Not only is it legal but it is depressingly common in some, ah, less IT savvy industries who have bought the FUD that Open Source software is a security risk - by definition.
Yes, I have had customers insist on buying MS SQL Server licenses because MySQL is Open Source and therefore completely banned in their company (and, I was assured, their industry generally). Not suprisingly, all the major vendors in that industry are MS Gold Partners and all the companies list as major MS accounts. Chicken or Egg?
You need to understand whether their problem is with the license or with the fact that Other People have access to the source code. If it is the former, you can write a new licence and double your fees. If it is the latter you will need to do a significant re-write to meet that requirement (and charge accordingly).
Yes, your boss is undereducated. And you are too. (Music significantly affects work patterns - do your homework before whining)
Actions: 1. Buy yourself some proper industrial hearing protection earmuffs. No "music at work" issues and more effective than earbuds 2. Buy the boss "Peopleware" for Christmas (http://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Projects-Teams-Second/dp/0932633439)
You can get 24db earmuffs (make sure you get ones that don't have a "speach hole") and add another 15 or 20 with the common or gardenttype little Yellow Earplugs. (See http://www.soundproofing.org/sales/ear_muffs.htm for examples)
In this age of 20yo CEOs and single-quarter companies it's hardly suprising that most software is no better than a rigged demo.
Just make it shiny enough for someone to buy the company and then let their support staff of MS trained monkeys deal with it
Then we have the "artists" (in both the software and hardware field) who have survived for twenty years without "all that sh1t". Course, like the CEO, they've gone on to their next challenge long before the chickens come home to roost. And it's not their fault everyone else is incompetent, is it?
I continue to be amazed, on a weekly basis, by the complete lack of experience shown by the actions and products of very large companies.
Oh, I reject the claim that
Software maintenance is not like hardware maintenance, which is the return of the item to its original state. Software maintenance involves moving an item away from its original state.
The author has obviously never maintained hardware: it has bugs, patches, upgrades just like any other part of your system.
You need to have a list of risks (and opportunities); their likelihood of occuring and their impact. Multiply the two to get a factored cost of risk. Sort. (google risk management)
Decide whether you need to accept; transfer or mitigate each and everyone of them.
Certain high-impact risks will need management review regardless of their probability - eg. your datacentre burning down, or anything that could kill/maim anyone.
Initially MGT will fine-tooth comb everything you do but if you get the format
( As other have mentioned, you need to be able to say * what assets you have and what their potential and actual capabilities are, plus their financial state * why you are spending the money you spend; * how that translates into money earnt and * what your efficency is - in terms of %availability * what issues you have that you need MGT to deal with and when )
For bonus points, * discover your MTBF and MTTR distributions for all your assets * start applying a little SPC or PCA to your failures/outages/traffic loads * write down all you plans/procedures. Backup, repair, training, technology road map. Review and update annually.
Management has been described as the art of making and sorting lists. If you add "scheduling and acting" to that, you're pretty close to the truth
Don't project your wishes onto the solution space. F'er example, WTF is wrong with their DVD soln?
You _don't_ know!
Because you've not captured the GOALS and mapped them into REQUIREMENTS, framed by CONSTRAINTS. Then, and only then, start thinking of possible SOLUTION ARCHITECTURES.
When I hear morons talk about muscle memory in Excel I know they don't understand what an advanced user is. Did ANY advanced user actually grab the mouse and click on a menu option rather than using one of the numerous keyboard shortcuts?
Right, so you aren't actually using the ribbon? Thought so. The best I've heard is "it's not so bad when you get used to it" quickly followed up by a complaint about a missing or corrupted feature (eg. 3-deep conditional formating)
We've had to keep a bunch of '03 machines as '07 can't seem to read/write '03 files reliably.
If you are training modern day boiler makers, then java or some other "industry ready" language is good.
If you are educating engineers or scientists, then algorithms and concepts are what you need. And a whole gamut of languages are useful (from Lisp to Perl, via C & Java)
History (Brooks, McCarthy etc) shows that the "LOC" per day is closer to ten than one hundred. A quarter of a centuary of anecdotal experience concurs.
If Ben Cohen is VHDLCohen, then +2. Until about half a decade ago I had done chip design and verification for almost two decades and VHDLCohen was one of the few people on the planet I'd run into who understood the language better than myself.
I'm not normally one to "do the yank" and claim the high ground. But this is one of those cases where I believe I have (or rather had) justification
There's a dozen or so companies providing software in this area, from littlies like Atrove to the big players like Xerox's Docushare.
