you should make a decision and stick to it. It doesn't really matter which team is in charge, so long as one of them is and that the other team knows it. ....said like a true PHB.
Neither. You do not have to compromise if you're the boss and you require stuff to work. Office politics and willy-waving over who's more important should be a secondary issue to making the stuff work.
So. you have a certification team (or quality team, or test team) who's job it is to certify that what dev has goven them works as dev said. These guys install it on their own separate systems that mirror the business (on a smaller scale) and test it out. Bugs get reported back to dev who get to fix them and so on. Eventually it'll get rolled out to IT who will have a reasonably good expectation that it'll all work.
However - even in the best of cases there will be exceptional circumstances, and its at this point that IT will get dev members to come and fix up issue that arise on the live system. IT should be first contacting the cert team who will determine the bug (hopefully with a bit more inside knowledge to reproduce it on their systems) and will then get dev to issue a patch, which goes through the standard release process.
Of course, if you want to let dev team hack about (which is probably why you have such a complex system in the first place), and IT to twiddle with their setup then fine - expect it all to go arse-up.
I like to think of these environments as always having a 'customer' that they deliver to. If they provide a poor service, the customer has every right to complain. So, Dev's customer is the IT guys, IT's customer is the Business, and Business answers to real, paying customers. Such a chain of responsibility does focus people's attention on what they are trying to achieve for the company.
ah yes, the old wheelmouse issue... they send 4 bytes instead of 3 to the PC, which can be one real issue for poor old Windows if you swap mice, or add a wheelmouse to a laptop. Raymond Chen had a good post about it on his blog a fair while back.
No, KVM will work, but it will not be as fast as you'd like. With the new CPU instructions, it will be a lot faster. (the reason is down to the memory management unit, with a VM every time it context switches, it throws away some cached page state. The new CPUs deal with this so you get the better performance).
I read a ng post where the author said his VM desktop was fine, but with the new CPUs you'd get performance very near running natively.
Those words of advice are for cheap KVMs.. however, I use a linksys one which handles 1600x1200@100Hz perfectly well, has never given me grief with mice (which admittedly is a USB one with a PS2 adapter) and was cheap at £20. (its the dual-port one with the integral cables).
On the other hand, we have a 8-port Lindy KVM which is a right PITA sometimes, often not switching video for our servers running at not-very-high-res.
you know the proverb about bad workmen and their tools, don't you?:-)
Far be it for me (a C++ dev) to praise a scripting language, but a lot of PHP is out there, and a lot of it achieves its tasks well. As for the rest, perhaps you're asking too much of what of it, trying to make it do something its not really designed for, or perhaps the comment above is more insightful than funny.
The trouble with feeding power back to the Grid is that you need an inverter to convert the DC generated from the cell (or windmill, or dog exercising treadmill, or whatever) to AC to feed into the grid. I know the power companies will accept this but they pay you a relatively low price per kWh (as only part of the cost is for generation, the rest is for the transmission infrastructure)
Anyway, something is better than nothing, and I think the ability to become a microgenerator is great. If everuoen did it, then you'd pay a lot less for your leccy than you do today, and we would reduce our need on those politically dodgy states.
Yeah, kdawson is quite the worst editor when it comes to allowing no-content anti-MS spin articles to be posted. eg, the recent one about how Vista's slipstreaming custom ISOs will allow malware authors to spread malware all over the world. Even a cursory glance at the article would show it was nothing but BS (plastered with adverts, of course).
Oh yes, of course - the editors RTFA. Silly me, how naive I am:-)
It is currently a problem with F/OSS software already. Take a look on google for emule (a popular P2P program amongst today's youth I understand). Only 1 of the hundreds of results takes you to the sourceforge.net emaul page, all the others are 'free malware included' versions.
Our chief weapon is surprise...surprise and fear...fear and surprise.... Our two weapons are fear and surprise...and litigation.... Our *three* weapons are fear, surprise, and litigation...and an almost fanatical devotion to making money.... Our *four*...no... *Amongst* our weapons.... are such elements as fear, surprise.... I'll come in again....
You are hereby charged that you did on diverse dates commit viewing of motion pictures....how do you plead?
Innocent?
We'll soon change your mind about that!
