When you give a requirement (for a piece of functionality, for a coworker, for a supplier,...) make sure that what you ask for is what you really want.
For example, - Don't require team members to work 8am to 5pm each day. Instead require what you really want: that they execute on their part of the project within the specified timeframe and allocated resources. For some team members, this will necessesitate that they work during the so called "normal business hours", but for others, it won't - Don't require code to be written in [pick your favorite language] simply because it is open source, free, and wonderful. Instead, require what you really want: that code is written in a language that maximizes productivity and maintainability and enables the team to complete the project on time and on budget.
I still have my original NES hooked up to the TV in the family room. Never had a SNES, N64, GameCube, PlayStation I/II or anything else.
I'm currently playing in the pennant race on Bases Loaded. I just finished beating Metroid and Contra (again). (For the latter, yes, I still use Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A.) Anyway the list goes on.
I've found that I can get all kinds of games for the NES from people that think they're worthless. Without even trying, I've picked up about 30 additional titles, along with several extra controllers and even a separate console that I use for spare parts when the need arises.:-)
Lots of fun, and I have no plans to upgrade to a "modern" system in the near future.
I'd like to second the points made by the poster. We've tried the appliance in house, and our experience was not good. Many people make the mistake of thinking:
1. Google.com is great 2. Google, the company, makes an enterprise solution. 3. Google.com == Google, the company == Google's enterprise solution. 4. Therefore, the enterprise solution is also great.
The appliance is basically a packaged version of the Google.com application. Obviously, this is no surprise, as we wouldn't expect Google to develop the two things in isolation. However, if you think about it, the enterprise customer doesn't *want* a replica of Google.com. There are things we need and want to be able to do, that we are not able to do on Google.com. For example:
1. Joe Marketing accidentally pushed a confidential page live and it needs to be removed immediately. (You can do this with Google, but it is done with a not easily maintainable Black List.) 2. Joe Marketing accidentally forgets to push a key page live with a product release and it needs to go live immediately. (Google may have fixed this by now, but it used to be that the only way to add a new page was to reindex your *entire* site, even if you have over 100,000 pages.) 3. CEO or CIO wants to ensure that company confidential data is not available outside the firewall. (With a single search appliance, you can't do this...you have to have one inside the firewall, for the intranet, and one outside the firewall, for the customer facing site.) And yes, I know that there is not only one firewall, or that all networks are configured with the same topology -- still, I think you get the point. 4. Joe Marketing wants to make his page show up first in the results when a user searches on "x". (Google, at the time we evaluated them, could not do this without using something akin to Sponsored Links. We would like to force certain pages to the top of the results and make the experience useful to both our marketing folks and to the user.) 5. SysAdmin wants to ensure network integrity. (Google forces users of the appliance to give them a way to update the appliance remotely: VPN, external modem, etc. It is a security risk, no matter how you look at it.) 6. Web project manager wants to integrate search results into other web, or even desktop, apps. (Again, speaking for the time that we had them in house, there was no API to get at the search results. The only way around this was to parse your own XML and build your own library for application programming. Not impossible, but certainly not expected in this market.)
I will say that the relevancy was ok, but if there ever was a problem, it was next to impossible to fix. The black box approach is great for low budget IT departments, where cost is a major issue, but the security and flexibility risks, for me, outweigh the benefits of this tool.
Your total of 376 is higher because they are counting "a partridge in a pear tree" as one gift, whereas you are counting it as two. So, they have 364. The difference between their number and yours is the 12 pear trees.
...I sat in a meeting for nearly an hour an a half discussing the following topic:
The marketing department has a track record of making bad ideas into "Tier 1" campaigns. Much of being called a "Tier 1" campaign involves getting anything you want on the website, regardless of how short the deadline is. Most of these projects fail and we end up adding more cruft to our web site. How can we build a system and process that easily allows us to throw away bad marketing projects after they bomb?
If someone can tell me a vital feature for everyday common use (don't forget just how many word processing installs are out there and what they are used for)
I think you can make the same argument about MS Wordpad vs. MS Word. Think about what people actually use Word for. Yes, this includes everyone from Grandma to Business Analyst. I know that there are power users out there, but can't most people get by with Wordpad? Here's a partial feature list: - Font configurability: (font face, bold, italics, underlined, color) - Paragraph conf (left-center-right justification, bulleted lists) - Embedded bitmaps, video, other objects - Page/margin setup - Print (including preview) - Find & Replace
Seriously, how many of the Word users use features not available in Wordpad?
