>>This is not a Republican or Democratic thing, it is a Government thing.
Well, see, no. These are precisely political failures, not governmental ones. The formulas for Social Security are not set by mid-level admins, but called for in law. A basic re-write of Medicare would require a lot of legislation to authorize and fund. The stimulus package was utterly political in concept through execution. The bureaucracy has nothing to do with these issues.
Now if you were saying you blame politics in general rather than either individual party I'm totally with you. Playing at politics has replaced working on governing at many levels and it's killing us. Individual legislators are in a bad place given the need for fundraising for re-election, dealing with big expectations for access for huge money from PACs, unions, corps and random rich people, balancing home district needs with party demands and the fact that our lack of will in the past has let a lot of issues get way out of hand.
At some point we need to stop worrying about the next election and deal with some serious problems, but neither party has the courage for that.
Single male, are you? Probably fairly young? Healthy enough, I bet.
Have a family, where there are annual visits for the wife and unbelievable numbers of well-child visits for young children. I believe a newborn in MN is expected to have visits at 1, 2, 4, 6, 12, 15, 18 and 24 months with between one and four shots per visit. Want a hint how much a visit costs? Somewhere betwee $200-$600, depending on what shots are called for. My company's insurance only covers $700 of well patient visit benefits a year so we deferred a lot of shots on our youngest until after 1/1/09. That's after approximately $25000 of total bills for the birth.
There's a time in life where people can stoutly sock away their money and claim that insurance is a scam, but there's a time in most lives when that's just foolish. It comes a lot sooner than you think, so don't be too big an ass is your fun, cheap youth lest you find yourself looking foolish at 30.
My wife worked at MECC for about five years until Softkey (*spit*) bought and liquidated them. It was a wonderful place to be right up to the end.
Little known fact about OT: if you started on the exact day, followed the exact path and stayed on a specific schedule (resting, waiting, etc) when you got to the Donner Pass you'd die in a snowstorm just like they did. The people working on the project (and all of the historical ones really) were adamant that historical details be correct, so someone embedded this and it stayed though many versions. (I do not recall the details, but I'm sure there are people out there who could produce the specifics.)
IE has been almost static for years, with just a couple "major" upgrades since about 2000. There's been a lot of patching, of course, but nothing that would dent the schedule of an OS project. And to complete the thought, how would all these freed up resources help Vista? From what I can tell they're already having trouble with too many cooks in the kitchen as it is.
Well, for small values of 'ever' anyway. In 1997 the Red River flooded and destroyed a lot of small and medium towns in ND and MN. Fargo-Morehead was flooded pretty badly. At one point it was flooded and snowing with ice floating in the streets with buildings on fire from gas leaks. There were some great pictures of firetrucks on flatbeds being hauled thru the water, and eventually they even tried using planes from the forest service to fight the fire. A sample of the coverage can be found here http://www.cnn.com/WEATHER/9704/20/flood/index.htm l.
For software to be truly successful in the coming years of ever-increasing dependency on computers, computer education simply must change. Programmers should become proficient in electronics as a prerequisite to any programming class. Project managers should have been programmers, and damn good ones, for 20 years prior to becoming project managers.
Wow, where to begin...
To start with that would be the Tech Lead position you're writing about. To be responsible for the technical efforts you should be the best available to make sure decisions are based on good info with a full grasp of options and risks. But to be responsible for the entire project frequently means responsibility for (and a deep knowledge of) complex business rules being implemented or integrated with, or very close personal relationships around the organization to wrangle necessary resources or buy-in, or any number of other aspects of large projects that might be more important. And even when the technical aspects are the most challenging that just means you have to have the best tech guys working on it, not necessarily running the show.
The only real requirement is that whoever is the PM makes it a priority to maintain frequent and open communications with every group involved. The best PM is only as good as the team doing the work, and if they can't cut the mustard a great technical PM is only going to see it earlier, not do much about it.
The project manager's job is to work out what needs to get built and by when; they need to get all the external dependencies sorted out, ensure the requirements are either known or the person(s) who controls those requirements is available when required, get the money and resources sorted out, and work with a techie on how to get the deliverables built in time.
On large software projects there are two core issues: determining what needs to be built and then building it. Being technical is very helpful in addressing the second point, but it isn't required or debilitating any more than having an exceptional understanding of the business side when writing requirements. A good tech mgr may know when to challenge developers' answers or estimations but might not have a clue about the soundness of the requirements. Non-tech mgrs from business can create better requirements docs that aren't as likely to change because they understand and anticipate future needs.
