Sounds like ya'll need a change management process.
Yeah, really?
Ok here's how change management works there: Everything, including minor changes to development boxes, has to go through outsourced change management. The meetings are weekly, so if you want to correct a configuration issue in a web server and it's the day after the change meeting, it'll be a minimum one week before the change can be made.
There is only one change meeting for the entire company. It is typically 3 to 4 hours long. It consists of reading through the changes and asking for "approved" or "disapproved" by the board, made up of manager without technical experience. There is no -- repeat no -- mechanism to identify how a random change will affect the resources for which you are responsible. It is entirely up to the workers to recognize that the proposed change involves a resource that affects them.
Soooo.... you can dial into the call, and listen to all four hours of droning, on the off chance that you will recognize an issue, but how well that works depends on how well you know the parts of the architecture for which you are not responsible. And how well you can understand someone who isn't communicating in their native language, over a scratchy connection. (Incidentally, it seems de rigor when you're reading off a change list to speak the change number distinctly and then let your voice fade out when you're saying the details. But I digress.)
For instance, patching is considered junior level work, and the junior admins work their night shift, which is your day shift. It's not uncommon for them to down a server that feeds records to another server, that consolidates data in a database on another server, which feeds your app. Your app has stopped working during office hours and you have no idea why.
So yeah, they have change management, but given the way it operates, it's just a managerial line item, not something actually meant to be useful.
In a previous job, middleware admins had a custom gadget that displayed status on a wide variety of web apps for which the department was responsible. Personally, I wouldn't have done it that way (you never know what Microsoft...stuff... will hang around and what won't) but I wasn't consulted.
So it occurs to me that, if the Windows admin group pushes out this update, it'll take a mission critical tool offline. I will have to call a former co-worker and see how that goes. Since Windows admin is outsourced, it probably won't even occur to them to tell the user community that they're about to disable gadgets.
Moreover, coffee is legal for kids, and is a big part of the teen culture. (Starbucks before and after school, like the malt shop two generations previously.)
You may have a point there. I'm the only person in my family who has never smoked. My wife doesn't smoke, and my teenage daughter has so far -- without any coaching from us (we didn't feel it was necessary) -- resisted peer pressure to take up smoking. My sister, who has smoked non-stop since she was 13, now as an adult has a 13 year old foster kid who -- surprise -- just took up smoking.
Exactly. The proper definition of a "gateway drug" is whatever is easiest to acquire. Which usually implies that it's either legal or much less illegal (if you will) than alternatives.
Make caffeine illegal under penalty of death and legalize pot, and the picture would reverse.
Cause it isn't grandma's first rodeo and she knows how much booze she has? (She's a grandma, not her first teen.)
You're right. Furthermore, Grandma probably also knows about the trick of watering down the remainder. (Don't ask me how I know.) So you would need to make your samples small across multiple bottles (and mix it together, which I think was called "bilge water" when we drank it as teens -- nasty) or save up samples from Grandma's only bottle over a period of time, and then have a party. It helps if Grandma is gettin' a mite forgetful.
If you live in a state where alcohol is sold right off the store shelves, there's always shoplifting.
Or you could try any of the above, and get caught, which some of us did.
But the fact that a lot of adults are nodding their heads while reading this, or can think up many other methods, (or remembering friends they lost to alcohol in their teens) means that acquiring alcohol whilst under age was not exactly unknown. Yeesh, google "underage drinking" and you get over four million hits. Acquiring alcohol was *easy*.
I disagree. Parents, or relatives, or parents of friends are much MUCH more likely to have alcohol at home than pot. Although this is only a single datapoint, I remember how old I was when I had my first drink -- 12 -- and what it was -- rye whiskey (I didn't like it) -- at a friend's house. Seriously, which is more likely in a randomly selected household -- that we kids had found a bottle or a bag?
It's true that weed is fairly easy to come by, and it's also true that people selling drugs probably don't check ids. (Although I can imagine that a crack dealer might be reluctant to sell to an eleven-year-old.) But why go out looking for a dime bag when grandma has sloe gin in the cupboard? Occam's razor.
