On the night that the final episode of the 2nd series was first broadcast on the BBC my wife went into labour and we rushed off to the maternity ward, taking a radio with us. We were able to listen to the episode just before my son was born.
So it was inevitable that my son would grow up to be an active contributer to the H2G2 website... what I didn't expect was that the new Doctor Who would copy my son's Manchester dress sense !
Of course some companies (think MS) even have worldwide "launch" events yet never deliver their "secure OS". Even more amazingly, they get customers to pay big bucks to "upgrade" (re-grade? regress?) from one non-delivered product to another non-delivered product.
In much of the UK's Local Government the introduction of "document management systems" is posing a great threat to future accessabilty of information and records, for, while incoming snail mail is scanned and stored on WORM media, the majority of records and documents are now computer generated, mainly by MS Word.
These Word documents are being stored on DVDs and CDs that are claimed to have a long storage life. Unfortunately neither MS nor the system suppliers will offer any guarantees that the information on them can be read beyond the current version of MS Office. MS depends on people continually buying new versions and so has no incentive to keep old formats.
Already we have Councils where the rich departments (like Legal) have Office XP while the poor departments (roads, parks) are still on Office 97. Legal can read Parks docs but not the other way round.... and Legal often gets asked to amend docs.
When you suggest the use of an open standard like XML they say "but MS Office is a de-facto standard!". So was WordPerfect once...
>>f someone could come over here and offer high speed, reliable, uncapped broadband internet access to the home for a reasonable price, they would absolutely conquer the market.
You seem to have limited your idea of Broadband to services using BT's phoneline connections.
Blueyonder offers reliable uncapped broadband at a reasonable price... but conquering the market is not possible except where cable exists.
That plans to sue the Government at all levels for the provision and maintenance of roads.. They have indisputable proof that this "roads" infrastrucure has been used in over 80% of all crimes.
In the days of 4-GLs I prototyped a number of Ingres apps. As well as learning to produce not-so-pretty prototypes, I also used QUEL as the query languge. Once they had agreed the basic functionality i could mention that it used the "non-standard" QUEL rather than SQL. "Oh you'll have to change that" they'd say, giving me an excuse to throw away the prototype and start again for the real app.
I was hired in the early 80's to spend time at a number of big UK defence contractors to identify why the software projects were all failing or being "completed" 3 or 4 years late.
I can agree with most of the points, especially about inappropriate technologies and methodologies, but it seems that one of the most important factors has been missed completely : the human factor.
Regardless of the other factors, on the worst projects the developers were treated just as "resources"... plug in humans who didn't matter because they were easily replaceable. There was little attempt to involve them in the project by asking there views on on the design or the development process. This resulted so often in the project management missing out on experience (both how to do things and how not to do them) that could have smoothed the development, as well as establishing an us-and-them division that reduced the chances of the developers responding positively to problems.
After my work the big companies introduced formal project management methodologies and better development technologies, but this did little to change the outcomes.. The previously bad projects now had all the documentation and signed-off specs to show that everything was ok, yet still produced non-working software. The previously well run projects were now taking less time but tended not to produce all the needed documents,
The "resource" view of development so often results in applying the wrong developers to the different parts of the project. Some developers enjoy particular bits of the development and some are just good at certain things. On the converse good developers can have weaknesses in certain parts of the process but can perform brilliantly when paired with someone who is good in those areas. To find these things out requires talking with the developers as if they are people rather that resource units in MS Project.
Developers can usually spot things going wrong with a project long before it shows up on the project monitoring tools, but find it frustrating that they cannot influence the management to avoid the impending problems. Too often they found that all their managers wanted were their timesheet figures, a situation made much worse if contract programmers were being used..
Re:All those Startrek, Stargate and Galactica Geek
on
TV Piracy is Next
·
· Score: 1
The original Startrek cast had contracts that paid them for the original US transmission and one repeat. Just think of how much money the studio has made from all the repeat showings of Startrek... without having to pay the cast anything (the movies were thought up as a way of making some money for the cast as well as the studio)
Actors learnt from the Startrek fiasco and now insist that if the studios are going to make money from repeats then some of it will come their way as well.
The BBC, apparantly operating to a higher ethical standard, chooses to reward even thos radio and TV performers who have no contractual right to a repeat fee. Even when the BBC is repeating in-house productions at no real cost, it uses an estimate of how much it would have cost to make a new program to fill the time being filled by the old one
All those Startrek, Stargate and Galactica Geeks
on
TV Piracy is Next
·
· Score: 4, Informative
All those Startrek, Stargate and Galactica Geeks probably have PCs (even Macs maybe) and are into P2P filesharing.
