"Excel" and "development" don't belong in the same sentence.
What... can't hack it?
Let's put it this way. As an analyst (someone else here said that too), Excel is an indespensible part of my job. A lof of work I do is tedious and repititive. So, I write small macros to automate some of those tasks. The next thing I know, I've put a front-end on it and made an application out of it.
I can't re-write it in some other development system because: 1) I'm an analyst. And while I can program pretty well in a variety of languages, there is no budgetary justification for buying an IDE in some other language system
2) Excel with VBA gets the job done quickly and well-enough
3) I only intend to stay in this job for a year or two. The next person can use my app or leave it... but either way, they still have to manipulate the data on the spreadsheet.
4) Ultimately, (tied to #3), it's the data and not the application that's important. Other people need to use the data in the spreadsheet, and I'll be damned if I waste a lot of time writing an application that inticipates everything they'll want to do with the data. They know how to use Excel to manipulate it they way they want.
Uncommented coding in any language is a hardship, but it's also not exclusive to Excel and VBA. Lack of comments and poor programming practices are a symptom of a bad programmer, not a bad environment. And to be truthful, the VBA portion of Excel does, in fact, provide a decent development environment for a small-scale project. There are all kinds of facilities for structured programming - comments, functions/procedures, variables with scope and visbility.
Really, it's not so bad. As somone else said, Excel is probably one of Microsoft's best products.
It's to the point where it's often twice as fast and cheap to use public transport.
Not here in Portland, OR. We claim to have a great public transportation system. I live 12 miles from work and my commute takes me right through downtown. If I take the light-rail (which stops one block from my house, and stops 3 blocks from work), my commute time (not including walking) is a solid 1 hour and 20 minutes - each way.
I can drive with no congestion in 20 minutes. The worst congestion I've seen has been a 40 minute commute. The cost in fuel compared to train tickets is about the same.
That's one reason I like the automobile.
Another reason is I don't particlarly like being packed in with a bunch of stinky loud-mouthed people. I've been puked on while riding the train. I've yet to be puked on while driving in my car.
I just don't like spending an extra hour on a train wondering who it was that shit their pants and is smelling up the whole damn thing.
3ven then, these are computers we're talking about. I've never seen one work 100% of the time.
Compared to perfection, you're right. But think about your commute... have you ever gone the whole way and not seen some human not working correctly?
I get the feeling that computer malfunctions will be easier to engineer for than human malfunctions. At least the computer won't be putting on mascara while eating a donut and talking on the phone at 75 mph.
Anyways, my point is, doesn't Apple (or other software companies,) have a similar policy regarding the release of their product and preorders? If not, perhaps they should.
I think the issue is that no OS companies are USED to shipping early. It's a contingency they're not prepared to deal with!
I have many years of IT experience and recently finished an MBA. I really like operations management, but it's a real stretch to take my IT experience and make it look like operations.
I finally took a major pay cut (now just $17/hour) to work temp at a great company. While I have a great theoretical basis to undertand things from, I have tons to learn and really didn't know squat about how things really work in the industry.
My first few months have been pretty un-exciting with lots of manually looking up data and making reports. But, I've learned a lot and asked tons of questions. I'm now being trained to do the monthly "buy", which is vital - the things we sell have to be bought from the factories that make them, and there are lots of constraints involved in order to keep us profitable. My manager and his boss are pushing really hard to get head-count increased so they can hire me as a permanent ops-analyst.
So no matter what your degree is, you don't know squat about how things work in a company and in the "real world". Find a good company and go in there. Be willing to do whatever crap they have for you, and learn as much as you can while doing it. If you're worth anything and you've picked a good company, they'll see your value and find a way to use you to your fullest potential.
I worked at an engineering/cs school for several years, and for the most part, such projects were not possible.
A term lasts 12 weeks. There aren't many projects a company can provide that can be completed in 12 weeks. After that, you would probably have complete turn-over of your staff (students). And it's not like these students can work "full-time" on the project because they have at least 3 other very demanding classes they have to complete as well.
Then consider the professor. Most are good at teaching and at their field. But few of them are qualified to be project managers leading a team of 20 or more people.
