What is most interesting is that Microsoft can release their documents as DRM'ed and then watch their own right servers as you and I log in to read them. I would assume they can use this like logging HTTP traffic; allow access to everyone but still require everyone to connect to open the document. Then you can parse the logs and see who is connecting, how often, etc.
Presumably they can do this to log who's running their (DRM-protected) applications, as well.
Most of the advice in the responses have been sound:
- (Try to) document the cost of the new request (in actual time and money, opportunity cost, risk, etc.)
- Make sure management and/or the client acknowledges the cost and signs on to the choices.
The second tier problems I have encountered are:
1) Cost projections are estimates, and (especially in development environments) subjective. Your cost estimates will be challenged, and there will always be somebody around willing to ingratiate themselves by offering a lower estimate. Whether they are misguided or mistaken (or right!) is not always clear, but managers and/or clients generally pick the most optimistic answer from each column.
2) There are always overhead costs that can't be projected exactly in MS Office: time lost to unexpected events (server crashes, illnesses, screwups, whatever). You can make an informed guess, but people will be suspicious of a "fudge factor" and will discount it.
At the end of the day, people will string together the most optimistic assumptions (often mutually exclusive) and ask you to commit to it.
This is what got NASA to where it is today.
[Sorry for the pessimism; I guess I read this too early in the morning; I'm still on my first cup of coffee.]
NASA's problem is a reflection of the institutional behavior I have seen at my last 4-1/2 employers (the least recent morphed into a pathological organization while I was there); it has become more important to appear to have a product or strategy (or quality) than to actually have it. Nothing Scott Adams hasn't been saying for years.
BTW, the mindset did not start within NASA. In the 60's, the mandate was to spend what was necessary to build the best solution that could be conceived; starting in the 70's, it was all about compromises.
It Would Be Nice if NASA could be given a mandate and execute on it in such a way to once again set an example on How It Should Be Done, but I think we ultimately need to fix our broader culture about the standards of how we conduct business.
IBM's trackpoint mouse does this and has been shipping for several years.
From the linked page: The mouse, introduced in 1984,...
What happened in 1984 that qualifies as the "introduction" of the mouse? Surely not the Mac, preceded by the Lisa and Xerox. Or did IBM adopt mice in 1984 (seems a bit early) and erase prior history?
On the first point, suffice it to say I agree with those who point out that Apple (and even Windoze) will retain the bulk of their customers because of the relative ease of setup and configuration.
As to the second point, if Linux racks up numbers that good, much of it will be at the expense of Windoze market share. If Linux helps (re)establish a heterogeneous desktop computing market, especially if it does so by increasing popularity of *nix, it erodes one of the biggest objections to inclusion of Macs in the workplace.
Studies show that computer-illiterate people are easily confused by multiple buttons. You'd be surprised, but it really is a problem.
Short version, in response to the complaint that the Mac has no right mouse button: the Mac has no wrong mouse button.
Re: code review: Anyone checked the analyst?
on
Latest SCO News
·
· Score: 1
Given the recent record of "analysts" on Wall Street, has anyone checked the credentials of the analyst cited in the article to see if she has a stake in the outcome?
- Parasitic cost vs. benefit; such an escape system would consume a lot of weight and space and compromise every mission, against the chance that they MIGHT be needed.
- Effectiveness: they would only be useful in an emergency where the crew knew there was a problem and had enough time to get the shuttle into a configuration where they might work.
Why don't airliners carry an escape pod for every passenger?
1)The paranoia is NOT justified, look at the Sept 11th events, tons of people on cellphones on the planes with no problems.
That's the conclusion I would expect if Microsoft QA was making airline safety decisions. I have a lot of problems with the FAA, but thank goodness they're a wee bit more stringent than that.
Sigh. I'm dating myself again.
OK, it's outdated; the Cold War is over, the telephone company isn't a monopoly, etc.
But it wouldn't take a genius to adapt the story to a new monopolist and a new world (dis)order.
And the President would still be a Texan...
...when it sold itself off to Sonic Blue, and they're still providing service, as they will probably continue to do under new owners.
Re:Separating Content from Presentation a Good Thi
on
Office 2003 and XML
·
· Score: 1
And this is bad how? Isn't this the dream that XML document proponents have aspired to for years? You just can't please some people...
It's bad because you can't pass an Excel document to another program for modification or update, and open it back up in Excel without loss of formatting (which was presumably important to you if you put it there).
