I'm afraid I think this is bad advice. As previously mentioned, it's not his problem to fill his position when he leaves, and grovelling because you can't find someone will just serve to prove him right. By all means he should offer to help interviewing candidates if he's still around, but his boss probably won't want him to, as its a little too much like admitting he's not as bad as the boss appears to be trying to make out he is. At the end of the day - as many other posters have said, the professional way is to hold up your end of the deal - work the notice, and work it as well as you've worked the rest of the time, but don't lie down and drop your pants the minute the "crazy" boss decides he wants more than you and employment law think is reasonable.
Re:Yes, now that they've fixed all the limitations
on
Daleks Return to Dr Who
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
Hang on a minute... What if we made all the doors just that bit too narrow for them to get through!!!
Wouldn't work in the USA - 75% of the population wouldn't fit through either:-)
Maybe it allows for faster implementation but it provides much slower and far more stupid solutions than true programming.
To be frank I am not a big fan of VB - but there are many cases where having a real short implementation time is what takes the biscuit. I recently came up with a fairly simple program for a one off migration, and chose to do it in VB, simply because it meant that I could deliver something that would do the job in under a week. While it may have taken 4 hours to run rather than 2, and would be harder to maintain afterwards - it allowed us to get the job done and move onto more exciting things - "real programming", if you will:-)
Not sure you can assume that here - given that (s)he can't remove minsweeper from the standard PC install, and doesn't seem capable of implementing web filters to stop online gambling. Our standard Win2K doesn't have Pinball.exe, and the proxies stop me doing much of what I shouldn't online. Just banning it, without implementing such things is a bit of a waste of time, in much the same was as banning leaning on brooms would be if the brooms were still designed to allow "users" to lean on them. Hang on a minute...:-)
Of course they do, unlike most other open source projects which just check in whole lumps of code without caring about what it does... Sorry which bit of this makes your comment relevant to the discussion?
It makes me smile that the next big step for the hurd seems will be a move away from a (technically inferior) GPL'ed microkernel (GNU Mach) to a BSD Licenced one (L4Ka Pistachio), but to see the 2 greatest visions of free (BSD freedom and GPL freedom); which have occasionally been perceived as 2 completely seperate camps software feeding one another in this way is quite a lovely thing to behold. Don't know how RMS takes the the hurd's steps away from GNU Mach or GPLed OSKit Mach though - it might mean that the final brick of GNU performs significantly better when running on a BSD Licenced brick than on the equivalent GPL'ed brick:-)
Sigh... RedHat is the OS, linux is the kernel - Linux "the OS" just doesn't exist. I'm no Stallman fanboy, but what you just said was drivel. Perhaps, "given the constantly-changing nature of the kernel, slagging off linux OS'es is never sensible" would have been better. But even so....
This will take a little preparation, but I would suggest going with a copy of ROBOCODE and a few starter robots. The great thing about this stuff, is that you can have a battle with some fairly simple robots (which you could code beforehand) and then get the kids to look at the code, give them a simple example of how to change some parameters (one of your stock robots may move very slowly, with long waits, another may turn 405 degrees right, where there may be time to be gained by just turning 45 degrees - seed the examples which is fairly obviously easy to improve) and see if they can come up with a better performing one. You may have to help them with the stricter bits of syntax, but if they can analyse behaviour and use the basics (TurnRight, turnGunRight) to improve that behaviour, your well into the territory of CS and already a step away from just asking them to complete a basic program to say "Hello!", which is less CS and more code-monkey...:-) You've covered analysis, versioning, coding and testing phases! If you could just get them to document it, they'd already be a step ahead of most coders:-)) It's probably more important that they can improve the behaviour to win battles, even if they can't actually write the code - they can always learn to do that later if they're keen.
I agree. At one point Dell sold the company I work for some servers that would be clustered and hooked up to SAN's the world over. They sold us "gold" maintenance, knowing fine well where each and every cluster would be located, because we told them, and they even factored that in to the overall quote. This isn't some little deal for a couple of tens of thousands of dollars, this is a 80,000+ users worldwide, who would all be moving from HP desktops and servers to Dell, for the Wintel stuff. Now guess what nearly blew the deal? One of the locations that was destined to receive a Dell cluster was not supported for 2-3 days a week because their support engineer organised deep-dea fishing trips!!! He was the Dell engineer, and they came within a hair's breadth of blowing this as they furiously scrambled for engineer cover in $LOCATION. I wouldn't give Dell ANY money for service over their default baseline, as they may know how to ship boxes, they don't know jack shit about service.
They're $350 USD (plus shipping) for the PCI model, but if you're using it in a datacenter, it's a real steal.
