In small planes (I used to fly them), GPS is auxiliary. A good pilot does not rely on GPS. Precisely becuase it dould be disabled.
And in large aircraft, where GPS is used there are many other systems as backup. And final approach etc is of course never based on GPS. So, do not worry.
No, don't shoot me, this is not meant to be a flame. I actually hire interns and IT guys in my company (I am the CTO). Now put yourself in my shoes for a second. There is enough on offer. I have to hire those who show most promise. I have to defend my hires to fellow execs. If I hire someone who writes things like "easist", "acronims" and "sentince", I will be asked why I did not at least hire someone who can read and write.
I realise this sounds dismissive, and I really do not mean it to. I am just trying to impress upon you the importance of basic skills. If you cannot distinguish "sentince" from "sentence", how can I be sure you can produce functional code? These are not mere typos.
Yes, I know there is much more than spelling to a person. It's just that this is kind of a basic skill. If you can improve on it, I am sure you can compete better with Johnnie Frat Boy. And please do try to see this as a constructive suggestion - I may be shot down but felt it needed saying.
Michael
PS ATM in a sentence? OK... I'll give you two: "ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) was not the panacea it was once thought to be to solve Internet connectivity woes". Or try "ATM (Automatic Teller Machine) technology has more than kept pace with Internet security technology and losses are minimal".:-)
This is just typical of the current world political climate. Do you realize what you just said? The implications of it?
I think I do.
Let's start here: Since you are implying the opposite: I am against the war in Iraq. And I do respect the right to have different opinions. The Saudis have a right to disallow women from driving, voting, or showing their arms, I suppose (though it is my right to disapprove.) I have worked in 25 countries (really) in my life so far, so I know about differing values.
But you miss my point perhaps. What I do not recommend is that we do not mention our own beliefs in fear of hurting someone else's belief system.
Either dead people talk to you or they do not. Either that guy who called the radio show had his electrons spinning at a high frequency to put him in touch with spirits, or he had epilepsy. I suspect the latter and I think telling him it's the former is not doing him a favour.
You're no different than the ultra-scary christian who would throw holy water on you shouting about how you are going to hell..
Seems to me I am very different. Again, religion is not about truth, but science is. You can TEST what I say. You cannot test what the Christian says. That's the power of science: you do NOT have to take anything from a priest, or scientist, or me. I am free to say what I think; you ar ethen free to test what I have said. In the absence of evidence for what I say (the ghosts), then I am probably wrong. Science is liberating. I do not believe this is at all scary.
we should respect the rights of everyone to believe in unquantifiable phenomenon if they so chose
Yes. sure. But we should not hesitate to apply the scientific test to these "unquantifiable" phenomena just becuase we fear the answer might upset the believers.
Sadly, we need this common sense. A lot of people are living in what Carl Sagan called a "demon haunted world".
Just last week I was with some people, otherwise intelligent people in a book club, who turn out to believe in predestination and ghosts - one lady says she hears voices of dead friends and they tell her they are OK and they give her comfort.
What is scary is not so much that (we all need comfort when friends die, and whatever we choose to believe is at least understandable), but the fact that the entire group of people misunderstood science. "There must be types of radiation that are not yet known causing this", was the consensus. Everyone just took this lady at her word!
Last week on a radio show here in Canada a "shaman", Doctor Somethingorother, took questions. One went like this:
"Doctor: Fred here from Winnipeg. My question: When you are about to get in touch with your spirit self, do your electrons speed up their frequency? And does this mean I have a talent for communicating with the spirits? Because this happens to me weekly: first I suddenly feel like my inner electrons are speeding up their frequency and then I am unable to talk for what seems like a while, I am like a Zombie for a few minutes, and meanwhile I feel like I am in the spirit world and communicate with their mystery, and then I come back again". Doctor: "Yes! Exactly! And Yes! And Yes! You are talented in spirit communication, and indeed the frequency response of the electrons increases as we get near the spirit communication level, as the energy increase is a presurcor to this communication..." bla bla bla.
Now this poor caller was presumably an epileptic or narcoleptic. He should have been told to get (science-based) medical treatment. But no-one found it necessary to point this out: just because someone starts talking in an authoritative voice, he is believed.
