Here's a good book on social and business networking (even for the shy): "Power Schmoozing" by Terri Mandell.
An excerpt:
"Volunteering connects you to entire new worlds to which you never thought you'd have access. It allows you to get closer to the people in the group. It gives you a "job" at the event, a reason for being there so that you won't feel a need to explain yourself. It gives you something to do instead of standing around waiting for something to happen. And being part of the committee or group that hosts the event puts you in a position of authority, which will draw people to you for information and conversation. But most important, it will make you feel like you belong, which does wonders for your confidence, and gives you a real head start in making contact with others."
1. Experience: self-educate in an emerging technology in your chosen field. You have the advantage of being unbiased to legacy practices. With an emerging technology, no one has experience. In today's world of cheap hardware and open-source software, it has never been easier for motivated people to find a way to contribute. Treat the learning process as an extended interview, including your project emails and contributions.
2. People: you're already at the bottom, nowhere to go but up. Don't further handicap yourself with low expectations, reality will be happy to reduce your expectations for you. Aim as high as you can imagine and work down as necessary. Rank the top ten companies or organizations (globally) with people who are experts in your chosen field. Identify some of these people by name and learn about their career path and current projects. Find a way to contribute to similar projects. Work backwards from their social network to your social network and try to have F2F conversations with local contacts who are best-of-breed.
3. Budgets: use your F2F contacts to obtain intelligence on budgets. In a poor economy with layoffs, the remaining people often have too much work to handle. Creative volunteering and compensation ideas can get you involved in real-world projects where the experience is worth 10X the dollar value comp. It all starts and ends with people, be they HR, managers or customers. So focus on being useful and building relationships with people. The most valuable information is often very transient (e.g. time sensitive hiring opportunities) and communicated only by word of mouth.
4. Recession: some of the best engineering creations have come from highly constrained environments. If you can be successful in an environment of fiscal discipline, you will only be more successful when boom times return. The same cannot be said for those who begin careers in boom times and are shocked by their first major downturn. There is no better time to start working than now. It doesn't mean you'll find a job quickly, but you will learn much more than by staying in school (which also costs money, even if deferred).
10 years from now, business schools will have course material dedicated to the lessons of these unprecedented economic times. New grads have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to experience the kind of business environment where fortunes will be lost and won, as economic hierarchies adjust. Don't miss the excitement by hiding in school!
Back in 1992, IBM and the Ontario Govt. prototyped ServiceOntario kiosks to provide DMV services (license plate sticker renewal and dispensation, address changes, vehicle abstracts, fine payments).
Included digital audio and 30fps video. Special hardware was engineered to dispense license plate stickers. Not sure what the kiosks are running today, but in 1992 Windows couldn't cut it. The kiosks (advanced ATMS really) have won awards and have since been deployed into malls around the province.
Read more about government and self-service kiosks here, including US initiatives. If you think about the nature of transactions being performed, such kiosks must be connected to multiple government networks, yet be located in public spaces. Legal, technical and process innovations were required to make this hybrid device possible.
You can, but convincing others to accept them will require more effort than developing the metrics.
To the extent that widely accepted metrics drive business decisions, they are reality.
The by-definition imperfection of all metrics need not stop us from seeking better metrics, when reality is impacted by documentable gaps in existing metrics.
Numbers need to reflect true costs of procurement.
Numbers aren't the problem. Incomplete numbers are the problem.
Partial numbers are like partial syslog output. Detailed logs are essential to admin diagnosis. Detailed tracking of time costs are equally essential to budget diagnosis.
The metrics are reality, but metrics too can be improved (i.e. metrics have metrics).
You can put LIDS on such a live CD for intrusion rejection. Instead of booting from a physical CD, use PXE to pull the.iso from a private network. A server-oriented distro will fit in a 25-50Mb compressed filesystem. E.g. any member of a diskless cluster of LIDS-enabled reverse-proxy web servers can detect an attack, reboot from PXE and be back online in short order. You gain flexibility by having the boot image(s) on the private network (which can itself be running a live CD).
Have done this from scratch with RedHat, but there's now a live CD with LIDS, SELinux and UML: Adios. Haven't used Adios yet, but it's probably worth a look.
The RPM-based PLD Rescue CD is also a good starting point (though their web site is currently in flux).
As use of virtualization (VMware, UML, vserver, Virtuozzo) increases, it will be easier to view a virtual node as a combination of read-only boot image + configuration. VMware can even do magic with a read-only base disk image and multiple virtual machines having concurrent read-write access to increments to the base. Later updates to the ancestral base propagate to the virtual, composite 'child' images.
