If I do database changes I try to split it up into different files for each step as well, since a semi-technical person at my customer has to run them. With each step split up, they can run a file, and if the output doesn't match the expected output, they can stop and I know exactly what state the resulting system is in.
So maybe this guy just chose security over convenience. I know, unexpected. But still a valid choice, right?:)
It took 100 years to develop automation to the point where you can do this without having a live person around for 8 hours a day or more. The keyword is "automated", not "stimulating", in my opinion.
A classic description of alienation. It seems to be a driving force for people becoming freelancers where I live - but if you can't escape that way, then perhaps taking the pink pill is a good way out.
As for your sig: I like the same stuff, and I like Iain M. Banks books too. Also most stuff by Charles Stross - sometimes chilling (his reboot of Ctulhu), sometimes going completely off the rails (Accelerando): see http://www.accelerando.org/ to read that story and see if you like his style.
It used to be the other way around, when the heavy industry was top dog - it was concentrated in the French parts, when the mines were concentrated in the Flemish parts. When the mines closed the Flemish parts had to change their way of getting income (they were quite poor). Combine that with general lack of education and the French speaking part holding all the trump cards and abusing them, and you'll understand some of the resentment towards the French speakers by the Flemish.
Unfortunately for the French speakers, the situation is reversed now. The Flemish concentrated on services and technology (not much else to do) and hey look, that's the way to make loads of money now and heavy industry is a loss-leader. Ouch.
To me, it just shows that when you decide to screw over your neighbours you should keep in mind that some day the situation may be reversed.
Correct. I'm in IT and even here noone tells me "ooooh look, I've got a 4G phone". All they tell me is how nice it works, how the display looks, how scratch-resistant it is, and that they can tweet. And receive emails.
Seriously, as long as it has internet it's fine. Speed isn't all that relevant to most users, as long as it is "good enough". And 3G seems to fit the bill well enough. It will take a few killer apps that won't run on 3G to change that.
In addition, I take it you've never been to Europe or Japan. Try not dressing the part over there as a manager and see where that gets you.
So true. An acquintance of mine went to Japan and had to get new businesscards, because even though he was very senior, it didn't show on the businesscard. He never thought his title was very important - after all, everyone knew him, right? Well, the Japanese managers were insulted that his department had chosen to send someone with apparently medior rank to meet with senior management. Until he showed his new cards and said there had been a misunderstanding, then it was fine.
In Europe, if you don't dress smartly (and that's not with a Hawaiian shirt and sneakers) you get laughed at. Mostly behind your back, but in Holland, probably right in your face. You won't get taken as serious as someone with a suit. Which is exactly the reason why as a freelancer, I make a point of wearing a nice suit and a tie. I've experimented with this a bit - going to meetings for the same company with a suit, then later without one. Makes a big difference in how people regard your opinions. Oh, and this was with technical people - with marketing/manager types the reaction is more subtle but still there.
So yes: appearances matter. An a-social geek (like I was, when younger) would say that others should adapt and gets ignored, even when what he says is the best option. A wise geek just wears a tie and gets his results he wants.
And gun them down. Although, come to think of it, most *civilized* nations don't exactly do that with random people stepping from the plane. But hey, it's Israel. We can overlook a few corpses here and there, right?
- I've seen worse UI's but only in free software. Never in something paid for. - User documentation sucks - Database field names are a joke (5 positions? come ON!) - If the metadata in SAP doesn't match the actual use of the field, too bad. - Modules are by and large crap, except for the ones like FiCo that have been developed over decades.
I've just had the misfortune of working on the SLcM module, which is the bastard child of the HR module, which itself is a demon-spawned object oriented abomination, created by what must be an automated implementation of a logical model designed by someone who hasn't a clue about relational modelling.
Also, the fact that this module only recognizes SAP technical keys and treats business keys as attributes, that can be valid for several technical keys at the same time, and each having their own timeline, creates a horrendous mess if you ever want any usefull management info out of it.
Another feature is where SAP hides the fact the database contains multiple overlapping timelines for attributes: they don't show them. You can even lose student grades this way. Joy.
No, SAP implementations should stick to FiCo, without customization. That's where it is really good and reliable. For everything else I'd highly recommend looking at alternatives.
