Plan a simple system properly and the tool matters little. I could have done it in Oracle and C++ and it may have worked a little faster if I did that, but that would take longer. The trade off in my time was not worth it. Access and Excel work pretty well for what they were designed for... for a very complex system it would pay off to use more advanced tools as the cost in development is low compared to the costs of running it (efficient and fast algorithms, for example).
But planning from the minimum total cost perspective is essential, and essentially missing from in house work!
But it really means Chief Iguana Ordinance. [Please note my slapdash emboldening of letters in emulation of the parent]
The real head of the project has been firing iguanas for the last few years but secretly remaining in power, as people, wrongly, think Chief Information Officers are being fired (how can someone be the chief of information anyway - do they sit around all dat loking at numbers on paper saying "I am your Chief"??? NO THEY DON'T! BECAUSE YOU ARE WRONG!!!!)
CIO = Chief Investment Officer (the one who decides where to invest money). More applicable to investment management companies than the government or regular corps, which are more likely to have the CIO absorbed into the CFO.
FYI:
CEO = Chief Executive Officer (head of the executive, the executive being the top layer of management and oversight within the company)
CFO = Chief Financial Officer (in charge of counting beans)
CTO = Chief Technology Officer (in charge of technology decisions etc)
Don't deal with contractors and subcontractors or if you do, make sure that the IRS is actively involved with management and funding of the project.
While I agree the IRS should be involved with the active management (well, at a strategy and audit level) using in-house development is the kiss of death.
This is the IRS, not some young.com startup. It will have a staid IT and development division - the hot bright sharp talent will not be there - they'll be challenging themselves and being rewarded for it in a specialist company. The IRS IT and devopment divisions will consist of career IT people who are not very good and have built themselves into ivory towers. The reason they use a multitude of data formats and code from the 60s is because that is what they knew when they entered - they got a cushy earner and don't see the point in continual learning or development. Then finally when they have to implement a new project they'll try to do it themselves instead of taking a compay who make a tried-and-tested off-the-shelf product and adapting it to the more unique requirements of the government. Then when all goes wrong the head of division resigns but the staff who have built up a culture of complacency and arogance stay on and the same happens over and over - start fresh or pick up the pieces, it is the same crap staff ding the work.
Not all of the government is the same, but the vast majority is. Dried up programmers protecting their lack of skills and ambition, clinging to their nice earner.
The source of my strong feeling? I worked in a government department implementing a new database system... nothing complex at all, just stored monthly data and compiled some percentages of this data. Budget was $1m, time to implementation 2 years. Final outcome? $3m in costs with a 3 year over-run. And hey, I was not on the IT team, I was a user! BTW: The old system was on a DEC and had worked fine for 20 years, the decision to upgrade was taken so we could go all TCP/IP and the DEC wasn't!!!!!!!!!
When I moved division I found a need for a similar system (their record keeping amounted to MS Word documents with tables in and a calculator in hand for the percentages). I took me a month to do it from database engine to fully functional query and data analysis system. Hey, I used Access (for data storage) and Excel (querying via SQL) to do it, all via VBA of course (yeah, this is/. and I'll get slated, but I needed something fast, my point of being there was not to implement a database and they had no other software licenced).
In house development is usually a bad thing because in-house IT staff tend to be old, dead wood.
"When disks are so cheap, is it worth my time permantly deleting it" is the (new) old line.
And I agree with it.
I have emails in my 'deleted' box, but there is no pernament delete. I want everything 'just in case' as $100 for an xGB section of a hard disk array is a cheap price for this age of accountability.
The UK doesn't have 3G. It has a company called '3' which promises 3G technology one day, but if you buy a 3G phone on contract now you are buying a 2.5/3G phone and a GRPS contract. That's right, a '3' phone is a 2.5G service. They hope to roll out a 3G service later this year, in limited areas.
So 3G is not failing in the UK - IT IS NOT IN THE UK! They like to keep this under wraps - I only noticed as I am a shareholder of PCCW. Go into your nearest '3' store and demand an answer.
Looking further afield, 2.5G services has become hugely popular in S. Korea, to the cost of those companies which bought the 3G licences. I don't think it is a technology sweeping the public over thing, rather public picking and choosing the technology as they like - th the moment they don't like.
BTW - 3G contracts are not a cost of the networks, they are passed wholly onto mobile users (present users are paying interest on debt the phone companies built up right now) - they are a tax on the mobile phone.
OK, so the RAND() function sucks, but it can serve as a way of example. Perhaps a list of audited random numbers would be better?
In no way is the underlying math hidden - the VBA code is there for all to see. If a copy of each run is needed (auditable) a text log file of all results could be very easily spun off during the simulation.
