He writes an article shunting the blame for the spam issue off on the user.
Well.... I got a work order last night (could not have been better timing) to assist one of my users. It says 'Client has over 21,000 junk mail in her GroupWise Inbox and would like our Network's Group help in deleting them, if that is possible.'
As I was sitting there deleting stuff, I noticed that on one day she got 203 items. I also saw that she reads spam, and replies to it!
So we have two problems here. 1) Sometimes, the user really is at fault. 2) Having the government pass a law relieves those users of responsibility for their actions. In this case, my employer will bill the client 1.3 hours at my (pretty expensive) rate. There is a decent chance that her boss will request some 'education' for her. And maybe, just maybe, the organization will allow me to implement SpamAssassin.
Laws don't work. In fact, they often have consequences that are far worse than their supposed cure - the War of Drugs being the prime example.
Because of the War of Drugs propaganda, parents are suckered into thinking government can do something about it; (some) kids are suckered into giving up on school because they can more money as drug-dealers; the artificially high price of the contraband leads to burglary and theft; and tax-payers lose because of the horrendous expense to hire police, courts, lawyers, jailers, and probation officers.
FWIW, after Prohibition was lifted in the 1930's, alcoholism rates did increase - 2%.
My point is that persecution of the merely annoying by law rarely works - and when it does work, the cost is way too high. There are private sector solutions that are better. Pay-per-kilobyte mail delivery being the obvious one - but then you wouldn't be getting your mail for 'free'. So the solution is to raise taxes and invite even more government intrusion into our lives?
And this is why companies implement Document Management Systems. ODMA has been around for quite a while - and as far as Microsoft is concerned, it doesn't like ODMA, because ODMA was Not Invented Here. This new feature is just Microsoft's version with the added feature (for them) to Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish all their competitior's Document Management systems.
I am pretty sure OpenOffice already supports ODMA. There are a number of vendors that have a vested interest in maintaining their current DMS. I think OpenOffice is a great fit for those companies that have a DMS and don't want to be coerced to rip and replace their current system.
Actually, if you are California state prison guard, you got a 17% raise (over three years). Pensioners also got increases, as well as the administation employees. Lastly, employees only remotely related to law enforcement were reclassified as peace officers, and thus get to cash in on the larger pension plan for those people who put their life on the line maintaining the peace. These raises were made final just prior to the last election - and Davis made sure those people knew who gave them the money.
FWIW, those debts has been building up over four years.
In ten years, I expect to have AI software assistance that writes the assembler code for me....
It is not unreasonable to expect to be able flowchart the problem at a high level, and have a code generator pop out whatever code you need. In ten years, the code generator should have a state-machine for its target to run the code against for ititerative optimizing cycles.
Well, o.k., ten years ago, I expected it to be here today....
So what happens if you just leave all the kiosks offline and give them all a copy of the master voter registration db? Now you've opened yourself up to voter fraud: you could go from kiosk to kiosk, casting multiple ballots as yourself.
I remember an image of the day at The Cellar Honduras prevents voting fraud which might solve this problem. Actually, the problem it solves occurs today in many elections. This biggest problem with it, the people who are going to whine about the mess. It will probably take a massive scandal before Joe Citizen would be willing to agree to this.
You missed the point. The winner of the office cares who voted against him. And it is in his best interest to crush his opponents. Tax audits are only one form of harassment. It can go a lot further. In California, we recently got government programs in the schools, for student job placement. Vote for the wrong guy, and your kid gets a crappy job.
Vote for the wrong guy, and the local officials suddenly realize that your business was issued the wrong zoning permit by mistake. Vote for the wrong guy, and the police show up on your front door, in front of your neighbors, arresting you for a bogus charge of child molesting. Sure, whomever filed the charge may have told a lie, and the government will later say 'oops, sorry.' But will you ever get your reputation back? That damage to your reputation could very well cost you that job promotion you were expecting.
>>>>
The 7 Vital Principles about Government
by Harry Browne
It's easy to think sometimes that a new
government program, law, or regulation could
cure a pressing social problem.
