Eh... I'll give you that SP 1.0 was a steaming pile, but I can't think of 1.0 of anything Microsoft that was good, honestly. It did get better.
In a lot of ways Alfresco is playing perpetually-behind catch-up in the same way Open Office chases Office and the Gimp chases Photoshop. Sharepoint, at this point, has a lot more tied/folded into it than simple ECM.
That being said, almost all of the bigger Microsoft shops I've worked in were using Sharepoint, and at least half of them weren't using it for anything that Alfresco wouldn't easily do straight out of the box.
It's unfortunate for B&N, and it basically means that Amazon has managed to displace all of the big players by going on-line and selling literally everything. My wife is a regular Amazon shopper, because for price and convenience, she just orders the books and they appear -- usually within a day or so. I can't argue with the economics of buying from Amazon, but I can see the position B&N is in.
What makes this even worse is the move to eBooks.
If you order from Amazon and take the free shipping, you'll probably get your books within a week or so, whereas going to the local B&N could get you the book immediately. A lot of the time 'within a week or so' is plenty fast, but sometimes it's not.
Now Amazon's got the Kindle and B&N's got the Nook, and they each have their merits and strong points as devices relative to the other, so it seems like a non-game-changer, right?
Except now the Amazon delivery time has gone from about a week to instant, and the B&N delivery time is basically the asme.
Along the same lines, for Amazon to be its cheapest you needed free shipping, which in most cases required buying a couple books at the same time. If you only want to buy one book and not wait until you're wanting three, maybe it doesn't seem like such a difference to go to the B&N. But there again the Kindle solves that problem entirely for books that you'd like to read on it, and probably a lot of the kinds of books you wouldn't want on it are expensive enough to clear free shipping.
I probably was going to an extreme, yes. I do that sometimes.:)
My experience is that when this:
I know I get very little done being in the office all of the time, and generally if I work from home for a few days I usually get a hell of a lot done.
is true, usually it's because you have a lot of knowledge (platform/institutional/architecture/whatever) and the reason you get a lot more done out of the office is because other people interrupt you a lot with questions or for help. In other words, if you're home, you may be a lot more productive, but it's very possible that other people are a lot less productive.
So there's a balancing act there. How valuable is it to the team to have you able to bust something out uninterrupted? How valuable to the team is it for other people to not spin their wheels uselessly because they can't as easily/effectively get your help?
You are welcome to your opinion, but I don't think it reflects reality. There's a lot that's done with physical proximity that doesn't have a thing to do with scheduled meetings. If this isn't true for someone, in most lines of work, it means they either have terrible social skills or their value to the team is incredibly low to begin with.
And you know, maybe companies decide that it's cost effective to hire people to be 60% efficient as long as they also pay 0% of the office costs, but that still wouldn't mean that there isn't a huge value to having people be able to stand up and talk to each other face to face.
By business phone I mean a phone your employer provides you free of charge (to you) as part of your job, intended solely or primarily for you to use as part of that job. It's a piece of office equipment, essentially -- if you quit or are fired, you give it back.
Granted, my clients tend to be in industries like finance, manufacturing, health care, insurance, etc., and the people I'm talking about work in offices, not in retail -- but not a one of the people I've worked with in any of those verticals has an iPhone as their business phone, though many do for their own personal phone. 100% of these that I've encountered so far are either:
A) Not a smartphone. (Basically a phone that just makes phone calls.)
B) A Blackberry.
As I've admitted above, the plural of anecdotes ais not data, and the fact that I've worked in the last year or two with hundreds of people with business phones across a number of companies and not one is an iPhone does not mean that no one anywhere is using an iPhone for that purpose, but it really feels to me like Blackberry still has a ridiculous lock on that market.
Some people do work in silos; however, most office workers will not be as productive if they're not in close proximity to their team. Hell, I'm a programmer -- one of the most notoriously telecommuteable jobs -- and on almost every project I see huge productivity gains from being on site. Whether you need help or advice from peers, to corner a business user who doesn't want to make time for you and force them to talk you a business case, to see an end user reproduce a bug you can't, or whatever.