You have three problems a) MS windows does not work with large end-to-end delays. You are going to need something third party (sharepoint, as has been pointed out, is not a solution to your problems) b) you apparently don't know who owns your documents. You need to sort your documents by publisher, IP ownership rules and then publisher's ID c) I worry when a "midsized aerospace company" hasn't worked out how to identify; revision control drafts and baseline manage issued documentation.
The problem has been solved for many years - the tools and best practice are constantly evolving (particularily with managing AV data).
Hire a DM/CM dude from a proper aerospace company. Or two. Or even a properly qualified librarian.
Finally, how on earth are you currently meet your contractual obligations?
You must teach in VHDL. You need to teach Verilog.
While Verilog is slowly adding features from VHDL, it's like comparing basic to e-lisp. The semantic possibilities in VHDL are significantly larger.
However the most important thing to teach is good practice: solving the seven or eight basic fifo problems; async vs sync reset; various counter and adder types
Just as programmers need to grok how their code gets turned into ASM, HDL coders need to grok the underlying hardware items that their compiler will spit out.
And verification - where you can test and were you must review.
And why coding style matters for test (eg. a parameterised loop can be verified by induction - a case statement cannot).
Particularily for chips (vs fpgas) it's got to be right first time, every time. So you need "Code Compete" next to "Microprocessor architectures"
ps - I designed chips from the mid eighties to the early noughties.
Where I live public transportation to most of the places I go simply doesn't exist.
And there in lies the problem. Somehow, we are entitled to 6 lane freeways and highways but urban, suburburban and interstate rail is, wooo, scary socialist stuff that "loses money".
Do that for six decades and you get a serious problem. Like Dallas
And by early next century, everyone will think it quaint that all the old programs were written in English, rather than Mandarin.
The languages of commerce and diplomacy follow the empires. And the sun is setting on two centuries of Anglophone dominance. Like Latin (and french and german) it will take a while before scholars stop needing it, but the Hep Cats will move away from it pretty damn quickly.
Watch for when your favorite code editor provides full support for Han Uncode!
thanks for the considered response. Let me drag you back to the real world.
First, I usually don't run anyone's app/website fullscreen. 2ndly, even if I do have 1/2G RAM, you can bet your bottom dollar there's half a dozen other apps fighting for it. Slashdot, ebay, twitter, aardvark. cyclingnews.com are all sideshows predominantly providing c. 10K text. Work?
Now, my home machine has only 388M of RAM and 1500 x 1024 pixels. My work machine has more ram (1/2G), but much less screen (1240 x 1024). Yes, that's my brand new corporate PC. My mother=in-law (and mother) have less than both of these. My kids have subnotebooks with VGA and sub VGA screens. Half my extended family are still on dialup (or dialup paced wifi). Let's not get started on the early adopterkindens with their wunderwebphones!
Now, I have a number of supplier/client sites whose first useful hyperlink is more than 1000 pixels away from top left. Painful. Pretty, pretty graphics above. But not user friendly.
The bottom line is - for most of us, www browsing is only one of the thomgs we are doing (I currently have gimp, xsls,open project, 5 browser panes, email, a stats package, two dos windows, one running perl, RDP and word open. Yes I'm mildly http://www.randsinrepose.com/ ADD )
And, as you said, the my.ebay start page is surreal.
Badly written pages (and oh are there a lot of them out there) not only take up more bandwidth because they have a lot of crap code in them, but they also tend to take longer to render.
ebay has "upgraded" their local site http://my.ebay.com.au/> and "my ebay" is now a 1M byte download. That's ONE MILLION BYTES to show about 7K of text and about 20 x 2Kb thumbnails.
The best bit is that the htm file itself over 1/2 Mbytes. Then there's two 150K+ js files and a 150k+ css file.
Web "designers" should be forced to develop on a 128M P3 machine with VGA screen and dial up modem
Re:no online id == no xp
on
Linked In Or Out?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Which means you won't be hiring many mature non-narcissists.
As we both are currently doing, many people use a nom de plume on the web. As a sometime consultant this part ticularily useful - I can be honest in my opinions on line without embarassing clients who, for perfectly valid business reasons, chose a path other than "the right one".
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, there's a whole body of research that shows just that.
But this is slashdot....
Not only is it legal but it is depressingly common in some, ah, less IT savvy industries who have bought the FUD that Open Source software is a security risk - by definition.
Yes, I have had customers insist on buying MS SQL Server licenses because MySQL is Open Source and therefore completely banned in their company (and, I was assured, their industry generally). Not suprisingly, all the major vendors in that industry are MS Gold Partners and all the companies list as major MS accounts. Chicken or Egg?
