Reminds me of the time that I brought our so-called professional-services team in to do a small ocntent management system. I handed them a design for doing it in Zope with an estimate of one week's labor doubled to two weeks for fudge factor, and a price tag of $10K.
Our structure at the time was to hand off and let them run with it. A month later, the customer blows up because the prof.svcs team has handed them a design based on their own home-grown network management system, (not designed to do content management) plus WinCVS, IIS FTP, and a handful of.bat files. They want six weeks time to build it, and they want to charge $40K.
So when the customer freaks, prof.svcs comes back the next day with one feature removed (web-GUI account management) and a $20K price tag. The customer now knows that the prof.svcs team is trying to milk them for cash, and refuses to do the deal.
End result: the customer is still stuck with manual content management, and our company didn't get a penny.
So, if you're going to try charging what the market will bear rather than cost + margin, you'd better make damn sure that you know the market:-)
I agree! hello? single sign on is the problem, not a particular implementation of it. "If only there was an open source version of Russian roulette, then I clould blow my brains out in a politically acceptable manner!"
Is this the same GEOS that ran on Commodores? I tried a demo out on my C64 a long long time ago. It wasn't compatible with my 80-character line video extender though, so it had to go:-)
My mom still owns and uses in her classroom a 286 with Lotus 123, WordPerfect, and Print Shop. Obsolete? Well, it goes from cold stop to ready to use in 60 seconds. My previous employer's Win2K IBM T20 laptop takes six minutes to do the same.
XFce is still quite active, and will support GTK2 in the relatively near future. There are screenshots of various configs (CDE-like isn't the only option) at http://www.xfce.org, and my screenshot is here: http://www.monkeynoodle.org/Photos/screenshot.png/ view
That's running some various Mozilla skins/themes (GTK, XFce, and Gkrellm), and xplanet for the auto-updating backdrop with weather maps showing a geosynchronous view from space of my house:-)
It's especially nice for new users because you can put the apps they care about on the icon bar or its pop-up menus. It's also very snappy from a performance perspective -- in fact, my wife uses it on a 10Mbit xterm, and you'd never know you weren't at the host.
On the larger subject of whether to use Windows or Linux on an old PC... I've tried Linux on various relatives in the past, and my advice is: if they don't ask for it, don't give it to them. My mother-in-law is a perfect example -- when I replaced her OE5/Word98/IE/Freecell machine with an Evolution/OpenOffice/Mozilla/AisleRiot machine, you'd probably think she was happy, right? Well, the transition from Word to OpenOffice was the show-stopper, because despite being shown a few times she couldn't make the leap from a W icon to a Seagull icon. That plus stupid webmasters who lock their sites to non-IE users with a browser-detection routine. I've had similar experiences with other relatives, but my wife is a happy Linux user because she's grokked the freedom issue.
So if the user is interested in Linux for the freedom or performance or stability aspect, as some of my neighbors are, help them install OpenOffice and Mozilla on their Windows machines and then see what they think in a month. But if the user just asks for a machine and won't listen to the freedom argument, give them Windows or a Mac. Otherwise, they won't be motivated to attack the slightest of learning curves.
Hah!!! You seem to assume that Ph.D. is some sort of a lucrative money track? I know several, and only one of them (theoretical physics) has been able to land a decent job. The rest were making less money than they did as students when trying to live off of their education. One has gone into IT (majored in Library Studies which was renamed Information Studies), and the rest have all quit the job market and stayed home with the kids on mommy/daddy track. Unless you're looking at a non-educational position such as doctor or lawyer, the prospects after grad school are rather bleak. Personally, I suggest considering grad school in a subject you care about to be the reward you should take after having a career, not the tool you use to get a career.
If you're not using corkscrew to tunnel through their web proxy to your unix box at home to read your email in mutt or pine over ssh, then maybe you shouldn't be reading personal email at work anyway.
Another way to say the same thing is: if you're not capable of bypassing the restrictions that are placed, then you're not qualified to bypass them and you should sit back and realize that the restriction is for your own good.
Not according to the small-time consultants I've talked to here in the SF Bay Area -- tiny companies are generally sticking with their trusty NetWare or not-so-trusty WinNt/2K servers because:
1) It's expensive to change things, even if the change is going to be a clear improvement.
