Good thoughts. Yes, you could use a common file server. But then you still have the problem of team member churn. Some members leave, others join. And for each newbie, you would have to remember to get server access. Which, in medium and larger companies, means pushing forms through the bureaucracy, i.e., begging for permission to do your job. And which means that, weeks later, the newbie has another password to remember.
On the plus side of a central server is the idea that the server will be backed up regularly. [Pause for laughter to die down.]
Which leads around to the question: "How often are the desktops/laptops backed up?" And the accompanying "Why master project data on un-backed-up desktops/laptops?" And here we see the joining of technologies that UServ gives. Each team member can mirror/publish to a central server box.
Another angle on this is access-mode. With a browser, your readers get read access. Your docs cannot be modified without your knowledge and permission. With a shared directory, anything is fair game. Including "accidental" deletes and over-writes. Ever lose a fifty page functional spec because some idjit on another team saved to the wrong directory? Very not fun.
So, yeah, you could use a shared directory for your docs. And you could use a shared directory for software source control. It would be simple. But would you really want to?
Congratulations. Glad they work for you. But why do you assume that they will work for everyone?
In my own experience with a nation-wide network, trying to access files that may be 1000 to 1800 miles and multiple router-hops away is so frustrating that it results in copies being saved locally to avoid the time-outs. The existence of local copies, then, almost assures that they are out of date. And in our shop, the work schedules change too often to rely on out of date information.
It's a neat idea, but realistically, I can't imagine personal "This is my Cat" webpages will be propagated far enough for it to be worthwhile
Forget your cat for a minute and think business environment. This is IBM-developed, remember? Now think about an office project team who need to quickly and easily share documentation files, project plans and schedules.
Traditionally, the project leaders flood their teams with rivers of emails and attachments. This not only bogs down the corporate mail-servers but also guarantees that half the team will never know which is the latest version of the schedule (since half the team is always new and hasn't been added to the MList yet).
Also, traditionally, there is so much corporate politics about placing docs on an official web server that it just isn't worth the time to fight those battles while under the gun to get your project out the door. And most project managers of my acquaintence have trouble spelling html, much less writing it to fit corporate standards.
This new tool would allow "publishing" documents to a team simply by copying them to a directory on the project leader's disk/desk. There, it's done. Followed by a short, small email to the team advising that a new version of the plan or schedule is available. In fact, the most serious problem will be getting mossback project managers to try a new tool instead of continuing to send 10Mb email attachments to a list of hundreds.
While UServ will never replace the established HTML/web world and cannot hope to replace anonymous peer-to-peer transfers, there is a place for this technology. Let's not fall into the trap of thinking that a tool must replace all other tools in order to be useful.
Several ice ages ago, when large glass containers of vacuum ruled the electronics world, I was told that there were two schools of thought on the true cause of death in electronic misadventure:
A) That, since the heart beats according to a small electrical shock to the muscles, a high enough voltage could kill you by shocking the heart out of or against its' normal rhythm.
2) That a sufficient current applied across the heart could over-power the normal muscular contractions of the heart and simply stop it.
IANAD (I am not a doctor). And I don't know which of these two explanations might be true. Personally, I am willing to believe both of them. YMMV. I have survived over forty years of professional and ham radio electronics by respecting the hell out of the ability of small inanimate objects to knock me off my feet and minimising their chances to do so.
Wouldn't it make more sense to teach things that will help students early
in their careers, like technical skills and other trade/foundation skills that
are often required of entry-level, non-management employees?
Does the average entry-level IT person need to make the sort of decisions a CEO or
CIO needs to make? Do companies really want me to spend more time
diagramming a program than I need to program it in the first place?
(What about just documenting the code?) Knowing the big picture is
good, but how do you get to that level if you don't have any skills?
Marvelous idea. I would love to find candidates who understand that there is more than one programming language in the world and that I have already picked the language(s) to be used on this project. Or that there is more than one type of version-control software. Heck, some days, I would settle for candidates who know how to use a spell-checker. (Side rant: does anyone really expect me to hire them when they cannot take the time to run a spell-checker over their resume and cover letter?)
Realistically, I would like to find candidates who understand that, for every hour of coding, there will be at least eight hours of writing documentation (functional specifications, technical specifications, GANT charts, test plans, release notes, implementation instructions, support documentation, user instructions). I would like them to understand that their performance and that of our department will be judged on them being able to do the whole job, not just writing an hour's worth of code and walking away.
