this has lead to over 15 enterprise apps being replaced with in-house versions that work better and are far FAR cheaper in the long run even when ignoring the fact that it is an asset now because the company owns it instead of a liability when you "lease" or "rent"(buy) software.
It is rather odd, but my job is much the same. I write code and change toner carts and help folks with MS Word/Excel/PowerPoint/etc/etc every day. But I feel that you are wrong. My training and history is as a programmer. Mind you I love my job, I get to go out and really help users out, solve problems, and even help out the Networking nerds.
The deal is however that I also have to clean up the odd bit of code they send down my pipe. At this very moment I have both a web page to clean up an a database front end to clean up. Both were made by well meaning cow-workers who were really app implementation and server people respectively. Truth be told their code sucks so bad that I have to rewrite it completely, lest it come back to haunt me.
Truth be told - if you are coding "Enterprise apps" without a dedicated programmer - let alone an Analyst - I guarantee you have serious flaws and bugs. I really don't mean to be elitist - but to me it is the same as saying -
"I want to run busses over the river" "OK, well, i can hire an engineer, architect, and builders or..." " No thanks, I once built a load bearing wall.. I'm good."
You may be...but Scalability, interoperability and the rare chance that you might have to jump up to big iron...well, hire a real programmer.
Sera
That even environmental law is still very much in the hands of individual states - try looking up auto emission standards by states. Another would be water purity - sure the Feds have theirs - but state laws can supersede (class Water extends MNStateGov) them.
You forgot that BitTorrent hides alien contact in Area 51, and that it also stole WMD's from Iraq just as we were going in. Also, it made me sterile just by watching a downloaded movie.
Yeah, because setting up a cron job when you inevitably set the machine up in the first place is so hard. Truth is, a daily cron on "grandma's" machine is safer than any windows update nonsense. I have seen the grand parents issue and worse in my time. Setting up a Windows machine takes no less than three trips to MS update IMHO and even then my palms itch for one last trip there.To get it to auto update is even worse - oh - and as the de-facto admin of the box I *dont* want grandma -
comfortable with the notion that the "Control Panel" is where you control things about how the system runs, and that when someone tells you to check how your Automatic Updates are set up, that you'd use the icon labeled "Automatic Updates."
If she needs that much we have both failed - Win or Lin. Grandma's machine should need no interaction from her - it should "Simply Work" Only Linux (set up right) and Mac can do that - I never want Grandma making the decision whether to install an update or not - and half the time that is a very big issue with MS. Example - we have yet to roll out SP2 system wide - it *still* breaks stuff.
You Sir, have managed to type one of the few lines I have ever read in my life that actually deserves to be put on a bumper sticker. I, a hard core Christian salute you.:)
Call your local small college (look for one that trains nurses) and find out if they have a Biology Department. If they do, ask if they have a Microbiologist on staff. If they don't see if they can refer you to one. Call up that Microbiologist and tell them that you would like to hire them for 2 hours at $25/hour (the $50 you would have spent on a book) to explain some things to you. Set up two *different* evenings and get questions ready before hand. The seperated days will allow you to come up with good questions after getting a base. Chances are they will gladly go over the whole thing at length - perhaps even for free if you are willing to come in during their regular office hours - I know that our Microbiology instructors would. BTW - if you are in Minnesota I can hook you up easy. Also I can probably answer a few questions myself, I was a student of Robert McKinnell's. Let me know - seraphim_72[at]yahoo
"Microsoft has already said that it will demonstrate 'the Xbox vision for the next generation,' which 'ensures that the user experience is always connected, always personalised and always in high definition'."... and always empty your wallet.
Sadly I have no control over that - it is our faculty who wanted it. Besides to my knowledge it is the only piece of software that does what it does - namely to automate tests for pilot's licenses.
On the other hand, having to deal with vendor $*#@ all day long was a real hassle. One thing that bugs the hell out of me with proprietary software is the lack of user input - some of the tools we used were klunky and broken, but they were the only tools that would work with a particular vendor. New features were useless, while good features were left out. Upgrades were often painful.
Just yesterday I got to have one of those wonderful moments. As I went about installing a piece of software at work that was some bizarre combination of DOS and VB6. The thing had been written ages ago but was sold on the market still. It had not been updated in ages and as near as they explained it, you had to sign into the software no less than four times to make it work. Ug. It would seem that since the days of DOS they had never listened to a single user. Their tech support was snotty and I had the weird feeling that I was speaking to one of the developers as every little chide I put up about the software was shot down hard. Mind you this was no rocket science piece of software - it was a simple testing solution that ftp'ed the questions down and presented them to multiple workstations. Something I am sure my Java students could code up in a semester without a problem. I can see where this closed source software has never had any real feed back taken seriously. I feel your pain.
