I won't argue that business has spent far too long only recruiting people who can "hit the ground running" and sawing the bottom rungs off the career ladder. However, there's a reason that lack of CICS expertise isn't killing us all.
The mainframe isn't dead, but it's no longer essential. Much of the real work these days gets done using servers, and HTTP servers actually have many functional similarities to CICS, Both are designed to provide terminal presentation and input. Both are geared towards fast request/response turnaround. Both have the ability to hook into back-end services such as databases.
While IBM is certainly supportive of CICS, they're also quite happy to sell you WebSphere to do many of the same things, and typically talking to the same backend systems. MQ very definitely hooks into JMS, and I've worked with several J2EE apps whose database services came from DB2.
CICS is complex, but then again, so are modern-day industrial-strength non-mainframe platforms. The bigger problem is that business has spent too much time shopping for talent at Wal-Mart.
"Here's an old computer science joke: What's the difference between hardware and software? If you use hardware long enough, it breaks. If you use software long enough, it works.
Actually, that's not true. COBOL programs are more durable because the COBOL architecture is very simple. Almost all of the work other than raw I/O was done in the COBOL code itself. Modern-day systems are heavily dependent on many external components, almost all of which are constantly evolving. So the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" approach is actually more of a "how long can you afford to delay upgrading before the whole thing collapses beyond repair?"
Even legacy programs didn't actually get better with time. Once you reach a certain point, it's more like you move the bugs around. The old "pressing on a ballon" analogy goes way back.
People who will break the law often conceal themselves. How many times have you seen a cat burglar walking down the street? Probably more then you realize.
The critical difference is that this hypothetical cat burglar is not likely to be an employee of an organization that is dedicated to persuading the world that theft is a sin, thieving is wrong and that you need their help to eliminate the sin of theft. Oh, and then there's the whole business of the fact that we weren't talking about the sinner covering up the sin, but the anti-sin organization covering up the sinner.
People would forgive even that, if the Church were noted for actually dealing with the sin: extracting repentance and penance, healing the wounds of the victims. The Church, after all, historically expected to be a law unto themselves, separate from secular law. But again, recent reports haven't been showing that. Instead, at best, the offender would be transferred somewhere else, at worst, the somewhere else would be yet another opportunity for sin.
Please point me to some citations on this. All the information I can find says that the rate of molestations are near identical to every other profession in which exposure to children is part of it.
This number is higher then a number for the general population. I think it has to do with those who would harm the children actively seeking out avenues to be exposed to them.
Whether it is or isn't, the reason for the outrage is that few professions are as monolithic between trade and employer as the Catholic Church and even fewer have a history of covering for offenders in such a wide-spread manner. Likewise, few other professions are dedicated specifically to moral standards. The Catholic Church is one of the world's major definers of moral standards. When it covers up violations and worse, lets the violators go unpunished, this damages their credibility in a significant way.
I think the point is that the telescope is so sensitive that it's likely that no matter how much you crank down the dBs, it would still splatter too much.
The problem would be as much in the fact that the remote units are probably going to be COTS and therefore not especially cranked down themselves. And travelling off-campus with the radio units still on.
RFI isn't the only case where nearby people can be a problem. The cryogenics lab at the University of Florida is (was?) located just about directly across the street from the football stadium, which is larger than many NFL stadiums. I was told that on game nights when the lights all went on and a 100+ thousand people filed in that the increased temperatures could be felt by some of the the more sensitive cryo experiments, even inside the brick building.
The concept of having millions of outstanding shares in a single corporation is a rather new idea. It as similar to communism (except everyone owns an EQUAL share in the corporation) as free market capitalism.
I don't know how much I agree or disagree with the rest of this, but allow me to introduce you to Creative Finance 101.
While the stereotypical corporation may be that simple, often times real corporations have 2 categories of stock: common and preferred. Preferred stock is typically non-voting stock, but Preferred shareholders get paid off before common shareholders do in the even of liquidation.
On top of that, some companies may have differing classes of common stock, frequently designated as "A Shares, B Shares", and so forth. Each class has different rights and dividend structures.
