...Maybe the traffic light far down the road from where Meadow was trying to park.
I didn't see the episode - haven't had time to follow the series this season - but I did read the episode summaries.......And fading to black on a green traffic light off in the distance, or better, reflected in a window of a cheesy store across the street from the diner... would have been perfect.
Yes, that's a reference, and if you slept through English in high school, go back and re-read The Great Gatsby, dammit.
Why spreadsheets? Why not databases? What about Sar-box or HIPAA? What about security?
From the top, I AM an accounting troll, and I am the local Excel guru.
Some random thoughts on the topic:
Like anything else, whether or not a spreadsheet is a good solution depends on the problem you're trying to solve.
Part of the problem is that the basic user-interface metaphor has a lot of legs. The spreadsheet metaphor has been around for 25+ years and gone through several different predominant apps in that time. It's well understood, intuitive and discoverable. From a user standpoint those are powerful reasons to stick with it. The problems are behind the scenes and particularly behind the scenes with excel. Now there's a surprise - software from M$ with hidden problems.
In a sense Excel suffers from the same bloat as Word - it's just less visible to most. Excel now ships with an enormous function library but most people only know and use a bare handful of the functions. For about 60% of the time, I only need about a dozen functions. And for most people that's all they EVER need. The other 40% of the time I will use everything I can find. All of that function library is simply unnecessary, confusing, and useless bloat to most people. Much more of it should be broken into add-in libraries only loaded when needed. The app itself should be smart enough to know when a spreadsheet is opened what modules it needs to load and lets the user know.
Excel now ships with a full IDE that lets someone have access to ActiveX and DirectX and all those other happy invitations to malware. Okay, there are things I need to do that I actually need a lot of that power - though I'd rather code in Python than VB - but Excel astonishingly and horrifically does NOT have the ability to do a simple keystroke macro to replicate simple tasks. The alleged "macro recorder" is a sadistic joke. Non-tech-savvy users hate that.
Using spreadsheets as databases - it's a valid point - excel isn't a database, doesn't play one on tv and shouldn't be confused with one. But a data table in excel is intuitive, available, discoverable. I can see the damn data!!!! I can fiddle around with it - quickly! - in a pivot table or the filter features. I don't have anything like the same ability to access data quickly and easily from the company's ERP system, and I certainly don't have the ability to poke around and explore the data when I'm trying to figure out what the hell is going on. I'm comfortable using SQL so real databases are no threat to me, but the data I need, locked away in some utterly inaccessible, uninterpretable ERP hell doesn't do me a lot of good.
Spreadsheet-as-user-interface metaphor is not going away - it's too powerful now. Some things that can be done to improve spreadsheets and excel in particular - make feature and function sets more modular - only load the ones that are needed or useful to a particular end-user. Improve the tools and documentation to make locked-down restricted-use spreadsheets the right way. Provide a lightweight click-and-keystroke macro facility and move the IDE-as-macro further away from the routine user. As for using Excel as a database - well, we can stop misusing excel for those purposes when there is 1) a general-purpose, intuitive tool that allows equally quick and simple access to data, and 2) more readily discoverable data in ERP systems.
Heinlein wrote a book _Take_Back_Your_Government_.
Think of it as the HOWTO for political activism, although it's several rev's out of date. Kludging television onto the political kernel really screwed things up.
Remember the Moral Majority? Remember how much influence they wielded? (Still do some places - hell in Kansas they managed to overthrow 100+ years of biology!) The hard core committed Moral Majority was in fact a very small minority of this country, yet they wielded tremendous influence. Why? Discipline, focus and effective lobbying of politicians, especially at the lower levels.
It can be done.
"Here's my experience. I run a fairly successful business with a mid-sized accounting department. My employees have years of experience with
Windows and Windows-based accounting software. It would simply not make sense to re-train them to use Linux."
Oh, bull.
That 50 year old clerk in the accounts payable department does indeed have years and years of experience on Windows based accounting systems.
