I think I understand the point that your CIO was making, although I don't know who or what JWZ is. I've heard similar comments in the past from people. I have found that the best response is to turn it around. Ask how much time and money is spent dealing with problems with an existing solution.:)
Seriously, OSS is not a panacea. There are some OSS projects which are mind-bogglingly successful precisely because they provide a solution that is more cost efficient overall. This includes usability for the pieces that matter. The classic LAMP implementation is one such solution that springs to mind. OpenOffice.org is another that meets the needs for many (not all!) organizations. Lyx is also one that I'm personally fond of for document creation.
However, this is not necessarily true of all OSS projects. Even OOo won't fit the bill for some organizations. The best advice that I can give is to stay calm and objective. When another project comes up where OSS might fit the bill, ask yourself if your research shows a shallow learning curve in addition to equivalent or more functionality. If so, suggest that a bake-off be done between your proposed OSS solution and the closed source candidate(s). Make sure that the bake-off targets usability and functionality.
If the OSS project passes, great! You've got a foot in the door. If it fails, don't be disappointed. Don't beat a dead horse and whine about how OSS Teh Way. Instead, use the opportunity to find out what the end users and other techies thought was missing. Use that information as part of your search criteria when you go looking for the next possible candidate.
It may take you a couple of tries before you get an OSS project in, but as long as you stay calm and professional in your relationships with the other people involved, it won't cost you any skin. Keep your CIO in the loop as you do this exercise. He'll appreciate it.
The one missing feature from the OS PM tools that I really, really like in MS Project are PERT charts. What? Doesn't anyone else want to make sure that they've REALLY identified all the task dependencies? Doesn't anyone else want to make sure that their project schedule has a sane completion date???
Literally. He said they were all facing in, no lights, no night vision goggles. And it gets DARK in the jungle at night.:)
It's been more than 20 years since I heard the story over beers at the NCO club, but IIRC the grunt said it never occurred to any of them to look up. That banyan tree had been there on the edge of the training ground all along. They had been assembling under it for three weeks, and basically forgot about it.
I think the whole point of the exercise was to show just how tough it was to set up an impenetrable defense, as well as to show a bunch of overconfident kids just how good the best really can be. Remember, these were survivors of some of the most intense jungle warfare of the past 30 years.
I developed a lot of respect for Marines during my service in the Navy. They are very, very good at what they do. But, as a gunny once told me, their job is to take an objective in the face of an estimated 80% casualties to the assaulting unit. That defines everything about the way that they train, establish esprit de corps, and deal with life in general. You can't be a good Marine if you care more about your own life than you do the USMC. You also can't be a good Marine if you are incapable of following orders instantly and unquestioningly. Nothing else will allow a Marine unit to get the job done.
The Navy, OTOH, needs and values initiative far more. Where Marines are hard charging, balls to the wall types, your typical sailor is much more likely to be happy go lucky, take life as it comes. Sailors are also generally more adaptable in general. A sailor is expected to seek out and take advantage of opportunities to gain expertise in the widest possible variety of skills. Cross training is the mantra we all lived by. Why? Because a ship or fleet on station is thousands of miles away from its supply base and must be self sufficient. If someone dies or is otherwise incapable of performing his or her duties, the rest of the crew MUST make up the difference. You can't pick up the phone and call your vendor to come out and pick up the slack.
The Army's esprit de corps shares some similarities to the Marines, but there are significant differences. These again are dictated by the difference in mission. The Marines are a self contained assault unit. The Army is expected to take and hold ground while preparing for the next large assault. The Marines have their own air arm, their own logistical base, specialized gear galore for assaulting beaches, and an entire branch of the Navy for moving them and their gear around. The Army, OTOH, relies on the USAF for transport and air support, the Navy for naval support on an as needed basis. They concentrate instead on ground warfare. At the regimental level and above, an Army unit will generally have more heavy weapons units than a comparable Marine unit. Especially artillery.
So, the Army goes for some characteristics in their soldiers that are similar to Marines. What they don't need, however, are guys who are willing to charge in the face of withering frontal fire. The Marines need them because they almost never have any other option. If the Army runs into that kind of problem, they either seek a way around it or back off and call in the long range heavy stuff.
Re: the USMC performance. You may not know this, but the only decent winter training ground in the entire lower 48 states is in Minnesota. We get temps reaching -40 degrees C about 5 or 6 times a year with snow depths typically around a meter or so. The local NG and Reserve units train there all year long, of course. However, it costs so much to rotate a US Army Division from its home base to Camp Ripley that they typically get up here maybe every 3-5 years at most. So far as I know, outside of our local Marine Reserve unit, no Marines get to use Camp Ripley at all.
I think the US Pacific fleet Marines train in Alaska once in a while alongside the Army Rangers and mountain troops (Is the 10th Mountain Division still active btw?). The US Atlantic fleet Marines has no handy training ground except for the annual Norway exercises. So, keep humbling them! It'll do 'em some good.:-)
I'm also reminded of a story a Marine on Guam told me once. He said that his platoon was taken into the jungle for a three week exercise. They did pretty well until the last night. The instructors were all Vietnam vets. They told the platoon to pick one member of the platoon to act as the target. They could pick any defensive position that they wanted. The trainers guaranteed that the target would be 'killed' in hand to hand combat with no one the wiser in less than 15 minutes.
The platoon decided to literally surround the guy standing shoulder to shoulder. 5 minutes into the exercise, they found out they failed. The instructors had placed a guy in a big banyan tree overlooking the compound. It was trivial for him to drop in, 'kill' the guy, and shinny back up into the tree. The jarhead who told me the story said it was one of the most humbling and educational experiences of his life.
I referenced this link in another part of this thread, but it bears repeating. Check out the veterans' proverbs floating around the 'Net that are known as Murphy's Laws of Combat. Very illuminating. And funny in a sick, twisted sort of way.:-)
Personally, I've often thought that the US forces should spend more time training with artificial limits. There's a wonderful list of veteran's proverbs sometimes known as Murpy's Laws of Combat floating around the 'Net that should be read by every armchair general who thinks war is just a matter of pushing a button.
Every decent combat leader knows you should train as realistically as possible. Part of that training should be coping with the loss of your tactical edge.
While not a complete solution to the ease of use issue, Lyx goes a long way toward easing the transition. You know, the app that bills itself as the first true WYSIWYMean?:)
That's funny. I'm currently driving a 1997 Ford F150 4x4, 4.6 liter V8 engine, 5 speed manual transmission that I bought from a guy who couldn't keep up on the payments. He bought it in April of '97, I got it from him in August of the same year.
When I got it, it had 12,000 miles on it. It now has 192,000 miles on it. Same engine, transmission, and clutch.
