On a side note i'm not that great with people skills so while i write the tests i no longer do the interviews - last too applicants ended up crying during the tests.
If you can't conduct the interviews, because of your people skills, how can you work with, train and motivate your staff?
Having said that, I too have poor people skills. But I've run development teams very successfully. I've managed non-technical people (I was an operations manager for a non tech company) and it was a disaster. But when I work with people who share my love of development and systems work in general, and who want to learn from me, I do rather well. I like to teach people things and help them grow in their chosen field. Then again, I only hired people that I felt were passionate about what they were doing. I had skill tests and all that prepared for them but a fair portion of my assessment of their suitability was their desire and whether or not I thought they would do well with my training and mentoring. "Prima Donnas" were never hired. I had to fire very few of those I hired in the technical arena. Now in the non-tech arena I once fired everyone in the building (not at the same time) but I inherited a staff full of the "This is the way I've always done it and I'm not changing" attitude. Needless to say I got out of non-tech industry. I wasn't good at it. The key is: Can you motivate your staff. If not, then you shouldn't be there.
And as the ability to produce one's own energy decreases I would expect a rise in prices to export it from another country. Supply and demand and all that.
According to this site: http://www.mathwords.com/d/degenerate.htm it is effectively a line segment. However, there are three points involved which is probably where the need to determine it can be "reduced" (my term, probably not mathematically correct) to a simpler form. Some calculation has to take place to determine it is in fact a "degenerate triangle".
When I last renewed my Technet subscription, (last May maybe), the reduced license count was an option. You could still pay the regular cost for the same number of licenses they offered previously. Have things changed?
I propose "slacker"! Just kidding, I started out with this stuff on os-9. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS-9/ (actually, before that but that was and has been one of my most favorite OS's of all time) I bet a few remember that OS, it was one of the few at the time that was re-entrant.
I actually found "Has Been" a rather enjoyable listen. Very funny in many places and he had some good musicians working with him. See:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Has_Been/ for details. Doesn't really matter in the end though, cause we're all gonna die:)
Redneck Rampage had a great sound track to it. Mojo Nixon, Beat Farmers, Cement Pond. I lost the disk but GOG had it for 5 bucks and included the mp3s. And that was released quite some time ago so this has been going on for awhile.
The fact is, critical data needs to be owned by the company that is using it, and it needs to reside (at least in backup form, if not in fully managed form) inside the company's infrastructure.
Absolutely. I can't tell you how many small businesses I've worked with that are franchisees and one of the big selling points is that they won't have to manage an internal network. The franchise company handles the whole vertical market app (such as dispatch software for service companies) including storing the data. I ask them: what happens if your internet access goes down? How are you going to find our where your techs are supposed to be? What about if the hosting company for the parent company goes down? Or, worst case scenario, you get in a conflict with the parent company and they don't release your data to you. You're out of business. Even if you had the data you don't have the app to read it. Trust me, this is being tried by a lot of franchise type companies and it's not going to be a happy ending for someone. The franchises aren't stupid, they know control of the data is control of the franchisee.
I once worked at a company and received a job offer with considerably higher pay. I put in my notice, and they offered to match it. Same story so far, however, there were no repercussions or bad feelings. Note: I didn't ask them to counter the offer, I simply said that the opportunity was too good to pass up and that I had to leave. The value of "something" is what people are willing to pay for it. In my opinion, this includes my skill set as well.
I've managed many developers and my advice to them was that if they received a better offer they should go for it. I was more concerned for them, personally, than the company I worked for. Upper management controlled pay rates but they did not control my concern and care for those that worked for/with me. Of course, this was good for morale and benefited the company in the long run.
That all being said, it could go either way. The outcome of how one might be treated depends on many things and is unique in most/all cases.
I think the point is that the pharma/food industries generally aren't recruiting kids to produce propaganda like flu shot or Got Milk PSAs. The media giants, in contrast, generally don't have as many scruples.
