What seems like a thousand years ago, IWABCFOG (I was a Biochemist Focused on Genetics) so I may have some idea what I'm talking about here but it may very well be that some of my speculation is wildly inaccurate/outdated.
I'm guessing that many of the well known genetic disorders (I'm pretty sure Huntington's falls in this category...don't know about Alzheimer's) very much is a "One Gene/One Polypeptide" type model. A single dominant allele causes the disorder to manifst itself.
Depression.....just thinking about the general mechanism of Serotonin uptake yields several possible points of failure. Is there a gene that simply cannot produce enough solid serotonin? Is there a gene that produced defective serotonin binding sites? Is there a gene that requires levels of serotonin concentration much higher or lower than the norm to begin reuptake and/or production processes?
I have a longstanding theory that I admittedly have not done enough research into trying to find it I am way off base or not...but I firmly believe that all too often the physicatric community is so focused on Serotonin being what causes feelings of depresssion when quite often it could very well be the delicate Dopamine/GABA balancing act. Now, I know a lot of people on SSRI's that fail to try to help themselves and rely completely on the medication while lying to their doctor about raging alcohol/drug problems and the like but I digress. With the Dopamine/GABA idea you throw additional genes into the equation for feelings of depression, compounding the problem of definitively nailing down a specific sequence that causes depression.
My statements in all are just me using my own thoughts of why we can't pin this down to a specific gene. There are probably too many factors to simplify this to a simple "You have the gene for depression" diagnosis.
I of course, welcome comments about my ideas but please remember two things - 1. I am not presenting any of this as fact. Just some ideas I have kicked around in my head. 2. I may have once been very strong in terms of Biochemistry and Genetics but I am years removed from it and may have ideas that cannot possibly be consistent with reality. I readily admit that. Please refrain from telling me that I am an idiot, but correct me if I have some scientifically obvious flaws.
I had a laptop running Vista that I had reinstalled by myself without any extra software from the vendor. Simply doing "Start" - "Run" (Or whatever you call it in Vista) - "Calc.Exe" would lead to a 15-20 second delay in Windows Calculator coming up. A very similar laptop that is right now running Windows 7 RC takes about a half second (Aero theme and such running on both).
That was my big problem with Vista. Responsiveness was very very poor for a lot of things. Network related actions (Opening up shares, connecting to exchange) seem much faster than Vista and faster than XP.
I know, highly scientific study I am presenting but I for one would not have recommended Vista to others based on personal experience but from what I've witnessed thus far I would not have a problem recommending Windows 7...assuming they don't completely blow the real release.
In short, a Linux machine that is run by a competent administrator is MUCH more difficult to infect or attack than a Windows machine, and the parent is a moron.
I'm going to agree with you on much of what you said, but I would like to point out the term "Competent Administrator" as a major issue here in terms of a business environment.
I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that most of the people who become proficient enough with a *nix system to get hired as some type of administrator at a company are going to be somewhat passionate about working with computer systems....spending time/have spent time at home learning how things really work. This should lead to them being at least somewhat competent.
Windows Admins? Not necessarily. I've worked with people that ranged from "Help Desk" to "Senior Network Engineer" whom I have no idea how they managed to get a job in IT or why (Actually the why is obviously, they heard it payed well) they even wanted to. They didn't know much and didn't care to learn anything more. Utterly incompetent. I had one "Senior Network Engineer" that told me at one time he didn't even have a computer at home...and he left his work laptop at work.
If we saw Linux suddenly grab 40% of the corporate desktop market, you'd end up with some positions filled by these types of people. It would still be more secure than Systems run by incompetent Windows Admins but certainly less secure than having most of the systems run by reasonably competent Linux Admins.
It is no longer the case that a part time person can keep 20 machines running. And when something does happen, it can be very difficult to fix. A single event can require a complete reinstall of the OS. I've made mistakes of going to a wrong web site and had this happen on a completely up to date machine. I have allowed untrusted parties to run my MS machines and have had significant damage caused within the hour. MS machines are the dependable work horses they once were. It now requires a significant infrastructure to keep MS machines a production. The best case scenario is to treat each machine as a RAID, keeping data off the machine, and using a standard HD disk images. Doesn't this sound like the pre-MS days of the so-called inefficient mainframe.
I assume you are talking about this in terms of the corporate environment. In that case, why would you not keep data off the machine and use a standard disk image? Users keeping data on their machines is a problem. That data is generally inaccessible to other people that may need it and more importantly, is a hard drive failure away from being gone forever. I think most corporations strongly discourage keeping data locally.
Not having some disk imaging software if you are managing any number of machines is crazy. You certainly do not want to use the default installs of Windows that are sent to you by the desktop manufacturers so you want to have disk images anyway. Most of the client manager's out there also allow you to transfer files and install select software packages as part of the imaging process. To think that any decent sized company has someone sitting there loading Windows from scratch just seems wrong.
Realistically, if the IT staff needs more than say...75 minutes to take a computer, transfer files, drop a new image, and install needed software on it they are doing something wrong. Because of this it is more effective from a perspective of the cost of an IT Employee's time to do it that way instead of troubleshooting a bizarre issue that could take them several hours to fix. Yeah, that is a crappy way to approach troubleshooting from the point of view of someone who likes to get into the nuts and bolts of a system and I would prefer to find a fix to problems instead of just dumping an image, but it is sensible from a cost of ownership point of view.
I'll tell you what....I actually have grown to like the Office 2007 Interface. I've been using it for over two years now so I get confused using older versions of Office.
I am certainly in the minority though. Most of the people at the Office I work at simply have not adjusted even after using it for an entire year. They absolutely despise it. The amount of time that I have spent showing people where things are (Not to mention department "Power Users") showing other users where things are has been outrageous.
If they felt they needed to do this, I think their big mistake was not easing the users into this type of menu. At least for one release of the software have both available or something. It has been an enormous hidden cost for the company I work at and I would imagine for a lot of other companies that use the Office Suite.
When I was a few years out of college I started to have issues concentrating, completing tasks, doing my work properly, and (At times) socializing at all. This was a complete 180 from how I had been in the past. I went to a doctor and he started asking me all sorts of questions ranging from my sleep schedule to my diet, to my sex drive. He told me of other cases he had that were similar and in different patients had found things like diabetes, Sleep Apnea, really low testosterone levels, even a young man with a brain tumor.