Whether it's a desire to end abortions, keep
the wrong people out of the country, make your
city drug-free, stop corporate frauds, crack
down on criminals, or make health care more
accessible and less expensive, you can imagine
how the right new law could make everything
okay.
But when you get that kind of thought, I hope
you'll remember the seven principles that apply
to _all_ government programs -- not just the
ones you oppose.
The Principles
1. Government is force.
Every government program, law, or regulation is
a demand that someone do what he doesn't want
to do, refrain from doing what he does want to
do, or pay for something he doesn't want to pay
for. And those demands are backed up by police
with guns.
You expect that force to be used only against
the guilty. But we can see how the Drug War,
the foreign wars, asset forfeiture, the Patriot
Act, and other government activities have used
force just as often against the innocent --
people who have not intruded on anyone else's
person or property.
In fact, government force is used more often
against the innocent than the guilty, because
the guilty make it their business to understand
the laws that apply to them and stay clear of
them. Meanwhile, the innocent, thinking they've
nothing to fear, suddenly find that they've
innocently violated laws they never heard of.
2. Government is politics.
Whenever you turn over to the government a
financial, social, medical, military, or
commercial matter, it's automatically
transformed into a political issue -- to be
decided by those with the most political
influence. And that will never be you or I.
Politicians don't weigh their votes on the
basis of ideology or social good. They think in
terms of political power.
3. You don't control government.
It's easy to think of the perfect law that will
stop the bad guys while leaving the good guys
unhindered. But no law will be written the way
you have in mind, it won't be administered the
way you have in mind, and it won't be
adjudicated the way you have in mind.
Your ideal law will be written by politicians
for political purposes, administered by
bureaucrats for political purposes, and
adjudicated by judges appointed for political
purposes. So don't be surprised if the new law
turns out to do exactly the opposite of what
you thought you were supporting.
4. Every government program will be more
expensive and more expansive than anything you
had in mind when you proposed it.
It will be applied in all sorts of ways you
never dreamed of.
When Medicare was initially passed in 1965, the
politicians projected its cost in 1992 to be $3
billion -- which is equivalent to $12 billion
when adjusted for inflation to 1992 dollars.
The actual cost in 1992 was $110 billion --
nine times as much.
And when Medicare was enacted, Section 1801 of
the original law specifically prohibit
Those first ideas upon waking are probably not going to be winners in anyone's book.
So this movie script writer has been on a long dry spell of not being able to come up with anything marketable. He has his friend who does pretty good, and tells him of his lament. The friend asks "You do dream, don't you? I get many good ideas when I am dreaming." What a great idea! He thanks his friend heartily.
Sure enough, he is dreaming, and realizes what a great story it is! He wakes up, astounded by how terific this story will be. Wonderful. A sure blockbuster - gobs of money, forever! He goes back to sleep, content in knowing all is well.
In the morning, he cannot remember the dream. It is gone. Horrible.
Well, there is always the next time.
And the same thing happens again. He wakes up from the dream in wonder of how great the story will be; but, in the morning - nothing. It vanished like a wisp of smoke.
He tells his friend, who offers another piece of advice: "Leave a notepad and paper on your nightstand. When you wake up, quickly jot down the story." Again, great advice from this friend.
He wakes up during the dream - sure enough, its a winner. He immediately writes it down, and settles back into his bed, as happy as can be, knowing that his fortunes are to be made great once again.
In the morning, he wakes up, and eagerly reads his notepad. It says:
For what it is worth, GroupWise version 6 fixed this a couple years ago. The rules functionality of GroupWise is one of those things rather like a blowtorch - use it carelessly, and you will get burned. Because of the number of people doing so, Novell changed the rules to match what the *nix world is doing
You can still have an indiscriminate reply-to-all defined now, but GroupWise only lets the first reply go out to any one sender on the internet (and resets the counter every 24 hours.)
And yes, some of my users complained - they wanted an auto-reply generated for every piece of mail received.
Although you feel GW is a toy mail system - my system can retract messages (that have not yet been opened), automatically tie my appointments in my calendar to my text pager, and stores only a single file attachment to be accessed by 600 recipients in one post office. GW has had (internally) the equivalent of Delivery Status Notification since day one - and is ready and waiting for the rest of the world to implement ESMTP and this feature.