I brought it in to the local Ford dealer at 85,000 miles for a tranny problem. The local indie garage that I had used to do a transmission flush and fill had overfilled it, blowing several of the seals. This meant dropping the tranny to replace them. I told them as long as it was out, go ahead and replace the clutch. I figured why not, even though I generally get more like 100,000 to 120,000 miles out of one. The dealer called me back three times to talk me out of it. He finally told me that it looked brand new.
At 120,000 miles I brought it back to the same Ford dealer and told them to replace the engine because I figured that was long enough on it. Note: I said replace, not rebuild, so we are talking thousands of dollars of work going their way. The head of the shop again called me back to talk me out of it. He told me that the engine compression was so tight it looked like it just rolled out of the factory. IOW, there was no point to rebuilding it, let alone replacing it.
When it comes to maintenance, all I've ever been religious about was using an automated car wash with underbody flush every time I filled the gas tank during the winter. I use the cheapest grade oil that Valvoline sells at Rapid Oil, and have it changed every 3,000 to 5,000 miles. (Ford recommends 3,000) I do insist on a filter change with every oil change. That's been pretty much it. I've stretched every other maintenance cycle to generally double the recommended length.
So, I've got a vehicle that has seen 7 Minnesota winters. It's been used as my only commuter vehicle and as my back to the woods truck several times a year. It's a little scratched up, but not too bad. No rust showing on the body at all. It's been a great vehicle for me, and I'd love to buy another one. (Too bad Ford no longer sells an F150 with a manual because so few people no longer know how to drive one.) In any case, my son will be getting it from me when he turns 16 in about 15 months. By then I'll have close to 230,000 miles on it, so I might ask the dealer to look over the engine again. I wonder if I'll have to have it replaced then?:)
I disagree 100%. This is one place where Linux is sorely lacking. Updates on most Linux distributions are still much too difficult for most users. There's no cohesive way of updating everything relating to the OS, so I would think that most people running Linux as a desktop are running with old software. MS has it's very, very simple automatic updates. There's nothing like it in Linux-land.
Personally, I've never used any automatic updater after being burned one too many times because something got screwed up that took forever to figure out. Strangely enough, many of those were Microsoft's. In any case, updating many distros is pretty easy.
Gentoo:
emerge sync; emerge -u world
Debian:
apt-get update; apt-get upgrade
Mandrake:
urpmi. There's a GUI front end for it that's pretty slick, too.
Suse (and Red Hat?):
yum
Nope, this problem is largely solved for Linux. And as usual, we've got several excellent competing solutions!:)
Well, we're still looking at you sending me an email. SPF is a very easy to implement feature that your email admin can do in about 10 minutes with no interference by you or me. Global digital signatures require a lot more work by all parties concerned. They are generally reserved for stuff that really has to be from the sending party.
SPF is geared towards proving that yes, that innocent email that claims to be from your Aunt Ida at least came from her ISP. It knocks down virtually all of the spammers' attempts to hide themselves. That factor, in and of itself, makes it a godsend for receivers.
So, bite the bullet, VPN in to your corporate LAN, and use your company's email services. Your customers and vendors will thank you.:)
Yes, Type Ahead Find works for links. I just tried it in Firefox 0.9.3. Want all text instead of links? Use the forward slash '/' key before starting your search. Works fine! Go ahead, try it!:)
So, you have to establish a VPN connection to your company so you have email sent with your company's email address. So what? As far as I'm concerned, if I were receiving your untrusted, unauthenticated email I would certainly want as many mechanisms in place to verify where it came from as is humanly possible.
Having to establish that VPN tunnel is a pretty minor burden in the grand scheme of things to gain a heck of a lot of peace of mind for everyone, don't you think?
Oh, come on. Reread what the GP said; "Not necessarily more than Windows, but more than there are now."
Do you really think that once we have hundreds of millions of Linux desktops that many or most of them won't be adminned poorly? Trust me, as the target population gets larger we will see more exploits. Poor passwords abound today, for heaven's sake. What won't be common are the kinds of root exploits that happen all the time with Windows boxes.
Heck, the tools are there to create all kinds of fun stuff in userspace. What's to prevent someone from setting up a daemon that kicks off silently every time someone logs in, for example? All it would take is something like a one line entry in a.rc file or two. Set it up to check to see if it's already running, and you're ready to go. Bury the executable and its associated logfiles or what have you 9 layers deep under an existing subdirectory in the user's home space and 9 times out of 10 it'll never get spotted.
So; no, we won't see the massive infection rates that we see with Windows.. Yes, infections will become a more serious problem as Linux desktops become more popular.
Actually, the legal age of consent varies by state. In Minnesota, for example, the age of consent for girls is 16, but for guys it's 18. This leads to interesting situations when you're in high school. There's nothing quite like telling a girl that technically she's committing statutory rape to REALLY get her hormones going. I had a lot of fun when I was young.:)
Oh, come on! Even the links you provide show that Randy Weaver and David Koresh aren't even close to being in the same class of 'bad guys'. At worst, Randy Weaver was guilty of selling a handful of sawed off shotguns that may or may not have been illegal to an undercover agent. Other than that, he was just a nut who wanted to be left alone. Granted, he made a LOT of mistakes in dealing with his legal woes. Even so, he apparently never attacked anyone until he was attacked. For that, he lost his wife and son to deliberate action by Federal agents.
David Koresh, OTOH, probably participated in a deliberate act of murder to gain control of a church, raped children as young as 12, and convinced over one hundred people to follow him into almost certain death in a hopeless standoff with the Feds. His actions helped to contribute to the death of dozens of kids.
Randy always struck me as someone who deserved pity more than hatred. I never considered Koresh as anything but an evil man.
The only thing that was worse than Koresh was the way that the Feds bungled his arrest. Why the hell didn't they just pick him up in town? It's not like they didn't know what his routine was.
If I were a hiring manager, yes, your personal experience would definitely interest me. You sound like the kind of guy that is all too rare nowadays; a Jack of all Trades that's extremely good at applying theory to practice.
The trouble is, I'll bet dollars to doughnuts you've never realized that's exactly what you're doing. You probably operate at an almost unconcious level on the theoretical side, and have a hard time explaining why exactly you chose the solution that you did for any problem.
Unfortunately, this makes you a tough sell to HR departments. You really do need to start thinking through how to better package your skillsets if you're looking for something that's more challenging than PC repair.
Besides, it looks like even board level repair of PCs is going to start drying up. We're going to see more and more of these $300 to $500 boxes coming out over the next few years. And the price will probably keep dropping. People will start treating them like throw aways here pretty quick. It really is time to think about a career move.
My resume doesn't do the skills/tools list, I'm convinced that tends to look tacky.
