Glad to see you got modded up. This guy is spot on. Smart Grid work has been primarily focused on operations (with planning a distant second), and now people are just beginning to realize that if you have two way communications below the aggregator level then that's a lot of data that's going to be coming in, and we'd better make sure we have some standards around how it's structured. This is also becoming big news in cyber-security and reliability circles (e.g. NERC).
You've made all the points I would make except for one. There's the economic concept of comparative advantage. Basically...how good are you at other tasks? What are you not doing while you're building these PCs? Not building a new file server cluster? Not updating the firmware on your SAN?
Now, who does get to do those tasks? Are they as good at it as you?
The point is - yes, you can build computers. But is it the best use of your time? Forget if it's fun (like for the parent) - what would your employer say is the best use of your time? When figuring this out, don't forget that your hourly rate is only a part of what your employer pays. If you're making $40 an hour, the true cost to your employer is closer to $70 or $80 for an hour of your time.
Ahem - "surely people with the smallest amount of common sense don't use Google more than they can help because of fears of how much data is being gathered by Google". I contend that's just as legitimate/silly an issue.
For those with experience in each, what argument could be made in favor of Plone to managers interested in pragmatism rather than idealism?
If the questioner doesn't actually already have some compelling arguments in favor of this particular solution, then he is making his choice based on idealism instead of pragmatism.
Do an honest evaluation based on criteria that are important to your organization (including upfront cost, ongoing support, etc) and see what wins. Use a scoring spreadsheet or a decision making tool. You may decide that "open source vs. closed source" counts for 5% of your overall evaluation grade. Adherence to functional requirements may count for another 30%. NFR a further 15%. Whatever. That will produce your compelling arguments in favor of the better tool, and in an open, honest, and transparent manner.
Something is either unique or it isn't. You cannot say that something is quite unique, very unique, totally unique etc.
Grammar police alert pedantic alert: of course you can say this. I think it's even grammatically correct. It would be more accurate in stating this is semantically incorrect, and perhaps that you should not say this.
Now, let us by all means return to the continuing debate...
I'd be much more impressed by your braggadocio if you could point to a post you made predicting this just after the Volt was announced...you know, not with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight...
Ah, I get it - I finally clicked on the first link, which goes straight to...an article written by one Mr. Roblimo. That article has a few more links (actually, apart from that one, the only other links are to Atlassian and Bitbucket). If I were a cynical type of chap, I'd suggest he's trying to pump up traffic to his page on this website and being too lazy to do it well.
No kidding. I am not one who usually comments on article submissions or the quality of the summary - I just ignore articles if I'm not interested in them - but this summary would (hopefully) be marked as troll if it was read as a comment. Given that something this rubbishy is posted by a/. editor, it's driving me to read/. less and less these days. Rationale - if this tripe is what makes it on to the front page, and from an editor, then my assurance of the quality of what's posted and what's left out is way down. What other value does/. have for me?
This has BAD ENDING written all over it, mark my words. Seriously, haven't you people learned ANYTHING??
Given that the average geek / Slashdot reader is falling over themselves to do almost exactly the same for Google, an entity that has demonstrated time and time again they have the ability and desire to be mining that data and already are......I think the answer is "not a bit".
I don't know that finger pointing is necessarily healthy - that tends to suggest CYA and childish blame games. But on a technical IT focused web site, one might suppose that a lessons learned exercise on the root cause of the failure of a massive website would be of interest and hopefully even an educational experience.
I suppose if I were an angst-ridden bitter friendless teenager I may have found it amusing too. Luckily, I'm an adult. (How sad that this comment is currently marked insightful.)
And - really? Genuine panic? I think that says more about the specific subset of Facebook users within your anecdote set than anything else. Or do you also extrapolate out from the frequent racist troll comments on Slashdot?
I don't know why a (probably hypothetical) question is modded insightful - flamebait may be more appropriate.
Anyway (and I know I'm feeding a troll, especialy given your other comments, but...) the answer is yes. Yes, you can. We have MS Word documents that are several thousand pages in length, including formulas, maps, charts, etc. No problem.
P.S. I can't let this go, because in a former life I was involved in DTP - your repeated insistence further up about Word being page layout software and not word processing software is just foolish. Either you're deliberately trying to pick an argument or you have no clue about what packages like PageMaker (which I was using when it was Aldus PageMaker) really do. Grow up.
