Having worked at some places where "ERP" or "CRM" was to be "implemented," the real issues are indeed the fault of the people at the top. There is a large disconnect between the way that folks think that their company is run, they way they say it is run, and the way it really is run. In a perfect world, all 3 would be the same. Alas, I live on Planet Earth. Neither companies nor governments have the monopoly on corruption.
ERP implementation 1: At this place, there was something, let's call it the TPS report. It was supposed to be an automated replacement for a number of things that were manually generated from database extracts and number crunching. So, an interview with, oh, let's call her Suzy goes something like:
Me: so why don't you use the numbers from the computer?
Her: they are wrong, I use the spreadsheet from Fred instead.
Me: so what is wrong with the computer numbers?
Her: If I use the numbers from the computer, then the TPS Report will be wrong.
Me: so what is wrong with the numbers in the computer?
Her: well, the sales guys all get commissions based on what is in the computer, but that is not what actually got sold. Jeff places orders for customers, and the customers send it back for credit (called channel stuffing). So Jeff gets credit for the sales, but not penalized for the returns. George puts his numbers in 3 weeks late. And the VP, Ed, he just makes up numbers to meet the monthly quotas.
ERP implementation 2: At this place, the (mis)manager, let us call him Bob, decided that he wanted to keep 4 sets of books. Set 1 was the one that the IRS got to see. Set 2 was the one that the board of directors got to see. Set 3 was the one used to show to investors and the stock market. Set 4 was the real set of books. I told my boss that I wanted nothing to do with this Enron-wannabe. I won't work for SPECTRE, nor will I work for Enron. I had to quit to get away from the project. I understand they wasted over $8,000,000 trying to implement this evil piece of stuff. And they never understood why the numbers did not match. There is a solid reason for Sarbanes-Oxley, there are still a lot of companies who succeed at getting away with this sort of business.
As long as the people putting bogus numbers into the system had more political power than the people putting the computer system in place, the system was never going to work. Corruption and cronyism are not exclusively endemic to government. Most programmers are naive, they lack an understanding of the power that politics have over the way that work really happens. Stuff like the above 2 samples are why older programmers are cynical and sometimes bitter. Part of the reason that companies look for young programmers (under 30) is that those naive babes in the woods haven't been through the woodchipper yet.
If you hear of a "failed" implementation of some ERP/CRM system, dig deep enough and you will see things like the above samples.
Only in America are people so naive as to say things like: let's leave politics out of this.
Nuclear reactors designed and built in the 1960s and early 1970s were originally intended to produce plutonium for sale to the US government. That business was so profitable, that electricity production was pure profit (hence the "nuclear generated electricity will be too cheap to meter" meme). In 1970, the US government stopped purchasing privately made plutonium, sending the economics of the reactors into a tail spin. It took several years for the power companies to realize that the suspension of plutonium purchases was permanent and not temporary. There are now about 1700 tons of plutonium in private hands across the US.
Cheap oil and cheap coal undercut the economics of nuclear power production. The price of coal will have to rise something near triple its current cost to make nukes close to the same economic scale.
Refining and reprocessing fuel for plants is horribly expensive both in money and energy. Which is why cynics kept asking during the 1970s when the nuclear industry was going to start generating more electricity than it consumed.
When MS has the market dominance in spyware detection and removal, I expect them to sell out like Aluria did (reported in this older slashdot post).
Microsoft used to bundle a virus checker back in the DOS days. Where is it now? Gone. I expect this product to destroy most of the ecosystem and then get dropped for some business reason.
The first company to have a Y2K problem was in 1970. They used the last 2 digits of the year to start policy numbers, and to make some company that they bought fit the system, they added 30 to the year, when January 1970 rolled around. The situation was written up in the early 1970s, as well as laughed about at conferences. It was dutifully ignored for another 25+ years.
This was not the first, nor will it be the last time that the saying if it wasn't for the last minute, nothing would ever get done applied to the efforts of a whole industry and the whole country.
The primary differences between UK/US libel/slander suits, are that in the US, the truth is a valid defense; and that public figures are have a much higher standard to prove libel/slander.
