A lot of contractors, especially government ones, have to spend their entire budget or face having it cut when the contract comes up for renewal. I've seen this stupid behaviour in the military and large companies. It can sometimes be a prestige issue since you raise your "importance" by controlling bigger projects and assets.
I've finally figured out what the problem is with getting good training approved:
Our work is paid under a one year renewable contract.
Lowest bidder gets the job.
Bid estimates are higher is they include traqining in the bid.
Therefore, there is no training budget. What little training we got was charged to overhead. That was, at least until our customer(government) started complaining about overhead charges.
We are stuck with whatever free seminars come around, what we're willing to pay for out of our own pockets, and mostly lame training given inhouse.
All that said though, I think training would be a good niche for User Groups.
I briefly attended the University Of Bahrain and from firsthand experience I can say the average student was at least three years beyond the average American HS student upon entering college. I'm not sure how representative these students were of the general populace since the students very well may have been the cream of the crop students among Gulf countries.
Unfortunatly I'm still stuck coding to the desires of managment ratherthan the customer. Going on two years of CMM mumbo-jumbo and we still have a moron middle-manager shooting from the hip when it comes to requirements. Not to mention that any attempt to guage user satisfaction or ask for user input is shot down.
I wonder if ATI smelled the blood in the water earlier this year? You can bet that PC manufacturers are taking a really close look at the health of NVidia now!
We should sue just about every software company for the crappy products they put out. When was th last time you were impressed with something or had it run bug-free? My PC has benn plenty fast for years now, but when will the software catch up?
For me it was KDE2. But I didn't pay for KDE. From my word processor to the OCR that came with my scanner, there is so much junk sortware it's depressing.
Two weeks ago I sat in a room full of US AirForce SysAdmins. Mostly they are a MS SQL Server shop. I mentioned MySQL and every SysAdmin, to the person, chuckled and cracked a smile. The manager turned to me and said, "We had one of those installed a few years ago."
Apparently, MySQL was a joke to them. Thats a pretty big institutional hurdle to jump.
From my own experiences MySQL does what it does very well. But lack of cascading updates/deletes and subselects are the big problems. SQL Server has plenty of its own quirks though(but you don't read about those on the side of the box).
90 minutes to Patch? Was it a known problem that some developers knew about but a design team decided not to implement? I find it hard to believe the fix was simply a matter of adding an IF statement, patching and testing.
I go to the movies a lot. I seldom pay to see sequels at the theater. Mostly because the suck. LOTR will be an exception. When it comes the ST:TNG having Will in the movie would have been a definite plus. It sounds like I'm in the minority here, but after Picard, Wesley Crusher was my favorite character. When he left the show ST:TNG went from "must see every week" to "if I happen to be around the TV on Saturday eveneng when they replay it". I think it was because his character was so intriguing. Like Q and Guinan(sp?) he had the potential for power and it was still up in the air which way he would go. But then again, I'm still waiting for #1's evil twin to reappear:)
"The GCC 3.2 release is now available, blah blah blah. The purpose of this release is to provide a stable blah blah blah releases. blah blah blah stabilize the C++ ABI; we believe blah blah blah are now stable. blah blah blah. Be awareblah blah blah GCC 3.2 will not interoperate blah blah blah GCC 3.1.1. blah blah blah"
A few years ago, when everything wasn't made of titanium, my friend had a set of titanium engagement rings made from titanium pipe stock by his uncle (who worked from a defense contractor).
The only problem was the only way he knew to prove to anyone it was titanium was to put it in a vice at work and let someone crank on it.
I wonder if Virginia Democratic Rep. Bobby Scott has beed putting the thumbscrews on ISP AOL(TimeWarner) to crack down of file sharers? Somehow I think not.
Anything SAP scares the hell out of me. SAP is like this big creeping monster swallowing up companies. Py previous employer decided to kill all legacy apps and switch to SAP. Up front thay make it sound like the most configuable set to integrated tools imaginable. Once the suckers buy into the hype its too late to back out. You spend more and more money tring to implement an unwieldly monster that isn't nearly as configurable as advetised. Up front you will have so much money and personnel commited to the change that there is no way to back out. Next you learn you must conform your business rules to the SAP rules. Last you learn the horrible, horrible truth: SAP OWNS YOUR COMPANY BECAUSE THEY OWN ALL YOUR DATA.
So what does MS do to solve the problem? Punish the users. Make the mail account smaller. Disable POP access. Post your user information to "affiliates". Nag you to death about your account being to big.
From what I can see, as far as human nature goes, you can't have on without the other.
If someone feels ownership toward somthing they generally show care and respect for it. Translate this into issues like broadcast frequencies and public lands and you see the direct correlation.
