Access is really good at writing quick customizable programs with a great UI. I use it as a gui builder as much as a simple database.
For example I helped a few guys at a small business who were friends of the family last summer. They owned a river rafting company on the Colorado River and had no inventory management at their wharehouse. I could have used mysql and wrote some sort of UI and hacked some ugly program together but I had to do it in a month and a half. I chose access and they loved the new inventory program. It had a nice gui and it was easy to use and manage for their needs and more importantly I did it within a month (I am not a programmer I may mention). If they needed to upgrade later (doubt it... its small business) they could move it to a MS-SQL server on low end intel hardare.
Its like VB which is fine for simple uses that need to be produced quickly. I agree access replacements would be nice. Perhaps a gui builder with rich database controls and scripting support might be in order. However Access is pretty advanced today.
Unfortunately HR is the one who filters candidates and they require a cs degree, knowledge of differential equations, and a whole bunch of buzzwords with experience for every platform/language under the sun.
If I were an IT manager I would go around HR and write the ad myself and do the filtering.
From what I understand is the EULA for gmail claims they will never sell your private data.
MS is taking advantage of this by doing just that in an effort to lure businesses to use their agency instead. Pretty sleezy if you ask me.
Isn't MSNsearch integrated in part of the desktop for Vista? I have not run any of the beta's but I wonder if MS is trying to starve off google by going after its main source of revenue?
Re:Burn out at work is not always work related!
on
Pay vs. Happiness
·
· Score: 1
I see
I have to take notes with problems and resolutions with 2 programs before I close the call so I have zero to 3 seconds of idle time between calls. I do end support with a trashy database program that we are forced to use(slows me down) which offers its own resolutions (not always accurate) and not using it could be grounds for termination. Most of the time most users just forget to plug in their ethernet ports between their modems and routers, yet I can not recommend to check this if the database program doesn't say to do it.
Re:Burn out at work is not always work related!
on
Pay vs. Happiness
·
· Score: 1
I hear you
I see Earthlink in your url? I just started working at AOL call center and yikes is an understandment. Its a horrible job with a very strong pressure to rush customers off the phone to increase your stats aka known as performance.
I assume Earthlink also looks at calltime and tech support work as call center work where you are only allowed 1 minute of idle time a day and continous pressure to reduce calls from Grandma whose pc is loaded with spyware to be resolved in under 12 minutes.
But truth be told if I want to stay in I.T I need this job. The economy is tough and I would like to go back into programming or system administration after college. To do that I need this support job at AOL, even if its callcenter type work.
It seems Linux stability has gone downhill since Alan Cox left. Didn't he get his MBA by now? He was a great engineer and I attribute teh stability of Linux to him.
Linux has grown too large to ever put things in like Dtrace and kernel level profiling (solaris style). A kernel should be small and tiny. I am no microkernel fanatic but the stable kernels of old BSD were no more than 32kb and this is what a kernel should be while the bloat goes into drivers and filesystems that are modules or servers (in the micro sense).
NetBSD is far too primptive for my tastes and is behind Linux and Unix. No journaling filesystem and the smp support is behind. To my horror the backspace key is not even support to make way for old teletype terminal compatiblity from the 1970's?? I think the backspace key works in bash but not in tcsh. This is important because I could not even fix my shell settings in VI because the keys were missing. I used to love FreeBSD but it turned political and all the good developers left and it went downhill to speghetti code lock hell.
I am looking at solarisx86. I am looking at opensolaris but it requires solaris... I think? Solarizx86 is stable, smp ready, and has decent java and 3d support for my xmms visualizations. Also the fonts are pretty since Linuxland is quite in a patent dispute on using certain font rendering techniques in which Apple and Microsoft patented.
I suggest Solaris. It will look good on your resume and at www.blastwave.org you can download thousands of pkg_add apps for solaris. It runs Linux binaries better than Linux itself. Meaning older linux binaries always have a ton of trouble on my gentoo system. But Sun profiles Lxrun with older versions of Linux so you can run quake3 fine in full opengl mode.