About 10 years, MAX.
Before that? Oh yeah, she was using a DOS-based or mainframe or mini-based system. Before that? Well she probably broke in as a young kid one keypunch machines and other dinosaurs of dataprocessing equipment, or even a manual system.
She does her reconciliations on Excel? and can't move to OpenOffice or something? Then how did she move from 123 to Excel? of from Visicalc to Excel?
Don't get me wrong, retraining is often time-consuming and rarely fun.
Actually, very rarely does a change in accounting standards drive a change in systems. A change in standards tends to lead to requirements to 1)Change the information disclosed in the notes to financials (By the way, if you want to understand a company's financial statments READ THE NOTES, that's what gives context to the numbers).
2)Require new accounts on the balance sheet or income statement. EXAMPLE: rules for accounting for pension benefits may change, increasing or decreasing the amount a company has to show as their liability for future pension payouts.
The point is, very rarely does the accounting system have to change - master files in the system just need to be maintained.
I AM a bean counter, and, frankly, this pisses me off.
Folks, being able to present a realistic and credible picture of how a company's finances will develop in the future is the name of the game. If you can't do that, sooner or later (sooner now) the financial plug will be pulled, either by higher levels in the corporation or by investors. I can't do that, and therefore secure the funding that is needed to continue YOUR employment (and mine) if all I have to work with is B.S. forecasts and B.S. excuses. It is not necessary to be dead nuts accurate, but enough information to explain what is happening and why things have not turned out the way you said previously IS IMPORTANT.
My other comment is that different kinds of forecasting apply to different projects. For well-defined problems, where the project scope is pretty clearly understood, where you are applying known software engineering techniques to a fairly well understood problem, the forecasts should indeed be tight - schedule and resources spelled out in advance and pretty much attained. Let's be honest. Many if not most software engineering projects can indeed be fit into this category. It's not sexy, it's not exciting, but it is effective (financially speaking). Reinventing the wheel is always lousy engineering. Trying to invent a mag-lev motorcycle when a moped will met the spec is lousy engineering. It might be fun coding, but it's lousy engineering.
Yes indeed, there are other projects that are NOT well-defined, where you don't know what you don't know about the problem, but I suspect there are fewer of them than is commonly perceived. I suspect there is a natural tendency to overcomplicate problems to provide ego-boost for the engineering, and justify inventing the really sexy app you really wanted to do anyway.
Re:What can be done? Nothing.
on
More On Tragedy
·
· Score: 1
Killing terrorists in retaliation won't work - they've already demonstrated they're not
afraid of death - something that most
americans can not truly admit.
Excuse me? Won't work at what? If they're dead, they are not going to be bombing our cities. What else should I be concerned about?
Yeah, Pearl Harbor was a surprise attack. Antietam was the bloodiest single day in American history - 26,134 casualties. Three days in Gettysburg cost 51,112 casualties.
One way to get past the user learning curve issues is to work inside your organization to build up a community of clueful users who can be available to coach and train their colleagues.
This is a deliberate parallel to the development mode employed by Linux: Self-selection of the self-motivated, rewarded by recognition and tangible rewards. Encourage your power users to communicate and share tips and techniques, with each other first, then with other users. How about a tip o' the month award (cheesy but fun)? Develop programs to encourage and reward them for sharing their skills, especially public recognition and feedback at performance review time ($$$$$$$$$) for those who take the time and effort to share their skills and make the cube-dwelling troglo...err..co-workers... around them more productive.
Yeah, it's not hacking. There's not one line of code in all of that. But it needs to be done.
3. A Spreadsheet program that has HUGE libraries of functions, and allows other functions to be written in any language under the sun, compiled, and then used nicely. Also, allowing spreadsheets to use scripts from the command line would be nice.
Yeah, that would be nice, just like a huge set of word processing options and presentation options would be nice.
But equally the ability to exclude 'em when not needed or wanted without breaking file compatability is important. Not everyone needs the same depth of features from a given app.