Actually, to some degree it depends where you want to end up. If you prefer working for bigger organizations, the skills/tools list is a must to get past the first automated keyword search that all HR departments seem to be moving to.
You have to think about what you really want to do. You want to convince the hiring manager that you are the right person for a job. However, you first have to jump through a few hoops to get that interview. HR acts as a screening function, which is both good and bad.
For example, I work in our enterprise architect group. We have a mix of oldtimers with decades of experience but little in the way of formal education and some younger people (the youngest is about 35) with masters and PhDs. Most of the oldtimers have been with our company for at least 15 years.
I was an exception in many ways; I had only been with the company less than 6 years when I started working in enterprise architecture, I was younger than most at 39, and I didn't have a 4 year degree. I got the job based purely on my internal reputation.
I don't think I'd get past the HR screening process now, even if my boss wanted to re-hire me. Heck, I'm not sure any of the oldtimers would get past the HR screeing process now. Why? Because HR won't even look at a resume if it doesn't have a 4 year degree on it. Yet some of our best EA types are the ones who have grown up with the company and have seen all kinds of projects come and go.
So, if you have your skills/tools list built up, use it on your resume to get past the keyword search. If you don't like having one, add it as an appendix so it doesn't clutter up the body of your resume. If you don't have one at all, I strongly recommend putting one together. And as usual, don't lie. But don't sell yourself short when you're putting it together.
For example, I had some limited exposure to satellite communications gear at my last duty station. When I hit the civilian market, I listed it, but I was prepared to talk about what I had learned and where I thought I needed more education.
Then again, when I went for the job interview that got me hired here, I found when I went in that they preferred someone with some Token Ring experience. The whole company was wired with it at the time. My network background at that point was all WAN and Ethernet. I told them up front I had no TR experience at all, but I was willing to learn. Other than that, I was definitely qualified for the job.
They called the headhunter I was working with and told her that I had the job before I got home. My guess is that at least a couple of the other people that they had interviewed had tried to bullshit them and they knew it.
Come on, you know that there are control freaks on both sides of any political debate anywhere in the world. Don't forget, something like half of the corporate shills in Congress are Democrats.
Keep in mind I was talking about stuff I was buying a few decades ago. Just to give you some idea of the albums that were available then:
* Rush's "2112" came out in 1976. The whole first side is dedicated to telling a story of a guy who discovers an old guitar in a heavily regimented world. He tries to get the powers that be to see how great it is to no avail. In despair, he commits suicide just before the returning rebels seize control. Side 2 has some kick ass tunes. * Jeff Lynne's "War of the Worlds" came out in '79 or '80, I think. It's a retelling of the old H.G. Wells story, narrated by Richard Burton. I still remember "Thunder Child" fondly. * Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon", "Animals", and "Wish You Were Here". '73 to '78. Album release dates from 7 Hell, ANY album by Pink Floyd is worth listening to all the way through. Digital remasters occasionally show up. BUY THEM! * Deep Purple's "Machine Head" (1972) only had 7 songs on it. Not a dud in the bunch, although I think 'Highway Star' was the weakest. OTOH, it had 'Maybe I'm a Leo', 'Pictures of Home', 'Never Before', 'Smoke on the Water', 'Lazy', and 'Space Truckin'. All were hardcore rock and roll. * Anything by Jimi Hendrix. I think he was incapable of writing a bad song. * Aerosmith's "Get Your Wings" '72? and "Toys in the Attic" 1976? * Alice Cooper had several underrated albums. * Kansas. Some people loved them, some loathed them. Their albums really hung together, though. * Closer to my tastes now would be Johnny Cash. Another man who I think was incapable of writing a bad tune.
More contemporary examples that have impressed me enough to at least consider buying albums are:
* Alan Jackson * Kenny Chesney * Brad Paisley * Shannon Curfmann -- I bought her debut album and I'm still waiting to see if she releases another. * The Offspring * Guns 'N Roses -- I've got "Americana" and like it a lot. * Sarah McLachlan -- I've heard a couple albums and have been very impressed. * Sara Evans * Martina McBride
That's just off the top of my head, looking at what's currently in my CD rack and thinking about what I listen to on the radio.
However, the problems with the record industry, including the RIAA, are not new. To quote from "Wish You Were Here":
Come in here, dear boy, have a cigar You're gonna go far, fly high Your're never gonna die, you're gonna makeit if you try; they're gonna love you Well I've always had a deep respect and I mean that most sincerely The band is just fantastic that is really what I think Oh by the way, which one's Pink? And did we tell you the name of the game, boy, we call it riding the Gravy Train We're just knocked out, We heard about the sell out You gotta get an album out You owe it to the people. We're so happy we can hardly count Everybody else is just green, have you seen the chart It's a hell of a start, it could be made into a monster if we all pull together as a team And did we tell you the name of the game, boy, we call it riding the Gravy Train
I used to buy at least a couple of CDs a payday. I passed outside the RIAA's primary demographic of 18-34 quite a few years ago, and my music buying habits did diminish quite a bit. I was down to maybe one a month.
About 5 years ago I quit buying any due to financial constraints. Once my situation improved, I didn't start buying CDs because; (a) I finally understood how the RIAA operates, (b) I really don't have time to sample tracks on sites like mp3.com anymore, and (c) my tastes run to mainstream music, mostly country.
Would I pay $10/mo just to be able to DL lossless music? Nope. Would I have 20 or 30 years ago? Doubtful. But back then you could still get some damn fine concept albums. Live albums, story albums like Jeff Lynne's "War of the Worlds", Rush 2112, almost anything by ELP (Emerson, Lake, and Palmer), Frank Zappa, the Grateful Dead, etc. Lots of good stuff. Now, albums just don't seem to hang together as well.
The point is that I bought albums because I wanted to hear all the tracks that never got airplay. So many of them were such great songs.
If there was a $5/mo service I'd be more interested, even if there were further surcharges for DLing songs. $10/mo for a service that I would only use infrequently sounds like too much.
Back in the late '70s I was stationed on a guided missile destroyer (DDG class) in Pearl Harbor. I checked in just as the ship was preparing to go into the yards after a long Indian Ocean/WestPac deployment. She was overdue for a major overhaul by about 18 months. Since DDGs were supposed to be on 12 month maintenance cycle, you can imagine just how close to riding on the ragged edge a lot of the systems on board were.
Well, I was assigned to the electronic tech comm group (ETN) and told that I was taking over the UHF and HF radios from a guy who had left the ship about six weeks before I got on board. The ship had 4 HF transmitters, 2 100W and 2 1KW, 4 HF receivers, and a bank of 8 UHF transceivers. The UHF tranceivers were in pretty good shape, as there was still a guy assigned to them who had been doing most of the work. The HF receivers were sorta OK. The HF transmitters, OTOH, was a complete mess. I found to my (literal!) pain that mixing high powered electronics with an incompetent tech is a really, really bad idea.