Just now as I typed this message received a junk fax for "Marina, a Leading Psychic". Many people will pay for this stuff, in 2003. Not 1403! Weird.
This suspension of disbelief is dangerous. I think we need to be forceful in debunking myth. It seems to me that in the early 21st century we are a bit too apologetic.. "emotional correctness": it is seen as necessary to respect all beliefs. I think we do ourselves a discredit by that.
Er, Yasser Arafat is not into Jihad, he is into Intifada. Nor is he into WTC bombings, that would be Bin Laden, and he sure did not blow up Oklahoma City. If the CIA came asking about this, I'd ask them what they had been smoking.
BBS's are still in use. For a start, radio amateurs using packet radio still use BBS systems like F6BBS. See http://www.f6fbb.org/.
1200 baud, ascii art, horrendous setup: it's all still there and in use today. I run a system and so do many other radio hams. Slow, primitive, but free, and I do not rely on the phone or cable company!
Actually, I think the only thing they should be concerned about is packets.
If I am a single user generating 1000 KaZaa packets a minute, I am presumably more of a nuisance tp them (and affect their routers more) than a home user with 12 PCs at home, all generating the odd email packet via NAT (ie me, at home). Surely if the scarce resource is bandwidth, they should charge for packets.
Let's not forget the difference between circuit switching (phone) and packet switching, which is what made the Internet possible in the first place.
Example of microwave propagation:
on
802.11 RF Amp
·
· Score: 2
Just read a web site about a ham "working 500kms on 3cms with 2.5W on Rain Scatter". That is 500 kms' not the 50 km I was talking about. Rain scatter!!
Actually, I have played with microwave up there a bit, yes, and I do have WiFI all through the house; and although this absorbs a little more than, say, 440 MHz (which I use all the time), it certainly goes through "things" and trees. Yes, it is attenuated, but it does go through. And as for not travelling 30 miles: it will travel 3000 miles, or 30,000 for that matter, with the right antenna and line-of-sight. Ask NASA.
As for the FCC, well it (and its equivalent in other countries) has all those laws for good reasons. They're there to make comms possible, not just to hassle us for no reason.
Simple fact: my neighbour's X.10 cam and cordless phone interferes with my use of the frequency, and the higher the power, the more neighbours get to interfere.
Mmm.. I wish I could be as much of an optimist. I have recently noticed that 2.4 GHz seems to be getting fuller. My MAME box in the basement sometimes will not see the wireless access point upstairs, and I suspect it's due to QRM - in other words, to the neighbours doing stuff (X.10, phone, etc) in the same frequency range. Power isn't everything (with 10W on 6m I have worked SCotland), but this is line of sight, and surely raising the power from 40 mW to 250 mW will enable more distant neighbours to add to that problem. Bluetooth uses 1 mW by the way, which gives 10m range. Power isn;t "nothing" either!
Ah... I open it with an RF-operated key (it's a Mercedes). And no matter how I pressed, nothing happened. MOst disconcerting. From using my radios I know this to be a high-RF environment. I could open the car using a metal 'emergency' key, and once away from that area, all worked OK again.
God forbid.
on
802.11 RF Amp
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The entire point of 802.11b is that it is low power, allowing a lot of use in a small area. If my neigbours all start to boost their signals (both ways of course), my 2.4 GHz RF environment is going to be be useless. X.10, cordless phones, bluetooth, 802.11b all share this frequency (and I have all four of those at home...)
In the UK, until recently 802.11b was illegal for commercial use because it was full, making it useless. My car the other day would not open in a high-RF environment (near Toronto's CN tower).
Can we please keep this frequency useable? Amplifying will kill it. An RF signal of this type can carry 30 miles very easily, making it useless if we all start amplifying.
I have some interest in this as I am trying to move my company to Linux. All our servers already are, but laptops and desktops are all Windows (98/XP).
The reasons are the same you will ahve heard many times.
1. Apps. We are trying StarOffice, but converting the world's excel, word and PPT files is a royal pain - never QUITE works. Office it is, much to my chagrin.
2. Integration. Cutting and pasting works different in all Linux aps. Fonts are sub-optimal. Everything works "almost" out of the box. You cannot right-click on a file and select "Send To...". And so on. Desktop Linuxius still for people who know what they are doing.