I need most of the functionality I can get out of a spreadsheet; very few people I work with are as demanded. Features that are essential to me are a pain-in-the-ass piece of bloat to them. OTOH, features in, say, the word processor which are essential to them are useless bloat to me.
...would be multiple distro's for different users. What does everyone hate about Office? The over-featured bloat that drives performance into the ground, right?
It would nice to see an OpenSource Office suite codebase that supported multiple distros, for different user needs.
I'm an accountant. I need a spreadsheet program with all the bells and whistles, and will happily dream up some more for you to implement. I need a presentation manager that lets me make Pretty Pictures, but I don't need a lot of sound and video effects. I need a damn word processor that allows met to have the same, simple, useful feature set previously implemented in, oh, let's say, MacWrite circa 1985. (fsck Word!)
The guys in sales need a very simple spreadsheet-the simpler the better, with fewer chances for them to screw up, pretty good word-processing with lots of support for standardized documents, and a stone killer presentation manager.
The paralegal down the hall needs all the bells and whistles for a word processor, a simple spreadsheet and really has no use for a presentation manager.
A killer office suite application would let me selectively included or exclude functionality before compiling and/or loading. A truly killer office suite would help me profile my requirements and then reccommend modules to load or not, while keeping file format compatability with other configurations of the same app.....
Good point.....understanding final function
on
Software Aesthetics
·
· Score: 1
The author makes an important point about internal form and function following internal form and function.
IANAH (I am not a hacker), but I do have training and experience in developing programs and systems to meet my needs as an accountant. This is my tale of hell.
My company wanted to implement a new system to integrate accounting, reporting, and planning for sale and orders for our three main sites (in 3 countries). We're a capital goods manufacturer so each individual sales contract (not counting spare parts) is mostly likely unique. We hired an outside shop to put this together for us. I spent several weeks with the guy they brought in going over the "big picture" components of the system - what we need to the system to do, what the key data were, how they needed to be structured. Our discussion led pretty cleanly from first principles to a definition of tables, and a pretty complete set of functional requirements. I had a lot of fun finding the most compact, complete way to look at the information we needed. It was, dare I say, something I was really proud of, especially the data model.
Ahh, user-boy, I thought to myself, your work here is done. Time to kick back, turn it over to the pros and check back in for beta test.
Wrong.
Way wrong.
I kept getting questions. Lots of questions. Questions that indicated that, despite the many hours of conversation, the guy doing the coding did not understand the big picture and what he was being asked to deliver. (Now, partly, this is because the fscking consulting company had hired a guy whose background was grinding out Access databases to implement something that had an Oracle backend and an intranet-based front end.) However, I soon realized that the lead consultant did not have a clue what the hell she was talking about. We would explain why things needed to be structured a certain way, sometimes quite forcefully, and she'd wander off, implementing it some brain-damaged way, then come back to ask another question about a problem her "solution" had created. The underlying data model and table structure ceased to bear any resemblance to the concepts we had so carefully sketched out weeks earlier.
Overtime. Overbudget. Clueless. The consultants were out the door. We put someone internally on to the project, and, sure enough, the only way they can get a clean product is to go back and do what we said in the first place.
The point of all of this is that the consultants did not have a clue from first to last what they were doing. And it shows as a gawd-awful mess of broken tangled tables and useless spaghetti code.
At this point, a year late, we still don't have a working system. (I'm so frustrated I want to go out and learn Linux, MySQL, and Python and do the g*damn thing myself for my own intellectual and esthetic satisfaction. If anyone knows a good tutorial for MySQL, please lemme know....)
Beautiful code comes from grokking the end-user, not just the code.
