I've often found that by far the best way of teaching him to do this kind of thing relies on finding something he wants his computer to do for him.
This could be just about anything - if he likes sports, it could be a sports results and stats database, if he likes RC modeling it could be an interactive application for setups for his radiocontrolled cars. Your only real role here is to ensure he chooses something feasible in a reasonable timeframe (don't suggest writing Quake5:) )
The thing I like about this approach, is that it will teach him far more than just "how to do it" - you can start it with a discussion about how he wants to go about it, to start with which language (pros and cons, quick GUI development vs. old school stuff - basically just see what ticks his boxes) and it'll then take you through the basics of data models, and the fact it'll be useful will keep him motivated. Help him break the task up into little bits, and use the first few to teach him the ropes, and then let him try some on his own.
Make it clear it's his project, that you're there to help whenever and wherever you can - but don't judge. If he wants to start with an Access DB - by all means point out the pros and cons, but it's his toy - let him do it, he should be old enough now to see for himself whether it's "right" or "wrong".
Most French don't like him either (and no, not just because of filesharing).
As a brit living in France for the past 12 years or so, this is one of the most annoying traits of the French vox populi. They forget very, very quickly that most of the French actually voted for him. His politics since he's been in power aren't that different from what he announced, and certainly not that different from his opinions in previous government positions. Short memory, and quick to criticise, the French - they did pretty much the same thing when Jacques Chirac got a landslide victory when most of them couldn't be bothered to vote and so Le Pen got to the second round.
Remember also if your targeting business and a client deployment is required, many will want this to be feasible automatically, and that means no manual activation (e.g. using a licence server which handles site licences, or just using trust).
In many corporations requiring individual serials or activation per client will get your product bad marks in the evaluation.
Then sue all the record stores, counting each customer as a unique individual channel. At the end of all this, no industry recorded music would be sold, and the recording industry would collapse.
As mentioned previously - this is ONLY the U.S. of A;) . The world's recording industry wouldn't collapse, and I'm tempted to say let 'em do it. Cripple themselves. Go on, guys, kill your own industry. I won't cry.
Unfortunately for you, the answer's kinda in the question:)) Unless you're after the first one, in which case, nepotism or truck loads of money are the only solutions:)
We don't have to review the source of all the programs we use to gain the "transparency" benefit of Open Source or Free Software. The idea is "many eyes", not "my eyes".
Oh so Open Source is all about relying on someone else to review the code for you? Please tell me how this is different from a software house paying QA guys to do it, apart from the fact they're paid professionals:)
I've said it once, and I'll say it again, you're trusting someone you don't know to check it's ok, and if that's the case, there is NO difference whether it's Open Source or not - so stop using it as an argument. There are many more arguments a lot better than this for using FOSS, it simply doesn't need BS like this.
I do. Other people can use it - fine - but if I can't see the source, I don't know whats/i>[sic] in it and I'm not very trusting.
I call bullsh1t on this. You've reviewed all the source of all the pgms you use? Stop this argument, please, it's not a real reason to choose one over the other unless you're actually willing to go through the source of every one of them, and I doubt you have the time, and if you do - you should do something better with it:) .
I thought the same thing, a flaw is a bug.
A bad implementation can be technically flawless.
Bzzzt. Wrong, and this is the typically techy approach to OSes. An OS with no bugs is not necessarily flawless. Flaw can be other things than bugs - flawed usability (e.g. having to go through a menu, 2 sub menus and an option page just to get to a very frequently used search, or having a modern OS that only supports 320x200 on the display).
Flaws are everywhere, in code, but also in DESIGN. And, of course, the design ones are often the hardest to fix, especially if you look at a list of flaws with only techy eyes;)
You simply cannot beat OpenBSD as a server though.
You can actually, what if you need HA clustering of applications?? Where's OpenBSD on that? We work in an area where our UNIX applications are clustered on 2 different HA clusters in 2 different countries, with replicated SAN volumes for each datacenter, and failure of one or more, or even the whole datacenter, is fixed by one or more cluster groups either failing over within the same datacenter or to the other datacenter a few thousand kms away, either automagically or manually. So show me an OpenBSD box that can do that, fanboy. Or did you just mean that you can't beat OpenBSD for mailserving from Mom's basement? I'm a big fan of the BSDs but leave out the dumb remarks, please.