And if Microsoft makes it possible to exchange "native" documents among.Net apps with full fidelity, then the XML standard "support" is just a fig leaf for vendor lock-in, analogous to overtly supporting Java while blending in proprietary extensions.
Doing Excel around "pure" XML plus something like CSS for formatting is possible, but only if you're willing to start from scratch and accept some compromises (in terms of fidelity of the conversion) that most Excel users would reject. If the world moves to open standards based document exchange, Excel will have to go the way of VisiCalc and 1-2-3. Don't count on Microsoft to volunteer.
Most/.ers are probably too young to remember this, but back in the day of vinyl records, computers with vacuum tubes, and the Beatles, people could (and did) pay more than 1/6 of the cost of an album for 45 RPM "singles" (actually two sides, and side "B" was uniformly awful).
Another terrible analogy is that the aggregate price of replacements for all the parts in your car is way more than the price of the car.
Finally, the introduction of the service presumably does not preclude the possibility of promotional pricing (i.e., a discount for an entire CD or other creatively packaged selections. Give the model a chance to work.
Go back and read this particular writer's (not Haddad's) previous columns in the archive. His January 15th and 29th columns are not particularly positive, and (IMHO) he went out of his way to find things to complain about in the latter column.
Also, in this column he dug up his own reasons to be impressed with Rendezvous (unless he had a reviewer's guide that mentions stuff Apple hasn't brought up before; it could happen.)
That's why we have to take over and have _supported_ hardware and software - stuff we choose. If you can run your own stuff, great! Buy whatever you like, call us to get the server settings, and make our life easier.
Oh, how I'd like to work for a company with such an enlightened IT department. Besides mandating equipment, most IT departments of my acquaintance mandate software on both server and client, and prohibit (or obstruct) use of anything else, making it difficult for progficient users from selecting their own tools and novices from discovering what works best for them.
...after watching this cycle repeat itself over 25+ years, it comes down to this:
When users choose and buy their own software, things work. When IT departments assume control of the computers and the software acquisitions, things go downhill.
In the mid-70's, I worked in a Computer-Aided Design department that had been built on department-purchased minicomputers (PDP-8's and -11's) and was moving onto the corporate 3x0 mainframes for performance. The transition was a disaster, and we were saved by the availability of mid-size systems (Prime's and VAX's) the department could acquire and control itself.
In the early 80's, the availability of workstations (Apollo's and their ilk) created new opportunities in the computer-aided engineering space, driven by the demands of the departments doing the real work.
A few years later, people started to buy PC's (and the software available for them) on their own dime (and later on their department's budget) because they ran software that enabled them to solve problems and get their work done. Once PC's had established themselves on corporate desktops through the back door, the IT departments moved in and took over.
More importantly, the vendors of the software once selected by individual users (Lotus, in my personal experience) started to realize that they had to sell their product to IT managers, not end users, and that started to drive the further evolution of the products (to their detriment, IMHO).
The PDA market exploded when they were purchased by individuals, and that marketplace has stagnated since they became an "enterprise product" selected by IT departments.
Apple still sells the Mac to end users, and Linux was driven by the needs and motivations of individuals. This is where the real action is today, and I hope and trust that there will always be a corner of the computing business where real people decide what they need for themselves.
To me, NASA stands for everything that is good about America, and today, a little piece of that was taken away.
It may be too early to say whether NASA became less worthy of respect today; the real test will be in how they handle the investigation and what that investigation reveals.
After the Challenger disaster, NASA (and the industry behind it) suffered from two revelations: there was an infection of "get-there-itus" that prevented people from acknowleding obvious problems, and a reluctance to admit to that phenomenon as the facts emerged.
NASA could screw itself badly by trying to bury inconvenient facts, or it could set new standards for bureaucratic excellence (hopefully not a contradiction in terms) by striking a good balance between candor and caution in its investigations.
I am genuinely hopeful that they will get it right.
[And, for the record, I don't assume that NASA has anything to hide, although there are likely to be many allegations to that effect in the coming weeks...]
The orbital tracker works by displaying where the shuttle should be based on the description of its orbit; it is not a real time tracking system. RTFD.
Med school aphorism: when you hear hoof beats, think horses, not zebras.
Defined-benefit pensions have been in the process of disappearing for years; if you're working in IT (or anywhere else, for that matter), take charge of your own life and start looking to your 401k and/or IRA.
I expect to be working or playing at this stuff until retirement age, but I'll probably detach myself from the IT rat-race before then only because it's a rat-race, not because of my ability to contribute.