You can't download some milk, or flu shots. If you take them you're taking physical property that can't be duplicated without additional cost. I don't care for much the things that big pharma, or factory farms do but their risk of "loss" (and I use the term loosely, not trying to discuss "lost sales" or whatnot) is not the same as that of the content that the anti-piracy advocates (Big Corps) are trying to protect. Do I find the practices described in TFA despicable, deplorable, misleading and cause me to lose even more faith in our governments? You bet. It damn near makes me want to go d/l some stuff right now:)
The electric company would be far less nefarious of course. Ostensibly, it is to rate throttle, prevent brownouts, and increase efficiency. All good green initiatives if you want to cooperate. I would not give them control over any of it, because I don't trust them to do it correctly. That, and at any one time, a refrigerator probably has at least $75 worth of food in it. Too risky. My beer might get warm.
I will most definitely agree with your sentiment about warm beer:) However, we participated in such a program in Florida and it worked well. No warm beer. No A/C not running (and it always needs to in all but a few months) We felt no impact at all. What we did experience was a decrease in our electric bill, albeit not a large one. It was a good trade off in my opinion. I think the targeted appliance was the hot water heater. And having a hot shower was not a problem.
It was free for access, at least on my BBS. Granted it wasn't in Australia, and you had to have your own computer and modem. But you need your own computer now to be on the net so no difference. If I could correspond with someone in Russia I do believe Australia would have been accessible to me as well. And the rest of the world to you. However, I do recognize that you may not have been of an age where you had money to do that. And I may be a bit older than you, therefore having more say or money at the time. Now you do, as shown by the fact that you are here. My point was simply that it was available, and not just to those who had restricted/specialized access. Granted, it wasn't Darpanet but global communication was not restricted to just a chosen few.
Scary thing is, we may be back there again if things keep going they way they are. I do not want the/any government having control over my access to communications. Fidonet, in some incarnation, may become more useful in the future. Leave the net for advertising, we can make our own thing and have it server OUR purposes rather than those who would wish to be our masters.
If there was no live footage, it would have been a calculated decision, IMHO. Perhaps based on the fallout anticipated from AP, next of kin, the rest of the world or whatever. Either that, or there was live footage, I myself wonder what Hillary Clinton was so upset about as she covered her mouth. If that's the case then we have the denial of such video. At least at this point. 50 years down the road disclosure might be different.
Those more knowledgeable perhaps can chime in as to whether or not an operation is typically recorded on video. (I do understand, this was not your "typical" operation.)
If the tax breaks are eliminated, or decreased, before we are fully prepared with alternative energy sources what do you think will happen. We will pay the difference at the pump, is my opinion.
I don't care for proprietary programming languages as much as the next guy. Take away the.net part of it, look at the principal architect of the C# language. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg/> Sorry, URL formatting has me stumped, I've followed the syntax, but that's not the point of this post. You can find him. He was was heavily involved/ perhaps lead architect (I don't know as of now) of Borland's Delphi. A most wonderful development environment, and the only real competitor to VB at the time. So my suggestion is don't bash C# but rather the encumbrances places upon it, like.NET.
Disclaimer: I still write in Delphi. If I want to update a network of 100 systems I just copy over the.exe. (Still using Delphi 7). No need to roll out updates to every machine. No registry usage. None of the BS that comes with rolling out a.Net application. And my clients find my work very valuable. My impression is that Delphi is much more common in the EU and I don't speak at all to the crap that's happened since then with the selling to this corp or that corp. I only point out that the person developed by C# is a talented individual.
I did a lot of work with Novell back in the 3.x days and it was a workhorse. When Microsoft first decided to try and penetrate the server market NT was a joke. I won't say that current MS server products are not good, in some cases they are. In my opinion, what really killed Novell and boosted Microsoft was that anyone and their brother could write server side code for Windows (not that it means it was good code, just much easier to do.) You had to be pretty good to write server side Novell code. So business who needed a server side app would go with cheap and available.
Then, essential apps started to appear that were only written for Windows. So even if you ran Novell you had to have a Windows server to handle the database or whatever. I saw it countless times and it worked in MS's favor. Finally folks just said why run two different server OSs? About that time Windows Server 2000 was out and it wasn't nearly as bad as the versions before. Trust me, I loved Novell. Rock solid. But it could only be that way in a manner that prevented every Tom, Dick and Harry from writing the next greatest customer management system. No winning IDEs like Delphi or, shudder, VB and Access so easily accessible. (Or other MS development languages.) MS made it easy to write code for the server. Note: I didn't say good code. And those apps sold. And they sold Windows along with it.