Cardinal Fang! Fetch...THE COMFY CHAIR!
(the article just reminded me of this old sketch)
Re:For Joel, it's always about hiring
on
Why Vista Took So Long
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
you want software to look good, hire a UI designer and a graphic artist.
I doubt its because the SCC cannot handle the physical number of users (5000 users, for MS and its unlimited hardware budget, I mean, come on, no way) but the way these users interact with each other.
If you have 5000 devs checking stuff in, if 1 of them does something that breaks the nightly build just once each, then you'll actually never produce anything the ever compiles. Instead you have to come up with some solution to this issue. Options are: make developers work on totally separate products (eg, Media Player has no dependencies on anything in the kernel, shell etc so they can do what they like knowing they won't break anything other that Media Player), or make devs work on subtrees.
Whilst the first is arguably the better option, its not always feasible, and I think MS way of working means that you end up with dependencies between projects - eg, the Shutdown UI was dependent on features in the Shell and Kernel even if these dependencies were made by contract (eg, Shutdown team said 'we need the following functionality, once you've implemented it we'll finish our job') the bureaucracy of MS meant that wasn't possible (ie, you can't be paid to sit around for a month waiting for the kernel team to fulfill their contract with you).
So, the 2nd option was utilised - you check your stuff into a branch that gets merged once you've completed your work. The trouble is that the project is so large that you're working on a branch that is branched off a branch, which in turn is branched.
Linux works the same way - no-one works off the main trunk, you'd check work into (eg) a test branch that gets merged into a unstable one, that then gets merged into the root.
I think the UI is great, it does (after all) only have 2 real options. As a comment on that blog says:
Anonymous said...
So Joel Spolsky slips back into a Microsoft Program Management (PM) role and decides to write a spec for the power button on the Vista Start menu. The reason he spent the time doing this is because he felt the number of options provided, 9 were excessive and confusing to most users. His spec comes down to:
"So now we've got exactly one log off button left. Call it "b'bye". When you click b'bye, the screen is locked and any RAM that hasn't already been copied out to flash is written. You can log back on, or anyone else can log on and get their own session, or you can unplug the whole computer."
Now if Joel actually clicked on the Vista Start button and then looked at the options presented before expanding the 'advanced' list of options then he would've realized that in fact the implementation in Vista is virtually identical to what he ended up specifying.
To the normal user there are really just 2 options, a 'Power' button and a 'Lock' button, which have tool tips that explain what they do.
Now on my desktop PC with a default install of Vista the Sleep option is a new hybrid sleep implementation which is really a combination of hibernate and sleep. When the PC goes to sleep, either based on an explicit user request or because it has been idle for 1 hour then Vista writes out any necessary RAM pages to disk as it would for a hibernate, but then instead of switching off it goes into sleep mode. The advantage of this scheme is that if there is a power failure (environment, cord unplugged accidentally or on purpose) then when the PC is powered on again it performs a hibernate resume. I've actually experienced this first hand with a recent power failure and it was really useful to get back to all my open applications etc. after the power failure.
Now in addition when the PC resumes from sleep in this scheme you are presented with a login screen, and if Joel had taken a look he would've also noticed a 'Switch User' button on this logon screen just below the password edit control.
So this default scheme is pretty darn close to what Joel has specified as his ideal UI, it really just has 1 extra option, the 'Lock' button.
The main issue I think is that Joel hasn't approached this as 'regular' user, but rather more as an advanced/power user who has decided to click on the advanced list which is shown when you click/hover over the '>' button. So Vista has provided the simplicity for regular users and has made an advanced list of options available for more advanced users. Now what may have been a more useful posting/debate is whether this advanced list is too easily accessible to regular users by accident, e.g. should it maybe only show up if say the 'alt' key is held down like a lot of the menu bars in Vista applications.
this is David from Microsoft's anti-phishing global initiative. I have evidence that little Johnny has been working with the Russian mafia to obtain identify credentials from internet connected computers across the world. If you do not pay us $2000 by return (click this link - htps://123.456.88.12/paypal.com?id=123234 - to pay saecurely online now) and avoid any legal prosecution.
Law enforcement has always required assistance from the public/society. If you report crime, you're assisting the police by describing what happened, making a statement, giving evidence in court etc. MS is doing exactly the same thing here.
