You could simply ask your current HR about their policy on this. If they confirm, then you know your boss cannot carry through on his threat. If he tries the threat again, then report him.
I've worked a 9/80 schedule at two different jobs. We were encouraged to schedule personal stuff on Fridays, such as Doctors appointments. The three day weekends were like having a mental health day every other week. And perhaps best, Fridays were declared no meeting days at both employers. The Fridays at the office were quiet, pleasantly productive days.
I used to work for a large company where we used to get a lecture every year from the company's intellectual property lawyer. The point I remember is this. If you want to protect a copyright, you have to protect it everywhere.
If Rowling wants to protect against "Gary Gotter and the Goblet of Glaze", then she has to protect it against unauthorized encyclopedias as well, no matter how innocuous or well intentioned. This provision invariably makes the big guy look bad.
The article should be called the Top 9 Worst uses for Windows. Number 7. Manufacturing and Number 9. SCADA systems are the same thing.
I used to work for a small consulting company that specialized in a UNIX HMI system, RTAP, developed by HP. It had an early foothold in the SCADA market, but was being replaced by WonderWare in leaps and bounds. The engineers at the plants were comfortable with Windows.
To emphasize Titus Barik's comments, the plants run on PLC's. They will run whether the HMI is up or not, be it Windows or *nix. So the inference in the main article was just plain wrong. I'm not a Windows fan by any stretch of the imagination, but bad arguments do not help your cause.
I got a buddy in academia, oceanography to be specific. In the last 5 years, he's seen the funding for his projects go from $10M to about $200K. And those projects had been tagged by the NSF as very important, so they weren't just boondoggles. Iraq has got everything to do with it. Funding for all the non-defense related sciences has dried up.
My MS in geophysics in the early 80's was indirectly funded by the nuclear industry. During the process, I got to talk to folks from the NRC. The problem with nuclear energy is that while it is clean, it is not cheap. The power companies who were building plants at the time were trying to make it cheap. They just did not take the safety issues seriously enough. That led to Three Mile Island and lots of much smaller accidents and problems at other plants. That scared away the public.
Blaming environmentalists for scaring the public is disingenuous. If the utility companies had taken the public perception seriously enough and put in the money required, we would not have had TMI and the industry would still be humming along. Face it, nuclear disasters have the potential of being really really bad. Of course, putting in the money required would have made nuclear power expensive. But if the utilities had invested the money then, the regulatory costs would be no where near what they are now.
There was a big red button on the inside of the server room opposite the card reader on the outside. I got curious if pushing the button would make the card reader light up. It didn't. The suddenly silent fans gave away the button's real purpose. And then we discovered that there was a lot more interconnectedness than anyone throught. Shutting down our server room crashed most of the servers on the three building campus. Lucky for me that this was an R&D type system with some inherent flakiness. Folks were used to losing access for an afternoon now and again. I got quite a razzing from my manager, but nothing worse.
The UNIX Programming Environment by Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike
This book explains the philosophy behind Unix and consequently Linux. Kernighan was one of the founders of Unix at Bell Labs and Pike came on board shortly afterwards. The book is definitely dated, having been published in 1984. However, I still feel like I have a better understanding of the Linux environment having read it.
I hate Microsoft for the same reason I hated IBM when they dominated the computing landscape. Through marketing muscle, they force me to use their products. What makes this particularly onerous is that those products are frequently inferior to competitors' products that I would have chosen if the competitive landscape were even. What makes those products inferior is that I spend far more time managing the product rather than doing the work (or play) that I want to accomplish with the product.
Have you looked into travelling by train lately? You can get there for the cost of flying at the speed of driving...very slowly. You might argue that more rail travel would mean better rail travel, but if you look at the history, trains were never very well managed in the United States. Cars are lot more flexible than trains and planes get there a lot quicker, meaning cheaper. There is a reason the passenger rail system was dismantled. Oh, and terrorists bomb trains too.
Want to read a great book? Try "Basin and Range" by John McPhee. It is a fascinating read about Plate Tectonics and geology in general. The "star" of the book happens to be Deffeyes. He's led a pretty cool life.
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Back in the early 1980's, my group used the Heathkit radios to synchronize portable seismographs. "At the tone, the time will be..."
