This statement is actually one of the reasons for using XML.
Using a standard data format like XML that is widely understood (but nooo, we only studied XML in college, as you put it) and has a mature set of parsing tools makes handling the data easier when the applications that process the data change, particularly if they change dramatically.
It sounds like your primary objection to XML for your application is that is not very efficient. There is always a trade-off between efficiency and flexibility. In the long-term flexibility usually wins.
So people can migrate from Word without noticing the difference.
And what about those of us who want something better?
Granted that many people think that the Word interface was handed down on Mt. Sinai, but there are at least three other approaches.
A bare-bones Notepad-like look, when all you want to do is type and save.
A split-screen reveal-codes view like Wordperfect has. Some of us think HTML markup is all a person needs in this world.
A rich outline view. Long documents are best handled hierarchically. The Word outline implementation is fairly clumsy.
The whole method of defining and using style sheets could be done better to encourage using them more.
Perhaps there should be a special word processing mouse configuration that brings up special menus for power users. A power user might prefer no on-screen menus but would want them to appear as needed by moving the mouse pointer to a particular spot on the screen.
More could be done with tabbed interfaces to display multiple documents or different places in the same document. The tabs could be either editable documents or browser windows. The tabs could be predefined groups of documents, Web pages and PDFs the way some browsers let you define groups of Web pages as tabs.
Already Outlook 2003 "provides an integrated solution for managing e-mail messages, schedules, tasks, notes, contacts, and other information. Outlook 2003 also delivers innovations you can use to stay organized and collaborate better--all from one place." Maybe that's the direction Open Office should be heading if it wants people to be comfortable.
Or, some people might want their word processing program to look more like their browser.
You really need just three things, and in my experience, nobody bothers to even go this far.
What might help is a project management infrastructure to assist in doing these things.
For design documentation and documentation in general you need a rudimentary content management system. It can be as simple as document repository under version control.
For e-mails to track changes and record on-going discussions and debate, use a change management system like Request Tracker or a threaded discussion group program with email notification.
Gforge, Tudos and trac are complete systems for managing development.
Having project management infrastructure in place at all times means that you can turn anything that requires more then, say, one person working two days, into a formal project with minimal overhead.
These systems reduce the number of face-to-face meetings that eat into development time and at the same time improve communication. The result is that there can be a measurable improvement in even the smallest project. Perhaps, especially in the smallest projects.
My claim is that he fundamentally misunderstands (perhaps deliberately) how Google works, and gives little credit to their demonstrated ability to improve how things work in the future.
If fact, Gorman does give credit to Google's ability to improve how things work in the future. He says:
I also favor digitizing such library holdings as unique manuscript collections, or photographs, when seeing the object itself is the point (this is reportedly the deal the New York Public Library has made with Google).
None of the "supplanted" media are dead, but in my opinion any library that concentrates on them at the expense of the newer ones will rapidly be discarded as irrelevant.
Gorman's sees the greater danger is that libraries will concentrate on "the newer ones" at the expense of books as bound volumes. He reaches this conclusion based on the distinction he makes between information and knowledge. This distinction is also the basis for his conclusion that the traditional role of the library will be relevant for some time to come.
Anyway, at least now you are dealing with Gorman's ideas instead of being content to characterize the dean of library services at Cal State Fresno and
president-elect of the American Library Association as a mouth-breathing
idiot.
Gorman apparently has the more limited goal of indexing materials without providing access to them, while mocking the efforts of these other organizations to provide access.
Alas, that comment and the rest of your post is confirmation of Gorman's lament:
It is obvious that the Blog People read what they want to read rather than what is in front of them and judge me to be wrong on the basis of what they think rather than what I actually wrote.
His complaint, if you read his original article, is that in Google's project, only snippets of the books that match the search terms will be displayed. Users will not see the search results in the larger context, which may include many pages. He says, "Absent a lot more searching, you have no idea whether there are other references to the subject in the book, and the 'information' you have found is almost meaningless out of context." He notes that "In the Google scheme, hundreds of thousands of books in copyright will not be available to be read as a whole."
