I mean, I get what you are trying to do. But doesn't the fact that Microsoft is hosting their big, annual, worldwide developers' conference and announcing things that would be of interest to tech folks qualify as legitimate news?
For me, it's the ubiquity of it. Until I bought a PixelXL, I only had to carry a single type of cable with me. It got used for EVERYTHING. I've got a lot of random micro-USB stuff. Now I have to remember a special cable for that one device, and it doesn't work on anything else. Don't get me wrong, USB-C is cool and has great advantages, but until there's actually an ecosystem around it, it's just an annoyance for me.
Dunno about that. I've had two, just got the Book a few months ago. It's great. Have another in our (small) company. My casual airport observations (I fly quite a bit) tells me they've become very popular with businesses. Mostly the Pros, not so much the book. I used to see more Apple devices, but now it's become a LOT of Surface Pros. So it seems to be doing well with their target audience.
Fair points, I think. But I'd argue that spending 10-20% of your time to plan (get on the same page), stay engaged with the business (goes both ways, they are engaged with you!), and to talk about what could improve is time well spent.
For us, the standup isn't much of a problem, but we are only across a few timezones, and for the most part we all work pretty normal hours. I could see how it might break your flow otherwise. Distributed teams are a challenge for sure.
I'm with you on the tools, I think they all kinda suck. Really, I much prefer index cards and stickies, but then there's the distributed teams problem.
Bummer about the micromanagement part; for us it's the opposite. The team gets to pretty much decide what the next two weeks looks like and who's doing what. If we didn't communicate well, then I could see this falling apart. But we make conscious effort to communicate. Really, if micromanaging is happening, I'd argue that the model isn't being applied well, and that *ought* to come up in retrospective. A good scrum master should notice it and take action.
Yeah, our product owner is 100% non-technical, and she's a critical part of sprint planning. Honestly, I don't know how you'd be successful without it that way. I mean, who answers questions about what's actually meant to happen?
I can see where you are coming from. We are a pretty strict Scrum shop (retrospectives and all the ceremonies). I can't speak to the larger Agile picture, but yes, we have business users as part of the sprint planning session and during the sprint review (invite widely!). Our product owner is 100% non-technical, so that really helps with the business perspective on the dev team. While it can seem tedious, having the trust from the business that we are working on the right thing, and having a great and engaged product owner helps get dev team questions answered right away and keeps things trucking.
It's way off topic, but why do you (seem) to hate Agile so much? We are a Scrum shop, and frankly it seems super great... better communication and understanding about what's being worked on.
I did this, 1-on-1 sharing without any problem at all. Started a chat with someone and jumped right into video and screen sharing. And thank Jeebus, the screen sharing performance is much, much better than that of Skype for Business, which kinda sucked.
I'm apparently the only person to actually try it here. With my token hipster slack-loving designer coworker. No joke, it's really, really nice. Great interface, nice features, good performance, and some superb and interesting integrations out of the box. nN excellent web client, and very good desktop and phone clients for all major platforms. It actually feels like the end game, connecting up a variety of useful, but disjointed MS products. Unlike slack, it has superb voice, video calling, and screen sharing built in. If you are in an O365 shop, you really, really should try this. It's truly an excellent offering.
I see a lot of them, too. I have a Surface Book (that I'm actually quite enamored with), and have a co-worker that has a Pro 4. She seems to like it well enough. I see them at airports a lot these days, but that could also be that I notice them because I have one (kinda like you buy a brand x car, then you see it EVERYWHERE), and they are very common at the conferences I attend as a vendor. Those are mostly government-worker attended conferences, though, and I think Microsoft still has excellent penetration into that market space.
So if you've already been infected and locked, this seems like it would shut down any avenue of unlocking your files. Maybe there aren't already people actively locked, but this seems like it would be a problem. Anyone know any more?
I just noticed that I had a comment. Good point, and I think it's utter garbage that a food can't be labeled as GMO free. I didn't know this and appreciate the information. I stick by my points, but fully support the right of the seller to to choose to label the food.
Reposting this because I screwed up and posted as AC.
I think his point is that "No, you do not have a right." And I'm inclined to agree. You have no right as a consumer to enforce an obligation on a supplier (at a cost) that has no basis in an agreed upon scientific standard. You might think there is a scientific basis, but many people don't. Hence the disagreement. It has *nothing* to do with favoring deceit (in my mind, at least). You might *want* to know, and I can't say I blame you, but I don't think you have a *right*.
What you can do is choose to buy carefully and selectively from products that voluntarily choose to give you the information you desire. That hurts no one.