The key is near-real-time disclosure. There are existing laws for disclosure, but the timeframes are too long. With immediate disclosure, it allows competing lobbyists to make their case(s).
Transparency of association, not chilling of speech.
There needs to be a precise legal definition of "open patents" when the term is used in the context of "open source". Just as OSI approves specific licenses as "Open Source", someone (OSI?) needs to approve the use of the term "Open Patent".
Patent grants that are restricted to specific licenses or license groups must be visibly differentiated (branding) from patent grants that have no such restriction.
Unzipping and using Perl for direct manipulation of the OpenOffice XML files is much faster than heavier solutions, the heaviest of which is the Open Office API.
have to be the biggest story in storage in 2004. We're talking a new product category that has been so successful, it is now multiplatform and multi-vendor and has spawned a related line of flash-based products (iShuffle).
1.8" drives, followed by flash ram eating into the hard drive market, there's progress in 2004.
Combined with PC virtualization (VMware, UML, Virtuozzo), it's just a matter of app integration before we start using widespread standby/resume that saves our virtual machines to iPod-scale media.
You imagine wrong. Go into Best Buy and try that comparison again. Cheapest DVD player is about half the price of the cheapest VCR. Cheap DVDs are a lot smaller and have less moving parts than cheap VCRs.
Appreciate the history lesson. Are any of the early requirements management tools still around, in any incarnation?
Agree on the value of tracking estimates and actuals. I've not had the experience of working on a project that was mature enough to track both. But even a mental comparison of estimates with personal observation was invaluable in understanding developer strengths/weaknesses.
Do you think there is a place in the market for an open-source requirements management system? E.g. if someone started such a tool, would any home-grown tool owners contribute expertise or code?
Have you seen a good tool that is more affordable than CaliberRM/DOORS? The market seems to have an absent low end (excluding MS Office). Microsoft plans some process management for their developer tools, e.g. "Visual Studio Team System" is mentioned in a comprehensive description (with photos) of their internal build+test environment for ASP.NET.
The real solution is to reject the spec as being not specific enough.
The original poster makes a good case why this is not an option (the customers are lawyers). If the original poster is correct, I propose forking the spec. If the original poster is incorrect, yes, rejecting the spec would be best.
Well perhaps the flimsy houses just never made it out the gate. The article is supposed to be about why projects fail. A failed project in my mind never shipped, and therefore, unless you worked there, you didn't know about it.
Well, Linux is open and the history is available for all to see. Both Google and Yahoo have been the subject of various articles on their internal architecture. Yahoo in particular is a good example of ad-hoc requirements and incremental implementation. They used a heavily customized version of FreeBSD and a proprietary scripting language (since replaced by PHP). Google as we know used a heavily customized version of Linux. I attended a UC Berkeley presentation by a senior Yahoo scientist who said they could go from internal concept to initial public deployment in two weeks. Google Labs shares a similar philosophy. In these particular cases, the development cultures promote early prototyping, so "not shipping" isn't the failure criterion it may be elsewhere.
From a requirements management point of view, the challenge is asking questions that result in testable assertions. A project is work that is bounded by a start and end date, where the end is defined by a set of testable completion assertions (functional, performance, quality).
We need not completely understand the market, but we need to understand the immediate customer to a point where a robust Q&A session with either developer or customer yields no "surprises". Robust Q&A implies sanity checks against other (markets | customers | projects | technology) of comparable complexity.
Everyone must manage up at least as much as down. That goes for the developer, release manager and even yes, the customer. Customers have customers too. We can only reduce risk and characterize uncertainty within the limits of our domain expertise. At the same time, we both educate and learn from those immediately up and downstream.
When these learning boundaries start to number in the dozens, and the system boundaries start to number in the hundreds, a good requirements management tool can perform instant impact assessment for any proposed change or discovered defect. Such a tool is the difference between saying "That's a bad idea" and "That will endanger component X, functionality Y, development path Z and customer schedule T".
Good process does not overtax project people, that would be bad process.
Tracking data does not predict the future, but it can change the future by correcting earlier judgements.
One simple change made possibly by tracking data is a change in resource (people) assignments. Place people where they have proven (by tracking data) to be effective.
There is always a choice between schedule changes and scope changes. Working harder is only an option if your team was slacking. But most teams are already working near capacity.
Increased schedule pressure can motivate better scope management, which means working harder at not doing cuttable or deferrable tasks.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a good book on social and business networking (even for the shy): "Power Schmoozing" by Terri Mandell.