Another possibility - competition. Your point about people not wanting to be burdened with a filesystem seems insightful to me. Novell tried that with their email system a while ago.
Everytime I read about the new WinFS and its database and indexing, I think "GroupWise Document Management - Microsoft meets the challenge."
GroupWise has always been a mail system on top of a central database. They added content indexing with version 5 to make finding individual messages quick. (And really, it was just the server-side application of the indexer WordPerfect came up with prior.) The next thing their customers asked for, was the same capability for files out on the server. What a concept, eh? Of course, there were a number of competitors, all trying to come up with their own advantages. Novell just wanted to make happy customers.
Thus was born GroupWise Document Management. You check your file into a library, and it gets content indexing, version control, user security control, and encrypted. (A further benefit is that with a single document file in central storage, when you mail the document, really, you are just mailing a pointer to the database record. Huge savings in disk space for us email administrators.)
Microsoft Exchange doesn't have anything like it. And yes, Novell tries to remind potential Exchange customers of this often. From what I know of its architecture, it isn't something Microsoft can feasibly do, due to the distributed nature of the Exchange data store.
Until something like WinFS comes along.
The light at the end of the tunnel is blinding us moles inside.;-)
This makes a lot of sense. One thing you and your co-workers will need to demand is an administrative assistant (or two, or three, with authority to do personal errands as well. These people will become a part of that barricade.) You also need to demand perks for your wife and familiy for the pain and suffering they are receiving - no-one gets to go back and relive your childrens's fun days while you were absent.
Since they are paying contractors extra, they have established that they have money.
After it is all said and done, you can point out to your managers that either 1) The cost to them was so high it wasn't, after all, worth it -or- 2) Yes, as a matter of fact, you are all heroes, and a nice holiday bonus will be expected.
Re:Do younger minds absorb quicker?
on
Ageism in IT?
·
· Score: 1
Actually, any company that would toss a resume because it didn't list college experience isn't a place I'd want to work anyway....
Interestingly, what you said could be interpreted to have a (perhaps unexpected) consequence: you want to work in a small organization.
My experience has been that the small organizations must be lean and mean. Skill talks, bullshit walks. The owner or manager is really only interested that you can get the job done - will you be of more benefit than cost?
On the other hand, in the big organizations, there is a disconnect between the bottom line and hiring process. The HR person doesn't handle Accounts Payable; doesn't see if there is a change in Accounts Receivable with the added staff. With those concerns out of the way, stuff like college experience does gain in significance.
IMHO the upshot is: if you want to work in a big organization, you do want to have that degree.
Actually, I used to work for a county Health Department that tried very hard to get classified as a 'Rural Health Provider'. We were successful, and you would not believe the number of T-1 lines they have going all over the place. There are more than twenty, but not quite thirty. Some of these sites have all of two PC's at them - and those are laptops that show up on 'clinic day' (maybe twice a week,) But without that Rural Health Provider funding, we would not have been able to afford such lavishness. (I say lavish, because for example, our Road Yard (Public Works) cannot afford a faster link than a 56 Kbps line for twelve PC's - the difference is that Public Works gets paid out of the local budget. The local administrators actually feel the need to pinch pennys.)
My biggest complaint with taxing the apples to fund the oranges, (so to speak) is that it becomes near impossible to tell how much money the oranges are getting.
One other problem is that this type of funding invariably comes with exclusiveness restrictions. The funding is for Health datacomm, and nothing else. Certainly, because of abuse in the past, I can understand where this comes from. But look at what it got us:
The town of Farmersville, CA has a building that houses its City Hall and Police Department. The local Health agency is using the other half of the building. Because of these special funding sources and their exclusivity clauses, there are at least three datacomm lines from the County into that building. 1) Health has a T1 line (and they do have a substantial presence there - a T1 probably is justified.) 2) The District Attorney has a 56 Kbps line into the Police Department for their gang project. A single PC, pulling up photographs out of a database through the 56 Kbps line - ridiculous. 3) The Workforce Improvemnt Department (job training and placement) has a kiosk sitting in the lobby so people can surf job listings - and that is an ISDN line. BTW, I believe there is another line going into the building for the Farmersville Police Department to access the Sheriff's Office mainframe (that mainframe provides access to the State of California DOJ records.) I don't work on the Sheriff's datacomm, so I don't know the details of thier connectivity.
