I work for mumble-mumble and a number of years ago it had become a meeting company. Head office was designed as a cubicle farm in the middle of a big room with conference rooms along all the walls. The most important application was the meeting scheduler.
One fine day I got invited to a meeting at head office. We leave the plant at 4 a.m. for a 5 1/2 hour drive. At 10 a.m. we wonder into the meeting room, which was in a seperate building from head office cause all the othere were in use. The first 1/2 hour of the meeting, the gent who called it is on his cell phone calling everyone else who was supposed to be there, telling them that this meeting was important. OK a bunch of people wander in. Each and every on fires up their laptops, go the the meeting scheduler and start preparing for the next meeting. The meeting itself took a half hour to decide that most people were not ready for the meeting and we would have another. Then we drove back.
Not long after the CEO (who was new to the job) made a policy change. "From now on, Thursdays will be no meeting days. Security will not unlock the conference room doors & will do walk throughs to toss out anyone caught in a conference room. Please take advantage of these meeting free days to get something of value done."
Actually there are a LOT of people who could be in trouble. The publication ban covers sites that link to sites that link to Captain Quarters. I have a link to Slashdot on my blog. Slashdot links to Captains quarters. I am instantly a criminal.
Yes I am Canadian. May be having a big "Going to Jail" sale real soon.
I started as a programmer in a factory just finishing up big new additions. The programmers were on the second floor of an outbuilding above a garage area. In el-cheapo fashion, it was a mini-cube farm. 5 foot high dividers enclosing your very own student desk 3 ft by 1 1/2 ft surface area. 4 cubes shares a phone which ended up sorta balanced in the middle. The dumb terminals were limmitted to 2400 baud due to the distance from the computer room. Printouts were from a fanfold line pinter pounding away in the corner cause these laser printer things were too expensive for mere programmers. Fold out the fan fold prints and they fall off the desk, cause they are too big. This building was beside a bulk unloading station and its air intake (when working) was at the same hight and location as the exaust fumes from the unloading trucks. Most of them had vibrators to get the last of the stuff out. So you get a buzz on from exhaust fumes and the the bulding starts to shake. Glorious. This building was planned to be demolished at the end of the project so there was no maintenance. The heat came on in January (in Canada). Programming in mittens just does not work. Someone would figure out how to turn on the air conditioner on some time in September. We would be sent home due to the heat on a regular basis. A minor math error was made in the initial design so all the computers were severly overloaded. The only thing we could do online was edit, everything else got submitted as a batch job. Look, my compile is #43, lunch time is 9:30 am today. Since it is a factory, & I am luckey enough to work in the machine control area, we get access when the whole place is shut down. It's a food factory so these shutdowns involve "Fogging for insects", beter know at filling the place with nerve gas. My instructions were: "It only hurts insects, but don't breath it. Now get out there and test yer stuff." More head rushes. Oh, and the department manager had a mental block when it came to my face & name. Couldn't remember either. Every month or so he would walk over and ask who I was and what I did. The goof HIRED me. And the best part was the environment with our customers. Lets just say that the Denver airport bagage system was a good rollout compared to this place. Nothing worked well enough to justify the hundreds of millions spent, so meeting with the customers began with the refrain, "Rip that shit out!" & usually went downhill from there. Then there were the users in the union who had a litle problem with management and their forced overtime. You WILL come in & we might let you go home after a 60 hour week, if we can. The instruction to me was "Stay away from the houly people." Back to the cube farm, There was a co-worker who had a hobby of getting people she didn't like fired. Missing a department softball game put you on the shit list. One of the flakier developers was the only tea drinker. So in usual cheap-o fashion, the company bought a electric kettle with a "it's-hot-enough" auto shutoff that would not boil water. So Skippy (as he was known) wired the switch down. And then got distracted. The melted plastic burned through a counter top and then the smoke REALLY started. The mechanics downstairs complained. Loudly. But we did learn that the fire alarms were not connected to anything. Eventually the head count horseman was let loose and things got worse. Nothing like supporting software that does not work while being watched by a spineless supervisor who needs documented proof of incompetence to help lower the head count. Tended to chip away at ones sanity. Luckily I got drunk at a party and mouthed off to the manager that I could do better job than the other department goof-de-juere who just happenned to be sacked the next day. Instant transfer. Happy times.
The real solution to the quality/security problem already exists. Sue the bastards. A software problem causes a plane to crash (people die.) Sue the bastards. Medical equipment, cars, etc.. screw up AND PEOPLE ARE HURT, the manufacturer gets hauled into court. Seems to work.
Now the problem is to determine the $ damages if software fails & someone is not hurt. It would need to be something like net income per hour averaged from the past 12/18 months and applied to the recorded downtime plus a pre-determined recovery charge (to keep scumbags from milking disasters.)