Not knowing exactly where to start, I picked one of the 100W transmitters at random and dove in. I found 13 problems in 11 days. I should have known that I was in serious trouble when I closed it up to take it over to MOTU-9 (MObile Technical Unit number 9, a support facility full of senior techs), then couldn't get it re-opened when I got it on their bench. It turned out that the slide rails had been completely trashed somewhere along the line and the previous tech hadn't bothered to order replacements. Instead he had just let it sit partially open. After about 3 weeks I still didn't have it completely up to snuff. At least it would transmit on a portion of its designed frequency range.
The second 100W transmitter turned out to be in somewhat better shape. It would at least transmit across its assigned spectrum, but it had far more in the way of reflected power than it should have had. I finally figured out that he had damaged the antenna jack somehow. Considering that those things are almost impossible to put on wrong, I don't know how he managed it. In any case, after running so long with that much RF bouncing through the circuitry, the entire output amplifier was always iffy. I never did get it all the way back up to full strength.
The first 1KW amplifier was dead, dead, dead. That one turned out to be a simple fix, though. I just had to replace the last stage output tube and some burned out control circuitry from when the output tube had shorted across a couple of its plates.
The last 1KW amplifier was the worst. It had a habit of going from full strength power to off as the ship rolled, then back on again. When I pulled the power supply apart, I found that he had replaced all four diodes in the full wave rectifier. Not such a problem, except that most of the leads leading to the rectifier on the board had burned away when the rectifier burned up. Rather than lay down some new ones, he had simply threaded the leads of each diode through their holes, folded the legs down to touch the unburned part of the leads, AND HAD NOT BOTHERED TO SOLDER THEM DOWN!!!!
Every time the ship would roll, the diodes would shift enough to break contact, then reconnect. The truly amazing part is that he didn't start a fire in the comm shack from all the sparks in that power supply.
It says a lot about how well built that comm gear was built that even after all of that abuse, I was able to keep at least some HF transmitting capability up at all until we made into the yards. Granted, most of the time I was busier than a one armed paper hanger.:)
We went out 3 times before we went into the yards on training exercises. The exercises were in Hawaiian waters, and lasted 3 days, 3 days, and a week. I actually had 8 hours at the start of the week's cruise where I had every piece of hardware assigned to me up and operational at the same time. After two months straigh
Speaking only as an end user, I HATE Flash. I can't recall the last time that I hit a site that made extensive use of it that I was happy with. If it was limited solely to multimedia displays I wouldn't mind it so much. However, time and time again I've seen developers use it to build their whole Website. Every time that occurs, I inevitably run into a situation where the embedded links give me grief in way or another.
Flash sites also generally load slower than clean HTML because inevitably the developers have implemented every bell and whistle that they can. Let me clue you; not everyone is on a cable modem. I'm ISDN, which is slow enough. I can't imagine how painfully slow some of these sites must be for someone on a dialup.
My biggest complaint with Flash sites lately has been an inability to use tabbed browsing. I frequently will connect to a site, open several interesting links in the background, then read the main page at my leisure. Flash sites won't allow you to do that.
Nope, if Macromedia dies and Flash goes away I won't be crying in my beer. More like dancing up and down and cheering.
Phhffftthth! Wimp. Try the financial typesetting industry for REAL time and just-gotta-work-first-time-every-time pressure.:)
Typical scenario:
Billion dollar deal in the works. Dozens of lawyers and accountants have been working feverishly for months to make it go. Finally, everything is nearly done and they decide to pull the trigger. This decision is inevitably made on Thursday or Friday, and they want to make the announcement just before the opening bell on Wall Street Monday morning. So, they call the printer and tell them to get ready to go.
Now, up until this point the printer hasn't heard a word about the deal for two reasons. One, all those lawyers and accountants are restricted by Federal regulations from talking about deals prior to public release of the information. Typesetters are also subject to the same regulations, but the habit of keeping your mouth closed still keeps the people directly involved in the deal from talking to anyone else.
Two, people get so caught up in actually working the deal that they just forget to contact the printer until the last second. Honest to God, it happens all the time.
OK, so on less than 4 hours notice representatives from all the involved firms and companies start showing up at the printer's office. For national deals, they'll be in the printer's offices in multiple cities. New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Atlanta, Chicago, you name it. If a financial typesetter doesn't have a presence in a major metropolitan city, it's tough to get a sale there.
All these highly paid, overworked, stressed out people start going through all the proof copies, making last minute changes for typos, misunderstood regulations that require changes, last minute changes to the terms of the deal, you name it. They hand back the corrected changes to the customer service reps, who in turn log it and hand it off to the typesetters. The typesetters update the working document, then print the next proof copy in ALL cities that customerss are located at so everyone is working from a current document set.
This goes on right through the weekend. The typesetters work in 8 hour shifts, typically, so at least they get to go home and feed the dog, kiss the spouse, and play with the kids for a bit. The customers almost always would stay in the office until the deal was completely packaged, printed, and being delivered Monday morning. Most of the time the only sleep they get are cat naps on the couches in the conference rooms.
The financial typesetter I used to work for guaranteed 20 minute turnaround on changed pages and routinely did them in 5 minutes. That's from when Customer Service logged the change request until we put printed pages in the customers' hands.
Now, multiply that scenario for as many as 20 deals a day when the IPO action is red hot. Extend it throughout the week. Ignore all holidays. Keep doing it no matter what happens. THAT's pressure!
The only job I ever worked with a higher requirement for stability and response was as a communications tech for the Navy. At least in that career there were a lot of us all dedicated to getting it done. The typesetting company I worked for had about 2,000 employees. We had 7 programmers, 6 dedicated network staff, 5 PC/file server support staff, and 8 computer room operational staff. That includes everybody from managers to the people changing tapes during backups, network designers to cable pullers, project managers to the newest hire code monkey.
I worked in the network group. We didn't have to do shift work like most of the rest of the geekgs. We covered all shifts 7x24x365 through pager and remote tools.
We were limited to doing many changes to a very narrow window on Sunday. Back out processes were mandatory.
It was a fun job in a lot of respects, but the crisis management mentality that type of industry thrives on finally wore me down. 60+ hours in a week weren't uncommon. That, plus the pay wasn't all that great. I left after 7 years for 20% more pay and a 40 hour work week.:)
GREAT book. My mom got that for my dad for his birthday about the time I turned 12. A truly hilarious sendup of the relationship books that were being written about that time.