Turns out I must have been depressed or something. The doctor ran tests on me and couldn't find anything definitive. He was a little vexed but did believe I was being truthful about my symptoms. I know the drug has somewhat of a stigma about it but I ended up being prescribed Provigil. It got my back on track doing good work, being able to hang out with friends, and enjoying life once again.
I too have used the RC for some time now and find it to be quite good. It is stable and reasonably fast (Although logging onto a domain seems to take a much much longer amount of time than it does in Windows XP for some reason. Completely anecdotal though as I've only tested it on one machine.)
The one thing that really really bothers me that started late in Windows XP is the new "Desktop Search." Maybe I'm a complete idiot but A. Having Search indexing turned on bogs down the machine at times and B. I'll do a Search for a file that I KNOW is present (As in, I browse to a directory and look at the file) and Search simply doesn't find it!?!?! I'm talking non-system, non-hidden files. Just foobar.txt or the like. There is probably some utility I can install but more and more I have found myself dropping to the command line to do a dir/s foobar* or something to find the files.
I do not actually post that much so I never bothered to change the defaults. I just use the HTML tags.
This may sound stupid but it reminds me a little of the earlier days of the internet. It was a bit harder to do things back and I didn't have the knowledge of how things worked. It was a strange and fantastic new world that had opened up before me where tons of knowledge was at my fingertips. The possibilities fascinated me.
Not that the Internet isn't great now.... Even with all of the bad things about it there are several orders more of knowledge to be had...but the early days of my browsing will always be a special memory for me.
For what it's worth try Trojan Supra Microsheer Polyurethane. They cost a bit more but I've found them to be a worthwhile investment.
My wife and I had some issues with Latex condoms. They really did smell quite poor and they caused her to feel burning after. Someone told us we should try lambskin and talk about smell....ewwww....I seriously had to stop once because the smell turned off my mood completely. Since we moved to the Microsheer things have been much better. Actually, they seem to be more sensitive than anything else so uhm, my performance uhm, dropped off a bit until I got used to the increased sensitivity.
Seriously, find a way that works for you. Much better than the alternative.
Ummmm....I don't use Office enough to actually create custom task bars. I just looked and the "Undo" command is right under the ribbon. Next to Redo and (The other thing that seems to be a sticking point) a save button.
I think a lot of the complaining about the ribbon has a lot to do with people not liking anything to be different at all....not it having a lack of usability.
---I--- personally do not need Legacy Code at home. At work? The users I support sure as heck need it. An example....we have four pieces of $100,000 equipment in the shop that are called "Mills". They are controlled by computers that run a piece of software that (Oddly) will not run on Vista, or (I'd imagine but have not bothered to try yet) Windows 7. The manufacturer has stated that they will not be releasing a new version of that software....probably ever. The machines were purchased in 1995 and are physically built to last for 20-25 years. I'll tell the company they need to drop $500,000 to replace their functioning Mills if I can't get something that will run Windows XP in 5 years.
We have an ERP system that we upgraded 2 1/2 years ago under the direction of a reseller of the software. There were two releases ahead of the one we upgraded to but they insisted that they would not be stable enough to trust for at least another 9 months. The system uses VBScript Macros that can have ActiveX VB running on it. I know I can probably get ActiveX applications written in Visual Studio 2010....but there are three other people who write some of the stuff that have not worked outside of VB 6. It just works. Time to upgrade our ERP system after only 2 1/2 years because VB 6 won't Install on Vista or Windows 7?
There are such examples most likely in every mid to enormous sized company around the world. Legacy Support is a big deal to them. For the most part, It doesn't matter to me at home but it sure matters at the place at work...which has obviously spent a far greater amount of money on Microsoft Products than I have.
For some demented reason I enjoy "studying" physical and mental illness and reading about pharmaceuticals in my spare time. Right out of college I was a more arrogant little bastard and thought I knew enough about everything to be an expert.
I don't want to get too deep into the issues, but I dealt with 7 people plus myself who got wrong advice/medications/treatments from doctors. I would lay out all the evidence I could accumulate and the patient would take it to their doctor and say "This is what is wrong" or "You put me on this medication and I feel like crap, maybe it's because it reacts this way to what you are already giving me." I just got lucky a few times. I was always spot on. I looked like a freaking genius. It got to the point where quite a few family and friends would call me before and after going to see a doctor. This didn't really help with my arrogance problem.
My mom has a long history of mental illness. Her doctors put her on some more pills that I considered to be foolish in the situation. I actually had the nerve to insist that she stop taking them and I acquired different medication for her (schedule IV stuff...I wasn't smuggling oxycontin or anything) and she started taking it. Long story short, three weeks later she had totally gone off the deep end. She destroyed a bunch of stuff in my parents' house, ripped up most of my dad's clothes, starting threatening homicide and/or suicide until finally my dad had to call the police. They gave her a three day restraining order and she kept coming back that and getting more beligerent before until finally five cops and the county psychiatric van pulled up and took her away for a little vacation.
That was quite an eye opener. I blew it. Bad. Looking back, I don't know what I was thinking. I had some problems of my own that I refused to attempt to treat/seek treatment for I did some good things for some people but helped cause a lot of problems for my parents.
This is a great story because it is important to be active participant in maintaining your health. Doctors are not infallible and you know your body/get more time to think about the issue than they get. When it comes down to it though, remember to seek the opinion of at least one, maybe more in important cases, actual medical professional.
The nice thing about Sharepoint is, depending on the functionality you need it can be FREE (as in beer) if you can get away with Windows Sharepoint Services.
The company I work for really wanted A Document Management System. They had tons of paperwork laying around. We put in Sharepoint along with a product called KnowledgeLake. Knowledgelake reads bar codes off documents that are printed or scanned to a network drive, grabs metadata from a SQL Server based on that bar code, and files the thing. It is really no hassle at all. Knowledgelake also adds a search component that is much better than the Sharepoint Search so finding documents is really really easy. There is also a client program for the Knowledgelake system that lets you right click on a document, pick a document library to send the document to, and manually input the key field to grab the Metadata and file the document properly.
I don't know what types of documents you are looking to index but all MS Office documents integrate with Sharepoint, obviously....but the real issue is other file types. Autocad Files, for Example, can be integrated into the Sharepoint System using third party applications (We ended up not going that direction so I can't remember what it is called..the company is named Bentley maybe?) and I am sure there are many other programs that have similar applications written for them.