There have been succesfull projects with waterfall methods. There have been a lot of succesfull projects with fixed price contracts: for the last 15 years I've never done business on any other basis (both as buyer and as supplier) - if you know what you are doing it's not a problem at all.
Even competence of the people involved isn't an issue. In a project that big, there's bound to be a lot of nitwits but the competent people can usually work around them.
No, what kills this thing is that even with the Gods of IT themselves on this project, once the scope exceeds a given size (you can measure that in the budget, anything over 100 million will never succeed) the amount of time needed to build and confirm that requirements have been met, exceeds the time before those requirements change. Also, the more people on the project, the larger the amount of overhead and internal communication.
Now, what agile development says is exactly what Fred Brooks says: more people on a project makes it later.
What they need to do is to cut down the scope to something manageable. They can waterfall or Scrum it to their hearts content then, but size the scope first.
If the scope of a project is big enough, it is actually impossible to nail the requirements because they will never get consistent. This is also the reason that there is a direct correlation between the size of the project and the successrate. To my knowledge, no single IT-projects over 100 million dollars has *ever* been completed within a reasonable amount of time and in range of the budget, with most of the desired features intact.
Ofcourse, even with a gazillion users there's no need to have a really complex set of requirements. Look at facebook. The problem is the amount of processes this thing has to support, which would be better served by splitting everything up and defining open interfaces so you could build things project by project.
Even big companies don't always fight. I remember a large company having a file on Microsoft about patent violations that was literally a complete file cabinet. And they never, ever, dared use even one of the patents because Microsoft could just stop supporting their hardware on Windows and that would be the end of their hardware business.
Eventually, they crosslicensed when MS's stack became bigger and their own patents started to run out of time.
Generalized critical thinking will not build you a bridge. Nor discover new medicines. Or teach you how to crack an NP-complete problem. While generalists have some value, mostly they are good at nothing. So they tend to end up in management where they do little harm, and make a lot of money.
If you buy PLEX you still need that PLEX to buy something that was playercreated, so you are transferring money from player to player.
With the new AUR you transfer money to something that is created at a moments notice, out of an infinite supply of bits, owned by EVE and not a player. Suddenly, the value of new ships is going to be exactly what EVE says it is, because if you price your ship higher they can always undercut you. This basically kills the entire cornerstone of the game, which is the market. With all its flaws it was still the driving force in the game, but this threatens that.
For other examples: suppose that in WOW you can buy every epic and craftable item there is for money direct from Blizzard, no questions asked. That would have an impact, and not a good one.
Pretty close:) I hope nothing unforeseen happens (like heat from the Sun causing gas to evaporate and the flightpath to deviate slightly - the scenario as described by Niven and Pournelle in one of their books). Would be embarassing.
Fortunately even if it does hit, it's only 8-18 meters across. According to the asteroid impact effect calculator, that'd be 720 KT of TNT when hitting the ground (assuming standard parameters, 18 meters and an iron asteroid). Tough if it were to hit you, but small chance of that. Calculator is here: http://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/ImpactEffects/
It's long been known that there are huge differences in productivity and output between IT-people. Some can do 8x the work of others. Some are respected in their field, other skilled IT-people want to work with them, but not with the nephew of the manager. There's all kinds of differences in personality and training.
It's not just true in IT. I've seen a case where one person was doing all the accounting in a firm. He had spare time in the afternoon to compose music. Everything ran like clockwork. Then his replacement arrived (he retired). They had to cut down his workload to half the original job and he still can't keep up.
Everyone is replaceable. It just isn't always very smart to replace good people with unknown quantities.
My colleague resigned and went to work for another firm, as highly paid project leader. Company I was working for at the time had to hire him back at a rate of 5 times his normal wage, and that was with a discount:) Too bad he didn't get it all, but it was still good:) (They should have promoted him, he was doing work way above his paygrade and doing it well - as the other company realized).
Another guy I worked with was laid off when his department was deemed "strategically unimportant". He used the severance package to tour the world. When he came back his area of expertise was "strategic" again, and he was hired back on the spot. He always had a big smile on his face when he told the story:)
No, but patenting the fact that you can use it to power a spaceship, will be. Because it is obvious.
Same as with Apple: they're not patenting the non-obvious multitouch technology, that they didn't invent, but they're patenting an obvious use for it, that was already considered by others and portrayed in movies, well before this was patented.