Thus his argument (very briefly summarized) is with Google's indexing scheme and the approach to knowledge that it presupposes, not with providing the books online.
When you accuse him of "mocking the efforts of these other organizations", he doesn't even mention any other organizations, let alone mock them.
Mr. Gorman, please keep in mind that when public library funding comes up for public discussion, your comments, especially given your position, are extraordinarily unhelpful.
In fact, he says:
I believe, however, that massive databases of digitized whole books, especially scholarly books, are expensive exercises in futility based on the staggering notion that, for the first time in history, one form of communication (electronic) will supplant and obliterate all previous forms.
It is beyond premature to prepare to mourn the death of libraries and the death of the book.
He is clearly endorsing libraries and his ideas would be extraordinarily helpful.
Re:Has anyone but the reviewer even read this book
on
Blink, Take 2
·
· Score: 1
The first time I heard of relativity I thought it was very strange.
That observation, of course, completely contradicts the premise of the book.
HP is mostly a printer company plus some side interests that barely earn any money.
According to the HP's quarterly report, it had quarterly revenue of $21.5 billion and earnings (profit) of $1.1 billion.
The Imaging and Printer division produced $6.1 billion in revenue. The other $15 billion came from what you call the "side interests", personal computers, storage and servers, software, services and financing.
The printer division is by far the most profitable, contributing about 70% of the profit. But the other divisions contributed about a half a billion dollars for the quarter, which is a long way from barely any money.
HP claims to be #1 globally in inkjet, all-in-one and single-function printers, mono and color laser printers, large format printing, scanners, print servers, and ink and laser supplies
However, its "side interests" make it
#1 globally in x86, Windows, Linux, UNIX and Blade servers
Imagine my surprise when after getting an electrical engr degree...I couldn't get a decent job
I appears you are saying that you lost your faith in God because you couldn't get a job.
Consider: if you had gotten a job you might still believe in God, which you now think is wrong. So the question is, which is more important? The job or knowing the truth?
Where is God?
Even people with fulltime jobs still ask this question.
No discussion of Subversion is complete without a considering the relative merits of the two types of the repository storage system, Berkeley DB and FSFS.
The Subversion book at red-bean.com has an informed discussion in Chapter 5.
It appears that FSFS, which is basically the regular file system like CVS uses, is better in every way. The books says, "In theory, it promises a lower barrier to entry for new administrators and is less susceptible to problems."
New administrators should take note because diagnosing and repairing problems with the Berkeley DB and Managing Disk Space is a whole other level of skill compared to administering CVS.
Unless you are going to administer a huge project, in which case you should NOT be a new administrator, the Berkeley DB offers nothing but potential headaches.
Unfortunately, creativity is not something that can be easily taught...
In a recent article, Mandelbrot shows three common techniques that have kept him creative even today when he's nearly 80:
I always saw a close kinship between the needs of "pure" mathematics and a certain hero of Greek mythology, Antaeus. The son of Earth, he had to touch the ground every so often in order to reestablish contact with his Mother; otherwise his strength waned. To strangle him, Hercules simply held him off the ground. Back to mathematics. Separation from any down-to-earth input could safely be complete for long periods -- but not forever.
A recent, important turn in my life occurred when I realized that something that I have long been stating in footnotes should be put on the marquee. I have engaged myself, without realizing it, in undertaking a theory of roughness.
To give an example, let me return to the stock market and the weather. It turns out... that the techniques I developed for studying turbulence -- like weather -- also apply to the stock market.
Mandelbrot's techniques can be roughly sumarized as (1) periodically return to basic principles or direct observation; (2) pay closer attention to obscure or peripheral phenomenon; and (3) apply techniques from apparently unrelated disciplines.
I suspect that part of the problem isn't that creativity is hard to teach but that it isn't taught at all. Creativity might be like any other technique. If you know it, you use it.