On one project I was working remotely as the sole developer on it -- pretty much the ideal telecommute case -- I probably got more done in the three days in which I flew out to the client site and worked closely with them than in the three weeks before it. Being able to so easily demo things, talk out problems, grab a whiteboard for five minutes to diagram something, and generally have a very tight and lossless feedback loop is a huge help.
Social and communication norms may reach a point in which that's less true, but we're not there yet if we'll ever be. You can get a lot farther today offsite than you could've a generation ago, because e-mail, IM, WebEx, and a whole slew of other technologies are big helps, but having close physical proximity to the various people your work depends on or whose work depends on you is still huge.
Yeah, the iPhone wasn't even close to being the #1 Smartphone in the US. That honor goes to Blackberry. So why compare to Apple? Ah, because it's cool to hate on Apple.
Slightly different markets. People have Blackberries for business, mostly. iPhones and Android phones are more personal consumer use products.
If we're going to ignore the business/personal distinction, then I'm going to hate on Macs for doing terribly in the business server market. You just can't win!:)
Out of curiousity, what do people typically have for business phones in Europe? Nokia?
My impression in America is that almost no one has a Blackberry for their personal phone, but that nearly every business smartphone is a Blackberry.
(Which also explains why it's interesting to talk about iPhone vs. Android -- they're currently seen as more "personal" phones, whereas Blackberry's market dominance is largely based on businesses, a market in which neither is remotely competitive with Blackberry yet.)
Or rather, the exclusivity deal between AT&T and Apple.
Anecdote: I had lunch over the weekend with a friend who lives in a part of the country that AT&T doesn't cover at all. He and his wife had seen other peoples' iPhones while travelling outside of that area, and all things being equal, would have preferred to buy iPhones, but couldn't. (Yes, they could have bought one someplace else, sucking up a useless contract, jailbreaking, etc., but come on -- that's not a real option for most people.) They ended up getting Android phones instead.
AT&T's commercials assert that it covers 97% of Americans, but if you live in or spend much time in one of the areas (more than 3% of the map) it doesn't cover, the iPhone loses by default even if Apple's marketing is successful.
I don't think they're good at marketing in the traditional sense. At this point, I really, honestly, truly suspect blackjack and hookers are responsible for these kinds of business decisions, because I can't see a rational agent wasting that much time and money doing it so horribly wrong.
I don't know that I'd go that far, although, Oracle, if this is true? I can be bought.
Somehow business decision makers have gotten this idea that Oracle is the best database and that serious businesses all use it. That, if they're a small business, that if their business is a success they'll need Oracle anyway, so why not go with it from the start? It would be a vote of no-confidence to try to cut corners on their database. (None of this makes sense to me, I've just heard some variation of one of these points a number of times when innocently asking my clients, so, why did you pick Oracle?)
Your observation about encouraging DBA as a profession is spot-on. At the places I've worked that were using SQL Server or MySQL, basically, there were few DBAs for many projects -- it was expected that developers would do all your basic database creation, write queries, define constraints, write procedures, etc. themselves and that DBA time was reserved solely for very DBA-ish tasks like the more complicated optimizations, data footprint/location on physical disk (there's probably a more concise name for that that I've forgotten), backups, etc. Compare that with the Oracle projects where, as you say, there are many more DBAs per project and DBAs are dicking around with things like setting up autoincrement primary keys.
Perhaps, but they have voided the warranty. Presumably the store staff are no longer allowed to work with that phone.
I picture an Island of Lost Toys somewhere on the Apple campus, filled with forlorn iPhones with voided warranties that no Apple Genius (tm) will touch. Denied the love and approving gaze of their turtlenecked creator, they are cast out and set to wander east of Eden, with Apple store employees with flaming swords turning every way to keep them from the Apple Store of Life.
Thiessen is an idiot; however, I disagree that WikiLeaks bears no ethical responsibility for what happens because of information they choose to release.
