There are two kinds of flextime: the bad kind and the good kind. You have to recognize that flextime has to be a win for your employer, too. Important questions to ask:
Do my company's customers expect/require the affected staff to be available at certain times? If so, flex-time may itself need flexibility, i.e., your company may need core hours. If you're a sysadmin running a website, you're on call 24/7, anyway, so flextime is a laughable reality. If you run the MIS helpdesk, you must deal with the iron discipline of the clock. If you're a programmer or web developer working on a website, you probably don't have to even show up in the office most of the time, let alone suffer from designated work hours.
How self-motivating are the people affected by flextime? If they are very motivated, you will see a net gain from flex-time; people like that tend to take home work anyway. If they are not very motivated, the results will be mixed. If there are morale problems or you have legions of slackers, you will get negative returns as they go to the gym or raise their kids on your nickel.
I have worked for companies where they had 10/4 (ten hour days, four days a week) schedules, and the net result was that the motivated people were there on the long "weekend" that resulted anyway. The ones that weren't motivated became clock-watchers four days a week. Similarly, my ex-employer went for a 9/9 schedule (nine hours per day, nine days per two week period with every other Friday off), and this also resulted in much bogus absenteeism. Of course, they already had a serious problem with morale because of their command and control mentality. Another experience: Hughes Aircraft, another former employer, tried mandatory ten hour day five days a week for all salaried employees just before I started there in 1987. The net result was those people putting in 60 hour weeks cut back, and nothing got done!
In general, I think flextime is a good idea. It makes retaining smart people easier. But you have to balance that against the needs of the customers, internal and external.
You can't run MSSQL in a colo facility. Remote access is of the "not enough, too slow" variety. Sorry, the Russian Hacker variety doesn't count. I know 'cause a friend whose company got bought out ended up having to make a colo decision (they wanted his servers in their colo), and rather than do that with NT+IIS+ASP+SQL Server, he migrated to RedHat+Apache+Perl+MySQL, and has an order of magnitude improved performance.
Re:What ever happened to Banyan StreetTalk?
on
Is Novell Doomed?
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· Score: 1
Banyan Systems morphed into epresence.com, and not that long ago -- the last SEC filing for them is dated 2/2000, though their last 10-Q was 1998. The writing was on the wall, I think...
I believe it was BSD based, sorta. We used it at my first job out of college back in 1987. (God does that make me feel old!)
My employer looked at their colo services. In a few words, they don't exist. Currently, they're providing ISP services at dedicated colo facilities that aren't theirs (Level 3, for instance). I think eventually that they will have to get into the game directly. I can say that we were using Internap through a different ISP (we're now using Exodus through their colo). Our subsequent connectivity has been somewhat flakier, albeit faster.
What bothers me about this is that there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that men
are inherently any better at this computer stuff than are women.
In this corner: Alan Turing, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, John von Neumann, Donald Knuth, Charles Babbage!, Gordon Moore, Linus Torvalds, etc., etc., etc.
In this corner: Admiral Grace Hopper. Lady Ada Lovelace (kinda). That chick at that lame Java startup, Castanet.
It's not even close. Put aside the BS -- men are better at this stuff, and it is intrinsic, for the same reason that little boy babies also suffer from higher birth defect rates. IQ is measurable, and for boys, it has a flatter Gaussian curve. If contemporary historians had somehow suppressed the true story of how a woman had invented the lightbulb, it would have been all over the newspapers by now. But the fact is that it didn't happen that way. What we get instead is a litany of "this second-rate thing is really first-rate, and IT WAS DONE BY A WOMAN!!!" Snore. I grant the occaisional exception -- Marie Curie seems to be one of them -- but, hey -- special and general theory of relativity? Germ theory of disease transmission? Quantum mechanics? The internal combustion engine? Sorry, ladies, you weren't there, either.