Obviously, an entry-level will not be making the "board-room" decisions. But understanding some of the rules of business will help in the understanding of why the code specs call for certain seemingly unnecessary functions. The excessive error checking; the massive fail-safe transaction rollback logic; the orderly shutdown logic; the remote monitoring processes.
I was once given a programming team for a credit card project and none of the coders had ever had a credit card. They had no idea about any part of credit card use or reconciliation. So they tried to leave out the pieces that didn't make sense to them. And most of them were dumped back out on the bricks. The rest expressed anough interest in learning that they were deemed salvageable. But teaching people how the world works while they are coding it is massively painful and not good for the blood pressure.
Bottom line, I want people whose technical skills are matched by real-world experiences. You want to write flight simulators? Go get some dual instruction in a Cessna 150. You want to write weather-forecast software? Go sign up for one of the weather bureau's spring tornado watcher classes. You want to write business software? At least take a class on double-entry bookkeeping.
Remember, programs are high-speed substitutes for human reasoning. If you don't understand the problem, how can you be a part of the solution? If all you know is how to write compilers, you are in a terribly limited job market.
... spandex, kevlar and velcro all started out as educational items...
Spandex is extremely educational when it is properly applied on someone else.
Re:What can be done about terrorism?
on
More On Tragedy
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· Score: 1
OK. You don't think it will work. Let's re-examine your objections.
You don't want bullets flying around an airplane.
Bean-bag guns. Never hard of them? Think low-velocity 12-guage shotgun/pistol throwing bean bags. One to the head and perp is down long enough for six passengers to stomp his head^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Htake him into custody. Don't like that? How about the new tangle-foot throwers. Spit a very sticky goo that will bind your arm to a bulkhead in nothing flat. Point is, you don't have to use traditional firearms. And we haven't even gotten to a discussion of rubber bullets or Tazers.
It will cost a bundle
True. What was the World Trade Complex worth? How many insurance companies are going to go broke trying to settle claims for the deaths / damage? How much are your taxes going to go up to make up the difference that the federal government is going to have to put into the pot? Don't just sit there a cry "It's too expensive". Think about the alternative.
You would need literally thousands of air marshalls
Again, true. The US air fleet is just over 4300 aircraft (as of 1999. See : http://usinfo.state.gov/journals/ites/1000/ijee/tr ans-faa.htm ) Let's assume that you can't work an air-crew member more than 40 hours a week. (I don't have the correct number at hand; someone chime in if you know.) This means you will need at least five marshalls per aircraft.
So what. The cost of each seat on a flight goes up (less than) $5.00US ($75,000 per year / 2080 hours per year * 8 hours per day = 288.46 per day direct cost * 2 to cover total employee cost and we add under $600US per day. Or per one long cross-country or two or three quarter-continent jumps.) $5.00 against the increasing odds of never hugging your kids or parents or SO again. Oh, and ground police don't make anywhere near $75,000 so they would be standing in line to get a job like this.
To say nothing about the support structures
Good. We'll say nothing about it since the support structure is already there. Or had you never noticed the people in the matching blazers who stand between the ticket counters and the boarding gates?
People wouldn't like it [snip] Most people wouldn't like the idea of firearms on board their flight.
Really? Let's ask the passengers of AA flight 11 how they feel about having a sky marshall on board.
an air marshall would presumably have the authority or even responsibility to search anyone getting on the plane
Nope. Not even. That functionality is already in place on the ground. No reason to abandon it completely, since they do seem able to detect professional football players with (oops...) forgotten handguns in their carry-ons.
Your right, there are no perfect solutions here.
Well, finally something we can agree on. And, for what it's worth, I don't like the marshall idea. Hell, I don't even like the inspection stations in the terminal. But there are too many morons in the world who will not be stopped by being told "We trust you to behave nicely". And they have to be stopped.
And thus starts another villification based on what? A label that has no meaning.
Does SUV mean a Ford Expedition or a Sazuki Samurai? What do these two vehicles have in common other than the label SUV?
Need we lump all SUVs into the class gas-guzzling? How about lumping all programmers into a single class of pimply-faced white teenage male linux-addicts?