3. The pain of changing. Even if (1) and (2) above were not an issue, the work of switching from one OS to another takes real effort, and we like all other companies are struggling to make the sales - the last thing we can afford is an exercise that will distract us from this.
Damn, I wish it were different, becuase I am very motivated to push this through...
Look up FARC. That is generally the effect of censorship: it makes the object more interesting. If the FARC thought is so powerful that it might corrupt me or cause me to set aside all my critical faculties, I would like to hear all about it.
...in not recognising that the useful 1% of a godzillion megapieces of information is a hell of a lot more useful than 99% of 100 www pages.
I, too, grew up in the early days and I recall them well. No noise, you could use newsgroups, and receiving email was a real event. Archie, remember archie? And Gopher? Veronica?
BUT... in those days I could not do a tenth of what I can do now. Not one hundredth. Use google. Use google groups (nee dejanews). Look up song lyrics. Bank online. Download videos. Find any company I do business with. And P2P (ha ha... 1200 bps modems, remember those??)
So, the noise is despiccable but do realise it is a side phenomenon of the great cyberworld we are creating.
Actually, yes, it seems to me that it IS disturbing that users do not upgrade.
Let's face it: people do use Office and IE. Like it or not. Our new PCs come with them, our companies require them, our colleagues send us documents in Office format, etc.
Let's also face this: Linux has vulnerabilities too. About 100 since I installed my RedHat 7.3 desktop. I installed all the fixes so am reasonably secure. If I stick my head in the sand and refuse to upgrade, that's a risk I am taking - my risk, not RedHat's fault.
At work, I always urge people to upgrade (go to Microsoft and apply critical security fixes). They seldom do. And hence, they often get hit with viruses etc that leave my machines untouched. I always ask "were you up to date" and the reply is usually "No, I did not bother".
We could hire more people to go do it, but I think users, if warned, should be mature enough to manage their own PCs - it's a PC after all, not a CC ("corporate computer").
Upgrading is simple: MS have done a good job (unlike, say, RedHat, where it is more difficult and you need to administer, log in, pay, etc).
If you KNOW there are serious bugs and you refuse to upgrade, you are adding to the problem. The bug should not be there but let's face it, it is, and there will always be bugs. Religion has no part in keeping your systems working.
Valid points of course: an IT organisation should prove its value, as should any activity in a company. Goes without saying, and I am not arguing that. Resources are always scarce, and need to be distributed on a basis better than "I say so".
But there is more to it than that.
First, mine was a general observation - not my company, but throughout the industry. My company is OK, thanks, as indeed we have representation (me) at the most senior level. But many companies are not so lucky.
I get the impression that IT is being singled out especially to prove its value - when is the last time you saw accountants, or marketers, or janitors whip out the spreadsheets to prove each quarter why they should be there? As an activity that has fallen into disfavour, IT now gets this all the time.
Thing is that this type of value is often hard to prove. An app to do something very specific: OK. But what is the value of a spreadsheet? Of a web site? What is the "value" to us all of slashdot? IN dollars? That's open to interpretation, which is why even the US government is not yet convinced IT contributes to productivity. And even if you can demostrate that it does: then over what time period? I venture thath the initial PCs took more time that they gave benefit, but still, were a worthwhile investment.
Another thing that bothers me is the lack of vision I see. In the dot com era, vision was everything, to ridiculous extremes. But now the pensulum has swung back too far and there's not place for it at all. Competitive advantage comes out of "vision", "R&D", "trying and failing and trying again", etc. I suspect if we took the spreadsheet approach every time there would BE no spreadsheets, PCs, airplanes - or slashdot.
Patrick: believe it or not, that is what I wrote - like most other news channels, slashdot editorialises posts. I noticed a few other changes from my submission too.
Michael - in Oakville, believe it or not, i.e. not a million miles from you.
If I had points today you'd get them: I think there is a lot in what you say.I;'ve been around a while as well and think your analysis is correct.
