work the problem backwards. what storage tech from 25 years ago (1980 for crying out loud, we're not talking that big a gap) has the required capacity, is still widely used (or at least easily used), shows no particular signs of obsolescence, and is physically robust enough to deal with being welded in a steel can for 25 years with possible odd temperature and condensation fluctuations? use that. it's a decent bet it'll still be around and easily usable in another 25 years.
One route to making people serious about IT processes is to relate it to relevant federal regulations.
For example, we've been doing work that will eventually involve us as a partner in upcoming clinical trials. There's a bunch of federal regulations about IT processes connected to clinical trials, and it has been easy to get management to accept that while our current processes can be as ad-hoc as we like, at some point having compliant processes will be essential to continuing the work we do, so we may as well get it right the first time rather than have to reimplement years worth of ad-hoc development somewhere down the track.
In my case, one trivial example has been being able to implement gpg signing of documents as a consequence of setting up the infrastructure to be able to be quickly compliant with 21 CFR 11, which we'd need to do if we're part of a clinical trial.
I seem to remember puritan crazies held themselves a coup and took over large chunks of the UK for a few decades. And that a bunch of them decided it'd be a good idea to shift shop across the Atlantic once people got sick of them in the UK etc. So it's ultimately your fault that the US wound up with puritan idiots dabbling in government (I'm assuming (probably wrongly) you're writing from the UK or north western Europe..). : )
Part of the whole point of having them in the first place was because the homeless need to shit too, and years of 'urban renewal' projects had removed all previous public toilets from the downtown area, which meant that there was a lot of human shit on the sidewalks. Charging 50c works fine when you're providing bathrooms for tourists; when it's for the homeless you just end up with people shitting right by the door of the facility as a 'vote with your bum' protest.
Seriously. Dump it on the curb, put a post on craigslist listing what's there and where it is - if you're in a metro area it'll be gone in hours, because *someone* will turn out to really really need that HDI-25 DBwhatever scsi adaptor cable for some arcane project they're working on, or the local nonprofit will grab all the cat5 to replace the cable that got trashed when they shifted that filing cabinet and snagged the existing cable or whatever.
And if any of it's still there in two days, go and clean up the mess, because whatever's left really is trash..
"2. There were some sickos during the civil war. Saving smallpox scabs in an envelope?"
Grinding up smallpox scabs and jabbing them into your skin used to be how you inoculated people for smallpox before the cowpox vaccination was invented/discovered. So collecting the scabs from people who had recently had it was a pretty common practice.
University of California policy is if one of your non-exempt employees replies to emails you sent them out of work hours you're supposed to reprimand them, for exactly this issue - if someone sues the university for unpaid overtime and can show a string of timestamps on emails to their supervisor of record outside normal work hours, this demonstrates a) they were doing uncompensated overtime, and, more importantly, b) their supervisor knew about it and did not stop it, which counts as approval in the eyes of courts.
I assume this counts for all employees in California at least. So if you're a non-exempt employee in California and have had it with creeping expectations about when and how you work, dig through the last two years of your outbox & give the CA dept. of industrial relations a call: http://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/HowToFileWageCLaim.htm
If you're not sure if you're 'non-exempt', the DIR is the body responsible for deciding if your occupation is exempt or no exempt (and their webpage has a handy link on the front page about software workers..) http://www.dir.ca.gov/IWC/IWC.html
As a national of another country, I'm curious - is this intended to be a parody?
I speak English as a first language, but I found Col. Bircher's responses to be, well, vacuous, and loaded with bureaucrateze (I see the US military has come up with a new term for "not my job" - "not in my lane" - shich I'm sure will spread rapidly in the US private sector..). I definitely can't imagine wanting to join an institution with the kind of internal culture that makes someone waffle with such content-free, acronym-laden earnestness.
