If you then took some time to actually attempt to use those software you snidely point to, you would discover that none of them can be used to solve the poster's problem. . . unless of course the poster is willing and able to do a lot of custom coding and to become an LDAP expert in the process.
Your advice is fine for programmers who are conversant with LDAP; however, for the rest of us it's not as simple as you imply.
I spent a couple of weekends in June trying to move my family's outlook contacts to an OpenLDAP server. . . I finally gave up. There is no solution that I could find; unless I am willing to become way more conversant in LDAP than I have time to invest.
What the poster was asking for, and what I too would love to see, is a simple install-and-run solution that allows Outlook contacts to be imported; since Outlook doesn't export anything that even looks remotely like LDAP, this isn't as easy as it should be.
The bottom line: your statement that this may be a place to spend some money on a programmer is correct.
So essentially you believe the abstract claims of a book author more than you trust your own people.
It's not about not trusting my staff, it's about having spent 10 years doing systems development before becoming a manager, reading a book that makes you realize something I hadn't realized on my own, and then applying that new idea. In other words, it's about learning and becoming a better manager, a better person, and a better developer.
Most programmers work in the same problem domain from year to year. The point Humphrey makes is that from one similar project to the next a programmer should get better and better at their "craft". He is teaching programming and systems development as a discipline instead of an art.
The house building analogy works much better than you argue it does. Have you looked at a house built today compared with a house built 50 years ago? In today's world, the trades have over-rotated in the direction you indicate; in North America today houses are built under the premise that any monkey can do plumbing, framing, electrical work, etc. The reality of the situation is that while any joe can read the blueprint, it takes practice and experience to bring the pieces together in a way that will look good AND stand the test of time.
In ages past, trades guilds treated their crafts almost as black art. Programmers and systems developers today sometimes operate from the same "it's a black art" perspective: they believe that every task is new, every new function is an unknown, nothing can be anticipated. The truth is that skills learned on one project can be carried forward to the next. Humphrey challanges readers to measure themselves, learn from their work, and never stop improving. The ability to estimate your work is one of the indicators of the amount of discipline there is in your work (as compared to the amount of flying by the seat of your pants).
In the specific situation I was referring to in my previous post, the programmers in question were being asked to update existing applications that they had already been working with for several years.
I acknowledge that situations such as you describe (where science needs to be done, etc.) do exist; however, in the vast field of programming and development they are the exception and not the norm.
From my experience managing programmers: the programmers themselves are more of a limiter than either the budget or the corporate environment around them.
Even worse than arguing with management and not getting the time necessary to write a proper spec is getting the time to write the spec and then going to the programming team, asking for an estimate, and discovering that your senior programmers (10+ years experience) are unable to gauge how long it will take them to get the programming done.
What really opened my eyes to this problem was reading Watts S. Humphrey's book, "A Discipline For Software Engineering".
If you're a professional programmer, then before you start pushing management for time to do things right, make sure you can hold up your end of the bargain.
I am sometimes called upon to negotiate with IT suppliers as part of my job. I am part of a scattered team: 7 of us located in 6 cities on 3 continents.
In the old days (i.e., before Instant Messaging), our negotiation team needed to fly to a common location in order to negotiate with a supplier. This was necessary so that we could stay in touch with one another during the negotiation.
Now, we all get on a telephone conference bridge with the supplier's team, and then we start up an IM conference that only our team uses. This allows us to stay in touch in real time during the negotiation; but, we don't have to travel the world and sit together (at great financial expense). Generally, one of us leads a particular section of the negotiation, and the others all feed him/her with input while he/she negotiates.
The odd time we do a face-to-face negotiation, we still an the IM conference, since it is a less obtrusive method of "passing notes" during the negotiation. We all have laptops and take notes on them during a negotiation, so our computers are in the room with us anyway.
Instant Messaging has improved our ability to get work done while lowering the cost of doing the work.
All the whining posted on this topic about how unfair it is that parents might actually back up their rules with enforcement simply underscores the point that parents sometimes need to use tools to assist them in their role as parents.