It's funny. I've done enterprise IT for a good long while. About 13 years. And now I do startups. And the thing that really shocked me was that even the little guys have "enterprise-style" needs. It's kind of funny, really. And the way enterprise IT vendors work, they lock out the little guys. I'm quite suspicious that there is a good market out there for bringing enterprise-level capabilities to small business.
GApps is good for what it is, and it knows what it is--an all web suite. I use it for a non-profit I manage. But I also manage a software startup, and Office 365 was a much better choice for us. Got us perfect Outlook/Exchange integration without managing Exchange. Gave the users the same experience they were used to on the desktop. You get all of the features you actually need with the desktop apps-I've written a lot of papers on GApps, but it doesn't cover it for polished sales proposals. But for simpler needs, GApps is great--gmail and calendaring are definitely good enough. It's just the rest of it that falls short.
It's kind of a no brainer for us. You get the benefits of a cloud solution, but with awesome desktop integration if you want it (key word being *if*). You get Exchange without having to manage Exchange. You get SharePoint without having to manage SharePoint. You want all web-based? Fine, do that. The pricing is great (like $6/user-month). Want to get more features, or subscription-based Office client apps like Word and Excel (which are quite simply head and shoulders above the web-apps from both MS and Google)? Pay a little more per month. And, like one of the commenters posted, quite sagely, if you create a partner arrangement, you get the E3 plan free for a year, and can extend it if you sell 50 more licenses. Pretty awesome deal. Or sign up for BizSpark, if you qualify, and get the whole enchilada for free for three years, with rights to keep the software you've downloaded. This gets you MSDN Ultimate for three years. It's insane. We've leveraged both of these, and the results are awesome for our company.
Oops, forgot to log in, I posted this anonymously by accident earlier.
The episode of The Daily show where this was covered is truly awesome. This news is covered and then there is an epic segment on "Science" where a Republican strategist is interviewed. Starts at about 6:00 in. It's frightening.
http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes/wed-october-26-2011-lisa-randall
Okay, I was *really* hoping that this would get crosslinked, because I'm an avid reader of Gizmodo as well as Slashdot. I also never comment in the wasteland that is the Gizmodo comment section. I also happen to have worked in Juvenile Justice for about 12 years, and (disclaimer) currently work for a major player in the exact "analytic" space that the article describes.
Let me get this off my chest first: Jesus Diaz (the Gizmodo writer) is an idiot of the most supreme caliber. His MO on the Gizmodo is to write ill-researched inflammatory articles. Over time I have figured that these must be written solely to stir up internet frenzy and increase page views. More power to him, but it automatically disadvantages his opinions for me.
Now that the ad-hominem is out of the way, let me get to the meat of it. The conclusions here are 100% wrong. What we do is provide Juvenile Justice departments (which is almost always Juvenile Probation) with tools, in the form of academically validated models, that help them determine which kids are at highest risk to re-offend. We're also able to determine, with a high degree of accuracy (thank you academia!) what the kids biggest needs areas are.
So how does all of this information actually get used? It turns out that it's used in amazingly great ways. It helps keep children placed in their own homes, not in residential treatment, juvenile hall, or the state's Youth Authority. We've had jurisdictions report out-of-home placements drop by 50% after implementing our tools. It also means that a Probation Officer can focus on kids that are at a high risk to re-offend, and have minimal contact with kids that are at a low risk to re-offend. As it turns out, the PHds that come up with these tools are able to determine that having lots of contact with the criminal justice system is bad for kids that are low risk - so it really helps to know the kids that minimal intervention is the best path for. Another benefit of this sort of classification scheme (which works just as well for adults) is that the officers (who are time constrained) are able to spend more time with their higher risk kids because they aren't spending as much time with their low risk kids. This probably seems obvious to most readers, but I'm surprised by the number of commenters that don't get that last point.
My final point is that these kids are already getting put into treatment programs, like anger management, or drug counseling, or teenage parent classes. That happens regardless of whether or not a jurisdiction uses software like ours. What this type of analytic software does is help take away the "gut instinct" part of program placement and give the officer a little more guidance into what programs will be most effective. If you can only send a kid to one program, why make it an anger management class when, after an assessment, you are able to determine that it's actually his drug use and poor school attendance that are his biggest risk factors?
So in the end, this isn't about pre-crime, or thought-crime, or any sort of Orwellian conspiracy. It is, quite literally, about helping place minors (and adults) that have already committed crimes against people or their community, into programs that have the statistically best chance of helping them not commit another crime. The best part is, the followup data from jurisdictions using this type of software suggests that it works, with fewer placements and less recidivism.
Oh, and Jesus Diaz is a idiot (man that feels good.)