"it'll appeal to the posers who want to be seen in the right places"
Except it won't even do that - by definition, anywhere where there's thousands of people isn't 'the right place'. Believe me, no hipster would be seen dead in pacbell park during a game or in some mega-nightclub. Posers want to boast about how they were in some tiny artspace with only 100 of the cogniceti(sp?) last night, now how they were in some giant venue that every moron from the burbs had managed to find.
It's the same in the US - I work for a large west coast university & have been advised by our legal dept that you cannot say anything bad about an ex-employee if someone calls for a reference, no matter how bad the ex employee was. However, the one question you *are* allowed to answer honestly if asked directly is "would you employ this person again if a similar position arose in your organization?". So if you're checking references in the US, always ask that question - if they answer "no", you know the person is a dud.
I've installed it alongside 2.4 - it's a lot slower than 2.4 (so much so that it's close to unusable on my 1.5 Ghz G4), but it has the lifesaving feature of being able to open.docx files, so it's worth the dual install from my point of view - I open them in 3.0 then save as odt or regular doc before working on them in 2.4. A glorified converter, but hey, it works.
Half my damn students.. I occasionally teach undergrads and every semester I make it clear that I will not accept papers in microsoft works format and every semester without fail a dozen students email me a final paper in works format. It came for free on their computer and by and large we're talking about a level of computer illiteracy where they can't actually tell the difference between works and regular office, let alone acquire a copy of either office or OO and install it..
Same thing you'd do with the user who did loosely equivalent things with paper records etc - you'd fire them.
Once upon a time, when computers were brand new technology, it was reasonable to provide repeated ongoing training, do hand-holding, and expect rough edges as people adopted to the new technology. That was 15-20 years ago. Now, to actually hang on to employees who repeatedly do the equivalent of throwing out needed paper documents (1, 4), damaging company property (2), failure to adhere to fundamental, basic company document storage procedures (3), destroying company documents with legally required retention periods (5), or handing the keys to the office over to any random idiot on the street (6) is, well, not the greatest HR policy I can think of. Yes, of course, there are still plenty of people who will do all of the things on your list - but to deliberately retain them is self-inflicted misery.
Finally, if you do have rigorous IT lockdown designed to protect your worst 10% of users from themselves, in all probability you're impinging on the other 90% of competent users from doing their many and varied jobs in the most effective way possible.
Same problem here. So I got the 3.0 beta instead, and a) it works fine so far; b) imports docx (that alone will keep it on my HD even if it turns out to be too buggy for daily use); and c) uses regular apple key mappings (cmd-c cmd-x cmd-v etc) instead of ctrl-everything.
Or for those of you reading from Europe, Australia, Canada etc:
On economic, foreign policy, and healthcare issues, Obama and Clinton would not look particularly out of place as candidates for:
Christian Democratic Union (Germany)
Liberal Party (Australia)
Conservative Party of Canada (Canada)
On some social issues however, they are both more left - for example both have stated that they will remove the current ban on Federal money being used to fund needle exchange. Having said that, note that all three of the above centre-right political parties either supported needle exchange or did nothing to restrict it when last in power.
In brief, for many issues the mainstream 'left' position in the United States would be seen as centre or even centre-right elsewhere. There are obvious exceptions, and the Republicans often have deep splits on social issues, with the Christian/moral right advocating for an extensive regulatory role for government on moral issues (policing of drug use, anything relating to sex, and so on) and the 'smallgovernment'/fiscal conservatives advocating for as little government regulation of social mores as possible.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't need to start one. There's several already. Pick according to your location:
Global
Australia
Thailand
United States
Canada
South Africa
etc etc
work the problem backwards. what storage tech from 25 years ago (1980 for crying out loud, we're not talking that big a gap) has the required capacity, is still widely used (or at least easily used), shows no particular signs of obsolescence, and is physically robust enough to deal with being welded in a steel can for 25 years with possible odd temperature and condensation fluctuations? use that. it's a decent bet it'll still be around and easily usable in another 25 years.
One route to making people serious about IT processes is to relate it to relevant federal regulations.