Well NetBSD is finally becoming stable but its a tiny obscure OS that is still years behind Linux in terms of SMP. FreeBSD is not stable anymore and I have not heard of anyone running mysql in a production environment that has gotten it to run reliably. OpenBSD is a nitch and is not smp ready.
You may want to try Solarisx86
I am about ready to make the jump. And Because Sun has paid for the patent rights to use proper fonts it looks alot better than Linux.
I lived near the WTC before it collapsed during the 9-11 attacks and it definetly was usefull of public works.
I had all the New Jersey transit system with the Hudson River tubes, most NYC subway lines, my pharmacy, my doctor's office, as well as a market during teh weekends just outside the towers. There was a nice winter gardens in the adjacent World Financial center and many art projects being displayed monthly in the walkway connecting the fincial center to the WTC.
Believe it or not I considered the WTC my backyard and it was a good use of tax payer money.
"Since when does anyone give a crap about MS source code... I thought they just wanted the specifications for these protocols published in a free (beer and speech) manner?"
I do!
I could finally write good quality and secure code from the masters.
Try running mozilla and firefox on grandma's pc with 256 megs of ram running on a 450mhz processor? Now tell me which one you would prefer Grandma to run?
Even on my system with 512 megs of ram I notice that firefox is snappier and I prefer it over mozilla for that reason.
BeOS did intrigue me even though I never used it. It was very multimedia friendly and could boot within 15 second and was lightyears ahead of the competition.
But I was referring to Jobs saving Apple and not which Os would be the technically supperior one.
And yes Windows 9.x did support premptive multitasking while MacOS was still using Windows 3.11 style equilivant cooperative multitasking. Even though MacOS was slighty more stable. It was funny reading about premptive multitasking the MacOSX demo when it came out.
The clones might have been better but it almost made Apple go under. Remember they are a hardware company and whats good for its users is not good for Apple.
The Imac was considered stylish and kind of high end in style and demand as a result. I did not mean computer performance. It recreated a branding and corporate image for Apple which is what reattracted its many former loyalists.
Hollywood refers to music as well and Itunes and alternative non microsoft formats are needed in this age of drm. Microsoft would love to use drm not to protect media interests but to force you o the upgrade treadmill. What they are doing with drm and monitors in the Vista is unreal and scary.
MacOSX already had a real unix on it and frameworks which were converted to cocoa which is what Steve Jobs liked. I wonder how mature Beos api's were?
Still with hardware increasing in power I suppose viewing media under OSX is about as pleasant as BeOS once was.
.Net is not and never will be compatible. I have not even heard of any applications being portable between the 2.
I don't mean hello world programs either..NET is a way to migrate linux users to Windows and no one with a brain would use mono.net on any production based webserver. Its just not stable and it will always be behind Microsoft's offerings. If you want.NET then you must use Windows.
Or face the task of a nightmarish scenario. Besides who says MS wont pull the plug on Mono? I was reading another article about fustrated developers using VB6 and being screwed since its no longer supported. MS is known to pull the plug on its own software. What makes you think Mono will be different?
Where I work teh application we use is not mdi very friendly even though it spawns seperate windows. Why?
Because its a Windows 2.0 application converted to a Win32 one with tons and tons of baggage along the way.
For example to switch windows you need to select the Window menu option since it does not appear on the taskbar.
But it works right? Why do you think SCO is still around? Many apps are still maintained and just compiled with 15 year old compilers running XENIX or dos in an emulator.
Hell rumor has it that Chase Bank uses an emulator which runs another emulator which runs a 1960's program written cobal that runs all of their transactions. The source code was lost 25 years ago. If its not broke dont fix it.