If, hypothetically, the Taliban finds out about an informant from the leaked information that they would not have otherwise known about and kills them, obviously the kill bears most, let's say 99%, of the responsibility for the death -- but the amount the people involved in the leak bear is not 0%.
Isn't the death rate already well over 100% due to them killing suspected informers whom aren't informers?
You're looking at the math from the wrong end.
If I'm a potential informant, one of my probable goals is not to reduce the death rates of informants overall; it is to reduce the death rates of specifically me.
Regardless of how often the Taliban murders false positives, if my name has a good chance of being leaked to the world if I inform, my risk goes up a lot if I inform.
You realize that almost half of this country pays no income tax whatsoever, right? It seems silly to think that the upper-brackets are getting the sweetheart deal when nearly half of the working population pays nothing.
How did half of the country become equivalent to half of the working population? Those are two pretty different numbers.
One of the major complaints by the gov't was that some of the Afghan informers that were named will now be Taliban targets. Seems an easy way to flush out more Talibs...just set up surveillance on the informers, and wait for the rats to find their way to the cheese...
And yet (without taking a position for/against this leak in specific or WikiLeaks in general), if I'm an Afghan considering becoming an informer, that's sure going to make me think twice about it, especially if I have a family.
Trapping rats is great and all, until someone makes you the cheese without your consent.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd have said it's more like Diablo 1 in those respects.
Which is a game I loved, but the state of the art really moved past it. I was excited about Torchlight but got bored of it pretty fast.
Eh... I'll give you that SP 1.0 was a steaming pile, but I can't think of 1.0 of anything Microsoft that was good, honestly. It did get better.
In a lot of ways Alfresco is playing perpetually-behind catch-up in the same way Open Office chases Office and the Gimp chases Photoshop. Sharepoint, at this point, has a lot more tied/folded into it than simple ECM.
That being said, almost all of the bigger Microsoft shops I've worked in were using Sharepoint, and at least half of them weren't using it for anything that Alfresco wouldn't easily do straight out of the box.
But we all write all the time, if not intended for publication.
Should 1% or less of all writing dictate what should happen to the other 99%+ of writing?
Aren't Android apps essentially Java apps? Would this be that hard to port, in theory?
(Probably the answer is yes, but I'm interested in the why.)
He's right, and the rest of you are just opinionated nerds.
Sir, you must have gotten lost. This is Slashdot. Opinionated nerdery is what it's for.
I've done everything the Bible says - even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff!
It's unfortunate for B&N, and it basically means that Amazon has managed to displace all of the big players by going on-line and selling literally everything. My wife is a regular Amazon shopper, because for price and convenience, she just orders the books and they appear -- usually within a day or so. I can't argue with the economics of buying from Amazon, but I can see the position B&N is in.
What makes this even worse is the move to eBooks.
If you order from Amazon and take the free shipping, you'll probably get your books within a week or so, whereas going to the local B&N could get you the book immediately. A lot of the time 'within a week or so' is plenty fast, but sometimes it's not.
Now Amazon's got the Kindle and B&N's got the Nook, and they each have their merits and strong points as devices relative to the other, so it seems like a non-game-changer, right?
Except now the Amazon delivery time has gone from about a week to instant, and the B&N delivery time is basically the asme.
Along the same lines, for Amazon to be its cheapest you needed free shipping, which in most cases required buying a couple books at the same time. If you only want to buy one book and not wait until you're wanting three, maybe it doesn't seem like such a difference to go to the B&N. But there again the Kindle solves that problem entirely for books that you'd like to read on it, and probably a lot of the kinds of books you wouldn't want on it are expensive enough to clear free shipping.
I probably was going to an extreme, yes. I do that sometimes. :)
My experience is that when this:
I know I get very little done being in the office all of the time, and generally if I work from home for a few days I usually get a hell of a lot done.
is true, usually it's because you have a lot of knowledge (platform/institutional/architecture/whatever) and the reason you get a lot more done out of the office is because other people interrupt you a lot with questions or for help. In other words, if you're home, you may be a lot more productive, but it's very possible that other people are a lot less productive.
