I can't tell what's more depressing, Gemmel passing away or only knowing about it after reading a post on a board about a completely different author. Gemmel is without a doubt one of my favorites.
Or you could look at manufacturing plants that have been storing, retrieving, and deriving time series data for as long as their have been time series historians. And even though "Wall Street" might have some nifty new systems, the data providers they connect to (or I should say the largest provider of stock pricing data) use SQL Server, an RDBMS.
If "broadband" ISP's didn't over-subscribe you would still be dialing in with a modem (and even then there was oversubscription). If oversubscription were not part of the process, then the only difference between a T1 and a cable line would be the cost of installation and level of support you could expect. Even at today's much lower prices, the price of T1 doesn't come down to anything close to the ~$40 of cable or DSL, much less the price when DSL and cable started making headway.
Oversubscription works on the model of not everyone being on the internet, capping their pipe simultaneously. The ISP assumes that few of it's customers are going to sit in front of the computer downloading at the maximum rate all day long. They then determine a ratio of oversubscription and start selling against that. The advent of small business accounts actually let ISPs take this farther, by adding in a second ratio of users that were almost all daytime users (as opposed to the majority of their residential users that are evening users).
Oversubscription is the only thing that made it profitable to offer people T1+ connections at $40-$60/month. Otherwise we would all be sitting around an complaining about the customer:modem ratio at the local ISP and how they didn't buy one modem for every end user.
Re:Tech is really a big marital issue for some?
on
'Til Tech Do Us Part
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· Score: 1
Oddly enough my wife and I are getting ready to start a joint email account to reduce the pressure. We have been married over a year, keep our finances separate (except what is necessary to pay bills, etc), keep our computers separate, keep our cars separate, manage our own pets for the most part, etc. However we have one relative that is constantly attempting to play us against one another. To the degree that we are just tired of dealing with it and have determined that we will create a joint email address for family communications and publicize it in the families as the only way to contact us. It's not a desire to share everything, be one, etc but an effort to reduce the insanity.
I carry my laptop too. It only has 1GB of memory, runs two different database servers, 4-5 different IDEs, label services, web services, several OPC and WW services, etc. I've found that as long as you close Firefox down on a daily basis then your pretty much ok for several weeks on end to just put it into standby mode. And yes, it does use a little power in standby mode to blink that LED, but I have yet for a laptop to run out of juice this way during a normal work week or weekend. Since my machine is in standby mode this means I can get it up and running in just a few seconds in the morning, then go get coffee or talk to the director while our Outlook system is brought to it's knees by everyone coming in (yes, it needs a little help).
Oddly enough, you pointing out his poor reading (or comprehension) of that point actually seems to back up his secondary point:
And we keep voting the same crew into office who keep appointing the same bozos to the FCC... shame on us. Although perhaps not as he originally intended:P
It wouldn't take much for Linux to leap forward in manufacturing, they were nearly non-existent in that market a few years ago and I haven't heard much more recently either. I think I recall one historian that would mostly work on Linux, a couple OPC servers or clients, and other minor random things here and there. No cohesive packages we could hand our engineers, very little competition to things like Wonderware, PI, Rockwell, etc. Unless we're talking about manufacturing in terms of just the scheduling, routing, etc and lets not tie it into the automation or let the manufacturing equipment communicate instead of making users type, that might be further along.
Don't get me wrong, I'd like to see more Linux in the manufacturing world, but I don't think it's there yet.
Then he likely would have been relating a different anecdote. The entire point of his anecdotal story was that the issue is not black and white, that in order to truly think critically about this issue you need to consider positives as well as negatives. The point of providing an anecdotal story with a good outcome was only to point out that good things can happen and perhaps should be included in any critical thinking that is done on the issue. That the issue, like so many, is gray rather than black and white. However even this point was considered by several people to be in support of one side or another, which is why the whole conversation about critical thought is so amusing. Think critically, but assume everything is black and white and that anyone who disagrees must be arguing the opposite "side".
