I'm just curious... which VM are you using? I started using VirtualBox this year to run the Windows applications I need and it's worked fairly well, but with a few annoyances (e.g. unable to burn CD/DVD, can't access creative Zen mp3 player).
Indeed. When you have experience with just one paradigm, moving to the second is probably the hardest. However, once you've done that a few times, at least in my own experience, it gets easier. And if you want something that works like X, often it's just best to use X.
Sadly, my only database experience with with MS SQL Server and Access (though I tend to use access for forms, front-end work, and excel/powerpoint automation). I'm anxious to try one of the open source alternatives for my own personal work and I'm leaning towards Postgresql, but it looks like I'm facing a pretty large learning curve. I enjoy using the Management Studio that comes with SQL 2008 and I haven't seen anything yet (but I haven't made a serious effort) that works in a similar way for Postgresql.
But that's like the joke about the guy brought out of retirement to fix a machine nobody else could fix. He puts a check on a spot and says replace that part. Then they get a bill for $20,000. "But all you did was put a checkmark on the part - we need an itemized bill." So he gives them "1) chalk mark... $1.00; 2) knowing where to put it... $19,999"
It might be as easy as placing a single comment character in a single file, but the trick is knowing that's what is needed. Maybe that's not well documented.
Indeed... that's true for modern games. But I suspect that if you're looking at 5 year old games, designed to work on 5 year old hardware, that they'd run decently on modern hardware, even if through a virtualization layer.
It would be interesting to see some benchmarks on it.
Of course, Linux + virtualization is not the best answer for all problems, but it's a good solution for my problems.
I'd push him to Linux, if Wine could support his "Really old graphic arts software" he runs.
I used to dual boot between Windows XP and Linux because I preferred to use Linux but there are applications that require Windows. After a recent hard-drive crash, I re-evaluated my setup and tried out VirtualBox - and it's fantastic!
Essentially you run it as a virtual machine on your host system (Linux) where you can then have Windows run in a box. I've been using that setup since January and I love it! I even managed to copy the partition of my work laptop and got it working as a virtual computer as well.
The biggest shortcomings are that I cannot get my Creative Zen to work in the virtual computer. Also, support for writing to DVD/CDs is not very good. I haven't found a good workaround for the Zen (gnomad2 kind of works), and for the DVD stuff, k3b works well on the native Linux side.
I also had success in getting the same image to work on my mom's computer running Vista. She hates vista and a lot of her old games don't work on it. She's thrilled to play her old favorite card game in the virtual computer I set up for her.
VirtualBox is now owned by Oracle, but I think it's still open source. I didn't try VMWare because VirtualBox as served my needs pretty well. You might want to look into it.
Where the hell is the tea party? They talk about keeping the government out of our lives, but when it really matters they aren't anywhere to be found.
That was my thought. When I used to fit more within conservative politics, the idea of limiting government monitoring of citizens an appealing part of the ideology.
Now I fit more within the liberal side of things (I've drifted to the left, but I think the country had drifted right), but I still don't like the idea of all of the eavesdropping and records retention used to monitor citizens. The right still talks about how evil and communist-like we liberals are. But it's sad to me that it's the right that's been implementing all these things that I consider hallmarks of a totalitarian regime. It's funny and sad that it's one of the more extreme Democrats (commie that he is, right?) that's challenging this bill.
Students' money going to fraud? Well, I suppose it cost about $10 in electricity to keep it going over the summer.
We (Engineering/CS school) needed the room but we just didn't have hardware to go in it a the time. If it looked unused, it was going to be given over to the English department. So I made it look used while the vultures were circling.
After a couple months (and the fiscal year started and we had extra money in the budget) finally able to use it as intended; as a "special projects" room for senior CS student projects, so I suspect the students actually did appreciate my "fraud". It was a small room, perfect for those students to work on their projects in a quiet place.
So I don't know about being an example of what's wrong... I was doing what was best for the paying students I was responsible for serving. Sometimes being able to do a good job requires being able to navigate the bureaucracy you find yourself in.
Working for a university once, there was a dispute over whether our department should get to keep a small closet of a room during a department change. In order to make the room look busy and important, I built a "Beowulf" cluster of stacks of 486 machines. I made sure the disk activity lights and network switch were visible from the window in the door and then had the machines randomly requesting 1 kb files from each other. All the activity lights looked really impressive. And we got to keep the room for a year.
Looking back, I should feel lucky I didn't accidentally create skynet.
Yeah, $8 a month for unlimited streaming is a fucking steal.
