Background: I worked for 7 years in TV/Radio IT. Joined when our dept. was very small (3 people: me in support, a network manager and an IT director) and the company was one (national) TV channel. When I left IT was over 50 people, over a dozen TV channels, several high-traffic websites and dozens of radio stations. I was the technology director for New Media when I left (so you can tell how long ago that was... "New Media").
You will find as your company grows the need for IT will become more obvious:
Do you want your broadcast engineers researching, acquiring, training and maintaining non-broadcast systems like accounting and payroll software, CRM, and email? Is that the best use of company resources?
Do you want your broadcast engineers implementing security policies for your corporate workforce?
What about maintaining non-broadcast hardware like printers for HR and new monitors for the folks in finance?
Not to mention traditional desktop support. You going to send the guy who troubleshoots the satellite up-link to fix the malware on the VP's laptop?
There are dozens of things like this. The thing is, if you ask any broadcast engineer, they will tell you they can and should be handling this, largely because they have been doing it until now. In our case it was a protracted battle to wrench these things away from broadcast operations, but we had a very savvy and strong-willed IT director who would not back down from a fight. What we ended up with was IT (reporting into the finance VP at the time, now into the CTO) overseeing everything that is not directly related to broadcast operations, and Operations controlling their own network and machines, editing suites, AS/400 and specialty hardware that only they used.
What we realized was there were actually very few points where these two entities overlap, and since neither side wanted much to do with the other anyway it all worked out well in the end.
Oh FFS! The statement "the conditions on this planet, at some point during its history, were exactly right for life to spontaneously form here" is NOT A THEORY! It proposes nothing and does not model anything. How can you compare that to a scientific theory, like evolution, which EXPLAINS something, proposes a model for it's process, and is falsifiable?
At best, your statement is an extreme simplification of the anthropic principle, which in itself is not a scientific theory, but something more like an axiom.
But even if we take your "theory" as a theory, it is falsifiable: If it's false then you wouldn't be here.
Re:dear libertarians and tea baggers:
on
Health Care Reform
·
· Score: 3, Informative
socialized heath care is everything but good heath care.
Canadian here.
I've been following this all pretty closely. And as soon as the public option is off the table, I just have to sit back and laugh. Conservatives/Libertarians/name-your-right-wing-group-member just don't get it, and never will. I almost understand. It's baked into the fabric of America. Take advantage by any means necessary to gain wealth no matter what the ramifications. Case in point - insurance-based healthcare.
What is good health care and what is bad heath care? Go ask these four people: A poor American, a poor Canadian, a rich American, and a rich Canadian.
Rich American: I have the best heath care in the world. We have the best doctors, no wait times, and access to the latest technology. Why, I had a triple bypass last year and I feel great! Only cost me $90,000, but worth every penny!
Rich Canadian: I have great health care! Doctors are always available and treatment is top-notch. I get to choose my physicians and everything! I went in for a triple bypass last year. Didn't have to wait for it. Cost? What do you mean?
Poor Canadian: (see above)
Poor American: I have a heart condition and need a triple bypass. I can't afford that and my employer-provided insurance doesn't cover it. They do cover the heart medication I'm on though, which is expensive. Unfortunately, I have to keep this shitty job at Meijers to keep it, even though I'm tired all the time and should probably be at home resting. Hopefully, things will get better. Oh shit... I just died.
And for all those who think socialized medicine is evil, well I guess the rest of the world is just evil and America is, as it always was, the epitome of "good".
Oh, and BTW, since you already have socialized postal, fire, school and police services, you should return those. They are evil.
Just imagine a society where someone's house is burning down and the fire dept. checked to see if you had insurance before dispatching a truck. It boggles the mind.
How about being able to target.NET 1.1, 2.0, 3.0, or 3.5? I thought that was pretty significant. Before, if you wanted to target.NET 1.1, you had to use VS 2003. If you wanted to target 2.0, you had to use 2005. With 2008, you can target any of them.