%95 of all software is really cloned anyway. The only difference is that closed source companies love to spread fud because they feel threatened by FOSS. Also many IT users see KDE and think its a knockoff of Windows and gnu is a knockoff of unix. That is 100% true... but in most inferior software dies in the free market of closed source apps but does not under FOSS.
There are great innovative software apps taht are free and a big boat load of CARP.
It doesn't have to be FOSS-based. I don't care what I use frankly and not every FOSS developer is a GNU zealot. I am a BSD one if anything.
Well if my apps don't solve your needs (they wont) then I wont get paid. If you want an app to suite your needs that comes at a cost. Simple economics 101.
Resources are scarce and whomever has the most money is the one who should get the resource. Plain and simple. My software I wrote is my own.
But if the theoretical app is profesional quality then why pay for it? See the contradiction? I disagree with paying for support. Its a very poor business model. Most FOSS develop software for their own needs or to better themselves and their resumes.
Most FOSS software is garbage just like closed source software. Some FOSS like Apache, Perl, Python, PostgreSQL, and Firefox are very good and are gems. Results drastically vary and FOSS is not under pressure of the market like closed software is that usually eliminates the inefficient and poor software.
I don't view opensource software as a solution. I view it as a framework to work on a solution if that makes any sense?
If I were high up and needed something done I would look at using FOSS projects and customizing them by my IT staff or consultants so I could have a package do exactly what I want. For example their are excellent libraries, languages, and tools to use that you can incorporate for your internal use. One good thing about FOSS is that you can integrate it easily unlike closed source apps.. cough SAP...cough.
Its difficult to create a custom solution for bussiness. How are the geeks supposed to know your needs? Where would they start? You have to pay them and they have to know what you need so they can work on it.
This brings me back to the whole create your own software vs buying prepackaged debacle. As you can tell I like creating my own software to solve problems vs buying prepackaged software for most uses.
There are plenty of successfull apps already done for your business like Sendmail, Linux, JBoss, Apache, Php, etc. They are just generic.
It is true what you say about quality. The market really is whats missed in FOSS. I for one want Gimp to die a horrible death so we can have a true photoediting program. There is noting in the commerical market close to photoshop because of the market which eliminates garbage.
It is legal here in the US and American commerce gloats that we are the most contract friendly nation on Earth.
Mainly IP is viewed as the lifeblood of IP in America and we care about businesses more than people since businesses are viewed here as the ones supplying the jobs and supporting the economy. Not the government.
Sure most FOSS are low end clones of successfull closed source software. Most of commercial software is like this as well. For example name one good photoshop equilivant app?
However there are a few professional innovative gems like Apache, Jboss, squid, and other programs that commercial software is only catching up on.
To me what this guy is railing agaisnt happens in the proprietary software industry. The only difference is that most crappy proprietary software is going under while crap lives on forever in the FOSS world.
I view FOSS as a resume builder for a dream software engineering job. I have no experience developing software so would you hire me? Of course not
However if I can show what I do and what I have done I have a chance.
If you were hiring someone would you hire them on their word on what projects that did at job X? Or would you hire someone who contributed %25 of the html rendering code in Konqueror and developed a nice tcp/ip sniffing application? I would chose the later. His or her code could also be viewed by other software engineers on the team for quality and it would show that person loves developing software and its not just a paycheck.
Really this is why I use FOSS. Its a chance to better myself and other people using it.
Most FOSS is not that innovative and just clones existing applications. Keep in mind closed source apps mainly do this as well.
However Apache and Firefox are the few innovative apps that closed source software is playing catchup in. Gnome and KDE are also not just cloning MacOSX and Windows but are now begining to come out with their own features.
This alone dispells the FOSS only copies myth going around by the software industry.
Slashdot Mirror
Access is really good at writing quick customizable programs with a great UI. I use it as a gui builder as much as a simple database.