The parent talks about 'Value-at-Risk' so I assume their specialism is finance. Finance (most investment companies and investment banks) moved away from FORTRAN a while ago and now uses bespoke C++ for the serious work and VBA for the interface/calling.
Certainly pre-made packages are not desirable for everyday work (the point is to produce something better and incorporate new ideas - an ends as much as a means to an ends) and pointless for a teaching tool.
Why not have the input values on one sheet, diffs on another (for running diffs many times in whatever way you wanted you could save them to a 3 dimensional matrix 'in the background' (non-observable)) and have a final sheet which incorporated these (or weighted vectors of your matrix)? This way you'd get what you want and others could too (if they wanted 4 or dimensions in their parameters, for example).
Pretty simple.
Trouble is, Excel encourages people to think in 2 dimensions. A little VBA and creativity, although it doesn't mix easy and tastes nasty, goes a long way.
As long as it hasn't been saved as an image along the way there are many PDF > CSV converters. Many spreadsheets are converted to PDF by 3rd parties because of licence restrictions (such as them only being allowed to distribute a 'published' product, no source).
Well, a knife can kill just as well as a gun... equal capacity at close range. And many criminals in the UK carry guns (perhaps more organised, but remember that spate of killings recently via gun for mobile phones... some killed were kids).
I find a gun scarier (on an emotional level), but having trained in kung fu for the past 8 years at short distance (up to 12" beyond arm length) I don't see much difference in the lethality of a gun and a knife in the hand of a determined criminal upon Joe Average. I guess what it comes down to is that it is easy to pull a trigger but an inexperienced attacked may hesitate killing with their own hand. Still... a knife is deadly (deep stab in the thigh equals dead in 30 seconds... slash across the throat equals dead in seconds... stab in the belly could mean dead in 2 minutes... stab in the chest could puncture all four chambers of your heart - seconds).
hmmmmm.... you take a little of fact, elaborate it and blend it in with an unconnected argument. You are either a political science student in desperate need of a thesis or plain ignoring conjuncture.
I live in the area and allis working fine. ~120k lines is not even near all of Manchester. Though I did notice UT04 central internet server was not working earlier I can't believe this is solely dependent on the gay area of Manchester.
Communism in Russia was taken down due to glasnost spreading to the populations, but perestroika not spreading so quickly causing popular revolt due to the intellectual influence and the initial presess of glasnost. In China the transition contains more perestroika-like benefits, perhaps because of the more aggressive adoption of a market economy and the more rapid spread of improvement of general standard of living (reducing the incentive to look elsewhere for political reform).
Q: Why are the chinese communists so afraid of free exchange of ideas and criticism?
A: They're afraid they'll have to give up power and find real jobs.
OK, so they have not decided to offer full democracy to everyone and are maintaining control on the strings of power. Good. The last thing we need is a nuclear nation of 1.2bn (last UN estimate) plunged into democracy.
Why?
Because, as Plato pointed out over 2000 years ago, democracy is a dangerous thing. The populace can be taken advantage of - note the cultural revolution was supported by the majority when millions were killed, so was the Russian revolution which supported Lenin's oppression and later Stalin's. China's population are unversed in the hypocrasy and 2-faced-ness democracy brings... there will be popularists who will only be too eager to take power. A tyranny is never good, but a tyranny that sees its failures and is moving on is better.
Personally, I'd prefer a China which was promoting a market economy, promoting (and a#enacting) political reform (MASSIVE progress since Den Xiao Ping) and moving steadily towards democracy, rather than jumping in the deep end. Saying that, I am concerned about the overtures of beijing regarding HK's basic law in recent weeks.
I thoroughly recommend you read Plato's 'The Republic' - not a hard read but a concise critic of democracy and its pitfalls.
Speed is a number and velocity is a vector. So an escape velocity can vary in speed as the angle of escape changes.
If space rockets are perpendicular (well, they're not really) to the tangent of the atmosphere on exit, their speed still has to be enough to let them escape, but this speed can be really low - I take it implicitly you mean the firing of the rocket is necessary to overcome gravity rather than to reach a certain speed. Conversly, planes in the outer atmosphere can go really fast (speed) but as their velocity does not have a vector pointing upwards they won't exit.
Acceleration has little to do with it other than making the escape more efficient (of course the rocket changing vector is also acceleration).
Yes, as long as people take the trouble to view these other sources. While some may seek out alternative websites most read CNN, MSNBC or whatever is on the front page of AOL. People that seek out news and opinion are likely to do it whatever the delivery form (as another poster pointed out, the BBC is available on cable channels, long range radio, etc).