Newsflash: it's men out there diddling with new gadgets, making Ogg Vorbis and Linux and emacs and gcc as a labor of love. And no amount of education or other brainwashing is gonna change that. Find me even ONE woman building the big pieces of Linux, Perl, or any major open-source project. It just isn't happening. Women aren't gonna get credit for what they don't accomplish, try as some revisionists might to reverse that.
Ahem. The real problem here is that they're trying to avoid selling us their product via UCITA. That is, their hirelings in Congress have obliged H'wood in voiding Universal v. Sony. Hm -- Barbara Streisand gets her very own tax deduction, but the gubmint can't give the rest of us Joes one because evil will befall? Feh.
I'm surprised nobody noticed that the FCC made yet another duopoly arrangement with these satellite licenses. Remember how long cellphones were that way? And remember how expensive they were until there were three or more players in each market?
Kinda makes me mad that most Linux distros only ship with bind and sendmail (and probably most commercial Unices as well). It would be especially nice (for me) if Redhat shipped with qmail and postfix RPMs as well as sendmail.
Perhaps if qmail's author would allow reasonable packaging, it would already be there. Have you tried to build RPMs for qmail? It's not pretty. You have to install the qmail userids prior to doing the build. The build! For the life of me, I really don't know why.
What's it going to take for us to recind the whole patent concept? Retiring Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the U.S. Constitution, not to mention voiding all kinds of international treaties.
I just realized what they're doing. This is exactly what Scientology has done all these years with their "Notes for Operating Thetans". It's a Trade Secret -- ya see -- and its copyrighted, so God help you if you ever disclose those "NOTs" to the general public. Microsoft isn't just a company, it's become a religion, with Bill as Godhead.
... and it should be noted that UPCs are neither universal (they use different ones in Canada for the same products we get here in the U.S. of A, sometimes) nor unique. Video distributors are notorious for pulling stunts like reusing UPCs for different products, though the situation has improved radically over the last two years, thanks to the Web. Why? Well, back in the olden days, prior to e-commerce being so big, brick-and-mortar retailers had set up software to override the mistakes of companies like Warner (WEA). But with the Web, the retailers had neither the time nor the margins to take these kinds of actions, so the product had to go out with whatever marking it had from the distributors. Ergo, if the distributors wanted the product sold, they would have to actually abide by what the UPC code was supposed to provide in the first place: uniqueness and universality.
Sure, Universal lost Universal v. Sony back in the 70's... but don't think that doesn't mean the MPAA couldn't buy the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. You thought you owned that DVD you bought? Ha! And the sorry thing is that so far, the dumbass judges are giving away the store on this one, as well.
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- Do my company's customers expect/require the affected staff to be available at certain times? If so, flex-time may itself need flexibility, i.e., your company may need core hours. If you're a sysadmin running a website, you're on call 24/7, anyway, so flextime is a laughable reality. If you run the MIS helpdesk, you must deal with the iron discipline of the clock. If you're a programmer or web developer working on a website, you probably don't have to even show up in the office most of the time, let alone suffer from designated work hours.
- How self-motivating are the people affected by flextime? If they are very motivated, you will see a net gain from flex-time; people like that tend to take home work anyway. If they are not very motivated, the results will be mixed. If there are morale problems or you have legions of slackers, you will get negative returns as they go to the gym or raise their kids on your nickel.
I have worked for companies where they had 10/4 (ten hour days, four days a week) schedules, and the net result was that the motivated people were there on the long "weekend" that resulted anyway. The ones that weren't motivated became clock-watchers four days a week. Similarly, my ex-employer went for a 9/9 schedule (nine hours per day, nine days per two week period with every other Friday off), and this also resulted in much bogus absenteeism. Of course, they already had a serious problem with morale because of their command and control mentality. Another experience: Hughes Aircraft, another former employer, tried mandatory ten hour day five days a week for all salaried employees just before I started there in 1987. The net result was those people putting in 60 hour weeks cut back, and nothing got done!In general, I think flextime is a good idea. It makes retaining smart people easier. But you have to balance that against the needs of the customers, internal and external.
