For me, the biggest problems with the windows UI are the things that are missing.
Programming editor with syntax highlighting, something like editplus.
An industrial grade database (msde but with a usable interface)
centrally manageable Apt-get like software package management.
Remote Desktop access on XP Home
SSH client & server
A little choice for common applications (web browsers, email).
A scripting environment that doesn't suck.
A command line environment that doesn't suck.
Outlook deserves it's own wing in the museum of usability nightmares.
Network places was a horrible idea. Now no one knows how to find anything on a network if it's not a shortcut in network places.
XP is lousy at search on so many levels. Example find-text-in-files doesn't show you the context of the matching text. Even searching by filename is very slow.
The OS litterally hides things from users. Abstracting complex ideas is good. Information hiding can be good. But you shouldn't hide information that a user is going to need at some point. For example, people need to access those hidden application data directories all the time because, go figure, that's where a lot of applications keep their data. Yet they are both hidden and buried.
I don't think internet2 was designed solely as a research network. Looking at i2's site, you can see their stated goals which will probably change over time:
Create a leading edge network capability for the national research community
Enable revolutionary Internet applications
Ensure the rapid transfer of new network services and applications to the broader Internet community.
P2P software falls under the last two points fairly well. I'm not saying it's right to download unauthorized copyrighted works, just that doing so on i2 doesn't strike me as any more of a corruption than doing so on the rest of the internet.
I'm just starting to use dokuwiki at work. It seems reasonably pleasant. However, one problem with a wiki is that it's probably hard to enforce an organizational pattern. With a small amount of documentation that is ok, with a lot of loosely connected information, that's probably ok too, but it's probably not too good when you need a uniform hierarchy. If you are restricted to dotnet and want a wiki, I think flexwiki is dotnet. It's also what MS uses at channel9.
Depending on what kind of documentation you are talking about putting online, you may want to look at ways to generate it as opposed to converting it. In other words, this could be an opportunity to improve your documentation or reduce the costs of generating it. You may want to look into tools like javadoc or doxygen.
Personally, and this is just an opinion, I think that pdfs are a completely inappropriate format for conveying information over the web. There are really only a few reasons to use pdfs on the web:
You want to save money at the expense of ease of use for customers and you are already invested in pdfs.
You want to provide a big document that can be downloaded and printed off all at once (I never want this out of online documentation).
You need to have everything look the same everywhere.
Otherwise, you're better off with online documentation that is written in the language of the web. It's stylistically and semantically consistent. It loads fast. No special software is required. It has the illusion of being more dynamic (read up-to-date) whether or not it actually is.
Personally, I've got no problem with niche marketting or more generally speaking segmenting the market and then customizing the product for the various market segments. If you can sell a business class mouse for $50 and a home user mouse for $20 and a gamer mouse for $30 and have them all be the same mouse, more power to you. If you didn't segment the market like this, your competitor might and then you could potentially lose sales because some idiot thinks he should pay $50 for a business class mouse. People who are making uninformed decisions will often prefer to pay more for a product because they associate price with quality. If you don't offer them the opportunity to pay more, in a sick twisted way, you're not listening to your customers.
The only time I have a problem with this kind of niche marketting is when I know I'm paying $30 too much for that "business class" mouse and the supplier won't let me buy the "home user" version. For example, I contacted our Dell premier guy about getting some n-series pcs, and he said I wasn't allowed to buy them because they were only available in small business.
Normally, I'd completely agree with you. Some of the stories of the past few months have kind of irked me, like when they posted the Tsunami deep see life urban legend as actual news or when Taco snapped at the general readership for complaining about dupe articles.
But one thing you've really got to like about this story is the way Hemos handled it.
He apologized for the error.
He issued a correction.
He did both in a timely manner.
I don't mind an occassional slip or error as long as they handle it as professionally as Hemos handled this one.
Maybe he was having some fun at your expense? I imagine people behind that counter get asked all sorts of questions day in and day out, and they probably get tired of it fast.
From you perspective you may have been asking a question, IT guy to IT guy, and in that sense, it makes sense to ask such a question. However, from his perspective, a customer was asking him yet another question that was vastly outside of the scope of things he was there to help them with.