Then you have to ask, "what do you cut out" to make room for this. Most curricula are already packed with requirements that the individual school can't change. At best, such a class could be an elective.
Finally, consider that if these kids can't do the work when they graduate, how can you expect them to handle it when they are only part way through the process.
A full fledged project with real, tangible consequences And what condquences would you consider?
Sadly, all the risk will be on the business. If the project doesn't get done adequately, the business is out whatever they put into it. The kids move on to the next class and never mention the project again.
Finally (yet again), remember that few of the profs teaching them have such real-world experience. Most have spent their careers getting their education and then getting into academia.
A possibly better idea would be to have them follow the program of good project development, even if they're writing a "hello world" program. But then again, consider that with 12 weeks, and 3 hours of class, that's only 36 contact hours with the professor. For an algorithms class, how many of those 36 hours should he focus on "project design" philosophy instead of algorithms?
If you're a project leader and you have to hire new people (and in particular, college grads), you need to be building into your plan that you're going to have to spend some time and resources getting your team up to speed on the project development philosophy you will be using on your project. If you don't, then you're not planning as well as you should.
Some coach once said, When we win, all the praise goes to the players. When we lose, all the blame goes to me.
the social contract by which you are afforded any rights at all
I don't know what country you come from, but in mine, it's the constitution that guarantees my rights, not some social contract. What you're saying sounds like I could lose the right to vote if I don't watch the political ads, because I've "violated the social contract".
I prefer to have something more solid that a social contract or a click-wrap EULA defining my rights.
I actually left the world of IT so I only have my own boxes at home to worry about (and seeing what I get through on the my machine at work - the user from hell).
For my home box, on the windows side, I use TweakUI, which is a pretty nifty tool.
If I were really going to look at such a CD, I'd find someone who left their computer logged in and look at it there!
The article mentioned that they were considering a club where customers could pay up-front to join, and then earn points on their purchases.
Sounds kind of dumb, really. I'll pay money to join Costco, because I get good stuff at a discount. I'm not going to pay money to Best Buy to buy crap at a premium.
I'm not saying it's the way it should be. It's just the way it is.
It's the system that dishes out the punishment for crimes. Since that system has a vested interest in protecting itself, clearly it will punish crimes that hurt it more than it will punish crimes that hurt the "common" plebian.
For a politician in the US, it's the people's faith in the constitution that allows them do their thing. If people start questioning that, then everything can come into question and society will mostly likely degrade into an anarchy of dog-eat-dog, and domination by the strongest.
Maybe it's already that way, but the "system" is in place to keep people complacent enough that they don't mount revolutions when they're unhappy.
Compromising the grade-system destroy's the common-people's faith in "the system", so it has to be punished more.
Beating up old ladies only destorys faith in the person who did it.
It's one reason petty counterfeiters are hit so harder than a petty theft. It's not like the few $100's they make will actually lead to inflation. But if enough people get away with it then it leads to a general lack of faith and confidence in the dollar. That's a bad thing, since the whole economy works on the idea that we all pretty much believe a dollar is worth the same thing.
Isn't this where you use routers and switched networks to prevent this kind of snooping?
The uni should use routers to connect different spans for Administrative (where the grades are stored), professor's computers, labs, and finally dorms.
The admin span should only accept external connections from the Prof span, and not the lab and dorm span.
Put everything on switches rather than hubs, and your sniffers shouldn't see too much at all. The prof can still connect via ssl into the admin span, but even so, a student can't sniff his connection because he's connected via a switch.
I agree with the first part of your analogy: "having a tire blowout at 85 on the freeway can kill you", the a better follow up (according to his advice) is, "so when you buy a new car, go out and replace the tires with expensive ones."
That's just fine. But if they want control over everything, they need to be responsive by getting things done and have useful information on the school website.
As a blatant example, it's a disgrace to the school to have sports and music schedules that are 3 years old attached to "upcoming events" on the main page. Equally lame was that PR would not allow departments to post lists of classes being offered.
But I think the most absurd was that PR would not even allow the School of Business, which has professors being entrusted with teaching things like marketing and branding, to have input about what was on the website for the School of Business.
