Situations like that (where you have to go through huge hoops to get a PO signed) are easily trumped by the level of management you are at. It sounds you are probably at the lower rungs of your organization.
If you like the organization you're in, then buttkiss or do whatever plan seems to work towards moving up a few rungs. That usually gets you the resources you need a bit faster.
You could always NOT use your laptop, and just let it sit as a doorstop if you have a desktop. Complain that it lacks memory and turn it back in as unacceptable. If you don't get it back fixed, then se la vie.
You can only create an I/T department that stifles, withholds and delays progress for so long before a change in senior management wipes them out. Very few organizations are immute. Just about anything can be outsourced or given to consultants.
I would remind those who aren't so mindful about the needs of your organization and are more concerned with protecting the environment that senior management may not see it that way and could very well outsource I/T functions in an attempt to speed up progress within the org.
- Go into consulting. Many times, organizations will blindly accept advice and deliverables from a consultant than from within their own I/T staff. If your organization has a preferred consulting group list, then call the head shop guys at the consulting firms, explain your situation and that you want to stop working for the company but come back as a consultant. Either way, you can work on software projects at the pace your client wants and you have less interest in seeing them succeed/fail. If you run into a BOFH I/T shop when you're in consulting, you can just document this and then explain that your project is going redline because of it (missed deadlines, etc). Usually the consulting fees are a good incentive for management to quickly fix the problem.
- Battle of the White Papers. I had to do this one as a FTE working for a rather large insurance company. The I/T department or architects would say NO to something. In fact, this same company said NO to formatting IBM MVS VSAM datasets as XML. "We'll wait til version 2 comes out" I was told. I had to do some research to show how project managers at NASA, Lockheed, Progressive and a few other competitors were already using XML as a medium for communicating data between disparate systems, then showed the ROI in saved resources on the enterprise project I was on. Instead of sending this white paper over to the architects to get their input, I sent it straight to senior management, who then went back to the architects for further explanation. Two more rounds of this and they were finally trumped. You literally won your arguments at this company by who had the highest stack of white papers (they were never read).
- Let Projects Fail. Dare I say it? While you are waiting for requests to be completed by the I/T department, document when they were sent and how long they are taking to act. Report your findings and PERSONALLY go with your project manager to senior management. If nothing is still done, then just let the projects fail. It only takes ONE pet project from senior management to be seriously delayed before someone puts the grease on that wheel. Besides, it's not your fault, it's the company's. They might not see it that way, but you have documentation to back you up. Meanwhile, I would run over to dice.com and look for a smaller, more agile organization to work for.
- Go Political (only pull this move after you try Let Projects Fail). At some very large organizations during the Change of Century chaos, many project managers had cart blanche authority to create I/T "fiefdoms" within the larger I/T organization. At the same insurance company I used to work for, a seperate mainframe sysplex was setup just for this project and programmers had their own development playground, testbeds, networks and admins. They completely bypassed the larger I/T beuracracy. You can attempt to do this if the I/T department is seriously thwarting most of your projects as a whole. Be prepared to anger and upset the I/T guys as they will stop what their doing to defend their turf. Just be clear, concise, document (DOCUMENTATION IS IMPORTANT) the I/T staff's shortcomings and give solutions to the problem. Make sure you emphasize that your goals are completely in line with the company's. Don't leaving them thinking anything but. If you pull this off successfully, the BOFH I/T staff will look like bumbling imbeciles.
Above all, no matter what strategy you try, don't get emotional. Just present evidence, be convincing, and alingn yourself and your projects to that of the company's. If the I/T staff is withholding resources from you, then illustrate how this is damaging user productivity and stifling innovation within the company. Ask for a balance. After all, you have to get your work done, too.
This is a trend that comes and goes with time. Everyone is too old to remember the days of NYC and Tammany Hall, where almost every aspect of city government was political, right down to was going to get the job of being a garbage man.
In fact, most municipalities have inherited political structure from the officials down to the paper pushers at all levels of government. Only when free-flowing exchanges of money happen (as in the case of Philadelphia) does the Federal government get involved and start prosecuting.
A Linux client that has decent support for webcams (Video Over Linux) support!
I ran modprobe for my webcam kernel module, downloaded the tarball, ran the Tcl script, and it picked up the fact I had VOL and the driver woke up in a second.
I don't know how Oracle could possibly "get you" if you published benchmarks of your APPLICATION when using each RDBMS, as long as you are careful not to go into too much detail about your database implementation.