Major TV series are usually broadcast in the US well ahead of their UK and european dates. When "Enterprise" first aired in the states, months ahead of its arrival in the UK, there was considerable traffic in DivX copies of the episodes. The same thing didn't happen with the latest series of Stargate because of the lack of reasonably small copies.
The "protection" that DVD producers have to stop the US discs playing outside the US didn't stop online sharing. Now the same thing is happening with regionally transmitted TV.
The TV producers are also worried because so much content goes on on subscription channels, so free access costs them profits.
It interesting that the BBC, who provide programs free here in the UK are worried by transatlantic access . They are about to provide free access to their program archives but have two problems..
1) The UK taxpayer pays for the programs to be made and expects that non-UK viewers should pay for access.
2) the BBC is very good about paying appearance money to actors appearing in old programs reshown on TV. They want to find a way of compensating actors for online distribution.
Here in the UK drivers caught by speed cameras successfully claimed that it would be a breach of human rights (self incrimination) if they were to admit who was driving the car at the time of the offence.
Newer cameras now take pictures from the front and I believe the law was changed to get driver's details
Has much thought been given to the quantity of data involved and how long it will it need to be archived ?
Accidents happen very quickly and so, to be useful in accident analysis, readings would have to be taken many times a second. Readings would probably include wheel position, accelerator position, braking state, grip, suspension movement, temperature, weather(!) as well as all the internal readings from inside the engine. This could amount to a considerable stream of data.
How would this data be stored ? Solid state or hard drive ? Would there need to be a mandatory minimum size for the log? One week's data or one year? Could it be an offence not to have enough capacity?
Would the on-board log wrap round or would it get reset? Could the driver reset the log? Would it be an offence to reset the log immediately after an accident?
If the log was used for maintaining the car would the garage doing the servicing have to download the log? Would they have to pass on details to the police? Would you be allowed to carry out servicing at home or only at "authorised" garages?
In imagining uses for this log it is interesting to note the differences between the US and the UK when it comes to the use of aircraft "black boxes". US airlines are required to record a minimal set of parameters and then these are used as part of any crash investigation. UK airlines, on the other hand, are required to record hundreds of parameters and each log has to undergo computer analysis after every flight. This analysis looks for values (or combinations) outside normal ranges and is used to trigger preventative maintenance and more detailed safety inspections.
Just look at the latest movie about King Arthur. Its apparently based on a true story, yet he lived a life based so closely on Akira Kurosawa's epic "Seven Samurai" that he must have had an early copy of the DVD. But how could he have played it ?
As a Roman (real name Lucius Artorius Castus) sent to Britain to maintain the information superhighway he obvious had access to open sores hardware (blade?) and used his knowledge to put together a hard discus system (Luciux) to run his DVD deCSS player on..
Centuries later, when Torvalds modified the system to use binary instead of Roman Numerals, the name was sneakily changed to Linux..
If we are talking mechanical here, then it is usually recognised that Charles Babbage's "Analytical Engine" was the first mechanical computer long before IBM came into existence selling punched card "collators". Babbage's earlier "Difference Engine" was not general purpose, having been designed to calculate mathematical tables.
There is an IBM link in how Babbage programmed his computer (rather ADA lovelace did the programming). The Jacquard Mechanical Loom used punched cards to control the pattern woven into the cloth. Babbage decided to use these punched cards as his imput mechanism, an idea later taken up by IBM.
Of course there are those who would say that Babbage got the idea for his computer from examining Thomas Fowler's earlier wooden calculator
The Guinness Book of Records examined all the evidence from both sides and awarded this certificate . They accept that, although UNIVAC was produced commercially a few weeks ahead of LEO, the LEO was the first computer designed for business use and the first actually used for business.
Remind you that the LEO [Lyons Electronic Office] was the first real "commercial" computer... in that it did commercial/business work.. 53 years ago it was processing bakery orders and development of stock-control software was in progress.
being the first required the invention of a number of other computing aspects such as line-printers and fast tape input.
UNIVAC may have been produced commercially but it was used by mathermaticians.
This service is only provided with Boeing aircraft and only from Munich yet Lufhansa's non-stop Munich to LA service is operated by Airbus aircraft.