2) Linux-knowledgeable people may be around, but they're not as thick on the street as MCSEs.
3) It's perceived that those Linux people are expensive gurus, unlike the maybe not-so-swift MCSE who'll work his butt off for $40K/yr (around here, that's rent+groceries and not much else). Granted he's spending time instead of money, but not all companies view uptime as more valuable than cash (in some cases, rightly so).
From: CompuServe Postmaster To: Blind.Copy.Receiver@compuserve.com Subject: Undeliverable Message: Delivery report for message to darlinghallrae Date: 25 Jul 2002 10:10:47 -0400 Message "UCITA Reversal", sent at 10:10 EDT on 25-Jul-02, could not be delivered to darlinghallrae at 10:10 EDT on 25-Jul-02 because the recipient mailbox is full.
No, I don't think that some silly-ass riddles will separate the wheat from the chaff. But I don't have three months to interview someone, I have three hours spread across two days, and in many cases it's been all over the phone. If I was interviewing ATCs I'd demand three months, but I've been interviewing SEs instead. When I'm interviewing, I'm looking to weed out junior salesweasels who want to have a higher base. The perfect fit for this job is a senior admin or architect who is tired of being on call.
No, I've been looking for pre-sales engineers to work with networking products, security products, and managed hosting (three different companies). If I was hiring admins or developers, I'd be less interested in their knowledge of details because they'd have an opportunity to learn on the job. When you're an SE, you don't get many chances to learn on the job -- you have to know the details because you're going to discuss them at a white board or a conference table, not at a keyboard where the answers are only a few seconds away.
Re:Why do interviewers use "riddles"?
on
Tech-Interview Riddles
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Those points are true if you're hiring a contractor to come in, do a job, and get out. They are not true if you're hiring a flexible team player who is going to handle a demanding job which is guranteed to throw new challenges on a daily basis.
If you're hiring the latter type of person, you want to know how they'll react to not knowing the answer in a high stress situation. I've done a lot of interviewing for sales engineering positions, and I can tell you some good ways to not get hired when this question comes up: a) lie, convincingly or otherwise b) go silent c) act like a teenager trying to ask for a date.
The proper response for me at least is to say "I don't know, but based on these things I do know, this is what I think." I choose people for the way they think in addition to what they know, because that tells me something about what they'll be able to learn.
That said, most interviewees never make it to a question like that because they get stumped on my initial tech question after "how are you and where did you work before":
"Describe in as much detail as you are comfortable using exactly what happens from a network perspective when you use that laptop to visit a web site. I'm looking for which packets go where."
If you tell me about ARP, DNS, and HTTP and you can name the port numbers and transport layers, that's fine. DHCP, load-balancing, firewalls, SSL, proxy servers, server-side processors, databases, that's all extra credit. If you can't talk about these things, you're not yet ready for a professional career in this industry.
Besides the mentioned two, anyone interested should get into: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World The Wind-up Bird Chronicles Norwegian Wood The Elephant Vanishes (short stories) Underground (non-fiction)
There are more, but those are my favorites:-)
And now, an anecdote: I was introduced to Murakami in an English class at UC Berkeley (haven of DWM's and ethnic literature, but largely void of anything else). The professor teaching the class approached the science fiction and fantasy genres as amusing trivialities and kept attempting to lead discussions into figuring out which of many parallel universes in the books was the "real" one. The students kept trying to introduce this wanker to the postmodernist idea that none of the universes is any more real or valid than the others. So finally, the guy pulls up Hard-Boiled Wonderland and says "do you really expect me to think this is a normal Japanese salaryman living a normal life?" At which point the Japanese exchange student raises her hand for the first time in weeks and says "well yes, of course he is. Strange things happen to him, but he's a totally normal person."
I side with the salesperson here, this is a valid answer to a stupid question. If the product didn't have anything to do with Java, why ask if it's compatible? The only possible answers at that point are "no, it will prevent Java apps running" or "yes, it is compatible." Compatible is not in the same class as Integrated or Designed For.
A good proxy is a great thing; not just for saving bandwidth, but also for improving performance. I've shared modem connections and high-latency wireless connections between multiple users, and the only thing that made it bearable was Squid.
But if you want to get through a proxy and everything else is blocked, try corkscrew or httptunnel.