There is the issue of ye old EULA. Those need to be rendered null and void. All software is a PRODUCT and despite whatever is said in ye old click through agreement, the software, as sold, is fit for it's intended purpose, is guaranteed to work and will not cause harm or injury in it's intended use. (Just like EVERYTHING ELSE you walk out of a store with.)
OSS probably has to drop of the radar cause there is no one to sue for enough to cover the damages. And the GPL is a EULA. It's gone too. Now all we have to do is create software that works. Right. Always. Gonna be slow and expensive. Join the guild before you try. Code in the approved language after years of study before touching a keyboard. It wont work cause the software will still foul up. Face it, computer science is still primitive. Outside of integrated systems, we do not know how to handle the compexity. For general purpose software, sometimes it works, sometimes not, and we can't prove what it will be until it's released into the wild. (Thats what testing tries to simulate.) Engineers wear the iron ring as a reminder of the things that FELL DOWN. If programmers had our own reminder like that, would we be able to recognize the things we haven't seen yet? We are still learning what the problems are, let alone the best way to prevent them. What is the best way to prevent corruption of a value chain? Whats the best way to impliment one? Whats a value chain? (Hint, does not exist, read Code Complete.) When will someone create one and what whould we use it for? Don't know yet. Might know later. Come back in 100 years.
As long as software has version numbers that change because of major improvements, we are learning about these darn computers. Hopefully getting better, but these darn computers keep getting faster and cheaper (more complexity.)
Maybe the whole thing should be put on hold until we hit the wall on Moores law. At least then, some of the shifting sand will be sitting still. If we are still in the "too complex to predict" state in 100 years, the guild idea may be the only way to go. Until then I am willing to keep messing up and learning from the rubble. If I have to join the guild today I will. My question is: Is the guild really any better at the complexity thing? Please include you proof.
Re:Driving a Truck Through This One
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Global Dimming
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NewsWeek had Global Cooling on it's cover in April 1975
http://www.globalclimate.org/Newsweek.htm
or any of googles 904,000 hits for "Global Cooling".
The term Hydro is not short for Hydrogen, it's the short form of Hydro-electrical generation, or electricity from a waterfall. Commonly used in Canada as part of electicity's company name (Ontario Hydro, B.C. Hydro) because that was the original source.
We tried this a work a while back and it turns out that most people will not turn it on. They don't want to see or be seen. It also got rid of the travel, meaning free lunch & time away from your desk.
It might be wise to try and find out if would actually be used before plunking down the cash.
We Canadians are lucky to have two monopolies, Bell with the phone lines and your regonal cable monopoly, that just happen to hate each others guts. (The cable companies divided up the country sbout 10 years ago.)
The hate part comes from the family of nutters with the Rogers name. Big cable & cell phone company. Needs bailouts (investments) on a regular basis. They have a stockholder problem. Something about the desire for profits.
Both teams keep going to the CRTC (Canadian FCC) to crack open the others business. Bell wants to run TV cable but is not allowed, hence it's trying to get their DSL service set up for streaming movies. Not there yet so Bell is also into satelite TV. The cable companies want the phone lines and ditto on the no go. To keep the hate fires burning, a couple of months ago one of the Rogers clan opened up to reporters about their VOIP plans & tests. Strongly hinted at trying to grab ALL the local phone business from Bell. Strangely, they are actually fighting it out in the marketplace (at least here in Ontario). Bell ads on TV are more than common. Most white box PC's come with a rogers cable software CD and 'come hither' pricing (3 month free). Bell ads pound and I mean POUND on cables sharing slow downs. Rogers counters by taking over a cable channel with a never ending loop on how easy it is to install & use. Gotta love a good turf war.
>Doesn't matter what employees do, it's a question of whether the top executive know
BEEP. No Soup for YOU!
Any employee of a company can be an "Authorized Agent", or in common language a representative. This responibility is handed out by giving you: A phone with direct dial. A business card. A paycheck that covers time spent outside the building (and not sick or on vacation.) Permission to speak to non-employees during business hours. And many more trivial type things.
Anything a company lets you do is your job and their problem. Thats why corporate manuals are always thick books.
In the Uber-Messed-up cubicle farm, sometimes action is required:
The basic rule is lead by example & then skrew em.
Figure out how to reduce the ringer volume on your phone. Turn it down. Listen for & locate the clowns who have theirs on max. Come in on the off hours & turn theirs down. (Asking them to do it is polite but usually useless) When you go away on vaction or whatever, turn your ringer off. When somone else goes away, do unto them. A post-it with "Ringer Off." stuck on their phone is polite.