Indeed. I've been streaming for a year with Netflix and keep thinking, "I can't believe this is only $8/month."
I'm not bothered by the increase in price, since for me it would be worth a higher price. I am, however, bothered by the change in the UI. My computer is not a TV and I expect to be able to do more with my computer (since i have more input options than just a remote control). I also don't like not being able to see the titles and ratings any more.
And they need to work on their PR and understanding the difference between "inside voice" and "outside voice". The latte thing is the kind of thing you say in an internal meeting because... well, you can see all the comments here about it. The "outside voice" should have been something along the lines of, "The content owners are raising our costs. We still want to offer the best content possible, but to do that, we have to charge a bit more."
I took a LEAN class from a professor who had been a management accountant for a good part of his life. He wrote a few books about how companies are often driven into inefficiency and/or ruin by allowing the accounting and finance arms of the companies to be the dominant decision makers. This one, Relevance Lost is from 1991:
There is a federal guideline for this and most states and cities follow it. It's the federal guideline known as the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) http://mutcd.fhwa.dot.gov/. Where it provides guidance, most follow it exactly, with exceptions being rare. However there are often local situations not covered precisely in the MUTCD.
It's very similar to a "Firefly" simulation in Netlogo (http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/). It's an agent-based simulation language/system that allows you to explore similar behaviors as the ones seen here, but virtually.
All you need are the BASIC cooking utensils... THEN all you need are fresh ingredients.
Alton Brown seems to espouse this idea that you don't need lots of fancy gadgets; just a good set of the basics. I've heard him say several times that the only tool in his kitchen that is made for just one purpose is his fire extinguisher.
Will Siemens have anything to do with the 21st century electric grid?
I hope not. Siemens does our corporate IT. As well as that works, it will be cheaper, cleaner, and more efficient to build a leaky 1960's technology nuclear reactor in every backyard.
I'm not sure that's a good comparison. Coke makes its money by selling product to its customers. Slashdot makes money by selling its customers as a product.
If customers complain about and stop buying Coke that results in an immediate hit to quarterly numbers and the bottom line. Coke (and Pepsi) build their brands based on a relationship with their customers - a feeling you get when drinking their sugary colored water; you belong to them, like a family. So when they change things seemingly unnecessarily, it violates a trust with the customer, and they don't get as much perceived value for their money.
When Slashdot makes an unpopular change to its design, sure some users will leave, but most, still getting more value than they pay for it, will stick it out. Plus there aren't very many good alternatives to what Slashdot provides.
Well, then it seems to me the airlines should be doing something to fix it besides just trying to ban electronic equipment. If a plane can truly be put into peril with a small battery-powered transmitter then it's not going to take long for the Bad Guys(TM) to figure out how to use that as a weapon.
I hope this is not going to be another unlocked cockpit door problem where hijackings could have been easily prevented by putting a strong lock on the cockpit doors.
The airlines and the FAA can try to ban PEDs all they want, but until they make the planes safe from them, then it's just another case of security theater.
Of course (Smith, et. al., 1743), it (Jameson, 1641) makes it difficult (Al-Hamdi, 1721) to read (Grog, -3000 BCE) a sentence (Miller, Miller, 1902) without (Gupta, 2003) going (Lucretius, 50 BCE) a bit mad (me, now).
How big exactly is an enormous powerpoint presentation? How big are these spreadsheets. Excel only handles 65,000 rows, the data can't possibly be that big.
Well, Excel 2003 only handles 65k rows... per sheet, but there can be at least 255 sheets. Plus many corporate offices are on Office 2007 or 2010, which had much higher limits.
I personally am tasked with sending an excel file each month to a VP that is about 150 MB, because it's basically an extract of a ton of data from a database... that he wants to have "on hand" in his iPad.... "just in case I need it". I'm sure there's a better way to make it available to him; however, I'm just glad I don't have to deliver it in some kind of PowerPoint format.
Granted, that's only 150 MB/month, but I suspect I'm not the only person tasked with requests like this. I can only imagine the gigabytes of PowerPoint presentations he has on the thing.
You come of as a bit of an asshole (Indians are people not monkeys), but I'll answer your questions anyway.
So at my company (a Fortune 500), if you want/need things like shared-drives, generic email accounts, Citrix platform for an application, a sql server database, you submit a request and it gets made. I think of this is the "operational infrastructure" of our IT organization.
Now, it's up to you, as the user, to build that database, populate it with tables, views, stored procedures, etc. They won't help you with that. Just like if you ask for a shared drive, they won't make the files that you want to store in it - that's up to you. However, they do handle day-to-day backups of that database and will do restores as needed. And yes, there are costs for these services - and our department is billed for those. I never said we wanted anything for free.