Are there any good computer games for cats? How do I make a web? Where do you go to send emails from excel? What's a good way to start learning perl? When your job is to fix Windows and hardware related problems, I can see a man cracking under such a barrage.
Yes ma'am, excel has a well hidden mail feature. Microsoft likes to keep it under wraps because it helps keep sales of Outlook Express up. You can even send batches of messages all at once. Just enter the recipients in column A and the messages in column B and then hit Ctrl-Shift-S-E-N-D. Of course, this will only work if you've properly configured your mail protocol. NEXT!
Bullshit. I've worked for more than one company where the failure of various IT systems brought half the company to a stand still... and we're not talking about complete failure either, just one subsystem system. Any computerized transaction rich environment is extremely sensitive to system failures.
No, those are 24/7 employers. If you work at 7/11 and get a call from your boss at 2am asking you to come into work, you can politely tell him to go to hell. If you work in IT and you get a call from your boss at 2am, it likely means that replication is broken on the SQL Server and the people working in your 24/7 processing plants in the US, Canada, and Europe are at a stand still.
In addition, it's much harder to go back to school later in life once you start the drudgery of "life maintenance"
The other big problem is that different things are important in real life and university life. It can be extremely difficult to get used to studying all the random information they try to feed you in college. It's also very difficult to re-adjust yourself to being evaluated not on the merits of your performance over several weeks, but on your performance on a 60 minute test.
I would suggest going to college first. If you want to travel there are a variety of options open. You could become a foreign exchange student. One of my profs tried to get me to go to Mexico for a quarter. You could intern some place far away. I had one friend who did externships in Alaska and Florida. My sister took two quarters off a year short of graduation so she could hike the Appalachian trail. A few of my friends went travelling around Europe the summer after they graduated.
When you truly start to understand some of these people, you can't really hate them anymore, you just start to pity them. There are reasons people succomb to these scams: mental problems, extreme loneliness, complete ignorance, a life that's so devoid of hope that they will cling to obviously false promises.
All of the comments seem to be advocating showing the kids what you do. Instead of boring them with technical details or demonstrations they can't understand, why not focus on why you do what you do.
For example, one driving motivator for a lot of people is this notion that they are building something that benefits a large number of people.
Kids, have any of you ever built a castle out of legos or a boat using capsella blocks? It's pretty fun isn't it? Ever show what you made to your friends or parents? Did they like it?
Software development is a little bit like that. We build things, complicated things, things that can help people. Sometimes the things we build are used by hundreds of people where we work. Sometimes they are used all over the world.
There's a man living half way around the world in Hong Kong. His name is Alan Knowles. I've never met him before, but he built a piece of software that I use everyday.
What is it, what did Alan build? He built a program that helps other people build better programs. You might say he built a new, better kind of lego.
Thousands of people all over the world use and enjoy the program Alan built. They use his program to build even more programs that benefit hundreds or thousands of people. If Alan's program is used by a thousand software developers, and each of them uses it to create a program that is used by a thousand people, then Alan's program benefits a million people. That's more people than live in (insert localization).
Imagine if the castle you built out of legos could be enjoyed by so many.
Maybe the question to ask is how much money does microsoft make from the upgrade market versus how much they stand to make from being nice to their customer base. I imagine that very few people buy upgrades. As for organizations, I imagine that if an orgranization insists on having the latest windows software, they probably have some kind of licensing agreement that gives them "free" upgrades while simultaneously locking them into the agreement.
For example, at Ohio State University, we recently went from a perpetual license to a contract with a 3 year time span. Meaning, if we buy a bundle of software licenses from Microsoft for a pc, those licenses expire at the end of the agreement. Esentially, this means we'll now be repurchasing of all of our MS software every 3 years. It's basically a subscription model. Whether or not this is cost effective for us is debatable. However, under this kind of model, backporting features doesn't cost MS upgrade revenues and it makes those of us who have to maintain systems a little happier.
I used to work at a death march job. 60 hour work weeks. Lousy environment. Lots of stress. No appreciation. I was miserable and my health was probably not what it could have been. Within a few months of quiting, I felt great. Apparently I also looked a lot better because everyone I ran into kept asking questions like... Have you lost weight? You been going to the gym? Of course I hadn't been anywhere near a gym and I weighed the same as the day I quit, but leaving that horrible place made a huge difference that was visible to everyone around me.
