Neither SAP nor Peoplesoft suck. They might be expensive, complex, old-fashioned and suffer from having been around and tinkered with for a long time (especially true for SAP), but they do work and with them it is actually possible to implement a system with the required functionality that works in a reasonable amount of time. This is not something you could do with a custom-built system or any of the cheap COTS systems.
The problem is typically not the technology, it is the convoluted and almost impossible to understand business rules in the payroll area. This is especially true in the public sector and in other places with heavy union involvement. Over time you get more and more complex rules for how to calculate pay. The end result is that nobody understands their pay slips anymore and it is nigh impossible to implement and test a system that handles all the exceptional cases. Still, they try and fail instead of simplifying the rules and use the money saved in consultant fees in a way that would actually benefit their employees.
I would like Apple to release an iPad. Basically it would be an ebook-reader using E-ink that you could write on. While reading fiction without making comments or highlighting is fine, it is not what you would want from a textbook -- and it is with textbooks and reference books this technology really shines. They are usually a lot heavier than the paperback novel you read on the commute.
The iPad It would work as an ebook-reader, diary and notebook. Maybe we could get to download books, newspapers, magazines and blogs from iTunes? So what do you think iPads for text and and iPods for rich media on the go?
In Sweden they actually both drove on the left and sat on the left, but they switched to driving on the right.
There used to be a joke about this. Changing the side of road to drive on was quite radical so they wanted to do it gradually. Trucks should switch first and cars half a year later...
And I would imagine that this is one of the reasons why designer or developer should always review the requirements before proceeding. Gathering requirements is incredibly hard, much harder than developing the solution to some well-defined specifications. In addition the analyst might not have a very deep technical understanding of the chosen technology which means that he will not be able to spot some requirements that will be incredibly hard to implement. With technical review before proceeding such problems as you describe should to a large degree be possible to iron out.
If this does not work for you, then you probably have a communication problem. Developers often have a problem speaking in a way that other people understand and sometimes only have a shallow understanding and indeed interest in the business domain. I think this is a great shame -- as this is one of very few areas where local developers can differentiate themselves from their offshore peers.
The correct answer is 10000000.00000001
The calculator's answer is 10000000.
A more interesting example would probably have been 0.00000001 + 10000000 - 10000000 = 0 and not 0.00000001 given that you evaluate from left to right. It is a phenomenon of floating point arithmetics know as catastrophic cancellation.
Well, there has been rumours about BEA for a while. Oracle might want to reduce the number of people supplying application servers to themselves, Microsoft and IBM. (Okay SAP offers some Middleware as well, but are anyone actually using it for anything other than running SAP?)
I find that Oracle support varies a lot from product to product. The smaller products seem to have better support than the bigger ones.
The quality also varies with what time you log the support request. For the best responses try to enter the request when India is asleep. I do not why the Indian techs are so bad, but I suspect it has something to do with the churn they have in India, people quit before they become halfway competent. Another big problem might be the incentives Oracle are offering. It seems that some of them in a mad dash to get the support request away from themselves only give the request a cursory glance and enters an almost random question.
Penguin is note just reprinting the originals. Many of these are new translations or new editions. Though editing a classic might seem like sacrilege, it is something that has been done to most of them and often there is no definite canonical edition. The books also include introductions and notes. I am not disputing that they might have pretty good margins on some of these, but they do have costs other than printing.
I know that eBookers has hired quite a few Norwegians to work in their call centre in India. The pay is bad, certainly compared to Norwegian standards.
The people they hire are usually young people wanting to experience something different for a year. Given the high rate of attrition in Indian call-centre, a year is actually considered pretty long.
they're going to need a LOT of diesel just to keep the lights on. On land, you'd sinply run off the grid. But on a boat, their entire power capacity is going to be supplied by the ships engines or generators.
This does not really add to the cost of doing business compared to what it would be in India as the power grid there is so unreliable that most IT shops need their own generators. Ships often use cheaper bunker oil instead of diesel so it might even work out to their advantage.