The point that needs expanding is the "do not do it only for profit" one. Of course companies do do everything for profit, cash flow, shareholder value. But in IT, a lot of benefit is derived from playing. Not "Quake 17" type of playing: I mean driver/OS/kernel/Office XP/Apple II type playing. A lot of the benefit of IT is in measurable productivity enhancement, and that is enhanced by deep knoweldge - deep knowledge that is enhanced by playing. So, two birds with one stone, job satisfaction and corporate benefit.
You are absolutely right. The question therefore is:
a) does IT contribute to cash flow? (Over what term? 1 week, 1 month? 1 year?)
b) can we actually quantify it? Does a spreadsheet show (as the CFO quite rightly demands) this effect? What is the spreadsheet effect of you having a PC? A fast Internet connection? Email once every 5 minutes rather than once a day?
Eh, I have an amateur radio packet radio server running on a 486/33 with 16 MB RAM, so not much more than what was suggested here.
It runs RedHat 5.2 and has been running continuously and free of any errors for three years now. I had to reboot it once for Y2K hardware testing (turned out all was OK), and at that time I cleaned out the dust. I guess I need to dio this again some time in the coming year.
This PC is on a UPS and monitors two TNC's (terminal node controllers) connected to two radios. These radios talk AX.25 on VHF and UHF respectively, and keep me connceted to the 'net slowly but reliably when the cable connection goes down.
It also runs a radio bulletin board and hosts FTP and Apache.
Point being, a server can be dedicated to some sepcific tasks and very old hardware can do a great job, and Linux can be compiled to run clean and small, and is utterly reliable. I think if I had any memory leaks I'd know by now!
I have one too - 8 extensions, 3 lines (2 connected). Panasonic PBX: takes key sets or analog sets
That is one of the most important variables: can you connect cheap analog sets, or must you use expensive key sets?
Used to be a phone engineer so it's an interesting hobby but also useful: share 2 lines, connect through, redirect fax calls to the fax, etc - recommend you buy a cheap analog PBX - few hunbdred bucks in Europe.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, I mean "solely". Very easily doable to make another type of approach.
In small planes (I used to fly them), GPS is auxiliary. A good pilot does not rely on GPS. Precisely becuase it dould be disabled.
And in large aircraft, where GPS is used there are many other systems as backup. And final approach etc is of course never based on GPS. So, do not worry.
Michael
But at least Johnnie Frat Boy knows how to spell!
:-)
No, don't shoot me, this is not meant to be a flame. I actually hire interns and IT guys in my company (I am the CTO). Now put yourself in my shoes for a second. There is enough on offer. I have to hire those who show most promise. I have to defend my hires to fellow execs. If I hire someone who writes things like "easist", "acronims" and "sentince", I will be asked why I did not at least hire someone who can read and write.
I realise this sounds dismissive, and I really do not mean it to. I am just trying to impress upon you the importance of basic skills. If you cannot distinguish "sentince" from "sentence", how can I be sure you can produce functional code? These are not mere typos.
Yes, I know there is much more than spelling to a person. It's just that this is kind of a basic skill. If you can improve on it, I am sure you can compete better with Johnnie Frat Boy. And please do try to see this as a constructive suggestion - I may be shot down but felt it needed saying.
Michael
PS ATM in a sentence? OK... I'll give you two: "ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) was not the panacea it was once thought to be to solve Internet connectivity woes". Or try "ATM (Automatic Teller Machine) technology has more than kept pace with Internet security technology and losses are minimal".
This is just typical of the current world political climate. Do you realize what you just said? The implications of it?
I think I do.
Let's start here: Since you are implying the opposite: I am against the war in Iraq. And I do respect the right to have different opinions. The Saudis have a right to disallow women from driving, voting, or showing their arms, I suppose (though it is my right to disapprove.) I have worked in 25 countries (really) in my life so far, so I know about differing values.
But you miss my point perhaps. What I do not recommend is that we do not mention our own beliefs in fear of hurting someone else's belief system.
Either dead people talk to you or they do not. Either that guy who called the radio show had his electrons spinning at a high frequency to put him in touch with spirits, or he had epilepsy. I suspect the latter and I think telling him it's the former is not doing him a favour.
You're no different than the ultra-scary christian who would throw holy water on you shouting about how you are going to hell..