My problem with Fedora Core is the annual major version upgrades. For servers I don't care, as I rarely want to install anything except possibly security updates, but for a desktop I don't want to have to do a major version upgrade once a year, with all th pain that entails. So basically instead of doing the major upgrade I end up putting it off...which lasts until I want to install a newer version of a piece of software and find out that for some reason the only version available on my 1 year old distro is 2+ years old, the libraries I need have only been compiled for a newer version of FC, etc. I hate doing major version upgrades in Linux distros, something always goes haywire. So I am left with the decision of rebuilding my machine once a year, like my POC windows laptop, or go the compilation route for every install. The most annoying thing for me was when I went to install MySQL and PHP off the disc in FC4 (I think, might have been 3). MySQL 5 had been out for a while, MySQL 4 was considered the current "stable" choice, the install used MySQL 3...
I don't want bleeding edge, but 2 major versions out of date? I found this was pretty consistent across a lot of packages offered from the installation media and online sources.
So mainly it was annoyance for me. Now I mostly use Debian and Mandriva because my level of annoyance with them is much lower (though Mandriva is starting to go the annual upgrade route, so if they fall too far behind I may have to find a replacement).
Cecil, your time and diligence are incredibly appreciated. Your list of released versions is impressive and I have found that you actually release new versions _more_ often than I want to deal with upgrades, not less:) There are a lot of Myth users whose lives are easier and possibly would not be using MythTV if you hadn't decided to start building and maintaining KnoppMyth. I personally appreciate your hard work a great deal, as does my wife who was initially a nonbeliever in PC-based set-top boxes;)
While not quite as good as a compatibility chart, the KnoppMyth TV forums have three forums specifically for hardware comaptibility. They are called Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3. Tier 1 posts are things that just plain worked out of the box. Tier 2 are things that required a little bit of tweaking. Tier 3 is things that just wouldn't work.
Actually what the ruling means is that theer was not a clause in the contract between kaleidoscope and CCA that prevented them from using the license purchased from CCA to create a network DVD storage device. This ruling had not a singlething to do with you private use of DVD's, with allowing ripping of DVDs in general, etc. It only affects those companies that have bought a license/signed the contract with CA to legally decode DVD's. So while Sony, Apple, etc might be able to use this ruling to their advantage (might, it wasn't an appellate decision), you and I do have not signed a contract with CCA and therefore couldn't even begin to use it to our advantage.
"There are people that write really bad code in language X, therefore we should get rid of language X."
I have personally seen absolutely horrible Java, PHP, ASP, VB.Net, C#, VB6, Fortran, Basic, Pascal, Bash, Python, VBScript, Javascript, HTML, XHTML, etc. Should we get rid of all of those just because amateurs have figured out how to write code (or copy and paste from the internet)?.Net itself is not to blame for bad coders. No matter what your dream language is, I guarantee there are numerous examples on the internet of how not to write code in that language.
If you have personally found.Net (in general) to be a POS, now might be a good time to go back and review what you have done to ensure your not adding to the list of "how not to do it".
I wonder if that is still the case when your running an image on virtualized hardware? We have an old crusty server running some legacy software that is bound to the hardware it is running on. The cojmpany that we purchased that software from no longer exists and our customers keep telling us it is vital to operations and still better than the 3 or 4 revisions all the competition has gone through. Solution? Virtualize the machine with VMWare. Apparently there is an option to virtualize the hardware to keep the software ignorant of the fact that it has been moved to another server. I wonder, if in this situation, a server is still capable of telling it is virtualized or if it feels it is sitting physiaclly on a server.
I am not a systems admin, I can only relate a solution we have tried in the broadest of details.