I worked at one place where the PHB wanted 70 hour weeks to appear to be "signed on." I started counting up the time spent during the crunch and measured 30+ hours of meetings per week. So even though we were slaving over a hot keyboard for hours and hours, we had the same amount of programming time that we would have had if the PHB could have shut his pie hole and let us work 40 hour weeks.
Having spent some time in Colorado Springs last year, I learned that the biggest killer for a security clearance is your credit. Having been out of work in 2001 and 2003/4, my credit score was way down there in the 400s. It is sad that too many employers make a decision as to whether you are a "worthy" hire or not based upon credit.
All too often, the complaints about "we can't find workers" really translates into "we can't find workers willing to work at those wages" or "we can't find workers with good credit."
It takes 18-36 months for a clearance. If you have great credit, you can get an "interim clearance" which is a temporary one until the real clearance is done. If you have spotty to rotten credit, you can expect to get turned down. Security officers know that, so your credit score is more important in an interview than whether you have a brain.
The second british atomic bomb ever made was made from plutonium from spent fuel rods back in 1953. It included lots of PU240. Even numbered isotopes of PU might suck as bad as even numbered star trek films, but you can still make a bomb from the stuff. I'm not sure why it became "impossible" 20 years after the British did it.
The British made such a bomb as their second atomic bomb.
The Osirak reactor in Iraq, that the Israelis bombed some years ago, was one such "research reactor."
Refining the isotopes of plutonium makes for a far more efficient bomb. But practical tests have shown that reactor grade plutonium, with all its isotopes, can be still be used to make one. It will be dirty, it will have a lower yield, it will use more plutonium, it will still explode. Totem 1, the second British bomb, detonated in 1953, was one such bomb: made from plutonium separated from spent reactor fuel. The Curve of Binding Energy illustrates some of the steps involved. The advantages to using spent fuel rods, assuming that your country is being watched, is that you could (with some slight of hand) swap some unspent pellets for spent pellets, and process the spent pellets yourself for plutonium.
The purpose of the Totem trials at Emu Plains in October 1953 was to find out how much of the isotope Pu-240 could be tolerated in military grade plutonium. This arose because Britain's nuclear power stations were not producing plutonium fast enough to meet the requirements of the Chiefs of Staff who wanted 200 A-bombs by 1957. The British scientists wanted to know whether the Magnox reactors, which were able to produce electricity as well as fissile material, could produce enough weapons grade plutonium. (Blakeway and Lloyd-Roberts, p78).
some stuff here and here. I found that one by googling "mean free path plutonium." So there!
Gaseous diffusion plants use insane amounts of power to run. Several hundred megawatts to run each one. Hanford nuclear reservation had several. It is commonly described as taking most of the output of a nuclear reactor to power each one.
The old reactors were designed to produce plutonium, not electricity. Their economics were designed to pay for the construction and operation by the sales (to the US government, to make bombs) of the plutonium extracted from the spent fuel rods. Any electricity produced would be pure profit. In 1970, the government stops buying plutonium, seriously screwing the economics of nuclear power plants. It is quite fashionable to blame the lack of nuclear plants on treehuggers, while carefully forgetting the real economics. It is only recently that the nuclear industry produces more electricity than it uses.
But you are right, the bush administration is in bed with the oil industry, and they would never disturb the oil industry by seriously looking into replacement power systems.
Any reactor design that can reasonably use plutonium would have a serious advantage over our current designs. Pebble bed, HTGR, all the ones using graphite, require highly enriched uranium. I'm not concerned about the fire potential, since our plants use containment vessels designed (3-5 feet thick walls of reinforced concrete) to take direct hits by passenger jets; Chernobyl, like all Soviet designs, did not have any containment vessel.
Separating plutonium from uranium is a reasonably easy chemical process. The book The Curve of Binding Energy describes it rather well. The reason nuclear power was supposed to be cheap had to do with the original economics where the main product was plutonium meant for sale to the US government. Electricty was a by-product. Then, in 1970, the US government stops buying plutonium from the industry. Ooops, that blows all the economic models. And now, private industry gets to store all the plutonium they produce. MUF (missing and unaccounted for) amounts to about 1-2% of production. Did that missing U/Plu go up the chimney? Or out the door in someone's pocket?