I wonder if the missing ingredient in creativity is arrogance, a quality much on display in Mandelbrot's article. Creative people think their rightful place is standing on the shoulders of giants. They've been told the view is better up there.
Every IT department has marketable products. They just need packaging and promotion.
Typical products or services include:
Offer generic IT services (for example, software development, security audits, disaster recovery) to existing customers
Take some system that was developed in house and offer it to non-competing companies. For example, a large telco packaged up its fleet management software and sold it to trucking and delivery companies.
Offer consulting on commercial systems that you use like databases, content management systems, publishing systems, network management, etc.
Marketing these products typically piggybacks on existing marketing efforts. For example, mention the product or service when making routine contact with customers or attending trade shows. Promote the products and services on the company Web site. The vendor of a commercial system that you've bought might be happy to promote your consulting service for the system if it helps make a sale or keeps another customer happy, particularly if it doesn't have local representation.
If you are in a business that has a critical IT component, you almost certainly have a product. All it may take is a minimum amount of packaging of the skills and experience. It can be as simple as thoroughly documenting your own processes and procedures and putting it in a handsome binder. Even if your department does little more than support the accounting system, you can offer consulting on customizing, upgrading and tweaking.
Your competitive advantage in the marketplace is that you don't have to cover your entire overhead, just defray some costs. As a result, your prices can be lower but profit can be higher.
Managers that are dumb enough to try to save money by cutting their IT departments might be gullible enough to fall for this proposal. It might buy you some time until they get turfed out. Then you can start all over again with the next bunch.
Or, as Robert B. Laughlin, professor of physics at Stanford University and a 1998 Nobel laureate in physics, said recently:
Physical law cannot generally be anticipated by pure thought, but must be discovered experimentally...
The world we actually inhabit, as opposed to the happy idealization of modern scientific mythology, is filled with wonderful and important things we have not yet seen because we have not looked, or have not been able to look because of technical limitations. The great power of science is its ability, through brutal objectivity, to reveal to us truth we did not anticipate. In this it continues to be invaluable, and one of the greatest of human creations.
"Brutal objectivity" is what limits most people, even the smartest. It is easy to become comfortable in our view of the universe and forget the uncomfortable process that brought us to this view in the first place.
In fact, a comfortable view is almost a warning. When things fit together too well, there must be something wrong.
"A stitch in time to save nine." comes from that event
The old saying "a stitch in time saves nine" is much older than 1937. I think you are confusing "a switch in time to save nine". This version of the old saying was a humourous play on words at the time of the Supreme Court decisions. Those decisions upheld parts of the New Deal and ended FDR's plan to increase the number of justices to 15 from 9.
However for the vast majority of day to day office work, documents are often formatted and reformatted till the 'Aha!' feeling comes.
There was a time when a typewriter was adequate for day-to-day office work. Word processors solved the main problem of typewriters, which was the difficulty of making corrections and revisions. The first word processors used printers that were little more than high-speed typewriters.
Elaborate typography resulted from the invention of cheap laser printers. However, even then, typography was more of a by-product. The main advantage of laser printers was speed. The speed of the laser printer further augmented the main function of word processors by allowing even faster corrections and revisions.
Typography has added an extra level of corrections and revisions. I suspect that today more time is spent fiddling with the typograpy than the content of the document. The reasons is that in the distant past, typesetting lent authority to a document because it suggested that it was important enough to go to the enormous extra trouble and cost of having it typeset. The typeset appearance is now the minimum standard so that a document without a typeset appearance has almost as little appearance of authority as a handwritten version.
In terms of efficiency, the optimal use of a word processor would be with a monospaced font with bolding, italicizing and different font sizes kept to a minimum. Such documents could be formatted in a markup language like Tex or HTML almost as efficiently as in a WYSIWYG processor. The small loss of efficiency would be recovered by the extra flexibility of managing the document as text in version control and content management systems and by making it easier to re-publish it in different formats (e.g. pdf, Web pages).