It's really sad because while the website is pretty, it's really devoid of useful information. If I were a prospective student I would quickly dropped the school from consideration just based on how lame the website was. In my case, I worked at the school (systems administrator) and got a nice discount.
It was frustrating telling professors and department heads, "Sure, you COULD have your course schedules put online, as well as a staff directory. In a technical sense, it's quite simple to do, really. But you'll have to get it past PR first."
Going back to responsiveness, I was assisting a professor with creating documents for a series of seminars he was contracted by the state to do through the university. We created brochures for the seminars, giving descriptions, agenda, etc. Because it was done through the U, PR demanded final approval on the things. I would agree with that in general. But, even with persistent hounding, they did not bother to take a look at them until after the seminars had already passed. How were we supposed to get the word out, and people registered (and paying) for the seminars if we can't send brochures?
So, maybe I'm tainted by my bad experience with PR where I worked for several years. But my general feeling is that PR folks are arrogant asses who don't give a shit about what other people are trying to accomplish and who feel that as long as it looks pretty, there's no need to have current or useful information available for people.
You know -- stuff that just might embarrass your PR group if it got published on slashdot.
I've found that most PR groups are a bunch of idiots who can't give up control. "You cannot use the 'official' university font or logo in any of your webpages or documents" kind of crap.
It's funny to think of handing them a million lines of source-code and asking them to check it before you release it a week later.
Slashdot Mirror
"Excel" and "development" don't belong in the same sentence.
What... can't hack it?
Let's put it this way. As an analyst (someone else here said that too), Excel is an indespensible part of my job. A lof of work I do is tedious and repititive. So, I write small macros to automate some of those tasks. The next thing I know, I've put a front-end on it and made an application out of it.
I can't re-write it in some other development system because:
1) I'm an analyst. And while I can program pretty well in a variety of languages, there is no budgetary justification for buying an IDE in some other language system
2) Excel with VBA gets the job done quickly and well-enough
3) I only intend to stay in this job for a year or two. The next person can use my app or leave it... but either way, they still have to manipulate the data on the spreadsheet.
4) Ultimately, (tied to #3), it's the data and not the application that's important. Other people need to use the data in the spreadsheet, and I'll be damned if I waste a lot of time writing an application that inticipates everything they'll want to do with the data. They know how to use Excel to manipulate it they way they want.
Uncommented coding in any language is a hardship, but it's also not exclusive to Excel and VBA. Lack of comments and poor programming practices are a symptom of a bad programmer, not a bad environment. And to be truthful, the VBA portion of Excel does, in fact, provide a decent development environment for a small-scale project. There are all kinds of facilities for structured programming - comments, functions/procedures, variables with scope and visbility.
Really, it's not so bad. As somone else said, Excel is probably one of Microsoft's best products.
It's to the point where it's often twice as fast and cheap to use public transport.
Not here in Portland, OR. We claim to have a great public transportation system. I live 12 miles from work and my commute takes me right through downtown. If I take the light-rail (which stops one block from my house, and stops 3 blocks from work), my commute time (not including walking) is a solid 1 hour and 20 minutes - each way.
I can drive with no congestion in 20 minutes. The worst congestion I've seen has been a 40 minute commute. The cost in fuel compared to train tickets is about the same.
That's one reason I like the automobile.
Another reason is I don't particlarly like being packed in with a bunch of stinky loud-mouthed people. I've been puked on while riding the train. I've yet to be puked on while driving in my car.
I just don't like spending an extra hour on a train wondering who it was that shit their pants and is smelling up the whole damn thing.
3ven then, these are computers we're talking about. I've never seen one work 100% of the time.
Compared to perfection, you're right. But think about your commute... have you ever gone the whole way and not seen some human not working correctly?
I get the feeling that computer malfunctions will be easier to engineer for than human malfunctions. At least the computer won't be putting on mascara while eating a donut and talking on the phone at 75 mph.
I think that's 11 as in 11:00pm. News often comes on local channels in the US at 11:00pm.
Could this be a case of "ceteris peribus" (a favorite term of economists)... the voltage is lower, while everthing else stays the same.
Anyways, my point is, doesn't Apple (or other software companies,) have a similar policy regarding the release of their product and preorders? If not, perhaps they should.