Writing software is rewarding; writing software for business sucks (after a while; 25+ years in my case).
But they can make it so massively complex that it is very difficult to implement interoperability with foreign tools, but that it is somehow much easier to implement with MS-centric tools.
Exactly right; and they don't have to make Excel or Word massively complex -- they already are.
XML is no more than an open-format serialization of the internal model maintained by application. Opening the format via XML makes it easier to parse the serialization, but it doesn't help reconstruct a valid model in another program, nor guarantee that you can modify the model (or create a new one), or write a syntactically correct model that is also semantically correct.
This is not really a consequence of Microsoft's obfuscation; it is really a limitation of XML (or, more properly, a problem that XML does not pretend to solve).
OTOH, I think Microsoft is over-representing how XML support "opens" their applications, and/or tacitly allowing the trade press to breathlessly over-represent it for them.
I was diagnosed with cancer a little over four years ago. Somehow, I managed to take a positive outlook on it. (If you'd asked me to predict my reaction beforehand, and if I'd answered honestly, I'd have predicted that I would have melted down.) I found that if I woke up in the morning committed to projecting a positive attitude, I actually started to feel it.
Where I do think it helped is getting through the discomfort and especially the chemo. I think it also made me more approachable by my friends and colleagues, and their willingness to talk and listen was a significant source of strength through that time.
Nonetheless, even as a new believer in the power of positive thinking, one of the most irritating phenomena I faced was the advice that my attitude was all-important, and the (perhaps unintended) implication that a bad outcome would be my own fault if I didn't smile.
Positive thinking is it's own reward, whether it's medically efficacious (sp?) or not. But one must be very careful about pressuring people to adopt the attitude and becoming part of the problem instead.
There's speed, and then there's performance
on
Is Mac OS X Slow?
·
· Score: 1
On my 192Mb 400MHz G3 iMac, OS X is decidedly more sluggish than OS 9 for similar things (opening Finder windows, for example), and my wife bugs me about this regularly.
However, OS X keeps on going under circumstances where OS 9 would have just plain refused to continue: load up AppleWorks, Word, PowerPooint, IE, Print Explosion, etc. and OS X will run (and thrash a little) where OS 9 would have just said no.
And it doesn't crash, of course. I had to remind my wife that she has never, not once, lost work to a crash since installing OS X.
In the 70's I worked in a college computer center equipped with an RCA Spectra 70 batch-oriented system. I was fixing a problem with one of the line printers (paper stacking) when I got a bad static shock from the printer cabinet, at which point the printer abruptly stopped printing.
I walked over to the operator's console to report the problem, and was interrupted by the console teletype printing a message (paraphrased):
Job 00371 has device LPT1 in silent death
While we were trying to figure that out, the console continued to print out messages every 30 seconds or so:
Job 00358 has device MTA0 in silent death
Job 00364 has device CDR0 in silent death
...and so on through all the peripherals. The center's systems programmer was called in, and he indicated that he had no idea what the messages meant. About this time the console printed the line:
Slashdot Mirror
Presumably they can do this to log who's running their (DRM-protected) applications, as well.
Most of the advice in the responses have been sound:
- (Try to) document the cost of the new request (in actual time and money, opportunity cost, risk, etc.)
- Make sure management and/or the client acknowledges the cost and signs on to the choices.
The second tier problems I have encountered are:
1) Cost projections are estimates, and (especially in development environments) subjective. Your cost estimates will be challenged, and there will always be somebody around willing to ingratiate themselves by offering a lower estimate. Whether they are misguided or mistaken (or right!) is not always clear, but managers and/or clients generally pick the most optimistic answer from each column.
2) There are always overhead costs that can't be projected exactly in MS Office: time lost to unexpected events (server crashes, illnesses, screwups, whatever). You can make an informed guess, but people will be suspicious of a "fudge factor" and will discount it.
At the end of the day, people will string together the most optimistic assumptions (often mutually exclusive) and ask you to commit to it.
This is what got NASA to where it is today.
[Sorry for the pessimism; I guess I read this too early in the morning; I'm still on my first cup of coffee.]
Surely you don't think that SCO is unique in this regard?
NASA's problem is a reflection of the institutional behavior I have seen at my last 4-1/2 employers (the least recent morphed into a pathological organization while I was there); it has become more important to appear to have a product or strategy (or quality) than to actually have it. Nothing Scott Adams hasn't been saying for years.