Active empowerment is necessary to make a real difference, and barring the BBC sending out spam or employing pop-up advertising that won't happen. What made the difference in the 60s was not the spread of television (in itself) as expsure to the television medium was already high, but rather the networks started to question the government line, ask questions and source directly from what indepedent (well, of view if not of employ) sources they could.
Sadly, questioning and insightful journalism seems largely forgotten, or subordinated in the name of the latest profit model.
The coloured one looks like a dinosaur to me, which was totally consistent with the name FireBird as birds evolved from dinosaurs, and the colour was red (like fire). Now I'm left thinking why fox when there's a pic of a dinosaur?
Yeah. Good on you using google. Great way to quote a load of crackpots, ahem, vested interest individuals/organisation (note that google sucks for filtering facts from misinformation - people who shout louder have less to base their arguments on etc).
If you are a student of a university then please visit the recommended reading list of the nearest environmental science course, rather than vested interest establishments (nor the the source of infinite ignorance that is Google) and pop down to the local library with it. If your local college does not have any suggestions I suggest Perman: Natural Resource and Environmental Economics, Cropper and Oates: Environmental Economics or Markandya and Richardson: The Erthscan Reader in Environmental Economics.
Read on and lose the chain of google - remember many of those that populate it of links are crazy peope or corporate vested interestes. Take or review an academic course - there is no free lunch, even/.!
Slashdot is a news aggregator, not an originator. If you want the latest OS-related news then read it on OSnews and similar sites, but if you want a broad mix of the mst important/interesting stories covering as wide (but nerd and OSource slanted) topics as OSes, outsourcing, security, games, legal rights, entertainment, general software and hardware, etc (see the topicspage!) then Slashdot is a great resource bringing them together.
If you like, you can bring your own interest (evidently including OSes) to slashdot by submitting stories and providing insightful and informative comments.
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Plan a simple system properly and the tool matters little. I could have done it in Oracle and C++ and it may have worked a little faster if I did that, but that would take longer. The trade off in my time was not worth it. Access and Excel work pretty well for what they were designed for... for a very complex system it would pay off to use more advanced tools as the cost in development is low compared to the costs of running it (efficient and fast algorithms, for example).
But planning from the minimum total cost perspective is essential, and essentially missing from in house work!
CIO stands for Chief Investment Officer. The retarded often do not understand this. In simple terms.
Mentioning retarded, here is a little tip in HTML:
If you want to post a link, encompass it in tags. So type:
<a href="YOUR URL HERE">LINK TEXT HERE<a>
Where capitals shows you where to put things.
For text in bold, use <b>TEXT</b>, italics <i>TEXT</i>.
I hope you find this useful in your apparant customary spreading-of-shit posts.
Goodbye.
That's what they want you to think.
But it really means Chief Iguana Ordinance. [Please note my slapdash emboldening of letters in emulation of the parent]
The real head of the project has been firing iguanas for the last few years but secretly remaining in power, as people, wrongly, think Chief Information Officers are being fired (how can someone be the chief of information anyway - do they sit around all dat loking at numbers on paper saying "I am your Chief"??? NO THEY DON'T! BECAUSE YOU ARE WRONG!!!!)
BZZT! WRONG!
WRONG!
WRONG!
WRONG!
WRONG!
WRONG!
But what the heck is CIO
CIO = Chief Investment Officer (the one who decides where to invest money). More applicable to investment management companies than the government or regular corps, which are more likely to have the CIO absorbed into the CFO.
FYI:
CEO = Chief Executive Officer (head of the executive, the executive being the top layer of management and oversight within the company)
CFO = Chief Financial Officer (in charge of counting beans)
CTO = Chief Technology Officer (in charge of technology decisions etc)
There you go!
Don't deal with contractors and subcontractors or if you do, make sure that the IRS is actively involved with management and funding of the project.
.com startup. It will have a staid IT and development division - the hot bright sharp talent will not be there - they'll be challenging themselves and being rewarded for it in a specialist company. The IRS IT and devopment divisions will consist of career IT people who are not very good and have built themselves into ivory towers. The reason they use a multitude of data formats and code from the 60s is because that is what they knew when they entered - they got a cushy earner and don't see the point in continual learning or development. Then finally when they have to implement a new project they'll try to do it themselves instead of taking a compay who make a tried-and-tested off-the-shelf product and adapting it to the more unique requirements of the government. Then when all goes wrong the head of division resigns but the staff who have built up a culture of complacency and arogance stay on and the same happens over and over - start fresh or pick up the pieces, it is the same crap staff ding the work.
/. and I'll get slated, but I needed something fast, my point of being there was not to implement a database and they had no other software licenced).