We also have another part of our IT organization who take care of the data and reporting part of the business ("Business Intelligence", I suppose). They manage all the various systems that capture data out of our transactional systems (e.g. SAP) and make reports based on that data. This is the part of the organization that should be providing a tool or system that does what our "home-built" system does.
So this application is essentially a "balanced scorecard" tool. In a nutshell, it's standalone (not attached to other databases) and allows for data to be keyed in or loaded via excel and produces PowerPoint decks and Excel reports. There are also some trivial administrative forms that allow for things like users checking boxes to indicate the data from their country is ready for reporting. The key requirement is that it has to be flexible. If the primary VP for this reporting wants to see a new report or changes to existing reports, we need to be able to turn that around in a week or two, not several months. The other key challenge is that it has to handle data that isn't provisioned through the certified data paths. Some data that needs to be reported simply does not exist in any current systems and is the result of offline analysis or it may be in systems that are otherwise not connected (not even all the "sanctioned" systems inter-operate). We have to report based on that data, so it gets loaded via a manual process of some kind. And there's no way to avoid that.
We've engaged several times with the BI team (the appropriate part of the IT organization for this kind of proposal... and yes the VP of IT is aware of the situation) to see how they can try to support our needs. Again, I'm not asking them to take over the application we've built, but instead come up with their own proposal based on approved systems and tools.
Each time, we provide a detailed list of requirements (must haves, really should haves, and like-to-haves) along with use cases, example reports, lists of source-systems for data, etc), with lots and lots of meetings to clarify what we're asking for. And then we ask them to propose an "approved" solution (approved meaning one they will support and manage). And that's where it hangs up.
But here's the challenge. From my end, regardless of the tools and methods available, I'm required to collect data from global systems and from 30 countries and then prepare decks of reports (up to 20 pages each) for each of those, usually by the 10th of the month. I can do that manually with linked excel sheets, vba macros, and checking files in and out of e-rooms (like sharepoint)... and if that was the only way to do it, I'd still be expected to do it (though I don't think it would be possible to do now - with all we have to do). On top of all that, we have to provide ad-hoc analysis based on our data, because management may want to explore specific details of potential problems.
Now, I've seen the threads here about how bad it is for businesses to "store" data in excel sheets and I agree. A database is the right place to store data. So we asked for a database and "report building" solution. We were told it couldn't be done (or could only be done for an impossible amount of money and in a very long time), so we did it ourselves... because we had to or we'd have to do it all by hand.
See above, you fucking incompetent nitwit. They offered you the solution that would WORK FOR THE ENTIRE COMPANY. You wanted everything now and for zero cost.
Actually, we have about 500 users using the application in 30 countries, and the application is actually quite stable. In five years, we've only had a couple hours of unplanned downtime, and half of that was a Citrix server problem (out of my control). Most of our planned downtime has typically been for upgrading servers (moving from SQL2000 to SQL2008 servers, or from a single Citrix box to a farm of Citirix servers for the application) and happens on holidays.
When I started, we supported this process for 8 countries and it took over 3 weeks every month to do (we were doing it by hand, in multiply-linked excel sheets, checking things in and out of an "e-room"). Now we support 30 countries and complete the process in 5 business days (with about 10 times the amount of data and detail). We have daily backups and have never lost a piece of data that couldn't be restored within a day.
Every year or so, we keep going back to IT asking them to propose a replacement solution. We're not even asking them to "take over" what I've done, but to come up with their own way of solving the problem with whatever tools they want to use (Teradata/Cognos, in-house job?). After about 40 hours of meetings, they come back and say they can't do it (for any price). And unlike the first effort with them, we now have a working prototype that actually captures all the business requirements and business rules. We're now in a position to more clearly explain exactly what we need and they still can't or won't do it.
So, exists and doing it its job, or doing it by hand waiting for a solution that will never come. Pick one.
Note, I'm not struggling with the entire IT organization. The people in IT who provide servers: SQL servers, shared-drives, and Citrix platforms, etc. are fantastic. I ask for what I need and they work with me to clarify what's actually needed then cheerfully provide it. I couldn't keep this going without them.
Well, all these IT problems come from IT always saying "no" to the "business users" or coming up with ridiculous proposals for a solution.