Moreover, by using style sheets to mark up the document, a document formatter would automatically apply the enhanced typograpy, giving the required appearance of authority.
The missing ingredient is a standard for the appearance for day-to-day documents, which would allow for the definition of style sheets. The absence of such a standard in most corporations indicates that corporations probably don't really understand document management.
The absence of the standard also appeals to another human frailty: the desire to put your own typographical stamp on the appearance of a document even when you did not create the content.
This piece is definitely worth a read for project managers. It's written in a jocular vein but his advice rings true:
It helps to realize that the key difference between a big decision and a
small one is whether you can fix your decision afterwards. Any decision
can be made small by just always making sure that if you were wrong (and
you _will_ be wrong), you can always undo the damage later by
backtracking. Suddenly, you get to be doubly managerial for making
_two_ inconsequential decisions - the wrong one _and_ the right one.
He says the advice applies to technical leads, not to regular business department managers, but it looks like nearly any manager would benefit.
The full title is: The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness. The 8th habit is "Find your voice and inspire others to find theirs."
According to the Publisher's Weekly review:
The bulk of the book details how, after finding your own voice, you can inspire others and create a workplace where people feel engaged. This includes establishing trust, searching for third alternatives (not a compromise between your way and my way, but a third, better way) and developing a shared vision.
The problem with the "shared vision" thing is that the interest of the manager is not necessarily the interest of the subordinates. For instance, managers are trying to get more for less from their staff so that "shared vision" is mostly a con job.
Covey really needs to write a book on the 7 habits of highly effective con men.
One often overlooked security gap is backup. Even if your desktop is physically secured, the backup has to be stored somewhere else.
Somewhere else can include storage on a server or removeable media. Typically, many generations of backup will exist and these generations tend to go astray. If the backup is on a server, the server gets backedup to removeable media that gets stored somewhere else. The removeable media may get reused without being completely erased or may be stored for future reuse without being erased at all.
Ideally, backup should be encrypted but maintenance of the keys over many generations of backup is both a management problem and a barrier to recovery in an emergency.
As a result, there may be many generations of confidential data stored in many different places. The situation is further complicated by the fact that the people who create the data will have no control over how the backup is handled and whether the security procedures are followed.
This process often means that in practice, the older the backup, the lower the physical security. Access to the backups by unauthorized people may be completely undetectable.
The best solution is for the people who create confidential data to control the backup lifecycle as well. It should be one of their primary responsibilities and it should be audited from time to time make sure the procedures are being followed. As with the PC itself, controlling physical access to the all the generations of backup is the first step.
The Office, the television series, is an example of looking at "the office", i.e., the workplace, as being funny rather than tragic. Humour is thus a possible way of dealing with stress that arises from forces beyond your control.
Time management is one area where employees can help themselves but most causes of stress are out of their control. The stress caused by the work is typically the least of the problems.
Sources of stress in the workplace:
Unrealistic deadlines
Conflicting priorities
Inadequate resources
Interpersonal conflicts
Poorly defined objectives
Difficult economic conditions
Sudden or frequent changes in managers
Personal problems outside work
Any one of these can cause excessive stress and it is not unusual to have several of them part of the typical day. The only practical way of dealing with them is just don't let it get to you. Focus on getting through day and try to find a place where things are better. Try to be a calming influence in the office instead of stoking the rumour mill and predicting the worst.
If you look at the office in a certain way, it can even be funny. Certainly, more comic than tragic.
When you try and raise all these kind of questions, I only ask one!! What is defined as a robot?
The article defines robot in paragraph 3:
My definition of a robot is any device controlled by software that can work 24/7 and put people out of work. The machines are not intelligent. They cannot comprehend Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics to protect and obey humans before preserving themselves. Yet they are all around us. In case you missed them, today's most popular robots are ATMs and computer printers.
So, my next question is what makes us not robot?