All ISPs oversubscribe themselves, thats the difference between having dedicated bandwidth and "bursting". ISPs know that home users are not going to max out their bandwidth usage all day, every day. So basically an ISP will calculate what an acceptable ratio of users will be at a set speed. For instance, they may decide that 1:30 is a good ratio. What this implies is that they believe that 30 people could be assigned the same slot and, due to mixed habits, average bandwidth use, etc. all 30 of these people will generally get acceptable service without running into one another. Additionally, since the pool is so large and there are maximum rates in place, the extremes tend to average themselves out. This also means that if a new service comes out that requires gobs of bandwidth and even 3 of those 30 people start using it, all 30 of those people are going to start noticing slowdowns. However, it wouldn't necessarally require everyone to get dedicated lines. You could modify the ratio if something that market-changing came along and maybe go with something like 1:20. You (the ISP) might need a few more lines, or it might require just a few upgrades to internal switches to offer the additional connections.
Now look at the other side of it. If ISPs only sold dedicated bandwidth, you would be forced to pay a lot more for a dedicated connection. $49.99/month just doesn't pay for even a single T1.
If a rich person needs a pacemaker installed, he can choose the finest cardiovascular surgeon in the country. If a pensioner requires the same procedure he'd have to settle for whatever surgeon is available at his local hospital.... The best part too? Everyone pays their fair share.
The worst part? Now everyone gets the poor schmoe that would have been making a similar amount in the older system, while the finest cardiovascular surgeon in the country spends his time in either private research, book signings, or a completely differant field. Will you still get your operation? Yep. If you have an extreme case of something-or-other that would normally be referred to the best damn doctor you could find, well, then your stuck with someone that is only good, as opposed to the best. Even if it takes a middle class person the rest of their life to pay the bills for surgery from one of the best in the country, at least they have that additional chance that there will be a rest of the life to pay.
The other worst part? The government defines non-elective, follow-up, and preventative. I agree that insurance companies are good at screwing us over these very terms, but if we have learned anythying over out lifetimes we ought to have learned that when it comes to screwing, the government has every private company beat. They can enact rules or guidelines that would send most insurance companies into bankruptcy.
Possible. Of course one or two of the five applications my wife used to interact with customer accounts was due to the fact that she worked nationals for a time. She worked in one of the call centers, not a store so maybe they get less attention then the sales people that work the stores. Of course, the sales people working the stores had a great deal more leniancy in their systems to roll their own account specials, so it was actually her job to review the various options that were slapped together and post it back to sales people to make it fit in an existing plan instead of making crap up.
Out of 3 or 4 major software rollouts that I heard about: 1 offered training ahead of time for the changes (a couple days before) all caused the systems to be down for 1/2 a workday or more (after testing, nightime installation)
Architecturally speaking, slapping a front-end on 4-5 disparate systems that each have their own authentication mechanism is a nice way to simplify peoples lives, but when you forget the details it can be hell. Like, oops, they all have differant time periods for changing passwords and, since they have 5 differant authentication methods, actually block access by the user if one has had it's password changed and the others haven't.
And lets not get into the Outlook/VBA application that handles most of the inter-office stuff like the queue of orders that need to be reviewed and so on.
Following that same logic, what was the point of making a new, seperate browser [Firefox] instead of joining forces with IE development and just distributing a re-branded IE with a new theme a couple pre-installed ActiveX plugins?
Etc, etc.
The point to doing something that someone else has already done is to either: 1) Do it better 2) Do it with more features (or better features) 3) Take advantage of an existing piece of the market (such as the thousands of professors that would love to finally upgrade from Netscape 4)
Customer service numbers? They might pride themselves on those numbers, but they are as full of crap as their systems. I'm sorry, any company who has a known issue of the IVR dropping options off of peoples accounts for years, that then decides to not fix the IVR system is not what I would call customer-oriented. Or how about the fact that they care so much about their customers that they require their call reps to handle anything non-call related in their spare moments between making call quotas? You know, those little things like recalculating bills that have gone awry (see IVR) or filing the paperwork...
My wife worked for Verizon, the only thing they care less about then their customers is their computer systems - except for th mice, those have to be installed by an expert technician. Probably not the same one that installed the fully tested software update that took down your entire department yesterday, cannot be backed out of, and is costing you your paycheck (if your not answering phones, your not earning...)