Geez; someone mod the parent of this as flamebait.
Not sure what you would consider evidence, but there are a lot of online documents quoting multiple published sources. Hard to believe that they are all phoney.
The service&support business model DOES NOT EXISTS.
Doesn't matter. You are not seeing an important facet of the retail customer mentality. They aren't going to buy it; they just want to know that it's available if they decide they need it.
In another life, I worked for a small vertical market software house. At first, the owner refused to consider selling software support or software maintenance packages. We wrote it, and we would stand behind it at no charge. Too simple.
After a couple of years, though, we needed the revenue and he invented the idea of selling S/S and S/M packages for reasonable costs. And guess what, our sales actually went up. Oh, not sales of the support packages; the basic software. People didn't want to buy support packages. They just wanted to know that such were available. Seems that almost nobody believed that they would get professional support for free. But if we said we were going to charge, then we must be legitimate.
Moral: they may not buy the options, but they won't buy the basic package if you don't have options.
Depending on the context, upwards 80% of all level one support contact is of the "password and printer" variety - dead easy questions which a suitably trained monkey can deal with.
Especially since 80% of all help desk level-1 responses are variations on "Yes, Sir. When was the last time you de-fragged your hard disk?"
"1989 Apple vs Apple: Apple Records, the record company created by the Beatles, sues Apple Computer for getting into the music business. According to Apple Records, the computer company violated a secret 1981 agreement that let Apple keep its fruit logo -- as long as it didn't have anything to do with music. By 1989, however, the music and PC worlds are already coming together."
"The two Apples will later settle, with the computer maker paying the record company."
If they can bend concrete, they may have just saved the national highway system. One of the biggest problems is roads that self-destruct when the soil under them shifts. With enough wet/dry, expand/contract, up/down cycles, our highways are in constant need of repair. If even a small portion of this rework can be avoided with the "flexible concrete", the potential savings are enormous.
Slashdot Mirror
Egads. An AC with a glimmering of understanding. Whatever next?
Good thoughts. Yes, you could use a common file server. But then you still have the problem of team member churn. Some members leave, others join. And for each newbie, you would have to remember to get server access. Which, in medium and larger companies, means pushing forms through the bureaucracy, i.e., begging for permission to do your job. And which means that, weeks later, the newbie has another password to remember.
On the plus side of a central server is the idea that the server will be backed up regularly. [Pause for laughter to die down.]
Which leads around to the question: "How often are the desktops/laptops backed up?" And the accompanying "Why master project data on un-backed-up desktops/laptops?" And here we see the joining of technologies that UServ gives. Each team member can mirror/publish to a central server box.
Another angle on this is access-mode. With a browser, your readers get read access. Your docs cannot be modified without your knowledge and permission. With a shared directory, anything is fair game. Including "accidental" deletes and over-writes. Ever lose a fifty page functional spec because some idjit on another team saved to the wrong directory? Very not fun.
So, yeah, you could use a shared directory for your docs. And you could use a shared directory for software source control. It would be simple. But would you really want to?
Congratulations. Glad they work for you. But why do you assume that they will work for everyone?
In my own experience with a nation-wide network, trying to access files that may be 1000 to 1800 miles and multiple router-hops away is so frustrating that it results in copies being saved locally to avoid the time-outs. The existence of local copies, then, almost assures that they are out of date. And in our shop, the work schedules change too often to rely on out of date information.
Forget your cat for a minute and think business environment. This is IBM-developed, remember? Now think about an office project team who need to quickly and easily share documentation files, project plans and schedules.
Traditionally, the project leaders flood their teams with rivers of emails and attachments. This not only bogs down the corporate mail-servers but also guarantees that half the team will never know which is the latest version of the schedule (since half the team is always new and hasn't been added to the MList yet).
Also, traditionally, there is so much corporate politics about placing docs on an official web server that it just isn't worth the time to fight those battles while under the gun to get your project out the door. And most project managers of my acquaintence have trouble spelling html, much less writing it to fit corporate standards.
This new tool would allow "publishing" documents to a team simply by copying them to a directory on the project leader's disk/desk. There, it's done. Followed by a short, small email to the team advising that a new version of the plan or schedule is available. In fact, the most serious problem will be getting mossback project managers to try a new tool instead of continuing to send 10Mb email attachments to a list of hundreds.