Religion for geeks, nerds, whatever (Score:2)
by mrgoat (mdafdsNO@SPAMyahoo.com) on Monday
As such, many of my friends thought that creating a religion that covers code as an expressive form of religion has come up very often. If you think about it, people who have a deep understanding (deep by the average citizens' point of view, shallow in the tech world) of computers and technology are pretty much regarded as witches by most folks out in the world. The best way, my friends and I thought, to fight this kind of mindset is simply to adopt a shroud of religion.
I read this and all I can think of is Isaac Asimov's "Foundation"....
once again, reality is for those who can't handle sicence fiction...
Many schools, ime, actually use grant funding to acquire their hardware. The problem is that the grant funds can't be used for software or anything else for that matter.
It's relatively easy to get funding for classroom workstations. It's damn near impossible to find money for software. And one license per seat? Forget it. The money is not available. The state and federal mandates for technology education, however, are in full effect.
If you want to hear a total rant, call up the sys admin at your local school district. Ask them about the e-rate, the so-called Internet tax on your phone bill. Blood from a stone, really. The notification that you intend to apply for the funds is several pages long, never mind the actual application for the funds itself (many times longer).
Because there is NO MONEY. None. My wife established and maintained a 1200 user 200 node network 3 server LAN/WAN on a shoestring. Her annaul budget was well less than $100K including salary costs and licenses. (not hardware). Grant-making institutions will fund hardware, but not administration or licenses.
You can bitch about software piracy; you can bitch about crappy education. Just don't bitch about how much (little!) you pay in taxes at the same time.
Look the "give 'em to schools" thing sounds like a good deal, but let's keep it in perspective: It takes LONGER to configure and maintain one of those old boxes, if only because you need to have to spend so much time massaging 'em and 2 donated boxes are rarely the same. Plus they suck.
My wife is a tech director for a school district -that includes hardware / software support, 200+ PC, 3 servers, LAN, WAN the whole deal, plus academic curriculum support, and teacher training, plus long-term tech strategy etc. Her staff consists of herself and 1 hardware support person. This is a small school district but that's about the level of support *most* districts get, apart from the relative handful of wealthy suburbs.
She doesn't have time to massage all those obsolete boxen into something resembling a desktop PC. She can write grants to get funding to buy new ones, but obviously has to configure them and get 'em hooked up.
You really wanna help, don't unload your obsolete junk on her and her colleagues, give 'em something useful like use of your brain and your skills. Most schools have Tech committees of local folk interested in technology issues to help get things done and shape policy. It's open to anyone interested, including that antitechnology nutcase down the street from you. Show up and help. Volunteer to help setup those 60 PCs she just got and needs to find time somewhere to configure. Volunteer to help train teachers (No joke, she had to start her training with "You turn the computer on with the Big Red Switch in the back"). Start a Linux / StarOffice In Schools program; her school requires technology education for everybody, but teaches Windows/Office because she doesn't have the tools to teach anything else at the jr. high / high school level.
If nothing else check out the NetDay program for a cool way to get your local school wired up for networking if that hasn't happened yet.
I think you have the makings of a great course, but you might want to consider looking at some of the wider implications of computers for society/culture in general since the evolution of the modern digitial computer in World War II. Let's face it, computers are neck-and-neck for the most important technology to emerge from that war (nuclear weapons and power being the other, duh.).
Over time popular (muggle, non-geek, luser, take your pick) perceptions of computers have evolved from awe to fear-and-loathing to present attitudes which combine lack of comprehension with daily requirements for use in a way those in support departments regret every day....
A couple random nuggets to think about: During the 1964 Free Speech Movement, people carried signs and what not saying "I am a Human Being. Do Not Fold, Spindle, or Mutilate" as a rip against the punch cards being used for student admin.
There was a movie Tracy-Hepburn movie about computers being introduced as a replacement for a librarian....
Actually, this would be an interesting course all on it's own....Popular images of the Computer....any other ideas for materials?
Would you like to tell me what is wrong with this? There is nothing that I've ever seen that guarantees anyone the right to make money off OS or webserver sales, why shouldn't this sort of thing be guaranteed to everyone rather than just those who can afford it, so long as there are those who are perfectly happy to give them away?