Believe me, the "business users" aren't just sitting out there trying to come up with ways to make IT work harder. They're trying to run a business and make money. When IT consistently says "no" or comes back with ridiculous proposals, the business users have no choice but to go find some other way to do it; and that usually means hacking something together with the limited tools and knowledge available... typically excel with some vba and/or Access. They don't have a choice... they have to get the job done because it's how the company makes money. And eventually you get tired of all the countless hours of bureaucratic meetings trying to get IT involved and you just give up.
In a recent example, we have a relatively simple problem... there are 3 simple excel sheets that have some 100 elements of data that need to be handled each month and put into a database to hold the history. Then an excel file needs be generated based on that history. We've been in countless hours of scoping meetings, with a consultant writing the BRDs and Business Cases over the last 4 months. All the while, the business users are handling this process by-hand in Excel (how accurate and error-free do you think they are that way?). Finally a solution was proposed... they can do it in 6 months and will charge the business $200k.
Really? For that money, we could just hire a new analyst and just have them keep doing this by hand. But that's not allowed by HR. So I'll be hacking this together over the next couple of weekends. And then IT will get to support it when I won't. They better hope I do it well. I'll do the best I can, but like I always say, "I'm not a database person".
Now wouldn't it have been better to not have all those hours and hours of meetings and just have a database person and a report-writing person sit down with me and spend a week building this "lightweight" application in a way that IT will prefer to support?
We're not talking enterprise-class software that has to have 24x7 availability with multiple redundancy. We just want a database to hold a trivial amount of data, import data from a standard format each month, and generate a standard report. If I can hack together over a weekend or two a solution that works, how is it that nobody in IT (who should know how to do this) can spend even quadruple that time and deliver something that works but is also built in a way IT would like to support?
It's inevitable that the business users will need lightweight applications. And as you know, it's inevitable that IT will have to end up supporting it. Wouldn't it make more sense to get out ahead of it then, and offer lightweight solutions in a reasonable manner, and not force the business users to hack their own crap together?
That said, he shouldn't be hooking up hardware to the network, especially in a hospital.
Better to have this as an "external example/proof of concept" that his management can use to demonstrate "this problem isn't that hard" and "the solution shouldn't cost $5mil".
Very quickly, all these databases became IT's responsibility to manage, especially when the pinheads who designed them got promoted to their particular level of incompetence, or left the company.
This inevitably happens because IT organizations refuse to comprehend or work under the concept that they are not the reason for the existence of the business, but instead exist to help the business make money.
I'm one of those "pinheads". My VPs give me requirements to accomplish some task, gather some data, and build some reports in order to support the operation of the business. Such a task requires some kind of database to hold the data and some kind of reporting application to build the reports. So I go to IT and ask, spend weeks building BRDs and cases and they come back with the ridiculous response that it will take 2 years to build and cost half a million dollars.
I'm not allowed to hire any new employees to do this work manually and this is far from the only task I have to do each week, so what do I do? I spend a couple evenings and weekends hacking together a solution that "works".
Now I try use the best practices I can, with normalized tables, primary keys, with the data all in SQL and linked to Access, etc. But I'm no expert. But why can't the IT organization come up with "quick solutions"? Are there no people in IT who know more than me who could make something "as good" as the POS I cobbled together in a week or two?
Well, the answer is that there apparently aren't. So pinheads like me, who have to get a job done "now" so the business can do what it does (making and selling widgets) do what we have to get the job done so we can sell widgets and earn the money that justifies our existence as a business (and pays for the IT budget and salaries).
I also know this makes a mess for the IT department when they have to inherit the POS I made. But just imagine how much easier things would be for the IT folks if they would provide people to help with these quick solutions so that they are designed reasonably well and are easier to support. Considering how much time and effort they have to spend on the back-end of it, dealing with crappy databases and data, it would probably actually require less time and effort if they availed themselves at the front-end when the business needed a quick solution.
If a pinhead like me can come up with a solution in a couple weeks (less time than all the project scoping meetings) that's still holding up pretty well after 5 years, then it's clearly not rocket-science. Why can't an IT person or two, who actually do this for a living, do the same or better?
Watching Cosmos is like comfort food to me. However, I was saddened a bit while reading Dawkins' "The Greatest Show On Earth" when he debunks that example of evolution.
On the other hand, the whole purpose of the book is to provide examples and evidence for evolution and its mechanisms. It's actually quite a good book. It would be awesome to see a tv series made of it.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm just curious... which VM are you using? I started using VirtualBox this year to run the Windows applications I need and it's worked fairly well, but with a few annoyances (e.g. unable to burn CD/DVD, can't access creative Zen mp3 player).