Which doesn't necessarily mean that alcohol is some magic gateway drug, (correlation does not imply causation) but that people with substance abuse problems naturally gravitate first to legal (and hence more easily acquirable) substances.
Look I'm as willing as anyone to stipulate that the "war on drugs" has been a total bust and a criminal waste of resources. I've told my teenage daughter "the worst thing about pot -- the absolute worst thing -- is what the government can do to you if they catch you with it".
But.
Could the results have anything to do with alcohol being much easier to acquire than pot? This is not an apples - to - apples comparison, and wouldn't have been unless we had never repealed the eighteenth amendment.
It's regularly over 100 degrees at Sky Harbor Airport, has been since at least the seventies when I lived there. Peaking at 122 degrees in 1990. Do they make different asphalt in Arizona?
To me the humor is this: why are they going after apple? Let them, surely - but why do they think it is apple who is out innovating them as opposed to the entire technology industry at large?
Well, firstly, because this focuses media attention on one competitor instead of Ballmer's general incompetence, and because they can't take on the entire technology industry at large. For one thing, a company this far behind the curve would have a difficult job playing catch-up. For Microsoft in particular, with it's record of killing promising projects because they can't leverage existing value streams, and hampering new products with the requirement of using the existing code base, the job is impossible.
Frankly, they're focusing on Apple not because they plan to out-innovate Apple, but because they have some plan in place to out-litigate or otherwise out-maneuver Apple. When you can't compete on your own expertise, your only hope is to drag your competition down to your level.
Frankly, I'm a little worried that Ballmer didn't mention Android -- is this the hand that's misdirecting us as to what the other hand is doing?
Yes, but it's miles ahead of IE6, which I believe was the most used browser until relatively recently. Microsoft -- let's give them credit, it doesn't cost us anything to be intellectually honest -- has made huge improvements in their browser -- with a few missteps -- over the last three major releases. One could still argue, though, that they started too late, and didn't do enough; that the magnitude of improvement is only relative to how low the starting point was.
The hot setup for Microsoft is to somehow get a significant number of developers designing web apps that work best in Microsoft's environment, which helps lock users into Windows, which is Microsoft's core business. But I strongly suspect that ship has sailed for the browser. Maybe Metro?...I just can't see it... Were Gates still in charge, we'd more likely see a huge push for web app tools, that were easy and gooey to use but created non-standard code that only worked well in the Windows environment. I don't think Ballmer is that canny.
...almost nothing, on the short term. Microsoft used IE and the fact that a lot of broken code on the net would only run on IE to drive sales on Windows. IE no longer drives sales on Windows, for a few reasons -- (a) the perception that IE is not as secure as other browsers, (b) Most competing browsers run on Windows, (c) the perception (less now) that IE is way behind in technology compared to other browsers.
So why would Microsoft care? I can think of one reason -- as has been pointed out by others, the more time people spend in a browser, the less they care about the underlying OS. When the user community is not dependent on a browser that's locked to a particular OS, the OS becomes less important, because you can run Chrome or Firefox or Opera on a lot of different platforms. Unlocking the browser from the OS is the first step -- causing a movement en-masse to a different operating system (or systems) is the next logical step. I would argue it is already happening.
So for the long term, if Microsoft isn't scared, they should be. I would expect over the next couple of years many attempts at embrace, extend, extinguish to get...something... that everyone uses, locked into their one platform. I mean, how else are they going to compete?
Right, but what is the "reasonable and articulable" suspicion that the person is armed and dangerous? Are we buying the theory that people of a certain race can naturally be supposed to be on their way to a crime?
In fact, one could make the argument that one implies the other. Communism doesn't work in numbers above, oh, twenty or so without fascist control of the population. And a fascist government invariably finds themselves collectively managing and distributing resources.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like ya'll need a change management process.
Yeah, really?
Ok here's how change management works there: Everything, including minor changes to development boxes, has to go through outsourced change management. The meetings are weekly, so if you want to correct a configuration issue in a web server and it's the day after the change meeting, it'll be a minimum one week before the change can be made.