Figure out how to up the volume in the phone earset & turn yours up. (Reduces the tendancey to SHOUT into the phone.) Off hours, do unto the shouters. If there is someone in the farm that uses a speaker phone to check their voice mail, have a "friend" leave them a detailed pornographic voicemain from a payphone over the wekend. (VERY effective.) For the clown who would rather use you as a talking data retrieval servent rather than flip open a manual, start by answering their question with the instructions on how to look it up themselves. If the clown does not "get it" the answer becomes "I don't know." and then go back to work. If that fails, start returning the "favor". (Whats the format of...?) If that fails, it is now time for for a heart felt face to face (loudly: "Look it up yourself you %&#*!")((If saying it to your own manager, be ready for trouble. Personal experience.))
Hail-Fellow-Well-Met syndrome:
If the morning ariaval of a co-worker is met with a rousing corus of "Hi" and "Good Morning", along with inquiries into last nights activities including but not limmetted to: sleep patterns, food consumption, road conditions and recreational activities, then be the last one in. Or spend the usual arrival period doing some non-local activity. (Collecting/stealing office supplies, user group visits, anything that gets you out of there. )
In a standard poorly designed cube farm, all hall chats will be beside someones cube. There is no way aroud this one. (Good time to clean you desk, and other assorted administrivia.) Or just join in the conversation and say things that are so stupid, everyone leaves.
The foul stench of someones lunch wafting through the air and peeling the paint requires a loud statement of fact. "Wow, that really stinks. I think I am going to be sick. I have to go home." Then leave.
When it gets to the point that nothing is getting done by anyone, anywhere, state the facts in writting. To the boss. Eventually their boss will figure out somthing is wrong & a paper trail comes in handy. These things come and go. When they come, it's a good time to take advantage of "Developmental assignments". On the last one, I took a position on the 24 hour support dest. Yep it was that bad.
Meeting Mania & how to be a wee bit less unproductive:
When someone attempts to schedule a meeting within 30 minutes of the regular quitting time, have a long standing personal issue that requires you to leave early that day & on that day leave early, no matter what.
The only valid answer to the question of "When is a good time this morning to have a get together?" is: "Now." Then start the meeting.
When handed printed material at a meeting, as soon as you leave, throw it out and e-mail a request to have a replacement e-mailed back. If you get something, you are now free to read it. If valuable, save it on disk, else delete. Next step, if required, is to actaully do what the meeting was about and/or reply in e-mail. Now the meeting Bozzo has a copy they will be able to find in 2 weeks. When you call a meeting that has an agenda, send out the agenda when you call the meeting. (Give the attendies the chance to come prepared, but don't expect a miracle. You will be the only one prepared.) After showing up at the correct place, when the clock strikes meeting time, start the meeting, even if you did not call it. There is nothing more productive than a room full of people wait
Nixon canceled the last flights to make sure NASA had the cash for the shuttle. The last moon ships were turned into lawn ornaments. Funding was never restored. NASA then LOST the blueprints for the Saturn 5.
NASA is not going to the moon now because THEY CAN'T.
Far more likely the important info would be, "Who sent you mail?" & "Who did you send mail to?".
Right now, the idea is to develope leads and see where they go. Shadey Character #31 e-mailed Scumbag #47 who talks to Scumbag #48 who talks to Shadey Character #30. "Put more Agents on checking out #30"
Nyet. Canada will NOT ratify. It has a thing called the Senate that generally sits on it's duff, feasting from the government teat. The old "Sober Second Thought" stuff. But every now and then a couple of brain cells fire off and they sent legislation back to the house of commons with a tiny little note that says "Call an Election on this one & if you win, we will pass it."
The last time it happened was to prevent "The Death of the Nation" (Tm) aka NAFTA. As I seem to remember, the result was a thing call a landslide for NAFTA.
The Canadian government represents the Canadian government. Every now & then we have to toss them out for a few years to get them to behave.
The point of a strong economy is the keep protecting the environment. Every time there is a recession, the jerks fire up their chain saws an go harvest some fire wood. The jerks claim they thought it was Crown (public) land. Only had to cut one chain to open the fence. The best one was the clown who dropped a tree completely across the road, taking out the power and phone lines, and crushing his own trailer.
Everything is great in theory. Reality differs. Such is life.
FYI:
About 6 months ago we had the internal disk on a VAX go bad. It was only used for the swap file. About 6 weeks ago we noticed that it was dead. (You only keep an eye on things that fail.) VAX VMS just kept on chugging away.
VMS coverted to Intel? Didn't DEC try that one back around 89 or so? IIRC there were some large technical problems such as to much written in MACRO.
I guess our Alpa migration should be cancled. It only took 3 years to make that decision. I wonder what will be around in 3 more years?