If you've not read it, The Double Helix is a great book that discusses the discovery from Watson's perspective. He covers his, Franklin's, Crick's, and Linus Paulings's involvement in a very interesting story. It's a short book, and well worth your time.
Watson rips on Franlin pretty hard in the book, but mainly because of personality conflicts. He acknowledges in the end that without her contributions, they wouldn't have achieved the same success.
I really hate to sound insensitive on this topic, but I'm tired of reading articles about web accessibility when it almost always boils down to one thing:
Don't forget to use ALT tags!
Ok, ok, so there's more to it than that. However, in my designs, I've begun to apply the following rule of thumb in regards to web accessibility:
The page is accessible if it can be properly viewed and navigated using a text-based browser (i.e. Lynx).
Lynx forces the page creator to use ALT tags liberally, and it reduces or eliminates the page's dependency on things like Javascript and Flash.
What else, really, has to be considered outside of the limitations of a text-based browser? I'd love to read some comments from folks with more expertise in this area.
For those of you familiar with the LabVIEW programming language for National Instruments, you know that the LabVIEW code is called "G". There's a funny song called "Write in G" that is very similar to the aforementioned song. There's an audio version here.
Sometimes you see companies doing this in order to make the rules more strict or to communicate to the employees that you are about to enforce them.
For example, we once had to sign a similar agreement about patents we held or had been granted at a previous job--even though we had already signed something similar when we came to work in the first place. (We were not granted any stock options unless we signed the new agreement.) The idea was that my current company wanted to ensure that their list was valid so that they would be justified in defending their own patents, or going after any that employees were granted during employment there.
It's just a lot easier to enforce an existing rule after you remind everyone that the rule is in place. That's why you hear around the holidays that the highway patrol will be cracking down on [insert your favorite violation, most often seat belt wearing where I'm from]. The law is already in place, and it is probably *possible* to enforce, but it is *easier* to enforce and subsequently prosecute if no one has an excuse of being ignorant of the law.
I use a graphical programming language from National Instruments called LabVIEW. It did not have the undo feature for over 10 years since its introduction, and I will never forget the sinking feeling of hitting the Delete key on accident only to see a whole page of graphical code lost forever!
NI added undo to LabVIEW in the 5.0 release (ca. 1997) of the product. It was really funny how the marketing from NI revolved around that feature. "Now with UNDO!" You would think that promoting the introduction of a feature that is so ubiquitous in most other desktop software would be less than effective--that people would groan because they had expected it for so long. However, at one of their trade shows, the presenter mentioned the new UNDO and got a standing ovation.
Google not a portal? Yeah, right.
on
Google's new toys
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
When Google News came out, I realized something: Google is trying to be a portal without being a portal, and by doing this, they are going to own the web.
Google has long said that they have no desire to enter the portal market to compete with the likes of Yahoo!. ("No, our customers are portals like Yahoo! and AOL. We're not a portal...we are just trying to be the best search engine.") While it is true that they are the best search engine, they are using characteristics of search to become a stealth portal.
Consider the following tools available from google and their counterparts on Yahoo!:
Search engine (cf. google.yahoo.com)
Directory (cf. www.yahoo.com)
People search (cf. people.yahoo.com)
Address search (cf. maps.yahoo.com)
Froogle directory (cf. shopping.yahoo.com)
News (cf. news.yahoo.com)
Stock quotes (cf. quote.yahoo.com)
There are more analogs between the two sites. But here's the thing: Google offers a value proposition over sites like Yahoo: Much more content and much lower overhead. Why? Because Google, as a "search engine" is simply here to Help People Find What They're Looking For. They will point us to other sites after we see our search results---it's just that our search results happen to look like tradiitonal portal pages. (In other words, news.google.com is a drop in replacement for CNN.com, only google's site is better because it contains fewer ads, less clutter, and much, much, more news.)
I think it is an interesting concept. One other poster said they thought Froogle could put Amazon out of business. In the near term--no. Longer term--yes. And this is because Google's value proposition to the user is better: I would bet money that when Froogle becomes a "release" and not just a "beta", that it has the ability to classify similar products from multiple vendors and search for the one that's the cheapest. If I can find the same books and electronics on Google that I can on Amazon, why would I go to Amazon?