For example, we've been doing work that will eventually involve us as a partner in upcoming clinical trials. There's a bunch of federal regulations about IT processes connected to clinical trials, and it has been easy to get management to accept that while our current processes can be as ad-hoc as we like, at some point having compliant processes will be essential to continuing the work we do, so we may as well get it right the first time rather than have to reimplement years worth of ad-hoc development somewhere down the track.
In my case, one trivial example has been being able to implement gpg signing of documents as a consequence of setting up the infrastructure to be able to be quickly compliant with 21 CFR 11, which we'd need to do if we're part of a clinical trial.
I seem to remember puritan crazies held themselves a coup and took over large chunks of the UK for a few decades. And that a bunch of them decided it'd be a good idea to shift shop across the Atlantic once people got sick of them in the UK etc. So it's ultimately your fault that the US wound up with puritan idiots dabbling in government (I'm assuming (probably wrongly) you're writing from the UK or north western Europe..). : )
Not bad, considering you get HCV from sharing used needles. Blood to blood transmission only.
I offer myself as the datum. I just turned 40.
Now all we need is a scale..
Part of the whole point of having them in the first place was because the homeless need to shit too, and years of 'urban renewal' projects had removed all previous public toilets from the downtown area, which meant that there was a lot of human shit on the sidewalks. Charging 50c works fine when you're providing bathrooms for tourists; when it's for the homeless you just end up with people shitting right by the door of the facility as a 'vote with your bum' protest.
Seriously. Dump it on the curb, put a post on craigslist listing what's there and where it is - if you're in a metro area it'll be gone in hours, because *someone* will turn out to really really need that HDI-25 DBwhatever scsi adaptor cable for some arcane project they're working on, or the local nonprofit will grab all the cat5 to replace the cable that got trashed when they shifted that filing cabinet and snagged the existing cable or whatever.
And if any of it's still there in two days, go and clean up the mess, because whatever's left really is trash..
"2. There were some sickos during the civil war. Saving smallpox scabs in an envelope?"
Grinding up smallpox scabs and jabbing them into your skin used to be how you inoculated people for smallpox before the cowpox vaccination was invented/discovered. So collecting the scabs from people who had recently had it was a pretty common practice.
University of California policy is if one of your non-exempt employees replies to emails you sent them out of work hours you're supposed to reprimand them, for exactly this issue - if someone sues the university for unpaid overtime and can show a string of timestamps on emails to their supervisor of record outside normal work hours, this demonstrates a) they were doing uncompensated overtime, and, more importantly, b) their supervisor knew about it and did not stop it, which counts as approval in the eyes of courts.
I assume this counts for all employees in California at least. So if you're a non-exempt employee in California and have had it with creeping expectations about when and how you work, dig through the last two years of your outbox & give the CA dept. of industrial relations a call: http://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/HowToFileWageCLaim.htm
If you're not sure if you're 'non-exempt', the DIR is the body responsible for deciding if your occupation is exempt or no exempt (and their webpage has a handy link on the front page about software workers..) http://www.dir.ca.gov/IWC/IWC.html
Enjoy : )
As a national of another country, I'm curious - is this intended to be a parody?
I speak English as a first language, but I found Col. Bircher's responses to be, well, vacuous, and loaded with bureaucrateze (I see the US military has come up with a new term for "not my job" - "not in my lane" - shich I'm sure will spread rapidly in the US private sector..). I definitely can't imagine wanting to join an institution with the kind of internal culture that makes someone waffle with such content-free, acronym-laden earnestness.
The openoffice 3.0 betas open docx just fine.
Thank you : )
"it'll appeal to the posers who want to be seen in the right places"
Except it won't even do that - by definition, anywhere where there's thousands of people isn't 'the right place'. Believe me, no hipster would be seen dead in pacbell park during a game or in some mega-nightclub. Posers want to boast about how they were in some tiny artspace with only 100 of the cogniceti(sp?) last night, now how they were in some giant venue that every moron from the burbs had managed to find.
