I get it - you sit down at your workstation and seem to be able to find any number of things to do rather than code - read Slashdot, check the news, etc - and before you know it, it's lunch time. And after lunch, you figure why start now, half the day is shot....
All the suggestions I've read here such as "take a relaxing walk", "you might just be burned out", etc - are wussy excuses that won't get you back in gear. If you *really* want to get back to work, talk to your boss (if you have one), and work out a firm schedule of milestones that must be met on the road to completing the project - real milestones that involve demonstration of completed code or GUI. And then insist that they check up on you daily to determine your progress. But most important, make your job contingent on meeting those milestones.
Nothing focuses the mind like having your way of life on the line. When goofing off at work means that you lose your house, your car, and that big screen TV, and have to move back home with the parents - that's when you will learn whether you intend to be a contributing member of society or some welfare junkie that the rest of us carry.
Think your grandmother had days when she just didn't want to drive any more rivets into B29 bombers? Think she got advice to "take a long walk and clear your mind"? Please.
To paraphrase Patton, years from now when you are bouncing your grandchildren on your knee and they look up at you and ask "What did you do during the dawn of the great Information Age"? - you won't have to sigh and say "Well, I played World of Warcraft and wolfed down Fritos".
I restore early systems as a hobby and have the following in bootable, working condition:
An 1976 IMSAI 8080 with 64K RAM, dual 8 inch floppies, and 5.25 and 3.5 drives, equipped with a Centronics printer and a ASR33 Teletype with paper tape reader.
A 1977 Genrad Futuredata firmware development system with dual 8 inch floppies and EPROM burner
A 1974-era duplicate of Jonathan Titus's Mark-8, a 16K 8008-based system as shown in July 1974 Radio Electronics
Recently sold my working 1975/76 Altair 8800 with dual fixed-format 8 inch floppies, 64K RAM, Centronics printer, ASR33 Teletype with paper tape reader. All original MITS boards. Would boot Bill Gates original BASIC, as well as Altair DOS and CP/M 2.2. Complete with original doc in MITS binders.
A 1977 TRS-80 Model I 16K
A good number of misc S-100 boards for IMSAI and Altair
80's stuff:
Original 128K Macintosh with dual 3.5 drives - boots and runs
After five years we should *own* that country. The fact that we aren't even close shows just how badly we dropped the ball in Afghanistan. We should pull out completely and let the country devolve into chaos. Then when bin Laden makes his triumphal return to organize the mess, nuke it into non-existence, which is what we should have done on 9/12.
As far as blasphemy? All religions - without exception - should be eliminated from the human experience. It is shameful that a species that can explore other planets still includes members that seriously believe in sky fairies.
Because creationists refuse to accept facts they make fairly poor candidates for any position that requires actual thought, but they make excellent manual laborers. My daughter plans on a career in physics and she said that she would consider allowing them to tend her garden or trim her hedges so long as they didn't actually speak to her.
This may actually comes as a shock, but it IS more important to feed your family than to protect bits in a computer, and I don't care what the information is that those bits represent.
Having said that, if you are in an environment where your recommendations are not being taken seriously, perhaps it's time time find an employer that holds to the same security ideals that you do.
Of course you could always have fun blowing the whistle and watching upper-level management try and play dodgeball....
Along with Microsoft's Coding Secrets, you can also buy....
Enrons's Guide to Business Ethics
Greenpeace's Tasty Whale Recipes
George Bush's Global Warming Solutions for our Time
Ron Jeremy's The Arguments for Abstinence
As soon as my nerdish daughter turned 13, the phone starting ringing off the hook and she was glued to her computer screen IMing with her friends.
I have no cell phone, don't IM (tried it), and like it that way. So, how do I turn my daughter into an introvert and restore my sanity?:-)
I was a codebreaker in the Army Security Agency from 71 to 77 and for the last five years worked at NSA. Taught myself programming to help automate some of the analysis I was doing at the time and was fortunate enough to work on some of the incredible hardware they had in the basement then. In 77 I had to decide whether to stay in (and stay poor on Army pay - about 10K/yr then) or get out and do real work, and interviewed with a number of DOD contractors around DC. When I told the interviewer the CDC mainframe model I last programmed, he confidently told me that CDC didn't make that model yet. I managed to convince him they did by describing some of its attributes and got the job, thereby doubling my pay.