Rubbish - if you have a datacenter you have console servers. If you haven't you are dumb - the price is peanuts based on the cost of the whole datacenter, so anyone building one already has equipment designed for the task, with vendor maintenance. Datacenters aren't expensive because they are full of servers, they're expensive because they have cabling, cooling, redundant power etc. If you've paid for that, filled it with servers and are thinking that a good opportunity to save a dollar or two would be to look for cheap ways to implement console servers - you need shooting:-)
I really don't know why you're asking us that - ask your boss if he wants your salary in the numbers or not. Or better still, just use your initiative and give him the figure and explicitly state whether or not it includes your salary, based on $X K p.a.
Maybe I've just run into a string of crappy developers with no clue how to design a UI, but every Oracle database I've ever had to deal with absolutely sucked from the user perspective.
I think you hit the nail on the head there:-) While Oracle may require leet skills to administer correctly, writing a good front end is peanuts - web, java client, perl, etc... It's supported as a DB by just about anyone with a brain, and unfortunately a lot without (your developers:-)) )
I'm afraid this is exactly what the companies want you to do rather than what you should do. This way you'll only get the sites that worked well and were delivered more or less on-time and within budget. There may well be 4 or 5 of these on the site, but you'll have know clue about all the stuff that they never finished, or delivered with broken functionality 2 years late. You're gonna have to speak to the company - while they won't immediately fess up to delivering late expensive crap, if they keep talking about the same 2 projects - you should smell a rat, they're the ones that worked. They should be able to comfortably discuss just about any project they've worked on, and if you know the size of the company and how long it has existed for, you can guess more or less how many projects that should be.
You seems to know you need 16GB - but you don't explain why or how you came to that figure. I guess it's to run an app or some DBs - do you have currently a box with 4G or 8G that's being RAM starved for doing the same task? 16GB + boxes are fairly commonplace as many have already pointed out - www.sun.com sells lots of them and the OS (Solaris) support is just fine for capacity well in excess of 16G, but as is HP-UX, AIX, OS/400, etc.... I do wonder if whoever asked you to source this box did the right thing if you're reduced to asking slashdot or beige box providers...
Hi the 4xxx serious are OK but forget the colour ones (4500,4550, IIRC). For the price look at real printing solutions (Xerox), as they are slow and very expensive to run. Where I work we have at least one per floor, and they're a nightmare. I also agree that the black and white ones, though cool for pretty light usage, are full of plastic, and I'm glad we have maintenance...
Well - if the companies choose to ignore best practice, and are quoted on the US Stock Exhcane, choosing to ignore SOX404 will take them to a higher (lower?) level.
Sarbanes-Oxley, and for financial institutions, BasleII will hopefully make companies that rely on admin's homes uninsurable....
Don't know which Anonymous coward is standing corrected:-) (parent or gp), but it's quite clear the lxrun is a x86 tool. lxrun works only on x86. Snippit: Lxrun is a freely downloadable utility that executes Linux applications on the Solaris Operating Environment, Intel platform edition. Lxrun is a software layer that sits between Solaris and the Linux Intel binary executable and remaps system calls "on the fly" allowing them to run unmodified on Solaris.
I once worked on a pilot for a project to deploy HP Digital Senders to remote locations for scanning documents and uploading them to a central european document archive onto WORM media. They have some useful remote configuration software that makes it easy to manage a "fleet" of them in one go, and they have several different options for user management. They're not cheap however. Might be worth investigating - though I don't know if they're customisable enough for your needs.
One reason why computers are so bad at it and the old way so good (aside from the mere ease of use and reliability aspects), is the size. You just cannot see and understand as much interrelated information in one glance on a computer scren as you can on a big board on the wall.
I agree if you look at it this way - but look at it another way. The HUGE advantage a computer based system would have is that everyone except the person in charge of the whole planning can look at only the information that concerns them. Individuals can see their own planning in a glimpse - team leads can handle planning for all their team members. The only person that suffers from what you describe here is if you have one person that's in charge of the whole damn thing. That may be a good reason in itself to split up into sub team. Handling such a large quantity of direct reports is tricky for many other reasons than not being able to see all the data on the screen at one time:-)
I'm manager of 18 direct reports... it's too many.
Re:Cool idea but may be dangerous
on
Bayesian Tail
·
· Score: 1
You mean like, errr, 'grep'? I think the whole point of this tool is for situations where 'grep' can't easily filter out the rest. In my ideal world developers always tag log entries in such a way that getting the entries you want out is as easy as grepping the file;-)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm afraid I think this is bad advice. As previously mentioned, it's not his problem to fill his position when he leaves, and grovelling because you can't find someone will just serve to prove him right. By all means he should offer to help interviewing candidates if he's still around, but his boss probably won't want him to, as its a little too much like admitting he's not as bad as the boss appears to be trying to make out he is. At the end of the day - as many other posters have said, the professional way is to hold up your end of the deal - work the notice, and work it as well as you've worked the rest of the time, but don't lie down and drop your pants the minute the "crazy" boss decides he wants more than you and employment law think is reasonable.