Seconded. If you read through my comment history, you'll see I've said in the past why I prefer Yahoo e-mail to GMail. My homepage is my customized "My Yahoo". I've been using Yahoo for longer than Google's been in existence, and I like it.
Plus, as other people have said, Google collects a lot of information. I'm not going to ascribe nefarious purposes...but I am going to use different e-mail, search, and mapping software. (Mainly because I happen to like those different e-mail and search apps better than Google. I really like Google Maps...but it constantly hangs and crashes for me. Bye-bye, Google Maps.)
{ Wonders: is it narcissistic to opine "this thing can not be useful because I personally don't see any importance or use for it"? }
Why is it that Slashdot users so frequently feel the need to sneer at people who do something outside of the typical/. realm? Recently, Facebook has:
informed me an old friend of mine living in New Zealand has won his second science fiction writing award. I care about that;
enabled my cousin in England to see I was online and given us the tool to have a chat and catch up with each other;
given me a quick way to check up on another old friend in New Zealand and make sure he was safe after the earthquake a few days ago;
helped me keep up to date with the progress of a sick friend in Italy;
been an easy way for me to get information and diagnose what's wrong with a friend's laptop. She lives in Louisiana.
You could point out that there are other ways to do all of that, but you'd be missing the point. Facebook is a great central portal. I have friends and family all over the world, and I don't even know half their e-mail addresses now. I don't need to. I can link up with them on Facebook.
If you have an equally effective way to keep in contact with people who are important to you, well, super. Facebook is a simple and effective way for me to keep up with people who are important to me.
And you know what? For other people, it might just be that it's fun. Some people have neither the time nor inclination to play an MMORPG, but find Farmville a relaxing diversion. What's wrong with that? Farmville bores you to tears? Okay, fine, ignore it. Isn't that one of the mantras of Slashdot - the freedom of choice is what matters? It is not important whether you use Firefox or Opera or Internet Explorer - it is important that you have the choice.
I still like using the phone and be in person when I talk to my friends.
So do I, but there's no denying it gets a wee bit expensive to sustain when my family are spread across the planet. Hey, how about that...a social networking site that facilitates me communicating with people who are important to me that are thousands of miles away. Neat thing, this Internet...
Really? Huh. Wish I could introduce you to one of my co-workers and recent MBA classmate - we went through the same course together. He happens to have a Master's in Engineering from one of the top engineering schools in the country and several years of work experience in Electrical Engineering working on problems which he gets right or else 50 million people lose power. No, I'm not making that number up.
Never mind - enjoy your cynical little private and inaccurate anecdotal world view. Judging by the comments here, there are plenty of willing sheep to bolster your self confidence in the rightness of such a view.
However in the US the majority of MBA students come straight from their first degree.
Where do you get this from? The MBA programs I've checked will give a class profile, and usually their students are listed as being in their late 20s or in their 30s, or as having five or six years of work experience.
(For reference, this is in Pennsylvania, so I'm talking about schools like Arcadia, Penn State at Great Valley, Villanova, etc.)
Having just completed my MBA, the average age in my class was 28, I think from memory. I estimate the youngest person in the class had four or five years of work experience.
For what it's worth, I have a purely technical background (my undergraduate degree is in Computer Science). I decided to go for an MBA because I heard time and time again that upper management knew my technical skills were superior, and I wanted to develop my understanding of business processes so I could be more effective in liaising between ITS and the business. Guess what - it worked. Our business is extremely technical - more than half our employees have engineering degrees. But there is a hell of a lot of our business that I understand better now that I know how to read a balance sheet, or what is involved in financial risk management.
Good, perhaps you can help me out. My old computer died, so I had to install on a new computer.
I plugged in my wife's iPod, and it synched up the tunes she'd bought from their store, but not anything we'd ripped from CD. How do I do that?
How do I deactivate the old computer so it doesn't take up one of the five "computer licenses" Apple allows me?
These were the main two headaches, but there are heaps more.
Honestly...I read comments waxing lyrical about how easy and intuitive it is, and I wonder what I'm missing. Every single time I try and use iTunes, it ends up a frustrating and painful experience, because I can't figure out how to do what I want without going to the help forums. This is not how software should be, especially from Apple.
Slashdot Mirror
Glad to see you got modded up. This guy is spot on. Smart Grid work has been primarily focused on operations (with planning a distant second), and now people are just beginning to realize that if you have two way communications below the aggregator level then that's a lot of data that's going to be coming in, and we'd better make sure we have some standards around how it's structured. This is also becoming big news in cyber-security and reliability circles (e.g. NERC).
