One of the nice things about peoplesoft is its customizability... my company does PeopleSoft work, and as I have heard them put it... alot of their tools and interfaces are not meant to be used on their own, but as a starting point to be expanded upon-IE all those interfaces can and should be changed. We do work for a BIG company, and I have never heard them complain about instability... nor could they tolerate it- you may have a poorly configured installation. They also seem to be grabbing alot of market share, so they must be doing something right.
peoplesoft is more of a 'system', not an application... its not as simple as saying... ill go google up some alternatives, make a business and rollout plan, and next week we will all be secure. Moving from PeopleSoft would be similar to moving the entire company from Windows to Linux. We are talking about a major change here, and how are you going to convince HR types that are afraid of change and who just spent a fortune on PeopleSoft and works very well to all of a sudden make a move to another product. Taking a hard stance here will, if he is lucky, get him laughed at. At worst, it will get him fired.
I definitely think so. I mean other search engines have yet to implement it effectively, even though they know in a broad sense how it works (IE they rank pages based on links to the page). I think the 'easily implementable' test can be executed as follows: do you know how to do this? Or if youre not a programmer type, could one of your programmer friends implement this? This is an entire system google developed, not some inanely simple idea some marketing guy thought he was a genius for thinking of (people like to buy things by clicking on as few pages as possible). I feel this is an excellent example of what a software patent should be, especially since the trickiness is in the implementation, as well as the idea.
I am not quite sure of the purpose of this article since most patent articles are intended to point out the ridiculousness of the patent system, but this seems like a pretty legit patent to me. They developed a technology that is superior to their peers, that they developed completely in house w/out ripping anyone off. This passes my shadiness test. If anything, we should all be happy now that Google will be publishing some of the details for their system.
its not really that their positions are that weak... Making a record requires studio time, which is expensive- good studios for albums cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, producers cost alot too- usually a flat fee along with a % of the proceeds, marketing is in the million(s) dollar range (see previous articles on the bribery system to get radio airplay), Cover art, distribution costs, the cost of physical cd production, Release parties cost money, and those figures probably dont include the advance the record company gives them. And while the band can go and perform to make its money, all of the label's revenue comes from the CD. Also, these numbers are a bit skewed since they are probably just past the 'break even' point. After that point, the artists take home more money for each CD. Also factor in that the artists can make money off of royalties. It should be said though that bands make money touring, not really by selling CD's. There have been several articles written about this, some posted on slashdot. In another application of the 80/20 rule, the record label's make money off of 20% of their artists, while they lose money on the other 80%. Of course they make mega-bucks off of their top acts though. I wouldnt cry a river for either side though- label's do go under or merge w/ others frequently enough, and aspiring stars know what they are getting into.
You mentioned "exploring the options" and I believe that is true, we should explore options. However, the Segway is a joke. It should have never gone this far. Using it in a city is like using a yacht to cross a pond. far better alternatives already exist. To name a few... skateboard, rollerblade, bicycle, scooter, that are a mere fraction of the price. If hyundai can profit off an $8000 car that accomdates 4 people, I am positive that a one person limited range vehicle could be produced for $5000 that absolutely blows the Segway away. quads and trikes are cheaper than that, go faster, have a longer range, and current designs could easily be modified to de-emphasize all terain performance and accomodate additional storage and run cleaner. The segway's criticism is well deserved. Environmental extremists have been predicting the end of the world due to the destruction of the environment for at least a century now- and it just isnt going to happen, not now.. not on in my children's lifetime, and I would be willing to bet my entire lifetime's income that it wont happen in my grandchildren's time or at any point in the future. If we do start seeing some real environmental damage affecting our live's, an enterprising person will design a nice portable bike that will be an instant craze in places like manhattan. The segway was a horrible idea, and anyone should have seen that just from the claims that it would revolutionize the world. Revolutions like that do not get planned, they just happen.