It can show an outline, but unlike MSFT Word, you can't do anything useful with the outline. You can send it to the clipboard or dump it into a presentation. You can't hide and show different heading levels - so you can't see the document structure. You can't promote and demote headings, drag a heading to a new spot and have all the subheadings and text follow. It's useless as a document reorg tool.
For the love of PETE! Try learning/using the program! It is called the "Navigator" Edit>Navigator or just hit the F5 key. It promotes, you can drag and drop, it shows structure and more. Custom design your levels and all will be good in the world. Much like Werd it is a very complex program, try learning it before commenting on it's weaknesses.
I have seen that as well - it always makes me wonder if it is not an artifact of the german origen of Knoppix. Is the standard paper size in Europe A4? By the way it is a dual fix issue. Both CUPS and OpenOffice have printer defaults - they both have to be changed for it to print right. If you only change one it will roll back to be in line with the other. It is a pain - but it is a linux issue as much as it is a OO.o issue.
And I want to develop a drug that cures cancer. Who's going to fund it? You? Obviously not? Government? Do you really want the government getting into the drug making business?
How about one of these attached to one of these? Together you are looking at about $500 but compared to the alternative... Dig around on thier site they even have accelerometers and other neat stuff. I have used thier software and hardware it's good stuff and the people at the company are friendy and helpfull.
Is there a way to contact you? The Minnesota State College and University System uses a thing called PALS for thier needs. They have supported it internally for years and functions across a huge number of college campuses both public and private.
Here is the deal though, they (for political, not library, reasons) are moving off of it and onto a different system. As this entire afair was made with state dollars I am a bit curious to know what is going to be done with the code base. I got the email addy of the top developer and I can shoot him off an email tomorrow to see what he says. If you are interested let me know. seraphim_72 [at] yahoo.com.deletethis.
You are in your 20's. Read up on why the Unions rose in the first place. Then go read what it is like to be an EA games programmer these days - hell just search Slashdot, you will find many references. See any parallels? Long work hours for low pay, and if you want to work less? Out the door you go.
Look at CEO vs worker pay - now look at that over time, does it make any sense at all? The GM contract is extreme and you very well know it - but it sure does stop the EA Games of this world from treating thier employees like crap doesn't it? In this, the time of Mega-Corps, Unions are needed now more than ever - hell I personally think that *consumers* should unionize and get Corps to behave like good citizens. Reply to this when you are 50, with carpal tunnel and a bad back, and getting "let go" because you don't meet the company minimums of production that are set on the behavior of 16 cup a day 21 year olds who turn out 10,000 lines of code 99% of which is crap because they have no experience at all while you turn out code whose every line is magic, but only a few hundred lines a week. Unions protect workers plain and simple. Executives protect the company. They are opposites in a mirror IMHO. Sorry about the rant - but Unions do some good as well.
Au contraire, organized ANYTHING is bad, and organized labor is particularly bad.
Organized Government, organized military, organized schools, organized employers, I can think of many more organized things that are good....
Then I will give you my experience. I was in Freshman Comp and taking Shakespeare at the same time. My Shakespeare Prof loved my essays, in fact he found the writing "delightful". My Comp Prof on the other hand consistently graded me down because of my "Archaic" writing style. Both were visiting Profs from england. I found out late term that they were also dating. One of my writing assignments was to "write about something nobody knows about" So - I wrote about castle construction in the 14th century. I was graded down because "every school girl knows how castles were made" The next was to write about something everyone knew about. I wrote about the BWCA (Boundry Waters Canoe Area) a very Minnesota thing. I was graded down because "No one knows about this" She asked the class if they knew of the BWCA - everyone raised thier hands - my grade stuck.
I fail to this day to understand why I got the grade that I did. "Archaic" writing may be tough to read but it is still good english - oh- her other criticism was that I used too many obtuse words, pardon me that my english is very good.
So to sum up you can stuff the whole "expert" thing as far as term papers go. I had the same prof for a year in History - if you leaned your papers toward his area of study you did better, period. I even leaned one out to test the theory - sure enough it was the ownly bad paper I turned in. In another class I also had the (mis)fortune to have a partner in a class who slept late, drank too much, and did his papers on notebook paper. We became good friends and would read each others papers before handing them in. I would consitently tell him "This paper sucks" and he would tell me "This is great" care to guess who got A's and who got F's? Care to guess which of us was the Prof's pet? He knew it and purposly wrote crap. I did my all in that class and even he acknowledged that she hated me for no reason and my grade was based on her opinion of me.