By the author's definition, we are not robots ("the machines are not intelligent. They cannot comprehend Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics", etc.)
Pvt. Lewis Schleifer at Hickam Field fired his weapon at a Japanese plane coming straight on until he fell mortally wounded. Lee Goldfarb, a radioman on the USS Oglala, was at his battle station when his ship was struck by a torpedo and sank.
why exactly is a Chinese guy getting pissed over the Titanic?
Eight men, all Sailors from Hong Kong, boarded the Titanic together at Southampton with third class ticket #1601 at a cost of £56 9s 11d.
Six of the men: Lee Bing, Chang Chip, Choong Foo, Ling Hee, Ali Lam and Fang Lang survived the sinking. Very little is known about them and there is disagreement over which boats they escaped in. Four of the men are thought to have escaped in Collapsible C, one possibly in lifeboat 13 and the sixth was picked up from the water by the sailors in lifeboat 14.
HTML is better than dragging it out of a database, because it produces a smaller cpu hit on the server.
A Content Management System provides a good deal more than a repository. You need to know when the last time a page was updated and who updated it. You need a version control system to know what changes were made. You need some kind of work flow to move a page from development to review to final approval and track the status of a page in the process.
A database application on the backend makes it a good deal easier to implement these features once you get beyond a surprisingly small number of pages. It is much easier to create a batch process that periodically generates static pages from the database than trying to duplicate the features of a CMS with html files stored in the file system.
Usually the confusion of managing a large site of static pages stored in the file system is more of a problem than wasting cpu time. The situation you describe where "the page doesnt change much, but more pages are added daily" is postponing the problem. Eventually there will be a large number of obsolete pages that will have to be reviewed and updated and no one will know which ones they are or even how many there are.
Slashdot Mirror
This statement is actually one of the reasons for using XML.
Using a standard data format like XML that is widely understood (but nooo, we only studied XML in college, as you put it) and has a mature set of parsing tools makes handling the data easier when the applications that process the data change, particularly if they change dramatically.
It sounds like your primary objection to XML for your application is that is not very efficient. There is always a trade-off between efficiency and flexibility. In the long-term flexibility usually wins.
So people can migrate from Word without noticing the difference.
And what about those of us who want something better?
Granted that many people think that the Word interface was handed down on Mt. Sinai, but there are at least three other approaches.
The whole method of defining and using style sheets could be done better to encourage using them more.
Perhaps there should be a special word processing mouse configuration that brings up special menus for power users. A power user might prefer no on-screen menus but would want them to appear as needed by moving the mouse pointer to a particular spot on the screen.
More could be done with tabbed interfaces to display multiple documents or different places in the same document. The tabs could be either editable documents or browser windows. The tabs could be predefined groups of documents, Web pages and PDFs the way some browsers let you define groups of Web pages as tabs.
Already Outlook 2003 "provides an integrated solution for managing e-mail messages, schedules, tasks, notes, contacts, and other information. Outlook 2003 also delivers innovations you can use to stay organized and collaborate better--all from one place." Maybe that's the direction Open Office should be heading if it wants people to be comfortable.
Or, some people might want their word processing program to look more like their browser.
You really need just three things, and in my experience, nobody bothers to even go this far.
What might help is a project management infrastructure to assist in doing these things.
For design documentation and documentation in general you need a rudimentary content management system. It can be as simple as document repository under version control.
For e-mails to track changes and record on-going discussions and debate, use a change management system like Request Tracker or a threaded discussion group program with email notification.
Gforge, Tudos and trac are complete systems for managing development.
Having project management infrastructure in place at all times means that you can turn anything that requires more then, say, one person working two days, into a formal project with minimal overhead.
These systems reduce the number of face-to-face meetings that eat into development time and at the same time improve communication. The result is that there can be a measurable improvement in even the smallest project. Perhaps, especially in the smallest projects.
My claim is that he fundamentally misunderstands (perhaps deliberately) how Google works, and gives little credit to their demonstrated ability to improve how things work in the future.