99.9% of the people feel no sense of ownership toward the radio waves so they don't react when greedy goverment employees do as the please with them.
A majority of people never see all the wonderful national parks WE own. Worse yet, the government places so many regulations on what citizens can do with public land that we form a "Owned By The Government mentality". So when the government cuts deals with private corporations to rape the land, only a handful of activists bother to complain.
And I'm not just talking about Federal property here. Where I live in Newport News Virginia is under attack from greedy bastards on the city council to build a huge shopping mall adjacent to our only public water resiviour. Some residents balked so the project was slowed. Not stopped, but slowed.
Try stealing someone's car or taking their land and you'll see the flipside of this hypothesis.
Oh, dear oh dear. Folks, there is an outside world out there and
that world uses computers to do REAL STUFF. One of the "real stuff"
things that computers do out there is to store data in files, both
on tape and on disk.
You go down to the courthouse and dig through a room of really old books. Last time I was there I talked with the librarian(?) and he mentioned that he was trying to figure out how to scan in all the documents so they wouln't have to be handled so much. That, he said, would have to be done out of his own pocket since the county didn't have the budget to do it.
If you ever get a half-day off from work you should take the ferry from Willimsburg to Surry. You can eat lunch at the Virginia Diner(be sure to eat some hush puppies) then walk across the street and look around the courthouse. Its kind of neat to read all the old legal papers.
I bought a piece of peopery in Surry County Virginia a few years ago. I had a hell of a time because the recorded deed goes back more than a hundred years and refers to chops in trees for markers and distances measured in chains.
Most mortgage companies wouln't touch it without a recent survey. I finally found a farm credit company that would give me the mortgage. I've had the road frontage surveyed but I still have to survey the other 60+acres. Researching the sale was quite an education.
I could go down to the city office and pull up three different aerial surveys of the area, but no land surveys. Reaally sad because the county taxes me on 40 acres and acording to the surveyer I used for the frontage, I probably have 80+ acres.
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A lot of contractors, especially government ones, have to spend their entire budget or face having it cut when the contract comes up for renewal. I've seen this stupid behaviour in the military and large companies. It can sometimes be a prestige issue since you raise your "importance" by controlling bigger projects and assets.
I've finally figured out what the problem is with getting good training approved:
Our work is paid under a one year renewable contract.
Lowest bidder gets the job.
Bid estimates are higher is they include traqining in the bid.
Therefore, there is no training budget. What little training we got was charged to overhead. That was, at least until our customer(government) started complaining about overhead charges.
We are stuck with whatever free seminars come around, what we're willing to pay for out of our own pockets, and mostly lame training given inhouse.
All that said though, I think training would be a good niche for User Groups.
It's called a bed. Every night I close my eyes and in a moment it is six hours later.
I briefly attended the University Of Bahrain and from firsthand experience I can say the average student was at least three years beyond the average American HS student upon entering college. I'm not sure how representative these students were of the general populace since the students very well may have been the cream of the crop students among Gulf countries.
Unfortunatly I'm still stuck coding to the desires of managment ratherthan the customer. Going on two years of CMM mumbo-jumbo and we still have a moron middle-manager shooting from the hip when it comes to requirements. Not to mention that any attempt to guage user satisfaction or ask for user input is shot down.
I wonder if ATI smelled the blood in the water earlier this year? You can bet that PC manufacturers are taking a really close look at the health of NVidia now!
We should sue just about every software company for the crappy products they put out. When was th last time you were impressed with something or had it run bug-free? My PC has benn plenty fast for years now, but when will the software catch up?
For me it was KDE2. But I didn't pay for KDE. From my word processor to the OCR that came with my scanner, there is so much junk sortware it's depressing.
Mozilla 1.0 came close.
Two weeks ago I sat in a room full of US AirForce SysAdmins. Mostly they are a MS SQL Server shop. I mentioned MySQL and every SysAdmin, to the person, chuckled and cracked a smile. The manager turned to me and said, "We had one of those installed a few years ago."
Apparently, MySQL was a joke to them. Thats a pretty big institutional hurdle to jump.
From my own experiences MySQL does what it does very well. But lack of cascading updates/deletes and subselects are the big problems. SQL Server has plenty of its own quirks though(but you don't read about those on the side of the box).
90 minutes to Patch? Was it a known problem that some developers knew about but a design team decided not to implement? I find it hard to believe the fix was simply a matter of adding an IF statement, patching and testing.
Are there any existsng GPL folder/drive encryption programs someone could use now? In Windows? With decent performance?