It's not tech literacy, just the happy combination of two heavily regulated industries providing the same service (phone and cable). There is profit to be made, competition to keep the price reasonable, and best of all the ever loving terror that "The government will take away my monopoly away if I dont play nice."
Overall tech wise, Canada is about the same as any other developed nation, but it does have more submarines in the West Edmonton Mall than in the navy.
Re:On the shoulders of giants..
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Duct Tape
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1 Petawatt for 1 picosecond = 1 Sears Die Hard battery discharging really, really fast.
You made my point. Those lasers will end up in a scrap pile some day.
The first ones takes years and millions of dollars, but eventually it's common place. There is more power in my car engine than the Wright brothers used on their flier. More power in my PC than the world had in..., well, you get the idea.
>"no more radioactive than uranium ore", it would still be highly dangerous
Ahem. Perhaps you have seen the (old) pictures of people loading fuel rods into new reactors. Standing around in cotton lab coats.
That can be done because at that time the fuel rods are not emitting high levels of radiation because they consist primarily of long half-life materials.
Burn the fuel for a while and lead suits are needed because there is high radiation from the short half-life fission products.
The longer the half-life, the lower the radiation.
Yes, the decay products of one isotope may be and often are more radioactive than the parent. Again, highly radioactive=short half-life. Everything with an atomic weight greater than iron is radioactive. Some of the half-lives are truly astronomical.
Although not tested in the real world yet (not enough elapsed time), the aprox. 600 year figure is correct to make spent fuel as radioactive as it was before it went into the reactor.
As for the people building houses on uranim mines comment, well they did, but the houses tend to get torn down when mining begins. The mine itself is not dangerous. It's the tailings from the initial processing. Fine bits of rock with some of the urainium still left being blown around and eventually inhaled.
This reminds me of a problem the French had in the 70's when a load of ore from one of their mines in Africa came up short on fissionables. After much investigation it turned out that back before Earth had a free oxegen atmosphere, there was this uranium, a stream, and some kind of bacteria that collected the stuff. The combination turned into a low level, natural reactor that over millions of years, burnt the fuel. It turned out that the waste products did not migrate very far, & AFAIK there was no nearby huge collection of fossils from irradiated critters.
On the shoulders of giants..
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Duct Tape
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As much as the govenment would like us to fear terrorists with high tech, could it be that it is the hobbiest will be the next big problem?
Plutonium is controlled but how long will it be before someone hacks together enough little lasers to trigger hydrogen fusion via kinetic implosion a.k.a. a H-bomb? That would reduce property values in that part of the city.
The relentless march of progress is making all the great new tech cheaper and cheaper. The business cycle means that old tech gets turfed faster. Dumpster diving can bring you a funtional genetics lab. Genetics used to be breeding differnt coloured flowers or cats or dogs. Soon "The Chicken Heart that Ate Chicago" could be a reality.
Could this be why SETI has yet to pick up a signal?
"Ever hear about the Quebec or Candian police doing anything like that when the US isn't involved? "
Well, the FLQ crisis, two diplomats kidnapped in Quebec, resulted in martial law in Quebec with tanks and troops in the street. The raid on Loui's Pet shop was the DND's finest hour. Oh, how about Oka, where the Quebec (again) provincial police tried to settle an Indian land claim dispute by firing off some rounds from their 6 shooters at machine gun armed Mohawk warriors. (They lost.) Again, out come the tanks. The Quebec police have had a long running battle with motorcycle gangs. They just can't seem to ever find the guys on loud motorcycles wearing jackets with the gang name on the back.
More recent (and for regional balance), was the RCMP pepper spraying protesters in Vancover who were no where near the site of another Big Meeting(Tm). But hey, this is Canada, where the PM has a personal solution to loud disturbing protesters. Grab them by the throat and squeese like a bastard until the Mounties pull you off. (True story.) Is it a conspiracy? Is it incompetence? When the outcome is the same, how do you tell?
Way back when the Apollo program was in it's swing Von Braun looked ahead to the Mars mission. The ships needed would be assembled in space and be rather large in the "Battlestar Galactica" take everything with you sence. They would need in orbit assembley. To do that you will need a construction shack aka space station. To build and supply that, you need the space shuttle. That is what it was designed to do. Not a bad idea.
But come the early - mid 70's and the money dries up. The remaining Apollo rockets were turned into lawn ornaments and the shuttle program was stretched out. The space station became Skylab. Mars? Forget it.
When the shuttle finally flew, it had no mission and it turned out to be a lot more expensive to launch than expected.
Eventually we get to SDI and the closing days of the Cold War. Finally a reason to build space station Freedom That will keep the commies from taking over low earth orbit. Toss in some more money problems and redesigns and, oops, down comes the wall and the cold war is over. Name change to International Space Station. Invite other countries to participate. Eventually it starts to get built.
