So
what's the problem, then? We have a hard time finding
parts to maintain the network. Our client says that he's
willing to invest in hardware upgrades, but we should
move to a Windows-like environment, however he doesn't
want to pay for more than 4000 Windows licenses.
That sounds like two problems, not one.
You, as system supplier, have some sort of maintainance issue with the current set-up, the nature of which is not described in detail, unfortunately, but I can understand that identifying the particular application on/. may not be the best way of endearing yourself to the rest of your company and its current client, especially if, as it sounds, it's a custom implementation for that client. Meanwhile, the client is saying that if the setup is going to have to be be changed anyway, then they want to take the opportunity to upgrade the application and make it... what? Just prettier for the sake of it, or a more common PC-like look and feel so that there is less sniping from their customers about it being primitive and out-of-date? Or do they want added functionality as well? Are the existing central servers sacrosanct, or can that part of the app be adjusted, too?
I've got no concrete suggestions, but as this response indicates, I'd personally be inclined to sit down with the client and explore what they want and their reasons for it, and then, and only then, evaluate the approaches you collect.
Re:Lacks any ability to glide
on
Fanwing Planes?
·
· Score: 2
Cirrus Design SR80 had a complete parachute system for the light aircraft, but that's hardly a scalable approach, and dropping even a small general aviation plane on a parachute over an urban area is distinctly second-best to being able to glide towards some reasonably open space *before* deploying the 'chute.
(Hm. A quick Google search indicates that Cirrus is actually manufacturing their planes. Good for them, innovation in any field is welcome.)
... was that this made/. without having a Lego Penguin...
Well... my second reaction to the Ascending and Descending piece was 'cool, nice little penguins' before I looked a bit closer. (First reaction was a broad grin.)
Actually, kids toys in general can be useful visual aids when you're at a meeting where different organisations are presenting their take on something and what they think is the way forward. By the time a few tens of PowerPoint bullet-item slides in the approved corporate style have been put up, everyone is getting drowsy and needs a bit of light relief: using toys to illustrate your contribution can get your point across pretty graphically.
A colleague of mine uses this technique a lot: Lego, Tinkertoys, Silly Putty, slinky springs, 'my first mobile phone'... he's used them all at one time or another to supplement his 'proper' presentation materials. Often gets his way because his contribution is the only one the PHB's can remember half an hour later (though there's always the danger that a decision-maker has zero sense of humor and writes him off as 'unprofessional').
One is an ID system for transportation workers, so that they have some way
of verifying that the guy in the tarmac in a blue jumpsuit really is an employee who is
allowed to be there....
I sincerely hope you're not hinting that security in US airports is so lax that this is not already standard practice.
... The TSA is looking at a way to unify the many different systems under
one, so that rather than having 50 different types of identification depending on where
you go, everyone will have the same types of ID. They're not implementing a new
system. They're making an existing one more standardized.
I'm not totally convinced that this is a good idea. A certain amount of variability between locations and/ or functions increases the effort needed to forge the desired credentials by making necessary to get the correct type of token to start with rather than being able to pick up one from another environment. (In general, too, you shouldn't be relying on token + pin/ biometrics alone for sensitive locations, you should have the gate to the secured locations monitored by people to make attempts to spoof the system difficult (or downright dangerous)).
The second is the Registered Traveler ID. This system is a voluntary system for
frequent flyers to bypass the tedious and sometimes invasive security procedures at
airports and train stations. Basically, you go through the background checks, etc. once,
and then you can skip all the feel-down lines and breeze your way to the gate.
Again, I sincerely hope that such a scheme would never be used in such a damnfool way, despite the temptation to cut corners to save costs. Human supervision of identity confirmation and the validity of the token and throwing in a degree of random checks anyway would be good indications that the scheme is actually designed to improve security rather than just making passengers feel safer (and selling a fairy story that something useful is really being done).
But we try to introduce new
products to keep up with the times and they act stupid on us and say we are killing
business because we **WON'T** migrate their stupid macros.
Seems to me you've lost sight of the purpose of IT: to provide a service. In your case, a service to support the needs of the rest of the business.