Boiling water reactors are designed to deliberately produce plutonium in the normal course of operation. Plutonium can be easily refined from spent fuel rods.
You cannot make gun-type (hiroshima) bombs with plutonium: you can only make them out of uranium, the isotopes of which are rather hard to separate out. Implosion-type bombs (trinity, nagasaki and pretty much all the rest) can be made from plutonium, and the excess polonium found in spent fuel rods make the use of initiators irrelevant.
The reason that folks claimed nuclear power will be too cheap to meter had to do with the real finances going on. The sale of plutonium to the US government was going to pay for the plant and operating it, and the electricity would be pure profit. Then, in 1970, the US government stops buying plutonium from private industry. So now this whole industry has to pay for its construction and operation from what had originally been planned as the by-product. And, to make matters worse, private industry has to store and secure its own plutonium waste. Almost every nuclear power plant design used in the US is purposely designed to produce excess plutonium as a byproduct. The Canadian "can-do" designs, as well as the pebble bed designs are intended to minimize the amount of plu production.
The nuclear industry uses huge amounts of electricity, and if you counted the refining and reprocessing, until recently, the nuclear industry used more electricity than it generated.
Don't believe me? Go pick up The Curve of Binding Energy.
The reason we live so much longer than we did centuries ago is not due to power or medicine. It is due to clean food and sanitation. It takes huge amounts of energy to make the pesticides and herbicides we depend upon for our current western food supply. And a meat-heavy diet exacerbates the energy misuse.
Uranium is all over the place. In the 1950s, folks ran around prospecting for it, until careful analysts noticed it makes up about.1% of granite. Might not be economical to extract, but granite is everywhere.
I agree with you on the exploration angle. We need to get established as a permanent presence elsewhere in the universe. But until those colonies can build their own spaceships and spacesuits, they are just long camping trips. It is the old Thoreau's Axe syndrome.
Having worked at some places where "ERP" or "CRM" was to be "implemented," the real issues are indeed the fault of the people at the top. There is a large disconnect between the way that folks think that their company is run, they way they say it is run, and the way it really is run. In a perfect world, all 3 would be the same. Alas, I live on Planet Earth.
ERP implementation 1: At this place, there was something, let's call it the TPS report. It was supposed to be an automated replacement for a number of things that were manually generated from database extracts and number crunching. So, an interview with, oh, let's call her Suzy goes something like:
Me: so why don't you use the numbers from the computer?
Her: they are wrong, I use the spreadsheet from Fred instead.
Me: so what is wrong with the computer numbers?
Her: If I use the numbers from the computer, then the TPS Report will be wrong.
Me: so what is wrong with the numbers in the computer?
Her: well, the sales guys all get commissions based on what is in the computer, but that is not what actually got sold. Jeff places orders for customers, and the customers send it back for credit (called channel stuffing). So Jeff gets credit for the sales, but not penalized for the returns. And the VP, Ed, he just makes up numbers to meet the monthly quotas.
ERP implementation 2: At this place, the (mis)manager, let us call him Bob, decided that he wanted to keep 4 sets of books. Set 1 was the one that the IRS got to see. Set 2 was the one that the board of directors got to see. Set 3 was the one used to show to investors and the stock market. Set 4 was the real set of books. I told my boss that I wanted nothing to do with this Enron-wannabe. I won't work for SPECTRE, nor will I work for Enron. I had to quit to get away from the project. I understand they wasted over $8,000,000 trying to implement this evil piece of stuff. And they never understood why the numbers did not match. There is a solid reason for Sarbanes-Oxley, there are still a lot of companies who succeed at getting away with this sort of business.
As long as the people putting bogus numbers into the system had more political power than the people putting the computer system in place, the system was never going to work. Corruption and cronyism are not exclusively endemic to government. Most programmers are naive, they lack an understanding of the power that politics have over the way that work really happens. Stuff like the above 2 samples are why older programmers are cynical and sometimes bitter.