I'll give you an example of what some may consider "cloud computing". Say you purchase a franchise. The franchiser, as part of the deal, requires that you use their software for all accounting, dispatching techs, if applicable, reporting, maintaining your customer list etc. A few of my clients have been in this scenario. Here are the drawbacks:
1. Obvious case, servers not available. In a service industry, such as air conditioning companies etc, this mean you don't even know where your techs are supposed to be.
2. Servers are up but your internet service is down. Same scenario as above.
3. Worst case of all is what happens if there is a disagreement between the franchiser and the franchisee? Well guess what, they have all your data and that gives them the upper hand. Pay up first, ask questions later kind of deal. And once they have your money there is much less incentive to be fair about things.
These are real world scenarios and my advice to my clients (and these were already established businesses who were considering a franchise as a way to increases revenues) that they refuse unless they could run the franchiser required software in-house. I'll also state that these ventures weren't a McDonald's type of operation, the franchisers were relatively small themselves.
In summary, it depends on the application (haven't heard that one before have you?:) _)
The franchises promote the fact that there are few support and infrastructure requirements at the client site, which is true, but they neglect to mention the other aspects. Who wants someone else to completely control your companies data? I realize that this is just a segment of "cloud computing" in general but it's being sold to businesses every day.
My two year old loves Backyardagains as well. I pretty cool show. On topic: Yep, got rid of cable, use Netflix and Playon Media Player. Got a Roku in the bedroom and a PS3 for the living room. It was funny, when we took our cable boxes back the woman who took them took a look at my son and said "How are you going to live without cable?" My wife just thought "you all really don't have a clue yet, do you..." I'm not a sports fan so the loss of sports doesn't matter to me. I like documentaries, dinosaurs and scary movies, my wife likes drama. We've got all that covered.
You know, they accepted the settlement. They could have held out if they wanted to gamble. They chose to pull their money off black when they were ahead and leave the casino. I'm afraid I feel no unhappiness for them at all. Greedy bastards, and I don't believe that's a term I've ever used before here on/. Doesn't mean I haven't thought it though:)
>>Pity that the nuclear problems seemed to overshadow all the vastly more important and tragic aspects of the quake and tsunami.
Indeed. Many people's lives were shattered. Corporations involved did what corporations do but I do not consider the handling of this situation any worse than BP's spill. Actually, I believe that the operators of the plant were more forthcoming and there was a lot of confusion going on related to what was screwed, where the problems were, etc.. Not to mention that knowing the problems didn't mean knowing the solutions. It has, and continues to be a terrible tragedy.
Fact is we are human and as much as we'd like to account for all risk factors I have to agree that given the technology is so old it could have been much worse. It also means that we'll never obtain anything that is 100% fail safe. Six nines maybe but never perfect. Does that lessen the pain of those suffering, or who are going to suffer and don't know it yet? No. But as long as we engineer things (some of which simply boggle my mind) on the edge there will always be a risk.
To address the immediate topic, I read a great deal, from different sources, on what was happening at any point in time and I didn't feel any gaps in the coverage (other than some information wasn't released, some argue for cultural reasons, in quite a timely manner as I might have liked. I read quite a bit though and I'm sure the summary will be helpful tor those that didn't.
Bottom line, it's the people I care about first and foremost.
Good method of making sure that things that can be used are given a chance to be used.
Here in the US, and the UK as well it appears, there is a network called Freecycle http://www.freecycle.org/ where people can offer up stuff they have but don't need so it doesn't end up in the landfill. You can ask, for an item, as well although those that only take and never offer are frowned upon.
"This is my perspective as a non-American living outside of the United States, but do the majority of people inside the U.S. realize how much they've lost on the world stage over the past decade?"
No, probably not the majority. But many of us do. Besides, it's a different world than it was 30 years ago. Our economies are so intertwined at this point it would be near impossible to practice isolationism even if the US wanted to. That being the case people from all over need to see things as they really are: boundaries are man-made, counter-productive at this point and they create a sense of isolation from responsibility to the rest of the world. Well, at least some of us here in the US thing so anyway.....