There's no silver bullet single answer: PMs are good or not based on how well they work with others, how well they make use of the resources at their disposal, how little time and money they waste and so on. It isn't because they are or are not technical as much as it is if they are or are not competent. And companies that do not believe in sound project management are only going to succeed in spite of that, not because of it.
On other thing I noticed about the Epson on-cartridge chip was that it isn't making decisions based on any meaningful ink level. When I got my reprogrammer dingus I reset the chip on a cart that had just run out and dropped it back in. Ran like a champ for quite a while more before it actually ran out of ink.
Last observation: the 777 can be used as a USB printer, but it really sucks when set up like that. After battling with it for weeks I dug up an old parallel cable and it became a pretty reliable machine.
There's shrinkage and then there's this. They look a $54 *Billion* dollar writeoff for the first quarter.
"After the effect of this accounting change, the Company incurred a net loss of $54.2 billion for the quarter, or a loss of $12.25 per basic common share."
Just so: USPS competition would be great if it would provide the services everywhere, but as that won't happen (not profitable in many areas) you need a subsidy if you want to ensure that everyone gets service.
Now replace "USPS" with "universal broadband" and you have a case for gov't cabling. Of course everything hinges on the "if you want to ensure everyone gets service" part, but that is left as an exercise for the reader.
The only mod we ever do to any workstations around here is to add RAM, and that isn't common. They all come with enough drive space (2GB+), good enough video and standard NICs, and since they're on a 3-4 year cycle (OK, maybe more four nowadays) they'll get tossed well before they lose all utility.
And that's the other thing : we pass on a lot of "obsolete" machines to non-profits, schools and other organizations. They have even less reason or resources for opening the case than we do.
The real question is why would anybody port.net over to linux in the first place.
Because you are Corel and M$ bought your nads for $150M and you don't have a choice. Tell me you saw this one coming the minute they announced that "partnership" with all the missing info on what M$ was getting for their kind gesture.
I frequently catch myself reading Katz like this when he gets a head of steam up. If it's an interesting enough piece I have to go back and re-read. But usually it's a sign that it's time to move on.
You want MS to reconfigure all your desktops automatically? At their discretion? Do you think this will be that simple? What about keeping yours ghosts in sync? How do you keep your people from doing it on their own (to manage your network load)? When you eventually start the upgrades do you honestly think they'll be flawless? How many full hardrives are there in your organization? Do you have a busy season in your business year? Does M$ care?
We skip plenty of "upgrades" because the cost in time and effort to get a configuration stable is far higher than any benefits we get from new software. It's a constant fight to tell users that we're not getting them the newest and coolest, and that's when they want to spend more money. How much harder will it be to stand fast when they want to upgrade to something they've already paid for? If M$ comes up with a release every 18 months and two or three other major fixpacks a year that means we'll be changing our ghosts two or three times more often than we do now. Tell me how that saves on staffing.
This is good for large organizations on a payment and licensing basis, but not on a staffing and workload basis. It isn't a clear win for anyone, and everyone will have to do their own analysis, but I really don't see the savings you're talking about here.
Why don't they put copy protection or something? Maybe they like people stealing their software because the alternative is to drive people towards cheaper or free software. Something to think about, by not going agressively against stealing they deprive Wordperfect office of customers.
You answered your own question: they use a liberal copy protection scheme to establish market share. Once the market has been converted to the proprietary file formats and users are conditioned to only expect one interface they're ready for a new princing model that looks something like Office 10.
The only point I'd like to dispute is the 10% figure you tossed out there: I'd wager that it is well above that. It isn't as bad as it was when Office fit on a single CD, but the current combination of simple key protection and not shipping media with most new PCs almost looks like a formula to maximize "sharing".
Wow, that was a cynical thought. Every once in a while I catch myself thinking like this and realize that such low expectations are Microsoft's single largest legacy. It's the worst harm they've brought to the industry.
I guess your basic premise of choosing who to insure or help or save or forgive based on some vague idea of responsibility isn't quite sound. OK, too polite: it's pretty stupid.
Who decides where these lines are (smoking == no insurance, smoking with classes == insurance). How about alcohol? Can I still drink? Moderately? OK, define that. Motorcycles kill, can I ride one? How about the helmet, if I do or don't have a helmet will that matter? If something is so stupid that we'll let you die for choosing it shouldn't we outlaw it? When does driving fast become driving recklessly and relieve hospitals from the burden of saving "stupid jerks who did it to themselves"?