Google is going to preach the "non portal" doctrine forever, however over the next 3-5 years, we will see the Google "portal" owning the web, at the expense of the Yahoo's, Amazon's, Ebay's, and CNN's of the world. This means that ad revenue on other sites will become ad revenue for Google.
Maybe this is a conspiracy theory, but I have to say that I like the way Google works, I like their site, and I'd like to see them succeed in this...they've certainly made my web searching more useful, and I'd like to see them do the same for the other tools I use in traditional portals.
The problem is that we have come to *rely* on DNS lookups. My company's website will not really work without DNS. Why? Because our customers, in order to do things like making purchases, would have to copy and paste every link into their browser and change the domain name to the IP address. The vast majority are either not capable or not willing to do that.
A DNS failure would be a disaster to the economy. Because users would not be willing to do the manual DNS lookup, they would not complete online sales and they would not be able to access our other contact information like phone numbers to complete sales in a more traditional way. We (my company) would lose double digit percentages of our sales, and this would dramatically affect our earnings. AND--we're not even a 90's era dot com.
So, I apologize for being so paranoid, but I think that you are underestimating the problem that would result. Sure, the technical challenge is easy to get around, but not everyone is a Slashdot geek like us.:-)
I would have to say that Orwell makes another point in this story that is even a better comparison to the current situation:
"And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed -if all records told the same tale -- then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'"
Yikes! Having evaluated Google along with many other search vendors and open source search tools for the enterprise, I can say that this would be a bad idea long term. The Google search appliance:
is closed
requires an ongoing fee for no new functionality
has a hard limit to the number of indexable docs
can't really do anything that open source tools do
I would recommend trying a combination of an open source search engine like Lucene along with its contributed filters (PDFs and other document types). You can also use open office document filters for MS Office docs where necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
When you give a requirement (for a piece of functionality, for a coworker, for a supplier, ...) make sure that what you ask for is what you really want.
For example,
- Don't require team members to work 8am to 5pm each day. Instead require what you really want: that they execute on their part of the project within the specified timeframe and allocated resources. For some team members, this will necessesitate that they work during the so called "normal business hours", but for others, it won't
- Don't require code to be written in [pick your favorite language] simply because it is open source, free, and wonderful. Instead, require what you really want: that code is written in a language that maximizes productivity and maintainability and enables the team to complete the project on time and on budget.
where 17-year June Bugs sometimes overlap with 13-year June Bugs
Well, let's see. Given that 17 and 13 are both prime numbers, would that mean that "sometimes" in this context actually means "221 years"?
I still have my original NES hooked up to the TV in the family room. Never had a SNES, N64, GameCube, PlayStation I/II or anything else.
:-)
I'm currently playing in the pennant race on Bases Loaded. I just finished beating Metroid and Contra (again). (For the latter, yes, I still use Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A.) Anyway the list goes on.
I've found that I can get all kinds of games for the NES from people that think they're worthless. Without even trying, I've picked up about 30 additional titles, along with several extra controllers and even a separate console that I use for spare parts when the need arises.
Lots of fun, and I have no plans to upgrade to a "modern" system in the near future.
I'd like to second the points made by the poster. We've tried the appliance in house, and our experience was not good. Many people make the mistake of thinking:
1. Google.com is great
2. Google, the company, makes an enterprise solution.
3. Google.com == Google, the company == Google's enterprise solution.
4. Therefore, the enterprise solution is also great.
The appliance is basically a packaged version of the Google.com application. Obviously, this is no surprise, as we wouldn't expect Google to develop the two things in isolation. However, if you think about it, the enterprise customer doesn't *want* a replica of Google.com. There are things we need and want to be able to do, that we are not able to do on Google.com. For example:
1. Joe Marketing accidentally pushed a confidential page live and it needs to be removed immediately. (You can do this with Google, but it is done with a not easily maintainable Black List.)
2. Joe Marketing accidentally forgets to push a key page live with a product release and it needs to go live immediately. (Google may have fixed this by now, but it used to be that the only way to add a new page was to reindex your *entire* site, even if you have over 100,000 pages.)
