Let's see... Boston's Big Dig. Nope. Designing a new aircraft carrier... nope. Red Sox winning the World Series... badly delayed;)
I wonder if in general it's creative projects or maybe highly complex projects that suffer lousy under-estimates for completion dates. Many software projects (i.e., MS Longhorn) are both.
On an unrelated note: I wonder how project planning estimate accuracy correlates with the experience level of the person making the estimate. Because if the IT industry tends to burn out the young people os that there are't many older IT people, that could contribute as well.
SQL Server is a joy to use, in medium-sized databases. So if MS was truly sharing it with the world gratis, that would be wonderful.
But the bigger concern is that by opening their source code, every open source database is now subject to a lawsuit from MS, claiming that it misappropriated some for-loop or comment line that appeared in SQL Server.
IMHO, the open-source DBs are catching up to SQL Server just fine, and would be far better off without the lawsuit risks associated with MS exposing its source code.
Well, you're supposed to think about what you read before you hit the reply button.
Now, would you feel better if I put a smiley on that last paragraph?
Or the one above this one?
--
When I want to be subtle, I'll let you know.
Look at you're.sig for this. I just take that at face value:)
How am I supposed to know you're being ironic rather than just stupid? We've never conversed before. You have a presumption of your intelligence that I had no reason to yet make.
Uh, no. Taco is allowed to believe he has the right to chastise Christians' beliefs, he's just not allowed to actually do it.
That in itself is a chastisement of Taco. If you're saying that he's not actually allowed to do it, then you're effectively saying that he's mistaken that he has a right to speak that way. You can't have a "right" that's not allowed to be exercised - that contradicts the definition of a right.
I've worked commercial and academic. All of those were fun and interesting, but some (mostly commercial) demanded long hours. That late-night work never resulted in the promised recognition.
Now I work for a govt. research lab. Although money is sometimes tight, and the paperwork is sometimes a pain in the butt, there are some really nice things about it:
- The pay is good (not mind blowing, but quite good). - I work with some of the smartest people I've ever worked with. Almost everyone has a master's degree, and a good fraction have their PhDs. - The job stability is pretty good (although no guarantees) - Because of the stability, I can feel free to dedicate my efforts to learning the problem domain, rather than staying abreast of each new glitzy programming language. I.e., I can focus on my current job rather than always focusing on being sellable in case I'm laid off. - If you land the right job, you get the sense that you're work actually goes to help people, rather than just line the pockets of some rich sociopathological CEO. That's a nice feeling.
Maybe the most important thing is the regular hours. If you're planning on having kids, it's great for them to expect you home every night for dinner and for you to actually show up. Kids thrive with that kind of stability and with your actually being around when they're awake. They only have one childhood - don't miss it. A slightly more exciting career isn't worth it.
I've heard very little discussion about how we (people who believe copywright and patent law has tipped too far in the corporations' favor) can use these laws AGAINST the big guys.
An earlier post suggested overwhelming Aussie ISPs with inaccurate copyright-breach claims.
But how about taking these laws to their logical, unreasonable conclussions on the lawmakers' and coprorations' own turfs?
For example: - Bring coypright violation claims against the websites of the Aussie parliamentarians / senators / corporations that supported the bill.
- Try to find ACTAUL copyright violations of these guys. Then tell ISPs to bring down these offending sites. But do it in a trickle of death. I.e., don't tell the site maintainers about all infringing content at once. Rather, tell the ISP about it once offence at a time, requiring a new take-down---fix-content---bring-up cycle for each offence.
- Develop our own submarine patent portfolio for use against corporations.
I think at best this could get new versions of the law up for consideration by lawmakers. Unfortunately, that just gives the special interests more of an opportunity to craft law to our disadvantage.
How do we actually get the lawmakers to TRY to craft law that's fair or even anti-copyright? Is there no way we can do it, since they ALWAYS ultimately follow the money?
deb packages can contain scripts that run during the installation procedure, prompting the person doing the installation/upgrade to make certain choices.
This is great, because when you have software packages that make use of fairly complicated/etc file, symlinks, etc., a well-written deb script will take care of all that stuff for the person doing the install.
I can't think of any examples of the particular things I've been prompted to decide about during deb package installation, but at the time I've realized that I'm very glad someone built that stuff into the script. It let me install some fairly complicated pieces of software and get them running without needing to become an expert on that software.
I work at a research lab for the U.S. military, and it's actually a lot more fun than its reputation...
The pay is quite good, I only work 40 hours/week, and I'm represented by a union. Plus, the work is really interesting - not at all like you might think.
Sometimes I miss the loose and super-casual lifestyle of working for a.com, but in my opinion the stability, pay, and hours more than make up for it.
There's another perk as well: I don't need to constantly try to keep my resume up to date with the latest buzzwords that don't even relate to my job. Since I've got great job stability, I can actually take the time to learn the particular problem domains really well instead of constantly worrying about my resume. That's something I've been missing.