Seems to me I am very different. Again, religion is not about truth, but science is. You can TEST what I say. You cannot test what the Christian says. That's the power of science: you do NOT have to take anything from a priest, or scientist, or me. I am free to say what I think; you ar ethen free to test what I have said. In the absence of evidence for what I say (the ghosts), then I am probably wrong. Science is liberating. I do not believe this is at all scary.
we should respect the rights of everyone to believe in unquantifiable phenomenon if they so chose
Yes. sure. But we should not hesitate to apply the scientific test to these "unquantifiable" phenomena just becuase we fear the answer might upset the believers.
Sadly, we need this common sense. A lot of people are living in what Carl Sagan called a "demon haunted world".
Just last week I was with some people, otherwise intelligent people in a book club, who turn out to believe in predestination and ghosts - one lady says she hears voices of dead friends and they tell her they are OK and they give her comfort.
What is scary is not so much that (we all need comfort when friends die, and whatever we choose to believe is at least understandable), but the fact that the entire group of people misunderstood science. "There must be types of radiation that are not yet known causing this", was the consensus. Everyone just took this lady at her word!
Last week on a radio show here in Canada a "shaman", Doctor Somethingorother, took questions. One went like this:
"Doctor: Fred here from Winnipeg. My question: When you are about to get in touch with your spirit self, do your electrons speed up their frequency? And does this mean I have a talent for communicating with the spirits? Because this happens to me weekly: first I suddenly feel like my inner electrons are speeding up their frequency and then I am unable to talk for what seems like a while, I am like a Zombie for a few minutes, and meanwhile I feel like I am in the spirit world and communicate with their mystery, and then I come back again". Doctor: "Yes! Exactly! And Yes! And Yes! You are talented in spirit communication, and indeed the frequency response of the electrons increases as we get near the spirit communication level, as the energy increase is a presurcor to this communication..." bla bla bla.
Now this poor caller was presumably an epileptic or narcoleptic. He should have been told to get (science-based) medical treatment. But no-one found it necessary to point this out: just because someone starts talking in an authoritative voice, he is believed.
Just now as I typed this message received a junk fax for "Marina, a Leading Psychic". Many people will pay for this stuff, in 2003. Not 1403! Weird.
This suspension of disbelief is dangerous. I think we need to be forceful in debunking myth. It seems to me that in the early 21st century we are a bit too apologetic.. "emotional correctness": it is seen as necessary to respect all beliefs. I think we do ourselves a discredit by that.
Er, Yasser Arafat is not into Jihad, he is into Intifada. Nor is he into WTC bombings, that would be Bin Laden, and he sure did not blow up Oklahoma City. If the CIA came asking about this, I'd ask them what they had been smoking.
Hey all,
BBS's are still in use. For a start, radio amateurs using packet radio still use BBS systems like F6BBS. See http://www.f6fbb.org/.
1200 baud, ascii art, horrendous setup: it's all still there and in use today. I run a system and so do many other radio hams. Slow, primitive, but free, and I do not rely on the phone or cable company!
Cheers,
Michael VA3MVW
Actually, I think the only thing they should be concerned about is packets.
If I am a single user generating 1000 KaZaa packets a minute, I am presumably more of a nuisance tp them (and affect their routers more) than a home user with 12 PCs at home, all generating the odd email packet via NAT (ie me, at home). Surely if the scarce resource is bandwidth, they should charge for packets.
Let's not forget the difference between circuit switching (phone) and packet switching, which is what made the Internet possible in the first place.
Michael
In my case it is /sbin/apcaccess status
(with or without the subsequent grep).
Just read a web site about a ham "working 500kms on 3cms with 2.5W on Rain Scatter". That is 500 kms' not the 50 km I was talking about. Rain scatter!!
See http://www.neoamateur.org/
Mike va3mvw
Actually, I have played with microwave up there a bit, yes, and I do have WiFI all through the house; and although this absorbs a little more than, say, 440 MHz (which I use all the time), it certainly goes through "things" and trees. Yes, it is attenuated, but it does go through. And as for not travelling 30 miles: it will travel 3000 miles, or 30,000 for that matter, with the right antenna and line-of-sight. Ask NASA.
As for the FCC, well it (and its equivalent in other countries) has all those laws for good reasons. They're there to make comms possible, not just to hassle us for no reason.