If you're unhappy or unhealthy, and if you can't make it so you are happy and healthy (by juggling schedules or whatever), then quit. Life's too short.
I've always thought it would be interesting if people or organizations within the open source movement would start patenting everything they invented, then license it under a gpl like clause but with some kind of protection measures against patent lawsuits. I seriously doubt anyone owns more valuable intellectual property than the FSF, they'd be the 800 lb gorilla. Of course, who can afford $2,000 per patent?
It's the differences between the browser support that gets me... which isn't really a complaint about the language itself exactly... that and I've had trouble locating good sources of online documentation. These two things are probably related.
As someone else indicated, languages are tools. Besides, even with an awesome IDE, cobol is still cobol, VB is still an object based (not oriented) language, and javascript still makes me cry.
If someone crying the superiority of Java over PHP over ASP, Windows over UNIX/Linux...they are not going to be making the best choices for the various parts of the product.
This is not necessarily true. I'm on loan to an internal organization to help them get a data driven web site up and running. Eventually they're supposed to be able to do stuff on their own. One has some experience with desktop databases, the other is a graphic designer who has maintained several mostly static web pages. Anyways, if I advocate PHP over Java,.NET, or ASP, that's not evangilism, it's sanity.
There's also other reasons for pushing a specific technology. For example, a firm's core competency's might be in a particular area. If the client doesn't care what technology is used, then should they care if the contractor is going to use the tools with which they are most proficient? ASP sucks. But it's possible that a contractor has a superb set of custom libraries and knowhow that make his ASP solution better than a competing PHP solution.
Lets go and give all them lazy bastard Londoners free perfect looking gardens before we help that poor girl with cancer. I'm sorry but this is downright stupid, even for Slashdot this is breaking a new barrel in.
Medical research is extremely slow and cumbersome. If the level of genetic engineering in the world were such that we had all sorts of genetically engineered products for the home garden, then the state of the art in genetic engineering would be improving far faster than if we were devoting our resources to the medical arena alone.
The result is the same mucking-with-genes, just much more slowly than genetic engineering promises.
Finally, someone who agrees. That's exactly what I said to the police officer. Look, I'm just driving to grocery store. The results are the same whether I go 25 mph or 125 mph down this residential street. What is the big deal?
Just a related comment... I work in a career services office. College kids can't wait to interview with Microsoft. Right now, the only company higher on the list might be Google, but they haven't done any recruiting through us. And this from a school whose computer science program is taught almost entirely in a solaris environment.
Slashdot Mirror
- Create a leading edge network capability for the national research community
- Enable revolutionary Internet applications
- Ensure the rapid transfer of new network services and applications to the broader Internet community.
P2P software falls under the last two points fairly well. I'm not saying it's right to download unauthorized copyrighted works, just that doing so on i2 doesn't strike me as any more of a corruption than doing so on the rest of the internet.Depending on what kind of documentation you are talking about putting online, you may want to look at ways to generate it as opposed to converting it. In other words, this could be an opportunity to improve your documentation or reduce the costs of generating it. You may want to look into tools like javadoc or doxygen.
Personally, and this is just an opinion, I think that pdfs are a completely inappropriate format for conveying information over the web. There are really only a few reasons to use pdfs on the web:
- You want to save money at the expense of ease of use for customers and you are already invested in pdfs.
- You want to provide a big document that can be downloaded and printed off all at once (I never want this out of online documentation).
- You need to have everything look the same everywhere.
Otherwise, you're better off with online documentation that is written in the language of the web. It's stylistically and semantically consistent. It loads fast. No special software is required. It has the illusion of being more dynamic (read up-to-date) whether or not it actually is.Personally, I've got no problem with niche marketting or more generally speaking segmenting the market and then customizing the product for the various market segments. If you can sell a business class mouse for $50 and a home user mouse for $20 and a gamer mouse for $30 and have them all be the same mouse, more power to you. If you didn't segment the market like this, your competitor might and then you could potentially lose sales because some idiot thinks he should pay $50 for a business class mouse. People who are making uninformed decisions will often prefer to pay more for a product because they associate price with quality. If you don't offer them the opportunity to pay more, in a sick twisted way, you're not listening to your customers.