If you hear of a "failed" implementation of some ERP/CRM system, dig deep enough and you will see things like the above samples.
Since the power required (to power up your particle accelerator) is close to what a small city uses, and the power used to store positrons is about an order of magnitude smaller, none of those new-fangled gadgets called, oh, capacitors, or batteries will supply anywhere near enough power. Those "hi tech" thingies are about 4 orders of magnitude too small. How much power does CERN use? How much power would the Superconducting Supercollider have used, if it had actually been built?
All it takes is some idiot with a backhoe, and we get to practice our Scotty impersonation: Captain! She's gonna blow any minute now!
If your electricity gets shut off, your antimatter containment vessel will detonate. Who needs Al Qeda when we have the electric grid.
And, as others have mentioned, a gram of this stuff will take more energy to make than all the output of all the generators in the world. The mad scientists who make this stuff (just add me to the list of would-be mad scientists) make anti matter a few atoms at a time. And use enough power to keep a small city running. Remember what a particle accelerator is?
You can color me cynical about the practicality of anti-matter as a weapon in the next century. For those keeping track, the color of cynical is somewhere between #000000 and #FFFFFF.
Subsidise the TV manufacturers. Not that there are any domestic manufacturers left, due to product dumping in the 70s and 80s.
Screw the public by overturning the Betamax ruling by technical means.
The movie industry wants to make it hard to impossible for you to copy TV shows, impossible to share recordings between different playback units in your own house (the p2p issue is baloney). Last time they tried this was with DivX, where the decryption keys to the discs were tied to your playback unit: no sharing discs between the living room and the bedroom, you pirate, you! And if your player broke, well, you get to buy all the movies in your collection all over again.
Digital TV does not solve any problem that we as consumers have. Digital TV does not automagically render TV shows into something worth watching. The only features that appear to be worth pushing this technology, are the ones that only Hollywood wants: to overturn Betamax. I didn't want the V-chip (and despite the promises of that technology, it still did not prevent the Janet Jackson incident). And I don't want this dorky new tech. Is Never Twice the Same Color (NTSC) an ancient technology? Yes, and so are books.
What can digital tv show that analog can't? I'm sure that you can come up with all sorts of trivial features, but it doesn't solve a problem that I have. Therefore there is no reason for me to go out and piss thousands of dollars down the drain on some new boob tube.
I think it is painfully clear that I am not alone in rejecting digital tv: the market isn't buying it. Corporate welfare to prop up the TV manufacturers (by subsidizing them) is a little late and quite misguided. As long as there is a difference in price between a digital tv and an analog one, price will win every time.
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ERP implementation 1: At this place, there was something, let's call it the TPS report. It was supposed to be an automated replacement for a number of things that were manually generated from database extracts and number crunching. So, an interview with, oh, let's call her Suzy goes something like:
Me: so why don't you use the numbers from the computer?
Her: they are wrong, I use the spreadsheet from Fred instead.
Me: so what is wrong with the computer numbers?
Her: If I use the numbers from the computer, then the TPS Report will be wrong.
Me: so what is wrong with the numbers in the computer?
Her: well, the sales guys all get commissions based on what is in the computer, but that is not what actually got sold. Jeff places orders for customers, and the customers send it back for credit (called channel stuffing). So Jeff gets credit for the sales, but not penalized for the returns. George puts his numbers in 3 weeks late. And the VP, Ed, he just makes up numbers to meet the monthly quotas.
ERP implementation 2: At this place, the (mis)manager, let us call him Bob, decided that he wanted to keep 4 sets of books. Set 1 was the one that the IRS got to see. Set 2 was the one that the board of directors got to see. Set 3 was the one used to show to investors and the stock market. Set 4 was the real set of books. I told my boss that I wanted nothing to do with this Enron-wannabe. I won't work for SPECTRE, nor will I work for Enron. I had to quit to get away from the project. I understand they wasted over $8,000,000 trying to implement this evil piece of stuff. And they never understood why the numbers did not match. There is a solid reason for Sarbanes-Oxley, there are still a lot of companies who succeed at getting away with this sort of business.