There are good (or at least understandable) reasons that users should be asked or required to migrate to different applications. Costs of providing support to a mixed environment, requirements that data should be exchangable seamlessly, reliability and security of business and customer data, and so on. But "keeping up with the times" so that the young BOFH-wannabes in the IT department don't have to demean themselves by dealing with older technology doesn't cut it as a business case.
If the business does decide that there is a good case for following IT's advice for application migration, and it provides the necessary budget for IT to support that migration by helping the users, then it can quite reasonably tell you to either do that or to find a new job yourself.
(Apologies for the rant, but I see altogether too much of the "customers, we don't need no stinking customers" attitude in the IT organisation where I work. Believe me, in the current climate, enough of that from the wrong people, and everyone starts getting tarred with the same brush.)
I'm looking for advice, not just for next week but for a few
years down the line. What can I do to acquire these
essential new skills?
Even when you're securely (as far as you can tell) employed, keep on reading the trade press and scanning the job ads. If a new topic starts making an appearance and it's one that you would consider working with, investigate it, do self-study, if it looks sufficiently promising consider shelling out for paid courses, if you can find any.
No guarantee that any of the knowledge you acquire will actually be something that you will use, but it may make it less likely that you experience the sudden realisation that your current skillset is past its sell-by date and that unless you have at least some familiarity with newer stuff then many employers are going to automatically drop your application at the first filtering stage.
It's a bit difficult to do comparisons when both the manufacturers and their major purchasers have their own reasons to be, er, less than transparent about the actual figures.
Fujitsu do seem to be attracting a lot of attention recently, though. And the place I work has had 2 division-wide replacement programs for Fujitsu HDs for their Compaq ENs in the last couple of years - for most cases a precaution, with data copied successfully 1 for 1 to the replacement device.
Just a single data point, of course.
Re:We are emotional and not rational??!!!
on
Halloween VII
·
· Score: 2
Closing, those who are familiar with OSS and Linux are favorably predisposed towards them. Linking this work with other on-point research, we can assume that in the majority of cases this reported 'favorability' is more emotional than it is rational. Given this context, we should not expect rational arguments focused on undermining support for OSS, Linux and the GPL to perform well.
In the short term, then, Microsoft should avoid criticizing OSS and Linux directly, continue to develop and aim to eventually win the TCO argument, and focus on delivering positive Shared Source messages that contain transparent, audience specific proof points.
Or, MS could just compete fairly on the merits of its products and services, rather than imitating the behavior of the proverbial 800-pound gorilla against its competitors and - some are beginning to think - its paying customers, and so provoking many people into emotionally favoring alternatives to MS (a recurring chorus in the survey). Chances are that it would still do pretty well.
Please note that yesterday evening, after he was appointed to the new SEC "watchdog" panel, William Webster admitted that he was on the board
of a company being investigated by the SEC for cooking the books.
Note also that it's now come out via New York Times and elsewhere that the SEC chairman Mr Pitt was aware of this but hadn't for some reason felt it necessary to disclose the information to the other SEC board members who share with him the responsibility for the appointment of Mr Webster. See this BBC report for an outline of the case.
At least there's now an inquiry (by the SEC - errrrm) being made into the circumstances of Mr Webster's selection, but there does seem to have been, at the very least, a lack of due diligence in the SEC process, and this at the highest level.
Note that they're scheduling an Enterprise Desktop version for Q1 2003, too, for the larger scale companies. (And already have 2 German commercial organisations on board, with 3K and 1K desktops respectively, to smooth out the rough edges in deploying and supporting on that scale.) Sounds as though this might turn out to be a serious injection of business realities into the task of getting Linux et al established at desktop level.
If you throw 'financial results embargo' at everyones favourite search engine you'll find a bunch of press releases that have been made available in advance of the nominal release time - my understanding is that this is often done so that information is available at the same time to everyone regardless of the news service they subscribe to. It feels somewhat odd if the companies involved haven't in fact been been doing this, but there may be some quirk of Scandinavian legal practice involved.
A bit odd, too, to find Reuters doing something that raises questions about their operating methods - most of the time they're keen to promote themselves as dependable partners of the companies they report on. They're undoubtedly feeling the effects of the current market storms themselves: perhaps a few corners were being cut in the effort to be first with the news.