I go to the movies a lot. I seldom pay to see sequels at the theater. Mostly because the suck. LOTR will be an exception. When it comes the ST:TNG having Will in the movie would have been a definite plus. It sounds like I'm in the minority here, but after Picard, Wesley Crusher was my favorite character. When he left the show ST:TNG went from "must see every week" to "if I happen to be around the TV on Saturday eveneng when they replay it". I think it was because his character was so intriguing. Like Q and Guinan(sp?) he had the potential for power and it was still up in the air which way he would go. But then again, I'm still waiting for #1's evil twin to reappear:)
"The GCC 3.2 release is now available, blah blah blah. The purpose of this release is to provide a stable blah blah blah releases. blah blah blah stabilize the C++ ABI; we believe blah blah blah are now stable. blah blah blah. Be awareblah blah blah GCC 3.2 will not interoperate blah blah blah GCC 3.1.1. blah blah blah"
A few years ago, when everything wasn't made of titanium, my friend had a set of titanium engagement rings made from titanium pipe stock by his uncle (who worked from a defense contractor).
The only problem was the only way he knew to prove to anyone it was titanium was to put it in a vice at work and let someone crank on it.
****Hypnotize Women into Bed****
Fat Bald Ugly Insecure Broke?
Guys!
Did you know you can learn to hypnotize women into bed?
Come on, dude - you can't tell me you don't need a little extra edge
when it comes to scoring. It's FUN, and it will CHANGE YOUR LIFE!
--err, I betting the same people that will respond to your SPAM message are the easiest to convince. Once you have that group sold, the rest is easy.
I wonder if Virginia Democratic Rep. Bobby Scott has beed putting the thumbscrews on ISP AOL(TimeWarner) to crack down of file sharers? Somehow I think not.
Anything SAP scares the hell out of me. SAP is like this big creeping monster swallowing up companies. Py previous employer decided to kill all legacy apps and switch to SAP. Up front thay make it sound like the most configuable set to integrated tools imaginable. Once the suckers buy into the hype its too late to back out. You spend more and more money tring to implement an unwieldly monster that isn't nearly as configurable as advetised. Up front you will have so much money and personnel commited to the change that there is no way to back out. Next you learn you must conform your business rules to the SAP rules. Last you learn the horrible, horrible truth: SAP OWNS YOUR COMPANY BECAUSE THEY OWN ALL YOUR DATA.
So what does MS do to solve the problem? Punish the users. Make the mail account smaller. Disable POP access. Post your user information to "affiliates". Nag you to death about your account being to big.
From what I can see, as far as human nature goes, you can't have on without the other.
If someone feels ownership toward somthing they generally show care and respect for it. Translate this into issues like broadcast frequencies and public lands and you see the direct correlation.
99.9% of the people feel no sense of ownership toward the radio waves so they don't react when greedy goverment employees do as the please with them.
A majority of people never see all the wonderful national parks WE own. Worse yet, the government places so many regulations on what citizens can do with public land that we form a "Owned By The Government mentality". So when the government cuts deals with private corporations to rape the land, only a handful of activists bother to complain.
And I'm not just talking about Federal property here. Where I live in Newport News Virginia is under attack from greedy bastards on the city council to build a huge shopping mall adjacent to our only public water resiviour. Some residents balked so the project was slowed. Not stopped, but slowed.
Try stealing someone's car or taking their land and you'll see the flipside of this hypothesis.
That scene was absulutely painful. I could hardly believe that even novice actors wouln't have pointed out the horrible dialogue to the director.
Maybe Google should get some award for preservation of history? Imagine what kind of gems will turn up fifty or a hundred years from now.
on tape and on disk
You go down to the courthouse and dig through a room of really old books. Last time I was there I talked with the librarian(?) and he mentioned that he was trying to figure out how to scan in all the documents so they wouln't have to be handled so much. That, he said, would have to be done out of his own pocket since the county didn't have the budget to do it.
If you ever get a half-day off from work you should take the ferry from Willimsburg to Surry. You can eat lunch at the Virginia Diner(be sure to eat some hush puppies) then walk across the street and look around the courthouse. Its kind of neat to read all the old legal papers.
I'll be able to float to work in the morning? Or take big moonsteps? Cool!
I bought a piece of peopery in Surry County Virginia a few years ago. I had a hell of a time because the recorded deed goes back more than a hundred years and refers to chops in trees for markers and distances measured in chains.
Most mortgage companies wouln't touch it without a recent survey. I finally found a farm credit company that would give me the mortgage. I've had the road frontage surveyed but I still have to survey the other 60+acres. Researching the sale was quite an education.
I could go down to the city office and pull up three different aerial surveys of the area, but no land surveys. Reaally sad because the county taxes me on 40 acres and acording to the surveyer I used for the frontage, I probably have 80+ acres.