3. CEO or CIO wants to ensure that company confidential data is not available outside the firewall. (With a single search appliance, you can't do this...you have to have one inside the firewall, for the intranet, and one outside the firewall, for the customer facing site.) And yes, I know that there is not only one firewall, or that all networks are configured with the same topology -- still, I think you get the point.
4. Joe Marketing wants to make his page show up first in the results when a user searches on "x". (Google, at the time we evaluated them, could not do this without using something akin to Sponsored Links. We would like to force certain pages to the top of the results and make the experience useful to both our marketing folks and to the user.)
5. SysAdmin wants to ensure network integrity. (Google forces users of the appliance to give them a way to update the appliance remotely: VPN, external modem, etc. It is a security risk, no matter how you look at it.)
6. Web project manager wants to integrate search results into other web, or even desktop, apps. (Again, speaking for the time that we had them in house, there was no API to get at the search results. The only way around this was to parse your own XML and build your own library for application programming. Not impossible, but certainly not expected in this market.)
I will say that the relevancy was ok, but if there ever was a problem, it was next to impossible to fix. The black box approach is great for low budget IT departments, where cost is a major issue, but the security and flexibility risks, for me, outweigh the benefits of this tool.
I love writing software, and I enjoy reading other people's source
:-)
No, this is just another way of saying he doesn't use Perl.
Your total of 376 is higher because they are counting "a partridge in a pear tree" as one gift, whereas you are counting it as two. So, they have 364. The difference between their number and yours is the 12 pear trees.
...I sat in a meeting for nearly an hour an a half discussing the following topic:
The marketing department has a track record of making bad ideas into "Tier 1" campaigns. Much of being called a "Tier 1" campaign involves getting anything you want on the website, regardless of how short the deadline is. Most of these projects fail and we end up adding more cruft to our web site. How can we build a system and process that easily allows us to throw away bad marketing projects after they bomb?
If someone can tell me a vital feature for everyday common use (don't forget just how many word processing installs are out there and what they are used for)
I think you can make the same argument about MS Wordpad vs. MS Word. Think about what people actually use Word for. Yes, this includes everyone from Grandma to Business Analyst. I know that there are power users out there, but can't most people get by with Wordpad? Here's a partial feature list:
- Font configurability: (font face, bold, italics, underlined, color)
- Paragraph conf (left-center-right justification, bulleted lists)
- Embedded bitmaps, video, other objects
- Page/margin setup
- Print (including preview)
- Find & Replace
Seriously, how many of the Word users use features not available in Wordpad?
If you've not read it, The Double Helix is a great book that discusses the discovery from Watson's perspective. He covers his, Franklin's, Crick's, and Linus Paulings's involvement in a very interesting story. It's a short book, and well worth your time.
Watson rips on Franlin pretty hard in the book, but mainly because of personality conflicts. He acknowledges in the end that without her contributions, they wouldn't have achieved the same success.
I'm not a big proponent of open source
:-)
Can somebody get this guy outta here?
Don't forget to use ALT tags!
Ok, ok, so there's more to it than that. However, in my designs, I've begun to apply the following rule of thumb in regards to web accessibility:
The page is accessible if it can be properly viewed and navigated using a text-based browser (i.e. Lynx).
Lynx forces the page creator to use ALT tags liberally, and it reduces or eliminates the page's dependency on things like Javascript and Flash.
What else, really, has to be considered outside of the limitations of a text-based browser? I'd love to read some comments from folks with more expertise in this area.
An electrifying discovery?
I'm shocked that someone would say that.
about 30 years ago
I know Slashdot is usually the last one to post news headlines, but this is getting ridiculous.
Sure they can:
Microsoft buys Connectix, gives it away for free
VMWare realizes they also have to give their product away for free.
VMWare realizes that, unlike Microsoft, they don't have $40 billion in the bank.
VMWare decides to release a rigorously standards-compliant version of their product named VMzilla. (It will be based on an engine called "Yucko".)
VMWare will be bought out by AOL, who will then release VMzilla a couple of years later, by which time Microsoft will...
Profit!!!
For those of you familiar with the LabVIEW programming language for National Instruments, you know that the LabVIEW code is called "G". There's a funny song called "Write in G" that is very similar to the aforementioned song. There's an audio version here.
When you say you're not making this up, are you making it up?
C'mon Dave, you can tell me.