If you report a crime and the police aren't interested (as they don't think its actually a criminal act) then you can bring a civil case instead and MS are doing this with the lesser offences.
I used to have a boss that didn't believe in telecommuting, even though we had a mainframe guy who'd come to the office to dial into the customer's mainframe (and he had a isdn line at home so he could do it from there just the same).
Oh yes, every friday, guess who worked from home..... (no, not the MF chap).
Insecure bosses are all over, the ones who believe that you're working when you're sitting at your computer typing (like I am now:) ) and if you're sitting back thinking, then you're slacking. The ones who believe time in office = work. Idiots who couldn't actually manage effectively.
I'd say I was still right - if that IT guy is a idiot, it doesn't matter if you're putting sunray clients in, it'd still go wrong:)
Incidentally, MS websites are excellent for technical information - go to Technet or MSDN and read all about the very inner workings of Windows. Linux does have a good range of information, but I'd have to say that it is somewhat erratic, you do have to hunt down the pearls in amongst the stuff that was valid for 2.2 kernels and obsolete application versions. A case in point: my recent foray in the world of systemimager (excellent software), but difficult to get relevant information. They have a document that is valid for v3.4.1, but the current version that works with 64bit is 3.7.5. It has been slightly difficult to get to grips with it and find out the issues that affected my servers. So I can't agree that support is really better with Linux. I'd have to say they're equal unless you've paid for support. (and I'm sure RedHat as well as MS does respectively)
Slashdot Mirror
you should make a decision and stick to it. It doesn't really matter which team is in charge, so long as one of them is and that the other team knows it. ....said like a true PHB.
Neither. You do not have to compromise if you're the boss and you require stuff to work. Office politics and willy-waving over who's more important should be a secondary issue to making the stuff work.
So. you have a certification team (or quality team, or test team) who's job it is to certify that what dev has goven them works as dev said. These guys install it on their own separate systems that mirror the business (on a smaller scale) and test it out. Bugs get reported back to dev who get to fix them and so on. Eventually it'll get rolled out to IT who will have a reasonably good expectation that it'll all work.
However - even in the best of cases there will be exceptional circumstances, and its at this point that IT will get dev members to come and fix up issue that arise on the live system. IT should be first contacting the cert team who will determine the bug (hopefully with a bit more inside knowledge to reproduce it on their systems) and will then get dev to issue a patch, which goes through the standard release process.
Of course, if you want to let dev team hack about (which is probably why you have such a complex system in the first place), and IT to twiddle with their setup then fine - expect it all to go arse-up.
I like to think of these environments as always having a 'customer' that they deliver to. If they provide a poor service, the customer has every right to complain. So, Dev's customer is the IT guys, IT's customer is the Business, and Business answers to real, paying customers. Such a chain of responsibility does focus people's attention on what they are trying to achieve for the company.
ah yes, the old wheelmouse issue... they send 4 bytes instead of 3 to the PC, which can be one real issue for poor old Windows if you swap mice, or add a wheelmouse to a laptop. Raymond Chen had a good post about it on his blog a fair while back.
No, KVM will work, but it will not be as fast as you'd like. With the new CPU instructions, it will be a lot faster. (the reason is down to the memory management unit, with a VM every time it context switches, it throws away some cached page state. The new CPUs deal with this so you get the better performance).
I read a ng post where the author said his VM desktop was fine, but with the new CPUs you'd get performance very near running natively.
Those words of advice are for cheap KVMs.. however, I use a linksys one which handles 1600x1200@100Hz perfectly well, has never given me grief with mice (which admittedly is a USB one with a PS2 adapter) and was cheap at £20. (its the dual-port one with the integral cables).
On the other hand, we have a 8-port Lindy KVM which is a right PITA sometimes, often not switching video for our servers running at not-very-high-res.
RTFA issue perhaps?
some of these can be solved when ATi and nVidia release their final (hopefully bug-free) drivers for Vista.
you know the proverb about bad workmen and their tools, don't you? :-)
Far be it for me (a C++ dev) to praise a scripting language, but a lot of PHP is out there, and a lot of it achieves its tasks well. As for the rest, perhaps you're asking too much of what of it, trying to make it do something its not really designed for, or perhaps the comment above is more insightful than funny.