My early college experience has taught me two important things
Play to the instructor's strengths
Suck up to the Prof
If you think that grading is fair based on the strength of the paper, I say go back to college
I thought the name sounded familiar - Digitalis sp. are the original source of the Digitalis line of heart meds.
Digitalis medicines are used to improve the strength and efficiency of the heart, or to control the rate and rhythm of the heartbeat. This leads to better blood circulation and reduced swelling of hands and ankles in patients with heart problems.From the NIH
I agree, a fine name for a linux distro. "Foxglove Linux, it's good for the heart."
Slashdot Mirror
It is rather odd, but my job is much the same. I write code and change toner carts and help folks with MS Word/Excel/PowerPoint/etc/etc every day. But I feel that you are wrong. My training and history is as a programmer. Mind you I love my job, I get to go out and really help users out, solve problems, and even help out the Networking nerds.
The deal is however that I also have to clean up the odd bit of code they send down my pipe. At this very moment I have both a web page to clean up an a database front end to clean up. Both were made by well meaning cow-workers who were really app implementation and server people respectively. Truth be told their code sucks so bad that I have to rewrite it completely, lest it come back to haunt me.
Truth be told - if you are coding "Enterprise apps" without a dedicated programmer - let alone an Analyst - I guarantee you have serious flaws and bugs. I really don't mean to be elitist - but to me it is the same as saying -
"I want to run busses over the river" .. I'm good."
"OK, well, i can hire an engineer, architect, and builders or..."
" No thanks, I once built a load bearing wall
You may be...but Scalability, interoperability and the rare chance that you might have to jump up to big iron ...well, hire a real programmer.
Sera
That even environmental law is still very much in the hands of individual states - try looking up auto emission standards by states. Another would be water purity - sure the Feds have theirs - but state laws can supersede (class Water extends MNStateGov) them.
Sera
You forgot that BitTorrent hides alien contact in Area 51, and that it also stole WMD's from Iraq just as we were going in. Also, it made me sterile just by watching a downloaded movie.
Sera
Read this folks - his comment makes sense
Sera
Yeah, because setting up a cron job when you inevitably set the machine up in the first place is so hard. Truth is, a daily cron on "grandma's" machine is safer than any windows update nonsense. I have seen the grand parents issue and worse in my time. Setting up a Windows machine takes no less than three trips to MS update IMHO and even then my palms itch for one last trip there.To get it to auto update is even worse - oh - and as the de-facto admin of the box I *dont* want grandma - If she needs that much we have both failed - Win or Lin. Grandma's machine should need no interaction from her - it should "Simply Work" Only Linux (set up right) and Mac can do that - I never want Grandma making the decision whether to install an update or not - and half the time that is a very big issue with MS. Example - we have yet to roll out SP2 system wide - it *still* breaks stuff.
Sera
You Sir, have managed to type one of the few lines I have ever read in my life that actually deserves to be put on a bumper sticker. I, a hard core Christian salute you.
Sera
No freaking lie ... Where did the Jesus Christ come from then?
Call your local small college (look for one that trains nurses) and find out if they have a Biology Department. If they do, ask if they have a Microbiologist on staff. If they don't see if they can refer you to one. Call up that Microbiologist and tell them that you would like to hire them for 2 hours at $25/hour (the $50 you would have spent on a book) to explain some things to you. Set up two *different* evenings and get questions ready before hand. The seperated days will allow you to come up with good questions after getting a base. Chances are they will gladly go over the whole thing at length - perhaps even for free if you are willing to come in during their regular office hours - I know that our Microbiology instructors would. BTW - if you are in Minnesota I can hook you up easy. Also I can probably answer a few questions myself, I was a student of Robert McKinnell's. Let me know - seraphim_72[at]yahoo
Sera
Sadly I have no control over that - it is our faculty who wanted it. Besides to my knowledge it is the only piece of software that does what it does - namely to automate tests for pilot's licenses.
Sera
Just yesterday I got to have one of those wonderful moments. As I went about installing a piece of software at work that was some bizarre combination of DOS and VB6. The thing had been written ages ago but was sold on the market still. It had not been updated in ages and as near as they explained it, you had to sign into the software no less than four times to make it work. Ug. It would seem that since the days of DOS they had never listened to a single user. Their tech support was snotty and I had the weird feeling that I was speaking to one of the developers as every little chide I put up about the software was shot down hard. Mind you this was no rocket science piece of software - it was a simple testing solution that ftp'ed the questions down and presented them to multiple workstations. Something I am sure my Java students could code up in a semester without a problem. I can see where this closed source software has never had any real feed back taken seriously. I feel your pain.