The VN listening post exhibit is interesting. Brought back a lot of memories from when I was stationed is SE Asia during the latter part of that war, helping to process the stuff those guys were intercepting. Fascinating work, and if it wasn't for the Carter-era hiring freeze, I'd still be solving those puzzles for a living.
"You need to make sure your report exudes a sense of honesty, openness, empathy, and maybe even a hint of humor."
Perhaps this:
"Wow! You're going to love this one - and it's really, really true! Chimpanzees, Gorillas, and us - we all had the same mega-great grandparent! (Gee - so THAT's why I like bananas so much...)"
All this is saying is that the general public won't begin to pay much attention to the science geeks until they actually start sounding human - just like the listener.
Well, I'm not female, so that let's me out of being the NEXT president, but assuming I make it eventually:
1. Pull our troops back to the oil fields, send in the tankers, and start pumping it into our ships until there isn't anything left. Once that is done, we leave and let them eat sand. br>
2. If we are ever attacked again, pick any mideast country at random and nuke it. Once no lifeforms remain, send in the troops and see #1. Repeat as needed.
3. Put teeth in laws protecting freedom of religion by making it a Federal offense to attempt to impose your religious beliefs on another citizen in any way whatsoever. This protects minority believers from the tyranny of the religous establishment. Intelligent Design? Illegal to espouse. Religious ads? Illegal to espouse. Worshipping in church? No problem.
4. Reaffirm the President as Commander in Chief. However, sending our troops anywhere outside the US is an automatic declaration of war and automatically activates the draft - and ALL able-bodied citizens must register and are eligible, including females.
5. Want to vote? Perform some type of Federal Service, including military, peace corps or equivalent. Yes, this is EXACTLY what Heinlein suggested in Starship Troopers.
6. Find a way to nationalize health care. Suggestion: guarantee a job for life for anyone that becomes a physician with a decent salary and the government pays for your entire education.
7. Introduce legislation that makes any substance people care to snort, smoke, inject, or swallow legal to possess and consume with appropriate taxes based on the impact to society, and appropriate FDA warnings on the bad stuff.
8. Heavily fund research into small-scale nuclear reactor development and begin a program of aggressive expansion.
9. Set immigration quotas for countries based on the amount of US goods they purchase. Regardless of quotas, anyone at all may obtain the right to immigrate by purchasing a legal, off-quota visa at a fixed price, which is adjusted monthly based on demand.
10. Celebrate one of our chief assets - our incredible inventiveness. Hold an annual inventor's fair where individuals or teams present their ideas or actual working stuff. The winners not only get a cash prize, but also get free government assistance to promote and develop the invention.
Here's a theory - the rocks grow ice wings. Cold wind blows across the top of the water, causing the portions of rocks that poke up above the water to be colder than the portion of the rock under the water. Water ripples hit the rock and some of the water freezes causing a halo of ice to form around the rock. The wind continues to blow the water across the formed ice sheet, and because the rock is still colder on top, more water freezes near the top center of the sheet than below. Now we end up with an ice sheet surrounding the rock that is curved on top and flat on the bottom. The water drains away/soaks into the ground, leaving the ice sheet with attached rock in the middle exposed to air. Air flows across the now wing-shaped sheet causing lift, and at some point the amount of lift, wind velocity and slipperiness of the mud combine to allow movement.
Or perhaps the rocks grow halos of ice, it rains again, and the ice provides enough boyancy to lift the rock.
The real answer, of course, is that Elvis landed his saucer and moved them while disguised as Bigfoot.
As someone who has made a 30-year career out of designing and building document management systems, I would urge you to look first at how you expect your users to find the documents they need. The expected results of a search should guide your choice of indexing methods - and the popular "meta tagging" method isn't always the best. There are shortcomings with all methods.
Full-text indexing allows users to search the entire contents of documents, but the results are imprecise and voluminous and not terribly useful in most cases (think web search engines here). Yes, you can find all documents that contain the word "patent", but you get a lot of old references to patent leather shoes in addition to what you were probably after. So, with full-text search you get it all, but force the user to subsearch for what they really want.