Another plus of working for them is that they're VERY supportive of pursuing your advanced degree. Almost everyone I work with has or is working towards an MS or PhD. I.e., I found a pocket of really smart people that I never knew existed. In the private sector, having my MS was a big distinction. In a military research lab, I'm surrounded by people that are really well educated. There's a lot to learn in a place like this.
Downsides, however, can be a hassle. For instance, it's a lot harded to publish a computer science paper. It has to go through Washington to get verified that it has no classified material in it. That's a downer, but not one that matters to me too often.
Overall, I'm very happy and recommend you check it out.
Taken at face value, that statement would mean that whenever we could imagine any tradeoff between pleasure and safety, we take pleasure. Obviously we all chose a balance in our lives.
The problem with how it was stated, though, is that it sounds kindof valid, and I could imagine lots of public officials getting jingoistic about it and taking that expression as dogma.
If we had a big population on Mars, how long would it be before we went to war with them?
One reason to not use strategic nukes on earth is that we all breath the same air and share the same climate. Nuking someone else thus causes you long term issues, even if they don't retaliate.
This concern goes away if we have interplanetary war.
Maybe THAT'S a reason not to terraform Mars: We shouldn't put ourselves in a position where we're more likely to nuke half of humanity's population.
"We don't negotiate with terrorists..." "We don't negotiate with terrorists..." "We don't negotiate with terrorists..." "We don't negotiate with terrorists..."
How do we actually *know* why property laws were invented.
I mean, yes we certainly see their utility in our lives.
But when you get right down to it, we inherited the ideas. And property laws originated so long ago that we probably can only *guess* at why their originators created them.
So what's my point? My point is that we just conject, not know, why property laws first came into effect.
(And for that matter, there may have been multiple societies that introduced them independently, so there could be multiple, different reasons for introducing them.)
Slashdot Mirror
How many non-IT projects are done on time?
;)
Let's see... Boston's Big Dig. Nope. Designing a new aircraft carrier... nope. Red Sox winning the World Series... badly delayed
I wonder if in general it's creative projects or maybe highly complex projects that suffer lousy under-estimates for completion dates. Many software projects (i.e., MS Longhorn) are both.
On an unrelated note: I wonder how project planning estimate accuracy correlates with the experience level of the person making the estimate. Because if the IT industry tends to burn out the young people os that there are't many older IT people, that could contribute as well.
http://www.angelfire.com/ego/philosophyradio/lectu res.html
Can't do much better than philosophy for something to engage your mind.
In "The Mythical Man Month", Fredrick Brooks argues that the communciation complexity within a team follows rougly that same n**2 rule.
I wonder if this means that Brook's formalization of the team-size problem is somewhat overstated as well.
Hmmm...
:)
;)
My government computer runs Debian, and I don't recall having ANY problems like this
Actually, now that I think about it, I *did* need to train my spam filter to discard our security team's "Microsoft virus alert" messages
I did not say that MySQL is bad. I said that SQL Server is wonderful.
I've was a SQL Server data warehouse architect for two years, and I've recently worked with MySQL.
If you missed my point that open-source DBs are looking very good these days, you should re-read my original post.
SQL Server is a joy to use, in medium-sized databases. So if MS was truly sharing it with the world gratis, that would be wonderful.
But the bigger concern is that by opening their source code, every open source database is now subject to a lawsuit from MS, claiming that it misappropriated some for-loop or comment line that appeared in SQL Server.
IMHO, the open-source DBs are catching up to SQL Server just fine, and would be far better off without the lawsuit risks associated with MS exposing its source code.
Now, would you feel better if I put a smiley on that last paragraph?
Or the one above this one?
--
When I want to be subtle, I'll let you know.
Look at you're .sig for this. I just take that at face value :)
How am I supposed to know you're being ironic rather than just stupid? We've never conversed before. You have a presumption of your intelligence that I had no reason to yet make.
That in itself is a chastisement of Taco. If you're saying that he's not actually allowed to do it, then you're effectively saying that he's mistaken that he has a right to speak that way. You can't have a "right" that's not allowed to be exercised - that contradicts the definition of a right.
Um, aren't you chastising Cmdr Taco's belief that he has a right to chastise Christian's beliefs?
I'm all for being nice to people, but I think you're logic is a little self-defeating.
Can anyone think of how this software violates copyrights or patents?
This would be delicious revenge to get them on an IP violation.
I've worked commercial and academic. All of those were fun and interesting, but some (mostly commercial) demanded long hours. That late-night work never resulted in the promised recognition.
Now I work for a govt. research lab. Although money is sometimes tight, and the paperwork is sometimes a pain in the butt, there are some really nice things about it:
- The pay is good (not mind blowing, but quite good).
- I work with some of the smartest people I've ever worked with. Almost everyone has a master's degree, and a good fraction have their PhDs.
- The job stability is pretty good (although no guarantees)
- Because of the stability, I can feel free to dedicate my efforts to learning the problem domain, rather than staying abreast of each new glitzy programming language. I.e., I can focus on my current job rather than always focusing on being sellable in case I'm laid off.
- If you land the right job, you get the sense that you're work actually goes to help people, rather than just line the pockets of some rich sociopathological CEO. That's a nice feeling.