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If you can't conduct the interviews, because of your people skills, how can you work with, train and motivate your staff?
Having said that, I too have poor people skills. But I've run development teams very successfully. I've managed non-technical people (I was an operations manager for a non tech company) and it was a disaster. But when I work with people who share my love of development and systems work in general, and who want to learn from me, I do rather well. I like to teach people things and help them grow in their chosen field. Then again, I only hired people that I felt were passionate about what they were doing. I had skill tests and all that prepared for them but a fair portion of my assessment of their suitability was their desire and whether or not I thought they would do well with my training and mentoring. "Prima Donnas" were never hired. I had to fire very few of those I hired in the technical arena. Now in the non-tech arena I once fired everyone in the building (not at the same time) but I inherited a staff full of the "This is the way I've always done it and I'm not changing" attitude. Needless to say I got out of non-tech industry. I wasn't good at it. The key is: Can you motivate your staff. If not, then you shouldn't be there.
And as the ability to produce one's own energy decreases I would expect a rise in prices to export it from another country. Supply and demand and all that.
According to this site: http://www.mathwords.com/d/degenerate.htm it is effectively a line segment. However, there are three points involved which is probably where the need to determine it can be "reduced" (my term, probably not mathematically correct) to a simpler form. Some calculation has to take place to determine it is in fact a "degenerate triangle".
When I last renewed my Technet subscription, (last May maybe), the reduced license count was an option. You could still pay the regular cost for the same number of licenses they offered previously. Have things changed?
I propose "slacker"! Just kidding, I started out with this stuff on os-9. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS-9/ (actually, before that but that was and has been one of my most favorite OS's of all time) I bet a few remember that OS, it was one of the few at the time that was re-entrant.
All I can say is that I wished I I had a job when I was in college where I looked at porn all day :)
I actually found "Has Been" a rather enjoyable listen. Very funny in many places and he had some good musicians working with him. See:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Has_Been/ for details. Doesn't really matter in the end though, cause we're all gonna die :)
Redneck Rampage had a great sound track to it. Mojo Nixon, Beat Farmers, Cement Pond. I lost the disk but GOG had it for 5 bucks and included the mp3s. And that was released quite some time ago so this has been going on for awhile.
Absolutely. I can't tell you how many small businesses I've worked with that are franchisees and one of the big selling points is that they won't have to manage an internal network. The franchise company handles the whole vertical market app (such as dispatch software for service companies) including storing the data. I ask them: what happens if your internet access goes down? How are you going to find our where your techs are supposed to be? What about if the hosting company for the parent company goes down? Or, worst case scenario, you get in a conflict with the parent company and they don't release your data to you. You're out of business. Even if you had the data you don't have the app to read it. Trust me, this is being tried by a lot of franchise type companies and it's not going to be a happy ending for someone. The franchises aren't stupid, they know control of the data is control of the franchisee.
I once worked at a company and received a job offer with considerably higher pay. I put in my notice, and they offered to match it. Same story so far, however, there were no repercussions or bad feelings. Note: I didn't ask them to counter the offer, I simply said that the opportunity was too good to pass up and that I had to leave. The value of "something" is what people are willing to pay for it. In my opinion, this includes my skill set as well.
I've managed many developers and my advice to them was that if they received a better offer they should go for it. I was more concerned for them, personally, than the company I worked for. Upper management controlled pay rates but they did not control my concern and care for those that worked for/with me. Of course, this was good for morale and benefited the company in the long run.
That all being said, it could go either way. The outcome of how one might be treated depends on many things and is unique in most/all cases.
You can't download some milk, or flu shots. If you take them you're taking physical property that can't be duplicated without additional cost. I don't care for much the things that big pharma, or factory farms do but their risk of "loss" (and I use the term loosely, not trying to discuss "lost sales" or whatnot) is not the same as that of the content that the anti-piracy advocates (Big Corps) are trying to protect. Do I find the practices described in TFA despicable, deplorable, misleading and cause me to lose even more faith in our governments? You bet. It damn near makes me want to go d/l some stuff right now :)
The electric company would be far less nefarious of course. Ostensibly, it is to rate throttle, prevent brownouts, and increase efficiency. All good green initiatives if you want to cooperate. I would not give them control over any of it, because I don't trust them to do it correctly. That, and at any one time, a refrigerator probably has at least $75 worth of food in it. Too risky. My beer might get warm.