You can actually be quite flexible here. While the trading of shares is regulated, the actual properties of the shares is mostly what the company decides to make them. Subject to prior (voting) shareholder approval, in the case of post-incorporation share class creation.
So, in short Corporations are not democracies (one SHARE one vote, not one PERSON one vote), and they are not Communistic (not all shares are equal). They are simply Corporations. How good or evil they are is up to them.
Charge $5/month to act as a spam filter. Plus they save on delivery by round filing junk mail for you at its origination point.
They'll never do that. Companies paying for that crap to be delivered is probably their best source of income for the Post Office. If they offer the receiver a way to opt out, those companies will be less likely to keep sending the stuff.
Companies paying for that crap ARE the best source of income for the Post Office, which, despite what some "small-government experts" think, is financed by that income, not taxes. The reason that the USPO is dropping Saturday delivery is due to exactly that reason. They can't just go to the government trough for more money and they don't think that jacking up the price of postage 25 cents will sell to their customer base. Just like a "real" business. Whodathunkit?
And you can opt out. The catch being that it's opt OUT and not opt IN, so you have to notify the various companies yourself. Or, if you're lucky, you can find their list supplier and opt out of multiple companies at once.
One of the overriding principles that the founders of the USA held almost universally was that the old royal way of just grabbing anyone who looked guilty wasn't going to apply anymore. That due process of law should be followed, not arbitrary whims.
it doesn't really matter what soil you're standing on. An American citizen used to be an American citizen no matter where they stood, just like Roman citizens before them. They didn't lose their citizenship just because they stepped onto foreign territory, much less an airport.
When you are actively engaged in combat against your country, you may reasonably expect that weapons of war will be turned against you, just as you can reasonably expect to be met with deadly force when committing a crime if you don't surrender. We allow for that.
What's more troubling is that increasingly we don't have a government of Laws, we have a government of Men. When deadly force is the first resort instead of the last resort and the rules are secret and informal, we are doing exactly the sort of thing that the King's men did to us. And we fought our own kinsmen to be free of that sort of thing.
Doesn't the burden fall on the government? If they want to press a case against this guy, they are required to grab him, present the evidence against him in a court of law, and let the laws as we've established them do their job. When we accept that the government can kill us, rather than give us a trial, because it's more expedient to just kill us, instead, we're all in trouble.
What a quaint old fashioned notion. Next you'll be saying that people shouldn't be drug-tested until there's reason to believe they are actually taking drugs. We haven't had that attitude about "innocent until proven guilty" since Reagan was president.
I suggest you look at how the Taliban has pretty much spanked the US army really hard in Afghanistan with only rocks and mules. In the USA there area LOT more resources for an uprising to decimate the Military and police.
So... YOUR neighbors celebrate weddings by firing off rapid-fire weapons into the air? Go around all day toting RPG launchers? THEY do.
Plus you have the problem that it's hard to make a soldier kill his own family and friends
Better go back and study the War Between the States. An awful lot of families did exactly that.
Desktop should have touch as an user Interface OPTION. I can see uses for touch on the desktop just not all the time.
Bingo!
One of the things that helped Windows in its early days was that a mouse was optional. You could do a lot of GUI-based work without buying a mouse at all, just by using the helpful command keys and tabs. Something, that, alas, pretty well went out the window (no pun intended) with the advent of pixel-graphic web browser applications.
You can get much better traction when a new feature is an enhancement to what people are used to than when you force them to start all over.
This reminds me a lot of another group of people who have recently been claiming their failures on the need to "educate" their target audience. And fail to realize that, for better or worse, their respective audiences feel that they have all the "education" they need.
Sometimes, when you Build It, they Don't Come. Sometimes you can't get a "great idea" to trickle down if you ram it with a plunger. Sometimes, in short, it's worth considering a different approach, rather than simply doubling down.
It would be ironic if the Year of the Linux Desktop finally arrived courtesy - not of improvements in Linux - but because Microsoft pushed its primary drug dealers, er, hardware manufacturers, into the waiting arms of the Penguin. Fortunately for the folks in Redmond, whatever disease this is seems to be widespread these days, as Linux has developed its own ways to fend of new arrivals in the form of Unity and Gnome3.