You need to understand whether their problem is with the license or with the fact that Other People have access to the source code. If it is the former, you can write a new licence and double your fees. If it is the latter you will need to do a significant re-write to meet that requirement (and charge accordingly).
Yes, your boss is undereducated. And you are too. (Music significantly affects work patterns - do your homework before whining)
Actions:
1. Buy yourself some proper industrial hearing protection earmuffs. No "music at work" issues and more effective than earbuds
2. Buy the boss "Peopleware" for Christmas (http://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Projects-Teams-Second/dp/0932633439)
You can get 24db earmuffs (make sure you get ones that don't have a "speach hole") and add another 15 or 20 with the common or gardenttype little Yellow Earplugs. (See http://www.soundproofing.org/sales/ear_muffs.htm for examples)
In this age of 20yo CEOs and single-quarter companies it's hardly suprising that most software is no better than a rigged demo.
Just make it shiny enough for someone to buy the company and then let their support staff of MS trained monkeys deal with it
Then we have the "artists" (in both the software and hardware field) who have survived for twenty years without "all that sh1t". Course, like the CEO, they've gone on to their next challenge long before the chickens come home to roost. And it's not their fault everyone else is incompetent, is it?
I continue to be amazed, on a weekly basis, by the complete lack of experience shown by the actions and products of very large companies.
Oh, I reject the claim that
The author has obviously never maintained hardware: it has bugs, patches, upgrades just like any other part of your system.
+1 I've had exactly _one_ call from a MAC user - including those I used to get a call from every week when they had windows.
No-one's mentioned risk.
You need to have a list of risks (and opportunities); their likelihood of occuring and their impact. Multiply the two to get a factored cost of risk. Sort. (google risk management)
Decide whether you need to accept; transfer or mitigate each and everyone of them.
Certain high-impact risks will need management review regardless of their probability - eg. your datacentre burning down, or anything that could kill/maim anyone.
Initially MGT will fine-tooth comb everything you do but if you get the format
(
As other have mentioned, you need to be able to say
* what assets you have and what their potential and actual capabilities are, plus their financial state
* why you are spending the money you spend;
* how that translates into money earnt and
* what your efficency is - in terms of %availability
* what issues you have that you need MGT to deal with and when
)
For bonus points,
* discover your MTBF and MTTR distributions for all your assets
* start applying a little SPC or PCA to your failures/outages/traffic loads
* write down all you plans/procedures. Backup, repair, training, technology road map. Review and update annually.
Management has been described as the art of making and sorting lists. If you add "scheduling and acting" to that, you're pretty close to the truth
"I'd love to do this in Linux"
STOP: You're failing already.
Don't project your wishes onto the solution space. F'er example, WTF is wrong with their DVD soln?
You _don't_ know!
Because you've not captured the GOALS and mapped them into REQUIREMENTS, framed by CONSTRAINTS. Then, and only then, start thinking of possible SOLUTION ARCHITECTURES.
And first, make sure you don't have a wicked problem. (See http://www.poppendieck.com/wicked.htm)
Go industrial - get something like the Moxa UC-7400 (18W, all solid state, small, no temperature issues)
No fan noise, either
See http://www.moxa.com/Product/UC-7400.htm
(Yes, I've got one sitting on my desk. I could sell you one but the postage would be prohibitive :-).)
So far, other than it being NEW, you've failed to answer the question.
Further, the points you raise could have easily been addressed as an add-on to XP (much like PowerShell). They are not key O/S items.
(BTW I have indexed search OFF on my XP box and use "classic" start menu).
So: which versions of Opera, K-Meleon, etc etc etc actually have the patch. Opera's website is vague, to say the least
If you are training modern day boiler makers, then java or some other "industry ready" language is good.
If you are educating engineers or scientists, then algorithms and concepts are what you need. And a whole gamut of languages are useful (from Lisp to Perl, via C & Java)
History (Brooks, McCarthy etc) shows that the "LOC" per day is closer to ten than one hundred. A quarter of a centuary of anecdotal experience concurs.
Sad but true.
If Ben Cohen is VHDLCohen, then +2. Until about half a decade ago I had done chip design and verification for almost two decades and VHDLCohen was one of the few people on the planet I'd run into who understood the language better than myself.
I'm not normally one to "do the yank" and claim the high ground. But this is one of those cases where I believe I have (or rather had) justification
There's a dozen or so companies providing software in this area, from littlies like Atrove to the big players like Xerox's Docushare.
You have three problems
a) MS windows does not work with large end-to-end delays. You are going to need something third party (sharepoint, as has been pointed out, is not a solution to your problems)
b) you apparently don't know who owns your documents. You need to sort your documents by publisher, IP ownership rules and then publisher's ID
c) I worry when a "midsized aerospace company" hasn't worked out how to identify; revision control drafts and baseline manage issued documentation.