Agreed - I used to be a ski racer, and as such my knees took a bit of pounding throughout my childhood and until I was 25 yrs old (whe I pretty much stopped competitive skiing), and these chairs are *TORTURE*. If you've ever had knee pain forget them, and I'd even go so far as to say evenin if you haven't I think you'll get knee issues if you use it for such extended periods. The knee, from a biomechanical point of view is simply not designed to support the most part of the body weight when flexed. Knees are joints that work well because of skeletal strength - whe you need them to support weight of any degree or for any length of time, you want the bones to be stacking up (ie straight legs) so it's the skeleton taking the strain and not the knee joint.
OTOH, GM won't void your warranty for using a non-Delco replacement water pump, though they can void your warranty for running the car over heat for too long; OBD-II (1996 and later) vehicles actually store a log of some of the sensors, including the coolant temperature sensor, so they actually can figure out if this has happened just with a scan tool on newer cars.
And of course because GM and their dealers are the only people with access to the magic tool, it's a thoroughly reliable way of testing whether installing an el-cheapo water pump had actually caused hot running or not. Do you know that the standard GM hardware replacement process using their tools doesn't set a tag in the onboard system when you type in Water Pump change, that just changing a water pump doesn't, for example and so the water pump that has sent a failure signal is still flagged as failed?
C'mon - get real, while there will be cases where your lawyers could prove them wrong in court, too many people are just not willing to bet on what they'd save on a non-standard pump rather than the risk of having to shell out legal representation against one of the companies that own congress. That's exactly the way GM wants it.....
Since we've been using VMware ESX for our infrastructure, the idea of lost tapes (from the mountain people) was a very huge problem for us. As of recently, we found ecnrypted backups (esxpress) for our ESX boxes, now we have no fear of lost backups or tapes.
What's with the VMWare SPAM - as much as I like what VMWare do, you don't need virtual machines to do encrypted backups any more than you need floppy drives to burn CDs.
Real life includes 24-7 environments where spectacular crashes, which cause real monetary losses in the form of downtime, don't stack up too well against a fault-tolerant alternative.
Which makes me thin you don't have anything to do with production. Before it meets production you have unit tests, integration test and user acceptance tests that mean if you test right it'll b0rk before it gets to production, and that is a GoodThing (TM). Example I recently received a new version of some ETL mappings that were all set to rely on DB constraints to fail, ie the mappings would never themselves fail. This was picked up the minute we did the first run in integration test.... I was really pleased that my ETL code let this happen.... If you have so many failures that you downtime in prod you either have tech architecture problems, or don't test....
Seriously?
*sigh* (I'm too damn old...)
Peter Sellars
Erm. Peter Sellers.... Love the irony of someone who can't spell an actors name picking up a "youngster" who just can't remember it. You may be "too damn old" but you're probably also old enough to know better, smart arse;)
You just have to deal with what you've got. If Exchange shits itself every other day and replacing it is out of the question, does that make you incompetent? No.
Perhaps not, and I am certainly not a big Ms fan, but if Exchange is "shitting itself" every day in your organisation, then the guys who set it up are incompetent. It ain't perfect, but I work for an organisation with over 70,000 users worldwide who have Exchange mailboxes. It's not perfect, but if it shat itself every day on even one of the cluster nodes it's running on it would be unbearable. If yours is doing that, then get help from an engineer who can help stabilise the environment.
I think we're all a bit too quick to say "They chose the wrong thing - it'll never work" when in many cases the problems can be fixed, just the person doesn't know how. If you hire a linux admin to look after your E2K servers, then I'd say you're wrong as ou would be to hire a Wintel admin to manage your UNIX web servers. If your Exchange is so badly behaved get someone in to fix it and tell them they have 3 months to do so and stop complaining, and stop hiring people that would rather complain about how all the choices are wrong than actually get their hands dirty and fix something:)
No - it's not unacceptable - and while the figures are "ball park" they're not made up, and certainly correct to within a couple of percent. It just happens that of our total failures very many happen on power downs. As a previous poster mentioned MTBF is very much just that, mean. Oh, and we don't do this every other weekend we do full restarts on the whole Datacenter *VERY* rarely. Believe me with the amount of money this means, any failures due to incorrect installations would very quickly mean that our hardware providers would start asking questions. They don't.
I've often found that by far the best way of teaching him to do this kind of thing relies on finding something he wants his computer to do for him.
:) )
This could be just about anything - if he likes sports, it could be a sports results and stats database, if he likes RC modeling it could be an interactive application for setups for his radiocontrolled cars. Your only real role here is to ensure he chooses something feasible in a reasonable timeframe (don't suggest writing Quake5
The thing I like about this approach, is that it will teach him far more than just "how to do it" - you can start it with a discussion about how he wants to go about it, to start with which language (pros and cons, quick GUI development vs. old school stuff - basically just see what ticks his boxes) and it'll then take you through the basics of data models, and the fact it'll be useful will keep him motivated. Help him break the task up into little bits, and use the first few to teach him the ropes, and then let him try some on his own.