The same whiners come out of the woodwork everytime their is a post about Internet filters. The fact that dishonest kids are going to circumvent the rules at every opportunity isn't any justification for using tools to help keep honest people honest.
We have four children and we do monitor computer use. Our kids each have a limited amount of time they are allowed to use the computer each day. A device like this doesn't replace parental monitoring, but it could make it easier for the kids to "spend" their computer time.
We home-school too, and the kids like to pop onto the computer during the day for a short chat with other home-schooled friends. Each chat counts against their computer time.
Because they consume the time in pieces, disagreements often arise about exactly how many minutes they have consumed. Sure, I could pull the login records (we use Win2K), and upon occasion I have, but something more "in their face" would certainly help.
We are definitely not our kids best friend, and don't attempt to be, but by arguing that using tools to assist with computering monitoring is somehow shirking our responsibilities is like arguing that putting a child-lock on the medicine cabinet is not part of responsibly keeping the kids from consuming a bottle of Tylenol.
mine are the same... But i've seen pages around that show you how to replace the old light module with a couple LEDs. I haven't gotten around to it yet though
These guys sell LEDs mounted in standard plugs specifically for easy replacement of incandescent lamps; they might have something that doesn't require custom wiring: http://www.superbrightleds.com/led_prods.htm.
I'm afraid you'll have to go with a business service.
Depending upon your ISP, business class may not even be available to you. I live in Ottawa, and my home is too far from the CO to be able to get DSL; so, a Cablemodem is my only option. The local cablemodem provider here (Rogers) will only sell their business class service to businesses located in commercial buildings. I've tried to get it, since I work fulltime out of my home, but they won't allow me to purchase it.
I was definitely not clear about the context of my explanation. My post had been motivated by a number of the other comments that preceded mine, and was not a direct answer to the question.
For the Win4Lin situation, CALs are not required; however, if you are using any version of MS Office newer than Office 95 then I believe Microsoft will assert that you are sharing licenses and need to acquire one per possible user.
I agree with you that the concept Win4Lin is selling is equivalent to 5 physical PCs; however, I do not believe that Microsoft agrees with us. From a "licensing of MS Office" perspective, the Win4Lin solution really isn't any different than MS's own Terminal Server solution: the MS Office license is still shared.
As the ever-alert/. readership will note, individuals sharing 5 PCs is also sharing Office licenses; however, this sharing of PCs is a historical practice and can easily be defended as "fair use" of the PC (and the software installed on it).
I should modify my earlier statement about the need to purchase CALs to state that this requirement only applies to use of MS's own Terminal Server product. However, regarding MS Office licensing, I am curious to understand whether or not the Win4Lin guys are willing to indemnify their customers against licensing lawsuits from Microsoft (assuming their customers exactly follow the Win4Lin solution outlined on the website)?
Microsoft sells something they call a Client Access License (CAL). You must purchase a CAL for every user who will be accessing the Terminal Server server. Each instance of MS Windows you purchase comes with a CAL, so the 5 MS Win licenses you have means that you effectively own 4 CALs that could be used remotely less the 1 license you need to run the server with.
Things get a little more complicated than this with Terminal Server, as Microsoft's USED to sell concurrent licenses for their Office products, but they NO LONGER sell concurrent licenses. This means that you will also have to purchase one Office license for every user who will access Office through Terminal Server. This results from MS's EULA statement where they declare that you are not allowed to "share" a license. Having 10 people take turns using 5 Office licenses involves "sharing".
As has already been noted by another poster, the safest position for a company to take w.r.t. Windows and Office licences is to ensure that they have purchased sufficient licenses to cover every possible PC/user that could possibly use/access Windows or Office. You then have to perform enough due diligence that if MS ever audits you that you can defend the position you have taken regarding the number of licenses you acquired.
For example, in your 100 person company: if you have some Linux file/compute servers in your server room, then you can safely risk not purchasing MS licenses for those PCs; however, if the 100 Linux users are able to access the Terminal Server server through your LAN, then even if you have put passwords on the server you would still have to purchase 100 CALs and 100 Office licenses to keep yourselves out of court following an audit as MS could claim that users sometimes share passwords and that there was no possible way you could guarantee that only a subset of the 100 users accessed the server.