I agree. There have been some arthouse films I thoroughly enjoyed, though. The Thin Red Line was very, very impressive on a big screen with good audio. Avatar was a long snooze by comparison. And the weird movie from David Lynch, Lost Highway... well, I can't say I knew what it was all about, but it had a plot, a start, some ending and it was a well made movie with a great soundtrack.
Most other indy movies are meh... but so are a lot of big budget movies. I've been to Fortress (gawd that was so bad) and Species (with a girl on a date. Last time she ever looked at me). Much worse than any indy movie I've seen.
Yeah, I'm sure Norway and Denmark have *loads* of children ready for adoption... not.
EU countries have a very low amount of unwanted pregnancies, less than the rate of people who want to adopt inside that country. So there is never a surplus.
Those children are not free from trouble. I know several parents who have adopted, and although I've seen success, I've also seen spectacular failures with children who were too damaged mentally to do more with them than put them in an institution. In one case a mother didn't want to do that and her marriage failed because of it.
Out of 5 children I know that have adopted, the score was: 1 child with dimorphic sexual organs. Still unclear what sex it is (USA). 2 children with "fins" instead of hands. Only 2 or 3 usable fingers. One child with such severe mental problems she is going to be a permanent basketcase. The brother of that kid was an extra (thrown into the deal to keep them together) and he's basically normal. One child with an opening in her mouth that needed to be treated (minor stuff) but has ADHD.
China used to have a lot of children ready for adoption, and even healthy and normal girls. However, most normal children now get adopted in China itself, so you can only get children with very severe disabilities. Not an attractive option. Neither are children from Haiti (a great deal of legal problems there) or the USA (a lot of children damaged by drugs during pregnancy, leading to a heap of misery later in life).
Surrogates would be better, but are either banned outright, or you can't pay money for it (unless you do what others do: go live in a country next-door and do your stuff there).
Adoption is an option of last resort, even later than having a transplant. Because the transplant either kills you or works and is removed - either way the misery stops after a year. But with adoption, the misery can last forever.
Slashdot Mirror
If I do database changes I try to split it up into different files for each step as well, since a semi-technical person at my customer has to run them. With each step split up, they can run a file, and if the output doesn't match the expected output, they can stop and I know exactly what state the resulting system is in.
So maybe this guy just chose security over convenience. I know, unexpected. But still a valid choice, right? :)
It could also be adequately explained by the following quote:
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity" (Hanlon's or Heinlein's razor)
It took 100 years to develop automation to the point where you can do this without having a live person around for 8 hours a day or more. The keyword is "automated", not "stimulating", in my opinion.
A classic description of alienation. It seems to be a driving force for people becoming freelancers where I live - but if you can't escape that way, then perhaps taking the pink pill is a good way out.
As for your sig: I like the same stuff, and I like Iain M. Banks books too. Also most stuff by Charles Stross - sometimes chilling (his reboot of Ctulhu), sometimes going completely off the rails (Accelerando): see http://www.accelerando.org/ to read that story and see if you like his style.
It used to be the other way around, when the heavy industry was top dog - it was concentrated in the French parts, when the mines were concentrated in the Flemish parts. When the mines closed the Flemish parts had to change their way of getting income (they were quite poor). Combine that with general lack of education and the French speaking part holding all the trump cards and abusing them, and you'll understand some of the resentment towards the French speakers by the Flemish.
Unfortunately for the French speakers, the situation is reversed now. The Flemish concentrated on services and technology (not much else to do) and hey look, that's the way to make loads of money now and heavy industry is a loss-leader. Ouch.
To me, it just shows that when you decide to screw over your neighbours you should keep in mind that some day the situation may be reversed.
Correct. I'm in IT and even here noone tells me "ooooh look, I've got a 4G phone". All they tell me is how nice it works, how the display looks, how scratch-resistant it is, and that they can tweet. And receive emails.
Seriously, as long as it has internet it's fine. Speed isn't all that relevant to most users, as long as it is "good enough". And 3G seems to fit the bill well enough. It will take a few killer apps that won't run on 3G to change that.
Hehehe - that must've hurt.
But still: why not use chaff?
In addition, I take it you've never been to Europe or Japan. Try not dressing the part over there as a manager and see where that gets you.