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, I get what you are trying to do. But doesn't the fact that Microsoft is hosting their big, annual, worldwide developers' conference and announcing things that would be of interest to tech folks qualify as legitimate news?
For me, it's the ubiquity of it. Until I bought a PixelXL, I only had to carry a single type of cable with me. It got used for EVERYTHING. I've got a lot of random micro-USB stuff. Now I have to remember a special cable for that one device, and it doesn't work on anything else. Don't get me wrong, USB-C is cool and has great advantages, but until there's actually an ecosystem around it, it's just an annoyance for me.
Dunno about that. I've had two, just got the Book a few months ago. It's great. Have another in our (small) company. My casual airport observations (I fly quite a bit) tells me they've become very popular with businesses. Mostly the Pros, not so much the book. I used to see more Apple devices, but now it's become a LOT of Surface Pros. So it seems to be doing well with their target audience.
Thanks for that. Certainly some interesting concepts to consider.
What would you suggest instead? We use it because we've never seen anything better.
For us, the standup isn't much of a problem, but we are only across a few timezones, and for the most part we all work pretty normal hours. I could see how it might break your flow otherwise. Distributed teams are a challenge for sure.
I'm with you on the tools, I think they all kinda suck. Really, I much prefer index cards and stickies, but then there's the distributed teams problem.
Bummer about the micromanagement part; for us it's the opposite. The team gets to pretty much decide what the next two weeks looks like and who's doing what. If we didn't communicate well, then I could see this falling apart. But we make conscious effort to communicate. Really, if micromanaging is happening, I'd argue that the model isn't being applied well, and that *ought* to come up in retrospective. A good scrum master should notice it and take action.
Yeah, our product owner is 100% non-technical, and she's a critical part of sprint planning. Honestly, I don't know how you'd be successful without it that way. I mean, who answers questions about what's actually meant to happen?
I can see where you are coming from. We are a pretty strict Scrum shop (retrospectives and all the ceremonies). I can't speak to the larger Agile picture, but yes, we have business users as part of the sprint planning session and during the sprint review (invite widely!). Our product owner is 100% non-technical, so that really helps with the business perspective on the dev team. While it can seem tedious, having the trust from the business that we are working on the right thing, and having a great and engaged product owner helps get dev team questions answered right away and keeps things trucking.
It's way off topic, but why do you (seem) to hate Agile so much? We are a Scrum shop, and frankly it seems super great... better communication and understanding about what's being worked on.
I did this, 1-on-1 sharing without any problem at all. Started a chat with someone and jumped right into video and screen sharing. And thank Jeebus, the screen sharing performance is much, much better than that of Skype for Business, which kinda sucked.
I'm apparently the only person to actually try it here. With my token hipster slack-loving designer coworker. No joke, it's really, really nice. Great interface, nice features, good performance, and some superb and interesting integrations out of the box. nN excellent web client, and very good desktop and phone clients for all major platforms. It actually feels like the end game, connecting up a variety of useful, but disjointed MS products. Unlike slack, it has superb voice, video calling, and screen sharing built in. If you are in an O365 shop, you really, really should try this. It's truly an excellent offering.
I see a lot of them, too. I have a Surface Book (that I'm actually quite enamored with), and have a co-worker that has a Pro 4. She seems to like it well enough. I see them at airports a lot these days, but that could also be that I notice them because I have one (kinda like you buy a brand x car, then you see it EVERYWHERE), and they are very common at the conferences I attend as a vendor. Those are mostly government-worker attended conferences, though, and I think Microsoft still has excellent penetration into that market space.
Yup, it's pretty good at it. Plenty of examples out on the web.
So if you've already been infected and locked, this seems like it would shut down any avenue of unlocking your files. Maybe there aren't already people actively locked, but this seems like it would be a problem. Anyone know any more?
Oops, that was me. Wasn't logged in.
I just noticed that I had a comment. Good point, and I think it's utter garbage that a food can't be labeled as GMO free. I didn't know this and appreciate the information. I stick by my points, but fully support the right of the seller to to choose to label the food.
Reposting this because I screwed up and posted as AC. I think his point is that "No, you do not have a right." And I'm inclined to agree. You have no right as a consumer to enforce an obligation on a supplier (at a cost) that has no basis in an agreed upon scientific standard. You might think there is a scientific basis, but many people don't. Hence the disagreement. It has *nothing* to do with favoring deceit (in my mind, at least). You might *want* to know, and I can't say I blame you, but I don't think you have a *right*. What you can do is choose to buy carefully and selectively from products that voluntarily choose to give you the information you desire. That hurts no one.