Yep, customers are number one, provided you qualify that statement as "after everythig else but the computer systems..."
Funny, I make good money now applying good programming practices, design practices, etc that I learned as part of my computer science degree while taking theoretical classes. I spend most of my time rewriting code written by guys that did not get degrees, one is a russian and the other was a liberal arts guy. I only have 200 MS access forms left to go before our company is actually stable. I already took the last server off the floor. After that I have to get rid of the telnet servers that multi-thread up to 5 connections before blowing up, randomly blow up after several months, and re-initialize their SQL connections each day without killing their old ones.
Give me a someone with a CS degree and I can show them limits on the practical use of their theory and application of their skills in the real world. I'm tired of cleaning up after everyone's messes.
I am not at all surprised. I have been going through verizon hell for 5 months now.
My wife used to have an employee account with them. When she left the company the person responsible for switching it to a consumer account forgot the minor detail of a contract. Within months the account balance started ballooning incredibly. After a lot of research I determined that a core option had magically disappeared from the secondary phone on the account, the In calling feature. After 2.5 months and several calls and promises to recalculate the bill, we finally had the bill recalculated, only to get a collection notice in the mail (3 days before a call that our bill had been corrected). Along with the collection notice our balance due went up again, this time by two $175 early termination fees. For those that don't know, ETF's are covered in contacts (with some stating there aren't any). So three months later and 6 more calls, I believe I have gotten the ETF's removed. I originally wanted to remain a customer, just to not have to change all of our numbers, but apparently it took so long for the account to be recalculated that I don't even have that option any more. of course, I sort of lost the desire to reconnect around month 2.5 when i received the collections notice in the middle of it finally be recalculated.
Most humorous (in a sad kind of way) quote from one of the many people I had to talk to: "Since your account didn't have a contract the system automatically assigned you a one year contract. So you do have a contract, and it lasts one year"...it took me a little while to formulate a response to this absurdity.
And trust me, you really don't want to know about software their rep's are forced to use. There were some tasks that required my wife to use one or more of 5 different sets of software to do the same exact thing, based on various things like location of the caller, location of the sales office, type of phone, etc.
Important Note: Don't pay over the phone. It's apparently a known issue that the IVR can and will randomly drop options off your account. Important Note 2: Don't expect a corrected bill. Even if they painstakingly correct every problem with your bill, the best you will get is a credited amount. Their systems cannot actually handle giving you an updated bill, only a credit-after-the-fact important Note 3: It's amazing how much functionality you can squeeze out of VBA through Outlook.
There has apparently been a great deal of research into where "fossil" fuels come from. I don't remember the exact details, but I believe a research group from Russia has not only proposed an alternative theory, but begun proving it as well. Something to do with compression and certain rocks, or some such. In any case, this is occasionally brought up as being an anti-peak oil argument, probably because it doesn't agree with the belief that "fossil" fuels are non-renewable.
Odd, I never considered application administration to be middleware. In fact I think a better definition of middleware is the software that resides in the middle of two other pieces of software that need to communicate.
When I came out of school I knew what ports were due to 2 semesters of networking, unless you mean porting code bases to other systems, at which point I have to question what you spent your time on in college. Deployment was a little sketchier, but the concept was fairly easy to pick-up, it's not rocket science. And apparently I have a better idea of middleware then CS grads from your school even after however many years of experience you have had.
I wish a couple business classes had been required. As a student I wasn't aware of any use of those classes and so didn't take them. As an experienced developer, having worked as both a full-time consultant and an IT developer/architect, I now recognize that a couple business classes would have helped out a great deal. Knowing the context of a system is very important, and rather than pick up all the business knowledge I need to design business systems, I would prefer to have already received a solid foundation and some of the same training as my users. The toughest things I had to learn (and am still learning) are that good enough is generally better than perfect, buying is often better than writing from scratch, and project management skills appear to have even less time spent on them for other degrees.