You could simply ask your current HR about their policy on this. If they confirm, then you know your boss cannot carry through on his threat. If he tries the threat again, then report him.
I've worked a 9/80 schedule at two different jobs. We were encouraged to schedule personal stuff on Fridays, such as Doctors appointments. The three day weekends were like having a mental health day every other week. And perhaps best, Fridays were declared no meeting days at both employers. The Fridays at the office were quiet, pleasantly productive days.
I used to work for a large company where we used to get a lecture every year from the company's intellectual property lawyer. The point I remember is this. If you want to protect a copyright, you have to protect it everywhere. If Rowling wants to protect against "Gary Gotter and the Goblet of Glaze", then she has to protect it against unauthorized encyclopedias as well, no matter how innocuous or well intentioned. This provision invariably makes the big guy look bad.
The article should be called the Top 9 Worst uses for Windows. Number 7. Manufacturing and Number 9. SCADA systems are the same thing.
I used to work for a small consulting company that specialized in a UNIX HMI system, RTAP, developed by HP. It had an early foothold in the SCADA market, but was being replaced by WonderWare in leaps and bounds. The engineers at the plants were comfortable with Windows.
To emphasize Titus Barik's comments, the plants run on PLC's. They will run whether the HMI is up or not, be it Windows or *nix. So the inference in the main article was just plain wrong. I'm not a Windows fan by any stretch of the imagination, but bad arguments do not help your cause.
I got a buddy in academia, oceanography to be specific. In the last 5 years, he's seen the funding for his projects go from $10M to about $200K. And those projects had been tagged by the NSF as very important, so they weren't just boondoggles. Iraq has got everything to do with it. Funding for all the non-defense related sciences has dried up.
My MS in geophysics in the early 80's was indirectly funded by the nuclear industry. During the process, I got to talk to folks from the NRC. The problem with nuclear energy is that while it is clean, it is not cheap. The power companies who were building plants at the time were trying to make it cheap. They just did not take the safety issues seriously enough. That led to Three Mile Island and lots of much smaller accidents and problems at other plants. That scared away the public.
Blaming environmentalists for scaring the public is disingenuous. If the utility companies had taken the public perception seriously enough and put in the money required, we would not have had TMI and the industry would still be humming along. Face it, nuclear disasters have the potential of being really really bad. Of course, putting in the money required would have made nuclear power expensive. But if the utilities had invested the money then, the regulatory costs would be no where near what they are now.
There was a big red button on the inside of the server room opposite the card reader on the outside. I got curious if pushing the button would make the card reader light up. It didn't. The suddenly silent fans gave away the button's real purpose. And then we discovered that there was a lot more interconnectedness than anyone throught. Shutting down our server room crashed most of the servers on the three building campus. Lucky for me that this was an R&D type system with some inherent flakiness. Folks were used to losing access for an afternoon now and again. I got quite a razzing from my manager, but nothing worse.
The UNIX Programming Environment by Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike
This book explains the philosophy behind Unix and consequently Linux. Kernighan was one of the founders of Unix at Bell Labs and Pike came on board shortly afterwards. The book is definitely dated, having been published in 1984. However, I still feel like I have a better understanding of the Linux environment having read it.
I hate Microsoft for the same reason I hated IBM when they dominated the computing landscape. Through marketing muscle, they force me to use their products. What makes this particularly onerous is that those products are frequently inferior to competitors' products that I would have chosen if the competitive landscape were even. What makes those products inferior is that I spend far more time managing the product rather than doing the work (or play) that I want to accomplish with the product.
Have you looked into travelling by train lately? You can get there for the cost of flying at the speed of driving...very slowly. You might argue that more rail travel would mean better rail travel, but if you look at the history, trains were never very well managed in the United States. Cars are lot more flexible than trains and planes get there a lot quicker, meaning cheaper. There is a reason the passenger rail system was dismantled. Oh, and terrorists bomb trains too.
It looks like a cross between an o'possum and a cockroach to me.
Want to read a great book? Try "Basin and Range" by John McPhee. It is a fascinating read about Plate Tectonics and geology in general. The "star" of the book happens to be Deffeyes. He's led a pretty cool life.