how far do you think choosing a slower processor is going to get you? lets say... and this is really a silly scenario since it takes a special kind of over-compensator to get THE best processor... that you choose an athlon XP 2800 at $395 so now instead... we drop to the 2200 for a little over $100. so were saving $300. thats just enough to buy a geforce4 or 9700, and mebbe an extra 128mb of memory. but if youre shelling out $400 for a processor, im sure your budget already has those included... lets look at a much more realistic situation... going from the 2500 to the 2100. we just saved $100. $100 spread over 3 components is not going to get you very far, and paying the premium for scsi doesnt make sense when you can add a raid controller and an extra HD for cheaper... My point being.... people are not going CPU crazy anymore... its just that they are so cheap there is no reason not to upgrade... and you will see a difference between a 1ghz and a 2ghz... a big one. I am sure there are uninformed people or people w/ too much money that are buying those processors, but anyone in their right mind who isnt driving a mercedes is picking much lower on the price curve... and yeah if they see that they can get an extra 100mhz for $8, I dont think they are stupid for doing so.
Not for nothing, but mebbe the NSA guy was just a skilled programmer who happened to want to get in the private sector? I mean if my company hired a secretary that worked at the NSA, does that mean my company is also in cahoots w/ whoever? Google has a bunch of employees, the law of large numbers says that if they get big enough they will also hire someone from the CIA, mebbe even a few marines or navy seals. That doesnt mean they are planning on doing a surgical strike on yahoo's or inktomi's offices though.
I am sorry, but (IMHO) Zelda takes that title hands down. A few years ago (AKA about 12 years after its release) it was still in the Nintendo Power Rankings.
This is absolutely wrong. However, what alot of people take out of context is the fact that there are many factors affecting your credit score, and some factors score much more heavily than others. Unfortunately, the actual formula used is proprietary. However, people have reverse engineered it to an extent. Having your credit checked does lower your score, but not by much. Your payment history, amount of debt, assets, and length of credit are the real deal things to worry about. If these are all ok, then you shouldnt have to worry about a credit check moving you into a different credit tier.
There really isnt a 'mega glut' of fiber. That would be implying that there is a ton of lit fiber that is going unused. That is not the case though. There is a ton of unlit fiber going unused. It is very expensive to light up and operate. Saying that is kind of like putting a 10,000 train cars in a parking lot and saying the town has a glut of trains.
Thats fine, until the network goes down, and you cant do anything. Network technologies have not approached power and telephone system reliability. I would not really want to place that much dependence on the network.
Re:Improve communication between techs and helpdes
on
Improving Your Help Desk?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It sounds like your real problem is that there is a seperation between the two groups. Sysadmins should be overseeing the helpdesk people, or be the 'second tier' of the help desk system. Secondly, unless you are dealing with large enterprise type machines, the developers should have their own machines and servers to play with. My view is somewhat biased since I work for a small consulting firm where we dont really work on 'internal' projects. Everything we do is billable to a client, or is being done to try and win a new project. The seperation avoids the inefficiency of large offices where daily memos about 'office policy' get sent around and generally annoy the crap out of people just trying to get something done without making 3 copies of all outgoing correspondence and putting them in 3 seperate desks where they are filed away never to be seen again until the file cabinet is full and they get thrown out. Sysadmins should provide network services, IE file servers, email, etc... but when it comes to getting a DB running on SQL Server for a development box, developers should deal with that, and maybe 'buy' time of the sysadmins to tune it or get a hand if they are incapable. Time is money. And departments should even be selling it internally as such.
A help desk SHOULD know how to bold and underline, but so should the users. The helpdesk is there to help with problems with PC hardware and configuration. They should not be there to teach you how to use word, or how to fax, or how to fix your excel spreadsheet. That is just ridiculous. A help desk should be designed with multiple tiers- the first line consisting of 7.00/hr high school students that can reroute questions like 'is the webserver down' and follow procedures to fix common problems like resetting printers, diagnosing where the problem is with the user's network connection (IE, software, hardware, or router problem). Then there should be the second tier guys who deal with things like the webserver being down, or the router melting down, or the tcp/ip settings of network printer 9E resetting themselves after a voltage spike. A system like that should work for any size org, although most larger ones tend to have a third tier... the 'oh shit' guys that really know their stuff. Above all, it is your hiring and training practices that need to be reviewed to make a helpless desk into a helpful desk. Users should be trained quickly that unless word is not starting, or it is mangling your documents upon opening them, to not call the help desk and bog them down w/ calls that make them want to hang themselves. Instead, they should bother their supervisors, who can then see the idiots that they are, and the cost of having them waste time due to basic inability to use software. Good hiring and training practices among both the users and techs will make all the difference.