Because of the task-based funding, these datacomm lines cannot be combnined. Each organization got its own separate routers, CSU/DSU's, and leased lines. Each piece of equipment has maintenance costs / service contracts. It is, by design, more expensive than it needs to be.
Of course, if the private sector was so stupid, it would go out of business.
Re:Bawk? Are you Jhn Clux0r?
on
Chicken Run
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· Score: 1
I showed the picture to my step-son and he thought it was something for the extra heavy-weight division in Battle Bots. PH2000 = Pummel House 2000, right?;-)
Re:Interesting recommendations
on
IT at the CIA
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· Score: 1
The other need mentioned was being able to track the workloads of the various DI analysts. This requires being able to assign workloads to various DI analysts.
For many organizations, this is a huge can of worms, and for which they don't have a solid IT answer. Sad to say, in my workplace, we (somewhat) use MS Project. Even sadder, if we were a MS Project + MS Exchange shop, we would at least have a chance of solving this problem. That Gantt chart becomes a whole lot more intelligent when it is backed up by every persons' calendars.
So a decent question is: is there a project management package that runs on Linux, and uses Ximian (or something like it) to tie everybody together?
I even have a book, System Design from Provably Correct Constructs by James Martin (Prentice-Hall, 1985). Part of it focuses on software that implements "Higher Order Software - A Methodology for Defining Software," by Margaret Hamilton and Saydean Zeldin. Unfortunately, I cannot say that I studied the book like I ought to have.
In my wide-eyed and optimistic youth, I fully expected CASE (Computer Aided Software Engineering) to revolutionize programming. And yes, your point (1) is +5 insightful. Regarding your point (2), I do think we will eventually get to error free systems. But I think it will take giving up the 'programmer as artiste' pretense. I do think that designers will still provide insight. But eventually, engineering a robust solution will be recognized as better than keeping around code just because it was first, and a cool hack at the time.
I could be wrong. I hear that the Linux kernel scheduler is being re-engineered - and that indeed, the new code is better. I suspect that more formal methods are used today. But I don't know that, and I could very well be very wrong.
I would like to rephrase your last question. What will it take before computers can validate our writing of error free grammar?
Partly because I worked on the printed wiring boards that went into it.;-)
Really, it was just plain cool. Description here. As I understand it, Odetics thought it would make a good robot to sell to the military, as a guard unit. It could stand guard all night, never falling asleep, and it can walk about anywhere to get a closer look at 'anomalies'.
The standard demo for it was to crawl out of a pickup truck bed, and then lift the end of the pickup truck off the ground.
Tell me this guard 'bot wouldn't be intimidating.;-) It was built around 1983.
Although it appears that Abm0raz is not using it, Novell does have an add-on product that allows case-sensitive passwords. It is tied to their biometics backend product NMAS (Novell Modular Authentication System.) There has been some marketing speak about it showing up for free / default in NetWare 6.5 (due this summer.) Might just be the "lite" version though. They are doing this with their directory synchronization tool: you get two for free, but additional directories cost you.
I'm not so sure that the/. crowd is a poor source of moral questions. Hang on, I'll explain that...
There is an old 'where are your beliefs?' question that helps you figure out what you think government should be like. The question (paraphrased) is: If you could place the people in the top 100 positions of government from the following two choices, which would it be? A) The top 100 graduates from Harvard University, -or- B) The first 100 people in the phone book? The point to think about is: which bias you prefer? Do you want people from a select class, with obvious advantages, but perhaps some myopia with respect to the real world; or, a bunch of people from all walks of life, some of which will be just like you? Do you want to be governed by The Elite or The Average Joe?
So what is the/. crowd is made up of?
