Slashdot seems to have a solution. Tried to post a funny message in all Caps and Slashdot responded: Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
All these products have a steep learning curve and will end up becoming essential to the business. Do you have an existing working relationship with any of these companies ? The consultancy costs for training and support will far exceed the cost of the product itself. Make sure the supplier can provided people to input into the buiness analysis phase as well as pure techies.
Ideally the hundred of services need for the 'my amazon' type services should not be called from the home page - only when they are required.
Perhaps amazon has looked at how users interact with the site and find they goto these options straight away - more likely the marketing department wants to present the user with lots of stuff they might like to buy as soon as possible.
Folders are not the best way to store music. You do not select a piece of music to listen to by selecting a 'folder' you chose an artist and then an album or a style of music to listen to - whilst it may be possible to map this onto folder structures it is less than ideal. This is where iTunes excels in comparison to other 'music players' i have seen. The user shouldn't care how music is stored on the filesystem - but they should easily be able to access music by a variety of categories.
These cheap PC for developing countries seem to be getting quite popular at the moment. Is this just a case of people in the technology industry trying to do something nice rather than meeting an actual need ? I would have thought that other infrastructure is more important to developing nations than having access to a PC.
I think it is worse than being surrounded by CS majors who think Java is the best language ever. The industry is full of people who know about PC / Windows / Linux / The Fastest Graphics Cards / Building a WebPages / The latest type of PC memory. Whilst some of these skills might be fine on a support desk many of these people are finding there way into development, not only do they lack the skills they also seem to lack the motivation to learn about languages, development techniques and methodologies.
There doesn't seem to be a clear career path across different companies. The same job title at one location can have a vastly different salary than another. I have seen 'Developer' jobs advertised at very high rates and then 'Architect' / 'Consultant' roles at lower levels. The term 'senior' can be attached to any of these and not have any affect on the salary. To add further confusion there seems to be very little difference in many of the job descriptions - most of them just requiring that a candidate understands a list of TLAs.
It must be very confusing for anyone entering or considering entering the industry to see what the career path in IT is. In other areas (electrical / civil engineering for instance) a career initially progresses until chartered status is reached, this is understood by these industries and is a requirement for a more senior jobs. Such a qualification is available for IT (I am in the UK - not sure how this works elsewhere) but not considered valuable when looking for jobs.
One of the advantages of VB for the complete beginner is the ease of building a GUI for an application without having to pick and learn a toolkit that would be needed with Python / Ruby / C etc. This means that people can quickly get results and hopefully gain an interest in developing and move onto learn other languages and proper design and development techniques.
It's a bit like going back to eduation in the 80's and comparing Basic with Logo. Logo could do pretty things very easily and get people interested. Basic took more skill and effort to achieve a similar thing.
Went to see Vint Cert at this event on monday: http://www.feis.herts.ac.uk/cs40/public/index.htm Interesting event - nothing that I hadn't heard in interview or read on the web but fun to see live. If a new he was recruiting I would have taken my CV along!
The email that takes the most disc space are those with attachments associated with them. A document (spreadsheet, word doc, pdf, images etc) that is sent to 20 people takes up 20x the disc space. If someone makes a change to the document and then sends it around again the disc usage is doubled. These documents should belong in a document mangemenet system that can track changes and handle the work flow. This need to be done with the education of the users - where this has been introduced I have seen this break down as the documents also get emailed around.
The solution ? A document management system that works well with email. Documents need to appear in peoples inbox and be forwarded around using traditional email techniques but underneath the conventional mailbox file systems are replaced with a database.
The problem with securing your machines and opening the AP is that certain ISP services (mainly SMTP servers for outgoing mail) don't require any authentication as the ISP assumes that who ever has physical access to the connection is the authorized user. Someone 'sharing' the connection could be using it to borrow the ISP SMTP server for sending out spam or other unwelcome email. Of course this can be resolved by putting the access point on the right side of well configured firewall, just pointing out there is more to consider than just securing your machine.
They plan to make use of technology to make it more interesting for the spectator. Overlaying live action onto a track for spectators and letting on-line competitors join in. Should have some interest amoung the slashdot crowd.
My prediction for the iBook: Wide screen form factor. 13" as the main model. Ultra small 8" model (branded as iBook mini?). Completely new enclosure - a scaled up iPod mini style case. Available in all the iPod mini colors.
Slashdot Mirror
Lots to see at Bletchley with the National Museum of computing also located there:http://www.tnmoc.org/
Not a new idea.
Ashton Tate released the first version of dBase as dBaseII to give the impression it was a new product.
The real problem here is teachers using windows.
Would the students try to break Linux or OS X ?