Using meta-tags gives the appearance of pre-classifying documents and having the users do it themselves means you don't have to have a dedicated person to assign the tags. The disadvantage is that everybody makes up their own tags or if you have a standard set, you have to rely on people being diligent about applying them. And tag popularity can easily change over time. For example, if you want to find docs that refer to "removable media", this might have garnered a "floppy" tag 15 years ago and "CD" or "DVD" today. You are therefore almost guaranteed of missing some documents using this method.
Database indexing means that you list all your docs in a database, perhaps by title, author, date, or other fields that your users would find useful for searching. The advantage is that every doucment is indexed the same way, searching is really fast, and the results are usually relevant if your schema is meaningful. The disadvantages are that indexing the docs takes work on input and users need to know how to search to get the best results.
Finally, you could organize the docs by simple name and folder. This works fine for the desktop and users usually can identify the category that points them to the folder they want. The disadvantage is that this only works well for limited document sets. Once you start getting hundreds of categories and thousands and thousands of documents, things become too hard to find.
So - understand your users search requirements and the size of your expected database. Only then can you make an informed decision about how to create and index the repository.
The only people that actually argue about operating systems are the digital evangelicals under the age of 30. Everybody else just turns their computer on and gets real work done.
Me? I decided a long time ago that I liked buying a car that just starts up and works. I don't rebuild the engine every month, nor do I buy my engine from a different manufacturer. Every part in my car was engineered to work perfectly in concert. My car starts every time, gets great mileage, has a decent resale value, and doesn't strand me along the highway when I least expect it. My ride never gets carjacked, even though it turns heads for its state-of-the-art design. I drive in comfort and confidence and never worry about the wheels coming off or the engine seizing up. Its gets me exactly where I want to go in comfort and style so I can enjoy the scenery along the way.
Life is short, kiddies. Pick a computer, get a life, quit worrying about my OS. I'm fine, thanks.
Just about every federal contract of any significance (translation: high dollar value) gets protested by the losers. Not news. Not a surprise. Not likely to have any effect of the outcome.
I feel like unless one studies and masters the use of these pretentious buzzwords and phrases, he/she will be run over by people with worse ideas but a nicer-sounding delivery. Is corporate speak a necessary evil?
Yes, corporate speak is a necessary evil and yes, unless you master the use of these phrases you WILL be run over by your more astute comrades.
Each major department in a corporation, such as marketing, management, IT, etc - has its own dialect and way of communicating concepts and ideas. At the IT level, precision is valued and useful. At the corporate/management level, the ability to convey large concepts in shorthand terms or to tone down specific bad news with obfuscating phraseology is useful. The language depends on the job involved. As a quick example, the reason why most corporations have project managers and insist that it be only the project manager that communicates with the client is that the PM knows how to communicate with the client in ways that will not jeopordize the contract. An IT weenie might blurt out that "you need to immediately buy 20 more servers or this won't work", whereas the PM knows that in most cases any contractual change issues must absolutely be approached with care and require much softer language, giving the client time to mentally adjust to the new reality of spending a bunch more money, etc.
The people with the most job security in a corporation are the multilingual people that know exactly how to convey ideas between departments. When marketing starts spouting Web 2.0 or the need to leapfrog the competition, and you take that back to IT and tell them that marketing wants the background color of the website changed ASAP (and marketing is happy as a result), you have now become valuable to both marketing and IT as someone that can perform translations - i.e. someone critical to the smooth operation of the company.
The more dialects you learn to speak, the more critical you become, and it now becomes real easy to leverage that pay raise.
I live in the Blueridge mountains of Virginia an hour west of DC. All I can get is dial-up. We don't have DSL, cable modem, and my 100 ft poplars and the mountain to my west prevent me from doing satellite. We are far enough out that I can't even get network TV. However, I have a 60 inch plasma HDTV and a Bose surround system and a library of 1,000 DVDs, a lot of which are documentaries, etc so my kids have something besides crap to watch (they read a lot). I visit a Blockbuster store once a week and it is 15 miles away, so I am likely to be a great candidate for this type of service, but I can tell you right now that I'm unlikely to ever use it as described.
Why? Because I'm all about owning my video and having the ability to sell them when the media they are on becomes obsolete (like VHS). After all, at $20 a pop x 1,000 DVDs, I have a real inventment. When I go to sell all those DVDs and trade up to Blu-ray (or whatever), I want something tangible that I can take a picture of and sell on eBay, and I just can't see that a terabyte video iPod loaded with movies would bring me more money than the actual physical DVD and case. Real hard to take a picture of bits.