Yes. If something works, then use it. Complaining its not using your favourite language/platform/OS is useless.
PHP, Perl, Java - who cares what it's made of if it gets the job done past a minimum standard.
I'd love to see the source too, but I'd have to download a pirate copy of Visual Cobol first to view it with. VCobol!!! ye gads!
:) )
(on the other hand, if its as good as it is, despite using VCobol, he's an excellent programmer. Masochistic, but excellent
The trouble with feeding power back to the Grid is that you need an inverter to convert the DC generated from the cell (or windmill, or dog exercising treadmill, or whatever) to AC to feed into the grid. I know the power companies will accept this but they pay you a relatively low price per kWh (as only part of the cost is for generation, the rest is for the transmission infrastructure)
/ FS_Grid_Tie_Inverters.pdf
:(
Anyway, something is better than nothing, and I think the ability to become a microgenerator is great. If everuoen did it, then you'd pay a lot less for your leccy than you do today, and we would reduce our need on those politically dodgy states.
Example: http://www.provenenergy.co.uk/images/stories/PDFs
Though they don't give prices anymore
Yeah, kdawson is quite the worst editor when it comes to allowing no-content anti-MS spin articles to be posted. eg, the recent one about how Vista's slipstreaming custom ISOs will allow malware authors to spread malware all over the world. Even a cursory glance at the article would show it was nothing but BS (plastered with adverts, of course).
:-)
Oh yes, of course - the editors RTFA. Silly me, how naive I am
It is currently a problem with F/OSS software already. Take a look on google for emule (a popular P2P program amongst today's youth I understand). Only 1 of the hundreds of results takes you to the sourceforge.net emaul page, all the others are 'free malware included' versions.
TFA is a troll.
NOBODY expects the MPAA.
...
Our chief weapon is surprise...surprise and fear...fear and surprise.... Our two weapons are fear and surprise...and litigation.... Our *three* weapons are fear, surprise, and litigation...and an almost fanatical devotion to making money.... Our *four*...no... *Amongst* our weapons.... are such elements as fear, surprise.... I'll come in again.
You are hereby charged that you did on diverse dates commit viewing of motion pictures....how do you plead?
Innocent?
We'll soon change your mind about that!
Cardinal Fang! Fetch...THE COMFY CHAIR!
(the article just reminded me of this old sketch)
you want software to look good, hire a UI designer and a graphic artist.
Decisions cannot efficiently be made by committees
:-)
I know, I worked on CORBA and J2EE systems once. .
I doubt its because the SCC cannot handle the physical number of users (5000 users, for MS and its unlimited hardware budget, I mean, come on, no way) but the way these users interact with each other.
If you have 5000 devs checking stuff in, if 1 of them does something that breaks the nightly build just once each, then you'll actually never produce anything the ever compiles. Instead you have to come up with some solution to this issue. Options are: make developers work on totally separate products (eg, Media Player has no dependencies on anything in the kernel, shell etc so they can do what they like knowing they won't break anything other that Media Player), or make devs work on subtrees.
Whilst the first is arguably the better option, its not always feasible, and I think MS way of working means that you end up with dependencies between projects - eg, the Shutdown UI was dependent on features in the Shell and Kernel even if these dependencies were made by contract (eg, Shutdown team said 'we need the following functionality, once you've implemented it we'll finish our job') the bureaucracy of MS meant that wasn't possible (ie, you can't be paid to sit around for a month waiting for the kernel team to fulfill their contract with you).
So, the 2nd option was utilised - you check your stuff into a branch that gets merged once you've completed your work. The trouble is that the project is so large that you're working on a branch that is branched off a branch, which in turn is branched.
Linux works the same way - no-one works off the main trunk, you'd check work into (eg) a test branch that gets merged into a unstable one, that then gets merged into the root.
I think the UI is great, it does (after all) only have 2 real options.
As a comment on that blog says:
Anonymous said...
So Joel Spolsky slips back into a Microsoft Program Management (PM) role and decides to write a spec for the power button on the Vista Start menu. The reason he spent the time doing this is because he felt the number of options provided, 9 were excessive and confusing to most users. His spec comes down to:
"So now we've got exactly one log off button left. Call it "b'bye". When you click b'bye, the screen is locked and any RAM that hasn't already been copied out to flash is written. You can log back on, or anyone else can log on and get their own session, or you can unplug the whole computer."