IIRC, mitnick did not program. His skill was entirely in social engineering, and phone technology (which I presume meant he had a good amount of electronics knowledge). Buffer overflows and computer exploits as we know them today were not his thing. While he may have understood how OS's like Unix work, on a very detailed level, he did not code in C/C++.
I never really thought that the problem lied with the server's hardware, but in the bandwidth to the host. Shouldn't an article be written about how to conserve bandwidth during a slashdot effect? Even older servers should be able to handle 100 requests per second. I think most FPS's are alot more taxing than that.
Most of today's games are rehashes of earlier games. The last time a 'new' game came about was probably wolfenstein- and it made a huge impact on the industry. Snood had the same amount of gameplay innovation in it as Quake 2 and 3, Unreal tournament 1 and 2, duke Nukem, etc... had. Indie designers can continually re-implement them because they dont need state of the art graphics, and thus given enough time can be made from the ground up with one or a few people. I do not disagree with what you are saying, but I also do not think you should limit the scope of your scorn to just puzzle games.
I like Linus Torvalds alot, and he wrote a great software product, but how exactly has he been an innovator? Stallman was more directly tied to the Free Software Movement and Open Source. He did do great things for computing, bringing *nix type power to desktops, but is copying another system really an innovation? I feel he should be seen more as a great engineer and designer, not necessarily an innovator. I guess I am not really an expert on the linux kernel, but as I understand it, it uses technology that has been around for awhile (as it should be if you are trying to build a solid system). From what I understand, Alan Cox was also more directly tied to any new innovations going into the kernel, while Linus is more of a commander-in-chief now.
Well, the age of the universe is one of the hardest questions science has had to answer. It is incredibly difficult to study bodies that are so far away from our own. To put a confidence level in perspective, imagine you are taking a test, you studied a good deal for it. You get up to a question, you are pretty sure about the answer, but would not bet the farm on it. You make that guess anyway. That's what the scientists are doing. They use formulas and apply theories to come up with an actual number for how confident they are. I am sure these scientist guys dont think they have the one true answer, but they have arrived closer to THE answer. The difference between science and religion tends to be that, science doesnt mind changing its mind and revising its answer if it comes up with a better way to formulate an answer (for a fairly non-technical example, look at how the definitions of units of measure have changed over time). Religion on the other hand, tends to keep the answers, but reformulate how they got them. IE, I have heard the 7 day theory of creation explained away by saying the 7 days were not necessarily consecutive, they may have been millions of years apart blahblahblah. For another example of this, look at the early renaissance European planetary charts, when Rome demanded that the Earth be in the center of the universe. There are zig-zags, loops, curly-Q's, all kinds of weirdness that was modified in because no matter how much evidence there was to the contrary, the Earth had to be in the center of the Universe. Eventually, evidence will come to light and we will be able to formulate more accurate answers. For right now, this is the best we can do, and Science has come alot closer to the answer in the past 100 years than religion has in about 2000.
(*Troll Alert, sorry religious discussions get me angry *)
BTW... I am just curious... what is the 'level of confidence' you have in water being turned into wine? Or that Mary wasn't covering up the fact that she was knockedup?
I am not one to defend Corporate America, but if you were Eisner, wouldnt you do the same? If one of the cornerstones of your business were to all of a sudden become freely reproducible, wouldnt you try to stop that from happening? I personally believe that an artist should have the right to his work during his lifetime, and to some extent believe the artist's survivors should have some entitlement to benefit from the copyrighted work. I think the problem lies when copyrights only benefit the businesses who bought them. However, I see no reason why only SONY music should have the rights to work done in the 50's if the artist is not still compensated in some form.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the nice things about peoplesoft is its customizability... my company does PeopleSoft work, and as I have heard them put it... alot of their tools and interfaces are not meant to be used on their own, but as a starting point to be expanded upon-IE all those interfaces can and should be changed. We do work for a BIG company, and I have never heard them complain about instability... nor could they tolerate it- you may have a poorly configured installation. They also seem to be grabbing alot of market share, so they must be doing something right.