BTW, the mindset did not start within NASA. In the 60's, the mandate was to spend what was necessary to build the best solution that could be conceived; starting in the 70's, it was all about compromises.
It Would Be Nice if NASA could be given a mandate and execute on it in such a way to once again set an example on How It Should Be Done, but I think we ultimately need to fix our broader culture about the standards of how we conduct business.
How does one manage to screw up paste? Even with PowerPoint?
From the linked page: The mouse, introduced in 1984, ...
What happened in 1984 that qualifies as the "introduction" of the mouse? Surely not the Mac, preceded by the Lisa and Xerox. Or did IBM adopt mice in 1984 (seems a bit early) and erase prior history?
On the first point, suffice it to say I agree with those who point out that Apple (and even Windoze) will retain the bulk of their customers because of the relative ease of setup and configuration.
As to the second point, if Linux racks up numbers that good, much of it will be at the expense of Windoze market share. If Linux helps (re)establish a heterogeneous desktop computing market, especially if it does so by increasing popularity of *nix, it erodes one of the biggest objections to inclusion of Macs in the workplace.
Short version, in response to the complaint that the Mac has no right mouse button: the Mac has no wrong mouse button.
Given the recent record of "analysts" on Wall Street, has anyone checked the credentials of the analyst cited in the article to see if she has a stake in the outcome?
Two reasons (off the top of my head):
- Parasitic cost vs. benefit; such an escape system would consume a lot of weight and space and compromise every mission, against the chance that they MIGHT be needed.
- Effectiveness: they would only be useful in an emergency where the crew knew there was a problem and had enough time to get the shuttle into a configuration where they might work.
Why don't airliners carry an escape pod for every passenger?
1)The paranoia is NOT justified, look at the Sept 11th events, tons of people on cellphones on the planes with no problems.
That's the conclusion I would expect if Microsoft QA was making airline safety decisions. I have a lot of problems with the FAA, but thank goodness they're a wee bit more stringent than that.
Sigh. I'm dating myself again. OK, it's outdated; the Cold War is over, the telephone company isn't a monopoly, etc. But it wouldn't take a genius to adapt the story to a new monopolist and a new world (dis)order. And the President would still be a Texan...
...when it sold itself off to Sonic Blue, and they're still providing service, as they will probably continue to do under new owners.
It's bad because you can't pass an Excel document to another program for modification or update, and open it back up in Excel without loss of formatting (which was presumably important to you if you put it there).
And if Microsoft makes it possible to exchange "native" documents among .Net apps with full fidelity, then the XML standard "support" is just a fig leaf for vendor lock-in, analogous to overtly supporting Java while blending in proprietary extensions.
Doing Excel around "pure" XML plus something like CSS for formatting is possible, but only if you're willing to start from scratch and accept some compromises (in terms of fidelity of the conversion) that most Excel users would reject. If the world moves to open standards based document exchange, Excel will have to go the way of VisiCalc and 1-2-3. Don't count on Microsoft to volunteer.
Another terrible analogy is that the aggregate price of replacements for all the parts in your car is way more than the price of the car.
Finally, the introduction of the service presumably does not preclude the possibility of promotional pricing (i.e., a discount for an entire CD or other creatively packaged selections. Give the model a chance to work.
Also, in this column he dug up his own reasons to be impressed with Rendezvous (unless he had a reviewer's guide that mentions stuff Apple hasn't brought up before; it could happen.)
Oh, how I'd like to work for a company with such an enlightened IT department. Besides mandating equipment, most IT departments of my acquaintance mandate software on both server and client, and prohibit (or obstruct) use of anything else, making it difficult for progficient users from selecting their own tools and novices from discovering what works best for them.
...after watching this cycle repeat itself over 25+ years, it comes down to this:
When users choose and buy their own software, things work. When IT departments assume control of the computers and the software acquisitions, things go downhill.
In the mid-70's, I worked in a Computer-Aided Design department that had been built on department-purchased minicomputers (PDP-8's and -11's) and was moving onto the corporate 3x0 mainframes for performance. The transition was a disaster, and we were saved by the availability of mid-size systems (Prime's and VAX's) the department could acquire and control itself.
In the early 80's, the availability of workstations (Apollo's and their ilk) created new opportunities in the computer-aided engineering space, driven by the demands of the departments doing the real work.
A few years later, people started to buy PC's (and the software available for them) on their own dime (and later on their department's budget) because they ran software that enabled them to solve problems and get their work done. Once PC's had established themselves on corporate desktops through the back door, the IT departments moved in and took over.
