first handful of posters seem to have forgotten, reiterate that the person asking the question wanted something simple! Not an app on a desktop that he can't fit in a briefcase, not a graphing calculator but an available calculator that is just like the one he has.
Yes, I like my TI-89, but that's not what this dude is asking for!
In other words, you need to listen to your own brainwaves, not some random noise or someone else's rhythms.
Wow, harsh criticism. Especially considering it's unfounded.
The article did do what you refer to, but they did nothing to contradict the decades old knowledge concerning noise and brainwaves. Read the first couple posts in this thread. There are several tools available that use binaural beats to attempt to change the state of the brain.
I had one about ten years ago that ran on DOS and found the results to be very convincing.
So, yes, the study in the article used the patients own brainwaves, but that doesn't mean it's the only way to do it. A Didjeridus way well be another way, or may not be, but certainly didn't warrent a "Next time read the article" rant.
most schools offer a seriously REDUCED rate for students purchasing MS Office.
First of all, to be pedantic, it wasn't the school offering it. It was Microsoft.
Second, I wonder if people can confirm that this is still true. My wife went back to school yesterday and, thinking that I'd be able to grab her the latest MS stuff at a good price I checked the bookstore. Microsoft Office Standard was only $10 cheaper than the exact same package from CDW. Something well north of $300.
Is this the standard practice now, or has my bookstore just not gotten their act together? (or perhaps the worst scenario, have they gotten their act together and marked up the software in a manner that would make an Enron exec blush)