Not exactly. You can't target any pre-2.0 framework with VS 2005/08/10. It's unfortunate, and is the reason our developers still have to keep a copy of VS 2002 around. There was a community attempt to write a MSBuild extension that could target fw 1.1, but I'm not sure what the status of it is.
The thing I don't understand is why folks seem disappointed with Obama's victory because things won't (or can't) change on the level he's proposing. Do they feel that McCain would be able to bring about this (or some equivalent amount of) change, and somehow Obama cannot?
If the landscape for the next term is more or less fixed for either candidate, then why the disappointment? Isn't it enough to have a President who can inspire the populace (even with empty rhetoric) and accomplish little, rather than one who does not inspire and also accomplish little?
Well... it might "change the world" as much as Gmail changed the world for non-corporate email. They may (should?) be targeting this as a replacement for home users installations of MS office, where a corporate level of security is not deemed as neccessary (although, it's arguable that it should be required).
I for one, would be interested in an functional online replacement for MS Office for personal use, and continue using an offline suite for work where I control where the data is. I'm guessing there are a lot of folks like me around.
A more interesting question is Ajax or Java.
I was a technical manager on the CNIB (Canadian National Institute for the Blind) "Children's Discovery Portal". This is the children's interface into the larger CNIB Digital Library initiative that provides digital access to the entire CNIB audio archive, including newspapers and magazines. It's a free service to CNIB members.
The project was sponsered to a large extent by Microsoft. They threw millions at it. Not surprisingly, the entire infrastructure around it consists of MS technology (interfacing with the legacy CNIB user data). We're talking W2K3 Servers, IIS, SQL,.NET, even Commerce Server to provide users with book recomendations (a la Amazon.com). WMV was even chosen for the streaming audio format.
The sole browser/screenreader combo targeted is IE/JAWS.
I can tell you, JAWS was not chosen for any sort of advanced features or (percieved) usability. From an implentation POV, it's a nightmare. It's archaic software that is very picky in what/how it reads. It predates browsers and does not play well with pages that are not specifically designed for it. That said, the only reason it was targeted for the project is that it is the de-facto standard screenreader for the blind community. It's been around so long that it's ubiquitous. And as bad as it is, the kids use it intuitively and to it's fullest extent. I couldn't believe how fast they had JAWS cranked up (it was reading the screen at something like 10x speed) and they jump around the page using the keyboard controls faster then I (a sighted person) could read what was on the screen! Really something.
Anyway, love it or hate it, it seems like JAWS will stick around for at least a while yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm... tried that. Clears for me. I'm using Ultimate build 9200.
Background: I worked for 7 years in TV/Radio IT. Joined when our dept. was very small (3 people: me in support, a network manager and an IT director) and the company was one (national) TV channel. When I left IT was over 50 people, over a dozen TV channels, several high-traffic websites and dozens of radio stations. I was the technology director for New Media when I left (so you can tell how long ago that was... "New Media").
You will find as your company grows the need for IT will become more obvious:
There are dozens of things like this. The thing is, if you ask any broadcast engineer, they will tell you they can and should be handling this, largely because they have been doing it until now. In our case it was a protracted battle to wrench these things away from broadcast operations, but we had a very savvy and strong-willed IT director who would not back down from a fight. What we ended up with was IT (reporting into the finance VP at the time, now into the CTO) overseeing everything that is not directly related to broadcast operations, and Operations controlling their own network and machines, editing suites, AS/400 and specialty hardware that only they used.
What we realized was there were actually very few points where these two entities overlap, and since neither side wanted much to do with the other anyway it all worked out well in the end.
He's Canadian and over 80 years old so he remembers when Canada was on the Imperial system.
You make it sound like Canadian metrication is some distant memory. I'm 39 and I remember Imperial quite well from the late 70's.
Oh FFS! The statement "the conditions on this planet, at some point during its history, were exactly right for life to spontaneously form here" is NOT A THEORY! It proposes nothing and does not model anything. How can you compare that to a scientific theory, like evolution, which EXPLAINS something, proposes a model for it's process, and is falsifiable?