Poorly thought out crap like this gives me the willies. The idea that someone can sit in a room and pass judgement on my worst behaviour without knowing me or my past and then decide if I'm worthy of medical care is chilling.
When your kid comes home from school after cutting his hand while on his skateboard, or blowing her knee in extra-curriculars or simply getting in a fight and needing a few stiches I hope the system really takes into account how necessary, safe and actuarially sound these activities are but manages to provide treatment anyway.
MS is only interested in the defense of their Windows franchise. Attacking a technology like java that could undermine it is an obvious move on their part. In fact they've already tried this once with J++ and got slapped for it.
But under a different license it wouldn't be illegal to produce a bunch of MS-specific changes (as long as they release the source). You can say everyone would reject such stuff, but the mass of MS pre-installs and re-installs (as part of, say, an IE 6 installation) is a formidable group of folks that would not reject it.
But even if everyone rejected the MS tools and libraries it wouldn't matter that much to MS since the desired effect is disruption and distraction, not a strategic platform effort. Any success their stuff had would be gravy as long as the forking blunted java's progress.
Think dog-in-the-manger defense. I don't think an intentional fork (under the guise of extra goodies for the consumer) is a hard scenario to envision.
Get a new job man. If you are in the IT industry as a janitor you should be making more than $1/hour. Here's where the bad math is hurting you: 16 hours a day * 7 days a week * 52 weeks a year = $5824. Move on.
Oh yes, and by the way, hating your low paying job is no excuse for stealing. You probably can't afford a Lexus either, but you're not (I hope) stealing those too. Grow up. I think it's ridiculous for artists to spend as much time fighting Napster as some are, but it's equally silly to say that there's nothing wrong about taking what you can't afford simply because it won't be missed.
anyone have a quick rundown of what goes where with the split?
anything that isn't part of the court's definition of OS goes to the other company. Anything that is in both comapnies goes to the app co and OS co gets a free license to use the tech indefinitely. That's from this afternoon's ruling.
As for whether 'formatting' is the best word for this operation - well, there is no word in the English language that means whatever it is you are doing to the disk, so either a new word had to be coined - or an old word recycled. I can't think of a better word than 'formatting'.
You could write the uber-compiler described above, but it'd largely remain an academic or fringe tool (like, say, Beowulf) regardless of how cool or fast it is.
It'd only become a good idea if you needed the performance so bad that you could tolerate the code maintenance nightmares.
In many/most places of business it takes a *lot* of performance gain to excuse unreadable code. As the man says, I already have enough performance in most situations: I'm user-bound more often than processor- or disk- or network-bound.
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>>This is not a Republican or Democratic thing, it is a Government thing.
Well, see, no. These are precisely political failures, not governmental ones. The formulas for Social Security are not set by mid-level admins, but called for in law. A basic re-write of Medicare would require a lot of legislation to authorize and fund. The stimulus package was utterly political in concept through execution. The bureaucracy has nothing to do with these issues.
Now if you were saying you blame politics in general rather than either individual party I'm totally with you. Playing at politics has replaced working on governing at many levels and it's killing us. Individual legislators are in a bad place given the need for fundraising for re-election, dealing with big expectations for access for huge money from PACs, unions, corps and random rich people, balancing home district needs with party demands and the fact that our lack of will in the past has let a lot of issues get way out of hand.
At some point we need to stop worrying about the next election and deal with some serious problems, but neither party has the courage for that.
Single male, are you? Probably fairly young? Healthy enough, I bet.
Have a family, where there are annual visits for the wife and unbelievable numbers of well-child visits for young children. I believe a newborn in MN is expected to have visits at 1, 2, 4, 6, 12, 15, 18 and 24 months with between one and four shots per visit. Want a hint how much a visit costs? Somewhere betwee $200-$600, depending on what shots are called for. My company's insurance only covers $700 of well patient visit benefits a year so we deferred a lot of shots on our youngest until after 1/1/09. That's after approximately $25000 of total bills for the birth.
There's a time in life where people can stoutly sock away their money and claim that insurance is a scam, but there's a time in most lives when that's just foolish. It comes a lot sooner than you think, so don't be too big an ass is your fun, cheap youth lest you find yourself looking foolish at 30.
My wife worked at MECC for about five years until Softkey (*spit*) bought and liquidated them. It was a wonderful place to be right up to the end.