I think with/. you get a little of best of both worlds. You get the focus of a tech-savvy community, without the exclusionary elements. Better yet, the Average Joe gets moderator points.
Sure, the professor could have thrown the question out on Usenet. Or, the professor could have only regurgitated what his peers in the education industry are saying. Heck, he could have done both at the same time by consulting the Internet Oracle;-)
I think too, that the timing of the question is significant. It isn't like classes begin next week. Chances are, this professor is preparing for a class for the summer or fall semester. That does show some forsight, and real interest being able to present quality material.
So if I were in a position of looking for the technology + moral questions of the day, I think I could do a lot worse than/.
I think it's a good idea to always have the floppy drive to fall back on.
I recently got to build myself a new PC from parts, and I figured I could leave out the floppy drive. It was going to be Linux only, but the built-in motherboard sound doesn't work under Linux. It has the new 'play.wav file during boot' feature, but I have to have Windows installed to run the.wav file update utility.
So I put in a second hard drive, with one OS on each: HDA runs Windows, HDB runs Linux. All I had to do is power the machine off, swap data cables, and power back on. How kludgy was that? Next step: 'dual boot'!
How on the Lord's green earth does one transfer a boot loader startup file to a PC without a floppy? How does one get a boot loader startup file without a floppy?
And briefly, I thought about using FTP or webmail. But this is even worse: instead of a $12 floppy, I am substituting a $1000 PC, ethernet, and hub.
Gad, what insanity drove me to even think this was a good idea? Or as my dad used to put it: "someone is suffering from more pride than brains... son.";-)
Slashdot Mirror
Well.... I got a work order last night (could not have been better timing) to assist one of my users. It says 'Client has over 21,000 junk mail in her GroupWise Inbox and would like our Network's Group help in deleting them, if that is possible.'
As I was sitting there deleting stuff, I noticed that on one day she got 203 items. I also saw that she reads spam, and replies to it!
So we have two problems here. 1) Sometimes, the user really is at fault. 2) Having the government pass a law relieves those users of responsibility for their actions. In this case, my employer will bill the client 1.3 hours at my (pretty expensive) rate. There is a decent chance that her boss will request some 'education' for her. And maybe, just maybe, the organization will allow me to implement SpamAssassin.
Laws don't work. In fact, they often have consequences that are far worse than their supposed cure - the War of Drugs being the prime example.
Because of the War of Drugs propaganda, parents are suckered into thinking government can do something about it; (some) kids are suckered into giving up on school because they can more money as drug-dealers; the artificially high price of the contraband leads to burglary and theft; and tax-payers lose because of the horrendous expense to hire police, courts, lawyers, jailers, and probation officers.
FWIW, after Prohibition was lifted in the 1930's, alcoholism rates did increase - 2%.
My point is that persecution of the merely annoying by law rarely works - and when it does work, the cost is way too high. There are private sector solutions that are better. Pay-per-kilobyte mail delivery being the obvious one - but then you wouldn't be getting your mail for 'free'. So the solution is to raise taxes and invite even more government intrusion into our lives?
I am pretty sure OpenOffice already supports ODMA. There are a number of vendors that have a vested interest in maintaining their current DMS. I think OpenOffice is a great fit for those companies that have a DMS and don't want to be coerced to rip and replace their current system.
FWIW, those debts has been building up over four years.
It is not unreasonable to expect to be able flowchart the problem at a high level, and have a code generator pop out whatever code you need. In ten years, the code generator should have a state-machine for its target to run the code against for ititerative optimizing cycles.
Well, o.k., ten years ago, I expected it to be here today....
+5 insightful
It isn't like Microsoft can do much about code on another platform that happens to be compatible with what third-party developers are writing....
I remember an image of the day at The Cellar Honduras prevents voting fraud which might solve this problem. Actually, the problem it solves occurs today in many elections. This biggest problem with it, the people who are going to whine about the mess. It will probably take a massive scandal before Joe Citizen would be willing to agree to this.