Maybe the most important thing is the regular hours. If you're planning on having kids, it's great for them to expect you home every night for dinner and for you to actually show up. Kids thrive with that kind of stability and with your actually being around when they're awake. They only have one childhood - don't miss it. A slightly more exciting career isn't worth it.
I never understood this.
Does "Dutch" refer to Holland-related stuff, Netherlands-related stuff, or both?
I've heard very little discussion about how we (people who believe copywright and patent law has tipped too far in the corporations' favor) can use these laws AGAINST the big guys.
An earlier post suggested overwhelming Aussie ISPs with inaccurate copyright-breach claims.
But how about taking these laws to their logical, unreasonable conclussions on the lawmakers' and coprorations' own turfs?
For example:
- Bring coypright violation claims against the websites of the Aussie parliamentarians / senators / corporations that supported the bill.
- Try to find ACTAUL copyright violations of these guys. Then tell ISPs to bring down these offending sites. But do it in a trickle of death. I.e., don't tell the site maintainers about all infringing content at once. Rather, tell the ISP about it once offence at a time, requiring a new take-down---fix-content---bring-up cycle for each offence.
- Develop our own submarine patent portfolio for use against corporations.
I think at best this could get new versions of the law up for consideration by lawmakers. Unfortunately, that just gives the special interests more of an opportunity to craft law to our disadvantage.
How do we actually get the lawmakers to TRY to craft law that's fair or even anti-copyright? Is there no way we can do it, since they ALWAYS ultimately follow the money?
deb packages can contain scripts that run during the installation procedure, prompting the person doing the installation/upgrade to make certain choices.
/etc file, symlinks, etc., a well-written deb script will take care of all that stuff for the person doing the install.
This is great, because when you have software packages that make use of fairly complicated
I can't think of any examples of the particular things I've been prompted to decide about during deb package installation, but at the time I've realized that I'm very glad someone built that stuff into the script. It let me install some fairly complicated pieces of software and get them running without needing to become an expert on that software.
I work at a research lab for the U.S. military, and it's actually a lot more fun than its reputation...
.com, but in my opinion the stability, pay, and hours more than make up for it.
The pay is quite good, I only work 40 hours/week, and I'm represented by a union. Plus, the work is really interesting - not at all like you might think.
Sometimes I miss the loose and super-casual lifestyle of working for a
There's another perk as well: I don't need to constantly try to keep my resume up to date with the latest buzzwords that don't even relate to my job. Since I've got great job stability, I can actually take the time to learn the particular problem domains really well instead of constantly worrying about my resume. That's something I've been missing.
Another plus of working for them is that they're VERY supportive of pursuing your advanced degree. Almost everyone I work with has or is working towards an MS or PhD. I.e., I found a pocket of really smart people that I never knew existed. In the private sector, having my MS was a big distinction. In a military research lab, I'm surrounded by people that are really well educated. There's a lot to learn in a place like this.
Downsides, however, can be a hassle. For instance, it's a lot harded to publish a computer science paper. It has to go through Washington to get verified that it has no classified material in it. That's a downer, but not one that matters to me too often.
Overall, I'm very happy and recommend you check it out.
Also from that part of the country, SCOX has filed a lawsuit against all computer fans who use Linux, in an effort to silence them.
I meant "we take safety", not "we take pleasure".
Taken at face value, that statement would mean that whenever we could imagine any tradeoff between pleasure and safety, we take pleasure. Obviously we all chose a balance in our lives.
The problem with how it was stated, though, is that it sounds kindof valid, and I could imagine lots of public officials getting jingoistic about it and taking that expression as dogma.
That's awesome - thanks. I just assumed It Wouldn't Work.
:)
Now if I can just convinece Blue's Clues that my fileserver is actually the CD ROM drive, I can avoid having my 3 year old put CDs into the computer
Hey - My son playes Blues Clues as well, but on Windows. I'd love to get it working on Linux.
Are you using Wine, or WineX? Any tricks you'd like to share to get it working?
Thanks,
Christian
If we had a big population on Mars, how long would it be before we went to war with them?
One reason to not use strategic nukes on earth is that we all breath the same air and share the same climate. Nuking someone else thus causes you long term issues, even if they don't retaliate.
This concern goes away if we have interplanetary war.
Maybe THAT'S a reason not to terraform Mars: We shouldn't put ourselves in a position where we're more likely to nuke half of humanity's population.
Repeat after me, EV1Servers people...
:)
"We don't negotiate with terrorists..."
"We don't negotiate with terrorists..."
"We don't negotiate with terrorists..."
"We don't negotiate with terrorists..."
I wish people would remember that...
While I'm no fan of oligopolies, it should be noted that communism / socialism hasn't exactly done a great job of feeding everyone either.
How do we actually *know* why property laws were invented.
I mean, yes we certainly see their utility in our lives.
But when you get right down to it, we inherited the ideas. And property laws originated so long ago that we probably can only *guess* at why their originators created them.
So what's my point? My point is that we just conject, not know, why property laws first came into effect.
(And for that matter, there may have been multiple societies that introduced them independently, so there could be multiple, different reasons for introducing them.)