Sorry, I react badly to "I'm experienced and know so much more then my young colleagues". Everyone knows something you don't, and nearly everyone knows something we do not and could learn from.
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I can't tell what's more depressing, Gemmel passing away or only knowing about it after reading a post on a board about a completely different author. Gemmel is without a doubt one of my favorites.
Or you could look at manufacturing plants that have been storing, retrieving, and deriving time series data for as long as their have been time series historians. And even though "Wall Street" might have some nifty new systems, the data providers they connect to (or I should say the largest provider of stock pricing data) use SQL Server, an RDBMS.
If "broadband" ISP's didn't over-subscribe you would still be dialing in with a modem (and even then there was oversubscription). If oversubscription were not part of the process, then the only difference between a T1 and a cable line would be the cost of installation and level of support you could expect. Even at today's much lower prices, the price of T1 doesn't come down to anything close to the ~$40 of cable or DSL, much less the price when DSL and cable started making headway.
Oversubscription works on the model of not everyone being on the internet, capping their pipe simultaneously. The ISP assumes that few of it's customers are going to sit in front of the computer downloading at the maximum rate all day long. They then determine a ratio of oversubscription and start selling against that. The advent of small business accounts actually let ISPs take this farther, by adding in a second ratio of users that were almost all daytime users (as opposed to the majority of their residential users that are evening users).
Oversubscription is the only thing that made it profitable to offer people T1+ connections at $40-$60/month. Otherwise we would all be sitting around an complaining about the customer:modem ratio at the local ISP and how they didn't buy one modem for every end user.
Oddly enough my wife and I are getting ready to start a joint email account to reduce the pressure. We have been married over a year, keep our finances separate (except what is necessary to pay bills, etc), keep our computers separate, keep our cars separate, manage our own pets for the most part, etc. However we have one relative that is constantly attempting to play us against one another. To the degree that we are just tired of dealing with it and have determined that we will create a joint email address for family communications and publicize it in the families as the only way to contact us. It's not a desire to share everything, be one, etc but an effort to reduce the insanity.
I carry my laptop too. It only has 1GB of memory, runs two different database servers, 4-5 different IDEs, label services, web services, several OPC and WW services, etc. I've found that as long as you close Firefox down on a daily basis then your pretty much ok for several weeks on end to just put it into standby mode. And yes, it does use a little power in standby mode to blink that LED, but I have yet for a laptop to run out of juice this way during a normal work week or weekend.
Since my machine is in standby mode this means I can get it up and running in just a few seconds in the morning, then go get coffee or talk to the director while our Outlook system is brought to it's knees by everyone coming in (yes, it needs a little help).
It wouldn't take much for Linux to leap forward in manufacturing, they were nearly non-existent in that market a few years ago and I haven't heard much more recently either. I think I recall one historian that would mostly work on Linux, a couple OPC servers or clients, and other minor random things here and there. No cohesive packages we could hand our engineers, very little competition to things like Wonderware, PI, Rockwell, etc.
Unless we're talking about manufacturing in terms of just the scheduling, routing, etc and lets not tie it into the automation or let the manufacturing equipment communicate instead of making users type, that might be further along.
Don't get me wrong, I'd like to see more Linux in the manufacturing world, but I don't think it's there yet.
Then he likely would have been relating a different anecdote. The entire point of his anecdotal story was that the issue is not black and white, that in order to truly think critically about this issue you need to consider positives as well as negatives. The point of providing an anecdotal story with a good outcome was only to point out that good things can happen and perhaps should be included in any critical thinking that is done on the issue. That the issue, like so many, is gray rather than black and white.
However even this point was considered by several people to be in support of one side or another, which is why the whole conversation about critical thought is so amusing. Think critically, but assume everything is black and white and that anyone who disagrees must be arguing the opposite "side".
My problem with Fedora Core is the annual major version upgrades. For servers I don't care, as I rarely want to install anything except possibly security updates, but for a desktop I don't want to have to do a major version upgrade once a year, with all th pain that entails.