OK, Now the "Mars mission supply" shuttle is used to build the international "stop the commies" space station which is used by the Russians as a hotel for "filthy capitalist running dogs" to raise the money to pay their rocket people so they don't go and work for Sadam & company.
The months of training are on the misson objectives, not on how to sit in a chair during liftoff. All the medical tests are used to get the thousands of applicants down to a hadfull. They also reduce the chance that a mission has to be cut short due to a medical problem. NASA still gets its cash through good PR and a sick astronaut is the last thing they want.
The space shuttle pulls 3 G's at max, which is less than a lot of roller coasters. They was no medical check or training session the last time I took a ride.
Slashdot Mirror
I work for mumble-mumble and a number of years ago it had become a meeting company.
Head office was designed as a cubicle farm in the middle of a big room with conference rooms along all the walls.
The most important application was the meeting scheduler.
One fine day I got invited to a meeting at head office.
We leave the plant at 4 a.m. for a 5 1/2 hour drive.
At 10 a.m. we wonder into the meeting room, which was in a seperate building from head office cause all the othere were in use.
The first 1/2 hour of the meeting, the gent who called it is on his cell phone calling everyone else who was supposed to be there, telling them that this meeting was important.
OK a bunch of people wander in.
Each and every on fires up their laptops, go the the meeting scheduler and start preparing for the next meeting.
The meeting itself took a half hour to decide that most people were not ready for the meeting and we would have another.
Then we drove back.
Not long after the CEO (who was new to the job) made a policy change.
"From now on, Thursdays will be no meeting days. Security will not unlock the conference room doors & will do walk throughs to toss out anyone caught in a conference room. Please take advantage of these meeting free days to get something of value done."
Happy times.
Actually there are a LOT of people who could be in trouble.
The publication ban covers sites that link to sites that link to Captain Quarters.
I have a link to Slashdot on my blog. Slashdot links to Captains quarters.
I am instantly a criminal.
Yes I am Canadian. May be having a big "Going to Jail" sale real soon.
Lets see.
The best quote so far:
Meanwhile, industry wags are saying that God invented SCO to give people a company to hate more than Microsoft.
Maybe the Red/Green/Blue Mars series he bought the right to?
I started as a programmer in a factory just finishing up big new additions. The programmers were on the second floor of an outbuilding above a garage area. In el-cheapo fashion, it was a mini-cube farm. 5 foot high dividers enclosing your very own student desk 3 ft by 1 1/2 ft surface area. 4 cubes shares a phone which ended up sorta balanced in the middle. The dumb terminals were limmitted to 2400 baud due to the distance from the computer room. Printouts were from a fanfold line pinter pounding away in the corner cause these laser printer things were too expensive for mere programmers. Fold out the fan fold prints and they fall off the desk, cause they are too big. This building was beside a bulk unloading station and its air intake (when working) was at the same hight and location as the exaust fumes from the unloading trucks. Most of them had vibrators to get the last of the stuff out. So you get a buzz on from exhaust fumes and the the bulding starts to shake. Glorious.
This building was planned to be demolished at the end of the project so there was no maintenance. The heat came on in January (in Canada). Programming in mittens just does not work. Someone would figure out how to turn on the air conditioner on some time in September. We would be sent home due to the heat on a regular basis.
A minor math error was made in the initial design so all the computers were severly overloaded. The only thing we could do online was edit, everything else got submitted as a batch job. Look, my compile is #43, lunch time is 9:30 am today.
Since it is a factory, & I am luckey enough to work in the machine control area, we get access when the whole place is shut down. It's a food factory so these shutdowns involve "Fogging for insects", beter know at filling the place with nerve gas. My instructions were: "It only hurts insects, but don't breath it. Now get out there and test yer stuff." More head rushes.
Oh, and the department manager had a mental block when it came to my face & name. Couldn't remember either. Every month or so he would walk over and ask who I was and what I did. The goof HIRED me.
And the best part was the environment with our customers. Lets just say that the Denver airport bagage system was a good rollout compared to this place. Nothing worked well enough to justify the hundreds of millions spent, so meeting with the customers began with the refrain, "Rip that shit out!" & usually went downhill from there. Then there were the users in the union who had a litle problem with management and their forced overtime. You WILL come in & we might let you go home after a 60 hour week, if we can. The instruction to me was "Stay away from the houly people."
Back to the cube farm,
There was a co-worker who had a hobby of getting people she didn't like fired. Missing a department softball game put you on the shit list. One of the flakier developers was the only tea drinker. So in usual cheap-o fashion, the company bought a electric kettle with a "it's-hot-enough" auto shutoff that would not boil water. So Skippy (as he was known) wired the switch down. And then got distracted. The melted plastic burned through a counter top and then the smoke REALLY started. The mechanics downstairs complained. Loudly. But we did learn that the fire alarms were not connected to anything.