So obviously they are going to have to fly a Boeing alongside the Airbus (within 300metres). I can't see how they are going to cover the Boeing's costs from 10 people paying $30 each.
Maybe they could use one of those Boeing air-tankers and extend the service range to australia non-stop?
Or maybe the Boeing is a stealth flight flying in the Airbus's radar shadow? Black Boeing being met at LA by black helicopters ??
What you want from a distribution and therefore what you want the review to cover does depend on the target audience.
At one end we might have the totally PC-illiterate but more likely is the person who has used a computer that has MS Windows installed, had used Office and IE, but isn't interested in the mechanics of how it all works.
at the other end is probably the guy (its usually a guy) who has assembled his own PCs (he has at least 4 at any time) and will insist on using Vi and text-only installs for the basic installation and then compile and install each application by hand.
The newbie probably doesn't want to know the sticky details, just about how easy it is to install without any brainwork on their part (like partitioning and mount points). They want to know how many applications are installed and how easy it is to find them. They may even want to know how easy it is to find other applications and get them working on their PC.
the other guy believes the people who can't use Man pages or install libraries and edit config files shouldn't be banned from using Linux anyway. They want to know about the Kernel and application versions; what libraries are included, etc.
Then of course there is the subset of those who want assurance that everything is GPL'd.
A review that satisfies the first type would probably bore the pants of the 2nd type.. Likewise a review aimed at the latter type would be confusing and unhelpful to the newbie.
so maybe the question should be "what range of reviews are needed?"
One of worse aspects of spreadsheet usage is when some Excel "guru" in a small department creates an Excel "application" to provide his department with some functionality that is not being provided by the corporate IT people. Often this spreadsheet will, after months or years become critical to somebody's decision making process.
It becomes a source of business information that is local when it might be of use to those running the company
Unfortunately it is usually stored on a local hard drive and is neither available to the company nor backed up. If the hard drive should fail, the department panics and starts blaming the IT support staff for not protecting this "important" application that they knew nothing about.
Another scenario, shared with users of Access, is the the call to support from a desperate manager "we had this spreadsheet/database. we've been using it for 2 years. the guy who set it up left last month. its not working. my department can't function without it.. YOU MUST FIX IT NOW!!!!"
Slashdot Mirror
On the night that the final episode of the 2nd series was first broadcast on the BBC my wife went into labour and we rushed off to the maternity ward, taking a radio with us. We were able to listen to the episode just before my son was born.
... what I didn't expect was that the new Doctor Who would copy my son's Manchester dress sense !
So it was inevitable that my son would grow up to be an active contributer to the H2G2 website
That must be it ....
Of course some companies (think MS) even have worldwide "launch" events yet never deliver their "secure OS". Even more amazingly, they get customers to pay big bucks to "upgrade" (re-grade? regress?) from one non-delivered product to another non-delivered product.
In much of the UK's Local Government the introduction of "document management systems" is posing a great threat to future accessabilty of information and records, for, while incoming snail mail is scanned and stored on WORM media, the majority of records and documents are now computer generated, mainly by MS Word.
.... and Legal often gets asked to amend docs.
These Word documents are being stored on DVDs and CDs that are claimed to have a long storage life. Unfortunately neither MS nor the system suppliers will offer any guarantees that the information on them can be read beyond the current version of MS Office. MS depends on people continually buying new versions and so has no incentive to keep old formats.
Already we have Councils where the rich departments (like Legal) have Office XP while the poor departments (roads, parks) are still on Office 97. Legal can read Parks docs but not the other way round
When you suggest the use of an open standard like XML they say "but MS Office is a de-facto standard!". So was WordPerfect once...
it has a long way to go to catch Dr Who ... though it might be up with Blake's Seven
A Patriot is someone who loves their country, while
A Nationalist is someone who hates everybody else's countries.
>>f someone could come over here and offer high speed, reliable, uncapped broadband internet access to the home for a reasonable price, they would absolutely conquer the market. You seem to have limited your idea of Broadband to services using BT's phoneline connections. Blueyonder offers reliable uncapped broadband at a reasonable price... but conquering the market is not possible except where cable exists.
and if there were no electricity supply, how could anyone use a computer to steal copyrighted material ?
That plans to sue the Government at all levels for the provision and maintenance of roads .. They have indisputable proof that this "roads" infrastrucure has been used in over 80% of all crimes.