So basically instead of doing the major upgrade I end up putting it off...which lasts until I want to install a newer version of a piece of software and find out that for some reason the only version available on my 1 year old distro is 2+ years old, the libraries I need have only been compiled for a newer version of FC, etc.
I hate doing major version upgrades in Linux distros, something always goes haywire. So I am left with the decision of rebuilding my machine once a year, like my POC windows laptop, or go the compilation route for every install.
The most annoying thing for me was when I went to install MySQL and PHP off the disc in FC4 (I think, might have been 3). MySQL 5 had been out for a while, MySQL 4 was considered the current "stable" choice, the install used MySQL 3...
I don't want bleeding edge, but 2 major versions out of date? I found this was pretty consistent across a lot of packages offered from the installation media and online sources.
So mainly it was annoyance for me. Now I mostly use Debian and Mandriva because my level of annoyance with them is much lower (though Mandriva is starting to go the annual upgrade route, so if they fall too far behind I may have to find a replacement).
Cecil, your time and diligence are incredibly appreciated. Your list of released versions is impressive and I have found that you actually release new versions _more_ often than I want to deal with upgrades, not less :) ;)
There are a lot of Myth users whose lives are easier and possibly would not be using MythTV if you hadn't decided to start building and maintaining KnoppMyth. I personally appreciate your hard work a great deal, as does my wife who was initially a nonbeliever in PC-based set-top boxes
While not quite as good as a compatibility chart, the KnoppMyth TV forums have three forums specifically for hardware comaptibility. They are called Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3. Tier 1 posts are things that just plain worked out of the box. Tier 2 are things that required a little bit of tweaking. Tier 3 is things that just wouldn't work.
Actually what the ruling means is that theer was not a clause in the contract between kaleidoscope and CCA that prevented them from using the license purchased from CCA to create a network DVD storage device. This ruling had not a singlething to do with you private use of DVD's, with allowing ripping of DVDs in general, etc. It only affects those companies that have bought a license/signed the contract with CA to legally decode DVD's. So while Sony, Apple, etc might be able to use this ruling to their advantage (might, it wasn't an appellate decision), you and I do have not signed a contract with CCA and therefore couldn't even begin to use it to our advantage.
And I didn't even read the whole article...
There is some good logic.
.Net itself is not to blame for bad coders. No matter what your dream language is, I guarantee there are numerous examples on the internet of how not to write code in that language.
.Net (in general) to be a POS, now might be a good time to go back and review what you have done to ensure your not adding to the list of "how not to do it".
"There are people that write really bad code in language X, therefore we should get rid of language X."
I have personally seen absolutely horrible Java, PHP, ASP, VB.Net, C#, VB6, Fortran, Basic, Pascal, Bash, Python, VBScript, Javascript, HTML, XHTML, etc. Should we get rid of all of those just because amateurs have figured out how to write code (or copy and paste from the internet)?
If you have personally found
I wonder if that is still the case when your running an image on virtualized hardware? We have an old crusty server running some legacy software that is bound to the hardware it is running on. The cojmpany that we purchased that software from no longer exists and our customers keep telling us it is vital to operations and still better than the 3 or 4 revisions all the competition has gone through.
Solution? Virtualize the machine with VMWare. Apparently there is an option to virtualize the hardware to keep the software ignorant of the fact that it has been moved to another server. I wonder, if in this situation, a server is still capable of telling it is virtualized or if it feels it is sitting physiaclly on a server.
I am not a systems admin, I can only relate a solution we have tried in the broadest of details.
All ISPs oversubscribe themselves, thats the difference between having dedicated bandwidth and "bursting". ISPs know that home users are not going to max out their bandwidth usage all day, every day.
So basically an ISP will calculate what an acceptable ratio of users will be at a set speed. For instance, they may decide that 1:30 is a good ratio. What this implies is that they believe that 30 people could be assigned the same slot and, due to mixed habits, average bandwidth use, etc. all 30 of these people will generally get acceptable service without running into one another. Additionally, since the pool is so large and there are maximum rates in place, the extremes tend to average themselves out.