Your best bet is to not use Terminal Server, but rather to purchase 5 extra PCs that are located in common areas and the users share access to---and those 5 PCs are the only computers that have Windows and Office installed on them. Then, when someone needs to use PowerPoint, they walk over to one of the Windows PCs and do their PowerPoint. In that manner you eliminate the audit risk and cap your investment in MS products.
...So kudos to MIT for following the science instead of the politics...
Actually, from what the short article says(which is probably incomplete) MIT chose the most "expensive" (from an environmental impact) way to create hydrogen and compared that to hybrid diesel. How would these two technologies compare if fossil fuels were not used to create hydrogen, but wind or solar energy was used instead?
Now this is impressive. Things like this are what WINE should be all about. Amazing.
I disagree, it's depressing not impressive:
The author first asserts that the process of moving files between the systems causes the upper/lower caseness of the filenames to be munged; however, the text later talks about how his personal preference for file casenames is all lower and so he changes them. There is nothing in his "transfer between Linux & Windows" scenario that causes the case names to be wrong. The real issue is simply that his personal preference for filenames differs from that of the original author of the source code.
The author displays no knowledge of the network mounting of filesystems using SAMBA (CIFS) or NFS. This would have been a far better method and while it too would have slowed down compiles on the machine mounting the filesystem he states that he is not unhappy with such a slowdown.
Why isn't the source code checked into a configuration management tool, like CVS? What the article should have been describing was the process he followed checking the application into CVS, making his personal preference changes, checking in those updates, and then checking it back out onto both platforms and performing the compiles there---with no compile slowdowns.
As others have already noted elsewhere, he will still have to test on the target platform. Those who argue that VMWare is as good as a native boot-up for testing are simply displaying their ignorance and inexperience: display and network problems are often induced by a change in hardware platform, and VMWare is a distinct hardware platform from a testing perspective. While testing on VMWare is useful, it is not sufficient: a Windows application should be tested on several different hardware platforms as part of its formal QA.
In summary, while the article probably accurately describes the author's actions, there is nothing in his account that others should be emulating. More experienced developers should be consulted in the search for best practices.
I write this as someone who has done software development for almost 20 years; more than 20 if you count my high school years as a computer hobbiest.
He was testing on a seperate machine, just wanted to avoid the hassle of transfering all the sources every time he wanted to compile.
Too bad he's never heard of SAMBA or NFS. Mounting file systems and maintaining one source tree is a far better method than the hack the article describes; although maintaining a CVS tree and checking the code in and out over the network would have been even better.
The desk layout shown in the document on thecampbeln's website is very much like what I am using; although mine wasn't DIY.
About 18 months ago I moved my office into a room in my basement. At work, I had been using a HermanMiller Passage Suite and had been very satisfied with it. While brand new HermanMiller furniture was out of my price range, the local HM dealer did have some old show room components that I was able to purchase for a much more reasonable price.
If we were talking about the employment of unskilled labourers, I might be swayed to accept your position; however, we are talking about highly skilled and educated (possibly self-educated) individuals. These workers don't need government protection; rather, they need personal initiative.
Each person needs to evaluate job offers they receive and decide whether or not to accept the position. If they would like to earn an hourly wage, then they should only accept such employment. The responsibility is the employee's, not the employer's.
If no company's in your region offers hourly employment, then move. If employees believe that they are not being treated fairly then they should resign and move to another employer.
How does any community-based server on the Internet get funded? First, some interested individual(s) puts up the server. Then, as usage picks up they get creative: ads, selling stuff, donations, subscription fees, etc. In this case I would envision a low cost (say $5 per year) listing fee. It's owned by whoever puts it up, or by some independent entity created for the purpose.
This is the real answer to the poster's dilemma. A properly configured outlook client will only be marignally slowing than POP mail.
We use Exchange and Outlook where I work too. When I travel I configure to work fully in offline mode and synchronize my inbox/outbox/address book every 10 minutes. Even with 100,000 or so entries in our corporate address book this doesn't present a problem as Outlook is smart enough to only synch changes... assuming, of course, that the user is smart enough to turn on the feature.