Hmmm....Let's see...Microsoft is threatened because someone is giving away for free a kind of software they're trying to charge money for.
Slashdot Mirror
...Maybe the traffic light far down the road from where Meadow was trying to park.
...And fading to black on a green traffic light off in the distance, or better, reflected in a window of a cheesy store across the street from the diner... would have been perfect.
I didn't see the episode - haven't had time to follow the series this season - but I did read the episode summaries....
Yes, that's a reference, and if you slept through English in high school, go back and re-read The Great Gatsby, dammit.
Why spreadsheets? Why not databases? What about Sar-box or HIPAA? What about security?
From the top, I AM an accounting troll, and I am the local Excel guru.
Some random thoughts on the topic:
Like anything else, whether or not a spreadsheet is a good solution depends on the problem you're trying to solve.
Part of the problem is that the basic user-interface metaphor has a lot of legs. The spreadsheet metaphor has been around for 25+ years and gone through several different predominant apps in that time. It's well understood, intuitive and discoverable. From a user standpoint those are powerful reasons to stick with it. The problems are behind the scenes and particularly behind the scenes with excel. Now there's a surprise - software from M$ with hidden problems.
In a sense Excel suffers from the same bloat as Word - it's just less visible to most. Excel now ships with an enormous function library but most people only know and use a bare handful of the functions. For about 60% of the time, I only need about a dozen functions. And for most people that's all they EVER need. The other 40% of the time I will use everything I can find. All of that function library is simply unnecessary, confusing, and useless bloat to most people. Much more of it should be broken into add-in libraries only loaded when needed. The app itself should be smart enough to know when a spreadsheet is opened what modules it needs to load and lets the user know.
Excel now ships with a full IDE that lets someone have access to ActiveX and DirectX and all those other happy invitations to malware. Okay, there are things I need to do that I actually need a lot of that power - though I'd rather code in Python than VB - but Excel astonishingly and horrifically does NOT have the ability to do a simple keystroke macro to replicate simple tasks. The alleged "macro recorder" is a sadistic joke. Non-tech-savvy users hate that.
Using spreadsheets as databases - it's a valid point - excel isn't a database, doesn't play one on tv and shouldn't be confused with one. But a data table in excel is intuitive, available, discoverable. I can see the damn data!!!! I can fiddle around with it - quickly! - in a pivot table or the filter features. I don't have anything like the same ability to access data quickly and easily from the company's ERP system, and I certainly don't have the ability to poke around and explore the data when I'm trying to figure out what the hell is going on. I'm comfortable using SQL so real databases are no threat to me, but the data I need, locked away in some utterly inaccessible, uninterpretable ERP hell doesn't do me a lot of good.
Spreadsheet-as-user-interface metaphor is not going away - it's too powerful now. Some things that can be done to improve spreadsheets and excel in particular - make feature and function sets more modular - only load the ones that are needed or useful to a particular end-user. Improve the tools and documentation to make locked-down restricted-use spreadsheets the right way. Provide a lightweight click-and-keystroke macro facility and move the IDE-as-macro further away from the routine user. As for using Excel as a database - well, we can stop misusing excel for those purposes when there is 1) a general-purpose, intuitive tool that allows equally quick and simple access to data, and 2) more readily discoverable data in ERP systems.
Heinlein wrote a book _Take_Back_Your_Government_. Think of it as the HOWTO for political activism, although it's several rev's out of date. Kludging television onto the political kernel really screwed things up. Remember the Moral Majority? Remember how much influence they wielded? (Still do some places - hell in Kansas they managed to overthrow 100+ years of biology!) The hard core committed Moral Majority was in fact a very small minority of this country, yet they wielded tremendous influence. Why? Discipline, focus and effective lobbying of politicians, especially at the lower levels. It can be done.
"Here's my experience. I run a fairly successful business with a mid-sized accounting department. My employees have years of experience with
Windows and Windows-based accounting software. It would simply not make sense to re-train them to use Linux."