Remember how it closed? A Senuous Dirty Old Man's only natural enemy is.... A Sensous Dirty Old Woman!:)
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I think I understand the point that your CIO was making, although I don't know who or what JWZ is. I've heard similar comments in the past from people. I have found that the best response is to turn it around. Ask how much time and money is spent dealing with problems with an existing solution. :)
Seriously, OSS is not a panacea. There are some OSS projects which are mind-bogglingly successful precisely because they provide a solution that is more cost efficient overall. This includes usability for the pieces that matter. The classic LAMP implementation is one such solution that springs to mind. OpenOffice.org is another that meets the needs for many (not all!) organizations. Lyx is also one that I'm personally fond of for document creation.
However, this is not necessarily true of all OSS projects. Even OOo won't fit the bill for some organizations. The best advice that I can give is to stay calm and objective. When another project comes up where OSS might fit the bill, ask yourself if your research shows a shallow learning curve in addition to equivalent or more functionality. If so, suggest that a bake-off be done between your proposed OSS solution and the closed source candidate(s). Make sure that the bake-off targets usability and functionality.
If the OSS project passes, great! You've got a foot in the door. If it fails, don't be disappointed. Don't beat a dead horse and whine about how OSS Teh Way. Instead, use the opportunity to find out what the end users and other techies thought was missing. Use that information as part of your search criteria when you go looking for the next possible candidate.
It may take you a couple of tries before you get an OSS project in, but as long as you stay calm and professional in your relationships with the other people involved, it won't cost you any skin. Keep your CIO in the loop as you do this exercise. He'll appreciate it.
The one missing feature from the OS PM tools that I really, really like in MS Project are PERT charts. What? Doesn't anyone else want to make sure that they've REALLY identified all the task dependencies? Doesn't anyone else want to make sure that their project schedule has a sane completion date???
Literally. He said they were all facing in, no lights, no night vision goggles. And it gets DARK in the jungle at night. :)
:)
It's been more than 20 years since I heard the story over beers at the NCO club, but IIRC the grunt said it never occurred to any of them to look up. That banyan tree had been there on the edge of the training ground all along. They had been assembling under it for three weeks, and basically forgot about it.
I think the whole point of the exercise was to show just how tough it was to set up an impenetrable defense, as well as to show a bunch of overconfident kids just how good the best really can be. Remember, these were survivors of some of the most intense jungle warfare of the past 30 years.
I developed a lot of respect for Marines during my service in the Navy. They are very, very good at what they do. But, as a gunny once told me, their job is to take an objective in the face of an estimated 80% casualties to the assaulting unit. That defines everything about the way that they train, establish esprit de corps, and deal with life in general. You can't be a good Marine if you care more about your own life than you do the USMC. You also can't be a good Marine if you are incapable of following orders instantly and unquestioningly. Nothing else will allow a Marine unit to get the job done.
The Navy, OTOH, needs and values initiative far more. Where Marines are hard charging, balls to the wall types, your typical sailor is much more likely to be happy go lucky, take life as it comes. Sailors are also generally more adaptable in general. A sailor is expected to seek out and take advantage of opportunities to gain expertise in the widest possible variety of skills. Cross training is the mantra we all lived by. Why? Because a ship or fleet on station is thousands of miles away from its supply base and must be self sufficient. If someone dies or is otherwise incapable of performing his or her duties, the rest of the crew MUST make up the difference. You can't pick up the phone and call your vendor to come out and pick up the slack.
The Army's esprit de corps shares some similarities to the Marines, but there are significant differences. These again are dictated by the difference in mission. The Marines are a self contained assault unit. The Army is expected to take and hold ground while preparing for the next large assault. The Marines have their own air arm, their own logistical base, specialized gear galore for assaulting beaches, and an entire branch of the Navy for moving them and their gear around. The Army, OTOH, relies on the USAF for transport and air support, the Navy for naval support on an as needed basis. They concentrate instead on ground warfare. At the regimental level and above, an Army unit will generally have more heavy weapons units than a comparable Marine unit. Especially artillery.
So, the Army goes for some characteristics in their soldiers that are similar to Marines. What they don't need, however, are guys who are willing to charge in the face of withering frontal fire. The Marines need them because they almost never have any other option. If the Army runs into that kind of problem, they either seek a way around it or back off and call in the long range heavy stuff.
Oh, well. Enough of this off topic rambling.
Re: the USMC performance. You may not know this, but the only decent winter training ground in the entire lower 48 states is in Minnesota. We get temps reaching -40 degrees C about 5 or 6 times a year with snow depths typically around a meter or so. The local NG and Reserve units train there all year long, of course. However, it costs so much to rotate a US Army Division from its home base to Camp Ripley that they typically get up here maybe every 3-5 years at most. So far as I know, outside of our local Marine Reserve unit, no Marines get to use Camp Ripley at all.
:-)
:-)
I think the US Pacific fleet Marines train in Alaska once in a while alongside the Army Rangers and mountain troops (Is the 10th Mountain Division still active btw?). The US Atlantic fleet Marines has no handy training ground except for the annual Norway exercises. So, keep humbling them! It'll do 'em some good.
I'm also reminded of a story a Marine on Guam told me once. He said that his platoon was taken into the jungle for a three week exercise. They did pretty well until the last night. The instructors were all Vietnam vets. They told the platoon to pick one member of the platoon to act as the target. They could pick any defensive position that they wanted. The trainers guaranteed that the target would be 'killed' in hand to hand combat with no one the wiser in less than 15 minutes.
The platoon decided to literally surround the guy standing shoulder to shoulder. 5 minutes into the exercise, they found out they failed. The instructors had placed a guy in a big banyan tree overlooking the compound. It was trivial for him to drop in, 'kill' the guy, and shinny back up into the tree. The jarhead who told me the story said it was one of the most humbling and educational experiences of his life.
I referenced this link in another part of this thread, but it bears repeating. Check out the veterans' proverbs floating around the 'Net that are known as Murphy's Laws of Combat. Very illuminating. And funny in a sick, twisted sort of way.
Personally, I've often thought that the US forces should spend more time training with artificial limits. There's a wonderful list of veteran's proverbs sometimes known as Murpy's Laws of Combat floating around the 'Net that should be read by every armchair general who thinks war is just a matter of pushing a button.
Every decent combat leader knows you should train as realistically as possible. Part of that training should be coping with the loss of your tactical edge.
While not a complete solution to the ease of use issue, Lyx goes a long way toward easing the transition. You know, the app that bills itself as the first true WYSIWYMean? :)
That's funny. I'm currently driving a 1997 Ford F150 4x4, 4.6 liter V8 engine, 5 speed manual transmission that I bought from a guy who couldn't keep up on the payments. He bought it in April of '97, I got it from him in August of the same year.
:)
When I got it, it had 12,000 miles on it. It now has 192,000 miles on it. Same engine, transmission, and clutch.