As long as the people putting bogus numbers into the system had more political power than the people putting the computer system in place, the system was never going to work. Corruption and cronyism are not exclusively endemic to government. Most programmers are naive, they lack an understanding of the power that politics have over the way that work really happens. Stuff like the above 2 samples are why older programmers are cynical and sometimes bitter. Part of the reason that companies look for young programmers (under 30) is that those naive babes in the woods haven't been through the woodchipper yet.
If you hear of a "failed" implementation of some ERP/CRM system, dig deep enough and you will see things like the above samples.Only in America are people so naive as to say things like: let's leave politics out of this.
disclaimer: this is an encore posting.
After decrypting them, you still have to translate them into English.
Cheap oil and cheap coal undercut the economics of nuclear power production. The price of coal will have to rise something near triple its current cost to make nukes close to the same economic scale.
Refining and reprocessing fuel for plants is horribly expensive both in money and energy. Which is why cynics kept asking during the 1970s when the nuclear industry was going to start generating more electricity than it consumed.
Microsoft used to bundle a virus checker back in the DOS days. Where is it now? Gone. I expect this product to destroy most of the ecosystem and then get dropped for some business reason.
The potion belt sounds like something off of Morrowind or Neverwinter Nights.
This was not the first, nor will it be the last time that the saying if it wasn't for the last minute, nothing would ever get done applied to the efforts of a whole industry and the whole country.
The primary differences between UK/US libel/slander suits, are that in the US, the truth is a valid defense; and that public figures are have a much higher standard to prove libel/slander.
You are supposed to Never Say Anything about No Such Agency.
I worked at one place where the PHB wanted 70 hour weeks to appear to be "signed on." I started counting up the time spent during the crunch and measured 30+ hours of meetings per week. So even though we were slaving over a hot keyboard for hours and hours, we had the same amount of programming time that we would have had if the PHB could have shut his pie hole and let us work 40 hour weeks.
All too often, the complaints about "we can't find workers" really translates into "we can't find workers willing to work at those wages" or "we can't find workers with good credit."
It takes 18-36 months for a clearance. If you have great credit, you can get an "interim clearance" which is a temporary one until the real clearance is done. If you have spotty to rotten credit, you can expect to get turned down. Security officers know that, so your credit score is more important in an interview than whether you have a brain.
The second british atomic bomb ever made was made from plutonium from spent fuel rods back in 1953. It included lots of PU240. Even numbered isotopes of PU might suck as bad as even numbered star trek films, but you can still make a bomb from the stuff. I'm not sure why it became "impossible" 20 years after the British did it.
The British made such a bomb as their second atomic bomb. The Osirak reactor in Iraq, that the Israelis bombed some years ago, was one such "research reactor."
That sounds interesting, and I think I like your suggestion.
some stuff here and here. I found that one by googling "mean free path plutonium." So there!
Gaseous diffusion plants use insane amounts of power to run. Several hundred megawatts to run each one. Hanford nuclear reservation had several. It is commonly described as taking most of the output of a nuclear reactor to power each one.
But you are right, the bush administration is in bed with the oil industry, and they would never disturb the oil industry by seriously looking into replacement power systems.
Any reactor design that can reasonably use plutonium would have a serious advantage over our current designs. Pebble bed, HTGR, all the ones using graphite, require highly enriched uranium. I'm not concerned about the fire potential, since our plants use containment vessels designed (3-5 feet thick walls of reinforced concrete) to take direct hits by passenger jets; Chernobyl, like all Soviet designs, did not have any containment vessel.
Boiling water reactors are designed to deliberately produce plutonium in the normal course of operation. Plutonium can be easily refined from spent fuel rods.
You cannot make gun-type (hiroshima) bombs with plutonium: you can only make them out of uranium, the isotopes of which are rather hard to separate out. Implosion-type bombs (trinity, nagasaki and pretty much all the rest) can be made from plutonium, and the excess polonium found in spent fuel rods make the use of initiators irrelevant.