An excerpt:
"Volunteering connects you to entire new worlds to which you never thought you'd have access. It allows you to get closer to the people in the group. It gives you a "job" at the event, a reason for being there so that you won't feel a need to explain yourself. It gives you something to do instead of standing around waiting for something to happen. And being part of the committee or group that hosts the event puts you in a position of authority, which will draw people to you for information and conversation. But most important, it will make you feel like you belong, which does wonders for your confidence, and gives you a real head start in making contact with others."
1. Experience: self-educate in an emerging technology in your chosen field. You have the advantage of being unbiased to legacy practices. With an emerging technology, no one has experience. In today's world of cheap hardware and open-source software, it has never been easier for motivated people to find a way to contribute. Treat the learning process as an extended interview, including your project emails and contributions.
2. People: you're already at the bottom, nowhere to go but up. Don't further handicap yourself with low expectations, reality will be happy to reduce your expectations for you. Aim as high as you can imagine and work down as necessary. Rank the top ten companies or organizations (globally) with people who are experts in your chosen field. Identify some of these people by name and learn about their career path and current projects. Find a way to contribute to similar projects. Work backwards from their social network to your social network and try to have F2F conversations with local contacts who are best-of-breed.
3. Budgets: use your F2F contacts to obtain intelligence on budgets. In a poor economy with layoffs, the remaining people often have too much work to handle. Creative volunteering and compensation ideas can get you involved in real-world projects where the experience is worth 10X the dollar value comp. It all starts and ends with people, be they HR, managers or customers. So focus on being useful and building relationships with people. The most valuable information is often very transient (e.g. time sensitive hiring opportunities) and communicated only by word of mouth.
4. Recession: some of the best engineering creations have come from highly constrained environments. If you can be successful in an environment of fiscal discipline, you will only be more successful when boom times return. The same cannot be said for those who begin careers in boom times and are shocked by their first major downturn. There is no better time to start working than now. It doesn't mean you'll find a job quickly, but you will learn much more than by staying in school (which also costs money, even if deferred).
10 years from now, business schools will have course material dedicated to the lessons of these unprecedented economic times. New grads have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to experience the kind of business environment where fortunes will be lost and won, as economic hierarchies adjust. Don't miss the excitement by hiding in school!
Back in 1992, IBM and the Ontario Govt. prototyped ServiceOntario kiosks to provide DMV services (license plate sticker renewal and dispensation, address changes, vehicle abstracts, fine payments).
Included digital audio and 30fps video. Special hardware was engineered to dispense license plate stickers. Not sure what the kiosks are running today, but in 1992 Windows couldn't cut it. The kiosks (advanced ATMS really) have won awards and have since been deployed into malls around the province.
Read more about government and self-service kiosks here, including US initiatives. If you think about the nature of transactions being performed, such kiosks must be connected to multiple government networks, yet be located in public spaces. Legal, technical and process innovations were required to make this hybrid device possible.
You can, but convincing others to accept them will require more effort than developing the metrics.
To the extent that widely accepted metrics drive business decisions, they are reality.
The by-definition imperfection of all metrics need not stop us from seeking better metrics, when reality is impacted by documentable gaps in existing metrics.
Numbers need to reflect true costs of procurement.
Numbers aren't the problem. Incomplete numbers are the problem.
Partial numbers are like partial syslog output. Detailed logs are essential to admin diagnosis. Detailed tracking of time costs are equally essential to budget diagnosis.
The metrics are reality, but metrics too can be improved (i.e. metrics have metrics).
You can put LIDS on such a live CD for intrusion rejection. Instead of booting from a physical CD, use PXE to pull the .iso from a private network. A server-oriented distro will fit in a 25-50Mb compressed filesystem. E.g. any member of a diskless cluster of LIDS-enabled reverse-proxy web servers can detect an attack, reboot from PXE and be back online in short order. You gain flexibility by having the boot image(s) on the private network (which can itself be running a live CD).
Have done this from scratch with RedHat, but there's now a live CD with LIDS, SELinux and UML: Adios. Haven't used Adios yet, but it's probably worth a look.
The RPM-based PLD Rescue CD is also a good starting point (though their web site is currently in flux).
As use of virtualization (VMware, UML, vserver, Virtuozzo) increases, it will be easier to view a virtual node as a combination of read-only boot image + configuration. VMware can even do magic with a read-only base disk image and multiple virtual machines having concurrent read-write access to increments to the base. Later updates to the ancestral base propagate to the virtual, composite 'child' images.