I think the issue is that no OS companies are USED to shipping early. It's a contingency they're not prepared to deal with!
I agree with you whole-heartedly!
I have many years of IT experience and recently finished an MBA. I really like operations management, but it's a real stretch to take my IT experience and make it look like operations.
I finally took a major pay cut (now just $17/hour) to work temp at a great company. While I have a great theoretical basis to undertand things from, I have tons to learn and really didn't know squat about how things really work in the industry.
My first few months have been pretty un-exciting with lots of manually looking up data and making reports. But, I've learned a lot and asked tons of questions. I'm now being trained to do the monthly "buy", which is vital - the things we sell have to be bought from the factories that make them, and there are lots of constraints involved in order to keep us profitable. My manager and his boss are pushing really hard to get head-count increased so they can hire me as a permanent ops-analyst.
So no matter what your degree is, you don't know squat about how things work in a company and in the "real world". Find a good company and go in there. Be willing to do whatever crap they have for you, and learn as much as you can while doing it. If you're worth anything and you've picked a good company, they'll see your value and find a way to use you to your fullest potential.
I worked at an engineering/cs school for several years, and for the most part, such projects were not possible.
A term lasts 12 weeks. There aren't many projects a company can provide that can be completed in 12 weeks. After that, you would probably have complete turn-over of your staff (students). And it's not like these students can work "full-time" on the project because they have at least 3 other very demanding classes they have to complete as well.
Then consider the professor. Most are good at teaching and at their field. But few of them are qualified to be project managers leading a team of 20 or more people.
Then you have to ask, "what do you cut out" to make room for this. Most curricula are already packed with requirements that the individual school can't change. At best, such a class could be an elective.
Finally, consider that if these kids can't do the work when they graduate, how can you expect them to handle it when they are only part way through the process.
A full fledged project with real, tangible consequences
And what condquences would you consider?
Sadly, all the risk will be on the business. If the project doesn't get done adequately, the business is out whatever they put into it. The kids move on to the next class and never mention the project again.
Finally (yet again), remember that few of the profs teaching them have such real-world experience. Most have spent their careers getting their education and then getting into academia.
A possibly better idea would be to have them follow the program of good project development, even if they're writing a "hello world" program. But then again, consider that with 12 weeks, and 3 hours of class, that's only 36 contact hours with the professor. For an algorithms class, how many of those 36 hours should he focus on "project design" philosophy instead of algorithms?
If you're a project leader and you have to hire new people (and in particular, college grads), you need to be building into your plan that you're going to have to spend some time and resources getting your team up to speed on the project development philosophy you will be using on your project. If you don't, then you're not planning as well as you should.
Some coach once said,
When we win, all the praise goes to the players.
When we lose, all the blame goes to me.
Google's all about researching. If you got a PhD, you are probably very good at two things:
1) your narrow area of focus in your field
2) researching
Stock is not so bad. As long as the company is in business and people are buying their stock, it's worth something.
Stock Options on the other hand are another beast all-together, and the company's stock price has to be growing for them to be worth anything.
Of course, don't take less salary than you need in lieu of stock/stock options. The previous poster was correct to count them as "bonuses".
the social contract by which you are afforded any rights at all
I don't know what country you come from, but in mine, it's the constitution that guarantees my rights, not some social contract. What you're saying sounds like I could lose the right to vote if I don't watch the political ads, because I've "violated the social contract".
I prefer to have something more solid that a social contract or a click-wrap EULA defining my rights.
I actually left the world of IT so I only have my own boxes at home to worry about (and seeing what I get through on the my machine at work - the user from hell).
For my home box, on the windows side, I use TweakUI, which is a pretty nifty tool.
If I were really going to look at such a CD, I'd find someone who left their computer logged in and look at it there!
I always hold down the shift-key when inserting misplaced CDs that say "CONFIDENTIAL Salary Information" on them. Haven't had a problem yet!
Way back when we were decomissioning a system that had the big 8" drives, we had to dissassemble the drives and apply a belt sander to the platters.
The cool part was that we got to keep the magnesium cases - which we took to a local metal recycler for a couple hundred $$. Great fun-money!
Who knows if it was "to-spec"... but it was thorough enough for the old Top Secret data that was on them.