Little known fact about OT: if you started on the exact day, followed the exact path and stayed on a specific schedule (resting, waiting, etc) when you got to the Donner Pass you'd die in a snowstorm just like they did. The people working on the project (and all of the historical ones really) were adamant that historical details be correct, so someone embedded this and it stayed though many versions. (I do not recall the details, but I'm sure there are people out there who could produce the specifics.)
Cris E
St Paul, MN
Hopefully backward compatibility might be one.
IE has been almost static for years, with just a couple "major" upgrades since about 2000. There's been a lot of patching, of course, but nothing that would dent the schedule of an OS project. And to complete the thought, how would all these freed up resources help Vista? From what I can tell they're already having trouble with too many cooks in the kitchen as it is.
Well, for small values of 'ever' anyway. In 1997 the Red River flooded and destroyed a lot of small and medium towns in ND and MN. Fargo-Morehead was flooded pretty badly. At one point it was flooded and snowing with ice floating in the streets with buildings on fire from gas leaks. There were some great pictures of firetrucks on flatbeds being hauled thru the water, and eventually they even tried using planes from the forest service to fight the fire. A sample of the coverage can be found here http://www.cnn.com/WEATHER/9704/20/flood/index.htm l.
If you've only been working for a year and come to these conclusions you're way ahead of half the blow-hards running around here.
Wow, where to begin...
To start with that would be the Tech Lead position you're writing about. To be responsible for the technical efforts you should be the best available to make sure decisions are based on good info with a full grasp of options and risks. But to be responsible for the entire project frequently means responsibility for (and a deep knowledge of) complex business rules being implemented or integrated with, or very close personal relationships around the organization to wrangle necessary resources or buy-in, or any number of other aspects of large projects that might be more important. And even when the technical aspects are the most challenging that just means you have to have the best tech guys working on it, not necessarily running the show.
The only real requirement is that whoever is the PM makes it a priority to maintain frequent and open communications with every group involved. The best PM is only as good as the team doing the work, and if they can't cut the mustard a great technical PM is only going to see it earlier, not do much about it.
On large software projects there are two core issues: determining what needs to be built and then building it. Being technical is very helpful in addressing the second point, but it isn't required or debilitating any more than having an exceptional understanding of the business side when writing requirements. A good tech mgr may know when to challenge developers' answers or estimations but might not have a clue about the soundness of the requirements. Non-tech mgrs from business can create better requirements docs that aren't as likely to change because they understand and anticipate future needs.
There's no silver bullet single answer: PMs are good or not based on how well they work with others, how well they make use of the resources at their disposal, how little time and money they waste and so on. It isn't because they are or are not technical as much as it is if they are or are not competent. And companies that do not believe in sound project management are only going to succeed in spite of that, not because of it.
On other thing I noticed about the Epson on-cartridge chip was that it isn't making decisions based on any meaningful ink level. When I got my reprogrammer dingus I reset the chip on a cart that had just run out and dropped it back in. Ran like a champ for quite a while more before it actually ran out of ink.
Last observation: the 777 can be used as a USB printer, but it really sucks when set up like that. After battling with it for weeks I dug up an old parallel cable and it became a pretty reliable machine.
There's shrinkage and then there's this. They look a $54 *Billion* dollar writeoff for the first quarter.
I think eliminating death would be useful to everyone...
Just so: USPS competition would be great if it would provide the services everywhere, but as that won't happen (not profitable in many areas) you need a subsidy if you want to ensure that everyone gets service.
Now replace "USPS" with "universal broadband" and you have a case for gov't cabling. Of course everything hinges on the "if you want to ensure everyone gets service" part, but that is left as an exercise for the reader.
The only mod we ever do to any workstations around here is to add RAM, and that isn't common. They all come with enough drive space (2GB+), good enough video and standard NICs, and since they're on a 3-4 year cycle (OK, maybe more four nowadays) they'll get tossed well before they lose all utility. And that's the other thing : we pass on a lot of "obsolete" machines to non-profits, schools and other organizations. They have even less reason or resources for opening the case than we do.
Because you are Corel and M$ bought your nads for $150M and you don't have a choice. Tell me you saw this one coming the minute they announced that "partnership" with all the missing info on what M$ was getting for their kind gesture.
Cris E
St Paul, MN
I frequently catch myself reading Katz like this when he gets a head of steam up. If it's an interesting enough piece I have to go back and re-read. But usually it's a sign that it's time to move on.
Cris E
St Paul, MN
You want MS to reconfigure all your desktops automatically? At their discretion? Do you think this will be that simple? What about keeping yours ghosts in sync? How do you keep your people from doing it on their own (to manage your network load)? When you eventually start the upgrades do you honestly think they'll be flawless? How many full hardrives are there in your organization? Do you have a busy season in your business year? Does M$ care?
