My high school physics teacher would read sections from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynmann! every week on Friday. I though it was weird then, but now I realize that it had a positive effect on me. It really helped to humanize the sciences.
If you really want to be thorough and get good support for your case, go ask your local reference librarian for help. I'm sure he or she will be able to get you enough evidence to quiet the people at your company who are tormenting you.
Is this the de-facto standard within IT, and for all jobs within IT?
I work for an internal consulting group at a big state university, so I don't know how applicable this is to the real world, but I have a $3,000 training, travel, and equipment budget to "use or lose" each year. I can spend it on courses, books, certification exams, travel to conferences, or any equipment I can justify to my manager. I also get to spend 8 hours per week working on pet projects and training (though 2-4 hours of this time is usually spent in internal, non-client meetings).
Certification is highly encouraged, and I am currently pursuing my MCSE. Our rule for MS exams state that the first attempt is paid for from my TTE budget, and if I don't pass, I have to pay for any subsequent attempts of that exam. I am pretty pleased with this situation because I think it encourages me to keep current skills and provides me the means to accomplish this. Twice a year I meet with a manager to set goals and check in on old goals.
I personally don't think it is reasonable for your employer to expect you to educate yourself to perform your job. Would they expect the same thing from a non-technical professional such as an accountant or compliance officer?
The key to Linux's success is for the developers to get smarter. The major problem, IMO, with corporate adoption of Linux is the lack of enterprise-level applications. There are lots of talented people working on lots of great OSS applications that completely miss the mark for mainstream adoption. Developers too often concentrate on getting the basic features of an application working extremely well and completely ignore the advanced features that are crucial for a large enterprise. Can my CIO delegate permission on his mailbox/calendar to his two secretaries to read and reply to emails on his behalf while he is traveling? Can these secretaries change items on his calendar from their office so that they will automatically be synced to his PDA while he is half way around the world? Can I actually teach these secretaries how to do it? If there is a OSS product that can do these things, please let me know so that I can start using it.
The Linux community is working very hard to create the world's fastest, most fuel-efficient mo-ped and then wondering why Fed-Ex isn't using them in their fleet. Change the target audience from the developer to the corporate user and then develop products for which there is actually a demand.
You guys do some pretty outrageous stuff on your show. What kind of legal clearance do you have to get to pull off your experiments without ending up in jail? For example, the show where you raced a toy car against a sports car looked like it required shutting down a major stretch of road. Is it hard to get support from the local authorities in the name of mythbusting? Have you ever gotten in any trouble with the law for your experiments?
PS - The Gigadrome Challenge at VMworld was a lot of fun.
God, I hope some developers are reading the parent. I am a Windows Admin for a smallish group (~450 machines) and almost all of the problems we admins run into result from applications doing dumb things. We have finally gotten a policy through our business admins that allows us to nix software that won't run properly as a user in the Users group, and we have had only 2 security incidents since (and one of those was a machine we didn't know existed and thus wasn't being patched or getting AV updates).
There is no reason the list of system requirements for an (end-user) application should ever contain "you must be logged in with administrative privileges on your computer."
Just because you're too lazy to learn how to troubleshoot a windows box doesn't make it any less usable. Lately I've been using a skill I picked up in kindergarten called 'reading' and I've learned a lot about how to prevent, diagnose, and remove security problems in windows.
Slashdot Mirror
My high school physics teacher would read sections from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynmann! every week on Friday. I though it was weird then, but now I realize that it had a positive effect on me. It really helped to humanize the sciences.
You might try searching on Google Scholar for some academic articles on the subject. It tried this quick search http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=multiple+monit ors+productivity&hl=en&lr= and got quite a few relevant articles.
If you really want to be thorough and get good support for your case, go ask your local reference librarian for help. I'm sure he or she will be able to get you enough evidence to quiet the people at your company who are tormenting you.
Is this the de-facto standard within IT, and for all jobs within IT? I work for an internal consulting group at a big state university, so I don't know how applicable this is to the real world, but I have a $3,000 training, travel, and equipment budget to "use or lose" each year. I can spend it on courses, books, certification exams, travel to conferences, or any equipment I can justify to my manager. I also get to spend 8 hours per week working on pet projects and training (though 2-4 hours of this time is usually spent in internal, non-client meetings). Certification is highly encouraged, and I am currently pursuing my MCSE. Our rule for MS exams state that the first attempt is paid for from my TTE budget, and if I don't pass, I have to pay for any subsequent attempts of that exam. I am pretty pleased with this situation because I think it encourages me to keep current skills and provides me the means to accomplish this. Twice a year I meet with a manager to set goals and check in on old goals. I personally don't think it is reasonable for your employer to expect you to educate yourself to perform your job. Would they expect the same thing from a non-technical professional such as an accountant or compliance officer?
I *know* this will be perceived as flamebait....
The key to Linux's success is for the developers to get smarter. The major problem, IMO, with corporate adoption of Linux is the lack of enterprise-level applications. There are lots of talented people working on lots of great OSS applications that completely miss the mark for mainstream adoption. Developers too often concentrate on getting the basic features of an application working extremely well and completely ignore the advanced features that are crucial for a large enterprise. Can my CIO delegate permission on his mailbox/calendar to his two secretaries to read and reply to emails on his behalf while he is traveling? Can these secretaries change items on his calendar from their office so that they will automatically be synced to his PDA while he is half way around the world? Can I actually teach these secretaries how to do it? If there is a OSS product that can do these things, please let me know so that I can start using it.
The Linux community is working very hard to create the world's fastest, most fuel-efficient mo-ped and then wondering why Fed-Ex isn't using them in their fleet. Change the target audience from the developer to the corporate user and then develop products for which there is actually a demand.
You guys do some pretty outrageous stuff on your show. What kind of legal clearance do you have to get to pull off your experiments without ending up in jail? For example, the show where you raced a toy car against a sports car looked like it required shutting down a major stretch of road. Is it hard to get support from the local authorities in the name of mythbusting? Have you ever gotten in any trouble with the law for your experiments?
PS - The Gigadrome Challenge at VMworld was a lot of fun.
God, I hope some developers are reading the parent. I am a Windows Admin for a smallish group (~450 machines) and almost all of the problems we admins run into result from applications doing dumb things. We have finally gotten a policy through our business admins that allows us to nix software that won't run properly as a user in the Users group, and we have had only 2 security incidents since (and one of those was a machine we didn't know existed and thus wasn't being patched or getting AV updates). There is no reason the list of system requirements for an (end-user) application should ever contain "you must be logged in with administrative privileges on your computer."
A Linux advocate who uses sarcasm. I never would have guessed.
Just because you're too lazy to learn how to troubleshoot a windows box doesn't make it any less usable. Lately I've been using a skill I picked up in kindergarten called 'reading' and I've learned a lot about how to prevent, diagnose, and remove security problems in windows.