On that note, don't think that being cool and running soft RAID means you don't need backups; a corrupted file system redundantly copied to another disk is, well, still corrupt.
I know where you're coming from; I won't eat in a place that cleans with Simple Green. Nastiest smelling yech ever used to clean something, and they expect you to eat in there? Round Table is a bad one for this, so the only time I ever give them money is when someone orders delivery.
When is waste of resources ever a good idea? Someone pays for them eventually, so if a little forethought could conserve resources, it should be applied.
Re:'The Economist' is guilty of wishful thinking
on
Andreesen "Grows Up"
·
· Score: 1
Social, personal, and professional interest circles are now global (within a common language pool) rather than city-wide.
I think that's a pretty huge change; people are able to trade information, ask advice, and help each other out across distance barriers that used to be insurmountable or only crossed very slowly in one direction (think snail-mailed newsletters).
CSS wasn't relevant when Netscape was built, and they gambled that it wouldn't become relevant until Netscape version five or six, so they released cruddy support in version four and rolled the dice. However, their competition and the press saw their weakness and beat them over the head with it. If you're competing with the 800-lb gorilla, you can't afford to do poorly on benchmarks, stress tests, and other public comparisons (artificial or otherwise). CSS ended up on the benchmarks when Netscape hoped it wouldn't, and IE's support was marginally better when Netscape hoped it wasn't. One more nail in the coffin...
Don't forget that you'd have to put your new radio on top of the dashboard and manually rewire the radio controls from the dashboard, steering wheel, and backseat so they'd use the new radio.
And then every other time that you take it in for an oil change or get some gas, evil gnomes from GM will rewire the dashboard controls to use the built-in radio, or maybe unplug the power wire from your new radio.
So if you're a Morlock, you can handle this because you know how to fix the wiring problems in your sleep and you can take some anti-evil-gnome measures... but if you're the typical Eloi computer luser, you're going to use the built-in radio and wait for version three to make it usable and wait for version five to make it good. MS deserves the lawsuit.
Slashdot Mirror
Reminds me of the time that I brought our so-called professional-services team in to do a small ocntent management system. I handed them a design for doing it in Zope with an estimate of one week's labor doubled to two weeks for fudge factor, and a price tag of $10K.
.bat files. They want six weeks time to build it, and they want to charge $40K.
:-)
Our structure at the time was to hand off and let them run with it. A month later, the customer blows up because the prof.svcs team has handed them a design based on their own home-grown network management system, (not designed to do content management) plus WinCVS, IIS FTP, and a handful of
So when the customer freaks, prof.svcs comes back the next day with one feature removed (web-GUI account management) and a $20K price tag. The customer now knows that the prof.svcs team is trying to milk them for cash, and refuses to do the deal.
End result: the customer is still stuck with manual content management, and our company didn't get a penny.
So, if you're going to try charging what the market will bear rather than cost + margin, you'd better make damn sure that you know the market
I agree! hello? single sign on is the problem, not a particular implementation of it. "If only there was an open source version of Russian roulette, then I clould blow my brains out in a politically acceptable manner!"
Is this the same GEOS that ran on Commodores? I tried a demo out on my C64 a long long time ago. It wasn't compatible with my 80-character line video extender though, so it had to go :-)
My mom still owns and uses in her classroom a 286 with Lotus 123, WordPerfect, and Print Shop. Obsolete? Well, it goes from cold stop to ready to use in 60 seconds. My previous employer's Win2K IBM T20 laptop takes six minutes to do the same.
XFce is still quite active, and will support GTK2 in the relatively near future. There are screenshots of various configs (CDE-like isn't the only option) at http://www.xfce.org, and my screenshot is here: http://www.monkeynoodle.org/Photos/screenshot.png/ view
:-)
That's running some various Mozilla skins/themes (GTK, XFce, and Gkrellm), and xplanet for the auto-updating backdrop with weather maps showing a geosynchronous view from space of my house
It's especially nice for new users because you can put the apps they care about on the icon bar or its pop-up menus. It's also very snappy from a performance perspective -- in fact, my wife uses it on a 10Mbit xterm, and you'd never know you weren't at the host.