For example I helped a few guys at a small business who were friends of the family last summer. They owned a river rafting company on the Colorado River and had no inventory management at their wharehouse. I could have used mysql and wrote some sort of UI and hacked some ugly program together but I had to do it in a month and a half. I chose access and they loved the new inventory program. It had a nice gui and it was easy to use and manage for their needs and more importantly I did it within a month (I am not a programmer I may mention). If they needed to upgrade later (doubt it... its small business) they could move it to a MS-SQL server on low end intel hardare.
Its like VB which is fine for simple uses that need to be produced quickly. I agree access replacements would be nice. Perhaps a gui builder with rich database controls and scripting support might be in order. However Access is pretty advanced today.
Unfortunately HR is the one who filters candidates and they require a cs degree, knowledge of differential equations, and a whole bunch of buzzwords with experience for every platform/language under the sun.
If I were an IT manager I would go around HR and write the ad myself and do the filtering.
From what I understand is the EULA for gmail claims they will never sell your private data.
MS is taking advantage of this by doing just that in an effort to lure businesses to use their agency instead. Pretty sleezy if you ask me.
Isn't MSNsearch integrated in part of the desktop for Vista? I have not run any of the beta's but I wonder if MS is trying to starve off google by going after its main source of revenue?
I see
I have to take notes with problems and resolutions with 2 programs before I close the call so I have zero to 3 seconds of idle time between calls. I do end support with a trashy database program that we are forced to use(slows me down) which offers its own resolutions (not always accurate) and not using it could be grounds for termination. Most of the time most users just forget to plug in their ethernet ports between their modems and routers, yet I can not recommend to check this if the database program doesn't say to do it.
I hear you
I see Earthlink in your url? I just started working at AOL call center and yikes is an understandment. Its a horrible job with a very strong pressure to rush customers off the phone to increase your stats aka known as performance.
I assume Earthlink also looks at calltime and tech support work as call center work where you are only allowed 1 minute of idle time a day and continous pressure to reduce calls from Grandma whose pc is loaded with spyware to be resolved in under 12 minutes.
But truth be told if I want to stay in I.T I need this job. The economy is tough and I would like to go back into programming or system administration after college. To do that I need this support job at AOL, even if its callcenter type work.
I hear ya
It seems Linux stability has gone downhill since Alan Cox left. Didn't he get his MBA by now? He was a great engineer and I attribute teh stability of Linux to him.
Linux has grown too large to ever put things in like Dtrace and kernel level profiling (solaris style). A kernel should be small and tiny. I am no microkernel fanatic but the stable kernels of old BSD were no more than 32kb and this is what a kernel should be while the bloat goes into drivers and filesystems that are modules or servers (in the micro sense).
NetBSD is far too primptive for my tastes and is behind Linux and Unix. No journaling filesystem and the smp support is behind. To my horror the backspace key is not even support to make way for old teletype terminal compatiblity from the 1970's?? I think the backspace key works in bash but not in tcsh. This is important because I could not even fix my shell settings in VI because the keys were missing. I used to love FreeBSD but it turned political and all the good developers left and it went downhill to speghetti code lock hell.
I am looking at solarisx86. I am looking at opensolaris but it requires solaris... I think? Solarizx86 is stable, smp ready, and has decent java and 3d support for my xmms visualizations. Also the fonts are pretty since Linuxland is quite in a patent dispute on using certain font rendering techniques in which Apple and Microsoft patented.
I suggest Solaris. It will look good on your resume and at www.blastwave.org you can download thousands of pkg_add apps for solaris. It runs Linux binaries better than Linux itself. Meaning older linux binaries always have a ton of trouble on my gentoo system. But Sun profiles Lxrun with older versions of Linux so you can run quake3 fine in full opengl mode.
Well NetBSD is finally becoming stable but its a tiny obscure OS that is still years behind Linux in terms of SMP. FreeBSD is not stable anymore and I have not heard of anyone running mysql in a production environment that has gotten it to run reliably. OpenBSD is a nitch and is not smp ready.