peoplesoft is more of a 'system', not an application... its not as simple as saying... ill go google up some alternatives, make a business and rollout plan, and next week we will all be secure. Moving from PeopleSoft would be similar to moving the entire company from Windows to Linux. We are talking about a major change here, and how are you going to convince HR types that are afraid of change and who just spent a fortune on PeopleSoft and works very well to all of a sudden make a move to another product. Taking a hard stance here will, if he is lucky, get him laughed at. At worst, it will get him fired.
I definitely think so. I mean other search engines have yet to implement it effectively, even though they know in a broad sense how it works (IE they rank pages based on links to the page). I think the 'easily implementable' test can be executed as follows: do you know how to do this? Or if youre not a programmer type, could one of your programmer friends implement this? This is an entire system google developed, not some inanely simple idea some marketing guy thought he was a genius for thinking of (people like to buy things by clicking on as few pages as possible). I feel this is an excellent example of what a software patent should be, especially since the trickiness is in the implementation, as well as the idea.
I am not quite sure of the purpose of this article since most patent articles are intended to point out the ridiculousness of the patent system, but this seems like a pretty legit patent to me. They developed a technology that is superior to their peers, that they developed completely in house w/out ripping anyone off. This passes my shadiness test. If anything, we should all be happy now that Google will be publishing some of the details for their system.
" This may lead to some interesting future projects."
Because you have an easily accessible method of obtaining zero gravity???
(could this be a driving force behind homebrew space vehicle projects?!)
its not really that their positions are that weak... Making a record requires studio time, which is expensive- good studios for albums cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, producers cost alot too- usually a flat fee along with a % of the proceeds, marketing is in the million(s) dollar range (see previous articles on the bribery system to get radio airplay), Cover art, distribution costs, the cost of physical cd production, Release parties cost money, and those figures probably dont include the advance the record company gives them. And while the band can go and perform to make its money, all of the label's revenue comes from the CD. Also, these numbers are a bit skewed since they are probably just past the 'break even' point. After that point, the artists take home more money for each CD. Also factor in that the artists can make money off of royalties. It should be said though that bands make money touring, not really by selling CD's. There have been several articles written about this, some posted on slashdot. In another application of the 80/20 rule, the record label's make money off of 20% of their artists, while they lose money on the other 80%. Of course they make mega-bucks off of their top acts though. I wouldnt cry a river for either side though- label's do go under or merge w/ others frequently enough, and aspiring stars know what they are getting into.
You mentioned "exploring the options" and I believe that is true, we should explore options. However, the Segway is a joke. It should have never gone this far. Using it in a city is like using a yacht to cross a pond. far better alternatives already exist. To name a few... skateboard, rollerblade, bicycle, scooter, that are a mere fraction of the price. If hyundai can profit off an $8000 car that accomdates 4 people, I am positive that a one person limited range vehicle could be produced for $5000 that absolutely blows the Segway away. quads and trikes are cheaper than that, go faster, have a longer range, and current designs could easily be modified to de-emphasize all terain performance and accomodate additional storage and run cleaner. The segway's criticism is well deserved. Environmental extremists have been predicting the end of the world due to the destruction of the environment for at least a century now- and it just isnt going to happen, not now.. not on in my children's lifetime, and I would be willing to bet my entire lifetime's income that it wont happen in my grandchildren's time or at any point in the future. If we do start seeing some real environmental damage affecting our live's, an enterprising person will design a nice portable bike that will be an instant craze in places like manhattan. The segway was a horrible idea, and anyone should have seen that just from the claims that it would revolutionize the world. Revolutions like that do not get planned, they just happen.