We skip plenty of "upgrades" because the cost in time and effort to get a configuration stable is far higher than any benefits we get from new software. It's a constant fight to tell users that we're not getting them the newest and coolest, and that's when they want to spend more money. How much harder will it be to stand fast when they want to upgrade to something they've already paid for? If M$ comes up with a release every 18 months and two or three other major fixpacks a year that means we'll be changing our ghosts two or three times more often than we do now. Tell me how that saves on staffing.
This is good for large organizations on a payment and licensing basis, but not on a staffing and workload basis. It isn't a clear win for anyone, and everyone will have to do their own analysis, but I really don't see the savings you're talking about here.
Cris E
St Paul, MN
You answered your own question: they use a liberal copy protection scheme to establish market share. Once the market has been converted to the proprietary file formats and users are conditioned to only expect one interface they're ready for a new princing model that looks something like Office 10.
The only point I'd like to dispute is the 10% figure you tossed out there: I'd wager that it is well above that. It isn't as bad as it was when Office fit on a single CD, but the current combination of simple key protection and not shipping media with most new PCs almost looks like a formula to maximize "sharing".
Wow, that was a cynical thought. Every once in a while I catch myself thinking like this and realize that such low expectations are Microsoft's single largest legacy. It's the worst harm they've brought to the industry.
Cris E
St Paul, MN
I guess your basic premise of choosing who to insure or help or save or forgive based on some vague idea of responsibility isn't quite sound. OK, too polite: it's pretty stupid.
Who decides where these lines are (smoking == no insurance, smoking with classes == insurance). How about alcohol? Can I still drink? Moderately? OK, define that. Motorcycles kill, can I ride one? How about the helmet, if I do or don't have a helmet will that matter? If something is so stupid that we'll let you die for choosing it shouldn't we outlaw it? When does driving fast become driving recklessly and relieve hospitals from the burden of saving "stupid jerks who did it to themselves"?
Poorly thought out crap like this gives me the willies. The idea that someone can sit in a room and pass judgement on my worst behaviour without knowing me or my past and then decide if I'm worthy of medical care is chilling.
When your kid comes home from school after cutting his hand while on his skateboard, or blowing her knee in extra-curriculars or simply getting in a fight and needing a few stiches I hope the system really takes into account how necessary, safe and actuarially sound these activities are but manages to provide treatment anyway.
Cris E
St Paul, MN
But under a different license it wouldn't be illegal to produce a bunch of MS-specific changes (as long as they release the source). You can say everyone would reject such stuff, but the mass of MS pre-installs and re-installs (as part of, say, an IE 6 installation) is a formidable group of folks that would not reject it.
But even if everyone rejected the MS tools and libraries it wouldn't matter that much to MS since the desired effect is disruption and distraction, not a strategic platform effort. Any success their stuff had would be gravy as long as the forking blunted java's progress.
Think dog-in-the-manger defense. I don't think an intentional fork (under the guise of extra goodies for the consumer) is a hard scenario to envision.
Cris E
St Paul, MN
followed by
"...us poor, sub $1 an hour wage earning people"
Get a new job man. If you are in the IT industry as a janitor you should be making more than $1/hour. Here's where the bad math is hurting you: 16 hours a day * 7 days a week * 52 weeks a year = $5824. Move on.
Oh yes, and by the way, hating your low paying job is no excuse for stealing. You probably can't afford a Lexus either, but you're not (I hope) stealing those too. Grow up. I think it's ridiculous for artists to spend as much time fighting Napster as some are, but it's equally silly to say that there's nothing wrong about taking what you can't afford simply because it won't be missed.
Cris E
St Paul, MN
anything that isn't part of the court's definition of OS goes to the other company. Anything that is in both comapnies goes to the app co and OS co gets a free license to use the tech indefinitely. That's from this afternoon's ruling.
Cris E
St Paul, MN
Initialize works well...
Cris E
St. Paul, MN
I'm fairly certain Heinlein didn't make it up, but he did make it popular.
Cris E
St Paul, MN
It'd only become a good idea if you needed the performance so bad that you could tolerate the code maintenance nightmares.
In many/most places of business it takes a *lot* of performance gain to excuse unreadable code. As the man says, I already have enough performance in most situations: I'm user-bound more often than processor- or disk- or network-bound.
Cris E
St Paul, MN