So yeah, you can make fun of me for sounding like a Microsoft shill but I evaluated several other Document Management Systems and Sharepoint with Knowledge Lake turned out to be the one that the company felt most comfortable with....and it has served it's purpose well!
Some of this may not apply to you....as you are working in a different industry but I am in a similar situation....sole IT guy for about 90 users (actually, my Boss is the lead Engineer and he does some of the help desk type stuff when he has time.)
The best advice I can give is to go out and be seen. You work for a small company so the building probably huge. Don't remote in to fix every problem....stretch your legs, take a walk, talk to the user and try to understand their problem, talk to the user to try to understand future needs, and talk to the user about their hobbies and your own. I've known many IT people who seem to think they can sit in their "Ivory Tower" and avoid actually interacting with the users. The users eventually catch on to the fact that they are aloof, antisocial jerks that think that having to help them with their computer is a hassle. They'll start to despise them.
My current environment is about 75% Office, 25% light manufacturing. I've gotten out on the shop floor, crawled around in the dust a little to reroute cables, got all sweaty and dirty......and actually gained a lot of respect for it. Again, I've seen IT workers who seem to think that going out into the shop is beneath them and if they get a little dirty or talk to the heavy machine operators that they might be infected with a virus that turns them into lowly shop grunts or something.
Act interested in not only solving their problems, but listening to their ideas on things that could make their jobs easier. Their idea to share out the crappy old deskjet installed on the computer across the way might seem nitpicky and inane to you but it very well may make their job a lot easier. Remember...you are there to make life easier for those responsible for producing the product that actually makes the money....you are not there so you can do way cool stuff with Active Directory policies that makes it impossible for them to do their jobs.
What I am presenting of course is more or less is just an extension of some other comments on here that you should "Play the politics game." By showing them that you are working hard, trying to help them in any way you can, and respect their input and opinions (Even if you really don't give a shit) you will find that they have a different attitude towards you. You really don't deserve respect just because you are an IT guy...you have to earn it. Just because you create the accounts doesn't mean that they need to follow your ideas for how the company should be run. If you do gain some respect don't expect to be constantly lavished with praise and bowed down before when you clean up some spyware on some idiot's machine.
I won't rule out the possibility that you work in an office that is entirely made up of complete jerks. That could very well be the case. It's a bummer alternative in today's job market but if I were in that sort of situation where everyone was outright rude to me all the time I would be polishing up my resume and seeing what else I can find.
Hairyfeet - My first thought when reading the Title of the Article was "They passed Yahoo? That means, what... 10 people used Bing?
And here you have to go and post something well thought out and tell me you use Yahoo. It made me realize that by exclusively using Google, perhaps I should be making fun of myself for insisting that something is better without checking out the competition for about 2 entire years.
You have convinced me to broaden my (search) Horizons.
Warning: Lame personal anecdote about getting paid for grades below.
When I was in Second Grade my grandfather started a tradition where he would give me $20 and put $20 into an account as a small college fund for a Good Report card (His idea of good was all at least Half A's with nothing lower than a B...except Penmanship. I think I got straight C's in Penmanship.)
Obviously $20 in hand and $20 a decade from then was never enough that I worked for good grades for the lone purpose of getting that money. I think it was more of a "My grandfather must really be proud of me to be giving me money!"
I got a C one quarter in 4th grade English. I was so ashamed that I avoided my grandfather for days. He sat me down, talked to me about why I got that C, talked to me about the importance of good grades, and said "What if I told you that I was still going to give you the money?" I thought it over for a second or two as I was startled that he'd suggest that before telling him "I would say take it back because I didn't earn it." He wasn't really going to give it to me, he just wanted to see what I would say.
By middle school/high school he continued the tradition and I was handing the twenty dollars right back to him to put into my college fund. I think between the report card money, the money I would put in here and there, and interest (5% on savings was not uncommon back then) I had a bit over $2000 in that account when I went to college. (My grandfather was deceased for 2 years by then). It was at that time that I truly appreciated what he did for me because I REALLY needed that money when it came time to go to school.
I'm not debating that the artist is the creator of the content and deserves to make the most off the sale of it.
Some artists may be able to lay down music on their own, but there is a decent amount of know how needed to recording and mastering tracks. I know a guy who runs a small studio (As a hobby...he used to work at a small record label but now has an engineering job as his "main" gig)and charges a reasonable rate for people to come in, record music, and have him polish it up. I went and watched him a few times thinking "How hard could it be?" I was pretty shocked at what went into the entire recording process in terms of know how AND equipment. For an artist to do it themselves would require quite an investment in terms of time and money to get the equipment and learn how to use it properly.
Of course, this guy doesn't do professional cover design, assist with distribution, or market for those that come to his studio. A real studio is going to have people that do all of this. Could they get by with a one-time fee to do it all? Maybe, but that fee may turn out to be prohibitively high, making it more difficult for starting bands to get their stuff out there. If the fee is small but royalties are collected, it probably becomes a lottery type system. The Label lost money on this artist, made cartloads of money on this other artist. (Just a guess)
It does seem that there should be a better way...but I honestly have not seen a suggestion yet that I think would actually end up fair for all parties....not that I have some great plan of my own.;)
Smaller artists need every penny, no doubt. Larger artists may not NEED every penny but if it is something that you use and derive enjoyment from you should not figure that since the artist is large enough you can just take their stuff for free. Even if the artist him/her/them/whatever self is a complete and utter jerk bathing in money that is not a valid reason for feeling justified by reaping the benefits of their work for nothing.
Mind you, I'm not even going to pretend I never downloaded music I didn't pay for. I'm just saying that fair should be fair for BOTH starving artists and those living in ivory towers.
Of course, having to pay artists for the music isn't really what we are debating...it's paying the studios/distributors for the pleasure of DRM laden content. To be fair there are a ton of people involved in the music industry that make the creation of albums possible. While your idea of torrenting and sending money directly to the artists it does not pay the salaries of the guys that helped make the album happen.
You might not think of biology as being important beyond what diseases it can cure right now./.ers tend to be annoyed by people who take this approach to computing. Hmm...