Hang on a minute... What if we made all the doors just that bit too narrow for them to get through!!!
:-)
Wouldn't work in the USA - 75% of the population wouldn't fit through either
This is actually a feature - "Hey geeks, hibernate and retain that unwashed smell you spent your life creating"
Maybe it allows for faster implementation but it provides much slower and far more stupid solutions than true programming.
:-)
To be frank I am not a big fan of VB - but there are many cases where having a real short implementation time is what takes the biscuit. I recently came up with a fairly simple program for a one off migration, and chose to do it in VB, simply because it meant that I could deliver something that would do the job in under a week. While it may have taken 4 hours to run rather than 2, and would be harder to maintain afterwards - it allowed us to get the job done and move onto more exciting things - "real programming", if you will
assuming the admin is competant
:-)
Not sure you can assume that here - given that (s)he can't remove minsweeper from the standard PC install, and doesn't seem capable of implementing web filters to stop online gambling. Our standard Win2K doesn't have Pinball.exe, and the proxies stop me doing much of what I shouldn't online. Just banning it, without implementing such things is a bit of a waste of time, in much the same was as banning leaning on brooms would be if the brooms were still designed to allow "users" to lean on them. Hang on a minute...
They go over every line of code.
Of course they do, unlike most other open source projects which just check in whole lumps of code without caring about what it does... Sorry which bit of this makes your comment relevant to the discussion?
It makes me smile that the next big step for the hurd seems will be a move away from a (technically inferior) GPL'ed microkernel (GNU Mach) to a BSD Licenced one (L4Ka Pistachio), but to see the 2 greatest visions of free (BSD freedom and GPL freedom); which have occasionally been perceived as 2 completely seperate camps software feeding one another in this way is quite a lovely thing to behold. Don't know how RMS takes the the hurd's steps away from GNU Mach or GPLed OSKit Mach though - it might mean that the final brick of GNU performs significantly better when running on a BSD Licenced brick than on the equivalent GPL'ed brick :-)
(the OS, not RedHat)
Sigh...
RedHat is the OS, linux is the kernel - Linux "the OS" just doesn't exist. I'm no Stallman fanboy, but what you just said was drivel. Perhaps, "given the constantly-changing nature of the kernel, slagging off linux OS'es is never sensible" would have been better. But even so....
If you do a careful cost analysis of that "gold" maintenance, you will find that it is "gold" for Dell, not you.
:-)
The cost analysis doesn't even have to be that careful
This will take a little preparation, but I would suggest going with a copy of ROBOCODE and a few starter robots. The great thing about this stuff, is that you can have a battle with some fairly simple robots (which you could code beforehand) and then get the kids to look at the code, give them a simple example of how to change some parameters (one of your stock robots may move very slowly, with long waits, another may turn 405 degrees right, where there may be time to be gained by just turning 45 degrees - seed the examples which is fairly obviously easy to improve) and see if they can come up with a better performing one. You may have to help them with the stricter bits of syntax, but if they can analyse behaviour and use the basics (TurnRight, turnGunRight) to improve that behaviour, your well into the territory of CS and already a step away from just asking them to complete a basic program to say "Hello!", which is less CS and more code-monkey... :-) You've covered analysis, versioning, coding and testing phases! If you could just get them to document it, they'd already be a step ahead of most coders :-)) It's probably more important that they can improve the behaviour to win battles, even if they can't actually write the code - they can always learn to do that later if they're keen.
I agree. At one point Dell sold the company I work for some servers that would be clustered and hooked up to SAN's the world over. They sold us "gold" maintenance, knowing fine well where each and every cluster would be located, because we told them, and they even factored that in to the overall quote. This isn't some little deal for a couple of tens of thousands of dollars, this is a 80,000+ users worldwide, who would all be moving from HP desktops and servers to Dell, for the Wintel stuff. Now guess what nearly blew the deal? One of the locations that was destined to receive a Dell cluster was not supported for 2-3 days a week because their support engineer organised deep-dea fishing trips!!! He was the Dell engineer, and they came within a hair's breadth of blowing this as they furiously scrambled for engineer cover in $LOCATION. I wouldn't give Dell ANY money for service over their default baseline, as they may know how to ship boxes, they don't know jack shit about service.
They're $350 USD (plus shipping) for the PCI model, but if you're using it in a datacenter, it's a real steal.
:-)
Rubbish - if you have a datacenter you have console servers. If you haven't you are dumb - the price is peanuts based on the cost of the whole datacenter, so anyone building one already has equipment designed for the task, with vendor maintenance. Datacenters aren't expensive because they are full of servers, they're expensive because they have cabling, cooling, redundant power etc. If you've paid for that, filled it with servers and are thinking that a good opportunity to save a dollar or two would be to look for cheap ways to implement console servers - you need shooting
Should I include my salary into the figures?