Vote for the wrong guy, and the local officials suddenly realize that your business was issued the wrong zoning permit by mistake. Vote for the wrong guy, and the police show up on your front door, in front of your neighbors, arresting you for a bogus charge of child molesting. Sure, whomever filed the charge may have told a lie, and the government will later say 'oops, sorry.' But will you ever get your reputation back? That damage to your reputation could very well cost you that job promotion you were expecting.
>>>>
The 7 Vital Principles about Government
by Harry Browne
It's easy to think sometimes that a new government program, law, or regulation could cure a pressing social problem.
Whether it's a desire to end abortions, keep the wrong people out of the country, make your city drug-free, stop corporate frauds, crack down on criminals, or make health care more accessible and less expensive, you can imagine how the right new law could make everything okay.
But when you get that kind of thought, I hope you'll remember the seven principles that apply to _all_ government programs -- not just the ones you oppose.
The Principles
1. Government is force.
Every government program, law, or regulation is a demand that someone do what he doesn't want to do, refrain from doing what he does want to do, or pay for something he doesn't want to pay for. And those demands are backed up by police with guns.
You expect that force to be used only against the guilty. But we can see how the Drug War, the foreign wars, asset forfeiture, the Patriot Act, and other government activities have used force just as often against the innocent -- people who have not intruded on anyone else's person or property.
In fact, government force is used more often against the innocent than the guilty, because the guilty make it their business to understand the laws that apply to them and stay clear of them. Meanwhile, the innocent, thinking they've nothing to fear, suddenly find that they've innocently violated laws they never heard of.
2. Government is politics.
Whenever you turn over to the government a financial, social, medical, military, or commercial matter, it's automatically transformed into a political issue -- to be decided by those with the most political influence. And that will never be you or I.
Politicians don't weigh their votes on the basis of ideology or social good. They think in terms of political power.
3. You don't control government.
It's easy to think of the perfect law that will stop the bad guys while leaving the good guys unhindered. But no law will be written the way you have in mind, it won't be administered the way you have in mind, and it won't be adjudicated the way you have in mind.
Your ideal law will be written by politicians for political purposes, administered by bureaucrats for political purposes, and adjudicated by judges appointed for political purposes. So don't be surprised if the new law turns out to do exactly the opposite of what you thought you were supporting.
4. Every government program will be more expensive and more expansive than anything you had in mind when you proposed it.
It will be applied in all sorts of ways you never dreamed of.
When Medicare was initially passed in 1965, the politicians projected its cost in 1992 to be $3 billion -- which is equivalent to $12 billion when adjusted for inflation to 1992 dollars. The actual cost in 1992 was $110 billion -- nine times as much.
And when Medicare was enacted, Section 1801 of the original law specifically prohibit
That made me chuckle - thanks. My hometown, Visalia, CA seems hell-bent on importing L.A. yuppies (as if it were a good thing.)
So this movie script writer has been on a long dry spell of not being able to come up with anything marketable. He has his friend who does pretty good, and tells him of his lament. The friend asks "You do dream, don't you? I get many good ideas when I am dreaming." What a great idea! He thanks his friend heartily.
Sure enough, he is dreaming, and realizes what a great story it is! He wakes up, astounded by how terific this story will be. Wonderful. A sure blockbuster - gobs of money, forever! He goes back to sleep, content in knowing all is well.
In the morning, he cannot remember the dream. It is gone. Horrible.
Well, there is always the next time.
And the same thing happens again. He wakes up from the dream in wonder of how great the story will be; but, in the morning - nothing. It vanished like a wisp of smoke.
He tells his friend, who offers another piece of advice: "Leave a notepad and paper on your nightstand. When you wake up, quickly jot down the story." Again, great advice from this friend.
He wakes up during the dream - sure enough, its a winner. He immediately writes it down, and settles back into his bed, as happy as can be, knowing that his fortunes are to be made great once again.
In the morning, he wakes up, and eagerly reads his notepad. It says:
Boy meets girl.
Boy loses girl.
Boy gets girl back again.
;-) Well, I hope it made you laugh.
I'm curious - which one are you? A moocher? Or a looter? if you don't get the reference
You can still have an indiscriminate reply-to-all defined now, but GroupWise only lets the first reply go out to any one sender on the internet (and resets the counter every 24 hours.)