Indeed. When you have experience with just one paradigm, moving to the second is probably the hardest. However, once you've done that a few times, at least in my own experience, it gets easier. And if you want something that works like X, often it's just best to use X.
Sadly, my only database experience with with MS SQL Server and Access (though I tend to use access for forms, front-end work, and excel/powerpoint automation). I'm anxious to try one of the open source alternatives for my own personal work and I'm leaning towards Postgresql, but it looks like I'm facing a pretty large learning curve. I enjoy using the Management Studio that comes with SQL 2008 and I haven't seen anything yet (but I haven't made a serious effort) that works in a similar way for Postgresql.
But that's like the joke about the guy brought out of retirement to fix a machine nobody else could fix. He puts a check on a spot and says replace that part. Then they get a bill for $20,000. "But all you did was put a checkmark on the part - we need an itemized bill." So he gives them "1) chalk mark... $1.00; 2) knowing where to put it... $19,999"
It might be as easy as placing a single comment character in a single file, but the trick is knowing that's what is needed. Maybe that's not well documented.
Indeed... that's true for modern games. But I suspect that if you're looking at 5 year old games, designed to work on 5 year old hardware, that they'd run decently on modern hardware, even if through a virtualization layer.
It would be interesting to see some benchmarks on it.
Of course, Linux + virtualization is not the best answer for all problems, but it's a good solution for my problems.
I'd push him to Linux, if Wine could support his "Really old graphic arts software" he runs.
I used to dual boot between Windows XP and Linux because I preferred to use Linux but there are applications that require Windows. After a recent hard-drive crash, I re-evaluated my setup and tried out VirtualBox - and it's fantastic!
Essentially you run it as a virtual machine on your host system (Linux) where you can then have Windows run in a box. I've been using that setup since January and I love it! I even managed to copy the partition of my work laptop and got it working as a virtual computer as well.
The biggest shortcomings are that I cannot get my Creative Zen to work in the virtual computer. Also, support for writing to DVD/CDs is not very good. I haven't found a good workaround for the Zen (gnomad2 kind of works), and for the DVD stuff, k3b works well on the native Linux side.
I also had success in getting the same image to work on my mom's computer running Vista. She hates vista and a lot of her old games don't work on it. She's thrilled to play her old favorite card game in the virtual computer I set up for her.
VirtualBox is now owned by Oracle, but I think it's still open source. I didn't try VMWare because VirtualBox as served my needs pretty well. You might want to look into it.
Where the hell is the tea party? They talk about keeping the government out of our lives, but when it really matters they aren't anywhere to be found.
That was my thought. When I used to fit more within conservative politics, the idea of limiting government monitoring of citizens an appealing part of the ideology.
Now I fit more within the liberal side of things (I've drifted to the left, but I think the country had drifted right), but I still don't like the idea of all of the eavesdropping and records retention used to monitor citizens. The right still talks about how evil and communist-like we liberals are. But it's sad to me that it's the right that's been implementing all these things that I consider hallmarks of a totalitarian regime. It's funny and sad that it's one of the more extreme Democrats (commie that he is, right?) that's challenging this bill.
Students' money going to fraud? Well, I suppose it cost about $10 in electricity to keep it going over the summer.
We (Engineering/CS school) needed the room but we just didn't have hardware to go in it a the time. If it looked unused, it was going to be given over to the English department. So I made it look used while the vultures were circling.
After a couple months (and the fiscal year started and we had extra money in the budget) finally able to use it as intended; as a "special projects" room for senior CS student projects, so I suspect the students actually did appreciate my "fraud". It was a small room, perfect for those students to work on their projects in a quiet place.
So I don't know about being an example of what's wrong... I was doing what was best for the paying students I was responsible for serving. Sometimes being able to do a good job requires being able to navigate the bureaucracy you find yourself in.
This reminds me...
Working for a university once, there was a dispute over whether our department should get to keep a small closet of a room during a department change. In order to make the room look busy and important, I built a "Beowulf" cluster of stacks of 486 machines. I made sure the disk activity lights and network switch were visible from the window in the door and then had the machines randomly requesting 1 kb files from each other. All the activity lights looked really impressive. And we got to keep the room for a year.
Looking back, I should feel lucky I didn't accidentally create skynet.
Yeah, $8 a month for unlimited streaming is a fucking steal.
Indeed. I've been streaming for a year with Netflix and keep thinking, "I can't believe this is only $8/month."