On the larger subject of whether to use Windows or Linux on an old PC... I've tried Linux on various relatives in the past, and my advice is: if they don't ask for it, don't give it to them. My mother-in-law is a perfect example -- when I replaced her OE5/Word98/IE/Freecell machine with an Evolution/OpenOffice/Mozilla/AisleRiot machine, you'd probably think she was happy, right? Well, the transition from Word to OpenOffice was the show-stopper, because despite being shown a few times she couldn't make the leap from a W icon to a Seagull icon. That plus stupid webmasters who lock their sites to non-IE users with a browser-detection routine. I've had similar experiences with other relatives, but my wife is a happy Linux user because she's grokked the freedom issue.
So if the user is interested in Linux for the freedom or performance or stability aspect, as some of my neighbors are, help them install OpenOffice and Mozilla on their Windows machines and then see what they think in a month. But if the user just asks for a machine and won't listen to the freedom argument, give them Windows or a Mac. Otherwise, they won't be motivated to attack the slightest of learning curves.
Hah!!! You seem to assume that Ph.D. is some sort of a lucrative money track? I know several, and only one of them (theoretical physics) has been able to land a decent job. The rest were making less money than they did as students when trying to live off of their education. One has gone into IT (majored in Library Studies which was renamed Information Studies), and the rest have all quit the job market and stayed home with the kids on mommy/daddy track. Unless you're looking at a non-educational position such as doctor or lawyer, the prospects after grad school are rather bleak. Personally, I suggest considering grad school in a subject you care about to be the reward you should take after having a career, not the tool you use to get a career.
If you're not using corkscrew to tunnel through their web proxy to your unix box at home to read your email in mutt or pine over ssh, then maybe you shouldn't be reading personal email at work anyway.
Another way to say the same thing is: if you're not capable of bypassing the restrictions that are placed, then you're not qualified to bypass them and you should sit back and realize that the restriction is for your own good.
(WebDav on Apache can't index M$Office documents AFAIK)
Zope can IIRC, and has a WebDAV interface to boot.
Have you used Ximian Evolution lately? It's so much like Outlook it's vaguely disconcerting to run it on a Linux box.
Not according to the small-time consultants I've talked to here in the SF Bay Area -- tiny companies are generally sticking with their trusty NetWare or not-so-trusty WinNt/2K servers because:
1) It's expensive to change things, even if the change is going to be a clear improvement.
2) Linux-knowledgeable people may be around, but they're not as thick on the street as MCSEs.
3) It's perceived that those Linux people are expensive gurus, unlike the maybe not-so-swift MCSE who'll work his butt off for $40K/yr (around here, that's rent+groceries and not much else). Granted he's spending time instead of money, but not all companies view uptime as more valuable than cash (in some cases, rightly so).
From: CompuServe Postmaster
To: Blind.Copy.Receiver@compuserve.com
Subject: Undeliverable Message: Delivery report for message to darlinghallrae
Date: 25 Jul 2002 10:10:47 -0400
Message "UCITA Reversal", sent at 10:10 EDT on 25-Jul-02, could not be
delivered to darlinghallrae at 10:10 EDT on 25-Jul-02 because the recipient
mailbox is full.
No, I don't think that some silly-ass riddles will separate the wheat from the chaff. But I don't have three months to interview someone, I have three hours spread across two days, and in many cases it's been all over the phone. If I was interviewing ATCs I'd demand three months, but I've been interviewing SEs instead. When I'm interviewing, I'm looking to weed out junior salesweasels who want to have a higher base. The perfect fit for this job is a senior admin or architect who is tired of being on call.
No, I've been looking for pre-sales engineers to work with networking products, security products, and managed hosting (three different companies). If I was hiring admins or developers, I'd be less interested in their knowledge of details because they'd have an opportunity to learn on the job. When you're an SE, you don't get many chances to learn on the job -- you have to know the details because you're going to discuss them at a white board or a conference table, not at a keyboard where the answers are only a few seconds away.
Those points are true if you're hiring a contractor to come in, do a job, and get out. They are not true if you're hiring a flexible team player who is going to handle a demanding job which is guranteed to throw new challenges on a daily basis.
If you're hiring the latter type of person, you want to know how they'll react to not knowing the answer in a high stress situation. I've done a lot of interviewing for sales engineering positions, and I can tell you some good ways to not get hired when this question comes up:
a) lie, convincingly or otherwise
b) go silent
c) act like a teenager trying to ask for a date.