I really don't know why you're asking us that - ask your boss if he wants your salary in the numbers or not. Or better still, just use your initiative and give him the figure and explicitly state whether or not it includes your salary, based on $X K p.a.
Well - we run a standard build of Win2K over many thousands of desktops. It's not perfect, but we have very few spyware issues. Why?
:-) )
- ActiveX is switched off and the security settings are tied down and cannot be adjusted without a) admin rights b) knowledge of regedit
- All web access is controlled through a webproxy running websense filters. You can't get to pr0n sites from work (I know - I've tried
Maybe I've just run into a string of crappy developers with no clue how to design a UI, but every Oracle database I've ever had to deal with absolutely sucked from the user perspective.
:-) While Oracle may require leet skills to administer correctly, writing a good front end is peanuts - web, java client, perl, etc ... It's supported as a DB by just about anyone with a brain, and unfortunately a lot without (your developers :-)) )
I think you hit the nail on the head there
I'm afraid this is exactly what the companies want you to do rather than what you should do. This way you'll only get the sites that worked well and were delivered more or less on-time and within budget. There may well be 4 or 5 of these on the site, but you'll have know clue about all the stuff that they never finished, or delivered with broken functionality 2 years late. You're gonna have to speak to the company - while they won't immediately fess up to delivering late expensive crap, if they keep talking about the same 2 projects - you should smell a rat, they're the ones that worked. They should be able to comfortably discuss just about any project they've worked on, and if you know the size of the company and how long it has existed for, you can guess more or less how many projects that should be.
You seems to know you need 16GB - but you don't explain why or how you came to that figure. I guess it's to run an app or some DBs - do you have currently a box with 4G or 8G that's being RAM starved for doing the same task? 16GB + boxes are fairly commonplace as many have already pointed out - www.sun.com sells lots of them and the OS (Solaris) support is just fine for capacity well in excess of 16G, but as is HP-UX, AIX, OS/400, etc.... I do wonder if whoever asked you to source this box did the right thing if you're reduced to asking slashdot or beige box providers...
Hi the 4xxx serious are OK but forget the colour ones (4500,4550, IIRC). For the price look at real printing solutions (Xerox), as they are slow and very expensive to run. Where I work we have at least one per floor, and they're a nightmare. I also agree that the black and white ones, though cool for pretty light usage, are full of plastic, and I'm glad we have maintenance...
So MS used USB for their controllers but proprietary-ized the physical connnector just to screw with everybody?
:-)
I'm sorry, I don't understand. Which bit of that surprises you?
Well - if the companies choose to ignore best practice, and are quoted on the US Stock Exhcane, choosing to ignore SOX404 will take them to a higher (lower?) level.
Sarbanes-Oxley, and for financial institutions, BasleII will hopefully make companies that rely on admin's homes uninsurable....
Don't know which Anonymous coward is standing corrected :-) (parent or gp), but it's quite clear the lxrun is a x86 tool. lxrun works only on x86. Snippit:
Lxrun is a freely downloadable utility that executes Linux applications on the Solaris Operating Environment, Intel platform edition. Lxrun is a software layer that sits between Solaris and the Linux Intel binary executable and remaps system calls "on the fly" allowing them to run unmodified on Solaris.
And French for some water would be "de l'eau", not "d'eau". "D'eau" would be used to mean "of water" - "une bouteille d'eau" == "a bottle of water".
I once worked on a pilot for a project to deploy HP Digital Senders to remote locations for scanning documents and uploading them to a central european document archive onto WORM media. They have some useful remote configuration software that makes it easy to manage a "fleet" of them in one go, and they have several different options for user management. They're not cheap however. Might be worth investigating - though I don't know if they're customisable enough for your needs.
One reason why computers are so bad at it and the old way so good (aside from the mere ease of use and reliability aspects), is the size. You just cannot see and understand as much interrelated information in one glance on a computer scren as you can on a big board on the wall.
:-)
I'm manager of 18 direct reports... it's too many.
I agree if you look at it this way - but look at it another way. The HUGE advantage a computer based system would have is that everyone except the person in charge of the whole planning can look at only the information that concerns them. Individuals can see their own planning in a glimpse - team leads can handle planning for all their team members. The only person that suffers from what you describe here is if you have one person that's in charge of the whole damn thing. That may be a good reason in itself to split up into sub team. Handling such a large quantity of direct reports is tricky for many other reasons than not being able to see all the data on the screen at one time
You mean like, errr, 'grep'? I think the whole point of this tool is for situations where 'grep' can't easily filter out the rest. In my ideal world developers always tag log entries in such a way that getting the entries you want out is as easy as grepping the file ;-)