If fact, Gorman does give credit to Google's ability to improve how things work in the future. He says:
None of the "supplanted" media are dead, but in my opinion any library that concentrates on them at the expense of the newer ones will rapidly be discarded as irrelevant.
Gorman's sees the greater danger is that libraries will concentrate on "the newer ones" at the expense of books as bound volumes. He reaches this conclusion based on the distinction he makes between information and knowledge. This distinction is also the basis for his conclusion that the traditional role of the library will be relevant for some time to come.
Anyway, at least now you are dealing with Gorman's ideas instead of being content to characterize the dean of library services at Cal State Fresno and president-elect of the American Library Association as a mouth-breathing idiot.
Gorman apparently has the more limited goal of indexing materials without providing access to them, while mocking the efforts of these other organizations to provide access.
Alas, that comment and the rest of your post is confirmation of Gorman's lament:
His complaint, if you read his original article, is that in Google's project, only snippets of the books that match the search terms will be displayed. Users will not see the search results in the larger context, which may include many pages. He says, "Absent a lot more searching, you have no idea whether there are other references to the subject in the book, and the 'information' you have found is almost meaningless out of context." He notes that "In the Google scheme, hundreds of thousands of books in copyright will not be available to be read as a whole."
Thus his argument (very briefly summarized) is with Google's indexing scheme and the approach to knowledge that it presupposes, not with providing the books online.
When you accuse him of "mocking the efforts of these other organizations", he doesn't even mention any other organizations, let alone mock them.
Mr. Gorman, please keep in mind that when public library funding comes up for public discussion, your comments, especially given your position, are extraordinarily unhelpful.
In fact, he says:
He is clearly endorsing libraries and his ideas would be extraordinarily helpful.
The first time I heard of relativity I thought it was very strange.
That observation, of course, completely contradicts the premise of the book.
HP is mostly a printer company plus some side interests that barely earn any money.
According to the HP's quarterly report, it had quarterly revenue of $21.5 billion and earnings (profit) of $1.1 billion.
The Imaging and Printer division produced $6.1 billion in revenue. The other $15 billion came from what you call the "side interests", personal computers, storage and servers, software, services and financing.
The printer division is by far the most profitable, contributing about 70% of the profit. But the other divisions contributed about a half a billion dollars for the quarter, which is a long way from barely any money.
HP claims to be #1 globally in inkjet, all-in-one and single-function printers, mono and color laser printers, large format printing, scanners, print servers, and ink and laser supplies
However, its "side interests" make it
Imagine my surprise when after getting an electrical engr degree...I couldn't get a decent job
I appears you are saying that you lost your faith in God because you couldn't get a job.
Consider: if you had gotten a job you might still believe in God, which you now think is wrong. So the question is, which is more important? The job or knowing the truth?
Where is God?
Even people with fulltime jobs still ask this question.
configuration and maintenance is a breeze.
No discussion of Subversion is complete without a considering the relative merits of the two types of the repository storage system, Berkeley DB and FSFS.
The Subversion book at red-bean.com has an informed discussion in Chapter 5.
It appears that FSFS, which is basically the regular file system like CVS uses, is better in every way. The books says, "In theory, it promises a lower barrier to entry for new administrators and is less susceptible to problems." New administrators should take note because diagnosing and repairing problems with the Berkeley DB and Managing Disk Space is a whole other level of skill compared to administering CVS.
Unless you are going to administer a huge project, in which case you should NOT be a new administrator, the Berkeley DB offers nothing but potential headaches.
Unfortunately, creativity is not something that can be easily taught...
In a recent article, Mandelbrot shows three common techniques that have kept him creative even today when he's nearly 80:
Mandelbrot's techniques can be roughly sumarized as (1) periodically return to basic principles or direct observation; (2) pay closer attention to obscure or peripheral phenomenon; and (3) apply techniques from apparently unrelated disciplines.