GNU Queue offers batch scheduling for clusters of computers; however, a cluster only needs to contain a single computer.
One additional commercial tool we use where I work is Platform Computing's Load Sharing Facility. It works well, but it's expensive (read "over priced") and I suggest you try something else first.
Slashdot Mirror
If you then took some time to actually attempt to use those software you snidely point to, you would discover that none of them can be used to solve the poster's problem. . . unless of course the poster is willing and able to do a lot of custom coding and to become an LDAP expert in the process.
Your advice is fine for programmers who are conversant with LDAP; however, for the rest of us it's not as simple as you imply.
I spent a couple of weekends in June trying to move my family's outlook contacts to an OpenLDAP server. . . I finally gave up. There is no solution that I could find; unless I am willing to become way more conversant in LDAP than I have time to invest.
What the poster was asking for, and what I too would love to see, is a simple install-and-run solution that allows Outlook contacts to be imported; since Outlook doesn't export anything that even looks remotely like LDAP, this isn't as easy as it should be.
The bottom line: your statement that this may be a place to spend some money on a programmer is correct.
So essentially you believe the abstract claims of a book author more than you trust your own people.
It's not about not trusting my staff, it's about having spent 10 years doing systems development before becoming a manager, reading a book that makes you realize something I hadn't realized on my own, and then applying that new idea. In other words, it's about learning and becoming a better manager, a better person, and a better developer.
Most programmers work in the same problem domain from year to year. The point Humphrey makes is that from one similar project to the next a programmer should get better and better at their "craft". He is teaching programming and systems development as a discipline instead of an art.
The house building analogy works much better than you argue it does. Have you looked at a house built today compared with a house built 50 years ago? In today's world, the trades have over-rotated in the direction you indicate; in North America today houses are built under the premise that any monkey can do plumbing, framing, electrical work, etc. The reality of the situation is that while any joe can read the blueprint, it takes practice and experience to bring the pieces together in a way that will look good AND stand the test of time.
In ages past, trades guilds treated their crafts almost as black art. Programmers and systems developers today sometimes operate from the same "it's a black art" perspective: they believe that every task is new, every new function is an unknown, nothing can be anticipated. The truth is that skills learned on one project can be carried forward to the next. Humphrey challanges readers to measure themselves, learn from their work, and never stop improving. The ability to estimate your work is one of the indicators of the amount of discipline there is in your work (as compared to the amount of flying by the seat of your pants).
In the specific situation I was referring to in my previous post, the programmers in question were being asked to update existing applications that they had already been working with for several years.
I acknowledge that situations such as you describe (where science needs to be done, etc.) do exist; however, in the vast field of programming and development they are the exception and not the norm.
From my experience managing programmers: the programmers themselves are more of a limiter than either the budget or the corporate environment around them.
Even worse than arguing with management and not getting the time necessary to write a proper spec is getting the time to write the spec and then going to the programming team, asking for an estimate, and discovering that your senior programmers (10+ years experience) are unable to gauge how long it will take them to get the programming done. What really opened my eyes to this problem was reading Watts S. Humphrey's book, "A Discipline For Software Engineering".
If you're a professional programmer, then before you start pushing management for time to do things right, make sure you can hold up your end of the bargain.
I am sometimes called upon to negotiate with IT suppliers as part of my job. I am part of a scattered team: 7 of us located in 6 cities on 3 continents.
In the old days (i.e., before Instant Messaging), our negotiation team needed to fly to a common location in order to negotiate with a supplier. This was necessary so that we could stay in touch with one another during the negotiation.
Now, we all get on a telephone conference bridge with the supplier's team, and then we start up an IM conference that only our team uses. This allows us to stay in touch in real time during the negotiation; but, we don't have to travel the world and sit together (at great financial expense). Generally, one of us leads a particular section of the negotiation, and the others all feed him/her with input while he/she negotiates.
The odd time we do a face-to-face negotiation, we still an the IM conference, since it is a less obtrusive method of "passing notes" during the negotiation. We all have laptops and take notes on them during a negotiation, so our computers are in the room with us anyway.