You're completely right, and thanks for adding this clarification. If you want to get a bit more of an idea of what is involved, start looking here.
Same bizarro world where you're not considering how long it takes to build the actual computers, which is also part of the question?
You've made all the points I would make except for one. There's the economic concept of comparative advantage. Basically...how good are you at other tasks? What are you not doing while you're building these PCs? Not building a new file server cluster? Not updating the firmware on your SAN?
Now, who does get to do those tasks? Are they as good at it as you?
The point is - yes, you can build computers. But is it the best use of your time? Forget if it's fun (like for the parent) - what would your employer say is the best use of your time? When figuring this out, don't forget that your hourly rate is only a part of what your employer pays. If you're making $40 an hour, the true cost to your employer is closer to $70 or $80 for an hour of your time.
Bing is utter crap.
Why? Seems to work pretty well for me.
Ahem - "surely people with the smallest amount of common sense don't use Google more than they can help because of fears of how much data is being gathered by Google". I contend that's just as legitimate/silly an issue.
Hear hear!
For those with experience in each, what argument could be made in favor of Plone to managers interested in pragmatism rather than idealism?
If the questioner doesn't actually already have some compelling arguments in favor of this particular solution, then he is making his choice based on idealism instead of pragmatism.
Do an honest evaluation based on criteria that are important to your organization (including upfront cost, ongoing support, etc) and see what wins. Use a scoring spreadsheet or a decision making tool. You may decide that "open source vs. closed source" counts for 5% of your overall evaluation grade. Adherence to functional requirements may count for another 30%. NFR a further 15%. Whatever. That will produce your compelling arguments in favor of the better tool, and in an open, honest, and transparent manner.
Something is either unique or it isn't. You cannot say that something is quite unique, very unique, totally unique etc.
Grammar police alert pedantic alert: of course you can say this. I think it's even grammatically correct. It would be more accurate in stating this is semantically incorrect, and perhaps that you should not say this.
Now, let us by all means return to the continuing debate...
I'd be much more impressed by your braggadocio if you could point to a post you made predicting this just after the Volt was announced...you know, not with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight...
Ah, I get it - I finally clicked on the first link, which goes straight to...an article written by one Mr. Roblimo. That article has a few more links (actually, apart from that one, the only other links are to Atlassian and Bitbucket). If I were a cynical type of chap, I'd suggest he's trying to pump up traffic to his page on this website and being too lazy to do it well.
No kidding. I am not one who usually comments on article submissions or the quality of the summary - I just ignore articles if I'm not interested in them - but this summary would (hopefully) be marked as troll if it was read as a comment. Given that something this rubbishy is posted by a /. editor, it's driving me to read /. less and less these days. Rationale - if this tripe is what makes it on to the front page, and from an editor, then my assurance of the quality of what's posted and what's left out is way down. What other value does /. have for me?
Helps if you spell it correctly - it's Prineville without a "c" and with an "n". From Bing maps, it's about 150 miles south-east of Portland.
This has BAD ENDING written all over it, mark my words. Seriously, haven't you people learned ANYTHING??
Given that the average geek / Slashdot reader is falling over themselves to do almost exactly the same for Google, an entity that has demonstrated time and time again they have the ability and desire to be mining that data and already are... ...I think the answer is "not a bit".
So is Slashdot.
I don't know that finger pointing is necessarily healthy - that tends to suggest CYA and childish blame games. But on a technical IT focused web site, one might suppose that a lessons learned exercise on the root cause of the failure of a massive website would be of interest and hopefully even an educational experience.
I suppose if I were an angst-ridden bitter friendless teenager I may have found it amusing too. Luckily, I'm an adult. (How sad that this comment is currently marked insightful.)
And - really? Genuine panic? I think that says more about the specific subset of Facebook users within your anecdote set than anything else. Or do you also extrapolate out from the frequent racist troll comments on Slashdot?
How is email any different than sending a message on Facebook?
Hint: it isn't at all.
E-mail accounts frequently change. Facebook accounts remain constant.
I can very easily search for my cousin by name on Facebook. How do I easily find out her e-mail address if I haven't seen her for a few years?
Multiply by 50 or 100 family and friends - Facebook is far more convenient.
Use Project Web Access (PWA). I believe it requires a CAL but that's it.