The only time I have a problem with this kind of niche marketting is when I know I'm paying $30 too much for that "business class" mouse and the supplier won't let me buy the "home user" version. For example, I contacted our Dell premier guy about getting some n-series pcs, and he said I wasn't allowed to buy them because they were only available in small business.
But one thing you've really got to like about this story is the way Hemos handled it.
- He apologized for the error.
- He issued a correction.
- He did both in a timely manner.
I don't mind an occassional slip or error as long as they handle it as professionally as Hemos handled this one.Maybe he was having some fun at your expense? I imagine people behind that counter get asked all sorts of questions day in and day out, and they probably get tired of it fast.
From you perspective you may have been asking a question, IT guy to IT guy, and in that sense, it makes sense to ask such a question. However, from his perspective, a customer was asking him yet another question that was vastly outside of the scope of things he was there to help them with.
Are there any good computer games for cats? How do I make a web? Where do you go to send emails from excel? What's a good way to start learning perl? When your job is to fix Windows and hardware related problems, I can see a man cracking under such a barrage.
Yes ma'am, excel has a well hidden mail feature. Microsoft likes to keep it under wraps because it helps keep sales of Outlook Express up. You can even send batches of messages all at once. Just enter the recipients in column A and the messages in column B and then hit Ctrl-Shift-S-E-N-D. Of course, this will only work if you've properly configured your mail protocol. NEXT!
So what I'm hearing is that the only constant in IT over the past 7 years is that ASP sucks, and it sucks every bit as much as it did 7 years ago?
Bullshit. I've worked for more than one company where the failure of various IT systems brought half the company to a stand still... and we're not talking about complete failure either, just one subsystem system. Any computerized transaction rich environment is extremely sensitive to system failures.
No, those are 24/7 employers. If you work at 7/11 and get a call from your boss at 2am asking you to come into work, you can politely tell him to go to hell. If you work in IT and you get a call from your boss at 2am, it likely means that replication is broken on the SQL Server and the people working in your 24/7 processing plants in the US, Canada, and Europe are at a stand still.
Or a spell checker, or a secondary read-only review queue, or any number of other things....
For for the dupe
Department of redundancy department?
In addition, it's much harder to go back to school later in life once you start the drudgery of "life maintenance"
The other big problem is that different things are important in real life and university life. It can be extremely difficult to get used to studying all the random information they try to feed you in college. It's also very difficult to re-adjust yourself to being evaluated not on the merits of your performance over several weeks, but on your performance on a 60 minute test.
I would suggest going to college first. If you want to travel there are a variety of options open. You could become a foreign exchange student. One of my profs tried to get me to go to Mexico for a quarter. You could intern some place far away. I had one friend who did externships in Alaska and Florida. My sister took two quarters off a year short of graduation so she could hike the Appalachian trail. A few of my friends went travelling around Europe the summer after they graduated.
When you truly start to understand some of these people, you can't really hate them anymore, you just start to pity them. There are reasons people succomb to these scams: mental problems, extreme loneliness, complete ignorance, a life that's so devoid of hope that they will cling to obviously false promises.
All of the comments seem to be advocating showing the kids what you do. Instead of boring them with technical details or demonstrations they can't understand, why not focus on why you do what you do.
For example, one driving motivator for a lot of people is this notion that they are building something that benefits a large number of people.
Kids, have any of you ever built a castle out of legos or a boat using capsella blocks? It's pretty fun isn't it? Ever show what you made to your friends or parents? Did they like it?
Software development is a little bit like that. We build things, complicated things, things that can help people. Sometimes the things we build are used by hundreds of people where we work. Sometimes they are used all over the world.
There's a man living half way around the world in Hong Kong. His name is Alan Knowles. I've never met him before, but he built a piece of software that I use everyday.
What is it, what did Alan build? He built a program that helps other people build better programs. You might say he built a new, better kind of lego.