Eventually the head count horseman was let loose and things got worse. Nothing like supporting software that does not work while being watched by a spineless supervisor who needs documented proof of incompetence to help lower the head count. Tended to chip away at ones sanity. Luckily I got drunk at a party and mouthed off to the manager that I could do better job than the other department goof-de-juere who just happenned to be sacked the next day. Instant transfer. Happy times.
Balding, middle aged, overweight man seeks woman who is much too good for him.
The real solution to the quality/security problem already exists. Sue the bastards. A software problem causes a plane to crash (people die.) Sue the bastards. Medical equipment, cars, etc.. screw up AND PEOPLE ARE HURT, the manufacturer gets hauled into court. Seems to work.
Now the problem is to determine the $ damages if software fails & someone is not hurt. It would need to be something like net income per hour averaged from the past 12/18 months and applied to the recorded downtime plus a pre-determined recovery charge (to keep scumbags from milking disasters.)
There is the issue of ye old EULA. Those need to be rendered null and void. All software is a PRODUCT and despite whatever is said in ye old click through agreement, the software, as sold, is fit for it's intended purpose, is guaranteed to work and will not cause harm or injury in it's intended use. (Just like EVERYTHING ELSE you walk out of a store with.)
OSS probably has to drop of the radar cause there is no one to sue for enough to cover the damages. And the GPL is a EULA. It's gone too.
Now all we have to do is create software that works. Right. Always.
Gonna be slow and expensive. Join the guild before you try. Code in the approved language after years of study before touching a keyboard.
It wont work cause the software will still foul up.
Face it, computer science is still primitive. Outside of integrated systems, we do not know how to handle the compexity. For general purpose software, sometimes it works, sometimes not, and we can't prove what it will be until it's released into the wild. (Thats what testing tries to simulate.) Engineers wear the iron ring as a reminder of the things that FELL DOWN. If programmers had our own reminder like that, would we be able to recognize the things we haven't seen yet? We are still learning what the problems are, let alone the best way to prevent them. What is the best way to prevent corruption of a value chain? Whats the best way to impliment one? Whats a value chain? (Hint, does not exist, read Code Complete.) When will someone create one and what whould we use it for? Don't know yet. Might know later. Come back in 100 years.
As long as software has version numbers that change because of major improvements, we are learning about these darn computers. Hopefully getting better, but these darn computers keep getting faster and cheaper (more complexity.)
Maybe the whole thing should be put on hold until we hit the wall on Moores law. At least then, some of the shifting sand will be sitting still.
If we are still in the "too complex to predict" state in 100 years, the guild idea may be the only way to go. Until then I am willing to keep messing up and learning from the rubble. If I have to join the guild today I will. My question is: Is the guild really any better at the complexity thing?
Please include you proof.
NewsWeek had Global Cooling on it's cover in April 1975
http://www.globalclimate.org/Newsweek.htm
or any of googles 904,000 hits for "Global Cooling".
Thats a wee bit later than the 50's.
The term Hydro is not short for Hydrogen, it's the short form of Hydro-electrical generation, or electricity from a waterfall. Commonly used in Canada as part of electicity's company name (Ontario Hydro, B.C. Hydro) because that was the original source.
The short form for Hydrogen is H2.
Actually a good point.
We tried this a work a while back and it turns out that most people will not turn it on.
They don't want to see or be seen. It also got rid of the travel, meaning free lunch & time away from your desk.
It might be wise to try and find out if would actually be used before plunking down the cash.
We Canadians are lucky to have two monopolies, Bell with the phone lines and your regonal cable monopoly, that just happen to hate each others guts. (The cable companies divided up the country sbout 10 years ago.)
The hate part comes from the family of nutters with the Rogers name. Big cable & cell phone company. Needs bailouts (investments) on a regular basis. They have a stockholder problem. Something about the desire for profits.
Both teams keep going to the CRTC (Canadian FCC) to crack open the others business. Bell wants to run TV cable but is not allowed, hence it's trying to get their DSL service set up for streaming movies. Not there yet so Bell is also into satelite TV. The cable companies want the phone lines and ditto on the no go.
To keep the hate fires burning, a couple of months ago one of the Rogers clan opened up to reporters about their VOIP plans & tests. Strongly hinted at trying to grab ALL the local phone business from Bell.
Strangely, they are actually fighting it out in the marketplace (at least here in Ontario). Bell ads on TV are more than common. Most white box PC's come with a rogers cable software CD and 'come hither' pricing (3 month free). Bell ads pound and I mean POUND on cables sharing slow downs. Rogers counters by taking over a cable channel with a never ending loop on how easy it is to install & use.