At best, your statement is an extreme simplification of the anthropic principle, which in itself is not a scientific theory, but something more like an axiom. But even if we take your "theory" as a theory, it is falsifiable: If it's false then you wouldn't be here.
socialized heath care is everything but good heath care.
Canadian here.
I've been following this all pretty closely. And as soon as the public option is off the table, I just have to sit back and laugh. Conservatives/Libertarians/name-your-right-wing-group-member just don't get it, and never will. I almost understand. It's baked into the fabric of America. Take advantage by any means necessary to gain wealth no matter what the ramifications. Case in point - insurance-based healthcare.
What is good health care and what is bad heath care? Go ask these four people: A poor American, a poor Canadian, a rich American, and a rich Canadian.
And for all those who think socialized medicine is evil, well I guess the rest of the world is just evil and America is, as it always was, the epitome of "good".
Oh, and BTW, since you already have socialized postal, fire, school and police services, you should return those. They are evil.
Just imagine a society where someone's house is burning down and the fire dept. checked to see if you had insurance before dispatching a truck. It boggles the mind.
How about being able to target .NET 1.1, 2.0, 3.0, or 3.5? I thought that was pretty significant. Before, if you wanted to target .NET 1.1, you had to use VS 2003. If you wanted to target 2.0, you had to use 2005. With 2008, you can target any of them.
Not exactly. You can't target any pre-2.0 framework with VS 2005/08/10. It's unfortunate, and is the reason our developers still have to keep a copy of VS 2002 around. There was a community attempt to write a MSBuild extension that could target fw 1.1, but I'm not sure what the status of it is.
The thing I don't understand is why folks seem disappointed with Obama's victory because things won't (or can't) change on the level he's proposing. Do they feel that McCain would be able to bring about this (or some equivalent amount of) change, and somehow Obama cannot? If the landscape for the next term is more or less fixed for either candidate, then why the disappointment? Isn't it enough to have a President who can inspire the populace (even with empty rhetoric) and accomplish little, rather than one who does not inspire and also accomplish little?
Well... it might "change the world" as much as Gmail changed the world for non-corporate email. They may (should?) be targeting this as a replacement for home users installations of MS office, where a corporate level of security is not deemed as neccessary (although, it's arguable that it should be required). I for one, would be interested in an functional online replacement for MS Office for personal use, and continue using an offline suite for work where I control where the data is. I'm guessing there are a lot of folks like me around. A more interesting question is Ajax or Java.
I was a technical manager on the CNIB (Canadian National Institute for the Blind) "Children's Discovery Portal". This is the children's interface into the larger CNIB Digital Library initiative that provides digital access to the entire CNIB audio archive, including newspapers and magazines. It's a free service to CNIB members.
.NET, even Commerce Server to provide users with book recomendations (a la Amazon.com). WMV was even chosen for the streaming audio format.
The project was sponsered to a large extent by Microsoft. They threw millions at it. Not surprisingly, the entire infrastructure around it consists of MS technology (interfacing with the legacy CNIB user data). We're talking W2K3 Servers, IIS, SQL,
The sole browser/screenreader combo targeted is IE/JAWS.
I can tell you, JAWS was not chosen for any sort of advanced features or (percieved) usability. From an implentation POV, it's a nightmare. It's archaic software that is very picky in what/how it reads. It predates browsers and does not play well with pages that are not specifically designed for it. That said, the only reason it was targeted for the project is that it is the de-facto standard screenreader for the blind community. It's been around so long that it's ubiquitous. And as bad as it is, the kids use it intuitively and to it's fullest extent. I couldn't believe how fast they had JAWS cranked up (it was reading the screen at something like 10x speed) and they jump around the page using the keyboard controls faster then I (a sighted person) could read what was on the screen! Really something.
Anyway, love it or hate it, it seems like JAWS will stick around for at least a while yet.
For what it's worth, Sympatico has dropped it's bandwidh cap as of July 4th.