Thousands of people all over the world use and enjoy the program Alan built. They use his program to build even more programs that benefit hundreds or thousands of people. If Alan's program is used by a thousand software developers, and each of them uses it to create a program that is used by a thousand people, then Alan's program benefits a million people. That's more people than live in (insert localization).
Imagine if the castle you built out of legos could be enjoyed by so many.
Maybe the question to ask is how much money does microsoft make from the upgrade market versus how much they stand to make from being nice to their customer base. I imagine that very few people buy upgrades. As for organizations, I imagine that if an orgranization insists on having the latest windows software, they probably have some kind of licensing agreement that gives them "free" upgrades while simultaneously locking them into the agreement.
For example, at Ohio State University, we recently went from a perpetual license to a contract with a 3 year time span. Meaning, if we buy a bundle of software licenses from Microsoft for a pc, those licenses expire at the end of the agreement. Esentially, this means we'll now be repurchasing of all of our MS software every 3 years. It's basically a subscription model. Whether or not this is cost effective for us is debatable. However, under this kind of model, backporting features doesn't cost MS upgrade revenues and it makes those of us who have to maintain systems a little happier.
I used to work at a death march job. 60 hour work weeks. Lousy environment. Lots of stress. No appreciation. I was miserable and my health was probably not what it could have been. Within a few months of quiting, I felt great. Apparently I also looked a lot better because everyone I ran into kept asking questions like... Have you lost weight? You been going to the gym? Of course I hadn't been anywhere near a gym and I weighed the same as the day I quit, but leaving that horrible place made a huge difference that was visible to everyone around me.
If you're unhappy or unhealthy, and if you can't make it so you are happy and healthy (by juggling schedules or whatever), then quit. Life's too short.
I've always thought it would be interesting if people or organizations within the open source movement would start patenting everything they invented, then license it under a gpl like clause but with some kind of protection measures against patent lawsuits. I seriously doubt anyone owns more valuable intellectual property than the FSF, they'd be the 800 lb gorilla. Of course, who can afford $2,000 per patent?
It's the differences between the browser support that gets me... which isn't really a complaint about the language itself exactly... that and I've had trouble locating good sources of online documentation. These two things are probably related.
Let's just say you're a member of the KKK going for a walk in Harlem... would you be a fool if you decided to wear your pointy hat?
As someone else indicated, languages are tools. Besides, even with an awesome IDE, cobol is still cobol, VB is still an object based (not oriented) language, and javascript still makes me cry.
If someone crying the superiority of Java over PHP over ASP, Windows over UNIX/Linux...they are not going to be making the best choices for the various parts of the product.
.NET, or ASP, that's not evangilism, it's sanity.
This is not necessarily true. I'm on loan to an internal organization to help them get a data driven web site up and running. Eventually they're supposed to be able to do stuff on their own. One has some experience with desktop databases, the other is a graphic designer who has maintained several mostly static web pages. Anyways, if I advocate PHP over Java,
There's also other reasons for pushing a specific technology. For example, a firm's core competency's might be in a particular area. If the client doesn't care what technology is used, then should they care if the contractor is going to use the tools with which they are most proficient? ASP sucks. But it's possible that a contractor has a superb set of custom libraries and knowhow that make his ASP solution better than a competing PHP solution.
D is for Diploma!
Lets go and give all them lazy bastard Londoners free perfect looking gardens before we help that poor girl with cancer. I'm sorry but this is downright stupid, even for Slashdot this is breaking a new barrel in.
Medical research is extremely slow and cumbersome. If the level of genetic engineering in the world were such that we had all sorts of genetically engineered products for the home garden, then the state of the art in genetic engineering would be improving far faster than if we were devoting our resources to the medical arena alone.
The result is the same mucking-with-genes, just much more slowly than genetic engineering promises.
Finally, someone who agrees. That's exactly what I said to the police officer. Look, I'm just driving to grocery store. The results are the same whether I go 25 mph or 125 mph down this residential street. What is the big deal?
Just a related comment... I work in a career services office. College kids can't wait to interview with Microsoft. Right now, the only company higher on the list might be Google, but they haven't done any recruiting through us. And this from a school whose computer science program is taught almost entirely in a solaris environment.