Gotta love a good turf war.
>Doesn't matter what employees do, it's a question of whether the top executive know
BEEP. No Soup for YOU!
Any employee of a company can be an "Authorized Agent", or in common language a representative. This responibility is handed out by giving you:
A phone with direct dial.
A business card.
A paycheck that covers time spent outside the building (and not sick or on vacation.)
Permission to speak to non-employees during business hours.
And many more trivial type things.
Anything a company lets you do is your job and their problem. Thats why corporate manuals are always thick books.
And laywers get rich.
In the Uber-Messed-up cubicle farm, sometimes action is required:
The basic rule is lead by example & then skrew em.
Figure out how to reduce the ringer volume on your phone. Turn it down.
Listen for & locate the clowns who have theirs on max.
Come in on the off hours & turn theirs down. (Asking them to do it is polite but usually useless)
When you go away on vaction or whatever, turn your ringer off.
When somone else goes away, do unto them. A post-it with "Ringer Off." stuck on their phone is polite.
Figure out how to up the volume in the phone earset & turn yours up. (Reduces the tendancey to SHOUT into the phone.)
Off hours, do unto the shouters.
If there is someone in the farm that uses a speaker phone to check their voice mail, have a "friend" leave them a detailed pornographic voicemain from a payphone over the wekend. (VERY effective.)
For the clown who would rather use you as a talking data retrieval servent rather than flip open a manual, start by answering their question with the instructions on how to look it up themselves. If the clown does not "get it" the answer becomes "I don't know." and then go back to work. If that fails, start returning the "favor". (Whats the format of...?) If that fails, it is now time for for a heart felt face to face (loudly: "Look it up yourself you %&#*!")((If saying it to your own manager, be ready for trouble. Personal experience.))
Hail-Fellow-Well-Met syndrome:
If the morning ariaval of a co-worker is met with a rousing corus of "Hi" and "Good Morning", along with inquiries into last nights activities including but not limmetted to: sleep patterns, food consumption, road conditions and recreational activities, then be the last one in. Or spend the usual arrival period doing some non-local activity. (Collecting/stealing office supplies, user group visits, anything that gets you out of there. )
In a standard poorly designed cube farm, all hall chats will be beside someones cube. There is no way aroud this one. (Good time to clean you desk, and other assorted administrivia.) Or just join in the conversation and say things that are so stupid, everyone leaves.
The foul stench of someones lunch wafting through the air and peeling the paint requires a loud statement of fact. "Wow, that really stinks. I think I am going to be sick. I have to go home." Then leave.
When it gets to the point that nothing is getting done by anyone, anywhere, state the facts in writting. To the boss. Eventually their boss will figure out somthing is wrong & a paper trail comes in handy.
These things come and go. When they come, it's a good time to take advantage of "Developmental assignments". On the last one, I took a position on the 24 hour support dest. Yep it was that bad.
Meeting Mania & how to be a wee bit less unproductive:
When someone attempts to schedule a meeting within 30 minutes of the regular quitting time, have a long standing personal issue that requires you to leave early that day & on that day leave early, no matter what.
The only valid answer to the question of "When is a good time this morning to have a get together?" is: "Now." Then start the meeting.
When handed printed material at a meeting, as soon as you leave, throw it out and e-mail a request to have a replacement e-mailed back. If you get something, you are now free to read it. If valuable, save it on disk, else delete. Next step, if required, is to actaully do what the meeting was about and/or reply in e-mail. Now the meeting Bozzo has a copy they will be able to find in 2 weeks.
When you call a meeting that has an agenda, send out the agenda when you call the meeting. (Give the attendies the chance to come prepared, but don't expect a miracle. You will be the only one prepared.)
After showing up at the correct place, when the clock strikes meeting time, start the meeting, even if you did not call it. There is nothing more productive than a room full of people wait
Nixon canceled the last flights to make sure NASA had the cash for the shuttle. The last moon ships were turned into lawn ornaments. Funding was never restored. NASA then LOST the blueprints for the Saturn 5.
NASA is not going to the moon now because THEY CAN'T.
Right now, the idea is to develope leads and see where they go. Shadey Character #31 e-mailed Scumbag #47 who talks to Scumbag #48 who talks to Shadey Character #30. "Put more Agents on checking out #30"
Anyone capured in uniform is a prisoner of war. Anyone found behind the lines who is not in uniform is a spy and can be shot on sight.
The last time it happened was to prevent "The Death of the Nation" (Tm) aka NAFTA. As I seem to remember, the result was a thing call a landslide for NAFTA.
The Canadian government represents the Canadian government. Every now & then we have to toss them out for a few years to get them to behave.