Kick them in the nuts. Now that you have their attention tell them to write good code.
And while you're at it, tell them that there are plenty of people in India who will be glad to write good code for $5/week, have 3 people on a team that properly requires 10, lay off 1 of them in order to instil proper levels of terror, make the remaining 2 work 70+ hours a week (salaried, of course), and just in case that doesn't motivate them enough, tell them that they must give "110 percent" and "work smarter, not harder".
You can't build a LAMP stack with PostgreSQL! The closest you can get is LAPP, but nobody wants a LAPP stack - it sounds like something Spaghatta Nadle would use for makeup.
No, but Pasco County in the Tampa area is considered one of the highest lightning capitals in the world. During monsoon season hail and dangerous lightning occurs practically every other day. THat can knock out data easily. I would not be surprised if lightning hits around the facility at least 30 or more times for the summer months.
Virginia gets them too but not so much as it is surrounded by warm 80 degree water on one side in the summer, but not 88 degree water on all 3 sides spawning these thunderstorms.
California obviously would be the best for inclement weather., but has an extremely expensive costs for land, rent, and labor with high taxes and earthquakes.
Most lightning maps draw a corridor right up I-4 from Tamps to Orlando. The second-highest probability zone is, well, just about the entire rest of the state. Lightning doesn't occur "every other day" in Summer, it occurs almost every day. People routinely get killed or injured.
Still, we know how to handle lightning and storms that take down power. Data centers with smaller budgets than Google are routinely built with motor-generators, backup batteries, power conditioners, etc., not to mention buildings capable of taking Category-4 winds, which is sufficient for almost everything but a head-on hit straight from the ocean of a major storm.
As natural disasters go, Florida actually isn't bad. Most of the really bad stuff can be predicted and planned for in advance. A lot of the scary stuff isn't as bad as it sounds - hail is rarely more than dime-sized, tornadoes are almost never Kansas-grade ferocity. Mildew, on the other hand...
Actually, the popular product is actually often more expensive than the better-quality one, and that was something I'd noted long before open-source became common. In particular, software tends to seem to follow an inverse-price/quality curve.
I don't think ignorance is a factor so much as perversity. People would rather sit in a box full of live ants than make the effort to climb out, and especially when everyone else is doing the same thing.
The Amiga's sterling features have since been adopted (and exceeded) by today's desktop computers, but going at it via IBM/Windows meant a lot of delays, warts, and extra pain.
It certainly didn't help that Commodore's management couldn't sell sex to bonobos, though.
I already have a phone that does this. As someone who is aware of my surroundings and generally conscientious, I simply turn my phone to "vibrate" or even - God forbid - OFF... It works very well indeed. And I even still receive alerts if a call or text came in. Amazing technology.
I fail on the "turn my phone" part. Get distracted, forget to push the button. Still "senses when the lights go down?" The stupid phone is in my POCKET!! It's ALREADY dark in there!
GPS suffers from not working well indoors, coarser positioning services are exactly that - 1000m precision, IIRC.
On the other hand, stringing a set of Bluetooth beacons throughout the theatre would work for me. Just cook up an appropriate protocol to tell the phone to go into "polite mode".
The good ideas/products will stay, the bad ones will die away. That's how evolution works.
That's why the Amiga, which came multi-tasking/color graphics/stereo sound/hardware accelerators out-of-the-box with a linear 64-bit memory system took over the world instead and the competing IBM PC AT with its lack of media outputs and feeble awkward 16-bit segmented addressing immediately tanked.
Slashdot Mirror
Saudi Arabia pays huge subsidies to domestic wheat farmers, when for a fraction of the cost they could just import wheat.
Silly Saudis, don't you know you're supposed to outsource all your critical resources to the lowest bidder?
It would be nice to think that a regional water shortage would pull these countries together to solve a mutual problem.
And I've recently been in the market for the London Bridge; have one for sale?
Funny you should mention that. I think there's one in the Arizona desert.
I won't argue that business has spent far too long only recruiting people who can "hit the ground running" and sawing the bottom rungs off the career ladder. However, there's a reason that lack of CICS expertise isn't killing us all.