I suspect that part of the problem isn't that creativity is hard to teach but that it isn't taught at all. Creativity might be like any other technique. If you know it, you use it.
I wonder if the missing ingredient in creativity is arrogance, a quality much on display in Mandelbrot's article. Creative people think their rightful place is standing on the shoulders of giants. They've been told the view is better up there.
Instead of cutting cost, try to generate revenue.
Every IT department has marketable products. They just need packaging and promotion.
Typical products or services include:
Marketing these products typically piggybacks on existing marketing efforts. For example, mention the product or service when making routine contact with customers or attending trade shows. Promote the products and services on the company Web site. The vendor of a commercial system that you've bought might be happy to promote your consulting service for the system if it helps make a sale or keeps another customer happy, particularly if it doesn't have local representation.
If you are in a business that has a critical IT component, you almost certainly have a product. All it may take is a minimum amount of packaging of the skills and experience. It can be as simple as thoroughly documenting your own processes and procedures and putting it in a handsome binder. Even if your department does little more than support the accounting system, you can offer consulting on customizing, upgrading and tweaking.
Your competitive advantage in the marketplace is that you don't have to cover your entire overhead, just defray some costs. As a result, your prices can be lower but profit can be higher.
Managers that are dumb enough to try to save money by cutting their IT departments might be gullible enough to fall for this proposal. It might buy you some time until they get turfed out. Then you can start all over again with the next bunch.
Shakespeare described their plight best
Or, as Robert B. Laughlin, professor of physics at Stanford University and a 1998 Nobel laureate in physics, said recently:
"Brutal objectivity" is what limits most people, even the smartest. It is easy to become comfortable in our view of the universe and forget the uncomfortable process that brought us to this view in the first place.
In fact, a comfortable view is almost a warning. When things fit together too well, there must be something wrong.
"A stitch in time to save nine." comes from that event
The old saying "a stitch in time saves nine" is much older than 1937. I think you are confusing "a switch in time to save nine". This version of the old saying was a humourous play on words at the time of the Supreme Court decisions. Those decisions upheld parts of the New Deal and ended FDR's plan to increase the number of justices to 15 from 9.
The phrase is mentioned inter alia here and here.
However for the vast majority of day to day office work, documents are often formatted and reformatted till the 'Aha!' feeling comes.
There was a time when a typewriter was adequate for day-to-day office work. Word processors solved the main problem of typewriters, which was the difficulty of making corrections and revisions. The first word processors used printers that were little more than high-speed typewriters.
Elaborate typography resulted from the invention of cheap laser printers. However, even then, typography was more of a by-product. The main advantage of laser printers was speed. The speed of the laser printer further augmented the main function of word processors by allowing even faster corrections and revisions.
Typography has added an extra level of corrections and revisions. I suspect that today more time is spent fiddling with the typograpy than the content of the document. The reasons is that in the distant past, typesetting lent authority to a document because it suggested that it was important enough to go to the enormous extra trouble and cost of having it typeset. The typeset appearance is now the minimum standard so that a document without a typeset appearance has almost as little appearance of authority as a handwritten version.
In terms of efficiency, the optimal use of a word processor would be with a monospaced font with bolding, italicizing and different font sizes kept to a minimum. Such documents could be formatted in a markup language like Tex or HTML almost as efficiently as in a WYSIWYG processor. The small loss of efficiency would be recovered by the extra flexibility of managing the document as text in version control and content management systems and by making it easier to re-publish it in different formats (e.g. pdf, Web pages).
Moreover, by using style sheets to mark up the document, a document formatter would automatically apply the enhanced typograpy, giving the required appearance of authority.
The missing ingredient is a standard for the appearance for day-to-day documents, which would allow for the definition of style sheets. The absence of such a standard in most corporations indicates that corporations probably don't really understand document management.
The absence of the standard also appeals to another human frailty: the desire to put your own typographical stamp on the appearance of a document even when you did not create the content.