Instant Messaging has improved our ability to get work done while lowering the cost of doing the work.
All the whining posted on this topic about how unfair it is that parents might actually back up their rules with enforcement simply underscores the point that parents sometimes need to use tools to assist them in their role as parents.
The same whiners come out of the woodwork everytime their is a post about Internet filters. The fact that dishonest kids are going to circumvent the rules at every opportunity isn't any justification for using tools to help keep honest people honest.
We have four children and we do monitor computer use. Our kids each have a limited amount of time they are allowed to use the computer each day. A device like this doesn't replace parental monitoring, but it could make it easier for the kids to "spend" their computer time.
We home-school too, and the kids like to pop onto the computer during the day for a short chat with other home-schooled friends. Each chat counts against their computer time.
Because they consume the time in pieces, disagreements often arise about exactly how many minutes they have consumed. Sure, I could pull the login records (we use Win2K), and upon occasion I have, but something more "in their face" would certainly help.
We are definitely not our kids best friend, and don't attempt to be, but by arguing that using tools to assist with computering monitoring is somehow shirking our responsibilities is like arguing that putting a child-lock on the medicine cabinet is not part of responsibly keeping the kids from consuming a bottle of Tylenol.
...or, you could subscribe to emusic.com for $10 a month and burn all the CDs you want.
mine are the same... But i've seen pages around that show you how to replace the old light module with a couple LEDs. I haven't gotten around to it yet though
These guys sell LEDs mounted in standard plugs specifically for easy replacement of incandescent lamps; they might have something that doesn't require custom wiring: http://www.superbrightleds.com/led_prods.htm.
I'm afraid you'll have to go with a business service.
Depending upon your ISP, business class may not even be available to you. I live in Ottawa, and my home is too far from the CO to be able to get DSL; so, a Cablemodem is my only option. The local cablemodem provider here (Rogers) will only sell their business class service to businesses located in commercial buildings. I've tried to get it, since I work fulltime out of my home, but they won't allow me to purchase it.
I was definitely not clear about the context of my explanation. My post had been motivated by a number of the other comments that preceded mine, and was not a direct answer to the question.
For the Win4Lin situation, CALs are not required; however, if you are using any version of MS Office newer than Office 95 then I believe Microsoft will assert that you are sharing licenses and need to acquire one per possible user.
I agree with you that the concept Win4Lin is selling is equivalent to 5 physical PCs; however, I do not believe that Microsoft agrees with us. From a "licensing of MS Office" perspective, the Win4Lin solution really isn't any different than MS's own Terminal Server solution: the MS Office license is still shared.
/. readership will note, individuals sharing 5 PCs is also sharing Office licenses; however, this sharing of PCs is a historical practice and can easily be defended as "fair use" of the PC (and the software installed on it).
As the ever-alert
I should modify my earlier statement about the need to purchase CALs to state that this requirement only applies to use of MS's own Terminal Server product. However, regarding MS Office licensing, I am curious to understand whether or not the Win4Lin guys are willing to indemnify their customers against licensing lawsuits from Microsoft (assuming their customers exactly follow the Win4Lin solution outlined on the website)?
I'm obviously not explaining my self well enough. Let me try this another way...
You have to purchase a CAL for each of the 100 users. CALs cannot be shared.
You have to purchase an Office license for each of the 100 users. Office licenses cannot be shared.
The issue you raise of Terminal Server only allowing N concurrent sessions is something I didn't even touch on in my post.
Microsoft sells something they call a Client Access License (CAL). You must purchase a CAL for every user who will be accessing the Terminal Server server. Each instance of MS Windows you purchase comes with a CAL, so the 5 MS Win licenses you have means that you effectively own 4 CALs that could be used remotely less the 1 license you need to run the server with.
Things get a little more complicated than this with Terminal Server, as Microsoft's USED to sell concurrent licenses for their Office products, but they NO LONGER sell concurrent licenses. This means that you will also have to purchase one Office license for every user who will access Office through Terminal Server. This results from MS's EULA statement where they declare that you are not allowed to "share" a license. Having 10 people take turns using 5 Office licenses involves "sharing".