Simple fact: my neighbour's X.10 cam and cordless phone interferes with my use of the frequency, and the higher the power, the more neighbours get to interfere.
Mike VA3MVW
Ted,
Mmm.. I wish I could be as much of an optimist. I have recently noticed that 2.4 GHz seems to be getting fuller. My MAME box in the basement sometimes will not see the wireless access point upstairs, and I suspect it's due to QRM - in other words, to the neighbours doing stuff (X.10, phone, etc) in the same frequency range. Power isn't everything (with 10W on 6m I have worked SCotland), but this is line of sight, and surely raising the power from 40 mW to 250 mW will enable more distant neighbours to add to that problem. Bluetooth uses 1 mW by the way, which gives 10m range. Power isn;t "nothing" either!
73
Michael
Ah... I open it with an RF-operated key (it's a Mercedes). And no matter how I pressed, nothing happened. MOst disconcerting. From using my radios I know this to be a high-RF environment. I could open the car using a metal 'emergency' key, and once away from that area, all worked OK again.
The entire point of 802.11b is that it is low power, allowing a lot of use in a small area. If my neigbours all start to boost their signals (both ways of course), my 2.4 GHz RF environment is going to be be useless. X.10, cordless phones, bluetooth, 802.11b all share this frequency (and I have all four of those at home...)
In the UK, until recently 802.11b was illegal for commercial use because it was full, making it useless. My car the other day would not open in a high-RF environment (near Toronto's CN tower).
Can we please keep this frequency useable? Amplifying will kill it. An RF signal of this type can carry 30 miles very easily, making it useless if we all start amplifying.
Michael (radio amateur, VA3MVW)
I have some interest in this as I am trying to move my company to Linux. All our servers already are, but laptops and desktops are all Windows (98/XP).
The reasons are the same you will ahve heard many times.
1. Apps. We are trying StarOffice, but converting the world's excel, word and PPT files is a royal pain - never QUITE works. Office it is, much to my chagrin.
2. Integration. Cutting and pasting works different in all Linux aps. Fonts are sub-optimal. Everything works "almost" out of the box. You cannot right-click on a file and select "Send To...". And so on. Desktop Linuxius still for people who know what they are doing.
3. The pain of changing. Even if (1) and (2) above were not an issue, the work of switching from one OS to another takes real effort, and we like all other companies are struggling to make the sales - the last thing we can afford is an exercise that will distract us from this.
Damn, I wish it were different, becuase I am very motivated to push this through...
Michael
Look up FARC. That is generally the effect of censorship: it makes the object more interesting. If the FARC thought is so powerful that it might corrupt me or cause me to set aside all my critical faculties, I would like to hear all about it.
Michael
...in not recognising that the useful 1% of a godzillion megapieces of information is a hell of a lot more useful than 99% of 100 www pages.
I, too, grew up in the early days and I recall them well. No noise, you could use newsgroups, and receiving email was a real event. Archie, remember archie? And Gopher? Veronica?
BUT... in those days I could not do a tenth of what I can do now. Not one hundredth. Use google. Use google groups (nee dejanews). Look up song lyrics. Bank online. Download videos. Find any company I do business with. And P2P (ha ha... 1200 bps modems, remember those??)
So, the noise is despiccable but do realise it is a side phenomenon of the great cyberworld we are creating.
Give me today's 'net anytime!
Actually, yes, it seems to me that it IS disturbing that users do not upgrade.
Let's face it: people do use Office and IE. Like it or not. Our new PCs come with them, our companies require them, our colleagues send us documents in Office format, etc.
Let's also face this: Linux has vulnerabilities too. About 100 since I installed my RedHat 7.3 desktop. I installed all the fixes so am reasonably secure. If I stick my head in the sand and refuse to upgrade, that's a risk I am taking - my risk, not RedHat's fault.
At work, I always urge people to upgrade (go to Microsoft and apply critical security fixes). They seldom do. And hence, they often get hit with viruses etc that leave my machines untouched. I always ask "were you up to date" and the reply is usually "No, I did not bother".
We could hire more people to go do it, but I think users, if warned, should be mature enough to manage their own PCs - it's a PC after all, not a CC ("corporate computer").