So there's a balancing act there. How valuable is it to the team to have you able to bust something out uninterrupted? How valuable to the team is it for other people to not spin their wheels uselessly because they can't as easily/effectively get your help?
You are welcome to your opinion, but I don't think it reflects reality. There's a lot that's done with physical proximity that doesn't have a thing to do with scheduled meetings. If this isn't true for someone, in most lines of work, it means they either have terrible social skills or their value to the team is incredibly low to begin with.
And you know, maybe companies decide that it's cost effective to hire people to be 60% efficient as long as they also pay 0% of the office costs, but that still wouldn't mean that there isn't a huge value to having people be able to stand up and talk to each other face to face.
By business phone I mean a phone your employer provides you free of charge (to you) as part of your job, intended solely or primarily for you to use as part of that job. It's a piece of office equipment, essentially -- if you quit or are fired, you give it back.
Granted, my clients tend to be in industries like finance, manufacturing, health care, insurance, etc., and the people I'm talking about work in offices, not in retail -- but not a one of the people I've worked with in any of those verticals has an iPhone as their business phone, though many do for their own personal phone. 100% of these that I've encountered so far are either:
A) Not a smartphone. (Basically a phone that just makes phone calls.)
B) A Blackberry.
As I've admitted above, the plural of anecdotes ais not data, and the fact that I've worked in the last year or two with hundreds of people with business phones across a number of companies and not one is an iPhone does not mean that no one anywhere is using an iPhone for that purpose, but it really feels to me like Blackberry still has a ridiculous lock on that market.
Yeah, absolutely. That (without trying to guess at numbers) was what I was trying to convey. Sorry if that wasn't clear.
Some people do work in silos; however, most office workers will not be as productive if they're not in close proximity to their team. Hell, I'm a programmer -- one of the most notoriously telecommuteable jobs -- and on almost every project I see huge productivity gains from being on site. Whether you need help or advice from peers, to corner a business user who doesn't want to make time for you and force them to talk you a business case, to see an end user reproduce a bug you can't, or whatever.
On one project I was working remotely as the sole developer on it -- pretty much the ideal telecommute case -- I probably got more done in the three days in which I flew out to the client site and worked closely with them than in the three weeks before it. Being able to so easily demo things, talk out problems, grab a whiteboard for five minutes to diagram something, and generally have a very tight and lossless feedback loop is a huge help.
Social and communication norms may reach a point in which that's less true, but we're not there yet if we'll ever be. You can get a lot farther today offsite than you could've a generation ago, because e-mail, IM, WebEx, and a whole slew of other technologies are big helps, but having close physical proximity to the various people your work depends on or whose work depends on you is still huge.
Obviously we're trading anecdotes here, but I've yet to encounter a business iPhone.
Yeah, the iPhone wasn't even close to being the #1 Smartphone in the US. That honor goes to Blackberry. So why compare to Apple? Ah, because it's cool to hate on Apple.
Slightly different markets. People have Blackberries for business, mostly. iPhones and Android phones are more personal consumer use products.
If we're going to ignore the business/personal distinction, then I'm going to hate on Macs for doing terribly in the business server market. You just can't win! :)
Out of curiousity, what do people typically have for business phones in Europe? Nokia?
My impression in America is that almost no one has a Blackberry for their personal phone, but that nearly every business smartphone is a Blackberry.
(Which also explains why it's interesting to talk about iPhone vs. Android -- they're currently seen as more "personal" phones, whereas Blackberry's market dominance is largely based on businesses, a market in which neither is remotely competitive with Blackberry yet.)
Or rather, the exclusivity deal between AT&T and Apple.
Anecdote: I had lunch over the weekend with a friend who lives in a part of the country that AT&T doesn't cover at all. He and his wife had seen other peoples' iPhones while travelling outside of that area, and all things being equal, would have preferred to buy iPhones, but couldn't. (Yes, they could have bought one someplace else, sucking up a useless contract, jailbreaking, etc., but come on -- that's not a real option for most people.) They ended up getting Android phones instead.