Sera
Heck, I would by a copy for that alone.
"White shores...and beyond... the far green country under a swift sunrise."
Um...your phone is ringing
Shut up, let it ring (sigh)
Sera
:)
Sera
For the love of PETE! Try learning/using the program! It is called the "Navigator" Edit>Navigator or just hit the F5 key. It promotes, you can drag and drop, it shows structure and more. Custom design your levels and all will be good in the world. Much like Werd it is a very complex program, try learning it before commenting on it's weaknesses.
Sera
I have seen that as well - it always makes me wonder if it is not an artifact of the german origen of Knoppix. Is the standard paper size in Europe A4? By the way it is a dual fix issue. Both CUPS and OpenOffice have printer defaults - they both have to be changed for it to print right. If you only change one it will roll back to be in line with the other. It is a pain - but it is a linux issue as much as it is a OO.o issue.
Sera
I looked at the Amazon reviews - is the one guy who trashs the book you? a brother? just some guy? I would love to know.
Sera
Yes I do. I really really do.
Sera
How about one of these attached to one of these? Together you are looking at about $500 but compared to the alternative
Here is the deal though, they (for political, not library, reasons) are moving off of it and onto a different system. As this entire afair was made with state dollars I am a bit curious to know what is going to be done with the code base. I got the email addy of the top developer and I can shoot him off an email tomorrow to see what he says. If you are interested let me know. seraphim_72 [at] yahoo.com.deletethis.
Congrats!! I think that is the first time I have every seen the word "grunty" used in a sentence.
Sera
Sera
You are in your 20's. Read up on why the Unions rose in the first place. Then go read what it is like to be an EA games programmer these days - hell just search Slashdot, you will find many references. See any parallels? Long work hours for low pay, and if you want to work less? Out the door you go.
Look at CEO vs worker pay - now look at that over time, does it make any sense at all? The GM contract is extreme and you very well know it - but it sure does stop the EA Games of this world from treating thier employees like crap doesn't it? In this, the time of Mega-Corps, Unions are needed now more than ever - hell I personally think that *consumers* should unionize and get Corps to behave like good citizens. Reply to this when you are 50, with carpal tunnel and a bad back, and getting "let go" because you don't meet the company minimums of production that are set on the behavior of 16 cup a day 21 year olds who turn out 10,000 lines of code 99% of which is crap because they have no experience at all while you turn out code whose every line is magic, but only a few hundred lines a week. Unions protect workers plain and simple. Executives protect the company. They are opposites in a mirror IMHO. Sorry about the rant - but Unions do some good as well.
Organized Government, organized military, organized schools, organized employers, I can think of many more organized things that are good....Sera
Sera
Then I will give you my experience. I was in Freshman Comp and taking Shakespeare at the same time. My Shakespeare Prof loved my essays, in fact he found the writing "delightful". My Comp Prof on the other hand consistently graded me down because of my "Archaic" writing style. Both were visiting Profs from england. I found out late term that they were also dating. One of my writing assignments was to "write about something nobody knows about" So - I wrote about castle construction in the 14th century. I was graded down because "every school girl knows how castles were made" The next was to write about something everyone knew about. I wrote about the BWCA (Boundry Waters Canoe Area) a very Minnesota thing. I was graded down because "No one knows about this" She asked the class if they knew of the BWCA - everyone raised thier hands - my grade stuck.
I fail to this day to understand why I got the grade that I did. "Archaic" writing may be tough to read but it is still good english - oh- her other criticism was that I used too many obtuse words, pardon me that my english is very good.
So to sum up you can stuff the whole "expert" thing as far as term papers go. I had the same prof for a year in History - if you leaned your papers toward his area of study you did better, period. I even leaned one out to test the theory - sure enough it was the ownly bad paper I turned in. In another class I also had the (mis)fortune to have a partner in a class who slept late, drank too much, and did his papers on notebook paper. We became good friends and would read each others papers before handing them in. I would consitently tell him "This paper sucks" and he would tell me "This is great" care to guess who got A's and who got F's? Care to guess which of us was the Prof's pet? He knew it and purposly wrote crap. I did my all in that class and even he acknowledged that she hated me for no reason and my grade was based on her opinion of me.
My early college experience has taught me two important things
- Play to the instructor's strengths
- Suck up to the Prof
If you think that grading is fair based on the strength of the paper, I say go back to collegeSera
I thought the name sounded familiar - Digitalis sp. are the original source of the Digitalis line of heart meds. I agree, a fine name for a linux distro. "Foxglove Linux, it's good for the heart."
Sera