What someone SHOULD do is kill off DVDs and the upcoming Blu-ray stuff and concentrate on building a read-only 30GB movie flash card that can somehow be loaded up *very* quickly (a GB/second) using special write hardware (perhaps located at Blockbuster and other stores). Now you have my attention. Not only would the media take up less space in my living room (allowing me to have a larger library), but it wouldn't be prone to scratching by my kids, and I still have a physical embodiment of the video that I can sell in the future. Since we already have 1GB flash cards, I don't see this as a tremendously difficult leap. The players would be a lot cheaper and more reliable too, since they would involve no moving parts.
Hmmm....forget I said anything. Think I'll start a new business....
The upside??? The more junk science your kids are taught, the easier MY kids will have getting into college:-)
Kansas - the future home of the best sanitation engineers in the world.
I like to build new street pipe organs and restore old pipe organs and player pianos. You can get plans to build a small street pipe organ that plays punched paper rolls (a program!!!) from John Smith of Flitwick, England and can see some examples of organs people have built here (along with a picture of mine):
Building a street organ will test your woodworking skills to the max, and if you are musical you can cut your own music rolls.
My log house was built around a 1933 Moller pipe organ that I pulled from a church in Chicago. Stands 16 ft tall, 16 ft wide and 6 ft deep. Has a door in the side you can walk into to do
maintenance. Fire that baby up while inside and its almost better than sex:-)
We build commercial client-server cross-platform software and are increasingly seeing requests for XServes. The reasons are not exactly what you would expect.
I have heard clients tell me that they chose XServes for the cost (combined server and RAID very reasonable when compared to others), and have had others tell me they were simply fed up with battling viruses and staying up to date with the Win patches, and still others saying that they were switching from all PCs to a mixed or all Mac environment because it costs less to support. There also seems to be some hesitation about basing enterprise-wide apps on open-source OS's such as Linux where they feel support is not as good as they can obtain from Apple.
Whether any or all of this may *actually* be true is irrelevant - it is the kind of things we are hearing. I *do* know that Apple is devoting significant resources to pursuing enterprise applications, and of course since that means us, we welcome it:-)
Flame on, kid.
Didn't say I preferred them. Just wanted to point out that geeks that enjoy building computers might just enjoy the challenges to be found in restoring an antique one. It was a simple suggestion, and not one that I imagined would bring down a personal attack. And 30 years ago I was hacking computers in the basement of NSA. What were you doing?
Down, boy. Good boy. Sit.
It was a fictional PC model meant to be humorous and illustrate a point. Substitute whatever cheapo but uselessly fast homegrown PC model you wish.
Here's a suggestion for all you computer builders that seem somehow to remain unfulfilled - buy and restore an S-100 computer running CP/M.
Anyone can buy a bunch of off-the-shelf PC stuff and build a computer - you know it can be done *somehow*. But after its all said and done, what have you accomplished that a million other geeks haven't already done?
Buy an old IMSAI running a 2 or 4 Mhz (yes Mhz) 8-bit Z80 with 64K (yes K) of RAM, a serial board, and a floppy controller, then buy a couple of old floppy drives off eBay and get THAT to boot. When you do, you will know you have done something, because you will have written the entire I/O portion of the operating system in assembly, researched and understood the difference between single density and double density and floppy drive spindle speeds, will have written a floppy formattter, will have written direct disk sector read and write utilities, and will - in short - know your computer better than you will ever be able to know that Alienware 20Terahertz Doom player you hacked up.
There's just nothing like being able to directly poke an entire game into memory using the front panel (IMSAI's 'Chase the lights game - which my daughter played for hours - requires only 40 bytes of code).
I program commercial Mac OS X apps for a living, but for sheer fun, I'd rather get another of my old IMSAI's or ALTAIRs (or any pre-PC computer) up and running again.
And you can do it for about what you pay for all those modern PC parts.
And by the way, IMSAI is still around - see www.imsai.net
Just a thought:-)
Slashdot Mirror
I get it - you sit down at your workstation and seem to be able to find any number of things to do rather than code - read Slashdot, check the news, etc - and before you know it, it's lunch time. And after lunch, you figure why start now, half the day is shot....