Sometimes you see companies doing this in order to make the rules more strict or to communicate to the employees that you are about to enforce them.
For example, we once had to sign a similar agreement about patents we held or had been granted at a previous job--even though we had already signed something similar when we came to work in the first place. (We were not granted any stock options unless we signed the new agreement.) The idea was that my current company wanted to ensure that their list was valid so that they would be justified in defending their own patents, or going after any that employees were granted during employment there.
It's just a lot easier to enforce an existing rule after you remind everyone that the rule is in place. That's why you hear around the holidays that the highway patrol will be cracking down on [insert your favorite violation, most often seat belt wearing where I'm from]. The law is already in place, and it is probably *possible* to enforce, but it is *easier* to enforce and subsequently prosecute if no one has an excuse of being ignorant of the law.
Bill Gates announced a line of MS wristwatches that receive email, stock quotes, sports scores, etc.
Microsoft: Now we know where you wanted to go today!
or perhaps:
Microsoft: At least the BSOD's are smaller now.
NI added undo to LabVIEW in the 5.0 release (ca. 1997) of the product. It was really funny how the marketing from NI revolved around that feature. "Now with UNDO!" You would think that promoting the introduction of a feature that is so ubiquitous in most other desktop software would be less than effective--that people would groan because they had expected it for so long. However, at one of their trade shows, the presenter mentioned the new UNDO and got a standing ovation.
Google has long said that they have no desire to enter the portal market to compete with the likes of Yahoo!. ("No, our customers are portals like Yahoo! and AOL. We're not a portal...we are just trying to be the best search engine.") While it is true that they are the best search engine, they are using characteristics of search to become a stealth portal.
Consider the following tools available from google and their counterparts on Yahoo!:
There are more analogs between the two sites. But here's the thing: Google offers a value proposition over sites like Yahoo: Much more content and much lower overhead. Why? Because Google, as a "search engine" is simply here to Help People Find What They're Looking For. They will point us to other sites after we see our search results---it's just that our search results happen to look like tradiitonal portal pages. (In other words, news.google.com is a drop in replacement for CNN.com, only google's site is better because it contains fewer ads, less clutter, and much, much, more news.)
I think it is an interesting concept. One other poster said they thought Froogle could put Amazon out of business. In the near term--no. Longer term--yes. And this is because Google's value proposition to the user is better: I would bet money that when Froogle becomes a "release" and not just a "beta", that it has the ability to classify similar products from multiple vendors and search for the one that's the cheapest. If I can find the same books and electronics on Google that I can on Amazon, why would I go to Amazon?
Google is going to preach the "non portal" doctrine forever, however over the next 3-5 years, we will see the Google "portal" owning the web, at the expense of the Yahoo's, Amazon's, Ebay's, and CNN's of the world. This means that ad revenue on other sites will become ad revenue for Google.
Maybe this is a conspiracy theory, but I have to say that I like the way Google works, I like their site, and I'd like to see them succeed in this...they've certainly made my web searching more useful, and I'd like to see them do the same for the other tools I use in traditional portals.
The problem is that we have come to *rely* on DNS lookups. My company's website will not really work without DNS. Why? Because our customers, in order to do things like making purchases, would have to copy and paste every link into their browser and change the domain name to the IP address. The vast majority are either not capable or not willing to do that.
:-)
A DNS failure would be a disaster to the economy. Because users would not be willing to do the manual DNS lookup, they would not complete online sales and they would not be able to access our other contact information like phone numbers to complete sales in a more traditional way. We (my company) would lose double digit percentages of our sales, and this would dramatically affect our earnings. AND--we're not even a 90's era dot com.
So, I apologize for being so paranoid, but I think that you are underestimating the problem that would result. Sure, the technical challenge is easy to get around, but not everyone is a Slashdot geek like us.
I would have to say that Orwell makes another point in this story that is even a better comparison to the current situation:
"And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed -if all records told the same tale -- then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'"
http://www.nomoreaolcds.com/
Yikes! Having evaluated Google along with many other search vendors and open source search tools for the enterprise, I can say that this would be a bad idea long term. The Google search appliance:
I would recommend trying a combination of an open source search engine like Lucene along with its contributed filters (PDFs and other document types). You can also use open office document filters for MS Office docs where necessary.
Then why can Amazon succeed in suing B&N over 1-click purchasing?