It's the same in the US - I work for a large west coast university & have been advised by our legal dept that you cannot say anything bad about an ex-employee if someone calls for a reference, no matter how bad the ex employee was. However, the one question you *are* allowed to answer honestly if asked directly is "would you employ this person again if a similar position arose in your organization?". So if you're checking references in the US, always ask that question - if they answer "no", you know the person is a dud.
Wow, and that's in CS - I teach sociology so at least my lot have some sort of excuse for computer illiteracy.
One of the March builds of 3.0.0 included a PPC version - OOo_3.0.0_080314_MacOSXPowerPC_install.dmg - I can't find it on OO's site any more, but it still seems to be available at http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/download.openoffice.org/extended/ooomisc/MacOSX/
.docx files, so it's worth the dual install from my point of view - I open them in 3.0 then save as odt or regular doc before working on them in 2.4. A glorified converter, but hey, it works.
and on some torrent trackers.
I've installed it alongside 2.4 - it's a lot slower than 2.4 (so much so that it's close to unusable on my 1.5 Ghz G4), but it has the lifesaving feature of being able to open
Half my damn students.. I occasionally teach undergrads and every semester I make it clear that I will not accept papers in microsoft works format and every semester without fail a dozen students email me a final paper in works format. It came for free on their computer and by and large we're talking about a level of computer illiteracy where they can't actually tell the difference between works and regular office, let alone acquire a copy of either office or OO and install it..
"You tell him"
"No, *you* tell him"
"... that would still take you 10^2299991 seconds. As a reference the universe according to Wikipedia is roughly 10^17 seconds old."
It's ok, I just edited wikipedia to make the age of the universe 10^2299991.
Oh, nearly forgot, ~~~~
ok, let's correct it: qwerty is designed to avoid jamming, through the mechanism of slowing typists down.
"a 'quagmire of heavy contracts, licensing fees, forced user registration and anti-competition clauses.'"
Wow, I can see the boner in Sony's pants all the way from here.
Same thing you'd do with the user who did loosely equivalent things with paper records etc - you'd fire them.
Once upon a time, when computers were brand new technology, it was reasonable to provide repeated ongoing training, do hand-holding, and expect rough edges as people adopted to the new technology. That was 15-20 years ago. Now, to actually hang on to employees who repeatedly do the equivalent of throwing out needed paper documents (1, 4), damaging company property (2), failure to adhere to fundamental, basic company document storage procedures (3), destroying company documents with legally required retention periods (5), or handing the keys to the office over to any random idiot on the street (6) is, well, not the greatest HR policy I can think of. Yes, of course, there are still plenty of people who will do all of the things on your list - but to deliberately retain them is self-inflicted misery.
Finally, if you do have rigorous IT lockdown designed to protect your worst 10% of users from themselves, in all probability you're impinging on the other 90% of competent users from doing their many and varied jobs in the most effective way possible.
Same problem here. So I got the 3.0 beta instead, and a) it works fine so far; b) imports docx (that alone will keep it on my HD even if it turns out to be too buggy for daily use); and c) uses regular apple key mappings (cmd-c cmd-x cmd-v etc) instead of ctrl-everything.
Or for those of you reading from Europe, Australia, Canada etc:
On economic, foreign policy, and healthcare issues, Obama and Clinton would not look particularly out of place as candidates for:
Christian Democratic Union (Germany)
Liberal Party (Australia)
Conservative Party of Canada (Canada)
On some social issues however, they are both more left - for example both have stated that they will remove the current ban on Federal money being used to fund needle exchange. Having said that, note that all three of the above centre-right political parties either supported needle exchange or did nothing to restrict it when last in power.
In brief, for many issues the mainstream 'left' position in the United States would be seen as centre or even centre-right elsewhere. There are obvious exceptions, and the Republicans often have deep splits on social issues, with the Christian/moral right advocating for an extensive regulatory role for government on moral issues (policing of drug use, anything relating to sex, and so on) and the 'smallgovernment'/fiscal conservatives advocating for as little government regulation of social mores as possible.