In the days of 4-GLs I prototyped a number of Ingres apps. As well as learning to produce not-so-pretty prototypes, I also used QUEL as the query languge. Once they had agreed the basic functionality i could mention that it used the "non-standard" QUEL rather than SQL. "Oh you'll have to change that" they'd say, giving me an excuse to throw away the prototype and start again for the real app.
Sadly QUEL was far better than SQL.
I was hired in the early 80's to spend time at a number of big UK defence contractors to identify why the software projects were all failing or being "completed" 3 or 4 years late.
... plug in humans who didn't matter because they were easily replaceable. There was little attempt to involve them in the project by asking there views on on the design or the development process. This resulted so often in the project management missing out on experience (both how to do things and how not to do them) that could have smoothed the development, as well as establishing an us-and-them division that reduced the chances of the developers responding positively to problems.
I can agree with most of the points, especially about inappropriate technologies and methodologies, but it seems that one of the most important factors has been missed completely : the human factor.
Regardless of the other factors, on the worst projects the developers were treated just as "resources"
After my work the big companies introduced formal project management methodologies and better development technologies, but this did little to change the outcomes.. The previously bad projects now had all the documentation and signed-off specs to show that everything was ok, yet still produced non-working software. The previously well run projects were now taking less time but tended not to produce all the needed documents,
The "resource" view of development so often results in applying the wrong developers to the different parts of the project. Some developers enjoy particular bits of the development and some are just good at certain things. On the converse good developers can have weaknesses in certain parts of the process but can perform brilliantly when paired with someone who is good in those areas. To find these things out requires talking with the developers as if they are people rather that resource units in MS Project. Developers can usually spot things going wrong with a project long before it shows up on the project monitoring tools, but find it frustrating that they cannot influence the management to avoid the impending problems. Too often they found that all their managers wanted were their timesheet figures, a situation made much worse if contract programmers were being used..
Actors learnt from the Startrek fiasco and now insist that if the studios are going to make money from repeats then some of it will come their way as well.
The BBC, apparantly operating to a higher ethical standard, chooses to reward even thos radio and TV performers who have no contractual right to a repeat fee. Even when the BBC is repeating in-house productions at no real cost, it uses an estimate of how much it would have cost to make a new program to fill the time being filled by the old one
Major TV series are usually broadcast in the US well ahead of their UK and european dates. When "Enterprise" first aired in the states, months ahead of its arrival in the UK, there was considerable traffic in DivX copies of the episodes. The same thing didn't happen with the latest series of Stargate because of the lack of reasonably small copies.
The "protection" that DVD producers have to stop the US discs playing outside the US didn't stop online sharing. Now the same thing is happening with regionally transmitted TV.
The TV producers are also worried because so much content goes on on subscription channels, so free access costs them profits.
It interesting that the BBC, who provide programs free here in the UK are worried by transatlantic access . They are about to provide free access to their program archives but have two problems..
1) The UK taxpayer pays for the programs to be made and expects that non-UK viewers should pay for access.
2) the BBC is very good about paying appearance money to actors appearing in old programs reshown on TV. They want to find a way of compensating actors for online distribution.
Here in the UK drivers caught by speed cameras successfully claimed that it would be a breach of human rights (self incrimination) if they were to admit who was driving the car at the time of the offence.
Newer cameras now take pictures from the front and I believe the law was changed to get driver's details
Has much thought been given to the quantity of data involved and how long it will it need to be archived ?
Accidents happen very quickly and so, to be useful in accident analysis, readings would have to be taken many times a second. Readings would probably include wheel position, accelerator position, braking state, grip, suspension movement, temperature, weather(!) as well as all the internal readings from inside the engine. This could amount to a considerable stream of data.
How would this data be stored ? Solid state or hard drive ? Would there need to be a mandatory minimum size for the log? One week's data or one year? Could it be an offence not to have enough capacity?
Would the on-board log wrap round or would it get reset? Could the driver reset the log? Would it be an offence to reset the log immediately after an accident?
If the log was used for maintaining the car would the garage doing the servicing have to download the log? Would they have to pass on details to the police? Would you be allowed to carry out servicing at home or only at "authorised" garages?
In imagining uses for this log it is interesting to note the differences between the US and the UK when it comes to the use of aircraft "black boxes". US airlines are required to record a minimal set of parameters and then these are used as part of any crash investigation. UK airlines, on the other hand, are required to record hundreds of parameters and each log has to undergo computer analysis after every flight. This analysis looks for values (or combinations) outside normal ranges and is used to trigger preventative maintenance and more detailed safety inspections.