While UServ will never replace the established HTML/web world and cannot hope to replace anonymous peer-to-peer transfers, there is a place for this technology. Let's not fall into the trap of thinking that a tool must replace all other tools in order to be useful.
So what you're saying is that you were paid money to learn the most important thing about trade shows; that your best friends are comfortable shoes.
It's not a "nipple". It's a tit-mouse.
It isn't paranoia when thay ARE out to get you. How many of YOUR skyscrapers are missing?
A) That, since the heart beats according to a small electrical shock to the muscles, a high enough voltage could kill you by shocking the heart out of or against its' normal rhythm.
2) That a sufficient current applied across the heart could over-power the normal muscular contractions of the heart and simply stop it.
IANAD (I am not a doctor). And I don't know which of these two explanations might be true. Personally, I am willing to believe both of them. YMMV. I have survived over forty years of professional and ham radio electronics by respecting the hell out of the ability of small inanimate objects to knock me off my feet and minimising their chances to do so.
We used to call that "core" memory.
Wouldn't it make more sense to teach things that will help students early
in their careers, like technical skills and other trade/foundation skills that
are often required of entry-level, non-management employees?
Does the average entry-level IT person need to make the sort of decisions a CEO or
CIO needs to make? Do companies really want me to spend more time
diagramming a program than I need to program it in the first place?
(What about just documenting the code?) Knowing the big picture is
good, but how do you get to that level if you don't have any skills?
Marvelous idea. I would love to find candidates who understand that there is more than one programming language in the world and that I have already picked the language(s) to be used on this project. Or that there is more than one type of version-control software. Heck, some days, I would settle for candidates who know how to use a spell-checker. (Side rant: does anyone really expect me to hire them when they cannot take the time to run a spell-checker over their resume and cover letter?)
Realistically, I would like to find candidates who understand that, for every hour of coding, there will be at least eight hours of writing documentation (functional specifications, technical specifications, GANT charts, test plans, release notes, implementation instructions, support documentation, user instructions). I would like them to understand that their performance and that of our department will be judged on them being able to do the whole job, not just writing an hour's worth of code and walking away.
Obviously, an entry-level will not be making the "board-room" decisions. But understanding some of the rules of business will help in the understanding of why the code specs call for certain seemingly unnecessary functions. The excessive error checking; the massive fail-safe transaction rollback logic; the orderly shutdown logic; the remote monitoring processes.
I was once given a programming team for a credit card project and none of the coders had ever had a credit card. They had no idea about any part of credit card use or reconciliation. So they tried to leave out the pieces that didn't make sense to them. And most of them were dumped back out on the bricks. The rest expressed anough interest in learning that they were deemed salvageable. But teaching people how the world works while they are coding it is massively painful and not good for the blood pressure.
Bottom line, I want people whose technical skills are matched by real-world experiences. You want to write flight simulators? Go get some dual instruction in a Cessna 150. You want to write weather-forecast software? Go sign up for one of the weather bureau's spring tornado watcher classes. You want to write business software? At least take a class on double-entry bookkeeping.
Remember, programs are high-speed substitutes for human reasoning. If you don't understand the problem, how can you be a part of the solution? If all you know is how to write compilers, you are in a terribly limited job market.
Spandex is extremely educational when it is properly applied on someone else.
You don't want bullets flying around an airplane.
Bean-bag guns. Never hard of them? Think low-velocity 12-guage shotgun/pistol throwing bean bags. One to the head and perp is down long enough for six passengers to stomp his head^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Htake him into custody. Don't like that? How about the new tangle-foot throwers. Spit a very sticky goo that will bind your arm to a bulkhead in nothing flat. Point is, you don't have to use traditional firearms. And we haven't even gotten to a discussion of rubber bullets or Tazers.
It will cost a bundle
True. What was the World Trade Complex worth? How many insurance companies are going to go broke trying to settle claims for the deaths / damage? How much are your taxes going to go up to make up the difference that the federal government is going to have to put into the pot? Don't just sit there a cry "It's too expensive". Think about the alternative.
You would need literally thousands of air marshalls
Again, true. The US air fleet is just over 4300 aircraft (as of 1999. See : http://usinfo.state.gov/journals/ites/1000/ijee/tr ans-faa.htm ) Let's assume that you can't work an air-crew member more than 40 hours a week. (I don't have the correct number at hand; someone chime in if you know.) This means you will need at least five marshalls per aircraft.