And yes, some of my users complained - they wanted an auto-reply generated for every piece of mail received.
Although you feel GW is a toy mail system - my system can retract messages (that have not yet been opened), automatically tie my appointments in my calendar to my text pager, and stores only a single file attachment to be accessed by 600 recipients in one post office. GW has had (internally) the equivalent of Delivery Status Notification since day one - and is ready and waiting for the rest of the world to implement ESMTP and this feature.
Everytime I read about the new WinFS and its database and indexing, I think "GroupWise Document Management - Microsoft meets the challenge."
GroupWise has always been a mail system on top of a central database. They added content indexing with version 5 to make finding individual messages quick. (And really, it was just the server-side application of the indexer WordPerfect came up with prior.) The next thing their customers asked for, was the same capability for files out on the server. What a concept, eh? Of course, there were a number of competitors, all trying to come up with their own advantages. Novell just wanted to make happy customers.
Thus was born GroupWise Document Management. You check your file into a library, and it gets content indexing, version control, user security control, and encrypted. (A further benefit is that with a single document file in central storage, when you mail the document, really, you are just mailing a pointer to the database record. Huge savings in disk space for us email administrators.)
Microsoft Exchange doesn't have anything like it. And yes, Novell tries to remind potential Exchange customers of this often. From what I know of its architecture, it isn't something Microsoft can feasibly do, due to the distributed nature of the Exchange data store.
Until something like WinFS comes along.
The light at the end of the tunnel is blinding us moles inside. ;-)
Since they are paying contractors extra, they have established that they have money.
After it is all said and done, you can point out to your managers that either 1) The cost to them was so high it wasn't, after all, worth it -or- 2) Yes, as a matter of fact, you are all heroes, and a nice holiday bonus will be expected.
Interestingly, what you said could be interpreted to have a (perhaps unexpected) consequence: you want to work in a small organization.
My experience has been that the small organizations must be lean and mean. Skill talks, bullshit walks. The owner or manager is really only interested that you can get the job done - will you be of more benefit than cost?
On the other hand, in the big organizations, there is a disconnect between the bottom line and hiring process. The HR person doesn't handle Accounts Payable; doesn't see if there is a change in Accounts Receivable with the added staff. With those concerns out of the way, stuff like college experience does gain in significance.
IMHO the upshot is: if you want to work in a big organization, you do want to have that degree.
My biggest complaint with taxing the apples to fund the oranges, (so to speak) is that it becomes near impossible to tell how much money the oranges are getting.
One other problem is that this type of funding invariably comes with exclusiveness restrictions. The funding is for Health datacomm, and nothing else. Certainly, because of abuse in the past, I can understand where this comes from. But look at what it got us:
The town of Farmersville, CA has a building that houses its City Hall and Police Department. The local Health agency is using the other half of the building. Because of these special funding sources and their exclusivity clauses, there are at least three datacomm lines from the County into that building. 1) Health has a T1 line (and they do have a substantial presence there - a T1 probably is justified.) 2) The District Attorney has a 56 Kbps line into the Police Department for their gang project. A single PC, pulling up photographs out of a database through the 56 Kbps line - ridiculous. 3) The Workforce Improvemnt Department (job training and placement) has a kiosk sitting in the lobby so people can surf job listings - and that is an ISDN line. BTW, I believe there is another line going into the building for the Farmersville Police Department to access the Sheriff's Office mainframe (that mainframe provides access to the State of California DOJ records.) I don't work on the Sheriff's datacomm, so I don't know the details of thier connectivity.
Because of the task-based funding, these datacomm lines cannot be combnined. Each organization got its own separate routers, CSU/DSU's, and leased lines. Each piece of equipment has maintenance costs / service contracts. It is, by design, more expensive than it needs to be.
Of course, if the private sector was so stupid, it would go out of business.