Oh, bull.
That 50 year old clerk in the accounts payable department does indeed have years and years of experience on Windows based accounting systems.
About 10 years, MAX.
Before that? Oh yeah, she was using a DOS-based or mainframe or mini-based system. Before that? Well she probably broke in as a young kid one keypunch machines and other dinosaurs of dataprocessing equipment, or even a manual system.
She does her reconciliations on Excel? and can't move to OpenOffice or something? Then how did she move from 123 to Excel? of from Visicalc to Excel?
Don't get me wrong, retraining is often time-consuming and rarely fun.
But too difficult? Bull.
Actually, very rarely does a change in accounting standards drive a change in systems. A change in standards tends to lead to requirements to 1)Change the information disclosed in the notes to financials (By the way, if you want to understand a company's financial statments READ THE NOTES, that's what gives context to the numbers).
2)Require new accounts on the balance sheet or income statement. EXAMPLE: rules for accounting for pension benefits may change, increasing or decreasing the amount a company has to show as their liability for future pension payouts.
The point is, very rarely does the accounting system have to change - master files in the system just need to be maintained.
I AM a bean counter, and, frankly, this pisses me off.
Folks, being able to present a realistic and credible picture of how a company's finances will develop in the future is the name of the game. If you can't do that, sooner or later (sooner now) the financial plug will be pulled, either by higher levels in the corporation or by investors. I can't do that, and therefore secure the funding that is needed to continue YOUR employment (and mine) if all I have to work with is B.S. forecasts and B.S. excuses. It is not necessary to be dead nuts accurate, but enough information to explain what is happening and why things have not turned out the way you said previously IS IMPORTANT.
My other comment is that different kinds of forecasting apply to different projects. For well-defined problems, where the project scope is pretty clearly understood, where you are applying known software engineering techniques to a fairly well understood problem, the forecasts should indeed be tight - schedule and resources spelled out in advance and pretty much attained. Let's be honest. Many if not most software engineering projects can indeed be fit into this category. It's not sexy, it's not exciting, but it is effective (financially speaking). Reinventing the wheel is always lousy engineering. Trying to invent a mag-lev motorcycle when a moped will met the spec is lousy engineering. It might be fun coding, but it's lousy engineering.
Yes indeed, there are other projects that are NOT well-defined, where you don't know what you don't know about the problem, but I suspect there are fewer of them than is commonly perceived. I suspect there is a natural tendency to overcomplicate problems to provide ego-boost for the engineering, and justify inventing the really sexy app you really wanted to do anyway.
Killing terrorists in retaliation won't work - they've already demonstrated they're not
afraid of death - something that most
americans can not truly admit.
Excuse me? Won't work at what? If they're dead, they are not going to be bombing our cities. What else should I be concerned about?
Yeah, Pearl Harbor was a surprise attack. Antietam was the bloodiest single day in American history - 26,134 casualties. Three days in Gettysburg cost 51,112 casualties.
One way to get past the user learning curve issues is to work inside your organization to build up a community of clueful users who can be available to coach and train their colleagues.
This is a deliberate parallel to the development mode employed by Linux: Self-selection of the self-motivated, rewarded by recognition and tangible rewards. Encourage your power users to communicate and share tips and techniques, with each other first, then with other users. How about a tip o' the month award (cheesy but fun)? Develop programs to encourage and reward them for sharing their skills, especially public recognition and feedback at performance review time ($$$$$$$$$) for those who take the time and effort to share their skills and make the cube-dwelling troglo...err..co-workers... around them more productive.
Yeah, it's not hacking. There's not one line of code in all of that. But it needs to be done.
3. A Spreadsheet program that has HUGE libraries of functions, and allows other functions to be written in any language under the sun, compiled, and then used nicely. Also, allowing spreadsheets to use scripts from the command line would be nice.