The mainframe isn't dead, but it's no longer essential. Much of the real work these days gets done using servers, and HTTP servers actually have many functional similarities to CICS, Both are designed to provide terminal presentation and input. Both are geared towards fast request/response turnaround. Both have the ability to hook into back-end services such as databases.
While IBM is certainly supportive of CICS, they're also quite happy to sell you WebSphere to do many of the same things, and typically talking to the same backend systems. MQ very definitely hooks into JMS, and I've worked with several J2EE apps whose database services came from DB2.
CICS is complex, but then again, so are modern-day industrial-strength non-mainframe platforms. The bigger problem is that business has spent too much time shopping for talent at Wal-Mart.
"Here's an old computer science joke: What's the difference between hardware and software? If you use hardware long enough, it breaks. If you use software long enough, it works.
Actually, that's not true. COBOL programs are more durable because the COBOL architecture is very simple. Almost all of the work other than raw I/O was done in the COBOL code itself. Modern-day systems are heavily dependent on many external components, almost all of which are constantly evolving. So the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" approach is actually more of a "how long can you afford to delay upgrading before the whole thing collapses beyond repair?"
Even legacy programs didn't actually get better with time. Once you reach a certain point, it's more like you move the bugs around. The old "pressing on a ballon" analogy goes way back.
People who will break the law often conceal themselves. How many times have you seen a cat burglar walking down the street? Probably more then you realize.
The critical difference is that this hypothetical cat burglar is not likely to be an employee of an organization that is dedicated to persuading the world that theft is a sin, thieving is wrong and that you need their help to eliminate the sin of theft. Oh, and then there's the whole business of the fact that we weren't talking about the sinner covering up the sin, but the anti-sin organization covering up the sinner.
People would forgive even that, if the Church were noted for actually dealing with the sin: extracting repentance and penance, healing the wounds of the victims. The Church, after all, historically expected to be a law unto themselves, separate from secular law. But again, recent reports haven't been showing that. Instead, at best, the offender would be transferred somewhere else, at worst, the somewhere else would be yet another opportunity for sin.
Please point me to some citations on this. All the information I can find says that the rate of molestations are near identical to every other profession in which exposure to children is part of it.
This number is higher then a number for the general population. I think it has to do with those who would harm the children actively seeking out avenues to be exposed to them.
Whether it is or isn't, the reason for the outrage is that few professions are as monolithic between trade and employer as the Catholic Church and even fewer have a history of covering for offenders in such a wide-spread manner. Likewise, few other professions are dedicated specifically to moral standards. The Catholic Church is one of the world's major definers of moral standards. When it covers up violations and worse, lets the violators go unpunished, this damages their credibility in a significant way.
Microwave ovens.
Long-distance microwave telephone replays (AT&T)?
Commercial airliner radar domes?
I think the point is that the telescope is so sensitive that it's likely that no matter how much you crank down the dBs, it would still splatter too much.
The problem would be as much in the fact that the remote units are probably going to be COTS and therefore not especially cranked down themselves. And travelling off-campus with the radio units still on.
RFI isn't the only case where nearby people can be a problem. The cryogenics lab at the University of Florida is (was?) located just about directly across the street from the football stadium, which is larger than many NFL stadiums. I was told that on game nights when the lights all went on and a 100+ thousand people filed in that the increased temperatures could be felt by some of the the more sensitive cryo experiments, even inside the brick building.
... at Fox reckon man never landed on the moon either.
Not true. Ronald Reagan landed there and planted the USA flag, claiming the moon for Peace and Freedom!
The concept of having millions of outstanding shares in a single corporation is a rather new idea. It as similar to communism (except everyone owns an EQUAL share in the corporation) as free market capitalism.
I don't know how much I agree or disagree with the rest of this, but allow me to introduce you to Creative Finance 101.
While the stereotypical corporation may be that simple, often times real corporations have 2 categories of stock: common and preferred. Preferred stock is typically non-voting stock, but Preferred shareholders get paid off before common shareholders do in the even of liquidation.
On top of that, some companies may have differing classes of common stock, frequently designated as "A Shares, B Shares", and so forth. Each class has different rights and dividend structures.