Make it clear it's his project, that you're there to help whenever and wherever you can - but don't judge. If he wants to start with an Access DB - by all means point out the pros and cons, but it's his toy - let him do it, he should be old enough now to see for himself whether it's "right" or "wrong".
Most French don't like him either (and no, not just because of filesharing).
As a brit living in France for the past 12 years or so, this is one of the most annoying traits of the French vox populi. They forget very, very quickly that most of the French actually voted for him. His politics since he's been in power aren't that different from what he announced, and certainly not that different from his opinions in previous government positions. Short memory, and quick to criticise, the French - they did pretty much the same thing when Jacques Chirac got a landslide victory when most of them couldn't be bothered to vote and so Le Pen got to the second round.
Remember also if your targeting business and a client deployment is required, many will want this to be feasible automatically, and that means no manual activation (e.g. using a licence server which handles site licences, or just using trust).
In many corporations requiring individual serials or activation per client will get your product bad marks in the evaluation.
Then sue all the record stores, counting each customer as a unique individual channel. At the end of all this, no industry recorded music would be sold, and the recording industry would collapse.
;) . The world's recording industry wouldn't collapse, and I'm tempted to say let 'em do it. Cripple themselves. Go on, guys, kill your own industry. I won't cry.
As mentioned previously - this is ONLY the U.S. of A
Unfortunately for you, the answer's kinda in the question :)) Unless you're after the first one, in which case, nepotism or truck loads of money are the only solutions :)
We don't have to review the source of all the programs we use to gain the "transparency" benefit of Open Source or Free Software. The idea is "many eyes", not "my eyes".
:)
Oh so Open Source is all about relying on someone else to review the code for you? Please tell me how this is different from a software house paying QA guys to do it, apart from the fact they're paid professionals
I've said it once, and I'll say it again, you're trusting someone you don't know to check it's ok, and if that's the case, there is NO difference whether it's Open Source or not - so stop using it as an argument. There are many more arguments a lot better than this for using FOSS, it simply doesn't need BS like this.
OK OK - I fscked up the html in there. I'm whipping myself as we speak, no point in doing it for me ;)
I do. Other people can use it - fine - but if I can't see the source, I don't know whats /i>[sic] in it and I'm not very trusting.
:) .
I call bullsh1t on this. You've reviewed all the source of all the pgms you use? Stop this argument, please, it's not a real reason to choose one over the other unless you're actually willing to go through the source of every one of them, and I doubt you have the time, and if you do - you should do something better with it
Why would an operating system designed for a handheld device with a 320x200 pixel backlit LCD have to support displays larger than 320x200 pixels?
Yes I agree, it was wrongly phrased, but you got the point, I think (I hope!).
I thought the same thing, a flaw is a bug. A bad implementation can be technically flawless.
;)
Bzzzt. Wrong, and this is the typically techy approach to OSes. An OS with no bugs is not necessarily flawless. Flaw can be other things than bugs - flawed usability (e.g. having to go through a menu, 2 sub menus and an option page just to get to a very frequently used search, or having a modern OS that only supports 320x200 on the display).
Flaws are everywhere, in code, but also in DESIGN. And, of course, the design ones are often the hardest to fix, especially if you look at a list of flaws with only techy eyes
If you restrict users to one single unmodified browser for the sake of unity then we have met the enemy and he is us.
Oh yes - that is soooo right! It's not about Firefox winning, it's about people being able to choose!
I only care about the country I was born in. The rest of the world can die in nuclear fire as far as I care.
And there was I about to feel sorry for you....
You simply cannot beat OpenBSD as a server though.
You can actually, what if you need HA clustering of applications?? Where's OpenBSD on that? We work in an area where our UNIX applications are clustered on 2 different HA clusters in 2 different countries, with replicated SAN volumes for each datacenter, and failure of one or more, or even the whole datacenter, is fixed by one or more cluster groups either failing over within the same datacenter or to the other datacenter a few thousand kms away, either automagically or manually. So show me an OpenBSD box that can do that, fanboy. Or did you just mean that you can't beat OpenBSD for mailserving from Mom's basement?
I'm a big fan of the BSDs but leave out the dumb remarks, please.