Upgrading is simple: MS have done a good job (unlike, say, RedHat, where it is more difficult and you need to administer, log in, pay, etc).
If you KNOW there are serious bugs and you refuse to upgrade, you are adding to the problem. The bug should not be there but let's face it, it is, and there will always be bugs. Religion has no part in keeping your systems working.
Just my 0.02
Mike
Hello, "this guy" here:
Valid points of course: an IT organisation should prove its value, as should any activity in a company. Goes without saying, and I am not arguing that. Resources are always scarce, and need to be distributed on a basis better than "I say so".
But there is more to it than that.
First, mine was a general observation - not my company, but throughout the industry. My company is OK, thanks, as indeed we have representation (me) at the most senior level. But many companies are not so lucky.
I get the impression that IT is being singled out especially to prove its value - when is the last time you saw accountants, or marketers, or janitors whip out the spreadsheets to prove each quarter why they should be there? As an activity that has fallen into disfavour, IT now gets this all the time.
Thing is that this type of value is often hard to prove. An app to do something very specific: OK. But what is the value of a spreadsheet? Of a web site? What is the "value" to us all of slashdot? IN dollars? That's open to interpretation, which is why even the US government is not yet convinced IT contributes to productivity. And even if you can demostrate that it does: then over what time period? I venture thath the initial PCs took more time that they gave benefit, but still, were a worthwhile investment.
Another thing that bothers me is the lack of vision I see. In the dot com era, vision was everything, to ridiculous extremes. But now the pensulum has swung back too far and there's not place for it at all. Competitive advantage comes out of "vision", "R&D", "trying and failing and trying again", etc. I suspect if we took the spreadsheet approach every time there would BE no spreadsheets, PCs, airplanes - or slashdot.
Michael
Patrick: believe it or not, that is what I wrote - like most other news channels, slashdot editorialises posts. I noticed a few other changes from my submission too.
Michael - in Oakville, believe it or not, i.e. not a million miles from you.
If I had points today you'd get them: I think there is a lot in what you say.I;'ve been around a while as well and think your analysis is correct.
The point that needs expanding is the "do not do it only for profit" one. Of course companies do do everything for profit, cash flow, shareholder value. But in IT, a lot of benefit is derived from playing. Not "Quake 17" type of playing: I mean driver/OS/kernel/Office XP/Apple II type playing. A lot of the benefit of IT is in measurable productivity enhancement, and that is enhanced by deep knoweldge - deep knowledge that is enhanced by playing. So, two birds with one stone, job satisfaction and corporate benefit.
Michael
You are absolutely right. The question therefore is:
a) does IT contribute to cash flow? (Over what term? 1 week, 1 month? 1 year?)
b) can we actually quantify it? Does a spreadsheet show (as the CFO quite rightly demands) this effect? What is the spreadsheet effect of you having a PC? A fast Internet connection? Email once every 5 minutes rather than once a day?
Not as easy as it soundsas first, I think.
Michael
Eh, I have an amateur radio packet radio server running on a 486/33 with 16 MB RAM, so not much more than what was suggested here.
It runs RedHat 5.2 and has been running continuously and free of any errors for three years now. I had to reboot it once for Y2K hardware testing (turned out all was OK), and at that time I cleaned out the dust. I guess I need to dio this again some time in the coming year.
This PC is on a UPS and monitors two TNC's (terminal node controllers) connected to two radios. These radios talk AX.25 on VHF and UHF respectively, and keep me connceted to the 'net slowly but reliably when the cable connection goes down.
It also runs a radio bulletin board and hosts FTP and Apache.
Point being, a server can be dedicated to some sepcific tasks and very old hardware can do a great job, and Linux can be compiled to run clean and small, and is utterly reliable. I think if I had any memory leaks I'd know by now!
Michael VA3MVW
Private Branch Exchange (not public!)
Michael (ex PBX engineer)
I have one too - 8 extensions, 3 lines (2 connected). Panasonic PBX: takes key sets or analog sets
That is one of the most important variables: can you connect cheap analog sets, or must you use expensive key sets?
Used to be a phone engineer so it's an interesting hobby but also useful: share 2 lines, connect through, redirect fax calls to the fax, etc - recommend you buy a cheap analog PBX - few hunbdred bucks in Europe.
MW