You can actually be quite flexible here. While the trading of shares is regulated, the actual properties of the shares is mostly what the company decides to make them. Subject to prior (voting) shareholder approval, in the case of post-incorporation share class creation.
So, in short Corporations are not democracies (one SHARE one vote, not one PERSON one vote), and they are not Communistic (not all shares are equal). They are simply Corporations. How good or evil they are is up to them.
Charge $5/month to act as a spam filter. Plus they save on delivery by round filing junk mail for you at its origination point.
They'll never do that. Companies paying for that crap to be delivered is probably their best source of income for the Post Office. If they offer the receiver a way to opt out, those companies will be less likely to keep sending the stuff.
Companies paying for that crap ARE the best source of income for the Post Office, which, despite what some "small-government experts" think, is financed by that income, not taxes. The reason that the USPO is dropping Saturday delivery is due to exactly that reason. They can't just go to the government trough for more money and they don't think that jacking up the price of postage 25 cents will sell to their customer base. Just like a "real" business. Whodathunkit?
And you can opt out. The catch being that it's opt OUT and not opt IN, so you have to notify the various companies yourself. Or, if you're lucky, you can find their list supplier and opt out of multiple companies at once.
One of the overriding principles that the founders of the USA held almost universally was that the old royal way of just grabbing anyone who looked guilty wasn't going to apply anymore. That due process of law should be followed, not arbitrary whims.
it doesn't really matter what soil you're standing on. An American citizen used to be an American citizen no matter where they stood, just like Roman citizens before them. They didn't lose their citizenship just because they stepped onto foreign territory, much less an airport.
When you are actively engaged in combat against your country, you may reasonably expect that weapons of war will be turned against you, just as you can reasonably expect to be met with deadly force when committing a crime if you don't surrender. We allow for that.
What's more troubling is that increasingly we don't have a government of Laws, we have a government of Men. When deadly force is the first resort instead of the last resort and the rules are secret and informal, we are doing exactly the sort of thing that the King's men did to us. And we fought our own kinsmen to be free of that sort of thing.
Doesn't the burden fall on the government? If they want to press a case against this guy, they are required to grab him, present the evidence against him in a court of law, and let the laws as we've established them do their job. When we accept that the government can kill us, rather than give us a trial, because it's more expedient to just kill us, instead, we're all in trouble.
What a quaint old fashioned notion. Next you'll be saying that people shouldn't be drug-tested until there's reason to believe they are actually taking drugs. We haven't had that attitude about "innocent until proven guilty" since Reagan was president.
I suggest you look at how the Taliban has pretty much spanked the US army really hard in Afghanistan with only rocks and mules. In the USA there area LOT more resources for an uprising to decimate the Military and police.
So... YOUR neighbors celebrate weddings by firing off rapid-fire weapons into the air? Go around all day toting RPG launchers? THEY do.
Plus you have the problem that it's hard to make a soldier kill his own family and friends
Better go back and study the War Between the States. An awful lot of families did exactly that.
But Amazon lets you return ebooks!
Sometimes even when you didn't want to!
Desktop should have touch as an user Interface OPTION. I can see uses for touch on the desktop just not all the time.
Bingo!
One of the things that helped Windows in its early days was that a mouse was optional. You could do a lot of GUI-based work without buying a mouse at all, just by using the helpful command keys and tabs. Something, that, alas, pretty well went out the window (no pun intended) with the advent of pixel-graphic web browser applications.
You can get much better traction when a new feature is an enhancement to what people are used to than when you force them to start all over.
This reminds me a lot of another group of people who have recently been claiming their failures on the need to "educate" their target audience. And fail to realize that, for better or worse, their respective audiences feel that they have all the "education" they need.
Sometimes, when you Build It, they Don't Come. Sometimes you can't get a "great idea" to trickle down if you ram it with a plunger. Sometimes, in short, it's worth considering a different approach, rather than simply doubling down.
It would be ironic if the Year of the Linux Desktop finally arrived courtesy - not of improvements in Linux - but because Microsoft pushed its primary drug dealers, er, hardware manufacturers, into the waiting arms of the Penguin. Fortunately for the folks in Redmond, whatever disease this is seems to be widespread these days, as Linux has developed its own ways to fend of new arrivals in the form of Unity and Gnome3.