There is only one change meeting for the entire company. It is typically 3 to 4 hours long. It consists of reading through the changes and asking for "approved" or "disapproved" by the board, made up of manager without technical experience. There is no -- repeat no -- mechanism to identify how a random change will affect the resources for which you are responsible. It is entirely up to the workers to recognize that the proposed change involves a resource that affects them.
Soooo.... you can dial into the call, and listen to all four hours of droning, on the off chance that you will recognize an issue, but how well that works depends on how well you know the parts of the architecture for which you are not responsible. And how well you can understand someone who isn't communicating in their native language, over a scratchy connection. (Incidentally, it seems de rigor when you're reading off a change list to speak the change number distinctly and then let your voice fade out when you're saying the details. But I digress.)
For instance, patching is considered junior level work, and the junior admins work their night shift, which is your day shift. It's not uncommon for them to down a server that feeds records to another server, that consolidates data in a database on another server, which feeds your app. Your app has stopped working during office hours and you have no idea why.
So yeah, they have change management, but given the way it operates, it's just a managerial line item, not something actually meant to be useful.
> he could be fracking parks and recreations
Gee thanks. It'll take a long time to get that mental image out of my head.
In a previous job, middleware admins had a custom gadget that displayed status on a wide variety of web apps for which the department was responsible. Personally, I wouldn't have done it that way (you never know what Microsoft ...stuff... will hang around and what won't) but I wasn't consulted.
So it occurs to me that, if the Windows admin group pushes out this update, it'll take a mission critical tool offline. I will have to call a former co-worker and see how that goes. Since Windows admin is outsourced, it probably won't even occur to them to tell the user community that they're about to disable gadgets.
Moreover, coffee is legal for kids, and is a big part of the teen culture. (Starbucks before and after school, like the malt shop two generations previously.)
You may have a point there. I'm the only person in my family who has never smoked. My wife doesn't smoke, and my teenage daughter has so far -- without any coaching from us (we didn't feel it was necessary) -- resisted peer pressure to take up smoking. My sister, who has smoked non-stop since she was 13, now as an adult has a 13 year old foster kid who -- surprise -- just took up smoking.
Exactly. The proper definition of a "gateway drug" is whatever is easiest to acquire. Which usually implies that it's either legal or much less illegal (if you will) than alternatives.
Make caffeine illegal under penalty of death and legalize pot, and the picture would reverse.
Cause it isn't grandma's first rodeo and she knows how much booze she has? (She's a grandma, not her first teen.)
You're right. Furthermore, Grandma probably also knows about the trick of watering down the remainder. (Don't ask me how I know.) So you would need to make your samples small across multiple bottles (and mix it together, which I think was called "bilge water" when we drank it as teens -- nasty) or save up samples from Grandma's only bottle over a period of time, and then have a party. It helps if Grandma is gettin' a mite forgetful.
If you live in a state where alcohol is sold right off the store shelves, there's always shoplifting.
Or you could try any of the above, and get caught, which some of us did.
But the fact that a lot of adults are nodding their heads while reading this, or can think up many other methods, (or remembering friends they lost to alcohol in their teens) means that acquiring alcohol whilst under age was not exactly unknown. Yeesh, google "underage drinking" and you get over four million hits. Acquiring alcohol was *easy*.
I disagree. Parents, or relatives, or parents of friends are much MUCH more likely to have alcohol at home than pot. Although this is only a single datapoint, I remember how old I was when I had my first drink -- 12 -- and what it was -- rye whiskey (I didn't like it) -- at a friend's house. Seriously, which is more likely in a randomly selected household -- that we kids had found a bottle or a bag?
It's true that weed is fairly easy to come by, and it's also true that people selling drugs probably don't check ids. (Although I can imagine that a crack dealer might be reluctant to sell to an eleven-year-old.) But why go out looking for a dime bag when grandma has sloe gin in the cupboard? Occam's razor.
Which doesn't necessarily mean that alcohol is some magic gateway drug, (correlation does not imply causation) but that people with substance abuse problems naturally gravitate first to legal (and hence more easily acquirable) substances.