More importantly, the vendors of the software once selected by individual users (Lotus, in my personal experience) started to realize that they had to sell their product to IT managers, not end users, and that started to drive the further evolution of the products (to their detriment, IMHO).
The PDA market exploded when they were purchased by individuals, and that marketplace has stagnated since they became an "enterprise product" selected by IT departments.
Apple still sells the Mac to end users, and Linux was driven by the needs and motivations of individuals. This is where the real action is today, and I hope and trust that there will always be a corner of the computing business where real people decide what they need for themselves.
To me, NASA stands for everything that is good about America, and today, a little piece of that was taken away.
It may be too early to say whether NASA became less worthy of respect today; the real test will be in how they handle the investigation and what that investigation reveals.
After the Challenger disaster, NASA (and the industry behind it) suffered from two revelations: there was an infection of "get-there-itus" that prevented people from acknowleding obvious problems, and a reluctance to admit to that phenomenon as the facts emerged.
NASA could screw itself badly by trying to bury inconvenient facts, or it could set new standards for bureaucratic excellence (hopefully not a contradiction in terms) by striking a good balance between candor and caution in its investigations.
I am genuinely hopeful that they will get it right.
[And, for the record, I don't assume that NASA has anything to hide, although there are likely to be many allegations to that effect in the coming weeks...]
Oh, please...
The orbital tracker works by displaying where the shuttle should be based on the description of its orbit; it is not a real time tracking system. RTFD.
Med school aphorism: when you hear hoof beats, think horses, not zebras.
I expect to be working or playing at this stuff until retirement age, but I'll probably detach myself from the IT rat-race before then only because it's a rat-race, not because of my ability to contribute.
Writing software is rewarding; writing software for business sucks (after a while; 25+ years in my case).
Exactly right; and they don't have to make Excel or Word massively complex -- they already are.
XML is no more than an open-format serialization of the internal model maintained by application. Opening the format via XML makes it easier to parse the serialization, but it doesn't help reconstruct a valid model in another program, nor guarantee that you can modify the model (or create a new one), or write a syntactically correct model that is also semantically correct.
This is not really a consequence of Microsoft's obfuscation; it is really a limitation of XML (or, more properly, a problem that XML does not pretend to solve).
OTOH, I think Microsoft is over-representing how XML support "opens" their applications, and/or tacitly allowing the trade press to breathlessly over-represent it for them.
I was diagnosed with cancer a little over four years ago. Somehow, I managed to take a positive outlook on it. (If you'd asked me to predict my reaction beforehand, and if I'd answered honestly, I'd have predicted that I would have melted down.) I found that if I woke up in the morning committed to projecting a positive attitude, I actually started to feel it.
Where I do think it helped is getting through the discomfort and especially the chemo. I think it also made me more approachable by my friends and colleagues, and their willingness to talk and listen was a significant source of strength through that time.
Nonetheless, even as a new believer in the power of positive thinking, one of the most irritating phenomena I faced was the advice that my attitude was all-important, and the (perhaps unintended) implication that a bad outcome would be my own fault if I didn't smile.
Positive thinking is it's own reward, whether it's medically efficacious (sp?) or not. But one must be very careful about pressuring people to adopt the attitude and becoming part of the problem instead.
On my 192Mb 400MHz G3 iMac, OS X is decidedly more sluggish than OS 9 for similar things (opening Finder windows, for example), and my wife bugs me about this regularly.
However, OS X keeps on going under circumstances where OS 9 would have just plain refused to continue: load up AppleWorks, Word, PowerPooint, IE, Print Explosion, etc. and OS X will run (and thrash a little) where OS 9 would have just said no.
And it doesn't crash, of course. I had to remind my wife that she has never, not once, lost work to a crash since installing OS X.
In the 70's I worked in a college computer center equipped with an RCA Spectra 70 batch-oriented system. I was fixing a problem with one of the line printers (paper stacking) when I got a bad static shock from the printer cabinet, at which point the printer abruptly stopped printing.
I walked over to the operator's console to report the problem, and was interrupted by the console teletype printing a message (paraphrased):
Job 00371 has device LPT1 in silent death
While we were trying to figure that out, the console continued to print out messages every 30 seconds or so:
Job 00358 has device MTA0 in silent death
Job 00364 has device CDR0 in silent death
Job *SYS* has device CPU0 in silent