I brought it in to the local Ford dealer at 85,000 miles for a tranny problem. The local indie garage that I had used to do a transmission flush and fill had overfilled it, blowing several of the seals. This meant dropping the tranny to replace them. I told them as long as it was out, go ahead and replace the clutch. I figured why not, even though I generally get more like 100,000 to 120,000 miles out of one. The dealer called me back three times to talk me out of it. He finally told me that it looked brand new.
At 120,000 miles I brought it back to the same Ford dealer and told them to replace the engine because I figured that was long enough on it. Note: I said replace, not rebuild, so we are talking thousands of dollars of work going their way. The head of the shop again called me back to talk me out of it. He told me that the engine compression was so tight it looked like it just rolled out of the factory. IOW, there was no point to rebuilding it, let alone replacing it.
When it comes to maintenance, all I've ever been religious about was using an automated car wash with underbody flush every time I filled the gas tank during the winter. I use the cheapest grade oil that Valvoline sells at Rapid Oil, and have it changed every 3,000 to 5,000 miles. (Ford recommends 3,000) I do insist on a filter change with every oil change. That's been pretty much it. I've stretched every other maintenance cycle to generally double the recommended length.
So, I've got a vehicle that has seen 7 Minnesota winters. It's been used as my only commuter vehicle and as my back to the woods truck several times a year. It's a little scratched up, but not too bad. No rust showing on the body at all. It's been a great vehicle for me, and I'd love to buy another one. (Too bad Ford no longer sells an F150 with a manual because so few people no longer know how to drive one.) In any case, my son will be getting it from me when he turns 16 in about 15 months. By then I'll have close to 230,000 miles on it, so I might ask the dealer to look over the engine again. I wonder if I'll have to have it replaced then?
Yep, America sure builds shitty vehicles. NOT!
Personally, I've never used any automatic updater after being burned one too many times because something got screwed up that took forever to figure out. Strangely enough, many of those were Microsoft's. In any case, updating many distros is pretty easy.
Gentoo:
emerge sync; emerge -u world
Debian:
apt-get update; apt-get upgrade
Mandrake:
urpmi. There's a GUI front end for it that's pretty slick, too.
Suse (and Red Hat?):
yum
Nope, this problem is largely solved for Linux. And as usual, we've got several excellent competing solutions!
Well, we're still looking at you sending me an email. SPF is a very easy to implement feature that your email admin can do in about 10 minutes with no interference by you or me. Global digital signatures require a lot more work by all parties concerned. They are generally reserved for stuff that really has to be from the sending party.
:)
SPF is geared towards proving that yes, that innocent email that claims to be from your Aunt Ida at least came from her ISP. It knocks down virtually all of the spammers' attempts to hide themselves. That factor, in and of itself, makes it a godsend for receivers.
So, bite the bullet, VPN in to your corporate LAN, and use your company's email services. Your customers and vendors will thank you.
Yes, Type Ahead Find works for links. I just tried it in Firefox 0.9.3. Want all text instead of links? Use the forward slash '/' key before starting your search. Works fine! Go ahead, try it! :)
So, you have to establish a VPN connection to your company so you have email sent with your company's email address. So what? As far as I'm concerned, if I were receiving your untrusted, unauthenticated email I would certainly want as many mechanisms in place to verify where it came from as is humanly possible.
Having to establish that VPN tunnel is a pretty minor burden in the grand scheme of things to gain a heck of a lot of peace of mind for everyone, don't you think?
Oh, come on. Reread what the GP said; "Not necessarily more than Windows, but more than there are now."
.rc file or two. Set it up to check to see if it's already running, and you're ready to go. Bury the executable and its associated logfiles or what have you 9 layers deep under an existing subdirectory in the user's home space and 9 times out of 10 it'll never get spotted.
Do you really think that once we have hundreds of millions of Linux desktops that many or most of them won't be adminned poorly? Trust me, as the target population gets larger we will see more exploits. Poor passwords abound today, for heaven's sake. What won't be common are the kinds of root exploits that happen all the time with Windows boxes.
Heck, the tools are there to create all kinds of fun stuff in userspace. What's to prevent someone from setting up a daemon that kicks off silently every time someone logs in, for example? All it would take is something like a one line entry in a
So; no, we won't see the massive infection rates that we see with Windows.. Yes, infections will become a more serious problem as Linux desktops become more popular.
Actually, the legal age of consent varies by state. In Minnesota, for example, the age of consent for girls is 16, but for guys it's 18. This leads to interesting situations when you're in high school. There's nothing quite like telling a girl that technically she's committing statutory rape to REALLY get her hormones going. I had a lot of fun when I was young. :)
Oh, come on! Even the links you provide show that Randy Weaver and David Koresh aren't even close to being in the same class of 'bad guys'. At worst, Randy Weaver was guilty of selling a handful of sawed off shotguns that may or may not have been illegal to an undercover agent. Other than that, he was just a nut who wanted to be left alone. Granted, he made a LOT of mistakes in dealing with his legal woes. Even so, he apparently never attacked anyone until he was attacked. For that, he lost his wife and son to deliberate action by Federal agents.
David Koresh, OTOH, probably participated in a deliberate act of murder to gain control of a church, raped children as young as 12, and convinced over one hundred people to follow him into almost certain death in a hopeless standoff with the Feds. His actions helped to contribute to the death of dozens of kids.
Randy always struck me as someone who deserved pity more than hatred. I never considered Koresh as anything but an evil man.
The only thing that was worse than Koresh was the way that the Feds bungled his arrest. Why the hell didn't they just pick him up in town? It's not like they didn't know what his routine was.
If I were a hiring manager, yes, your personal experience would definitely interest me. You sound like the kind of guy that is all too rare nowadays; a Jack of all Trades that's extremely good at applying theory to practice.
The trouble is, I'll bet dollars to doughnuts you've never realized that's exactly what you're doing. You probably operate at an almost unconcious level on the theoretical side, and have a hard time explaining why exactly you chose the solution that you did for any problem.
Unfortunately, this makes you a tough sell to HR departments. You really do need to start thinking through how to better package your skillsets if you're looking for something that's more challenging than PC repair.
Besides, it looks like even board level repair of PCs is going to start drying up. We're going to see more and more of these $300 to $500 boxes coming out over the next few years. And the price will probably keep dropping. People will start treating them like throw aways here pretty quick. It really is time to think about a career move.
Actually, to some degree it depends where you want to end up. If you prefer working for bigger organizations, the skills/tools list is a must to get past the first automated keyword search that all HR departments seem to be moving to.
You have to think about what you really want to do. You want to convince the hiring manager that you are the right person for a job. However, you first have to jump through a few hoops to get that interview. HR acts as a screening function, which is both good and bad.