Agreed - I used to be a ski racer, and as such my knees took a bit of pounding throughout my childhood and until I was 25 yrs old (whe I pretty much stopped competitive skiing), and these chairs are *TORTURE*. If you've ever had knee pain forget them, and I'd even go so far as to say evenin if you haven't I think you'll get knee issues if you use it for such extended periods. The knee, from a biomechanical point of view is simply not designed to support the most part of the body weight when flexed. Knees are joints that work well because of skeletal strength - whe you need them to support weight of any degree or for any length of time, you want the bones to be stacking up (ie straight legs) so it's the skeleton taking the strain and not the knee joint.
Seperate Language from Location please.
;)
Here! here! or "Ici! Ici!" as they say in the location I am currently in
OTOH, GM won't void your warranty for using a non-Delco replacement water pump, though they can void your warranty for running the car over heat for too long; OBD-II (1996 and later) vehicles actually store a log of some of the sensors, including the coolant temperature sensor, so they actually can figure out if this has happened just with a scan tool on newer cars.
And of course because GM and their dealers are the only people with access to the magic tool, it's a thoroughly reliable way of testing whether installing an el-cheapo water pump had actually caused hot running or not. Do you know that the standard GM hardware replacement process using their tools doesn't set a tag in the onboard system when you type in Water Pump change, that just changing a water pump doesn't, for example and so the water pump that has sent a failure signal is still flagged as failed?
C'mon - get real, while there will be cases where your lawyers could prove them wrong in court, too many people are just not willing to bet on what they'd save on a non-standard pump rather than the risk of having to shell out legal representation against one of the companies that own congress. That's exactly the way GM wants it.....
Since we've been using VMware ESX for our infrastructure, the idea of lost tapes (from the mountain people) was a very huge problem for us. As of recently, we found ecnrypted backups (esxpress) for our ESX boxes, now we have no fear of lost backups or tapes.
What's with the VMWare SPAM - as much as I like what VMWare do, you don't need virtual machines to do encrypted backups any more than you need floppy drives to burn CDs.
Amen!! Sorry I have no mod points, but I'll burn a bit of karma to try and get the parent modded up. Insightful, it is indeed.
Real life includes 24-7 environments where spectacular crashes, which cause real monetary losses in the form of downtime, don't stack up too well against a fault-tolerant alternative.
Which makes me thin you don't have anything to do with production. Before it meets production you have unit tests, integration test and user acceptance tests that mean if you test right it'll b0rk before it gets to production, and that is a GoodThing (TM). Example I recently received a new version of some ETL mappings that were all set to rely on DB constraints to fail, ie the mappings would never themselves fail. This was picked up the minute we did the first run in integration test.... I was really pleased that my ETL code let this happen.... If you have so many failures that you downtime in prod you either have tech architecture problems, or don't test....
I'm not nessisarily saying
:)
OK - stop there. We get the picture
Seriously? *sigh* (I'm too damn old...) Peter Sellars
;)
Erm. Peter Sellers.... Love the irony of someone who can't spell an actors name picking up a "youngster" who just can't remember it. You may be "too damn old" but you're probably also old enough to know better, smart arse
You just have to deal with what you've got. If Exchange shits itself every other day and replacing it is out of the question, does that make you incompetent? No.
:)
Perhaps not, and I am certainly not a big Ms fan, but if Exchange is "shitting itself" every day in your organisation, then the guys who set it up are incompetent. It ain't perfect, but I work for an organisation with over 70,000 users worldwide who have Exchange mailboxes. It's not perfect, but if it shat itself every day on even one of the cluster nodes it's running on it would be unbearable. If yours is doing that, then get help from an engineer who can help stabilise the environment.
I think we're all a bit too quick to say "They chose the wrong thing - it'll never work" when in many cases the problems can be fixed, just the person doesn't know how. If you hire a linux admin to look after your E2K servers, then I'd say you're wrong as ou would be to hire a Wintel admin to manage your UNIX web servers. If your Exchange is so badly behaved get someone in to fix it and tell them they have 3 months to do so and stop complaining, and stop hiring people that would rather complain about how all the choices are wrong than actually get their hands dirty and fix something
I couldn't possibly drink that much
No - it's not unacceptable - and while the figures are "ball park" they're not made up, and certainly correct to within a couple of percent. It just happens that of our total failures very many happen on power downs. As a previous poster mentioned MTBF is very much just that, mean. Oh, and we don't do this every other weekend we do full restarts on the whole Datacenter *VERY* rarely. Believe me with the amount of money this means, any failures due to incorrect installations would very quickly mean that our hardware providers would start asking questions. They don't.
Yes - sorry perhaps this would have been better directed at the post above yours rather than yours. Big fingers, small buttons :-) Apologies.