I don't know why a (probably hypothetical) question is modded insightful - flamebait may be more appropriate.
Anyway (and I know I'm feeding a troll, especialy given your other comments, but...) the answer is yes. Yes, you can. We have MS Word documents that are several thousand pages in length, including formulas, maps, charts, etc. No problem.
P.S. I can't let this go, because in a former life I was involved in DTP - your repeated insistence further up about Word being page layout software and not word processing software is just foolish. Either you're deliberately trying to pick an argument or you have no clue about what packages like PageMaker (which I was using when it was Aldus PageMaker) really do. Grow up.
Seconded. If you read through my comment history, you'll see I've said in the past why I prefer Yahoo e-mail to GMail. My homepage is my customized "My Yahoo". I've been using Yahoo for longer than Google's been in existence, and I like it.
Plus, as other people have said, Google collects a lot of information. I'm not going to ascribe nefarious purposes...but I am going to use different e-mail, search, and mapping software. (Mainly because I happen to like those different e-mail and search apps better than Google. I really like Google Maps...but it constantly hangs and crashes for me. Bye-bye, Google Maps.)
{ Wonders: is it narcissistic to opine "this thing can not be useful because I personally don't see any importance or use for it"? }
Why is it that Slashdot users so frequently feel the need to sneer at people who do something outside of the typical /. realm? Recently, Facebook has:
You could point out that there are other ways to do all of that, but you'd be missing the point. Facebook is a great central portal. I have friends and family all over the world, and I don't even know half their e-mail addresses now. I don't need to. I can link up with them on Facebook.
If you have an equally effective way to keep in contact with people who are important to you, well, super. Facebook is a simple and effective way for me to keep up with people who are important to me.
And you know what? For other people, it might just be that it's fun. Some people have neither the time nor inclination to play an MMORPG, but find Farmville a relaxing diversion. What's wrong with that? Farmville bores you to tears? Okay, fine, ignore it. Isn't that one of the mantras of Slashdot - the freedom of choice is what matters? It is not important whether you use Firefox or Opera or Internet Explorer - it is important that you have the choice.
I still like using the phone and be in person when I talk to my friends.
So do I, but there's no denying it gets a wee bit expensive to sustain when my family are spread across the planet. Hey, how about that...a social networking site that facilitates me communicating with people who are important to me that are thousands of miles away. Neat thing, this Internet...
You should be modded insightful, rather than that tripe posted by A/C. Nicely put.
Facebook is cancer on the internet that is eating away creativity and innovation.
You sound just like those other "theme" preachers.
* Video games are responsible for an entire generation of fat and violent children.
* Pirates are killing the music industry.
* etc.
And you get modded insightful for this. Yay Slashdot.
Really? Huh. Wish I could introduce you to one of my co-workers and recent MBA classmate - we went through the same course together. He happens to have a Master's in Engineering from one of the top engineering schools in the country and several years of work experience in Electrical Engineering working on problems which he gets right or else 50 million people lose power. No, I'm not making that number up.
Never mind - enjoy your cynical little private and inaccurate anecdotal world view. Judging by the comments here, there are plenty of willing sheep to bolster your self confidence in the rightness of such a view.
However in the US the majority of MBA students come straight from their first degree.
Where do you get this from? The MBA programs I've checked will give a class profile, and usually their students are listed as being in their late 20s or in their 30s, or as having five or six years of work experience.
(For reference, this is in Pennsylvania, so I'm talking about schools like Arcadia, Penn State at Great Valley, Villanova, etc.)
Having just completed my MBA, the average age in my class was 28, I think from memory. I estimate the youngest person in the class had four or five years of work experience.
For what it's worth, I have a purely technical background (my undergraduate degree is in Computer Science). I decided to go for an MBA because I heard time and time again that upper management knew my technical skills were superior, and I wanted to develop my understanding of business processes so I could be more effective in liaising between ITS and the business. Guess what - it worked. Our business is extremely technical - more than half our employees have engineering degrees. But there is a hell of a lot of our business that I understand better now that I know how to read a balance sheet, or what is involved in financial risk management.
Good, perhaps you can help me out. My old computer died, so I had to install on a new computer.
These were the main two headaches, but there are heaps more.
Honestly...I read comments waxing lyrical about how easy and intuitive it is, and I wonder what I'm missing. Every single time I try and use iTunes, it ends up a frustrating and painful experience, because I can't figure out how to do what I want without going to the help forums. This is not how software should be, especially from Apple.