As long as you talk about app performance and steathily avoid flogging Oracle, then you should be O.K.
Launching the MSXML parser in COM with the tag and/or using jscript/vbscript on the page was the equivalent of doing the same thing as playing with an APPLET with Javascript.
And yes, you could back in the IE4 days get into the data within the applet using javascript (applet was coded to hit a service on the web server), update the data and use it as a "hole" in the page to get back to the server without refreshing _BEFORE_ MSXML made it easier. I did use both techniques, since applets didn't have XML DOM parsing in the foundation classes, using string split() and touching the applet's methods was a bummer.
The growth bubble in India has a few years to go before it becomes almost as expensive as Eastern Europeans.
Indonesia is probanly the next company to see a surge in outsourcing dollars, although it lacks that vast educational resources India has, it has workers that are willing to work for HALF as much as Indians will and there is an educated population there willing to do this work. The only hurdles they have to overcome is geographic access and improving their telecom network (GB pushed India into Westernization long ago).
Mexico is already losing factory work to Indonesia and other cheaper south Asian nations... jobs that 10 years ago seemed extremely cheap when the jobs fled the US to Mexico. Mexicans were willing to work for just 2-5 dollars an hour vd $10 in the US... now you can get someone who will work for $0.50 an hour.
It's going to be interesting to see where all these bottom denominators go.
After a good medium with DRM protection comes in, someone will write a Windows driver to take the digitized sound that's playing and redirect the stream to a file and reformat it as unprotected MP3 (you can already do this in UNIX easily).
Only a matter of time.
Someone want to pick up the Windows DDK and start work on this early?
It's not limited to France. Most of continental Europe is this way. Greeks cannot stand Armenians and Turks, Italians with the Germans although there are hordes of tourists from both countries visiting each other, Portugal with Angloans, Spain with the Islamic and the Basque.
If you want to see some people who REALLY hate Muslims, you can always visit Serbia; at one point in the 90s I figured genocide would have made a comeback.
Server Error in '/' Application. Runtime Error Description: An application error occurred on the server. The current custom error settings for this application prevent the details of the application error from being viewed remotely (for security reasons). It could, however, be viewed by browsers running on the local server machine.
Details: To enable the details of this specific error message to be viewable on remote machines, please create a tag within a "web.config" configuration file located in the root directory of the current web application. This tag should then have its "mode" attribute set to "Off".
Doubtful. There's not that many choices in Mexico except the PAN and the PRI. The PAN party has been historically week since the Revolution and probably will always will be. Mexico has a very skeptical culture and is very resistant to political change since the days of dictator after dictator.
The fact that PAN managed to snag the presidency astounded everybody. Look for the PRI to win back that seat in the next election.
SBC makes SATX the Telecom capital o'the World?
on
Ma Bell is Back
·
· Score: 1
San Antonio already has all of its skyscrapers with the SBC logo hanging off them, you can even see faint shadows of the 70's-era Bell logos still on them. Wonder if they'll go back to the junkyards to see if they can find all their old insignia and put them back on all their skyscrapers.
People overlook San Antonio a lot, but it's a big call-center HQ industry there, and with the AT&T purchase it makes it the biggest telecom city along with Clear Channel which is also HQ'd there, the biggest radio op. SAT had fiber and broadband connections long before many other cities had them.
Anyone familiar with Rackspace? Also a SAT company.
Having using Slackware since its first release on a computer that dual booted OS/2, I can say for certain Slackware has staying power. DOS 6 was easy to install, Slack is too.
Slack 10.2 makes it tons easier to boot from CD and even get the network up before you even boot into your installed OS, to be able to download any patches or setup NFS you need or copy special conf files down.
If you want to do a complex install like I have (setting up software RAID on a 2.6 kernel running an AMD64-Dualcore with a Shuttle ST20G5), you can setup the raid from the boot CD, install everything, and patch your/etc files in vi right there before you boot into Linux.
Without Slackware, I probably would have never been interested in Linux at all.
to justify suing Microsoft for more money. After all, they are responsible for a lot of bad code out there today thanks to that monstrosit... er high level language (VB).
Other than some parts of IIS, the TabletPC, Microsoft Bob and IntelliSense and that rolly thing on those IntelliMice, what else is there?
COM - rip off of IBM's SOM (System Object Model)
Money - there were several DOS based checkbook programs for DOS at the time Money was released
Internet Explorer - wonder why your browser returns "Mozilla?" and has a blub in help->about you see something about "developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign."