So true. An acquintance of mine went to Japan and had to get new businesscards, because even though he was very senior, it didn't show on the businesscard. He never thought his title was very important - after all, everyone knew him, right? Well, the Japanese managers were insulted that his department had chosen to send someone with apparently medior rank to meet with senior management. Until he showed his new cards and said there had been a misunderstanding, then it was fine.
In Europe, if you don't dress smartly (and that's not with a Hawaiian shirt and sneakers) you get laughed at. Mostly behind your back, but in Holland, probably right in your face. You won't get taken as serious as someone with a suit. Which is exactly the reason why as a freelancer, I make a point of wearing a nice suit and a tie. I've experimented with this a bit - going to meetings for the same company with a suit, then later without one. Makes a big difference in how people regard your opinions. Oh, and this was with technical people - with marketing/manager types the reaction is more subtle but still there.
So yes: appearances matter. An a-social geek (like I was, when younger) would say that others should adapt and gets ignored, even when what he says is the best option. A wise geek just wears a tie and gets his results he wants.
And gun them down. Although, come to think of it, most *civilized* nations don't exactly do that with random people stepping from the plane. But hey, it's Israel. We can overlook a few corpses here and there, right?
- I've seen worse UI's but only in free software. Never in something paid for.
- User documentation sucks
- Database field names are a joke (5 positions? come ON!)
- If the metadata in SAP doesn't match the actual use of the field, too bad.
- Modules are by and large crap, except for the ones like FiCo that have been developed over decades.
I've just had the misfortune of working on the SLcM module, which is the bastard child of the HR module, which itself is a demon-spawned object oriented abomination, created by what must be an automated implementation of a logical model designed by someone who hasn't a clue about relational modelling.
Also, the fact that this module only recognizes SAP technical keys and treats business keys as attributes, that can be valid for several technical keys at the same time, and each having their own timeline, creates a horrendous mess if you ever want any usefull management info out of it.
Another feature is where SAP hides the fact the database contains multiple overlapping timelines for attributes: they don't show them. You can even lose student grades this way. Joy.
No, SAP implementations should stick to FiCo, without customization. That's where it is really good and reliable. For everything else I'd highly recommend looking at alternatives.
There have been succesfull projects with waterfall methods. There have been a lot of succesfull projects with fixed price contracts: for the last 15 years I've never done business on any other basis (both as buyer and as supplier) - if you know what you are doing it's not a problem at all.
Even competence of the people involved isn't an issue. In a project that big, there's bound to be a lot of nitwits but the competent people can usually work around them.
No, what kills this thing is that even with the Gods of IT themselves on this project, once the scope exceeds a given size (you can measure that in the budget, anything over 100 million will never succeed) the amount of time needed to build and confirm that requirements have been met, exceeds the time before those requirements change. Also, the more people on the project, the larger the amount of overhead and internal communication.
Now, what agile development says is exactly what Fred Brooks says: more people on a project makes it later.
What they need to do is to cut down the scope to something manageable. They can waterfall or Scrum it to their hearts content then, but size the scope first.
If the scope of a project is big enough, it is actually impossible to nail the requirements because they will never get consistent. This is also the reason that there is a direct correlation between the size of the project and the successrate. To my knowledge, no single IT-projects over 100 million dollars has *ever* been completed within a reasonable amount of time and in range of the budget, with most of the desired features intact.
Ofcourse, even with a gazillion users there's no need to have a really complex set of requirements. Look at facebook. The problem is the amount of processes this thing has to support, which would be better served by splitting everything up and defining open interfaces so you could build things project by project.
Even big companies don't always fight. I remember a large company having a file on Microsoft about patent violations that was literally a complete file cabinet. And they never, ever, dared use even one of the patents because Microsoft could just stop supporting their hardware on Windows and that would be the end of their hardware business.
Eventually, they crosslicensed when MS's stack became bigger and their own patents started to run out of time.
Generalized critical thinking will not build you a bridge. Nor discover new medicines. Or teach you how to crack an NP-complete problem. While generalists have some value, mostly they are good at nothing. So they tend to end up in management where they do little harm, and make a lot of money.
If you buy PLEX you still need that PLEX to buy something that was playercreated, so you are transferring money from player to player.
With the new AUR you transfer money to something that is created at a moments notice, out of an infinite supply of bits, owned by EVE and not a player. Suddenly, the value of new ships is going to be exactly what EVE says it is, because if you price your ship higher they can always undercut you. This basically kills the entire cornerstone of the game, which is the market. With all its flaws it was still the driving force in the game, but this threatens that.