Yeah, that would be nice, just like a huge set of word processing options and presentation options would be nice.
But equally the ability to exclude 'em when not needed or wanted without breaking file compatability is important. Not everyone needs the same depth of features from a given app.
I need most of the functionality I can get out of a spreadsheet; very few people I work with are as demanded. Features that are essential to me are a pain-in-the-ass piece of bloat to them. OTOH, features in, say, the word processor which are essential to them are useless bloat to me.
...would be multiple distro's for different users. What does everyone hate about Office? The over-featured bloat that drives performance into the ground, right? It would nice to see an OpenSource Office suite codebase that supported multiple distros, for different user needs. I'm an accountant. I need a spreadsheet program with all the bells and whistles, and will happily dream up some more for you to implement. I need a presentation manager that lets me make Pretty Pictures, but I don't need a lot of sound and video effects. I need a damn word processor that allows met to have the same, simple, useful feature set previously implemented in, oh, let's say, MacWrite circa 1985. (fsck Word!) The guys in sales need a very simple spreadsheet-the simpler the better, with fewer chances for them to screw up, pretty good word-processing with lots of support for standardized documents, and a stone killer presentation manager. The paralegal down the hall needs all the bells and whistles for a word processor, a simple spreadsheet and really has no use for a presentation manager. A killer office suite application would let me selectively included or exclude functionality before compiling and/or loading. A truly killer office suite would help me profile my requirements and then reccommend modules to load or not, while keeping file format compatability with other configurations of the same app.....
The author makes an important point about internal form and function following internal form and function.
IANAH (I am not a hacker), but I do have training and experience in developing programs and systems to meet my needs as an accountant. This is my tale of hell.
My company wanted to implement a new system to integrate accounting, reporting, and planning for sale and orders for our three main sites (in 3 countries). We're a capital goods manufacturer so each individual sales contract (not counting spare parts) is mostly likely unique. We hired an outside shop to put this together for us. I spent several weeks with the guy they brought in going over the "big picture" components of the system - what we need to the system to do, what the key data were, how they needed to be structured. Our discussion led pretty cleanly from first principles to a definition of tables, and a pretty complete set of functional requirements. I had a lot of fun finding the most compact, complete way to look at the information we needed. It was, dare I say, something I was really proud of, especially the data model.
Ahh, user-boy, I thought to myself, your work here is done. Time to kick back, turn it over to the pros and check back in for beta test.
Wrong.
Way wrong.
I kept getting questions. Lots of questions. Questions that indicated that, despite the many hours of conversation, the guy doing the coding did not understand the big picture and what he was being asked to deliver. (Now, partly, this is because the fscking consulting company had hired a guy whose background was grinding out Access databases to implement something that had an Oracle backend and an intranet-based front end.) However, I soon realized that the lead consultant did not have a clue what the hell she was talking about. We would explain why things needed to be structured a certain way, sometimes quite forcefully, and she'd wander off, implementing it some brain-damaged way, then come back to ask another question about a problem her "solution" had created. The underlying data model and table structure ceased to bear any resemblance to the concepts we had so carefully sketched out weeks earlier.
Overtime. Overbudget. Clueless. The consultants were out the door. We put someone internally on to the project, and, sure enough, the only way they can get a clean product is to go back and do what we said in the first place.
The point of all of this is that the consultants did not have a clue from first to last what they were doing. And it shows as a gawd-awful mess of broken tangled tables and useless spaghetti code.
At this point, a year late, we still don't have a working system. (I'm so frustrated I want to go out and learn Linux, MySQL, and Python and do the g*damn thing myself for my own intellectual and esthetic satisfaction. If anyone knows a good tutorial for MySQL, please lemme know....)
Beautiful code comes from grokking the end-user, not just the code.