I will most definitely agree with your sentiment about warm beer :) However, we participated in such a program in Florida and it worked well. No warm beer. No A/C not running (and it always needs to in all but a few months) We felt no impact at all. What we did experience was a decrease in our electric bill, albeit not a large one. It was a good trade off in my opinion. I think the targeted appliance was the hot water heater. And having a hot shower was not a problem.
It was free for access, at least on my BBS. Granted it wasn't in Australia, and you had to have your own computer and modem. But you need your own computer now to be on the net so no difference. If I could correspond with someone in Russia I do believe Australia would have been accessible to me as well. And the rest of the world to you. However, I do recognize that you may not have been of an age where you had money to do that. And I may be a bit older than you, therefore having more say or money at the time. Now you do, as shown by the fact that you are here. My point was simply that it was available, and not just to those who had restricted/specialized access. Granted, it wasn't Darpanet but global communication was not restricted to just a chosen few.
Scary thing is, we may be back there again if things keep going they way they are. I do not want the/any government having control over my access to communications. Fidonet, in some incarnation, may become more useful in the future. Leave the net for advertising, we can make our own thing and have it server OUR purposes rather than those who would wish to be our masters.
What would one expect as usage of XP decreases and Win7 increases?
If there was no live footage, it would have been a calculated decision, IMHO. Perhaps based on the fallout anticipated from AP, next of kin, the rest of the world or whatever. Either that, or there was live footage, I myself wonder what Hillary Clinton was so upset about as she covered her mouth. If that's the case then we have the denial of such video. At least at this point. 50 years down the road disclosure might be different.
Those more knowledgeable perhaps can chime in as to whether or not an operation is typically recorded on video. (I do understand, this was not your "typical" operation.)
If the tax breaks are eliminated, or decreased, before we are fully prepared with alternative energy sources what do you think will happen. We will pay the difference at the pump, is my opinion.
I don't care for proprietary programming languages as much as the next guy. Take away the .net part of it, look at the principal architect of the C# language. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg/> Sorry, URL formatting has me stumped, I've followed the syntax, but that's not the point of this post. You can find him. He was was heavily involved/ perhaps lead architect (I don't know as of now) of Borland's Delphi. A most wonderful development environment, and the only real competitor to VB at the time. So my suggestion is don't bash C# but rather the encumbrances places upon it, like .NET.
Disclaimer: I still write in Delphi. If I want to update a network of 100 systems I just copy over the .exe. (Still using Delphi 7). No need to roll out updates to every machine. No registry usage. None of the BS that comes with rolling out a .Net application. And my clients find my work very valuable. My impression is that Delphi is much more common in the EU and I don't speak at all to the crap that's happened since then with the selling to this corp or that corp. I only point out that the person developed by C# is a talented individual.
I did a lot of work with Novell back in the 3.x days and it was a workhorse. When Microsoft first decided to try and penetrate the server market NT was a joke. I won't say that current MS server products are not good, in some cases they are. In my opinion, what really killed Novell and boosted Microsoft was that anyone and their brother could write server side code for Windows (not that it means it was good code, just much easier to do.) You had to be pretty good to write server side Novell code. So business who needed a server side app would go with cheap and available.
Then, essential apps started to appear that were only written for Windows. So even if you ran Novell you had to have a Windows server to handle the database or whatever. I saw it countless times and it worked in MS's favor. Finally folks just said why run two different server OSs? About that time Windows Server 2000 was out and it wasn't nearly as bad as the versions before. Trust me, I loved Novell. Rock solid. But it could only be that way in a manner that prevented every Tom, Dick and Harry from writing the next greatest customer management system. No winning IDEs like Delphi or, shudder, VB and Access so easily accessible. (Or other MS development languages.) MS made it easy to write code for the server. Note: I didn't say good code. And those apps sold. And they sold Windows along with it.
Obviously a fast switch of batteries is a better idea. I don't want to wait 15 minutes or even 5 to recharge. ...