The problem has been solved for many years - the tools and best practice are constantly evolving (particularily with managing AV data).
Hire a DM/CM dude from a proper aerospace company. Or two. Or even a properly qualified librarian.
Finally, how on earth are you currently meet your contractual obligations?
Air France Flight 447?
See the .sig
I call bullshit
Engineering is a creative process, but a disciplined, analytic process.
Without the discipline, the job is never finished or faulty (see "university" or "research")
Without analysis it devolves to a trade (like programming, tech writing or machining).
To quote Dilbert - if you don't understand the difference between an engineer and a tech writer, you're not qualified to be an engineer.
You must teach in VHDL. You need to teach Verilog.
While Verilog is slowly adding features from VHDL, it's like comparing basic to e-lisp. The semantic possibilities in VHDL are significantly larger.
However the most important thing to teach is good practice: solving the seven or eight basic fifo problems; async vs sync reset; various counter and adder types
Just as programmers need to grok how their code gets turned into ASM, HDL coders need to grok the underlying hardware items that their compiler will spit out.
And verification - where you can test and were you must review.
And why coding style matters for test (eg. a parameterised loop can be verified by induction - a case statement cannot).
Particularily for chips (vs fpgas) it's got to be right first time, every time. So you need "Code Compete" next to "Microprocessor architectures"
ps - I designed chips from the mid eighties to the early noughties.
Does NZ count as the third world?
Bruce Simpson (http://aardvark.co.nz) built a cruise missile half a decade ago and nearly sold it to the yanks
http://www.interestingprojects.com/cruisemissile/missilemanbook.shtml
And there in lies the problem. Somehow, we are entitled to 6 lane freeways and highways but urban, suburburban and interstate rail is, wooo, scary socialist stuff that "loses money". Do that for six decades and you get a serious problem. Like Dallas
"if you don't understand the difference between an engineer and a tech writer" Or in this case, what it takes to make a CAT-x setup work
Don't waste your time.
Pay for someone to install AND TEST the inter-room cabling, terminated at patch panels. Then buy mid-range commercial patch leads.
You've got better things to do with your time. Unless you want to become a certified cable puller.
And by early next century, everyone will think it quaint that all the old programs were written in English, rather than Mandarin.
The languages of commerce and diplomacy follow the empires. And the sun is setting on two centuries of Anglophone dominance. Like Latin (and french and german) it will take a while before scholars stop needing it, but the Hep Cats will move away from it pretty damn quickly.
Watch for when your favorite code editor provides full support for Han Uncode!
Hi Mikael,
thanks for the considered response. Let me drag you back to the real world.
First, I usually don't run anyone's app/website fullscreen. 2ndly, even if I do have 1/2G RAM, you can bet your bottom dollar there's half a dozen other apps fighting for it. Slashdot, ebay, twitter, aardvark. cyclingnews.com are all sideshows predominantly providing c. 10K text. Work?
Now, my home machine has only 388M of RAM and 1500 x 1024 pixels. My work machine has more ram (1/2G), but much less screen (1240 x 1024). Yes, that's my brand new corporate PC. My mother=in-law (and mother) have less than both of these. My kids have subnotebooks with VGA and sub VGA screens. Half my extended family are still on dialup (or dialup paced wifi). Let's not get started on the early adopterkindens with their wunderwebphones!
Now, I have a number of supplier/client sites whose first useful hyperlink is more than 1000 pixels away from top left. Painful. Pretty, pretty graphics above. But not user friendly.
The bottom line is - for most of us, www browsing is only one of the thomgs we are doing (I currently have gimp, xsls,open project, 5 browser panes, email, a stats package, two dos windows, one running perl, RDP and word open. Yes I'm mildly http://www.randsinrepose.com/ ADD )
And, as you said, the my.ebay start page is surreal.
ebay has "upgraded" their local site http://my.ebay.com.au/> and "my ebay" is now a 1M byte download. That's ONE MILLION BYTES to show about 7K of text and about 20 x 2Kb thumbnails.
The best bit is that the htm file itself over 1/2 Mbytes. Then there's two 150K+ js files and a 150k+ css file.
Web "designers" should be forced to develop on a 128M P3 machine with VGA screen and dial up modem
Which means you won't be hiring many mature non-narcissists.
As we both are currently doing, many people use a nom de plume on the web. As a sometime consultant this part ticularily useful - I can be honest in my opinions on line without embarassing clients who, for perfectly valid business reasons, chose a path other than "the right one".