Religion for geeks, nerds, whatever (Score:2)
by mrgoat (mdafdsNO@SPAMyahoo.com) on Monday
As such, many of my friends thought that creating a religion that covers code as an expressive form of religion has come up very often. If you think about it, people who have a deep understanding (deep by the average citizens' point of view, shallow in the tech world) of computers and technology are pretty much regarded as witches by most folks out in the world. The best way, my friends and I thought, to fight this kind of mindset is simply to adopt a shroud of religion.
I read this and all I can think of is Isaac Asimov's "Foundation"....
once again, reality is for those who can't handle sicence fiction...
Simple....
Aim 3 feet higher...and more to the centerline...
Many schools, ime, actually use grant funding to acquire their hardware. The problem is that the grant funds can't be used for software or anything else for that matter.
It's relatively easy to get funding for classroom workstations. It's damn near impossible to find money for software. And one license per seat? Forget it. The money is not available. The state and federal mandates for technology education, however, are in full effect.
If you want to hear a total rant, call up the sys admin at your local school district. Ask them about the e-rate, the so-called Internet tax on your phone bill. Blood from a stone, really. The notification that you intend to apply for the funds is several pages long, never mind the actual application for the funds itself (many times longer).
Helloooooo....Is anybody home?
Because there is NO MONEY. None. My wife established and maintained a 1200 user 200 node network 3 server LAN/WAN on a shoestring. Her annaul budget was well less than $100K including salary costs and licenses. (not hardware). Grant-making institutions will fund hardware, but not administration or licenses.
You can bitch about software piracy; you can bitch about crappy education. Just don't bitch about how much (little!) you pay in taxes at the same time.
Look the "give 'em to schools" thing sounds like a good deal, but let's keep it in perspective: It takes LONGER to configure and maintain one of those old boxes, if only because you need to have to spend so much time massaging 'em and 2 donated boxes are rarely the same. Plus they suck.
My wife is a tech director for a school district -that includes hardware / software support, 200+ PC, 3 servers, LAN, WAN the whole deal, plus academic curriculum support, and teacher training, plus long-term tech strategy etc. Her staff consists of herself and 1 hardware support person. This is a small school district but that's about the level of support *most* districts get, apart from the relative handful of wealthy suburbs.
She doesn't have time to massage all those obsolete boxen into something resembling a desktop PC. She can write grants to get funding to buy new ones, but obviously has to configure them and get 'em hooked up.
You really wanna help, don't unload your obsolete junk on her and her colleagues, give 'em something useful like use of your brain and your skills. Most schools have Tech committees of local folk interested in technology issues to help get things done and shape policy. It's open to anyone interested, including that antitechnology nutcase down the street from you. Show up and help. Volunteer to help setup those 60 PCs she just got and needs to find time somewhere to configure. Volunteer to help train teachers (No joke, she had to start her training with "You turn the computer on with the Big Red Switch in the back"). Start a Linux / StarOffice In Schools program; her school requires technology education for everybody, but teaches Windows/Office because she doesn't have the tools to teach anything else at the jr. high / high school level.
If nothing else check out the NetDay program for a cool way to get your local school wired up for networking if that hasn't happened yet.
Okay, rant off.
Do Not Taunt Happy Fun Ball
I think you have the makings of a great course, but you might want to consider looking at some of the wider implications of computers for society/culture in general since the evolution of the modern digitial computer in World War II. Let's face it, computers are neck-and-neck for the most important technology to emerge from that war (nuclear weapons and power being the other, duh.).
Over time popular (muggle, non-geek, luser, take your pick) perceptions of computers have evolved from awe to fear-and-loathing to present attitudes which combine lack of comprehension with daily requirements for use in a way those in support departments regret every day....
A couple random nuggets to think about: During the 1964 Free Speech Movement, people carried signs and what not saying "I am a Human Being. Do Not Fold, Spindle, or Mutilate" as a rip against the punch cards being used for student admin.
There was a movie Tracy-Hepburn movie about computers being introduced as a replacement for a librarian....
Actually, this would be an interesting course all on it's own....Popular images of the Computer....any other ideas for materials?