how far do you think choosing a slower processor is going to get you? lets say... and this is really a silly scenario since it takes a special kind of over-compensator to get THE best processor... that you choose an athlon XP 2800 at $395 so now instead... we drop to the 2200 for a little over $100. so were saving $300. thats just enough to buy a geforce4 or 9700, and mebbe an extra 128mb of memory. but if youre shelling out $400 for a processor, im sure your budget already has those included... lets look at a much more realistic situation... going from the 2500 to the 2100. we just saved $100. $100 spread over 3 components is not going to get you very far, and paying the premium for scsi doesnt make sense when you can add a raid controller and an extra HD for cheaper... My point being.... people are not going CPU crazy anymore... its just that they are so cheap there is no reason not to upgrade... and you will see a difference between a 1ghz and a 2ghz... a big one. I am sure there are uninformed people or people w/ too much money that are buying those processors, but anyone in their right mind who isnt driving a mercedes is picking much lower on the price curve... and yeah if they see that they can get an extra 100mhz for $8, I dont think they are stupid for doing so.
Not for nothing, but mebbe the NSA guy was just a skilled programmer who happened to want to get in the private sector? I mean if my company hired a secretary that worked at the NSA, does that mean my company is also in cahoots w/ whoever? Google has a bunch of employees, the law of large numbers says that if they get big enough they will also hire someone from the CIA, mebbe even a few marines or navy seals. That doesnt mean they are planning on doing a surgical strike on yahoo's or inktomi's offices though.
id much rather avril and blink to nsync and the backstreet boys... just my $.02
I am sorry, but (IMHO) Zelda takes that title hands down. A few years ago (AKA about 12 years after its release) it was still in the Nintendo Power Rankings.
Nes Play Action Football blew it away.
It appeared fine for me through IE6. then again I am running at 1600x1200. Its hard not to fit things on the screen...
This is absolutely wrong. However, what alot of people take out of context is the fact that there are many factors affecting your credit score, and some factors score much more heavily than others. Unfortunately, the actual formula used is proprietary. However, people have reverse engineered it to an extent. Having your credit checked does lower your score, but not by much. Your payment history, amount of debt, assets, and length of credit are the real deal things to worry about. If these are all ok, then you shouldnt have to worry about a credit check moving you into a different credit tier.
There really isnt a 'mega glut' of fiber. That would be implying that there is a ton of lit fiber that is going unused. That is not the case though. There is a ton of unlit fiber going unused. It is very expensive to light up and operate. Saying that is kind of like putting a 10,000 train cars in a parking lot and saying the town has a glut of trains.
Thats fine, until the network goes down, and you cant do anything. Network technologies have not approached power and telephone system reliability. I would not really want to place that much dependence on the network.
It sounds like your real problem is that there is a seperation between the two groups. Sysadmins should be overseeing the helpdesk people, or be the 'second tier' of the help desk system. Secondly, unless you are dealing with large enterprise type machines, the developers should have their own machines and servers to play with. My view is somewhat biased since I work for a small consulting firm where we dont really work on 'internal' projects. Everything we do is billable to a client, or is being done to try and win a new project. The seperation avoids the inefficiency of large offices where daily memos about 'office policy' get sent around and generally annoy the crap out of people just trying to get something done without making 3 copies of all outgoing correspondence and putting them in 3 seperate desks where they are filed away never to be seen again until the file cabinet is full and they get thrown out. Sysadmins should provide network services, IE file servers, email, etc... but when it comes to getting a DB running on SQL Server for a development box, developers should deal with that, and maybe 'buy' time of the sysadmins to tune it or get a hand if they are incapable. Time is money. And departments should even be selling it internally as such.
A help desk SHOULD know how to bold and underline, but so should the users. The helpdesk is there to help with problems with PC hardware and configuration. They should not be there to teach you how to use word, or how to fax, or how to fix your excel spreadsheet. That is just ridiculous. A help desk should be designed with multiple tiers- the first line consisting of 7.00/hr high school students that can reroute questions like 'is the webserver down' and follow procedures to fix common problems like resetting printers, diagnosing where the problem is with the user's network connection (IE, software, hardware, or router problem). Then there should be the second tier guys who deal with things like the webserver being down, or the router melting down, or the tcp/ip settings of network printer 9E resetting themselves after a voltage spike. A system like that should work for any size org, although most larger ones tend to have a third tier... the 'oh shit' guys that really know their stuff. Above all, it is your hiring and training practices that need to be reviewed to make a helpless desk into a helpful desk. Users should be trained quickly that unless word is not starting, or it is mangling your documents upon opening them, to not call the help desk and bog them down w/ calls that make them want to hang themselves. Instead, they should bother their supervisors, who can then see the idiots that they are, and the cost of having them waste time due to basic inability to use software. Good hiring and training practices among both the users and techs will make all the difference.