No... that would be "Star Trek: The Captain's Log"
I simply delete the files that give flash support for my Mozilla install. Poof - no more flash crap.
If there's a website where I really need/want to see the flashcrap, I go to the site with IE.
The article mentioned that they were considering a club where customers could pay up-front to join, and then earn points on their purchases.
Sounds kind of dumb, really. I'll pay money to join Costco, because I get good stuff at a discount. I'm not going to pay money to Best Buy to buy crap at a premium.
I'm not saying it's the way it should be. It's just the way it is.
It's the system that dishes out the punishment for crimes. Since that system has a vested interest in protecting itself, clearly it will punish crimes that hurt it more than it will punish crimes that hurt the "common" plebian.
For a politician in the US, it's the people's faith in the constitution that allows them do their thing. If people start questioning that, then everything can come into question and society will mostly likely degrade into an anarchy of dog-eat-dog, and domination by the strongest.
Maybe it's already that way, but the "system" is in place to keep people complacent enough that they don't mount revolutions when they're unhappy.
Compromising the grade-system destroy's the common-people's faith in "the system", so it has to be punished more.
Beating up old ladies only destorys faith in the person who did it.
It's one reason petty counterfeiters are hit so harder than a petty theft. It's not like the few $100's they make will actually lead to inflation. But if enough people get away with it then it leads to a general lack of faith and confidence in the dollar. That's a bad thing, since the whole economy works on the idea that we all pretty much believe a dollar is worth the same thing.
Isn't this where you use routers and switched networks to prevent this kind of snooping?
The uni should use routers to connect different spans for Administrative (where the grades are stored), professor's computers, labs, and finally dorms.
The admin span should only accept external connections from the Prof span, and not the lab and dorm span.
Put everything on switches rather than hubs, and your sniffers shouldn't see too much at all. The prof can still connect via ssl into the admin span, but even so, a student can't sniff his connection because he's connected via a switch.
Am I misunderstanding how these things work?
Not in America. As the parent pointed out, you're no longer permitted to lock your baggage when you check it.
Almost...
I agree with the first part of your analogy: "having a tire blowout at 85 on the freeway can kill you", the a better follow up (according to his advice) is, "so when you buy a new car, go out and replace the tires with expensive ones."
This won't, but a nicotine patch might.
That's just fine. But if they want control over everything, they need to be responsive by getting things done and have useful information on the school website.
As a blatant example, it's a disgrace to the school to have sports and music schedules that are 3 years old attached to "upcoming events" on the main page. Equally lame was that PR would not allow departments to post lists of classes being offered.
But I think the most absurd was that PR would not even allow the School of Business, which has professors being entrusted with teaching things like marketing and branding, to have input about what was on the website for the School of Business.
It's really sad because while the website is pretty, it's really devoid of useful information. If I were a prospective student I would quickly dropped the school from consideration just based on how lame the website was. In my case, I worked at the school (systems administrator) and got a nice discount.
It was frustrating telling professors and department heads, "Sure, you COULD have your course schedules put online, as well as a staff directory. In a technical sense, it's quite simple to do, really. But you'll have to get it past PR first."
Going back to responsiveness, I was assisting a professor with creating documents for a series of seminars he was contracted by the state to do through the university. We created brochures for the seminars, giving descriptions, agenda, etc. Because it was done through the U, PR demanded final approval on the things. I would agree with that in general. But, even with persistent hounding, they did not bother to take a look at them until after the seminars had already passed. How were we supposed to get the word out, and people registered (and paying) for the seminars if we can't send brochures?
So, maybe I'm tainted by my bad experience with PR where I worked for several years. But my general feeling is that PR folks are arrogant asses who don't give a shit about what other people are trying to accomplish and who feel that as long as it looks pretty, there's no need to have current or useful information available for people.
That's not good branding. It's just being an ass.
You know -- stuff that just might embarrass your PR group if it got published on slashdot.
I've found that most PR groups are a bunch of idiots who can't give up control. "You cannot use the 'official' university font or logo in any of your webpages or documents" kind of crap.
It's funny to think of handing them a million lines of source-code and asking them to check it before you release it a week later.