While I agree the IRS should be involved with the active management (well, at a strategy and audit level) using in-house development is the kiss of death.
This is the IRS, not some young
Not all of the government is the same, but the vast majority is. Dried up programmers protecting their lack of skills and ambition, clinging to their nice earner.
The source of my strong feeling? I worked in a government department implementing a new database system... nothing complex at all, just stored monthly data and compiled some percentages of this data. Budget was $1m, time to implementation 2 years. Final outcome? $3m in costs with a 3 year over-run. And hey, I was not on the IT team, I was a user! BTW: The old system was on a DEC and had worked fine for 20 years, the decision to upgrade was taken so we could go all TCP/IP and the DEC wasn't!!!!!!!!!
When I moved division I found a need for a similar system (their record keeping amounted to MS Word documents with tables in and a calculator in hand for the percentages). I took me a month to do it from database engine to fully functional query and data analysis system. Hey, I used Access (for data storage) and Excel (querying via SQL) to do it, all via VBA of course (yeah, this is
In house development is usually a bad thing because in-house IT staff tend to be old, dead wood.
"When disks are so cheap, is it worth my time permantly deleting it" is the (new) old line.
And I agree with it.
I have emails in my 'deleted' box, but there is no pernament delete. I want everything 'just in case' as $100 for an xGB section of a hard disk array is a cheap price for this age of accountability.
The UK doesn't have 3G. It has a company called '3' which promises 3G technology one day, but if you buy a 3G phone on contract now you are buying a 2.5/3G phone and a GRPS contract. That's right, a '3' phone is a 2.5G service. They hope to roll out a 3G service later this year, in limited areas.
So 3G is not failing in the UK - IT IS NOT IN THE UK! They like to keep this under wraps - I only noticed as I am a shareholder of PCCW. Go into your nearest '3' store and demand an answer.
Looking further afield, 2.5G services has become hugely popular in S. Korea, to the cost of those companies which bought the 3G licences. I don't think it is a technology sweeping the public over thing, rather public picking and choosing the technology as they like - th the moment they don't like.
BTW - 3G contracts are not a cost of the networks, they are passed wholly onto mobile users (present users are paying interest on debt the phone companies built up right now) - they are a tax on the mobile phone.
1 of 3. I do have a nice tight ass. Do you have a loose ass?
No it's not acceptable.
To equate this to an evolution of language shows your retardation in general communication.
seems to be a phb
OK, so the RAND() function sucks, but it can serve as a way of example. Perhaps a list of audited random numbers would be better?
In no way is the underlying math hidden - the VBA code is there for all to see. If a copy of each run is needed (auditable) a text log file of all results could be very easily spun off during the simulation.
The parent talks about 'Value-at-Risk' so I assume their specialism is finance. Finance (most investment companies and investment banks) moved away from FORTRAN a while ago and now uses bespoke C++ for the serious work and VBA for the interface/calling.
Certainly pre-made packages are not desirable for everyday work (the point is to produce something better and incorporate new ideas - an ends as much as a means to an ends) and pointless for a teaching tool.
Why not have the input values on one sheet, diffs on another (for running diffs many times in whatever way you wanted you could save them to a 3 dimensional matrix 'in the background' (non-observable)) and have a final sheet which incorporated these (or weighted vectors of your matrix)? This way you'd get what you want and others could too (if they wanted 4 or dimensions in their parameters, for example).
Pretty simple.
Trouble is, Excel encourages people to think in 2 dimensions. A little VBA and creativity, although it doesn't mix easy and tastes nasty, goes a long way.
As long as it hasn't been saved as an image along the way there are many PDF > CSV converters. Many spreadsheets are converted to PDF by 3rd parties because of licence restrictions (such as them only being allowed to distribute a 'published' product, no source).
Well, a knife can kill just as well as a gun... equal capacity at close range. And many criminals in the UK carry guns (perhaps more organised, but remember that spate of killings recently via gun for mobile phones... some killed were kids).
I find a gun scarier (on an emotional level), but having trained in kung fu for the past 8 years at short distance (up to 12" beyond arm length) I don't see much difference in the lethality of a gun and a knife in the hand of a determined criminal upon Joe Average. I guess what it comes down to is that it is easy to pull a trigger but an inexperienced attacked may hesitate killing with their own hand. Still... a knife is deadly (deep stab in the thigh equals dead in 30 seconds... slash across the throat equals dead in seconds... stab in the belly could mean dead in 2 minutes... stab in the chest could puncture all four chambers of your heart - seconds).
hmmmmm.... you take a little of fact, elaborate it and blend it in with an unconnected argument. You are either a political science student in desperate need of a thesis or plain ignoring conjuncture.