All the suggestions I've read here such as "take a relaxing walk", "you might just be burned out", etc - are wussy excuses that won't get you back in gear. If you *really* want to get back to work, talk to your boss (if you have one), and work out a firm schedule of milestones that must be met on the road to completing the project - real milestones that involve demonstration of completed code or GUI. And then insist that they check up on you daily to determine your progress. But most important, make your job contingent on meeting those milestones.
Nothing focuses the mind like having your way of life on the line. When goofing off at work means that you lose your house, your car, and that big screen TV, and have to move back home with the parents - that's when you will learn whether you intend to be a contributing member of society or some welfare junkie that the rest of us carry.
Think your grandmother had days when she just didn't want to drive any more rivets into B29 bombers? Think she got advice to "take a long walk and clear your mind"? Please.
To paraphrase Patton, years from now when you are bouncing your grandchildren on your knee and they look up at you and ask "What did you do during the dawn of the great Information Age"? - you won't have to sigh and say "Well, I played World of Warcraft and wolfed down Fritos".
I restore early systems as a hobby and have the following in bootable, working condition:
An 1976 IMSAI 8080 with 64K RAM, dual 8 inch floppies, and 5.25 and 3.5 drives, equipped with a Centronics printer and a ASR33 Teletype with paper tape reader.
A 1977 Genrad Futuredata firmware development system with dual 8 inch floppies and EPROM burner
A 1974-era duplicate of Jonathan Titus's Mark-8, a 16K 8008-based system as shown in July 1974 Radio Electronics
Recently sold my working 1975/76 Altair 8800 with dual fixed-format 8 inch floppies, 64K RAM, Centronics printer, ASR33 Teletype with paper tape reader. All original MITS boards. Would boot Bill Gates original BASIC, as well as Altair DOS and CP/M 2.2. Complete with original doc in MITS binders.
A 1977 TRS-80 Model I 16K
A good number of misc S-100 boards for IMSAI and Altair
80's stuff:
Original 128K Macintosh with dual 3.5 drives - boots and runs
Cromemco SBC with 3K Basic in ROM
Masscomp 68010 RT Unix - boots and runs
A bunch of old accoustic modems...
After five years we should *own* that country. The fact that we aren't even close shows just how badly we dropped the ball in Afghanistan. We should pull out completely and let the country devolve into chaos. Then when bin Laden makes his triumphal return to organize the mess, nuke it into non-existence, which is what we should have done on 9/12.
As far as blasphemy? All religions - without exception - should be eliminated from the human experience. It is shameful that a species that can explore other planets still includes members that seriously believe in sky fairies.
Because creationists refuse to accept facts they make fairly poor candidates for any position that requires actual thought, but they make excellent manual laborers. My daughter plans on a career in physics and she said that she would consider allowing them to tend her garden or trim her hedges so long as they didn't actually speak to her.
This may actually comes as a shock, but it IS more important to feed your family than to protect bits in a computer, and I don't care what the information is that those bits represent.
Having said that, if you are in an environment where your recommendations are not being taken seriously, perhaps it's time time find an employer that holds to the same security ideals that you do.
Of course you could always have fun blowing the whistle and watching upper-level management try and play dodgeball....
Along with Microsoft's Coding Secrets, you can also buy....
...and many others!!!
Enrons's Guide to Business Ethics
Greenpeace's Tasty Whale Recipes
George Bush's Global Warming Solutions for our Time
Ron Jeremy's The Arguments for Abstinence
As soon as my nerdish daughter turned 13, the phone starting ringing off the hook and she was glued to her computer screen IMing with her friends. I have no cell phone, don't IM (tried it), and like it that way. So, how do I turn my daughter into an introvert and restore my sanity? :-)
True story:
I was a codebreaker in the Army Security Agency from 71 to 77 and for the last five years worked at NSA. Taught myself programming to help automate some of the analysis I was doing at the time and was fortunate enough to work on some of the incredible hardware they had in the basement then. In 77 I had to decide whether to stay in (and stay poor on Army pay - about 10K/yr then) or get out and do real work, and interviewed with a number of DOD contractors around DC. When I told the interviewer the CDC mainframe model I last programmed, he confidently told me that CDC didn't make that model yet. I managed to convince him they did by describing some of its attributes and got the job, thereby doubling my pay.