Slashdot seems to have a solution. Tried to post a funny message in all Caps and Slashdot responded:
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Fred Brooks original silver bullet paper
All these products have a steep learning curve and will end up becoming essential to the business. Do you have an existing working relationship with any of these companies ? The consultancy costs for training and support will far exceed the cost of the product itself. Make sure the supplier can provided people to input into the buiness analysis phase as well as pure techies.
Did this happen with the Sony Walkman in the 80s ? On the daily commute it seems everyone has an iPod - was it the same with the Walkman ?
or buy an iRiver :)
BBC article here
Ideally the hundred of services need for the 'my amazon' type services should not be called from the home page - only when they are required.
Perhaps amazon has looked at how users interact with the site and find they goto these options straight away - more likely the marketing department wants to present the user with lots of stuff they might like to buy as soon as possible.
'If you hit the Amazon.com gateway page, the application calls more than 100 services to collect data and construct the page for you.'
and this a good thing ?
Folders are not the best way to store music. You do not select a piece of music to listen to by selecting a 'folder' you chose an artist and then an album or a style of music to listen to - whilst it may be possible to map this onto folder structures it is less than ideal.
This is where iTunes excels in comparison to other 'music players' i have seen. The user shouldn't care how music is stored on the filesystem - but they should easily be able to access music by a variety of categories.
These cheap PC for developing countries seem to be getting quite popular at the moment. Is this just a case of people in the technology industry trying to do something nice rather than meeting an actual need ?
I would have thought that other infrastructure is more important to developing nations than having access to a PC.
I think it is worse than being surrounded by CS majors who think Java is the best language ever. The industry is full of people who know about PC / Windows / Linux / The Fastest Graphics Cards / Building a WebPages / The latest type of PC memory. Whilst some of these skills might be fine on a support desk many of these people are finding there way into development, not only do they lack the skills they also seem to lack the motivation to learn about languages, development techniques and methodologies.
There doesn't seem to be a clear career path across different companies. The same job title at one location can have a vastly different salary than another. I have seen 'Developer' jobs advertised at very high rates and then 'Architect' / 'Consultant' roles at lower levels. The term 'senior' can be attached to any of these and not have any affect on the salary. To add further confusion there seems to be very little difference in many of the job descriptions - most of them just requiring that a candidate understands a list of TLAs.
It must be very confusing for anyone entering or considering entering the industry to see what the career path in IT is. In other areas (electrical / civil engineering for instance) a career initially progresses until chartered status is reached, this is understood by these industries and is a requirement for a more senior jobs. Such a qualification is available for IT (I am in the UK - not sure how this works elsewhere) but not considered valuable when looking for jobs.
If it is running Linux a next gen console version of Nethack cannot be far away!
One of the advantages of VB for the complete beginner is the ease of building a GUI for an application without having to pick and learn a toolkit that would be needed with Python / Ruby / C etc.
This means that people can quickly get results and hopefully gain an interest in developing and move onto learn other languages and proper design and development techniques.
It's a bit like going back to eduation in the 80's and comparing Basic with Logo. Logo could do pretty things very easily and get people interested. Basic took more skill and effort to achieve a similar thing.
Went to see Vint Cert at this event on monday: http://www.feis.herts.ac.uk/cs40/public/index.htm
Interesting event - nothing that I hadn't heard in interview or read on the web but fun to see live.
If a new he was recruiting I would have taken my CV along!
The email that takes the most disc space are those with attachments associated with them. A document (spreadsheet, word doc, pdf, images etc) that is sent to 20 people takes up 20x the disc space. If someone makes a change to the document and then sends it around again the disc usage is doubled. These documents should belong in a document mangemenet system that can track changes and handle the work flow. This need to be done with the education of the users - where this has been introduced I have seen this break down as the documents also get emailed around.
The solution ? A document management system that works well with email. Documents need to appear in peoples inbox and be forwarded around using traditional email techniques but underneath the conventional mailbox file systems are replaced with a database.
The problem with securing your machines and opening the AP is that certain ISP services (mainly SMTP servers for outgoing mail) don't require any authentication as the ISP assumes that who ever has physical access to the connection is the authorized user. Someone 'sharing' the connection could be using it to borrow the ISP SMTP server for sending out spam or other unwelcome email.
Of course this can be resolved by putting the access point on the right side of well configured firewall, just pointing out there is more to consider than just securing your machine.
They plan to make use of technology to make it more interesting for the spectator. Overlaying live action onto a track for spectators and letting on-line competitors join in. Should have some interest amoung the slashdot crowd.
Mono = One
Rail = Rail
Someday someone will invent a 101 button mouse. Then we can get rid of these silly keyboard things.
http://www.itconversations.com/
My prediction for the iBook:
Wide screen form factor. 13" as the main model. Ultra small 8" model (branded as iBook mini?).
Completely new enclosure - a scaled up iPod mini style case. Available in all the iPod mini colors.