This also means that if a new service comes out that requires gobs of bandwidth and even 3 of those 30 people start using it, all 30 of those people are going to start noticing slowdowns. However, it wouldn't necessarally require everyone to get dedicated lines. You could modify the ratio if something that market-changing came along and maybe go with something like 1:20. You (the ISP) might need a few more lines, or it might require just a few upgrades to internal switches to offer the additional connections.
Now look at the other side of it. If ISPs only sold dedicated bandwidth, you would be forced to pay a lot more for a dedicated connection. $49.99/month just doesn't pay for even a single T1.
The worst part? Now everyone gets the poor schmoe that would have been making a similar amount in the older system, while the finest cardiovascular surgeon in the country spends his time in either private research, book signings, or a completely differant field. Will you still get your operation? Yep. If you have an extreme case of something-or-other that would normally be referred to the best damn doctor you could find, well, then your stuck with someone that is only good, as opposed to the best.
Even if it takes a middle class person the rest of their life to pay the bills for surgery from one of the best in the country, at least they have that additional chance that there will be a rest of the life to pay.
The other worst part? The government defines non-elective, follow-up, and preventative. I agree that insurance companies are good at screwing us over these very terms, but if we have learned anythying over out lifetimes we ought to have learned that when it comes to screwing, the government has every private company beat. They can enact rules or guidelines that would send most insurance companies into bankruptcy.
"Perhaps that is the case in your region"
Possible. Of course one or two of the five applications my wife used to interact with customer accounts was due to the fact that she worked nationals for a time. She worked in one of the call centers, not a store so maybe they get less attention then the sales people that work the stores. Of course, the sales people working the stores had a great deal more leniancy in their systems to roll their own account specials, so it was actually her job to review the various options that were slapped together and post it back to sales people to make it fit in an existing plan instead of making crap up.
Out of 3 or 4 major software rollouts that I heard about:
1 offered training ahead of time for the changes (a couple days before)
all caused the systems to be down for 1/2 a workday or more (after testing, nightime installation)
Architecturally speaking, slapping a front-end on 4-5 disparate systems that each have their own authentication mechanism is a nice way to simplify peoples lives, but when you forget the details it can be hell. Like, oops, they all have differant time periods for changing passwords and, since they have 5 differant authentication methods, actually block access by the user if one has had it's password changed and the others haven't.
And lets not get into the Outlook/VBA application that handles most of the inter-office stuff like the queue of orders that need to be reviewed and so on.
Following that same logic, what was the point of making a new, seperate browser [Firefox] instead of joining forces with IE development and just distributing a re-branded IE with a new theme a couple pre-installed ActiveX plugins?
Etc, etc.
The point to doing something that someone else has already done is to either:
1) Do it better
2) Do it with more features (or better features)
3) Take advantage of an existing piece of the market (such as the thousands of professors that would love to finally upgrade from Netscape 4)
Customer service numbers? They might pride themselves on those numbers, but they are as full of crap as their systems. I'm sorry, any company who has a known issue of the IVR dropping options off of peoples accounts for years, that then decides to not fix the IVR system is not what I would call customer-oriented.
Or how about the fact that they care so much about their customers that they require their call reps to handle anything non-call related in their spare moments between making call quotas? You know, those little things like recalculating bills that have gone awry (see IVR) or filing the paperwork...
My wife worked for Verizon, the only thing they care less about then their customers is their computer systems - except for th mice, those have to be installed by an expert technician. Probably not the same one that installed the fully tested software update that took down your entire department yesterday, cannot be backed out of, and is costing you your paycheck (if your not answering phones, your not earning...)
Yep, customers are number one, provided you qualify that statement as "after everythig else but the computer systems..."