If I had moderator points I'd want a +234 insightful to dole out to you for that comment. People from all walks of life expect everything considered to be important from the world of science to be on the level of "We cured Cancer....Yes....All Forms of it...For Good", "We successfully cloned a Grand Army of The Republic", or "The Moon Base is ready for humans to inhabit and the Mars base is 50% complete!"
Most really practical advancement in science these days has been built on top of the knowledge generated by hundreds of Scientists making small, even seemingly inane progress in the field. All of those baby steps are important if you one day expect to see any discoveries with a profound impact on human life. Heck, even well documented failures can be "Breakthroughs" of a sorts.
Do you have any proof to backup your claim that the more you educate a society the fewer the crimes that occur? I am not so sure of this. Perhaps the types of crime or the methods used might change, but surely crime will be ever present.
Sexual Assault of children is a crime that will be performed by a completely poor idiot or an absolutely brilliant millionaire. Theft? You assume that only poor, dumb people want to take your money/stuff. Surely there are smart, rich people who are of the same mindset. Murder? Not exclusive to poor black men in Compton. Drugs? The Number of intelligent and educated people I have seen hooked on drugs is staggering.
In fact, ensuring everyone is highly educated could lead to more dangerous criminals. Surely many of those who are engaged in internet fraud have a decent degree of technical "Education" of some type.
I'm more of a Network Support guy but I write small web apps when I need to. The company I work for really wanted a "Store Locator" program and instead of writing it from scratch I found one laying around. I did a lot of tweaking to add some features and make it more like what they wanted and told them that I had built on somebody's idea and wanted to post my "Improved" application. After all, we derived the benefit of hours of my time from something someone else had put on the web....posting my improvements wouldn't cost the company anything. The company really freaked out.
Because this is a small company with a small IT staff, decisions like this have to be presented to the extremely non technical President. The application in question has an XML database on the back end. The basic problem here was communication. They heard "Runs off a database" and didn't understand that there are actually multiple databases within the company. They thought that to release this I would be packaging up our main ERP database and posting it for every crook on the internet to see. Never mind that I would be packaging the schema only...not the data. The higher ups don't understand where a "Program" ends and a "Database" begins. They think it's all wrapped together.
I switched it over to a MySQL database (really easier to show someone non-technical) and showed them the application running on a database with only the header columns and two "Fake" locations. They asked why I was wasting their time asking if I could post it on the internet. It had no company information so they didn't care. I'm polishing it up a bit and am going to submit it to the original developer to see if he wants to implement may changes to the software. I finally will be giving back to the community.
I guess my point is that in some cases, management might not understand what precisely you are giving away. Most Execs (And sadly some tech people) can't really differentiate between "Our System" and "Little piece of software that manipulates data to be displayed in a certain manner." It sounds like your case was more extreme, but for others I would recommend trying different ways to explain what you want to do, and why.
The freeloaders are a fact of life. And they don't really bother me. The value of a piece of software is what it can do for me; it's not dependent on scarcity. If a thousand other people start using this software, it has absolutely no effect on what I can do with it.
I wouldn't say it has no effect on what you can do with it. The larger the user base the larger the "online community" for that piece of software will be. Most of those people will not help improve the software by writing additional code for the next update but they might be able to help you in a pinch if the developer cannot get back to you soon, they may provide ideas that the developer uses to make the next version of the software better/more stable/more fully featured that you may not think of on your own.
That is what I see as one of the the important reasons behind Linux getting more of the market share. It leads to more people on newsgroup type places sharing their ideas and fixes with each other.
I'm going off on a tangent here.....I'll admit that I am forced to use Microsoft products a large part of the time because the jobs available to me were places that are almost exclusively Windows. I run into things that I cannot figure out by myself fairly often. Have you ever contacted Microsoft for support? Has anyone? Seriously? My support for Microsoft products comes in the form of the various communities laying around. For the most part that is how I get support for most of the open source products that I use, as well. I will occasionally browse communities for different pieces of software and chime in when I can to help others.
This is the true benefit of a thousand other people using a piece of software.
I'm going to agree with you on point one. No doubt. I have several copies of the Bible in my house, none of which I have paid for. (I would probably be considered an Atheist but I do remain open to other possibilities.) No, they are not stolen either.
Point 2......I personally believe that the stories in the Bible are more easily digested because they are "Ancient" and people seem to accept a little more mysticism from things that are very old. This may come half from the fact that "Hey, people have believed this for 2000 years...sounds reasonable" and half from the fact that it can not really be completely dis proven. If I came down a mountain with stone tablets with ten rules and said that God told me to write them down I would be mocked relentlessly
Point three mostly holds true for me too. There are a few people who have treated me with suspicion, pity, and condescention when they discovered that I do not believe in the Christian God. In their defense it is entirely possible they derided by other Atheist or Agnostic types in the past. Unfortunately, our combined experience is simply anecdotal compared to the experiences of victims of the inquisition and other religious persecution at the hands of Christians.
I do appreciate that you stuck up for Christianity even though you are an Agnostic. I'll make a stand for Science when the lunatic fringe of the Christian Community tries to impede education and progress, but I think making fun of someone's deeply held personal beliefs is pretty darn low. I've met many Atheists that somehow believe making fun of Religion makes them intelligent and cool. It really doesn't. Science provides some answers and provides more and more each day. When it comes down to it, it is still a leap of faith to say that science will give us all the answers some day. That is MY belief and I really would prefer not to be mocked because of it so I will not mock the beliefs of others.
Well, people say that any publicity..even bad...is good for a company. I think that is true except in the case of an ubiquitous company like Sony. I'd suspect that a very very high percentage of people in the United States (Don't know about other countries) knowingly own/have owned/know someone who owns a product made by Sony. They don't really need the publicity.
This article makes me think less of Sony because not only is their CEO making him sound like a complete and utter fool, but there is not someone around him with the guts to say "Sir, uhm, I think saying that "nothing good has come out of this internet thingy" is probably a poor thing to say when you are running a company that sells (Among other things) technology."
Yeah, When I was in school we had to take a Home Ec class that was supposed to have a lot of cooking in it......seriously....I learned how to make pancakes. Not anything crazy like creating our own mix...just dumping an egg, milk, and oil into a bowl...stir it....dump it on a griddle. Eat. I think possible we made some "Brown and Serve" sausage to go with it.