AT&T's commercials assert that it covers 97% of Americans, but if you live in or spend much time in one of the areas (more than 3% of the map) it doesn't cover, the iPhone loses by default even if Apple's marketing is successful.
I don't think they're good at marketing in the traditional sense. At this point, I really, honestly, truly suspect blackjack and hookers are responsible for these kinds of business decisions, because I can't see a rational agent wasting that much time and money doing it so horribly wrong.
I don't know that I'd go that far, although, Oracle, if this is true? I can be bought.
Somehow business decision makers have gotten this idea that Oracle is the best database and that serious businesses all use it. That, if they're a small business, that if their business is a success they'll need Oracle anyway, so why not go with it from the start? It would be a vote of no-confidence to try to cut corners on their database. (None of this makes sense to me, I've just heard some variation of one of these points a number of times when innocently asking my clients, so, why did you pick Oracle?)
Your observation about encouraging DBA as a profession is spot-on. At the places I've worked that were using SQL Server or MySQL, basically, there were few DBAs for many projects -- it was expected that developers would do all your basic database creation, write queries, define constraints, write procedures, etc. themselves and that DBA time was reserved solely for very DBA-ish tasks like the more complicated optimizations, data footprint/location on physical disk (there's probably a more concise name for that that I've forgotten), backups, etc. Compare that with the Oracle projects where, as you say, there are many more DBAs per project and DBAs are dicking around with things like setting up autoincrement primary keys.
Perhaps, but they have voided the warranty. Presumably the store staff are no longer allowed to work with that phone.
I picture an Island of Lost Toys somewhere on the Apple campus, filled with forlorn iPhones with voided warranties that no Apple Genius (tm) will touch. Denied the love and approving gaze of their turtlenecked creator, they are cast out and set to wander east of Eden, with Apple store employees with flaming swords turning every way to keep them from the Apple Store of Life.
No one (sane) claims apple products don't have exploits or malware...
I think you just called a few dozen people who post here crazy. :)
Thiessen is an idiot; however, I disagree that WikiLeaks bears no ethical responsibility for what happens because of information they choose to release.
If, hypothetically, the Taliban finds out about an informant from the leaked information that they would not have otherwise known about and kills them, obviously the kill bears most, let's say 99%, of the responsibility for the death -- but the amount the people involved in the leak bear is not 0%.
Isn't the death rate already well over 100% due to them killing suspected informers whom aren't informers?
You're looking at the math from the wrong end.
If I'm a potential informant, one of my probable goals is not to reduce the death rates of informants overall; it is to reduce the death rates of specifically me.
Regardless of how often the Taliban murders false positives, if my name has a good chance of being leaked to the world if I inform, my risk goes up a lot if I inform.
Somehow, leaking the uncomfortable truth sounds so unglamorous when you put it that way.
Your post, emphasis mine:
You realize that almost half of this country pays no income tax whatsoever, right? It seems silly to think that the upper-brackets are getting the sweetheart deal when nearly half of the working population pays nothing.
How did half of the country become equivalent to half of the working population? Those are two pretty different numbers.
One of the major complaints by the gov't was that some of the Afghan informers that were named will now be Taliban targets. Seems an easy way to flush out more Talibs...just set up surveillance on the informers, and wait for the rats to find their way to the cheese...
And yet (without taking a position for/against this leak in specific or WikiLeaks in general), if I'm an Afghan considering becoming an informer, that's sure going to make me think twice about it, especially if I have a family.
Trapping rats is great and all, until someone makes you the cheese without your consent.
haven't you seen star wars? if you strike him down, he will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
Dude, Julian Assange is not a Jedi. He won't come back as a ghost after death to advise Luke. If you strike him down, he'll be dead.
And, sure, martyrs can have a power to move opinion that living people lack, but I'm not convinced this is one of those situations.