What is more not all Encarta articles are available within those two hours. Take a look at the entry for George Orwell's 1984 as an example. Seems a bit cheap to still deduct time from the two hours when all you see is the MSN logo pasted over the entire article.
The Oracle E-Business Suite is available for MacOS X and has both enterprise class CRM and accounting software. While the CRM software might not be in the same league as Siebel, it has other benefits as tight integration with Accounts Receivables and Daily Business Intelligence -- which can save you from implementing costly high-maintenance data warehouses. The accounting software is just about the best there is.
Anyway most enterprises I know choose to run their enterprise wide applications on UNIX-boxes or on Linux -- even though they use Windows for everything else. I should think a Mac is just as capable of connecting to these as any Wintel.
From the article it seemed that the university catered more for people that had been in the industry for a while without any degree. I think that two years could be sufficient for people with a lot of previous practical experience. They probably already have a feeling for the subjects already. The main reason why a degree takes so long is that one time in order for things to sink in.
I was in North Korea a couple of years ago. In the biggest library in Pyongyang they had a room with computers, all of them running a Korean version of Microsoft Windows. Even if Microsoft is not selling them software, they can still copy and use it as they please. I doubt they have any copyright legislation.
But you are right in there not being too many IIS servers. Not much need for them when you are not connected to the Internet (top party brass excluded). I doubt they ever will be under the current system. The country is too poor to build even a Saudi or Chinese-style firewall, and even that would not be sufficient in a country where information is so tightly controlled.
North Korea is after all the country where you cannot tune into channels on radios and television sets. These come pretuned to government channels in order to stop people from listening to foreign broadcasts.
If free software really had been about everyone working for the common good, it would not have enjoyed the success it has. Free software is more about people working for their own good, adding functionality they need getting rid of defects that hinder their work. By sharing their work with others they gain by not having to maintain a separate source tree. By using apropriate licenses they can also ensure that they gain from any later changes by other people. Of course, there are people who do not code for profit, but they mostly do it for the joy of it.
Sometimes your own selfish interests coincide with what could be described as the common good. That is "the invisible hand" at work. Communism is a totalitarian system that is totally opposed to freedom, including free software. In a communist society the state will seek to gain a monopoly of information. In the Soviet Union you had to have a licence in order to get a typewriter. Photocopiers were kept in locked rooms. I cannot see how free software could exist under such a system.
Northern Light used to do this. It worked rather well, but in most cases writing better search criteria is less work. The reason why Google doesn't offer anything similar might be because Northern Light has patented their subject classification and taxonomy.
The situation is not quite as bad as you describe it. UK ISPs can subtract the VAT they pay on hardware, software and services so AOL doesn't get quite as much free as you stated.
Actually in this case it is that simple. Since there already is support for the other variety of written Norwegian "Bokmaal". The character set, the input method and formatting are all identical. Anyway it is just a question of translating the text on menus, buttons etc. There has been spell-checking support for "Nynorsk" for ages.
Personally I would stay clear of the Norwegian language edition of Microsoft Office. In Excel they have even translated the commands used in the formulas, which means that a sheet written in Norwegian language edition does not work in the English language one. There doesn't seem like there went a lot of thought into that.
In Norway there has been a study that shows that children learn to read and write faster using personal computers. Pupils who learnt writing on computers exclusively until the 3rd grade developed both better writing skills and quality of content of their writings. Oddly enough the children who put off writing with pen and paper had better hand-writing as well. The hypothesis given to explain the results were that small children had not fully developed motor skills, and learning to write by hand for that reason could be both frustrating and more time-consuming.