I can't even begin to fathom the number of times I ended up with Pancakes for dinner in college....I can't touch them to this day
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What seems like a thousand years ago, IWABCFOG (I was a Biochemist Focused on Genetics) so I may have some idea what I'm talking about here but it may very well be that some of my speculation is wildly inaccurate/outdated.
I'm guessing that many of the well known genetic disorders (I'm pretty sure Huntington's falls in this category...don't know about Alzheimer's) very much is a "One Gene/One Polypeptide" type model. A single dominant allele causes the disorder to manifst itself.
Depression.....just thinking about the general mechanism of Serotonin uptake yields several possible points of failure. Is there a gene that simply cannot produce enough solid serotonin? Is there a gene that produced defective serotonin binding sites? Is there a gene that requires levels of serotonin concentration much higher or lower than the norm to begin reuptake and/or production processes?
I have a longstanding theory that I admittedly have not done enough research into trying to find it I am way off base or not...but I firmly believe that all too often the physicatric community is so focused on Serotonin being what causes feelings of depresssion when quite often it could very well be the delicate Dopamine/GABA balancing act. Now, I know a lot of people on SSRI's that fail to try to help themselves and rely completely on the medication while lying to their doctor about raging alcohol/drug problems and the like but I digress. With the Dopamine/GABA idea you throw additional genes into the equation for feelings of depression, compounding the problem of definitively nailing down a specific sequence that causes depression.
My statements in all are just me using my own thoughts of why we can't pin this down to a specific gene. There are probably too many factors to simplify this to a simple "You have the gene for depression" diagnosis.
I of course, welcome comments about my ideas but please remember two things - 1. I am not presenting any of this as fact. Just some ideas I have kicked around in my head. 2. I may have once been very strong in terms of Biochemistry and Genetics but I am years removed from it and may have ideas that cannot possibly be consistent with reality. I readily admit that. Please refrain from telling me that I am an idiot, but correct me if I have some scientifically obvious flaws.
I had a laptop running Vista that I had reinstalled by myself without any extra software from the vendor. Simply doing "Start" - "Run" (Or whatever you call it in Vista) - "Calc.Exe" would lead to a 15-20 second delay in Windows Calculator coming up. A very similar laptop that is right now running Windows 7 RC takes about a half second (Aero theme and such running on both).
That was my big problem with Vista. Responsiveness was very very poor for a lot of things. Network related actions (Opening up shares, connecting to exchange) seem much faster than Vista and faster than XP.
I know, highly scientific study I am presenting but I for one would not have recommended Vista to others based on personal experience but from what I've witnessed thus far I would not have a problem recommending Windows 7...assuming they don't completely blow the real release.
In short, a Linux machine that is run by a competent administrator is MUCH more difficult to infect or attack than a Windows machine, and the parent is a moron.
I'm going to agree with you on much of what you said, but I would like to point out the term "Competent Administrator" as a major issue here in terms of a business environment.
I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that most of the people who become proficient enough with a *nix system to get hired as some type of administrator at a company are going to be somewhat passionate about working with computer systems....spending time/have spent time at home learning how things really work. This should lead to them being at least somewhat competent.
Windows Admins? Not necessarily. I've worked with people that ranged from "Help Desk" to "Senior Network Engineer" whom I have no idea how they managed to get a job in IT or why (Actually the why is obviously, they heard it payed well) they even wanted to. They didn't know much and didn't care to learn anything more. Utterly incompetent. I had one "Senior Network Engineer" that told me at one time he didn't even have a computer at home...and he left his work laptop at work.
If we saw Linux suddenly grab 40% of the corporate desktop market, you'd end up with some positions filled by these types of people. It would still be more secure than Systems run by incompetent Windows Admins but certainly less secure than having most of the systems run by reasonably competent Linux Admins.
It is no longer the case that a part time person can keep 20 machines running. And when something does happen, it can be very difficult to fix. A single event can require a complete reinstall of the OS. I've made mistakes of going to a wrong web site and had this happen on a completely up to date machine. I have allowed untrusted parties to run my MS machines and have had significant damage caused within the hour. MS machines are the dependable work horses they once were. It now requires a significant infrastructure to keep MS machines a production. The best case scenario is to treat each machine as a RAID, keeping data off the machine, and using a standard HD disk images. Doesn't this sound like the pre-MS days of the so-called inefficient mainframe.
I assume you are talking about this in terms of the corporate environment. In that case, why would you not keep data off the machine and use a standard disk image? Users keeping data on their machines is a problem. That data is generally inaccessible to other people that may need it and more importantly, is a hard drive failure away from being gone forever. I think most corporations strongly discourage keeping data locally.
Not having some disk imaging software if you are managing any number of machines is crazy. You certainly do not want to use the default installs of Windows that are sent to you by the desktop manufacturers so you want to have disk images anyway. Most of the client manager's out there also allow you to transfer files and install select software packages as part of the imaging process. To think that any decent sized company has someone sitting there loading Windows from scratch just seems wrong.
Realistically, if the IT staff needs more than say...75 minutes to take a computer, transfer files, drop a new image, and install needed software on it they are doing something wrong. Because of this it is more effective from a perspective of the cost of an IT Employee's time to do it that way instead of troubleshooting a bizarre issue that could take them several hours to fix. Yeah, that is a crappy way to approach troubleshooting from the point of view of someone who likes to get into the nuts and bolts of a system and I would prefer to find a fix to problems instead of just dumping an image, but it is sensible from a cost of ownership point of view.
I'll tell you what....I actually have grown to like the Office 2007 Interface. I've been using it for over two years now so I get confused using older versions of Office.
I am certainly in the minority though. Most of the people at the Office I work at simply have not adjusted even after using it for an entire year. They absolutely despise it. The amount of time that I have spent showing people where things are (Not to mention department "Power Users") showing other users where things are has been outrageous.
If they felt they needed to do this, I think their big mistake was not easing the users into this type of menu. At least for one release of the software have both available or something. It has been an enormous hidden cost for the company I work at and I would imagine for a lot of other companies that use the Office Suite.
When I was a few years out of college I started to have issues concentrating, completing tasks, doing my work properly, and (At times) socializing at all. This was a complete 180 from how I had been in the past. I went to a doctor and he started asking me all sorts of questions ranging from my sleep schedule to my diet, to my sex drive. He told me of other cases he had that were similar and in different patients had found things like diabetes, Sleep Apnea, really low testosterone levels, even a young man with a brain tumor.