Outlook - email clients not much of an innovation these days
Windows NT - this was originally going to be OS/2 3.0, until the API was ripped out and replaced with the Windows API at the last minute (however the kernels between NT3 and OS/2 2.x were amazingly similar)
Explorer - after Program Manager bombed, surprisingly Microsoft created something that felt and acted quite a bit like OS/2's Presentation Manager
FrontPage - see those _vti folders in IIS? That stands for Vermeer Technologies, Inc.
In fact, if you look at the long history of Microsoft products, you really don't see that much grand innovation anywhere. In fact, the big moneymakers at Microsoft AREN'T the items they've dreamed up completely by themselves and rightly-so.
Why spend a lot of capital to invent something that probably won't be successful, when you can buy a small fry that obviously does have lots of potential and go for the patents and quash the competitition with your marketing?
If you have worked with Tier II of the HIPAA laws that govern EDI transaction processing, you can quickly discover how complex and involved open standards can be. It took YEARS to get from 5 different formats for electonic medical billing transactions down to two (ANSIX12 and NCPDP).
Now...
Who is going to set the standards and who will pay to keep them working on them?
Who is going to make sure the standards support new technology, new ways of doing things?
Who keeps tabs on the standard committies to make sure they are looking out for the users and not for special corporate interests?
Open standards are a LOT of work if everyone drags their heels. Aren't most standards industry-derived, anyway?
Slashdot Mirror
Situations like that (where you have to go through huge hoops to get a PO signed) are easily trumped by the level of management you are at. It sounds you are probably at the lower rungs of your organization.
If you like the organization you're in, then buttkiss or do whatever plan seems to work towards moving up a few rungs. That usually gets you the resources you need a bit faster.
You could always NOT use your laptop, and just let it sit as a doorstop if you have a desktop. Complain that it lacks memory and turn it back in as unacceptable. If you don't get it back fixed, then se la vie.
You can only create an I/T department that stifles, withholds and delays progress for so long before a change in senior management wipes them out. Very few organizations are immute. Just about anything can be outsourced or given to consultants.
I would remind those who aren't so mindful about the needs of your organization and are more concerned with protecting the environment that senior management may not see it that way and could very well outsource I/T functions in an attempt to speed up progress within the org.
These are some known workarounds:
- Go into consulting. Many times, organizations will blindly accept advice and deliverables from a consultant than from within their own I/T staff. If your organization has a preferred consulting group list, then call the head shop guys at the consulting firms, explain your situation and that you want to stop working for the company but come back as a consultant. Either way, you can work on software projects at the pace your client wants and you have less interest in seeing them succeed/fail. If you run into a BOFH I/T shop when you're in consulting, you can just document this and then explain that your project is going redline because of it (missed deadlines, etc). Usually the consulting fees are a good incentive for management to quickly fix the problem.
- Battle of the White Papers. I had to do this one as a FTE working for a rather large insurance company. The I/T department or architects would say NO to something. In fact, this same company said NO to formatting IBM MVS VSAM datasets as XML. "We'll wait til version 2 comes out" I was told. I had to do some research to show how project managers at NASA, Lockheed, Progressive and a few other competitors were already using XML as a medium for communicating data between disparate systems, then showed the ROI in saved resources on the enterprise project I was on. Instead of sending this white paper over to the architects to get their input, I sent it straight to senior management, who then went back to the architects for further explanation. Two more rounds of this and they were finally trumped. You literally won your arguments at this company by who had the highest stack of white papers (they were never read).
- Let Projects Fail. Dare I say it? While you are waiting for requests to be completed by the I/T department, document when they were sent and how long they are taking to act. Report your findings and PERSONALLY go with your project manager to senior management. If nothing is still done, then just let the projects fail. It only takes ONE pet project from senior management to be seriously delayed before someone puts the grease on that wheel. Besides, it's not your fault, it's the company's. They might not see it that way, but you have documentation to back you up. Meanwhile, I would run over to dice.com and look for a smaller, more agile organization to work for.
- Go Political (only pull this move after you try Let Projects Fail). At some very large organizations during the Change of Century chaos, many project managers had cart blanche authority to create I/T "fiefdoms" within the larger I/T organization. At the same insurance company I used to work for, a seperate mainframe sysplex was setup just for this project and programmers had their own development playground, testbeds, networks and admins. They completely bypassed the larger I/T beuracracy. You can attempt to do this if the I/T department is seriously thwarting most of your projects as a whole. Be prepared to anger and upset the I/T guys as they will stop what their doing to defend their turf. Just be clear, concise, document (DOCUMENTATION IS IMPORTANT) the I/T staff's shortcomings and give solutions to the problem. Make sure you emphasize that your goals are completely in line with the company's. Don't leaving them thinking anything but. If you pull this off successfully, the BOFH I/T staff will look like bumbling imbeciles.