I'm not bothered by the increase in price, since for me it would be worth a higher price. I am, however, bothered by the change in the UI. My computer is not a TV and I expect to be able to do more with my computer (since i have more input options than just a remote control). I also don't like not being able to see the titles and ratings any more.
And they need to work on their PR and understanding the difference between "inside voice" and "outside voice". The latte thing is the kind of thing you say in an internal meeting because... well, you can see all the comments here about it. The "outside voice" should have been something along the lines of, "The content owners are raising our costs. We still want to offer the best content possible, but to do that, we have to charge a bit more."
I took a LEAN class from a professor who had been a management accountant for a good part of his life. He wrote a few books about how companies are often driven into inefficiency and/or ruin by allowing the accounting and finance arms of the companies to be the dominant decision makers. This one, Relevance Lost is from 1991:
http://www.amazon.com/Relevance-Lost-Rise-Management-Accounting/dp/0875842542
There is a federal guideline for this and most states and cities follow it. It's the federal guideline known as the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) http://mutcd.fhwa.dot.gov/. Where it provides guidance, most follow it exactly, with exceptions being rare. However there are often local situations not covered precisely in the MUTCD.
Roundabouts, including their markings, are covered in Chapter 3C http://mutcd.fhwa.dot.gov/htm/2009/part3/part3c.htm.
It's very similar to a "Firefly" simulation in Netlogo (http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/). It's an agent-based simulation language/system that allows you to explore similar behaviors as the ones seen here, but virtually.
All you need are the BASIC cooking utensils... THEN
all you need are fresh ingredients.
Alton Brown seems to espouse this idea that you don't need lots of fancy gadgets; just a good set of the basics. I've heard him say several times that the only tool in his kitchen that is made for just one purpose is his fire extinguisher.
Will Siemens have anything to do with the 21st century electric grid?
I hope not. Siemens does our corporate IT. As well as that works, it will be cheaper, cleaner, and more efficient to build a leaky 1960's technology nuclear reactor in every backyard.
I'm not sure that's a good comparison. Coke makes its money by selling product to its customers. Slashdot makes money by selling its customers as a product.
If customers complain about and stop buying Coke that results in an immediate hit to quarterly numbers and the bottom line. Coke (and Pepsi) build their brands based on a relationship with their customers - a feeling you get when drinking their sugary colored water; you belong to them, like a family. So when they change things seemingly unnecessarily, it violates a trust with the customer, and they don't get as much perceived value for their money.
When Slashdot makes an unpopular change to its design, sure some users will leave, but most, still getting more value than they pay for it, will stick it out. Plus there aren't very many good alternatives to what Slashdot provides.
Well, then it seems to me the airlines should be doing something to fix it besides just trying to ban electronic equipment. If a plane can truly be put into peril with a small battery-powered transmitter then it's not going to take long for the Bad Guys(TM) to figure out how to use that as a weapon.
I hope this is not going to be another unlocked cockpit door problem where hijackings could have been easily prevented by putting a strong lock on the cockpit doors.
The airlines and the FAA can try to ban PEDs all they want, but until they make the planes safe from them, then it's just another case of security theater.
Of course (Smith, et. al., 1743), it (Jameson, 1641) makes it difficult (Al-Hamdi, 1721) to read (Grog, -3000 BCE) a sentence (Miller, Miller, 1902) without (Gupta, 2003) going (Lucretius, 50 BCE) a bit mad (me, now).
How big exactly is an enormous powerpoint presentation? How big are these spreadsheets. Excel only handles 65,000 rows, the data can't possibly be that big.
Well, Excel 2003 only handles 65k rows... per sheet, but there can be at least 255 sheets. Plus many corporate offices are on Office 2007 or 2010, which had much higher limits.
I personally am tasked with sending an excel file each month to a VP that is about 150 MB, because it's basically an extract of a ton of data from a database... that he wants to have "on hand" in his iPad.... "just in case I need it". I'm sure there's a better way to make it available to him; however, I'm just glad I don't have to deliver it in some kind of PowerPoint format.
Granted, that's only 150 MB/month, but I suspect I'm not the only person tasked with requests like this. I can only imagine the gigabytes of PowerPoint presentations he has on the thing.
You come of as a bit of an asshole (Indians are people not monkeys), but I'll answer your questions anyway.
So at my company (a Fortune 500), if you want/need things like shared-drives, generic email accounts, Citrix platform for an application, a sql server database, you submit a request and it gets made. I think of this is the "operational infrastructure" of our IT organization.