Turns out I must have been depressed or something. The doctor ran tests on me and couldn't find anything definitive. He was a little vexed but did believe I was being truthful about my symptoms. I know the drug has somewhat of a stigma about it but I ended up being prescribed Provigil. It got my back on track doing good work, being able to hang out with friends, and enjoying life once again.
I too have used the RC for some time now and find it to be quite good. It is stable and reasonably fast (Although logging onto a domain seems to take a much much longer amount of time than it does in Windows XP for some reason. Completely anecdotal though as I've only tested it on one machine.)
The one thing that really really bothers me that started late in Windows XP is the new "Desktop Search." Maybe I'm a complete idiot but A. Having Search indexing turned on bogs down the machine at times and B. I'll do a Search for a file that I KNOW is present (As in, I browse to a directory and look at the file) and Search simply doesn't find it!?!?! I'm talking non-system, non-hidden files. Just foobar.txt or the like. There is probably some utility I can install but more and more I have found myself dropping to the command line to do a dir /s foobar* or something to find the files.
I do not actually post that much so I never bothered to change the defaults. I just use the HTML tags.
This may sound stupid but it reminds me a little of the earlier days of the internet. It was a bit harder to do things back and I didn't have the knowledge of how things worked. It was a strange and fantastic new world that had opened up before me where tons of knowledge was at my fingertips. The possibilities fascinated me.
Not that the Internet isn't great now.... Even with all of the bad things about it there are several orders more of knowledge to be had...but the early days of my browsing will always be a special memory for me.
For what it's worth try Trojan Supra Microsheer Polyurethane. They cost a bit more but I've found them to be a worthwhile investment.
My wife and I had some issues with Latex condoms. They really did smell quite poor and they caused her to feel burning after. Someone told us we should try lambskin and talk about smell....ewwww....I seriously had to stop once because the smell turned off my mood completely. Since we moved to the Microsheer things have been much better. Actually, they seem to be more sensitive than anything else so uhm, my performance uhm, dropped off a bit until I got used to the increased sensitivity.
Seriously, find a way that works for you. Much better than the alternative.
Ummmm....I don't use Office enough to actually create custom task bars. I just looked and the "Undo" command is right under the ribbon. Next to Redo and (The other thing that seems to be a sticking point) a save button.
I think a lot of the complaining about the ribbon has a lot to do with people not liking anything to be different at all....not it having a lack of usability.
---I--- personally do not need Legacy Code at home. At work? The users I support sure as heck need it. An example....we have four pieces of $100,000 equipment in the shop that are called "Mills". They are controlled by computers that run a piece of software that (Oddly) will not run on Vista, or (I'd imagine but have not bothered to try yet) Windows 7. The manufacturer has stated that they will not be releasing a new version of that software....probably ever. The machines were purchased in 1995 and are physically built to last for 20-25 years. I'll tell the company they need to drop $500,000 to replace their functioning Mills if I can't get something that will run Windows XP in 5 years.
We have an ERP system that we upgraded 2 1/2 years ago under the direction of a reseller of the software. There were two releases ahead of the one we upgraded to but they insisted that they would not be stable enough to trust for at least another 9 months. The system uses VBScript Macros that can have ActiveX VB running on it. I know I can probably get ActiveX applications written in Visual Studio 2010....but there are three other people who write some of the stuff that have not worked outside of VB 6. It just works. Time to upgrade our ERP system after only 2 1/2 years because VB 6 won't Install on Vista or Windows 7?
There are such examples most likely in every mid to enormous sized company around the world. Legacy Support is a big deal to them. For the most part, It doesn't matter to me at home but it sure matters at the place at work...which has obviously spent a far greater amount of money on Microsoft Products than I have.
For some demented reason I enjoy "studying" physical and mental illness and reading about pharmaceuticals in my spare time. Right out of college I was a more arrogant little bastard and thought I knew enough about everything to be an expert.
I don't want to get too deep into the issues, but I dealt with 7 people plus myself who got wrong advice/medications/treatments from doctors. I would lay out all the evidence I could accumulate and the patient would take it to their doctor and say "This is what is wrong" or "You put me on this medication and I feel like crap, maybe it's because it reacts this way to what you are already giving me." I just got lucky a few times. I was always spot on. I looked like a freaking genius. It got to the point where quite a few family and friends would call me before and after going to see a doctor. This didn't really help with my arrogance problem.
My mom has a long history of mental illness. Her doctors put her on some more pills that I considered to be foolish in the situation. I actually had the nerve to insist that she stop taking them and I acquired different medication for her (schedule IV stuff...I wasn't smuggling oxycontin or anything) and she started taking it. Long story short, three weeks later she had totally gone off the deep end. She destroyed a bunch of stuff in my parents' house, ripped up most of my dad's clothes, starting threatening homicide and/or suicide until finally my dad had to call the police. They gave her a three day restraining order and she kept coming back that and getting more beligerent before until finally five cops and the county psychiatric van pulled up and took her away for a little vacation.
That was quite an eye opener. I blew it. Bad. Looking back, I don't know what I was thinking. I had some problems of my own that I refused to attempt to treat/seek treatment for I did some good things for some people but helped cause a lot of problems for my parents.
This is a great story because it is important to be active participant in maintaining your health. Doctors are not infallible and you know your body/get more time to think about the issue than they get. When it comes down to it though, remember to seek the opinion of at least one, maybe more in important cases, actual medical professional.
The nice thing about Sharepoint is, depending on the functionality you need it can be FREE (as in beer) if you can get away with Windows Sharepoint Services.
The company I work for really wanted A Document Management System. They had tons of paperwork laying around. We put in Sharepoint along with a product called KnowledgeLake. Knowledgelake reads bar codes off documents that are printed or scanned to a network drive, grabs metadata from a SQL Server based on that bar code, and files the thing. It is really no hassle at all. Knowledgelake also adds a search component that is much better than the Sharepoint Search so finding documents is really really easy. There is also a client program for the Knowledgelake system that lets you right click on a document, pick a document library to send the document to, and manually input the key field to grab the Metadata and file the document properly.
I don't know what types of documents you are looking to index but all MS Office documents integrate with Sharepoint, obviously....but the real issue is other file types. Autocad Files, for Example, can be integrated into the Sharepoint System using third party applications (We ended up not going that direction so I can't remember what it is called..the company is named Bentley maybe?) and I am sure there are many other programs that have similar applications written for them.