Just look at the latest movie about King Arthur. Its apparently based on a true story, yet he lived a life based so closely on Akira Kurosawa's epic "Seven Samurai" that he must have had an early copy of the DVD. But how could he have played it ?
As a Roman (real name Lucius Artorius Castus) sent to Britain to maintain the information superhighway he obvious had access to open sores hardware (blade?) and used his knowledge to put together a hard discus system (Luciux) to run his DVD deCSS player on..
Centuries later, when Torvalds modified the system to use binary instead of Roman Numerals, the name was sneakily changed to Linux..
If we are talking mechanical here, then it is usually recognised that Charles Babbage's "Analytical Engine" was the first mechanical computer long before IBM came into existence selling punched card "collators". Babbage's earlier "Difference Engine" was not general purpose, having been designed to calculate mathematical tables. There is an IBM link in how Babbage programmed his computer (rather ADA lovelace did the programming). The Jacquard Mechanical Loom used punched cards to control the pattern woven into the cloth. Babbage decided to use these punched cards as his imput mechanism, an idea later taken up by IBM.
Of course there are those who would say that Babbage got the idea for his computer from examining Thomas Fowler's earlier wooden calculator
and the Yanks invented the bug !
The Guinness Book of Records examined all the evidence from both sides and awarded this certificate . They accept that, although UNIVAC was produced commercially a few weeks ahead of LEO, the LEO was the first computer designed for business use and the first actually used for business.
awarded this certificate to end the arguements.
Remind you that the LEO [Lyons Electronic Office] was the first real "commercial" computer ... in that it did commercial/business work .. 53 years ago it was processing bakery orders and development of stock-control software was in progress.
being the first required the invention of a number of other computing aspects such as line-printers and fast tape input.
UNIVAC may have been produced commercially but it was used by mathermaticians.
speak chinese ??
If we could get americans to speak "English", like the rest of the world does, it would be a good start !
This service is only provided with Boeing aircraft and only from Munich yet Lufhansa's non-stop Munich to LA service is operated by Airbus aircraft.
So obviously they are going to have to fly a Boeing alongside the Airbus (within 300metres). I can't see how they are going to cover the Boeing's costs from 10 people paying $30 each.
Maybe they could use one of those Boeing air-tankers and extend the service range to australia non-stop?
Or maybe the Boeing is a stealth flight flying in the Airbus's radar shadow? Black Boeing being met at LA by black helicopters ??
whilst the plane is in mid-atlantic, under which country's laws would the RIAA prosecute me ?
What you want from a distribution and therefore what you want the review to cover does depend on the target audience.
At one end we might have the totally PC-illiterate but more likely is the person who has used a computer that has MS Windows installed, had used Office and IE, but isn't interested in the mechanics of how it all works. at the other end is probably the guy (its usually a guy) who has assembled his own PCs (he has at least 4 at any time) and will insist on using Vi and text-only installs for the basic installation and then compile and install each application by hand.
The newbie probably doesn't want to know the sticky details, just about how easy it is to install without any brainwork on their part (like partitioning and mount points). They want to know how many applications are installed and how easy it is to find them. They may even want to know how easy it is to find other applications and get them working on their PC.
the other guy believes the people who can't use Man pages or install libraries and edit config files shouldn't be banned from using Linux anyway. They want to know about the Kernel and application versions; what libraries are included, etc. Then of course there is the subset of those who want assurance that everything is GPL'd.
A review that satisfies the first type would probably bore the pants of the 2nd type.. Likewise a review aimed at the latter type would be confusing and unhelpful to the newbie.
so maybe the question should be "what range of reviews are needed?"
One of worse aspects of spreadsheet usage is when some Excel "guru" in a small department creates an Excel "application" to provide his department with some functionality that is not being provided by the corporate IT people. Often this spreadsheet will, after months or years become critical to somebody's decision making process.
It becomes a source of business information that is local when it might be of use to those running the company
Unfortunately it is usually stored on a local hard drive and is neither available to the company nor backed up. If the hard drive should fail, the department panics and starts blaming the IT support staff for not protecting this "important" application that they knew nothing about.
Another scenario, shared with users of Access, is the the call to support from a desperate manager "we had this spreadsheet/database. we've been using it for 2 years. the guy who set it up left last month. its not working. my department can't function without it.. YOU MUST FIX IT NOW!!!!"