The nuclear industry uses huge amounts of electricity, and if you counted the refining and reprocessing, until recently, the nuclear industry used more electricity than it generated.
Don't believe me? Go pick up The Curve of Binding Energy.
Uranium is all over the place. In the 1950s, folks ran around prospecting for it, until careful analysts noticed it makes up about .1% of granite. Might not be economical to extract, but granite is everywhere.
I agree with you on the exploration angle. We need to get established as a permanent presence elsewhere in the universe. But until those colonies can build their own spaceships and spacesuits, they are just long camping trips. It is the old Thoreau's Axe syndrome.
Gross name, my mother brought a couple cans back to the US when she visited there. Tastes like a cross between 7-up and gatorade.
ERP implementation 1: At this place, there was something, let's call it the TPS report. It was supposed to be an automated replacement for a number of things that were manually generated from database extracts and number crunching. So, an interview with, oh, let's call her Suzy goes something like:
Me: so why don't you use the numbers from the computer?
Her: they are wrong, I use the spreadsheet from Fred instead.
Me: so what is wrong with the computer numbers?
Her: If I use the numbers from the computer, then the TPS Report will be wrong.
Me: so what is wrong with the numbers in the computer?
Her: well, the sales guys all get commissions based on what is in the computer, but that is not what actually got sold. Jeff places orders for customers, and the customers send it back for credit (called channel stuffing). So Jeff gets credit for the sales, but not penalized for the returns. And the VP, Ed, he just makes up numbers to meet the monthly quotas.
ERP implementation 2: At this place, the (mis)manager, let us call him Bob, decided that he wanted to keep 4 sets of books. Set 1 was the one that the IRS got to see. Set 2 was the one that the board of directors got to see. Set 3 was the one used to show to investors and the stock market. Set 4 was the real set of books. I told my boss that I wanted nothing to do with this Enron-wannabe. I won't work for SPECTRE, nor will I work for Enron. I had to quit to get away from the project. I understand they wasted over $8,000,000 trying to implement this evil piece of stuff. And they never understood why the numbers did not match. There is a solid reason for Sarbanes-Oxley, there are still a lot of companies who succeed at getting away with this sort of business.
As long as the people putting bogus numbers into the system had more political power than the people putting the computer system in place, the system was never going to work. Corruption and cronyism are not exclusively endemic to government. Most programmers are naive, they lack an understanding of the power that politics have over the way that work really happens. Stuff like the above 2 samples are why older programmers are cynical and sometimes bitter.
If you hear of a "failed" implementation of some ERP/CRM system, dig deep enough and you will see things like the above samples.
All it takes is some idiot with a backhoe, and we get to practice our Scotty impersonation: Captain! She's gonna blow any minute now!
And, as others have mentioned, a gram of this stuff will take more energy to make than all the output of all the generators in the world. The mad scientists who make this stuff (just add me to the list of would-be mad scientists) make anti matter a few atoms at a time. And use enough power to keep a small city running. Remember what a particle accelerator is?
You can color me cynical about the practicality of anti-matter as a weapon in the next century. For those keeping track, the color of cynical is somewhere between #000000 and #FFFFFF.
- Subsidise the TV manufacturers. Not that there are any domestic manufacturers left, due to product dumping in the 70s and 80s.
- Screw the public by overturning the Betamax ruling by technical means.
The movie industry wants to make it hard to impossible for you to copy TV shows, impossible to share recordings between different playback units in your own house (the p2p issue is baloney). Last time they tried this was with DivX, where the decryption keys to the discs were tied to your playback unit: no sharing discs between the living room and the bedroom, you pirate, you! And if your player broke, well, you get to buy all the movies in your collection all over again.What can digital tv show that analog can't? I'm sure that you can come up with all sorts of trivial features, but it doesn't solve a problem that I have. Therefore there is no reason for me to go out and piss thousands of dollars down the drain on some new boob tube.
I think it is painfully clear that I am not alone in rejecting digital tv: the market isn't buying it. Corporate welfare to prop up the TV manufacturers (by subsidizing them) is a little late and quite misguided. As long as there is a difference in price between a digital tv and an analog one, price will win every time.