Look I'm as willing as anyone to stipulate that the "war on drugs" has been a total bust and a criminal waste of resources. I've told my teenage daughter "the worst thing about pot -- the absolute worst thing -- is what the government can do to you if they catch you with it".
But.
Could the results have anything to do with alcohol being much easier to acquire than pot? This is not an apples - to - apples comparison, and wouldn't have been unless we had never repealed the eighteenth amendment.
It's regularly over 100 degrees at Sky Harbor Airport, has been since at least the seventies when I lived there. Peaking at 122 degrees in 1990. Do they make different asphalt in Arizona?
> But I guess being bested by Android probably caused a whole office furniture set to become airborne.
Speaking of which, why isn't there a chair throwing game on Android or IOS?
To me the humor is this: why are they going after apple? Let them, surely - but why do they think it is apple who is out innovating them as opposed to the entire technology industry at large?
Well, firstly, because this focuses media attention on one competitor instead of Ballmer's general incompetence, and because they can't take on the entire technology industry at large. For one thing, a company this far behind the curve would have a difficult job playing catch-up. For Microsoft in particular, with it's record of killing promising projects because they can't leverage existing value streams, and hampering new products with the requirement of using the existing code base, the job is impossible.
Frankly, they're focusing on Apple not because they plan to out-innovate Apple, but because they have some plan in place to out-litigate or otherwise out-maneuver Apple. When you can't compete on your own expertise, your only hope is to drag your competition down to your level.
Frankly, I'm a little worried that Ballmer didn't mention Android -- is this the hand that's misdirecting us as to what the other hand is doing?
Yes, but it's miles ahead of IE6, which I believe was the most used browser until relatively recently. Microsoft -- let's give them credit, it doesn't cost us anything to be intellectually honest -- has made huge improvements in their browser -- with a few missteps -- over the last three major releases. One could still argue, though, that they started too late, and didn't do enough; that the magnitude of improvement is only relative to how low the starting point was.
The hot setup for Microsoft is to somehow get a significant number of developers designing web apps that work best in Microsoft's environment, which helps lock users into Windows, which is Microsoft's core business. But I strongly suspect that ship has sailed for the browser. Maybe Metro? ...I just can't see it... Were Gates still in charge, we'd more likely see a huge push for web app tools, that were easy and gooey to use but created non-standard code that only worked well in the Windows environment. I don't think Ballmer is that canny.
So why would Microsoft care? I can think of one reason -- as has been pointed out by others, the more time people spend in a browser, the less they care about the underlying OS. When the user community is not dependent on a browser that's locked to a particular OS, the OS becomes less important, because you can run Chrome or Firefox or Opera on a lot of different platforms. Unlocking the browser from the OS is the first step -- causing a movement en-masse to a different operating system (or systems) is the next logical step. I would argue it is already happening.
So for the long term, if Microsoft isn't scared, they should be. I would expect over the next couple of years many attempts at embrace, extend, extinguish to get ...something... that everyone uses, locked into their one platform. I mean, how else are they going to compete?
As is coke and pepsi even today.
> That would have been quite a shock to Stalin, who spent the 1930s and 40s fighting a bitter - and very successful - war to the death with fascism.
That is really funny.
Right, but what is the "reasonable and articulable" suspicion that the person is armed and dangerous? Are we buying the theory that people of a certain race can naturally be supposed to be on their way to a crime?
In fact, one could make the argument that one implies the other. Communism doesn't work in numbers above, oh, twenty or so without fascist control of the population. And a fascist government invariably finds themselves collectively managing and distributing resources.
>> If the representatives get away with something, it's because people don't care.
> Uh, no. It's because all they can do is elect a replacement who will treat them just the same, or get out the burning torches, pitchforks and ropes.
Well, that would be caring.
On the face of it, EPEAT directly conflicts with the Apple business plan. This is going to be interesting.
> Their organization is so ridiculous that no matter how hard you tried you just couldn't make something like that up.
As I said, all things are relative. I find both to be somewhat tiresome.