Above all, no matter what strategy you try, don't get emotional. Just present evidence, be convincing, and alingn yourself and your projects to that of the company's. If the I/T staff is withholding resources from you, then illustrate how this is damaging user productivity and stifling innovation within the company. Ask for a balance. After all, you have to get your work done, too.
This is a trend that comes and goes with time. Everyone is too old to remember the days of NYC and Tammany Hall, where almost every aspect of city government was political, right down to was going to get the job of being a garbage man.
In fact, most municipalities have inherited political structure from the officials down to the paper pushers at all levels of government. Only when free-flowing exchanges of money happen (as in the case of Philadelphia) does the Federal government get involved and start prosecuting.
At least you can go to a porn site when the computer comes back up and masturbate. That relieves stress.
The Logitech QuickCam Chat works on Linux, and works great with aMSN.
Here's the QuickCam Chat
And, the kernel module (2.4/2.6) for it: http://mxhaard.free.fr/download.html
Make sure you recompile ('make menuconfig') the kernel for Video On Linux support.
After you compile the kernel module for your box, just modprobe it in before you start the webcam feature on aMSN.
A Linux client that has decent support for webcams (Video Over Linux) support!
I ran modprobe for my webcam kernel module, downloaded the tarball, ran the Tcl script, and it picked up the fact I had VOL and the driver woke up in a second.
Well done!
I don't know how Oracle could possibly "get you" if you published benchmarks of your APPLICATION when using each RDBMS, as long as you are careful not to go into too much detail about your database implementation.
As long as you talk about app performance and steathily avoid flogging Oracle, then you should be O.K.
...than the original IBM Model-M clicky keyboard. It is the keyboard I make the fewest typos with.
I am going to counter that a bit... some.
Launching the MSXML parser in COM with the tag and/or using jscript/vbscript on the page was the equivalent of doing the same thing as playing with an APPLET with Javascript.
And yes, you could back in the IE4 days get into the data within the applet using javascript (applet was coded to hit a service on the web server), update the data and use it as a "hole" in the page to get back to the server without refreshing _BEFORE_ MSXML made it easier. I did use both techniques, since applets didn't have XML DOM parsing in the foundation classes, using string split() and touching the applet's methods was a bummer.
The growth bubble in India has a few years to go before it becomes almost as expensive as Eastern Europeans.
Indonesia is probanly the next company to see a surge in outsourcing dollars, although it lacks that vast educational resources India has, it has workers that are willing to work for HALF as much as Indians will and there is an educated population there willing to do this work. The only hurdles they have to overcome is geographic access and improving their telecom network (GB pushed India into Westernization long ago).
Mexico is already losing factory work to Indonesia and other cheaper south Asian nations... jobs that 10 years ago seemed extremely cheap when the jobs fled the US to Mexico. Mexicans were willing to work for just 2-5 dollars an hour vd $10 in the US... now you can get someone who will work for $0.50 an hour.
It's going to be interesting to see where all these bottom denominators go.
After a good medium with DRM protection comes in, someone will write a Windows driver to take the digitized sound that's playing and redirect the stream to a file and reformat it as unprotected MP3 (you can already do this in UNIX easily).
Only a matter of time.
Someone want to pick up the Windows DDK and start work on this early?
So, basically... we're going back to the bad old days of b-tree+ISAM datasets. They are fast, but they're also a bitch.
I'm very curious how XQuery+SQL aggregates are going to be handled. As intuitively as SELECT SUM(blahblah) FROM foo?
My guess would be no.
Time to crack open the "--- For Dummies" books when they hit the stores. Gonna have to learn how to query data all over again.
Legal services are being outsourced now, and Wipro and Tata already have PM's ready to work on projects on-site for you.
PMI will get you better pay today, but it does NOT guarantee job security. I've seen PMs hired and let go in droves just like programmers.
It's not limited to France. Most of continental Europe is this way. Greeks cannot stand Armenians and Turks, Italians with the Germans although there are hordes of tourists from both countries visiting each other, Portugal with Angloans, Spain with the Islamic and the Basque.