You may want to try Solarisx86
I am about ready to make the jump. And Because Sun has paid for the patent rights to use proper fonts it looks alot better than Linux.
Well said.
I lived near the WTC before it collapsed during the 9-11 attacks and it definetly was usefull of public works.
I had all the New Jersey transit system with the Hudson River tubes, most NYC subway lines, my pharmacy, my doctor's office, as well as a market during teh weekends just outside the towers. There was a nice winter gardens in the adjacent World Financial center and many art projects being displayed monthly in the walkway connecting the fincial center to the WTC.
Believe it or not I considered the WTC my backyard and it was a good use of tax payer money.
"Since when does anyone give a crap about MS source code... I thought they just wanted the specifications for these protocols published in a free (beer and speech) manner?"
I do!
I could finally write good quality and secure code from the masters.
Is there something that Emacs can't do?
Come with a good editor that doesnt require obscure unlogical keystrokes.
Try running mozilla and firefox on grandma's pc with 256 megs of ram running on a 450mhz processor? Now tell me which one you would prefer Grandma to run?
Even on my system with 512 megs of ram I notice that firefox is snappier and I prefer it over mozilla for that reason.
The tower was used to worship other gods namely Pegan ones which is why he was angry.
Funny how the windows vulnerabilities and the vulnerabilities of Zlib appeared at the same time.
I dont want to debate or anything.
BeOS did intrigue me even though I never used it. It was very multimedia friendly and could boot within 15 second and was lightyears ahead of the competition.
But I was referring to Jobs saving Apple and not which Os would be the technically supperior one.
And yes Windows 9.x did support premptive multitasking while MacOS was still using Windows 3.11 style equilivant cooperative multitasking. Even though MacOS was slighty more stable. It was funny reading about premptive multitasking the MacOSX demo when it came out.
The clones might have been better but it almost made Apple go under. Remember they are a hardware company and whats good for its users is not good for Apple.
The Imac was considered stylish and kind of high end in style and demand as a result. I did not mean computer performance. It recreated a branding and corporate image for Apple which is what reattracted its many former loyalists.
Hollywood refers to music as well and Itunes and alternative non microsoft formats are needed in this age of drm. Microsoft would love to use drm not to protect media interests but to force you o the upgrade treadmill. What they are doing with drm and monitors in the Vista is unreal and scary.
MacOSX already had a real unix on it and frameworks which were converted to cocoa which is what Steve Jobs liked. I wonder how mature Beos api's were?
Still with hardware increasing in power I suppose viewing media under OSX is about as pleasant as BeOS once was.
.Net is not and never will be compatible. I have not even heard of any applications being portable between the 2.
.NET is a way to migrate linux users to Windows and no one with a brain would use mono.net on any production based webserver. Its just not stable and it will always be behind Microsoft's offerings. If you want .NET then you must use Windows.
I don't mean hello world programs either.
Or face the task of a nightmarish scenario. Besides who says MS wont pull the plug on Mono? I was reading another article about fustrated developers using VB6 and being screwed since its no longer supported. MS is known to pull the plug on its own software. What makes you think Mono will be different?
Keep VB6 and the app.
Where I work teh application we use is not mdi very friendly even though it spawns seperate windows. Why?
Because its a Windows 2.0 application converted to a Win32 one with tons and tons of baggage along the way.
For example to switch windows you need to select the Window menu option since it does not appear on the taskbar.
But it works right? Why do you think SCO is still around? Many apps are still maintained and just compiled with 15 year old compilers running XENIX or dos in an emulator.
Hell rumor has it that Chase Bank uses an emulator which runs another emulator which runs a 1960's program written cobal that runs all of their transactions. The source code was lost 25 years ago. If its not broke dont fix it.
reread my post. I said the samething.