For other examples: suppose that in WOW you can buy every epic and craftable item there is for money direct from Blizzard, no questions asked. That would have an impact, and not a good one.
... Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard.
I think I may want this quote for my signature. It could also double as the signature in several of my emails :)
Pretty close :) I hope nothing unforeseen happens (like heat from the Sun causing gas to evaporate and the flightpath to deviate slightly - the scenario as described by Niven and Pournelle in one of their books). Would be embarassing.
Fortunately even if it does hit, it's only 8-18 meters across. According to the asteroid impact effect calculator, that'd be 720 KT of TNT when hitting the ground (assuming standard parameters, 18 meters and an iron asteroid). Tough if it were to hit you, but small chance of that. Calculator is here: http://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/ImpactEffects/
It's long been known that there are huge differences in productivity and output between IT-people. Some can do 8x the work of others. Some are respected in their field, other skilled IT-people want to work with them, but not with the nephew of the manager. There's all kinds of differences in personality and training.
It's not just true in IT. I've seen a case where one person was doing all the accounting in a firm. He had spare time in the afternoon to compose music. Everything ran like clockwork. Then his replacement arrived (he retired). They had to cut down his workload to half the original job and he still can't keep up.
Everyone is replaceable. It just isn't always very smart to replace good people with unknown quantities.
Hehe, yeah that happens a lot.
My colleague resigned and went to work for another firm, as highly paid project leader. Company I was working for at the time had to hire him back at a rate of 5 times his normal wage, and that was with a discount :) Too bad he didn't get it all, but it was still good :) (They should have promoted him, he was doing work way above his paygrade and doing it well - as the other company realized).
Another guy I worked with was laid off when his department was deemed "strategically unimportant". He used the severance package to tour the world. When he came back his area of expertise was "strategic" again, and he was hired back on the spot. He always had a big smile on his face when he told the story :)
No, but patenting the fact that you can use it to power a spaceship, will be. Because it is obvious.
Same as with Apple: they're not patenting the non-obvious multitouch technology, that they didn't invent, but they're patenting an obvious use for it, that was already considered by others and portrayed in movies, well before this was patented.
I agree. There have been some arthouse films I thoroughly enjoyed, though. The Thin Red Line was very, very impressive on a big screen with good audio. Avatar was a long snooze by comparison. And the weird movie from David Lynch, Lost Highway... well, I can't say I knew what it was all about, but it had a plot, a start, some ending and it was a well made movie with a great soundtrack.
Most other indy movies are meh... but so are a lot of big budget movies. I've been to Fortress (gawd that was so bad) and Species (with a girl on a date. Last time she ever looked at me). Much worse than any indy movie I've seen.
If we're talking about firing or shooting executives, rightsizing is actually the correct term :)
It's pretty simple: old-school.
Yeah, I'm sure Norway and Denmark have *loads* of children ready for adoption... not.
EU countries have a very low amount of unwanted pregnancies, less than the rate of people who want to adopt inside that country. So there is never a surplus.
Those children are not free from trouble. I know several parents who have adopted, and although I've seen success, I've also seen spectacular failures with children who were too damaged mentally to do more with them than put them in an institution. In one case a mother didn't want to do that and her marriage failed because of it.
Out of 5 children I know that have adopted, the score was: 1 child with dimorphic sexual organs. Still unclear what sex it is (USA). 2 children with "fins" instead of hands. Only 2 or 3 usable fingers. One child with such severe mental problems she is going to be a permanent basketcase. The brother of that kid was an extra (thrown into the deal to keep them together) and he's basically normal. One child with an opening in her mouth that needed to be treated (minor stuff) but has ADHD.
China used to have a lot of children ready for adoption, and even healthy and normal girls. However, most normal children now get adopted in China itself, so you can only get children with very severe disabilities. Not an attractive option. Neither are children from Haiti (a great deal of legal problems there) or the USA (a lot of children damaged by drugs during pregnancy, leading to a heap of misery later in life).
Surrogates would be better, but are either banned outright, or you can't pay money for it (unless you do what others do: go live in a country next-door and do your stuff there).
Adoption is an option of last resort, even later than having a transplant. Because the transplant either kills you or works and is removed - either way the misery stops after a year. But with adoption, the misery can last forever.