Oh to have mod points. HTML5 and JS (and let's not forget to throw CSS on top) are so awful, it's ridiculous. Couldn't agree with you more.
It's funny. I've done enterprise IT for a good long while. About 13 years. And now I do startups. And the thing that really shocked me was that even the little guys have "enterprise-style" needs. It's kind of funny, really. And the way enterprise IT vendors work, they lock out the little guys. I'm quite suspicious that there is a good market out there for bringing enterprise-level capabilities to small business.
GApps is good for what it is, and it knows what it is--an all web suite. I use it for a non-profit I manage. But I also manage a software startup, and Office 365 was a much better choice for us. Got us perfect Outlook/Exchange integration without managing Exchange. Gave the users the same experience they were used to on the desktop. You get all of the features you actually need with the desktop apps-I've written a lot of papers on GApps, but it doesn't cover it for polished sales proposals. But for simpler needs, GApps is great--gmail and calendaring are definitely good enough. It's just the rest of it that falls short.
It's kind of a no brainer for us. You get the benefits of a cloud solution, but with awesome desktop integration if you want it (key word being *if*). You get Exchange without having to manage Exchange. You get SharePoint without having to manage SharePoint. You want all web-based? Fine, do that. The pricing is great (like $6/user-month). Want to get more features, or subscription-based Office client apps like Word and Excel (which are quite simply head and shoulders above the web-apps from both MS and Google)? Pay a little more per month. And, like one of the commenters posted, quite sagely, if you create a partner arrangement, you get the E3 plan free for a year, and can extend it if you sell 50 more licenses. Pretty awesome deal. Or sign up for BizSpark, if you qualify, and get the whole enchilada for free for three years, with rights to keep the software you've downloaded. This gets you MSDN Ultimate for three years. It's insane. We've leveraged both of these, and the results are awesome for our company.
Oops, forgot to log in, I posted this anonymously by accident earlier. The episode of The Daily show where this was covered is truly awesome. This news is covered and then there is an epic segment on "Science" where a Republican strategist is interviewed. Starts at about 6:00 in. It's frightening. http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes/wed-october-26-2011-lisa-randall
Let me get this off my chest first: Jesus Diaz (the Gizmodo writer) is an idiot of the most supreme caliber. His MO on the Gizmodo is to write ill-researched inflammatory articles. Over time I have figured that these must be written solely to stir up internet frenzy and increase page views. More power to him, but it automatically disadvantages his opinions for me.
Now that the ad-hominem is out of the way, let me get to the meat of it. The conclusions here are 100% wrong. What we do is provide Juvenile Justice departments (which is almost always Juvenile Probation) with tools, in the form of academically validated models, that help them determine which kids are at highest risk to re-offend. We're also able to determine, with a high degree of accuracy (thank you academia!) what the kids biggest needs areas are.
So how does all of this information actually get used? It turns out that it's used in amazingly great ways. It helps keep children placed in their own homes, not in residential treatment, juvenile hall, or the state's Youth Authority. We've had jurisdictions report out-of-home placements drop by 50% after implementing our tools. It also means that a Probation Officer can focus on kids that are at a high risk to re-offend, and have minimal contact with kids that are at a low risk to re-offend. As it turns out, the PHds that come up with these tools are able to determine that having lots of contact with the criminal justice system is bad for kids that are low risk - so it really helps to know the kids that minimal intervention is the best path for. Another benefit of this sort of classification scheme (which works just as well for adults) is that the officers (who are time constrained) are able to spend more time with their higher risk kids because they aren't spending as much time with their low risk kids. This probably seems obvious to most readers, but I'm surprised by the number of commenters that don't get that last point.
My final point is that these kids are already getting put into treatment programs, like anger management, or drug counseling, or teenage parent classes. That happens regardless of whether or not a jurisdiction uses software like ours. What this type of analytic software does is help take away the "gut instinct" part of program placement and give the officer a little more guidance into what programs will be most effective. If you can only send a kid to one program, why make it an anger management class when, after an assessment, you are able to determine that it's actually his drug use and poor school attendance that are his biggest risk factors?
So in the end, this isn't about pre-crime, or thought-crime, or any sort of Orwellian conspiracy. It is, quite literally, about helping place minors (and adults) that have already committed crimes against people or their community, into programs that have the statistically best chance of helping them not commit another crime. The best part is, the followup data from jurisdictions using this type of software suggests that it works, with fewer placements and less recidivism.
Oh, and Jesus Diaz is a idiot (man that feels good.)
I just want the April Fool's achievement. I don't have anything else to offer.
Whoa, this is real?