Now if Joel actually clicked on the Vista Start button and then looked at the options presented before expanding the 'advanced' list of options then he would've realized that in fact the implementation in Vista is virtually identical to what he ended up specifying.
To the normal user there are really just 2 options, a 'Power' button and a 'Lock' button, which have tool tips that explain what they do.
Now on my desktop PC with a default install of Vista the Sleep option is a new hybrid sleep implementation which is really a combination of hibernate and sleep. When the PC goes to sleep, either based on an explicit user request or because it has been idle for 1 hour then Vista writes out any necessary RAM pages to disk as it would for a hibernate, but then instead of switching off it goes into sleep mode. The advantage of this scheme is that if there is a power failure (environment, cord unplugged accidentally or on purpose) then when the PC is powered on again it performs a hibernate resume. I've actually experienced this first hand with a recent power failure and it was really useful to get back to all my open applications etc. after the power failure.
Now in addition when the PC resumes from sleep in this scheme you are presented with a login screen, and if Joel had taken a look he would've also noticed a 'Switch User' button on this logon screen just below the password edit control.
So this default scheme is pretty darn close to what Joel has specified as his ideal UI, it really just has 1 extra option, the 'Lock' button.
The main issue I think is that Joel hasn't approached this as 'regular' user, but rather more as an advanced/power user who has decided to click on the advanced list which is shown when you click/hover over the '>' button. So Vista has provided the simplicity for regular users and has made an advanced list of options available for more advanced users. Now what may have been a more useful posting/debate is whether this advanced list is too easily accessible to regular users by accident, e.g. should it maybe only show up if say the 'alt' key is held down like a lot of the menu bars in Vista applications.
a 2000EUR slap on the wrist... "they had fun fun fun, until daddy took the broadband away"
Hello.
:-)
this is David from Microsoft's anti-phishing global initiative. I have evidence that little Johnny has been working with the Russian mafia to obtain identify credentials from internet connected computers across the world. If you do not pay us $2000 by return (click this link - htps://123.456.88.12/paypal.com?id=123234 - to pay saecurely online now) and avoid any legal prosecution.
Thank you for your cooperation.
Frank.
The chief's red indian guide?
Law enforcement has always required assistance from the public/society. If you report crime, you're assisting the police by describing what happened, making a statement, giving evidence in court etc. MS is doing exactly the same thing here.
If you report a crime and the police aren't interested (as they don't think its actually a criminal act) then you can bring a civil case instead and MS are doing this with the lesser offences.
I used to have a boss that didn't believe in telecommuting, even though we had a mainframe guy who'd come to the office to dial into the customer's mainframe (and he had a isdn line at home so he could do it from there just the same).
:) ) and if you're sitting back thinking, then you're slacking. The ones who believe time in office = work. Idiots who couldn't actually manage effectively.
:-)
Oh yes, every friday, guess who worked from home..... (no, not the MF chap).
Insecure bosses are all over, the ones who believe that you're working when you're sitting at your computer typing (like I am now
Things are better now at my current place
They probably just printed off the entire Technet and MSDN content, but I think that'd come to a lot more than 8500 pages.
missionary conqu.. conversion...
:-)
You just made me think of IT missionaries coming to African villages, arms full of Debian DVDs
I'd say I was still right - if that IT guy is a idiot, it doesn't matter if you're putting sunray clients in, it'd still go wrong :)
Incidentally, MS websites are excellent for technical information - go to Technet or MSDN and read all about the very inner workings of Windows. Linux does have a good range of information, but I'd have to say that it is somewhat erratic, you do have to hunt down the pearls in amongst the stuff that was valid for 2.2 kernels and obsolete application versions. A case in point: my recent foray in the world of systemimager (excellent software), but difficult to get relevant information. They have a document that is valid for v3.4.1, but the current version that works with 64bit is 3.7.5. It has been slightly difficult to get to grips with it and find out the issues that affected my servers. So I can't agree that support is really better with Linux. I'd have to say they're equal unless you've paid for support. (and I'm sure RedHat as well as MS does respectively)