Funny, I make good money now applying good programming practices, design practices, etc that I learned as part of my computer science degree while taking theoretical classes. I spend most of my time rewriting code written by guys that did not get degrees, one is a russian and the other was a liberal arts guy. I only have 200 MS access forms left to go before our company is actually stable. I already took the last server off the floor. After that I have to get rid of the telnet servers that multi-thread up to 5 connections before blowing up, randomly blow up after several months, and re-initialize their SQL connections each day without killing their old ones.
Give me a someone with a CS degree and I can show them limits on the practical use of their theory and application of their skills in the real world. I'm tired of cleaning up after everyone's messes.
Javascript can also be used as the scripting language for class ASP pages. has been a choice since before .Net made it onto the scene.
Except that they don't get external access to the web. That kind of puts a crimp in the plan.
I am not at all surprised. I have been going through verizon hell for 5 months now.
...it took me a little while to formulate a response to this absurdity.
My wife used to have an employee account with them. When she left the company the person responsible for switching it to a consumer account forgot the minor detail of a contract. Within months the account balance started ballooning incredibly. After a lot of research I determined that a core option had magically disappeared from the secondary phone on the account, the In calling feature. After 2.5 months and several calls and promises to recalculate the bill, we finally had the bill recalculated, only to get a collection notice in the mail (3 days before a call that our bill had been corrected). Along with the collection notice our balance due went up again, this time by two $175 early termination fees. For those that don't know, ETF's are covered in contacts (with some stating there aren't any). So three months later and 6 more calls, I believe I have gotten the ETF's removed. I originally wanted to remain a customer, just to not have to change all of our numbers, but apparently it took so long for the account to be recalculated that I don't even have that option any more. of course, I sort of lost the desire to reconnect around month 2.5 when i received the collections notice in the middle of it finally be recalculated.
Most humorous (in a sad kind of way) quote from one of the many people I had to talk to:
"Since your account didn't have a contract the system automatically assigned you a one year contract. So you do have a contract, and it lasts one year"
And trust me, you really don't want to know about software their rep's are forced to use. There were some tasks that required my wife to use one or more of 5 different sets of software to do the same exact thing, based on various things like location of the caller, location of the sales office, type of phone, etc.
Important Note: Don't pay over the phone. It's apparently a known issue that the IVR can and will randomly drop options off your account.
Important Note 2: Don't expect a corrected bill. Even if they painstakingly correct every problem with your bill, the best you will get is a credited amount. Their systems cannot actually handle giving you an updated bill, only a credit-after-the-fact
important Note 3: It's amazing how much functionality you can squeeze out of VBA through Outlook.
There has apparently been a great deal of research into where "fossil" fuels come from. I don't remember the exact details, but I believe a research group from Russia has not only proposed an alternative theory, but begun proving it as well. Something to do with compression and certain rocks, or some such. In any case, this is occasionally brought up as being an anti-peak oil argument, probably because it doesn't agree with the belief that "fossil" fuels are non-renewable.
Odd, I never considered application administration to be middleware. In fact I think a better definition of middleware is the software that resides in the middle of two other pieces of software that need to communicate.
When I came out of school I knew what ports were due to 2 semesters of networking, unless you mean porting code bases to other systems, at which point I have to question what you spent your time on in college. Deployment was a little sketchier, but the concept was fairly easy to pick-up, it's not rocket science. And apparently I have a better idea of middleware then CS grads from your school even after however many years of experience you have had.
I wish a couple business classes had been required. As a student I wasn't aware of any use of those classes and so didn't take them. As an experienced developer, having worked as both a full-time consultant and an IT developer/architect, I now recognize that a couple business classes would have helped out a great deal. Knowing the context of a system is very important, and rather than pick up all the business knowledge I need to design business systems, I would prefer to have already received a solid foundation and some of the same training as my users.
The toughest things I had to learn (and am still learning) are that good enough is generally better than perfect, buying is often better than writing from scratch, and project management skills appear to have even less time spent on them for other degrees.
Sorry, I react badly to "I'm experienced and know so much more then my young colleagues". Everyone knows something you don't, and nearly everyone knows something we do not and could learn from.