The point of a strong economy is the keep protecting the environment. Every time there is a recession, the jerks fire up their chain saws an go harvest some fire wood. The jerks claim they thought it was Crown (public) land. Only had to cut one chain to open the fence. The best one was the clown who dropped a tree completely across the road, taking out the power and phone lines, and crushing his own trailer.
Everything is great in theory. Reality differs. Such is life.
VMS coverted to Intel? Didn't DEC try that one back around 89 or so? IIRC there were some large technical problems such as to much written in MACRO.
I guess our Alpa migration should be cancled. It only took 3 years to make that decision. I wonder what will be around in 3 more years?
Overall tech wise, Canada is about the same as any other developed nation, but it does have more submarines in the West Edmonton Mall than in the navy.
You made my point. Those lasers will end up in a scrap pile some day.
The first ones takes years and millions of dollars, but eventually it's common place. There is more power in my car engine than the Wright brothers used on their flier. More power in my PC than the world had in..., well, you get the idea.
Ahem. Perhaps you have seen the (old) pictures of people loading fuel rods into new reactors. Standing around in cotton lab coats.
That can be done because at that time the fuel rods are not emitting high levels of radiation because they consist primarily of long half-life materials.
Burn the fuel for a while and lead suits are needed because there is high radiation from the short half-life fission products.
The longer the half-life, the lower the radiation.
Yes, the decay products of one isotope may be and often are more radioactive than the parent. Again, highly radioactive=short half-life. Everything with an atomic weight greater than iron is radioactive. Some of the half-lives are truly astronomical.
Although not tested in the real world yet (not enough elapsed time), the aprox. 600 year figure is correct to make spent fuel as radioactive as it was before it went into the reactor.
As for the people building houses on uranim mines comment, well they did, but the houses tend to get torn down when mining begins. The mine itself is not dangerous. It's the tailings from the initial processing. Fine bits of rock with some of the urainium still left being blown around and eventually inhaled.
This reminds me of a problem the French had in the 70's when a load of ore from one of their mines in Africa came up short on fissionables. After much investigation it turned out that back before Earth had a free oxegen atmosphere, there was this uranium, a stream, and some kind of bacteria that collected the stuff. The combination turned into a low level, natural reactor that over millions of years, burnt the fuel. It turned out that the waste products did not migrate very far, & AFAIK there was no nearby huge collection of fossils from irradiated critters.
Plutonium is controlled but how long will it be before someone hacks together enough little lasers to trigger hydrogen fusion via kinetic implosion a.k.a. a H-bomb? That would reduce property values in that part of the city.
The relentless march of progress is making all the great new tech cheaper and cheaper. The business cycle means that old tech gets turfed faster. Dumpster diving can bring you a funtional genetics lab. Genetics used to be breeding differnt coloured flowers or cats or dogs. Soon "The Chicken Heart that Ate Chicago" could be a reality.
Could this be why SETI has yet to pick up a signal?
Well, the FLQ crisis, two diplomats kidnapped in Quebec, resulted in martial law in Quebec with tanks and troops in the street. The raid on Loui's Pet shop was the DND's finest hour. Oh, how about Oka, where the Quebec (again) provincial police tried to settle an Indian land claim dispute by firing off some rounds from their 6 shooters at machine gun armed Mohawk warriors. (They lost.) Again, out come the tanks. The Quebec police have had a long running battle with motorcycle gangs. They just can't seem to ever find the guys on loud motorcycles wearing jackets with the gang name on the back.
More recent (and for regional balance), was the RCMP pepper spraying protesters in Vancover who were no where near the site of another Big Meeting(Tm). But hey, this is Canada, where the PM has a personal solution to loud disturbing protesters. Grab them by the throat and squeese like a bastard until the Mounties pull you off. (True story.) Is it a conspiracy? Is it incompetence? When the outcome is the same, how do you tell?
But come the early - mid 70's and the money dries up. The remaining Apollo rockets were turned into lawn ornaments and the shuttle program was stretched out. The space station became Skylab. Mars? Forget it.
When the shuttle finally flew, it had no mission and it turned out to be a lot more expensive to launch than expected.
Eventually we get to SDI and the closing days of the Cold War. Finally a reason to build space station Freedom That will keep the commies from taking over low earth orbit. Toss in some more money problems and redesigns and, oops, down comes the wall and the cold war is over. Name change to International Space Station. Invite other countries to participate. Eventually it starts to get built.
OK, Now the "Mars mission supply" shuttle is used to build the international "stop the commies" space station which is used by the Russians as a hotel for "filthy capitalist running dogs" to raise the money to pay their rocket people so they don't go and work for Sadam & company.
Now what was that about doing science in space?
The space shuttle pulls 3 G's at max, which is less than a lot of roller coasters. They was no medical check or training session the last time I took a ride.