The proper response for me at least is to say "I don't know, but based on these things I do know, this is what I think." I choose people for the way they think in addition to what they know, because that tells me something about what they'll be able to learn.
That said, most interviewees never make it to a question like that because they get stumped on my initial tech question after "how are you and where did you work before":
"Describe in as much detail as you are comfortable using exactly what happens from a network perspective when you use that laptop to visit a web site. I'm looking for which packets go where."
If you tell me about ARP, DNS, and HTTP and you can name the port numbers and transport layers, that's fine. DHCP, load-balancing, firewalls, SSL, proxy servers, server-side processors, databases, that's all extra credit. If you can't talk about these things, you're not yet ready for a professional career in this industry.
Besides the mentioned two, anyone interested should get into:
:-)
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
The Wind-up Bird Chronicles
Norwegian Wood
The Elephant Vanishes (short stories)
Underground (non-fiction)
There are more, but those are my favorites
And now, an anecdote: I was introduced to Murakami in an English class at UC Berkeley (haven of DWM's and ethnic literature, but largely void of anything else). The professor teaching the class approached the science fiction and fantasy genres as amusing trivialities and kept attempting to lead discussions into figuring out which of many parallel universes in the books was the "real" one. The students kept trying to introduce this wanker to the postmodernist idea that none of the universes is any more real or valid than the others. So finally, the guy pulls up Hard-Boiled Wonderland and says "do you really expect me to think this is a normal Japanese salaryman living a normal life?" At which point the Japanese exchange student raises her hand for the first time in weeks and says "well yes, of course he is. Strange things happen to him, but he's a totally normal person."
It was enjoyable to see.
Many IBM Stinkpads have three buttons -- high end and low end models. You get two red buttons and a big blue button under them.
I use a Zalman radial cpu fan from QuietPC on my Athlon 900, no problems.
I side with the salesperson here, this is a valid answer to a stupid question. If the product didn't have anything to do with Java, why ask if it's compatible? The only possible answers at that point are "no, it will prevent Java apps running" or "yes, it is compatible." Compatible is not in the same class as Integrated or Designed For.
Garbage In, Garbage Out.
A good proxy is a great thing; not just for saving bandwidth, but also for improving performance. I've shared modem connections and high-latency wireless connections between multiple users, and the only thing that made it bearable was Squid.
But if you want to get through a proxy and everything else is blocked, try corkscrew or httptunnel.
.
On that note, don't think that being cool and running soft RAID means you don't need backups; a corrupted file system redundantly copied to another disk is, well, still corrupt.
I know where you're coming from; I won't eat in a place that cleans with Simple Green. Nastiest smelling yech ever used to clean something, and they expect you to eat in there? Round Table is a bad one for this, so the only time I ever give them money is when someone orders delivery.
When is waste of resources ever a good idea? Someone pays for them eventually, so if a little forethought could conserve resources, it should be applied.
Social, personal, and professional interest circles are now global (within a common language pool) rather than city-wide.
I think that's a pretty huge change; people are able to trade information, ask advice, and help each other out across distance barriers that used to be insurmountable or only crossed very slowly in one direction (think snail-mailed newsletters).
CSS wasn't relevant when Netscape was built, and they gambled that it wouldn't become relevant until Netscape version five or six, so they released cruddy support in version four and rolled the dice. However, their competition and the press saw their weakness and beat them over the head with it. If you're competing with the 800-lb gorilla, you can't afford to do poorly on benchmarks, stress tests, and other public comparisons (artificial or otherwise). CSS ended up on the benchmarks when Netscape hoped it wouldn't, and IE's support was marginally better when Netscape hoped it wasn't. One more nail in the coffin...
Don't forget that you'd have to put your new radio on top of the dashboard and manually rewire the radio controls from the dashboard, steering wheel, and backseat so they'd use the new radio.
And then every other time that you take it in for an oil change or get some gas, evil gnomes from GM will rewire the dashboard controls to use the built-in radio, or maybe unplug the power wire from your new radio.
So if you're a Morlock, you can handle this because you know how to fix the wiring problems in your sleep and you can take some anti-evil-gnome measures... but if you're the typical Eloi computer luser, you're going to use the built-in radio and wait for version three to make it usable and wait for version five to make it good. MS deserves the lawsuit.
.