Check out this article from Aftenposten (in Norwegian) for more:
Slashdot Mirror
Neither SAP nor Peoplesoft suck. They might be expensive, complex, old-fashioned and suffer from having been around and tinkered with for a long time (especially true for SAP), but they do work and with them it is actually possible to implement a system with the required functionality that works in a reasonable amount of time. This is not something you could do with a custom-built system or any of the cheap COTS systems. The problem is typically not the technology, it is the convoluted and almost impossible to understand business rules in the payroll area. This is especially true in the public sector and in other places with heavy union involvement. Over time you get more and more complex rules for how to calculate pay. The end result is that nobody understands their pay slips anymore and it is nigh impossible to implement and test a system that handles all the exceptional cases. Still, they try and fail instead of simplifying the rules and use the money saved in consultant fees in a way that would actually benefit their employees.
I would like Apple to release an iPad. Basically it would be an ebook-reader using E-ink that you could write on. While reading fiction without making comments or highlighting is fine, it is not what you would want from a textbook -- and it is with textbooks and reference books this technology really shines. They are usually a lot heavier than the paperback novel you read on the commute.
The iPad It would work as an ebook-reader, diary and notebook. Maybe we could get to download books, newspapers, magazines and blogs from iTunes? So what do you think iPads for text and and iPods for rich media on the go?
Have you ever heard about CONNECT BY?
In Sweden they actually both drove on the left and sat on the left, but they switched to driving on the right.
There used to be a joke about this. Changing the side of road to drive on was quite radical so they wanted to do it gradually. Trucks should switch first and cars half a year later...
And I would imagine that this is one of the reasons why designer or developer should always review the requirements before proceeding. Gathering requirements is incredibly hard, much harder than developing the solution to some well-defined specifications. In addition the analyst might not have a very deep technical understanding of the chosen technology which means that he will not be able to spot some requirements that will be incredibly hard to implement. With technical review before proceeding such problems as you describe should to a large degree be possible to iron out.
If this does not work for you, then you probably have a communication problem. Developers often have a problem speaking in a way that other people understand and sometimes only have a shallow understanding and indeed interest in the business domain. I think this is a great shame -- as this is one of very few areas where local developers can differentiate themselves from their offshore peers.
10000000 + 0.00000001 ?
The correct answer is 10000000.00000001
The calculator's answer is 10000000.
A more interesting example would probably have been 0.00000001 + 10000000 - 10000000 = 0 and not 0.00000001 given that you evaluate from left to right. It is a phenomenon of floating point arithmetics know as catastrophic cancellation.
Well, there has been rumours about BEA for a while. Oracle might want to reduce the number of people supplying application servers to themselves, Microsoft and IBM. (Okay SAP offers some Middleware as well, but are anyone actually using it for anything other than running SAP?)
I find that Oracle support varies a lot from product to product. The smaller products seem to have better support than the bigger ones.
The quality also varies with what time you log the support request. For the best responses try to enter the request when India is asleep. I do not why the Indian techs are so bad, but I suspect it has something to do with the churn they have in India, people quit before they become halfway competent. Another big problem might be the incentives Oracle are offering. It seems that some of them in a mad dash to get the support request away from themselves only give the request a cursory glance and enters an almost random question.
Penguin is note just reprinting the originals. Many of these are new translations or new editions. Though editing a classic might seem like sacrilege, it is something that has been done to most of them and often there is no definite canonical edition. The books also include introductions and notes. I am not disputing that they might have pretty good margins on some of these, but they do have costs other than printing.
I know that eBookers has hired quite a few Norwegians to work in their call centre in India. The pay is bad, certainly compared to Norwegian standards.
The people they hire are usually young people wanting to experience something different for a year. Given the high rate of attrition in Indian call-centre, a year is actually considered pretty long.
This does not really add to the cost of doing business compared to what it would be in India as the power grid there is so unreliable that most IT shops need their own generators. Ships often use cheaper bunker oil instead of diesel so it might even work out to their advantage.
What is more not all Encarta articles are available within those two hours. Take a look at the entry for George Orwell's 1984 as an example. Seems a bit cheap to still deduct time from the two hours when all you see is the MSN logo pasted over the entire article.
Yahoo Search has had something similar for ages.