For example, I work in our enterprise architect group. We have a mix of oldtimers with decades of experience but little in the way of formal education and some younger people (the youngest is about 35) with masters and PhDs. Most of the oldtimers have been with our company for at least 15 years.
I was an exception in many ways; I had only been with the company less than 6 years when I started working in enterprise architecture, I was younger than most at 39, and I didn't have a 4 year degree. I got the job based purely on my internal reputation.
I don't think I'd get past the HR screening process now, even if my boss wanted to re-hire me. Heck, I'm not sure any of the oldtimers would get past the HR screeing process now. Why? Because HR won't even look at a resume if it doesn't have a 4 year degree on it. Yet some of our best EA types are the ones who have grown up with the company and have seen all kinds of projects come and go.
So, if you have your skills/tools list built up, use it on your resume to get past the keyword search. If you don't like having one, add it as an appendix so it doesn't clutter up the body of your resume. If you don't have one at all, I strongly recommend putting one together. And as usual, don't lie. But don't sell yourself short when you're putting it together.
For example, I had some limited exposure to satellite communications gear at my last duty station. When I hit the civilian market, I listed it, but I was prepared to talk about what I had learned and where I thought I needed more education.
Then again, when I went for the job interview that got me hired here, I found when I went in that they preferred someone with some Token Ring experience. The whole company was wired with it at the time. My network background at that point was all WAN and Ethernet. I told them up front I had no TR experience at all, but I was willing to learn. Other than that, I was definitely qualified for the job.
They called the headhunter I was working with and told her that I had the job before I got home. My guess is that at least a couple of the other people that they had interviewed had tried to bullshit them and they knew it.
And the left wing doesn't?
Come on, you know that there are control freaks on both sides of any political debate anywhere in the world. Don't forget, something like half of the corporate shills in Congress are Democrats.
Yes, I know.
Keep in mind I was talking about stuff I was buying a few decades ago. Just to give you some idea of the albums that were available then:
* Rush's "2112" came out in 1976. The whole first side is dedicated to telling a story of a guy who discovers an old guitar in a heavily regimented world. He tries to get the powers that be to see how great it is to no avail. In despair, he commits suicide just before the returning rebels seize control. Side 2 has some kick ass tunes.
* Jeff Lynne's "War of the Worlds" came out in '79 or '80, I think. It's a retelling of the old H.G. Wells story, narrated by Richard Burton. I still remember "Thunder Child" fondly.
* Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon", "Animals", and "Wish You Were Here". '73 to '78. Album release dates from 7 Hell, ANY album by Pink Floyd is worth listening to all the way through. Digital remasters occasionally show up. BUY THEM!
* Deep Purple's "Machine Head" (1972) only had 7 songs on it. Not a dud in the bunch, although I think 'Highway Star' was the weakest. OTOH, it had 'Maybe I'm a Leo', 'Pictures of Home', 'Never Before', 'Smoke on the Water', 'Lazy', and 'Space Truckin'. All were hardcore rock and roll.
* Anything by Jimi Hendrix. I think he was incapable of writing a bad song.
* Aerosmith's "Get Your Wings" '72? and "Toys in the Attic" 1976?
* Alice Cooper had several underrated albums.
* Kansas. Some people loved them, some loathed them. Their albums really hung together, though.
* Closer to my tastes now would be Johnny Cash. Another man who I think was incapable of writing a bad tune.
More contemporary examples that have impressed me enough to at least consider buying albums are:
* Alan Jackson
* Kenny Chesney
* Brad Paisley
* Shannon Curfmann -- I bought her debut album and I'm still waiting to see if she releases another.
* The Offspring
* Guns 'N Roses -- I've got "Americana" and like it a lot.
* Sarah McLachlan -- I've heard a couple albums and have been very impressed.
* Sara Evans
* Martina McBride
That's just off the top of my head, looking at what's currently in my CD rack and thinking about what I listen to on the radio.
However, the problems with the record industry, including the RIAA, are not new. To quote from "Wish You Were Here":
Come in here, dear boy, have a cigar
You're gonna go far, fly high
Your're never gonna die,
you're gonna makeit if you try;
they're gonna love you
Well I've always had a deep respect
and I mean that most sincerely
The band is just fantastic
that is really what I think
Oh by the way, which one's Pink?
And did we tell you the name of the game, boy,
we call it riding the Gravy Train
We're just knocked out,
We heard about the sell out
You gotta get an album out
You owe it to the people.
We're so happy we can hardly count
Everybody else is just green,
have you seen the chart
It's a hell of a start,
it could be made into a monster
if we all pull together as a team
And did we tell you the name of the game, boy,
we call it riding the Gravy Train
-- Roger Waters, 1973
I used to buy at least a couple of CDs a payday. I passed outside the RIAA's primary demographic of 18-34 quite a few years ago, and my music buying habits did diminish quite a bit. I was down to maybe one a month.
.02. No one else's. :)
About 5 years ago I quit buying any due to financial constraints. Once my situation improved, I didn't start buying CDs because; (a) I finally understood how the RIAA operates, (b) I really don't have time to sample tracks on sites like mp3.com anymore, and (c) my tastes run to mainstream music, mostly country.
Would I pay $10/mo just to be able to DL lossless music? Nope. Would I have 20 or 30 years ago? Doubtful. But back then you could still get some damn fine concept albums. Live albums, story albums like Jeff Lynne's "War of the Worlds", Rush 2112, almost anything by ELP (Emerson, Lake, and Palmer), Frank Zappa, the Grateful Dead, etc. Lots of good stuff. Now, albums just don't seem to hang together as well.
The point is that I bought albums because I wanted to hear all the tracks that never got airplay. So many of them were such great songs.
If there was a $5/mo service I'd be more interested, even if there were further surcharges for DLing songs. $10/mo for a service that I would only use infrequently sounds like too much.
Just my
Ooh, do I have a good one for this thread!
:)
Back in the late '70s I was stationed on a guided missile destroyer (DDG class) in Pearl Harbor. I checked in just as the ship was preparing to go into the yards after a long Indian Ocean/WestPac deployment. She was overdue for a major overhaul by about 18 months. Since DDGs were supposed to be on 12 month maintenance cycle, you can imagine just how close to riding on the ragged edge a lot of the systems on board were.
Well, I was assigned to the electronic tech comm group (ETN) and told that I was taking over the UHF and HF radios from a guy who had left the ship about six weeks before I got on board. The ship had 4 HF transmitters, 2 100W and 2 1KW, 4 HF receivers, and a bank of 8 UHF transceivers. The UHF tranceivers were in pretty good shape, as there was still a guy assigned to them who had been doing most of the work. The HF receivers were sorta OK. The HF transmitters, OTOH, was a complete mess. I found to my (literal!) pain that mixing high powered electronics with an incompetent tech is a really, really bad idea.