Now, it's up to you, as the user, to build that database, populate it with tables, views, stored procedures, etc. They won't help you with that. Just like if you ask for a shared drive, they won't make the files that you want to store in it - that's up to you. However, they do handle day-to-day backups of that database and will do restores as needed. And yes, there are costs for these services - and our department is billed for those. I never said we wanted anything for free.
We also have another part of our IT organization who take care of the data and reporting part of the business ("Business Intelligence", I suppose). They manage all the various systems that capture data out of our transactional systems (e.g. SAP) and make reports based on that data. This is the part of the organization that should be providing a tool or system that does what our "home-built" system does.
So this application is essentially a "balanced scorecard" tool. In a nutshell, it's standalone (not attached to other databases) and allows for data to be keyed in or loaded via excel and produces PowerPoint decks and Excel reports. There are also some trivial administrative forms that allow for things like users checking boxes to indicate the data from their country is ready for reporting. The key requirement is that it has to be flexible. If the primary VP for this reporting wants to see a new report or changes to existing reports, we need to be able to turn that around in a week or two, not several months. The other key challenge is that it has to handle data that isn't provisioned through the certified data paths. Some data that needs to be reported simply does not exist in any current systems and is the result of offline analysis or it may be in systems that are otherwise not connected (not even all the "sanctioned" systems inter-operate). We have to report based on that data, so it gets loaded via a manual process of some kind. And there's no way to avoid that.
We've engaged several times with the BI team (the appropriate part of the IT organization for this kind of proposal... and yes the VP of IT is aware of the situation) to see how they can try to support our needs. Again, I'm not asking them to take over the application we've built, but instead come up with their own proposal based on approved systems and tools.
Each time, we provide a detailed list of requirements (must haves, really should haves, and like-to-haves) along with use cases, example reports, lists of source-systems for data, etc), with lots and lots of meetings to clarify what we're asking for. And then we ask them to propose an "approved" solution (approved meaning one they will support and manage). And that's where it hangs up.
But here's the challenge. From my end, regardless of the tools and methods available, I'm required to collect data from global systems and from 30 countries and then prepare decks of reports (up to 20 pages each) for each of those, usually by the 10th of the month. I can do that manually with linked excel sheets, vba macros, and checking files in and out of e-rooms (like sharepoint)... and if that was the only way to do it, I'd still be expected to do it (though I don't think it would be possible to do now - with all we have to do). On top of all that, we have to provide ad-hoc analysis based on our data, because management may want to explore specific details of potential problems.
Now, I've seen the threads here about how bad it is for businesses to "store" data in excel sheets and I agree. A database is the right place to store data. So we asked for a database and "report building" solution. We were told it couldn't be done (or could only be done for an impossible amount of money and in a very long time), so we did it ourselves... because we had to or we'd have to do it all by hand.
So, what would you do (aside from quitting)?
See above, you fucking incompetent nitwit. They offered you the solution that would WORK FOR THE ENTIRE COMPANY. You wanted everything now and for zero cost.
Actually, we have about 500 users using the application in 30 countries, and the application is actually quite stable. In five years, we've only had a couple hours of unplanned downtime, and half of that was a Citrix server problem (out of my control). Most of our planned downtime has typically been for upgrading servers (moving from SQL2000 to SQL2008 servers, or from a single Citrix box to a farm of Citirix servers for the application) and happens on holidays.
When I started, we supported this process for 8 countries and it took over 3 weeks every month to do (we were doing it by hand, in multiply-linked excel sheets, checking things in and out of an "e-room"). Now we support 30 countries and complete the process in 5 business days (with about 10 times the amount of data and detail). We have daily backups and have never lost a piece of data that couldn't be restored within a day.
Every year or so, we keep going back to IT asking them to propose a replacement solution. We're not even asking them to "take over" what I've done, but to come up with their own way of solving the problem with whatever tools they want to use (Teradata/Cognos, in-house job?). After about 40 hours of meetings, they come back and say they can't do it (for any price). And unlike the first effort with them, we now have a working prototype that actually captures all the business requirements and business rules. We're now in a position to more clearly explain exactly what we need and they still can't or won't do it.
So, exists and doing it its job, or doing it by hand waiting for a solution that will never come. Pick one.
Note, I'm not struggling with the entire IT organization. The people in IT who provide servers: SQL servers, shared-drives, and Citrix platforms, etc. are fantastic. I ask for what I need and they work with me to clarify what's actually needed then cheerfully provide it. I couldn't keep this going without them.
Well, all these IT problems come from IT always saying "no" to the "business users" or coming up with ridiculous proposals for a solution.