The Oracle E-Business Suite is available for MacOS X and has both enterprise class CRM and accounting software. While the CRM software might not be in the same league as Siebel, it has other benefits as tight integration with Accounts Receivables and Daily Business Intelligence -- which can save you from implementing costly high-maintenance data warehouses. The accounting software is just about the best there is.
Anyway most enterprises I know choose to run their enterprise wide applications on UNIX-boxes or on Linux -- even though they use Windows for everything else. I should think a Mac is just as capable of connecting to these as any Wintel.
From the article it seemed that the university catered more for people that had been in the industry for a while without any degree. I think that two years could be sufficient for people with a lot of previous practical experience. They probably already have a feeling for the subjects already. The main reason why a degree takes so long is that one time in order for things to sink in.
I was in North Korea a couple of years ago. In the biggest library in Pyongyang they had a room with computers, all of them running a Korean version of Microsoft Windows. Even if Microsoft is not selling them software, they can still copy and use it as they please. I doubt they have any copyright legislation.
But you are right in there not being too many IIS servers. Not much need for them when you are not connected to the Internet (top party brass excluded). I doubt they ever will be under the current system. The country is too poor to build even a Saudi or Chinese-style firewall, and even that would not be sufficient in a country where information is so tightly controlled.
North Korea is after all the country where you cannot tune into channels on radios and television sets. These come pretuned to government channels in order to stop people from listening to foreign broadcasts.
That is not so strange as North Korea has no started using its domain yet.
If free software really had been about everyone working for the common good, it would not have enjoyed the success it has. Free software is more about people working for their own good, adding functionality they need getting rid of defects that hinder their work. By sharing their work with others they gain by not having to maintain a separate source tree. By using apropriate licenses they can also ensure that they gain from any later changes by other people. Of course, there are people who do not code for profit, but they mostly do it for the joy of it.
Sometimes your own selfish interests coincide with what could be described as the common good. That is "the invisible hand" at work. Communism is a totalitarian system that is totally opposed to freedom, including free software. In a communist society the state will seek to gain a monopoly of information. In the Soviet Union you had to have a licence in order to get a typewriter. Photocopiers were kept in locked rooms. I cannot see how free software could exist under such a system.
Northern Light used to do this. It worked rather well, but in most cases writing better search criteria is less work. The reason why Google doesn't offer anything similar might be because Northern Light has patented their subject classification and taxonomy.
That would be "A Petition From the Manufacturers of Candles, Tapers, Lanterns, sticks, Street Lamps, Snuffers, and Extinguishers, and from Producers of Tallow, Oil, Resin, Alcohol, and Generally of Everything Connected with Lighting." by Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850), not Swift. You can read it here
The situation is not quite as bad as you describe it. UK ISPs can subtract the VAT they pay on hardware, software and services so AOL doesn't get quite as much free as you stated.
But in Norway they don't use neither at period nor a comma to delimit their thousands, they use spaces.
Actually in this case it is that simple. Since there already is support for the other variety of written Norwegian "Bokmaal". The character set, the input method and formatting are all identical. Anyway it is just a question of translating the text on menus, buttons etc. There has been spell-checking support for "Nynorsk" for ages.
Personally I would stay clear of the Norwegian language edition of Microsoft Office. In Excel they have even translated the commands used in the formulas, which means that a sheet written in Norwegian language edition does not work in the English language one. There doesn't seem like there went a lot of thought into that.
In Norway there has been a study that shows that children learn to read and write faster using personal computers. Pupils who learnt writing on computers exclusively until the 3rd grade developed both better writing skills and quality of content of their writings. Oddly enough the children who put off writing with pen and paper had better hand-writing as well. The hypothesis given to explain the results were that small children had not fully developed motor skills, and learning to write by hand for that reason could be both frustrating and more time-consuming.
Check out this article from Aftenposten (in Norwegian) for more:
l ?articleID=395751
http://www.aftenposten.no/utdannelse/article.jhtm