Not knowing exactly where to start, I picked one of the 100W transmitters at random and dove in. I found 13 problems in 11 days. I should have known that I was in serious trouble when I closed it up to take it over to MOTU-9 (MObile Technical Unit number 9, a support facility full of senior techs), then couldn't get it re-opened when I got it on their bench. It turned out that the slide rails had been completely trashed somewhere along the line and the previous tech hadn't bothered to order replacements. Instead he had just let it sit partially open. After about 3 weeks I still didn't have it completely up to snuff. At least it would transmit on a portion of its designed frequency range.
The second 100W transmitter turned out to be in somewhat better shape. It would at least transmit across its assigned spectrum, but it had far more in the way of reflected power than it should have had. I finally figured out that he had damaged the antenna jack somehow. Considering that those things are almost impossible to put on wrong, I don't know how he managed it. In any case, after running so long with that much RF bouncing through the circuitry, the entire output amplifier was always iffy. I never did get it all the way back up to full strength.
The first 1KW amplifier was dead, dead, dead. That one turned out to be a simple fix, though. I just had to replace the last stage output tube and some burned out control circuitry from when the output tube had shorted across a couple of its plates.
The last 1KW amplifier was the worst. It had a habit of going from full strength power to off as the ship rolled, then back on again. When I pulled the power supply apart, I found that he had replaced all four diodes in the full wave rectifier. Not such a problem, except that most of the leads leading to the rectifier on the board had burned away when the rectifier burned up. Rather than lay down some new ones, he had simply threaded the leads of each diode through their holes, folded the legs down to touch the unburned part of the leads, AND HAD NOT BOTHERED TO SOLDER THEM DOWN!!!!
Every time the ship would roll, the diodes would shift enough to break contact, then reconnect. The truly amazing part is that he didn't start a fire in the comm shack from all the sparks in that power supply.
It says a lot about how well built that comm gear was built that even after all of that abuse, I was able to keep at least some HF transmitting capability up at all until we made into the yards. Granted, most of the time I was busier than a one armed paper hanger.
We went out 3 times before we went into the yards on training exercises. The exercises were in Hawaiian waters, and lasted 3 days, 3 days, and a week. I actually had 8 hours at the start of the week's cruise where I had every piece of hardware assigned to me up and operational at the same time. After two months straigh
Speaking only as an end user, I HATE Flash. I can't recall the last time that I hit a site that made extensive use of it that I was happy with. If it was limited solely to multimedia displays I wouldn't mind it so much. However, time and time again I've seen developers use it to build their whole Website. Every time that occurs, I inevitably run into a situation where the embedded links give me grief in way or another.
Flash sites also generally load slower than clean HTML because inevitably the developers have implemented every bell and whistle that they can. Let me clue you; not everyone is on a cable modem. I'm ISDN, which is slow enough. I can't imagine how painfully slow some of these sites must be for someone on a dialup.
My biggest complaint with Flash sites lately has been an inability to use tabbed browsing. I frequently will connect to a site, open several interesting links in the background, then read the main page at my leisure. Flash sites won't allow you to do that.
Nope, if Macromedia dies and Flash goes away I won't be crying in my beer. More like dancing up and down and cheering.
Phhffftthth! Wimp. Try the financial typesetting industry for REAL time and just-gotta-work-first-time-every-time pressure. :)
:)
Typical scenario:
Billion dollar deal in the works. Dozens of lawyers and accountants have been working feverishly for months to make it go. Finally, everything is nearly done and they decide to pull the trigger. This decision is inevitably made on Thursday or Friday, and they want to make the announcement just before the opening bell on Wall Street Monday morning. So, they call the printer and tell them to get ready to go.
Now, up until this point the printer hasn't heard a word about the deal for two reasons. One, all those lawyers and accountants are restricted by Federal regulations from talking about deals prior to public release of the information. Typesetters are also subject to the same regulations, but the habit of keeping your mouth closed still keeps the people directly involved in the deal from talking to anyone else.
Two, people get so caught up in actually working the deal that they just forget to contact the printer until the last second. Honest to God, it happens all the time.
OK, so on less than 4 hours notice representatives from all the involved firms and companies start showing up at the printer's office. For national deals, they'll be in the printer's offices in multiple cities. New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Atlanta, Chicago, you name it. If a financial typesetter doesn't have a presence in a major metropolitan city, it's tough to get a sale there.
All these highly paid, overworked, stressed out people start going through all the proof copies, making last minute changes for typos, misunderstood regulations that require changes, last minute changes to the terms of the deal, you name it. They hand back the corrected changes to the customer service reps, who in turn log it and hand it off to the typesetters. The typesetters update the working document, then print the next proof copy in ALL cities that customerss are located at so everyone is working from a current document set.
This goes on right through the weekend. The typesetters work in 8 hour shifts, typically, so at least they get to go home and feed the dog, kiss the spouse, and play with the kids for a bit. The customers almost always would stay in the office until the deal was completely packaged, printed, and being delivered Monday morning. Most of the time the only sleep they get are cat naps on the couches in the conference rooms.
The financial typesetter I used to work for guaranteed 20 minute turnaround on changed pages and routinely did them in 5 minutes. That's from when Customer Service logged the change request until we put printed pages in the customers' hands.
Now, multiply that scenario for as many as 20 deals a day when the IPO action is red hot. Extend it throughout the week. Ignore all holidays. Keep doing it no matter what happens. THAT's pressure!
The only job I ever worked with a higher requirement for stability and response was as a communications tech for the Navy. At least in that career there were a lot of us all dedicated to getting it done. The typesetting company I worked for had about 2,000 employees. We had 7 programmers, 6 dedicated network staff, 5 PC/file server support staff, and 8 computer room operational staff. That includes everybody from managers to the people changing tapes during backups, network designers to cable pullers, project managers to the newest hire code monkey.
I worked in the network group. We didn't have to do shift work like most of the rest of the geekgs. We covered all shifts 7x24x365 through pager and remote tools.
We were limited to doing many changes to a very narrow window on Sunday. Back out processes were mandatory.
It was a fun job in a lot of respects, but the crisis management mentality that type of industry thrives on finally wore me down. 60+ hours in a week weren't uncommon. That, plus the pay wasn't all that great. I left after 7 years for 20% more pay and a 40 hour work week.
GREAT book. My mom got that for my dad for his birthday about the time I turned 12. A truly hilarious sendup of the relationship books that were being written about that time.
:)
Remember how it closed? A Senuous Dirty Old Man's only natural enemy is.... A Sensous Dirty Old Woman!
I thought US Robotics was named in honor of the Asimov books in the first place?