Believe me, the "business users" aren't just sitting out there trying to come up with ways to make IT work harder. They're trying to run a business and make money. When IT consistently says "no" or comes back with ridiculous proposals, the business users have no choice but to go find some other way to do it; and that usually means hacking something together with the limited tools and knowledge available... typically excel with some vba and/or Access. They don't have a choice... they have to get the job done because it's how the company makes money. And eventually you get tired of all the countless hours of bureaucratic meetings trying to get IT involved and you just give up.
In a recent example, we have a relatively simple problem... there are 3 simple excel sheets that have some 100 elements of data that need to be handled each month and put into a database to hold the history. Then an excel file needs be generated based on that history. We've been in countless hours of scoping meetings, with a consultant writing the BRDs and Business Cases over the last 4 months. All the while, the business users are handling this process by-hand in Excel (how accurate and error-free do you think they are that way?). Finally a solution was proposed... they can do it in 6 months and will charge the business $200k.
Really? For that money, we could just hire a new analyst and just have them keep doing this by hand. But that's not allowed by HR. So I'll be hacking this together over the next couple of weekends. And then IT will get to support it when I won't. They better hope I do it well. I'll do the best I can, but like I always say, "I'm not a database person".
Now wouldn't it have been better to not have all those hours and hours of meetings and just have a database person and a report-writing person sit down with me and spend a week building this "lightweight" application in a way that IT will prefer to support?
We're not talking enterprise-class software that has to have 24x7 availability with multiple redundancy. We just want a database to hold a trivial amount of data, import data from a standard format each month, and generate a standard report. If I can hack together over a weekend or two a solution that works, how is it that nobody in IT (who should know how to do this) can spend even quadruple that time and deliver something that works but is also built in a way IT would like to support?
It's inevitable that the business users will need lightweight applications. And as you know, it's inevitable that IT will have to end up supporting it. Wouldn't it make more sense to get out ahead of it then, and offer lightweight solutions in a reasonable manner, and not force the business users to hack their own crap together?
That said, he shouldn't be hooking up hardware to the network, especially in a hospital.
Better to have this as an "external example/proof of concept" that his management can use to demonstrate "this problem isn't that hard" and "the solution shouldn't cost $5mil".
Very quickly, all these databases became IT's responsibility to manage, especially when the pinheads who designed them got promoted to their particular level of incompetence, or left the company.
This inevitably happens because IT organizations refuse to comprehend or work under the concept that they are not the reason for the existence of the business, but instead exist to help the business make money.
I'm one of those "pinheads". My VPs give me requirements to accomplish some task, gather some data, and build some reports in order to support the operation of the business. Such a task requires some kind of database to hold the data and some kind of reporting application to build the reports. So I go to IT and ask, spend weeks building BRDs and cases and they come back with the ridiculous response that it will take 2 years to build and cost half a million dollars.
I'm not allowed to hire any new employees to do this work manually and this is far from the only task I have to do each week, so what do I do? I spend a couple evenings and weekends hacking together a solution that "works".
Now I try use the best practices I can, with normalized tables, primary keys, with the data all in SQL and linked to Access, etc. But I'm no expert. But why can't the IT organization come up with "quick solutions"? Are there no people in IT who know more than me who could make something "as good" as the POS I cobbled together in a week or two?
Well, the answer is that there apparently aren't. So pinheads like me, who have to get a job done "now" so the business can do what it does (making and selling widgets) do what we have to get the job done so we can sell widgets and earn the money that justifies our existence as a business (and pays for the IT budget and salaries).
I also know this makes a mess for the IT department when they have to inherit the POS I made. But just imagine how much easier things would be for the IT folks if they would provide people to help with these quick solutions so that they are designed reasonably well and are easier to support. Considering how much time and effort they have to spend on the back-end of it, dealing with crappy databases and data, it would probably actually require less time and effort if they availed themselves at the front-end when the business needed a quick solution.
If a pinhead like me can come up with a solution in a couple weeks (less time than all the project scoping meetings) that's still holding up pretty well after 5 years, then it's clearly not rocket-science. Why can't an IT person or two, who actually do this for a living, do the same or better?
Watching Cosmos is like comfort food to me. However, I was saddened a bit while reading Dawkins' "The Greatest Show On Earth" when he debunks that example of evolution.
On the other hand, the whole purpose of the book is to provide examples and evidence for evolution and its mechanisms. It's actually quite a good book. It would be awesome to see a tv series made of it.
Jonas Jr. seems to be doing pretty well in his own right.
The Lepidopterists is my favorite episode of the whole series.