%95 of all software is really cloned anyway. The only difference is that closed source companies love to spread fud because they feel threatened by FOSS. Also many IT users see KDE and think its a knockoff of Windows and gnu is a knockoff of unix. That is 100% true... but in most inferior software dies in the free market of closed source apps but does not under FOSS.
There are great innovative software apps taht are free and a big boat load of CARP.
It doesn't have to be FOSS-based. I don't care what I use frankly and not every FOSS developer is a GNU zealot. I am a BSD one if anything.
Well if my apps don't solve your needs (they wont) then I wont get paid. If you want an app to suite your needs that comes at a cost. Simple economics 101.
Resources are scarce and whomever has the most money is the one who should get the resource. Plain and simple. My software I wrote is my own.
But if the theoretical app is profesional quality then why pay for it? See the contradiction? I disagree with paying for support. Its a very poor business model. Most FOSS develop software for their own needs or to better themselves and their resumes.
...cough.
Most FOSS software is garbage just like closed source software. Some FOSS like Apache, Perl, Python, PostgreSQL, and Firefox are very good and are gems. Results drastically vary and FOSS is not under pressure of the market like closed software is that usually eliminates the inefficient and poor software.
I don't view opensource software as a solution. I view it as a framework to work on a solution if that makes any sense?
If I were high up and needed something done I would look at using FOSS projects and customizing them by my IT staff or consultants so I could have a package do exactly what I want. For example their are excellent libraries, languages, and tools to use that you can incorporate for your internal use. One good thing about FOSS is that you can integrate it easily unlike closed source apps.. cough SAP
Its difficult to create a custom solution for bussiness. How are the geeks supposed to know your needs? Where would they start? You have to pay them and they have to know what you need so they can work on it.
This brings me back to the whole create your own software vs buying prepackaged debacle. As you can tell I like creating my own software to solve problems vs buying prepackaged software for most uses.
There are plenty of successfull apps already done for your business like Sendmail, Linux, JBoss, Apache, Php, etc. They are just generic.
It is true what you say about quality. The market really is whats missed in FOSS. I for one want Gimp to die a horrible death so we can have a true photoediting program. There is noting in the commerical market close to photoshop because of the market which eliminates garbage.
It is legal here in the US and American commerce gloats that we are the most contract friendly nation on Earth.
Mainly IP is viewed as the lifeblood of IP in America and we care about businesses more than people since businesses are viewed here as the ones supplying the jobs and supporting the economy. Not the government.
Happens in commercial software too.
Most likely the projects are cancelled or the startup goes under.
Its no different than closed source apps.
FOSS mimicks closed source applications.
Sure most FOSS are low end clones of successfull closed source software. Most of commercial software is like this as well. For example name one good photoshop equilivant app?
However there are a few professional innovative gems like Apache, Jboss, squid, and other programs that commercial software is only catching up on.
To me what this guy is railing agaisnt happens in the proprietary software industry. The only difference is that most crappy proprietary software is going under while crap lives on forever in the FOSS world.
Quite easy.
I view FOSS as a resume builder for a dream software engineering job. I have no experience developing software so would you hire me? Of course not
However if I can show what I do and what I have done I have a chance.
If you were hiring someone would you hire them on their word on what projects that did at job X? Or would you hire someone who contributed %25 of the html rendering code in Konqueror and developed a nice tcp/ip sniffing application? I would chose the later. His or her code could also be viewed by other software engineers on the team for quality and it would show that person loves developing software and its not just a paycheck.
Really this is why I use FOSS. Its a chance to better myself and other people using it.
Most FOSS is not that innovative and just clones existing applications. Keep in mind closed source apps mainly do this as well.
However Apache and Firefox are the few innovative apps that closed source software is playing catchup in. Gnome and KDE are also not just cloning MacOSX and Windows but are now begining to come out with their own features.
This alone dispells the FOSS only copies myth going around by the software industry.
Wasn't Hejsberg the lead designer of Borland's Delphi and Pascal products?
It would make sense for him to bring more features of the languages he prefered best.