The VN listening post exhibit is interesting. Brought back a lot of memories from when I was stationed is SE Asia during the latter part of that war, helping to process the stuff those guys were intercepting. Fascinating work, and if it wasn't for the Carter-era hiring freeze, I'd still be solving those puzzles for a living.
"You need to make sure your report exudes a sense of honesty, openness, empathy, and maybe even a hint of humor."
Perhaps this:
"Wow! You're going to love this one - and it's really, really true! Chimpanzees, Gorillas, and us - we all had the same mega-great grandparent! (Gee - so THAT's why I like bananas so much...)"
All this is saying is that the general public won't begin to pay much attention to the science geeks until they actually start sounding human - just like the listener.
Well, I'm not female, so that let's me out of being the NEXT president, but assuming I make it eventually:
1. Pull our troops back to the oil fields, send in the tankers, and start pumping it into our ships until there isn't anything left. Once that is done, we leave and let them eat sand.
br> 2. If we are ever attacked again, pick any mideast country at random and nuke it. Once no lifeforms remain, send in the troops and see #1. Repeat as needed.
3. Put teeth in laws protecting freedom of religion by making it a Federal offense to attempt to impose your religious beliefs on another citizen in any way whatsoever. This protects minority believers from the tyranny of the religous establishment. Intelligent Design? Illegal to espouse. Religious ads? Illegal to espouse. Worshipping in church? No problem.
4. Reaffirm the President as Commander in Chief. However, sending our troops anywhere outside the US is an automatic declaration of war and automatically activates the draft - and ALL able-bodied citizens must register and are eligible, including females.
5. Want to vote? Perform some type of Federal Service, including military, peace corps or equivalent. Yes, this is EXACTLY what Heinlein suggested in Starship Troopers.
6. Find a way to nationalize health care. Suggestion: guarantee a job for life for anyone that becomes a physician with a decent salary and the government pays for your entire education.
7. Introduce legislation that makes any substance people care to snort, smoke, inject, or swallow legal to possess and consume with appropriate taxes based on the impact to society, and appropriate FDA warnings on the bad stuff.
8. Heavily fund research into small-scale nuclear reactor development and begin a program of aggressive expansion.
9. Set immigration quotas for countries based on the amount of US goods they purchase. Regardless of quotas, anyone at all may obtain the right to immigrate by purchasing a legal, off-quota visa at a fixed price, which is adjusted monthly based on demand.
10. Celebrate one of our chief assets - our incredible inventiveness. Hold an annual inventor's fair where individuals or teams present their ideas or actual working stuff. The winners not only get a cash prize, but also get free government assistance to promote and develop the invention.
Here's a theory - the rocks grow ice wings. Cold wind blows across the top of the water, causing the portions of rocks that poke up above the water to be colder than the portion of the rock under the water. Water ripples hit the rock and some of the water freezes causing a halo of ice to form around the rock. The wind continues to blow the water across the formed ice sheet, and because the rock is still colder on top, more water freezes near the top center of the sheet than below. Now we end up with an ice sheet surrounding the rock that is curved on top and flat on the bottom. The water drains away/soaks into the ground, leaving the ice sheet with attached rock in the middle exposed to air. Air flows across the now wing-shaped sheet causing lift, and at some point the amount of lift, wind velocity and slipperiness of the mud combine to allow movement. Or perhaps the rocks grow halos of ice, it rains again, and the ice provides enough boyancy to lift the rock. The real answer, of course, is that Elvis landed his saucer and moved them while disguised as Bigfoot.
He was let go because his stock was about to vest...
As someone who has made a 30-year career out of designing and building document management systems, I would urge you to look first at how you expect your users to find the documents they need. The expected results of a search should guide your choice of indexing methods - and the popular "meta tagging" method isn't always the best. There are shortcomings with all methods.
Full-text indexing allows users to search the entire contents of documents, but the results are imprecise and voluminous and not terribly useful in most cases (think web search engines here). Yes, you can find all documents that contain the word "patent", but you get a lot of old references to patent leather shoes in addition to what you were probably after. So, with full-text search you get it all, but force the user to subsearch for what they really want.