So what. The cost of each seat on a flight goes up (less than) $5.00US ($75,000 per year / 2080 hours per year * 8 hours per day = 288.46 per day direct cost * 2 to cover total employee cost and we add under $600US per day. Or per one long cross-country or two or three quarter-continent jumps.) $5.00 against the increasing odds of never hugging your kids or parents or SO again. Oh, and ground police don't make anywhere near $75,000 so they would be standing in line to get a job like this.
To say nothing about the support structures
Good. We'll say nothing about it since the support structure is already there. Or had you never noticed the people in the matching blazers who stand between the ticket counters and the boarding gates?
People wouldn't like it [snip] Most people wouldn't like the idea of firearms on board their flight.
Really? Let's ask the passengers of AA flight 11 how they feel about having a sky marshall on board.
an air marshall would presumably have the authority or even responsibility to search anyone getting on the plane
Nope. Not even. That functionality is already in place on the ground. No reason to abandon it completely, since they do seem able to detect professional football players with (oops...) forgotten handguns in their carry-ons.
Your right, there are no perfect solutions here.
Well, finally something we can agree on. And, for what it's worth, I don't like the marshall idea. Hell, I don't even like the inspection stations in the terminal. But there are too many morons in the world who will not be stopped by being told "We trust you to behave nicely". And they have to be stopped.
And thus starts another villification based on what? A label that has no meaning.
Does SUV mean a Ford Expedition or a Sazuki Samurai? What do these two vehicles have in common other than the label SUV?
Need we lump all SUVs into the class gas-guzzling? How about lumping all programmers into a single class of pimply-faced white teenage male linux-addicts?
Geez; someone mod the parent of this as flamebait.
Not sure what you would consider evidence, but there are a lot of online documents quoting multiple published sources. Hard to believe that they are all phoney.
Try a simple Google search
You can do the same for indian slaveowners.
Mmmm... donuts... edible zeros.
The only eBooks I'm interested in are those from Project Gutenberg.
Ladies and gentlemen, pay close attention to this story. For someday, this person will be the head of marketing at the company where you work.
At least the ones in which the UFO turns out to have been her little frisbee-thingie. (1)(2)
Notes:
(1) I really don't know what it was called.
(2) I really don't care.
Doesn't matter. You are not seeing an important facet of the retail customer mentality. They aren't going to buy it; they just want to know that it's available if they decide they need it.
In another life, I worked for a small vertical market software house. At first, the owner refused to consider selling software support or software maintenance packages. We wrote it, and we would stand behind it at no charge. Too simple.
After a couple of years, though, we needed the revenue and he invented the idea of selling S/S and S/M packages for reasonable costs. And guess what, our sales actually went up. Oh, not sales of the support packages; the basic software. People didn't want to buy support packages. They just wanted to know that such were available. Seems that almost nobody believed that they would get professional support for free. But if we said we were going to charge, then we must be legitimate.
Moral: they may not buy the options, but they won't buy the basic package if you don't have options.
End of marketing lesson.
Don't sweat it. It's not like you are the only one to ever hit "Submit" a tenth of a second before you spot the obvious error in your comment.
Especially since 80% of all help desk level-1 responses are variations on "Yes, Sir. When was the last time you de-fragged your hard disk?"
Before or after the $400 rebate from Microsoft?
Nope.
"1989 Apple vs Apple: Apple Records, the record company created by the Beatles, sues Apple Computer for getting into the music business. According to Apple Records, the computer company violated a secret 1981 agreement that let Apple keep its fruit logo -- as long as it didn't have anything to do with music. By 1989, however, the music and PC worlds are already coming together."
"The two Apples will later settle, with the computer maker paying the record company."
Reference: http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:q3wWyevbLiY:n ews.zdnet.co.uk/zdnetuk/news/story/0,,s2080611,00. html+beatles+apple+sues+&hl=en
If they can bend concrete, they may have just saved the national highway system. One of the biggest problems is roads that self-destruct when the soil under them shifts. With enough wet/dry, expand/contract, up/down cycles, our highways are in constant need of repair. If even a small portion of this rework can be avoided with the "flexible concrete", the potential savings are enormous.
People will believe what they want to.