IIRC, mitnick did not program. His skill was entirely in social engineering, and phone technology (which I presume meant he had a good amount of electronics knowledge). Buffer overflows and computer exploits as we know them today were not his thing. While he may have understood how OS's like Unix work, on a very detailed level, he did not code in C/C++.
I never really thought that the problem lied with the server's hardware, but in the bandwidth to the host. Shouldn't an article be written about how to conserve bandwidth during a slashdot effect? Even older servers should be able to handle 100 requests per second. I think most FPS's are alot more taxing than that.
Most of today's games are rehashes of earlier games. The last time a 'new' game came about was probably wolfenstein- and it made a huge impact on the industry. Snood had the same amount of gameplay innovation in it as Quake 2 and 3, Unreal tournament 1 and 2, duke Nukem, etc... had. Indie designers can continually re-implement them because they dont need state of the art graphics, and thus given enough time can be made from the ground up with one or a few people. I do not disagree with what you are saying, but I also do not think you should limit the scope of your scorn to just puzzle games.
I like Linus Torvalds alot, and he wrote a great software product, but how exactly has he been an innovator? Stallman was more directly tied to the Free Software Movement and Open Source. He did do great things for computing, bringing *nix type power to desktops, but is copying another system really an innovation? I feel he should be seen more as a great engineer and designer, not necessarily an innovator. I guess I am not really an expert on the linux kernel, but as I understand it, it uses technology that has been around for awhile (as it should be if you are trying to build a solid system). From what I understand, Alan Cox was also more directly tied to any new innovations going into the kernel, while Linus is more of a commander-in-chief now.
How about Brian Kernhigan?
I know this doesnt exactly fit, but Jon Postel deserves an honor too.
Well, the age of the universe is one of the hardest questions science has had to answer. It is incredibly difficult to study bodies that are so far away from our own. To put a confidence level in perspective, imagine you are taking a test, you studied a good deal for it. You get up to a question, you are pretty sure about the answer, but would not bet the farm on it. You make that guess anyway. That's what the scientists are doing. They use formulas and apply theories to come up with an actual number for how confident they are. I am sure these scientist guys dont think they have the one true answer, but they have arrived closer to THE answer. The difference between science and religion tends to be that, science doesnt mind changing its mind and revising its answer if it comes up with a better way to formulate an answer (for a fairly non-technical example, look at how the definitions of units of measure have changed over time). Religion on the other hand, tends to keep the answers, but reformulate how they got them. IE, I have heard the 7 day theory of creation explained away by saying the 7 days were not necessarily consecutive, they may have been millions of years apart blahblahblah. For another example of this, look at the early renaissance European planetary charts, when Rome demanded that the Earth be in the center of the universe. There are zig-zags, loops, curly-Q's, all kinds of weirdness that was modified in because no matter how much evidence there was to the contrary, the Earth had to be in the center of the Universe. Eventually, evidence will come to light and we will be able to formulate more accurate answers. For right now, this is the best we can do, and Science has come alot closer to the answer in the past 100 years than religion has in about 2000.
(*Troll Alert, sorry religious discussions get me angry *)
BTW... I am just curious... what is the 'level of confidence' you have in water being turned into wine? Or that Mary wasn't covering up the fact that she was knockedup?
I am not one to defend Corporate America, but if you were Eisner, wouldnt you do the same? If one of the cornerstones of your business were to all of a sudden become freely reproducible, wouldnt you try to stop that from happening? I personally believe that an artist should have the right to his work during his lifetime, and to some extent believe the artist's survivors should have some entitlement to benefit from the copyrighted work. I think the problem lies when copyrights only benefit the businesses who bought them. However, I see no reason why only SONY music should have the rights to work done in the 50's if the artist is not still compensated in some form.