It makes the winning team the "First Annual Google Genius Lottery Winner", whose likeness can be used to incent other Google Geniuses to work harder.
All thumbs are equal, but some thumbs are more important than others.
Not the contents, just the fact of the meeting.
The key is near-real-time disclosure. There are existing laws for disclosure, but the timeframes are too long. With immediate disclosure, it allows competing lobbyists to make their case(s).
Transparency of association, not chilling of speech.
RHEL 4 Beta2 is two months old, perhaps that became the release candidate for LinuxWorld?
Require public Internet disclosure of every meeting between an elected official and a lobbyist.
Think of it as CVS for Lobbyists.
Check in. Check out.
There needs to be a precise legal definition of "open patents" when the term is used in the context of "open source". Just as OSI approves specific licenses as "Open Source", someone (OSI?) needs to approve the use of the term "Open Patent".
Patent grants that are restricted to specific licenses or license groups must be visibly differentiated (branding) from patent grants that have no such restriction.
Unzipping and using Perl for direct manipulation of the OpenOffice XML files is much faster than heavier solutions, the heaviest of which is the Open Office API.
It's really issue, change or ticket tracking, rather than bug tracking.
But ChangeZilla, TicketZilla or IssueZilla aren't as clear as bugzilla.
It's easier to overload the most common term, instead of using a general term that risks being ambiguous.
have to be the biggest story in storage in 2004. We're talking a new product category that has been so successful, it is now multiplatform and multi-vendor and has spawned a related line of flash-based products (iShuffle).
1.8" drives, followed by flash ram eating into the hard drive market, there's progress in 2004.
Combined with PC virtualization (VMware, UML, Virtuozzo), it's just a matter of app integration before we start using widespread standby/resume that saves our virtual machines to iPod-scale media.
Compared to Internet Suspend/Resume, this would be more secure.
What bizarre keyboards, good pointer. There are both full-size and mini versions and a bright-yellow variant.
The Thinkpad A21P also includes analog video capture, built-in floppy drive and serial port.
Contains 130Mb of tools on a 50 MB ISO. Can run from RAM, so CD can be removed after boot.
Not while servers can afford the same size hard drives as clients, while they distribute that cost over many clients.
You imagine wrong. Go into Best Buy and try that comparison again. Cheapest DVD player is about half the price of the cheapest VCR. Cheap DVDs are a lot smaller and have less moving parts than cheap VCRs.
Appreciate the history lesson. Are any of the early requirements management tools still around, in any incarnation?
Agree on the value of tracking estimates and actuals. I've not had the experience of working on a project that was mature enough to track both. But even a mental comparison of estimates with personal observation was invaluable in understanding developer strengths/weaknesses.
Do you think there is a place in the market for an open-source requirements management system? E.g. if someone started such a tool, would any home-grown tool owners contribute expertise or code?
Have you seen a good tool that is more affordable than CaliberRM/DOORS? The market seems to have an absent low end (excluding MS Office). Microsoft plans some process management for their developer tools, e.g. "Visual Studio Team System" is mentioned in a comprehensive description (with photos) of their internal build+test environment for ASP.NET.
From a requirements management point of view, the challenge is asking questions that result in testable assertions. A project is work that is bounded by a start and end date, where the end is defined by a set of testable completion assertions (functional, performance, quality).
We need not completely understand the market, but we need to understand the immediate customer to a point where a robust Q&A session with either developer or customer yields no "surprises". Robust Q&A implies sanity checks against other (markets | customers | projects | technology) of comparable complexity.
Everyone must manage up at least as much as down. That goes for the developer, release manager and even yes, the customer. Customers have customers too. We can only reduce risk and characterize uncertainty within the limits of our domain expertise. At the same time, we both educate and learn from those immediately up and downstream.
When these learning boundaries start to number in the dozens, and the system boundaries start to number in the hundreds, a good requirements management tool can perform instant impact assessment for any proposed change or discovered defect. Such a tool is the difference between saying "That's a bad idea" and "That will endanger component X, functionality Y, development path Z and customer schedule T".
Good process does not overtax project people, that would be bad process.
Tracking data does not predict the future, but it can change the future by correcting earlier judgements.
One simple change made possibly by tracking data is a change in resource (people) assignments. Place people where they have proven (by tracking data) to be effective.
There is always a choice between schedule changes and scope changes. Working harder is only an option if your team was slacking. But most teams are already working near capacity.
Increased schedule pressure can motivate better scope management, which means working harder at not doing cuttable or deferrable tasks.