I live in the area and allis working fine. ~120k lines is not even near all of Manchester. Though I did notice UT04 central internet server was not working earlier I can't believe this is solely dependent on the gay area of Manchester.
Communism in Russia was taken down due to glasnost spreading to the populations, but perestroika not spreading so quickly causing popular revolt due to the intellectual influence and the initial presess of glasnost. In China the transition contains more perestroika-like benefits, perhaps because of the more aggressive adoption of a market economy and the more rapid spread of improvement of general standard of living (reducing the incentive to look elsewhere for political reform).
Q: Why are the chinese communists so afraid of free exchange of ideas and criticism?
A: They're afraid they'll have to give up power and find real jobs.
OK, so they have not decided to offer full democracy to everyone and are maintaining control on the strings of power.
Good. The last thing we need is a nuclear nation of 1.2bn (last UN estimate) plunged into democracy.
Why?
Because, as Plato pointed out over 2000 years ago, democracy is a dangerous thing. The populace can be taken advantage of - note the cultural revolution was supported by the majority when millions were killed, so was the Russian revolution which supported Lenin's oppression and later Stalin's. China's population are unversed in the hypocrasy and 2-faced-ness democracy brings... there will be popularists who will only be too eager to take power. A tyranny is never good, but a tyranny that sees its failures and is moving on is better.
Personally, I'd prefer a China which was promoting a market economy, promoting (and a#enacting) political reform (MASSIVE progress since Den Xiao Ping) and moving steadily towards democracy, rather than jumping in the deep end. Saying that, I am concerned about the overtures of beijing regarding HK's basic law in recent weeks.
I thoroughly recommend you read Plato's 'The Republic' - not a hard read but a concise critic of democracy and its pitfalls.
Except the production of hydrogen is not all that ultra clean.
Speed is a number and velocity is a vector. So an escape velocity can vary in speed as the angle of escape changes.
If space rockets are perpendicular (well, they're not really) to the tangent of the atmosphere on exit, their speed still has to be enough to let them escape, but this speed can be really low - I take it implicitly you mean the firing of the rocket is necessary to overcome gravity rather than to reach a certain speed. Conversly, planes in the outer atmosphere can go really fast (speed) but as their velocity does not have a vector pointing upwards they won't exit.
Acceleration has little to do with it other than making the escape more efficient (of course the rocket changing vector is also acceleration).
Yes, as long as people take the trouble to view these other sources. While some may seek out alternative websites most read CNN, MSNBC or whatever is on the front page of AOL. People that seek out news and opinion are likely to do it whatever the delivery form (as another poster pointed out, the BBC is available on cable channels, long range radio, etc).
Active empowerment is necessary to make a real difference, and barring the BBC sending out spam or employing pop-up advertising that won't happen. What made the difference in the 60s was not the spread of television (in itself) as expsure to the television medium was already high, but rather the networks started to question the government line, ask questions and source directly from what indepedent (well, of view if not of employ) sources they could.
Sadly, questioning and insightful journalism seems largely forgotten, or subordinated in the name of the latest profit model.
The coloured one looks like a dinosaur to me, which was totally consistent with the name FireBird as birds evolved from dinosaurs, and the colour was red (like fire). Now I'm left thinking why fox when there's a pic of a dinosaur?
Yeah. Good on you using google. Great way to quote a load of crackpots, ahem, vested interest individuals/organisation (note that google sucks for filtering facts from misinformation - people who shout louder have less to base their arguments on etc).
/.!
If you are a student of a university then please visit the recommended reading list of the nearest environmental science course, rather than vested interest establishments (nor the the source of infinite ignorance that is Google) and pop down to the local library with it. If your local college does not have any suggestions I suggest Perman: Natural Resource and Environmental Economics, Cropper and Oates: Environmental Economics or Markandya and Richardson: The Erthscan Reader in Environmental Economics.
Read on and lose the chain of google - remember many of those that populate it of links are crazy peope or corporate vested interestes. Take or review an academic course - there is no free lunch, even
I think one of the String Theories will prevail...
err... the string theories have been shown to be consistent.
Slashdot is a news aggregator, not an originator. If you want the latest OS-related news then read it on OSnews and similar sites, but if you want a broad mix of the mst important/interesting stories covering as wide (but nerd and OSource slanted) topics as OSes, outsourcing, security, games, legal rights, entertainment, general software and hardware, etc (see the topicspage!) then Slashdot is a great resource bringing them together.
If you like, you can bring your own interest (evidently including OSes) to slashdot by submitting stories and providing insightful and informative comments.