It's Xyvision
This piece is definitely worth a read for project managers. It's written in a jocular vein but his advice rings true:
He says the advice applies to technical leads, not to regular business department managers, but it looks like nearly any manager would benefit.
The full title is: The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness. The 8th habit is "Find your voice and inspire others to find theirs."
According to the Publisher's Weekly review:
The problem with the "shared vision" thing is that the interest of the manager is not necessarily the interest of the subordinates. For instance, managers are trying to get more for less from their staff so that "shared vision" is mostly a con job.
Covey really needs to write a book on the 7 habits of highly effective con men.
One often overlooked security gap is backup. Even if your desktop is physically secured, the backup has to be stored somewhere else.
Somewhere else can include storage on a server or removeable media. Typically, many generations of backup will exist and these generations tend to go astray. If the backup is on a server, the server gets backedup to removeable media that gets stored somewhere else. The removeable media may get reused without being completely erased or may be stored for future reuse without being erased at all.
Ideally, backup should be encrypted but maintenance of the keys over many generations of backup is both a management problem and a barrier to recovery in an emergency.
As a result, there may be many generations of confidential data stored in many different places. The situation is further complicated by the fact that the people who create the data will have no control over how the backup is handled and whether the security procedures are followed.
This process often means that in practice, the older the backup, the lower the physical security. Access to the backups by unauthorized people may be completely undetectable.
The best solution is for the people who create confidential data to control the backup lifecycle as well. It should be one of their primary responsibilities and it should be audited from time to time make sure the procedures are being followed. As with the PC itself, controlling physical access to the all the generations of backup is the first step.
The Office, the television series, is an example of looking at "the office", i.e., the workplace, as being funny rather than tragic. Humour is thus a possible way of dealing with stress that arises from forces beyond your control.
Perhaps I did not make myself clear.
Time management is one area where employees can help themselves but most causes of stress are out of their control. The stress caused by the work is typically the least of the problems.
Sources of stress in the workplace:
Any one of these can cause excessive stress and it is not unusual to have several of them part of the typical day. The only practical way of dealing with them is just don't let it get to you. Focus on getting through day and try to find a place where things are better. Try to be a calming influence in the office instead of stoking the rumour mill and predicting the worst.
If you look at the office in a certain way, it can even be funny. Certainly, more comic than tragic.
Or if you want to consider space a unit of its own, then a longer space is just two or more spaces in a row
If a longer space is just two or more spaces in row, would a dash not be just two or more dots in a row?
If so, we're back to two units, dot and space.
When you try and raise all these kind of questions, I only ask one!! What is defined as a robot?
The article defines robot in paragraph 3:
So, my next question is what makes us not robot?
By the author's definition, we are not robots ("the machines are not intelligent. They cannot comprehend Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics", etc.)
why exactly is a Jewish guy getting pissed over Pearl Harbor
See: Jews fought at Pearl Harbor
why exactly is a Chinese guy getting pissed over the Titanic?
See Chinese Sailors on the Titanic:
HTML is better than dragging it out of a database, because it produces a smaller cpu hit on the server.
A Content Management System provides a good deal more than a repository. You need to know when the last time a page was updated and who updated it. You need a version control system to know what changes were made. You need some kind of work flow to move a page from development to review to final approval and track the status of a page in the process.
A database application on the backend makes it a good deal easier to implement these features once you get beyond a surprisingly small number of pages. It is much easier to create a batch process that periodically generates static pages from the database than trying to duplicate the features of a CMS with html files stored in the file system.
Usually the confusion of managing a large site of static pages stored in the file system is more of a problem than wasting cpu time. The situation you describe where "the page doesnt change much, but more pages are added daily" is postponing the problem. Eventually there will be a large number of obsolete pages that will have to be reviewed and updated and no one will know which ones they are or even how many there are.
Looping and recursion are fundamentally the same thing...
Aho's book uses the same joke for "loop" in the index.
Perhaps, I should have said the joke was more of an example of iteration than recursion. Certainly, the repetition of the joke is.