How about if the range of the vehicle was quadrupled? Would you wait then?
I'll give you an example of what some may consider "cloud computing". Say you purchase a franchise. The franchiser, as part of the deal, requires that you use their software for all accounting, dispatching techs, if applicable, reporting, maintaining your customer list etc. A few of my clients have been in this scenario. Here are the drawbacks:
1. Obvious case, servers not available. In a service industry, such as air conditioning companies etc, this mean you don't even know where your techs are supposed to be.
2. Servers are up but your internet service is down. Same scenario as above.
3. Worst case of all is what happens if there is a disagreement between the franchiser and the franchisee? Well guess what, they have all your data and that gives them the upper hand. Pay up first, ask questions later kind of deal. And once they have your money there is much less incentive to be fair about things.
These are real world scenarios and my advice to my clients (and these were already established businesses who were considering a franchise as a way to increases revenues) that they refuse unless they could run the franchiser required software in-house. I'll also state that these ventures weren't a McDonald's type of operation, the franchisers were relatively small themselves.
In summary, it depends on the application (haven't heard that one before have you? :) _)
The franchises promote the fact that there are few support and infrastructure requirements at the client site, which is true, but they neglect to mention the other aspects. Who wants someone else to completely control your companies data? I realize that this is just a segment of "cloud computing" in general but it's being sold to businesses every day.
My two year old loves Backyardagains as well. I pretty cool show. On topic: Yep, got rid of cable, use Netflix and Playon Media Player. Got a Roku in the bedroom and a PS3 for the living room. It was funny, when we took our cable boxes back the woman who took them took a look at my son and said "How are you going to live without cable?" My wife just thought "you all really don't have a clue yet, do you..." I'm not a sports fan so the loss of sports doesn't matter to me. I like documentaries, dinosaurs and scary movies, my wife likes drama. We've got all that covered.
You know, they accepted the settlement. They could have held out if they wanted to gamble. They chose to pull their money off black when they were ahead and leave the casino. I'm afraid I feel no unhappiness for them at all. Greedy bastards, and I don't believe that's a term I've ever used before here on /. Doesn't mean I haven't thought it though :)
>>Pity that the nuclear problems seemed to overshadow all the vastly more important and tragic aspects of the quake and tsunami.
Indeed. Many people's lives were shattered. Corporations involved did what corporations do but I do not consider the handling of this situation any worse than BP's spill. Actually, I believe that the operators of the plant were more forthcoming and there was a lot of confusion going on related to what was screwed, where the problems were, etc.. Not to mention that knowing the problems didn't mean knowing the solutions. It has, and continues to be a terrible tragedy.
Fact is we are human and as much as we'd like to account for all risk factors I have to agree that given the technology is so old it could have been much worse. It also means that we'll never obtain anything that is 100% fail safe. Six nines maybe but never perfect. Does that lessen the pain of those suffering, or who are going to suffer and don't know it yet? No. But as long as we engineer things (some of which simply boggle my mind) on the edge there will always be a risk.
To address the immediate topic, I read a great deal, from different sources, on what was happening at any point in time and I didn't feel any gaps in the coverage (other than some information wasn't released, some argue for cultural reasons, in quite a timely manner as I might have liked. I read quite a bit though and I'm sure the summary will be helpful tor those that didn't.
Bottom line, it's the people I care about first and foremost.
Good method of making sure that things that can be used are given a chance to be used.
Here in the US, and the UK as well it appears, there is a network called Freecycle http://www.freecycle.org/ where people can offer up stuff they have but don't need so it doesn't end up in the landfill. You can ask, for an item, as well although those that only take and never offer are frowned upon.
"This is my perspective as a non-American living outside of the United States, but do the majority of people inside the U.S. realize how much they've lost on the world stage over the past decade?"
No, probably not the majority. But many of us do. Besides, it's a different world than it was 30 years ago. Our economies are so intertwined at this point it would be near impossible to practice isolationism even if the US wanted to. That being the case people from all over need to see things as they really are: boundaries are man-made, counter-productive at this point and they create a sense of isolation from responsibility to the rest of the world. Well, at least some of us here in the US thing so anyway.....