Kick them in the nuts. Now that you have their attention tell them to write good code.
And while you're at it, tell them that there are plenty of people in India who will be glad to write good code for $5/week, have 3 people on a team that properly requires 10, lay off 1 of them in order to instil proper levels of terror, make the remaining 2 work 70+ hours a week (salaried, of course), and just in case that doesn't motivate them enough, tell them that they must give "110 percent" and "work smarter, not harder".
So.. you are saying good code equals company goes bust?
It's kind of worrisome, isn't it?
The perversity of the universe tends towards the maximum
Larry Niven (I think).
one could even say it's GNU slash Linux. Or, as I've taken to calling it more recently, GNU plus Linux.
Linux distributions are much more than just Linux and GNU.
More properly, it's Linux plus GNU. Plus other things.
You want a GNU OS, try the Hurd.
You can't build a LAMP stack with PostgreSQL! The closest you can get is LAPP, but nobody wants a LAPP stack - it sounds like something Spaghatta Nadle would use for makeup.
Got something against reindeer?
No, but Pasco County in the Tampa area is considered one of the highest lightning capitals in the world. During monsoon season hail and dangerous lightning occurs practically every other day. THat can knock out data easily. I would not be surprised if lightning hits around the facility at least 30 or more times for the summer months.
Virginia gets them too but not so much as it is surrounded by warm 80 degree water on one side in the summer, but not 88 degree water on all 3 sides spawning these thunderstorms.
California obviously would be the best for inclement weather., but has an extremely expensive costs for land, rent, and labor with high taxes and earthquakes.
Most lightning maps draw a corridor right up I-4 from Tamps to Orlando. The second-highest probability zone is, well, just about the entire rest of the state. Lightning doesn't occur "every other day" in Summer, it occurs almost every day. People routinely get killed or injured.
Still, we know how to handle lightning and storms that take down power. Data centers with smaller budgets than Google are routinely built with motor-generators, backup batteries, power conditioners, etc., not to mention buildings capable of taking Category-4 winds, which is sufficient for almost everything but a head-on hit straight from the ocean of a major storm.
As natural disasters go, Florida actually isn't bad. Most of the really bad stuff can be predicted and planned for in advance. A lot of the scary stuff isn't as bad as it sounds - hail is rarely more than dime-sized, tornadoes are almost never Kansas-grade ferocity. Mildew, on the other hand...
Actually, the popular product is actually often more expensive than the better-quality one, and that was something I'd noted long before open-source became common. In particular, software tends to seem to follow an inverse-price/quality curve.
I don't think ignorance is a factor so much as perversity. People would rather sit in a box full of live ants than make the effort to climb out, and especially when everyone else is doing the same thing.
The Amiga's sterling features have since been adopted (and exceeded) by today's desktop computers, but going at it via IBM/Windows meant a lot of delays, warts, and extra pain.
It certainly didn't help that Commodore's management couldn't sell sex to bonobos, though.
I already have a phone that does this. As someone who is aware of my surroundings and generally conscientious, I simply turn my phone to "vibrate" or even - God forbid - OFF... It works very well indeed. And I even still receive alerts if a call or text came in. Amazing technology.
I fail on the "turn my phone" part. Get distracted, forget to push the button. Still "senses when the lights go down?" The stupid phone is in my POCKET!! It's ALREADY dark in there!
GPS suffers from not working well indoors, coarser positioning services are exactly that - 1000m precision, IIRC.
On the other hand, stringing a set of Bluetooth beacons throughout the theatre would work for me. Just cook up an appropriate protocol to tell the phone to go into "polite mode".
not buy it.
The good ideas/products will stay, the bad ones will die away. That's how evolution works.
That's why the Amiga, which came multi-tasking/color graphics/stereo sound/hardware accelerators out-of-the-box with a linear 64-bit memory system took over the world instead and the competing IBM PC AT with its lack of media outputs and feeble awkward 16-bit segmented addressing immediately tanked.