Using meta-tags gives the appearance of pre-classifying documents and having the users do it themselves means you don't have to have a dedicated person to assign the tags. The disadvantage is that everybody makes up their own tags or if you have a standard set, you have to rely on people being diligent about applying them. And tag popularity can easily change over time. For example, if you want to find docs that refer to "removable media", this might have garnered a "floppy" tag 15 years ago and "CD" or "DVD" today. You are therefore almost guaranteed of missing some documents using this method.
Database indexing means that you list all your docs in a database, perhaps by title, author, date, or other fields that your users would find useful for searching. The advantage is that every doucment is indexed the same way, searching is really fast, and the results are usually relevant if your schema is meaningful. The disadvantages are that indexing the docs takes work on input and users need to know how to search to get the best results.
Finally, you could organize the docs by simple name and folder. This works fine for the desktop and users usually can identify the category that points them to the folder they want. The disadvantage is that this only works well for limited document sets. Once you start getting hundreds of categories and thousands and thousands of documents, things become too hard to find.
So - understand your users search requirements and the size of your expected database. Only then can you make an informed decision about how to create and index the repository.
Windows, Linux, Mac OS X? Who the hell cares?
The only people that actually argue about operating systems are the digital evangelicals under the age of 30. Everybody else just turns their computer on and gets real work done.
Me? I decided a long time ago that I liked buying a car that just starts up and works. I don't rebuild the engine every month, nor do I buy my engine from a different manufacturer. Every part in my car was engineered to work perfectly in concert. My car starts every time, gets great mileage, has a decent resale value, and doesn't strand me along the highway when I least expect it. My ride never gets carjacked, even though it turns heads for its state-of-the-art design. I drive in comfort and confidence and never worry about the wheels coming off or the engine seizing up. Its gets me exactly where I want to go in comfort and style so I can enjoy the scenery along the way.
Life is short, kiddies. Pick a computer, get a life, quit worrying about my OS. I'm fine, thanks.
Just about every federal contract of any significance (translation: high dollar value) gets protested by the losers. Not news. Not a surprise. Not likely to have any effect of the outcome.
I feel like unless one studies and masters the use of these pretentious buzzwords and phrases, he/she will be run over by people with worse ideas but a nicer-sounding delivery. Is corporate speak a necessary evil?
Yes, corporate speak is a necessary evil and yes, unless you master the use of these phrases you WILL be run over by your more astute comrades.
Each major department in a corporation, such as marketing, management, IT, etc - has its own dialect and way of communicating concepts and ideas. At the IT level, precision is valued and useful. At the corporate/management level, the ability to convey large concepts in shorthand terms or to tone down specific bad news with obfuscating phraseology is useful. The language depends on the job involved. As a quick example, the reason why most corporations have project managers and insist that it be only the project manager that communicates with the client is that the PM knows how to communicate with the client in ways that will not jeopordize the contract. An IT weenie might blurt out that "you need to immediately buy 20 more servers or this won't work", whereas the PM knows that in most cases any contractual change issues must absolutely be approached with care and require much softer language, giving the client time to mentally adjust to the new reality of spending a bunch more money, etc.
The people with the most job security in a corporation are the multilingual people that know exactly how to convey ideas between departments. When marketing starts spouting Web 2.0 or the need to leapfrog the competition, and you take that back to IT and tell them that marketing wants the background color of the website changed ASAP (and marketing is happy as a result), you have now become valuable to both marketing and IT as someone that can perform translations - i.e. someone critical to the smooth operation of the company.
The more dialects you learn to speak, the more critical you become, and it now becomes real easy to leverage that pay raise.
I live in the Blueridge mountains of Virginia an hour west of DC. All I can get is dial-up. We don't have DSL, cable modem, and my 100 ft poplars and the mountain to my west prevent me from doing satellite. We are far enough out that I can't even get network TV. However, I have a 60 inch plasma HDTV and a Bose surround system and a library of 1,000 DVDs, a lot of which are documentaries, etc so my kids have something besides crap to watch (they read a lot). I visit a Blockbuster store once a week and it is 15 miles away, so I am likely to be a great candidate for this type of service, but I can tell you right now that I'm unlikely to ever use it as described.