So yeah, you can make fun of me for sounding like a Microsoft shill but I evaluated several other Document Management Systems and Sharepoint with Knowledge Lake turned out to be the one that the company felt most comfortable with....and it has served it's purpose well!
Some of this may not apply to you....as you are working in a different industry but I am in a similar situation....sole IT guy for about 90 users (actually, my Boss is the lead Engineer and he does some of the help desk type stuff when he has time.)
The best advice I can give is to go out and be seen. You work for a small company so the building probably huge. Don't remote in to fix every problem....stretch your legs, take a walk, talk to the user and try to understand their problem, talk to the user to try to understand future needs, and talk to the user about their hobbies and your own. I've known many IT people who seem to think they can sit in their "Ivory Tower" and avoid actually interacting with the users. The users eventually catch on to the fact that they are aloof, antisocial jerks that think that having to help them with their computer is a hassle. They'll start to despise them.
My current environment is about 75% Office, 25% light manufacturing. I've gotten out on the shop floor, crawled around in the dust a little to reroute cables, got all sweaty and dirty......and actually gained a lot of respect for it. Again, I've seen IT workers who seem to think that going out into the shop is beneath them and if they get a little dirty or talk to the heavy machine operators that they might be infected with a virus that turns them into lowly shop grunts or something.
Act interested in not only solving their problems, but listening to their ideas on things that could make their jobs easier. Their idea to share out the crappy old deskjet installed on the computer across the way might seem nitpicky and inane to you but it very well may make their job a lot easier. Remember...you are there to make life easier for those responsible for producing the product that actually makes the money....you are not there so you can do way cool stuff with Active Directory policies that makes it impossible for them to do their jobs.
What I am presenting of course is more or less is just an extension of some other comments on here that you should "Play the politics game." By showing them that you are working hard, trying to help them in any way you can, and respect their input and opinions (Even if you really don't give a shit) you will find that they have a different attitude towards you. You really don't deserve respect just because you are an IT guy...you have to earn it. Just because you create the accounts doesn't mean that they need to follow your ideas for how the company should be run. If you do gain some respect don't expect to be constantly lavished with praise and bowed down before when you clean up some spyware on some idiot's machine.
I won't rule out the possibility that you work in an office that is entirely made up of complete jerks. That could very well be the case. It's a bummer alternative in today's job market but if I were in that sort of situation where everyone was outright rude to me all the time I would be polishing up my resume and seeing what else I can find.
Hairyfeet - My first thought when reading the Title of the Article was "They passed Yahoo? That means, what... 10 people used Bing?
And here you have to go and post something well thought out and tell me you use Yahoo. It made me realize that by exclusively using Google, perhaps I should be making fun of myself for insisting that something is better without checking out the competition for about 2 entire years.
You have convinced me to broaden my (search) Horizons.
Warning: Lame personal anecdote about getting paid for grades below.
When I was in Second Grade my grandfather started a tradition where he would give me $20 and put $20 into an account as a small college fund for a Good Report card (His idea of good was all at least Half A's with nothing lower than a B...except Penmanship. I think I got straight C's in Penmanship.)
Obviously $20 in hand and $20 a decade from then was never enough that I worked for good grades for the lone purpose of getting that money. I think it was more of a "My grandfather must really be proud of me to be giving me money!"
I got a C one quarter in 4th grade English. I was so ashamed that I avoided my grandfather for days. He sat me down, talked to me about why I got that C, talked to me about the importance of good grades, and said "What if I told you that I was still going to give you the money?" I thought it over for a second or two as I was startled that he'd suggest that before telling him "I would say take it back because I didn't earn it." He wasn't really going to give it to me, he just wanted to see what I would say.
By middle school/high school he continued the tradition and I was handing the twenty dollars right back to him to put into my college fund. I think between the report card money, the money I would put in here and there, and interest (5% on savings was not uncommon back then) I had a bit over $2000 in that account when I went to college. (My grandfather was deceased for 2 years by then). It was at that time that I truly appreciated what he did for me because I REALLY needed that money when it came time to go to school.
I'm not debating that the artist is the creator of the content and deserves to make the most off the sale of it.
Some artists may be able to lay down music on their own, but there is a decent amount of know how needed to recording and mastering tracks. I know a guy who runs a small studio (As a hobby...he used to work at a small record label but now has an engineering job as his "main" gig)and charges a reasonable rate for people to come in, record music, and have him polish it up. I went and watched him a few times thinking "How hard could it be?" I was pretty shocked at what went into the entire recording process in terms of know how AND equipment. For an artist to do it themselves would require quite an investment in terms of time and money to get the equipment and learn how to use it properly.
Of course, this guy doesn't do professional cover design, assist with distribution, or market for those that come to his studio. A real studio is going to have people that do all of this. Could they get by with a one-time fee to do it all? Maybe, but that fee may turn out to be prohibitively high, making it more difficult for starting bands to get their stuff out there. If the fee is small but royalties are collected, it probably becomes a lottery type system. The Label lost money on this artist, made cartloads of money on this other artist. (Just a guess)
It does seem that there should be a better way...but I honestly have not seen a suggestion yet that I think would actually end up fair for all parties....not that I have some great plan of my own. ;)
Smaller artists need every penny, no doubt. Larger artists may not NEED every penny but if it is something that you use and derive enjoyment from you should not figure that since the artist is large enough you can just take their stuff for free. Even if the artist him/her/them/whatever self is a complete and utter jerk bathing in money that is not a valid reason for feeling justified by reaping the benefits of their work for nothing.
Mind you, I'm not even going to pretend I never downloaded music I didn't pay for. I'm just saying that fair should be fair for BOTH starving artists and those living in ivory towers.
Of course, having to pay artists for the music isn't really what we are debating...it's paying the studios/distributors for the pleasure of DRM laden content. To be fair there are a ton of people involved in the music industry that make the creation of albums possible. While your idea of torrenting and sending money directly to the artists it does not pay the salaries of the guys that helped make the album happen.
You might not think of biology as being important beyond what diseases it can cure right now. /.ers tend to be annoyed by people who take this approach to computing. Hmm...