I showed the picture to my step-son and he thought it was something for the extra heavy-weight division in Battle Bots. PH2000 = Pummel House 2000, right? ;-)
For many organizations, this is a huge can of worms, and for which they don't have a solid IT answer. Sad to say, in my workplace, we (somewhat) use MS Project. Even sadder, if we were a MS Project + MS Exchange shop, we would at least have a chance of solving this problem. That Gantt chart becomes a whole lot more intelligent when it is backed up by every persons' calendars.
So a decent question is: is there a project management package that runs on Linux, and uses Ximian (or something like it) to tie everybody together?
And here I thought what they needed for their Analyst Websites was just to throw up some slashcode. ;-)
In my wide-eyed and optimistic youth, I fully expected CASE (Computer Aided Software Engineering) to revolutionize programming. And yes, your point (1) is +5 insightful. Regarding your point (2), I do think we will eventually get to error free systems. But I think it will take giving up the 'programmer as artiste' pretense. I do think that designers will still provide insight. But eventually, engineering a robust solution will be recognized as better than keeping around code just because it was first, and a cool hack at the time.
I could be wrong. I hear that the Linux kernel scheduler is being re-engineered - and that indeed, the new code is better. I suspect that more formal methods are used today. But I don't know that, and I could very well be very wrong.
I would like to rephrase your last question. What will it take before computers can validate our writing of error free grammar?
(Note that I programmed in it 8 hours a day, five days a week for two years - so I might be a little biased)
Really, it was just plain cool. Description here. As I understand it, Odetics thought it would make a good robot to sell to the military, as a guard unit. It could stand guard all night, never falling asleep, and it can walk about anywhere to get a closer look at 'anomalies'.
The standard demo for it was to crawl out of a pickup truck bed, and then lift the end of the pickup truck off the ground. Tell me this guard 'bot wouldn't be intimidating. ;-) It was built around 1983.
Although it appears that Abm0raz is not using it, Novell does have an add-on product that allows case-sensitive passwords. It is tied to their biometics backend product NMAS (Novell Modular Authentication System.) There has been some marketing speak about it showing up for free / default in NetWare 6.5 (due this summer.) Might just be the "lite" version though. They are doing this with their directory synchronization tool: you get two for free, but additional directories cost you.
There is an old 'where are your beliefs?' question that helps you figure out what you think government should be like. The question (paraphrased) is: If you could place the people in the top 100 positions of government from the following two choices, which would it be? A) The top 100 graduates from Harvard University, -or- B) The first 100 people in the phone book? The point to think about is: which bias you prefer? Do you want people from a select class, with obvious advantages, but perhaps some myopia with respect to the real world; or, a bunch of people from all walks of life, some of which will be just like you? Do you want to be governed by The Elite or The Average Joe?
So what is the /. crowd is made up of?
I think with /. you get a little of best of both worlds. You get the focus of a tech-savvy community, without the exclusionary elements. Better yet, the Average Joe gets moderator points.
Sure, the professor could have thrown the question out on Usenet. Or, the professor could have only regurgitated what his peers in the education industry are saying. Heck, he could have done both at the same time by consulting the Internet Oracle ;-)
I think too, that the timing of the question is significant. It isn't like classes begin next week. Chances are, this professor is preparing for a class for the summer or fall semester. That does show some forsight, and real interest being able to present quality material.
So if I were in a position of looking for the technology + moral questions of the day, I think I could do a lot worse than /.
I recently got to build myself a new PC from parts, and I figured I could leave out the floppy drive. It was going to be Linux only, but the built-in motherboard sound doesn't work under Linux. It has the new 'play .wav file during boot' feature, but I have to have Windows installed to run the .wav file update utility.
So I put in a second hard drive, with one OS on each: HDA runs Windows, HDB runs Linux. All I had to do is power the machine off, swap data cables, and power back on. How kludgy was that? Next step: 'dual boot'!
How on the Lord's green earth does one transfer a boot loader startup file to a PC without a floppy? How does one get a boot loader startup file without a floppy?
And briefly, I thought about using FTP or webmail. But this is even worse: instead of a $12 floppy, I am substituting a $1000 PC, ethernet, and hub.
Gad, what insanity drove me to even think this was a good idea? Or as my dad used to put it: "someone is suffering from more pride than brains... son." ;-)