You can't run MSSQL in a colo facility. Remote access is of the "not enough, too slow" variety. Sorry, the Russian Hacker variety doesn't count. I know 'cause a friend whose company got bought out ended up having to make a colo decision (they wanted his servers in their colo), and rather than do that with NT+IIS+ASP+SQL Server, he migrated to RedHat+Apache+Perl+MySQL, and has an order of magnitude improved performance.
I believe it was BSD based, sorta. We used it at my first job out of college back in 1987. (God does that make me feel old!)
... or Gore. Both major party candidates will violate the First Amendment 100 times out of 100 if it will mean they can score political points.
Puhleeze. You're killing me!
In this corner: Admiral Grace Hopper. Lady Ada Lovelace (kinda). That chick at that lame Java startup, Castanet.
It's not even close. Put aside the BS -- men are better at this stuff, and it is intrinsic, for the same reason that little boy babies also suffer from higher birth defect rates. IQ is measurable, and for boys, it has a flatter Gaussian curve. If contemporary historians had somehow suppressed the true story of how a woman had invented the lightbulb, it would have been all over the newspapers by now. But the fact is that it didn't happen that way. What we get instead is a litany of "this second-rate thing is really first-rate, and IT WAS DONE BY A WOMAN!!!" Snore. I grant the occaisional exception -- Marie Curie seems to be one of them -- but, hey -- special and general theory of relativity? Germ theory of disease transmission? Quantum mechanics? The internal combustion engine? Sorry, ladies, you weren't there, either.
Newsflash: it's men out there diddling with new gadgets, making Ogg Vorbis and Linux and emacs and gcc as a labor of love. And no amount of education or other brainwashing is gonna change that. Find me even ONE woman building the big pieces of Linux, Perl, or any major open-source project. It just isn't happening. Women aren't gonna get credit for what they don't accomplish, try as some revisionists might to reverse that.
Ahem. The real problem here is that they're trying to avoid selling us their product via UCITA. That is, their hirelings in Congress have obliged H'wood in voiding Universal v. Sony. Hm -- Barbara Streisand gets her very own tax deduction, but the gubmint can't give the rest of us Joes one because evil will befall? Feh.
I'm surprised nobody noticed that the FCC made yet another duopoly arrangement with these satellite licenses. Remember how long cellphones were that way? And remember how expensive they were until there were three or more players in each market?
Perhaps if qmail's author would allow reasonable packaging, it would already be there. Have you tried to build RPMs for qmail? It's not pretty. You have to install the qmail userids prior to doing the build. The build! For the life of me, I really don't know why.
What's it going to take for us to recind the whole patent concept? Retiring Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the U.S. Constitution, not to mention voiding all kinds of international treaties.
Hello? The lame RSA patent was paid for on a U. S. Navy contract.
I just realized what they're doing. This is exactly what Scientology has done all these years with their "Notes for Operating Thetans". It's a Trade Secret -- ya see -- and its copyrighted, so God help you if you ever disclose those "NOTs" to the general public. Microsoft isn't just a company, it's become a religion, with Bill as Godhead.
... and it should be noted that UPCs are neither universal (they use different ones in Canada for the same products we get here in the U.S. of A, sometimes) nor unique. Video distributors are notorious for pulling stunts like reusing UPCs for different products, though the situation has improved radically over the last two years, thanks to the Web. Why? Well, back in the olden days, prior to e-commerce being so big, brick-and-mortar retailers had set up software to override the mistakes of companies like Warner (WEA). But with the Web, the retailers had neither the time nor the margins to take these kinds of actions, so the product had to go out with whatever marking it had from the distributors. Ergo, if the distributors wanted the product sold, they would have to actually abide by what the UPC code was supposed to provide in the first place: uniqueness and universality.
Sure, Universal lost Universal v. Sony back in the 70's... but don't think that doesn't mean the MPAA couldn't buy the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. You thought you owned that DVD you bought? Ha! And the sorry thing is that so far, the dumbass judges are giving away the store on this one, as well.