Why? Because I'm all about owning my video and having the ability to sell them when the media they are on becomes obsolete (like VHS). After all, at $20 a pop x 1,000 DVDs, I have a real inventment. When I go to sell all those DVDs and trade up to Blu-ray (or whatever), I want something tangible that I can take a picture of and sell on eBay, and I just can't see that a terabyte video iPod loaded with movies would bring me more money than the actual physical DVD and case. Real hard to take a picture of bits.
What someone SHOULD do is kill off DVDs and the upcoming Blu-ray stuff and concentrate on building a read-only 30GB movie flash card that can somehow be loaded up *very* quickly (a GB/second) using special write hardware (perhaps located at Blockbuster and other stores). Now you have my attention. Not only would the media take up less space in my living room (allowing me to have a larger library), but it wouldn't be prone to scratching by my kids, and I still have a physical embodiment of the video that I can sell in the future. Since we already have 1GB flash cards, I don't see this as a tremendously difficult leap. The players would be a lot cheaper and more reliable too, since they would involve no moving parts.
Hmmm....forget I said anything. Think I'll start a new business....
The upside??? The more junk science your kids are taught, the easier MY kids will have getting into college :-)
Kansas - the future home of the best sanitation engineers in the world.
I like to build new street pipe organs and restore old pipe organs and player pianos. You can get plans to build a small street pipe organ that plays punched paper rolls (a program!!!) from John Smith of Flitwick, England and can see some examples of organs people have built here (along with a picture of mine):
:-)
http://www.melright.com/busker/jsmith.htm
Building a street organ will test your woodworking skills to the max, and if you are musical you can cut your own music rolls.
My log house was built around a 1933 Moller pipe organ that I pulled from a church in Chicago. Stands 16 ft tall, 16 ft wide and 6 ft deep. Has a door in the side you can walk into to do maintenance. Fire that baby up while inside and its almost better than sex
Craig Landrum Flint Hill, VA
We build commercial client-server cross-platform software and are increasingly seeing requests for XServes. The reasons are not exactly what you would expect.
I have heard clients tell me that they chose XServes for the cost (combined server and RAID very reasonable when compared to others), and have had others tell me they were simply fed up with battling viruses and staying up to date with the Win patches, and still others saying that they were switching from all PCs to a mixed or all Mac environment because it costs less to support. There also seems to be some hesitation about basing enterprise-wide apps on open-source OS's such as Linux where they feel support is not as good as they can obtain from Apple.
Whether any or all of this may *actually* be true is irrelevant - it is the kind of things we are hearing. I *do* know that Apple is devoting significant resources to pursuing enterprise applications, and of course since that means us, we welcome it :-)
No insult was intended. Live long and prosper :-)
Flame on, kid. Didn't say I preferred them. Just wanted to point out that geeks that enjoy building computers might just enjoy the challenges to be found in restoring an antique one. It was a simple suggestion, and not one that I imagined would bring down a personal attack. And 30 years ago I was hacking computers in the basement of NSA. What were you doing?
Down, boy. Good boy. Sit. It was a fictional PC model meant to be humorous and illustrate a point. Substitute whatever cheapo but uselessly fast homegrown PC model you wish.
Here's a suggestion for all you computer builders that seem somehow to remain unfulfilled - buy and restore an S-100 computer running CP/M. Anyone can buy a bunch of off-the-shelf PC stuff and build a computer - you know it can be done *somehow*. But after its all said and done, what have you accomplished that a million other geeks haven't already done? Buy an old IMSAI running a 2 or 4 Mhz (yes Mhz) 8-bit Z80 with 64K (yes K) of RAM, a serial board, and a floppy controller, then buy a couple of old floppy drives off eBay and get THAT to boot. When you do, you will know you have done something, because you will have written the entire I/O portion of the operating system in assembly, researched and understood the difference between single density and double density and floppy drive spindle speeds, will have written a floppy formattter, will have written direct disk sector read and write utilities, and will - in short - know your computer better than you will ever be able to know that Alienware 20Terahertz Doom player you hacked up. There's just nothing like being able to directly poke an entire game into memory using the front panel (IMSAI's 'Chase the lights game - which my daughter played for hours - requires only 40 bytes of code). I program commercial Mac OS X apps for a living, but for sheer fun, I'd rather get another of my old IMSAI's or ALTAIRs (or any pre-PC computer) up and running again. And you can do it for about what you pay for all those modern PC parts. And by the way, IMSAI is still around - see www.imsai.net Just a thought :-)