If I had moderator points I'd want a +234 insightful to dole out to you for that comment. People from all walks of life expect everything considered to be important from the world of science to be on the level of "We cured Cancer....Yes....All Forms of it...For Good", "We successfully cloned a Grand Army of The Republic", or "The Moon Base is ready for humans to inhabit and the Mars base is 50% complete!"
Most really practical advancement in science these days has been built on top of the knowledge generated by hundreds of Scientists making small, even seemingly inane progress in the field. All of those baby steps are important if you one day expect to see any discoveries with a profound impact on human life. Heck, even well documented failures can be "Breakthroughs" of a sorts.
Do you have any proof to backup your claim that the more you educate a society the fewer the crimes that occur? I am not so sure of this. Perhaps the types of crime or the methods used might change, but surely crime will be ever present.
Sexual Assault of children is a crime that will be performed by a completely poor idiot or an absolutely brilliant millionaire. Theft? You assume that only poor, dumb people want to take your money/stuff. Surely there are smart, rich people who are of the same mindset. Murder? Not exclusive to poor black men in Compton. Drugs? The Number of intelligent and educated people I have seen hooked on drugs is staggering.
In fact, ensuring everyone is highly educated could lead to more dangerous criminals. Surely many of those who are engaged in internet fraud have a decent degree of technical "Education" of some type.
I'm more of a Network Support guy but I write small web apps when I need to. The company I work for really wanted a "Store Locator" program and instead of writing it from scratch I found one laying around. I did a lot of tweaking to add some features and make it more like what they wanted and told them that I had built on somebody's idea and wanted to post my "Improved" application. After all, we derived the benefit of hours of my time from something someone else had put on the web....posting my improvements wouldn't cost the company anything. The company really freaked out.
Because this is a small company with a small IT staff, decisions like this have to be presented to the extremely non technical President. The application in question has an XML database on the back end. The basic problem here was communication. They heard "Runs off a database" and didn't understand that there are actually multiple databases within the company. They thought that to release this I would be packaging up our main ERP database and posting it for every crook on the internet to see. Never mind that I would be packaging the schema only...not the data. The higher ups don't understand where a "Program" ends and a "Database" begins. They think it's all wrapped together.
I switched it over to a MySQL database (really easier to show someone non-technical) and showed them the application running on a database with only the header columns and two "Fake" locations. They asked why I was wasting their time asking if I could post it on the internet. It had no company information so they didn't care. I'm polishing it up a bit and am going to submit it to the original developer to see if he wants to implement may changes to the software. I finally will be giving back to the community.
I guess my point is that in some cases, management might not understand what precisely you are giving away. Most Execs (And sadly some tech people) can't really differentiate between "Our System" and "Little piece of software that manipulates data to be displayed in a certain manner." It sounds like your case was more extreme, but for others I would recommend trying different ways to explain what you want to do, and why.
The freeloaders are a fact of life. And they don't really bother me. The value of a piece of software is what it can do for me; it's not dependent on scarcity. If a thousand other people start using this software, it has absolutely no effect on what I can do with it.
I wouldn't say it has no effect on what you can do with it. The larger the user base the larger the "online community" for that piece of software will be. Most of those people will not help improve the software by writing additional code for the next update but they might be able to help you in a pinch if the developer cannot get back to you soon, they may provide ideas that the developer uses to make the next version of the software better/more stable/more fully featured that you may not think of on your own.
That is what I see as one of the the important reasons behind Linux getting more of the market share. It leads to more people on newsgroup type places sharing their ideas and fixes with each other.
I'm going off on a tangent here.....I'll admit that I am forced to use Microsoft products a large part of the time because the jobs available to me were places that are almost exclusively Windows. I run into things that I cannot figure out by myself fairly often. Have you ever contacted Microsoft for support? Has anyone? Seriously? My support for Microsoft products comes in the form of the various communities laying around. For the most part that is how I get support for most of the open source products that I use, as well. I will occasionally browse communities for different pieces of software and chime in when I can to help others.
This is the true benefit of a thousand other people using a piece of software.
I'm going to agree with you on point one. No doubt. I have several copies of the Bible in my house, none of which I have paid for. (I would probably be considered an Atheist but I do remain open to other possibilities.) No, they are not stolen either.
Point 2......I personally believe that the stories in the Bible are more easily digested because they are "Ancient" and people seem to accept a little more mysticism from things that are very old. This may come half from the fact that "Hey, people have believed this for 2000 years...sounds reasonable" and half from the fact that it can not really be completely dis proven. If I came down a mountain with stone tablets with ten rules and said that God told me to write them down I would be mocked relentlessly
Point three mostly holds true for me too. There are a few people who have treated me with suspicion, pity, and condescention when they discovered that I do not believe in the Christian God. In their defense it is entirely possible they derided by other Atheist or Agnostic types in the past. Unfortunately, our combined experience is simply anecdotal compared to the experiences of victims of the inquisition and other religious persecution at the hands of Christians.
I do appreciate that you stuck up for Christianity even though you are an Agnostic. I'll make a stand for Science when the lunatic fringe of the Christian Community tries to impede education and progress, but I think making fun of someone's deeply held personal beliefs is pretty darn low. I've met many Atheists that somehow believe making fun of Religion makes them intelligent and cool. It really doesn't. Science provides some answers and provides more and more each day. When it comes down to it, it is still a leap of faith to say that science will give us all the answers some day. That is MY belief and I really would prefer not to be mocked because of it so I will not mock the beliefs of others.
Well, people say that any publicity..even bad...is good for a company. I think that is true except in the case of an ubiquitous company like Sony. I'd suspect that a very very high percentage of people in the United States (Don't know about other countries) knowingly own/have owned/know someone who owns a product made by Sony. They don't really need the publicity.
This article makes me think less of Sony because not only is their CEO making him sound like a complete and utter fool, but there is not someone around him with the guts to say "Sir, uhm, I think saying that "nothing good has come out of this internet thingy" is probably a poor thing to say when you are running a company that sells (Among other things) technology."
Yeah, When I was in school we had to take a Home Ec class that was supposed to have a lot of cooking in it......seriously....I learned how to make pancakes. Not anything crazy like creating our own mix...just dumping an egg, milk, and oil into a bowl...stir it....dump it on a griddle. Eat. I think possible we made some "Brown and Serve" sausage to go with it.
I can't even begin to fathom the number of times I ended up with Pancakes for dinner in college....I can't touch them to this day