If you want to see some people who REALLY hate Muslims, you can always visit Serbia; at one point in the 90s I figured genocide would have made a comeback.
Cosmology, science?
If Dionne Warwick and her Psychic Friends were so in-tune with cosmology, didn't they see their financial collapse coming?
Heh.
Server Error in '/' Application.
Runtime Error
Description: An application error occurred on the server. The current custom error settings for this application prevent the details of the application error from being viewed remotely (for security reasons). It could, however, be viewed by browsers running on the local server machine.
Details: To enable the details of this specific error message to be viewable on remote machines, please create a tag within a "web.config" configuration file located in the root directory of the current web application. This tag should then have its "mode" attribute set to "Off".
Doubtful. There's not that many choices in Mexico except the PAN and the PRI. The PAN party has been historically week since the Revolution and probably will always will be. Mexico has a very skeptical culture and is very resistant to political change since the days of dictator after dictator.
The fact that PAN managed to snag the presidency astounded everybody. Look for the PRI to win back that seat in the next election.
San Antonio already has all of its skyscrapers with the SBC logo hanging off them, you can even see faint shadows of the 70's-era Bell logos still on them. Wonder if they'll go back to the junkyards to see if they can find all their old insignia and put them back on all their skyscrapers.
People overlook San Antonio a lot, but it's a big call-center HQ industry there, and with the AT&T purchase it makes it the biggest telecom city along with Clear Channel which is also HQ'd there, the biggest radio op. SAT had fiber and broadband connections long before many other cities had them.
Anyone familiar with Rackspace? Also a SAT company.
Having using Slackware since its first release on a computer that dual booted OS/2, I can say for certain Slackware has staying power. DOS 6 was easy to install, Slack is too.
/etc files in vi right there before you boot into Linux.
Slack 10.2 makes it tons easier to boot from CD and even get the network up before you even boot into your installed OS, to be able to download any patches or setup NFS you need or copy special conf files down.
If you want to do a complex install like I have (setting up software RAID on a 2.6 kernel running an AMD64-Dualcore with a Shuttle ST20G5), you can setup the raid from the boot CD, install everything, and patch your
Without Slackware, I probably would have never been interested in Linux at all.
to justify suing Microsoft for more money. After all, they are responsible for a lot of bad code out there today thanks to that monstrosit... er high level language (VB).
Other than some parts of IIS, the TabletPC, Microsoft Bob and IntelliSense and that rolly thing on those IntelliMice, what else is there?
COM - rip off of IBM's SOM (System Object Model)
Money - there were several DOS based checkbook programs for DOS at the time Money was released
Internet Explorer - wonder why your browser returns "Mozilla?" and has a blub in help->about you see something about "developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign."
Outlook - email clients not much of an innovation these days
Windows NT - this was originally going to be OS/2 3.0, until the API was ripped out and replaced with the Windows API at the last minute (however the kernels between NT3 and OS/2 2.x were amazingly similar)
Explorer - after Program Manager bombed, surprisingly Microsoft created something that felt and acted quite a bit like OS/2's Presentation Manager
Word - go see Xerox
Excel - go see VisiCalc
SQL Server - we all know that was Sybase
WindowsCE - *sigh* Palm and countless others
BizTalk - see Gentran
FrontPage - see those _vti folders in IIS? That stands for Vermeer Technologies, Inc.
In fact, if you look at the long history of Microsoft products, you really don't see that much grand innovation anywhere. In fact, the big moneymakers at Microsoft AREN'T the items they've dreamed up completely by themselves and rightly-so.
Why spend a lot of capital to invent something that probably won't be successful, when you can buy a small fry that obviously does have lots of potential and go for the patents and quash the competitition with your marketing?
It's America. What's wrong with it?
it's not fast enough to serve up web pages for their performance stats (/.'d)
If you have worked with Tier II of the HIPAA laws that govern EDI transaction processing, you can quickly discover how complex and involved open standards can be. It took YEARS to get from 5 different formats for electonic medical billing transactions down to two (ANSIX12 and NCPDP).
Now...
Who is going to set the standards and who will pay to keep them working on them?
Who is going to make sure the standards support new technology, new ways of doing things?
Who keeps tabs on the standard committies to make sure they are looking out for the users and not for special corporate interests?
Open standards are a LOT of work if everyone drags their heels. Aren't most standards industry-derived, anyway?
They help find the Indian programmers who are at least capable of *reading* technical English.