As has already been noted by another poster, the safest position for a company to take w.r.t. Windows and Office licences is to ensure that they have purchased sufficient licenses to cover every possible PC/user that could possibly use/access Windows or Office. You then have to perform enough due diligence that if MS ever audits you that you can defend the position you have taken regarding the number of licenses you acquired.
For example, in your 100 person company: if you have some Linux file/compute servers in your server room, then you can safely risk not purchasing MS licenses for those PCs; however, if the 100 Linux users are able to access the Terminal Server server through your LAN, then even if you have put passwords on the server you would still have to purchase 100 CALs and 100 Office licenses to keep yourselves out of court following an audit as MS could claim that users sometimes share passwords and that there was no possible way you could guarantee that only a subset of the 100 users accessed the server.
Your best bet is to not use Terminal Server, but rather to purchase 5 extra PCs that are located in common areas and the users share access to---and those 5 PCs are the only computers that have Windows and Office installed on them. Then, when someone needs to use PowerPoint, they walk over to one of the Windows PCs and do their PowerPoint. In that manner you eliminate the audit risk and cap your investment in MS products.
Actually, from what the short article says(which is probably incomplete) MIT chose the most "expensive" (from an environmental impact) way to create hydrogen and compared that to hybrid diesel. How would these two technologies compare if fossil fuels were not used to create hydrogen, but wind or solar energy was used instead?
Or,
Compile under VMWare, or
Still compile under Wine, or
Dual boot the computer.
Now this is impressive. Things like this are what WINE should be all about. Amazing.
I disagree, it's depressing not impressive:
In summary, while the article probably accurately describes the author's actions, there is nothing in his account that others should be emulating. More experienced developers should be consulted in the search for best practices.
I write this as someone who has done software development for almost 20 years; more than 20 if you count my high school years as a computer hobbiest.
He was testing on a seperate machine, just wanted to avoid the hassle of transfering all the sources every time he wanted to compile.
Too bad he's never heard of SAMBA or NFS. Mounting file systems and maintaining one source tree is a far better method than the hack the article describes; although maintaining a CVS tree and checking the code in and out over the network would have been even better.
The desk layout shown in the document on thecampbeln's website is very much like what I am using; although mine wasn't DIY.
About 18 months ago I moved my office into a room in my basement. At work, I had been using a HermanMiller Passage Suite and had been very satisfied with it. While brand new HermanMiller furniture was out of my price range, the local HM dealer did have some old show room components that I was able to purchase for a much more reasonable price.
All people should be paid hourly, period.
If we were talking about the employment of unskilled labourers, I might be swayed to accept your position; however, we are talking about highly skilled and educated (possibly self-educated) individuals. These workers don't need government protection; rather, they need personal initiative.
Each person needs to evaluate job offers they receive and decide whether or not to accept the position. If they would like to earn an hourly wage, then they should only accept such employment. The responsibility is the employee's, not the employer's.
If no company's in your region offers hourly employment, then move. If employees believe that they are not being treated fairly then they should resign and move to another employer.
Now why couldn't I find that?
That's exactly the sort of thing I had in mind.
Who funds it? Who owns it?
How does any community-based server on the Internet get funded? First, some interested individual(s) puts up the server. Then, as usage picks up they get creative: ads, selling stuff, donations, subscription fees, etc. In this case I would envision a low cost (say $5 per year) listing fee. It's owned by whoever puts it up, or by some independent entity created for the purpose.
Let's keep the government out of it.
Mod the parent up, as they say.
This is the real answer to the poster's dilemma. A properly configured outlook client will only be marignally slowing than POP mail.
We use Exchange and Outlook where I work too. When I travel I configure to work fully in offline mode and synchronize my inbox/outbox/address book every 10 minutes. Even with 100,000 or so entries in our corporate address book this doesn't present a problem as Outlook is smart enough to only synch changes... assuming, of course, that the user is smart enough to turn on the feature.
GNU Queue offers batch scheduling for clusters of computers; however, a cluster only needs to contain a single computer.
One additional commercial tool we use where I work is Platform Computing's Load Sharing Facility. It works well, but it's expensive (read "over priced") and I suggest you try something else first.