Veering offtopic, but didn't Douglas Adams put in some time as a script editor (aka uncredited writer) on the series when Tom Baker incarnated the good doctor? ISTR some sort of Amazing Engine in one episode which had the usual perspex, silverpaint and blinkenlichten, and somewhere in the middle, the main control... the steering wheel from a Moris Minor[1]. Now that was being creative on a small budget.
[1]A small British automobile, manufactured from soon after World War 2 until the very late 1950's or early 1960s. (Austin Powers would know them, and would surrender to Dr Evil rather than being seen dead in one.) Primitive, but reliable[2], some of the station-wagon versions with the wooden window-frames in the rear extension were still going strong into the late 1990's. They probably finally failed their annual safety tests because of damage from woodworm and deathwatch beetle rather than from rust.
[2]The Morris Minor, not Austin Powers[3].
[3]Austin was another British automobile manufacturer, it merged with Morris after WW2.
[4]Apologies and credits to Terry Pratchett, independent inventor and populariser of the footnote-to-footnote joke.
You know, you have to go through an awful amount of effort to create a website that isn't accessable. - squiggleslash
(sigh) No, not really. All you have to do is to leave it out of the initial specifications, either out of carelessness, or as a deliberate choice because you calculate that it will probably cost more than it's worth. What you then get at the end of the development, implementation, deployment, in-house training, etc etc etc, will cost too much to enhance for accessibility. And unless you're in business selling to the small minority of sense-handicapped individuals, the people who made the mistake, or the choice, aren't going to get penalised for it.
<blurb>
Ever marvel at how Perl can "do the right thing" but still be written in C?</blurb>
No. I do marvel occasionally at how the Perl5 interpreter has been so constructed that it can handle pedantic, careful, robust, production-quality mannerisms without barfing on quick'n'dirty one-time script shortcuts. But mostly, these days I just take it for granted, and give thanks that a student of human language has built such a flexible language-to-instruct-machines. The underlying langauge of implementation is usually irrelevant, unless there's a need to connect to something that has neglected to provide a Perl API, in which case we can usually find a way via the de-facto machine-independent assembler, "C".
But for code that calculates my taxes or bank balance, or drives the displays at the operating theatre if I'm brought in for emergency heart surgery, I want implementation languages where there is no question of ambiguity in the interpretation of the semantics of the code.
-- Perl, C, C++ (urgh) hacker. Don't tell anyone I can read COBOL.
David Blunkett has a habit of putting legislation into action that is far too heavy handed...
It's not an individual matter. The Home Office (that's the branch of the UK government that deals with law and order and domestic security) has a long track record of using every opportunity that comes up to legislate additional powers for itself and its clients in the security services, with as little external oversight as it can smuggle through Parliament. Very few Home Secretaries have avoided 'going native' and taking up this agenda - the only name that comes readily to my mind is Roy jenkins, and that's going back around 30 years. Blunkett's immediate predecessors were even worse: Jack Straw - who introduced the accursed RIP Act in the first place - and Michael Howard, a Tory who managed the difficult feat of making even his fellow law-and-order Tories feel uncomfortable.
Personally, I'd like to see the responsibilities for security and for justice in the UK split up into different government ministries: the Home Office is institutionally incapable of balancing the two.
But, does anyone have any *serious* suggestions for economically viable ways to reuse the materials in provided-for-free CDs? They're not yet so ubiquitous as waste-paper or retail shopping bags, but in the places where they are widely distributed, the obvious uses of propping up short furniture legs, mounting on strings to scare birds away from ripe fruit, and amusing children with microwave-oven indoor firework displays must all have been reached long ago.
... why, for example, accessing port 80 (web access) needs root access ?
Basically, because ports used for 'well-known' services, like port 80, shouldn't be readily available to arbitary programs, because that would allow a mischievously constructed program to bind to such a port and start serving inapproriate results (or, indeed, just do nothing). The standard IP stack implementations reserve port numbers under 1000 for these well-known services, and typically require that a process attempting to bind to them has some sort of (OS-dependent) privilege. Unfortunately, under classic Unix, 'privileged' equates to root access - it's an all or nothing thing.
Separating the various functions whose use should require privileges into catagories that can be granted individually (or in groups) to different userids is definitely a Good Thing: it probably won't eliminate the need for a super-user and a few godlike system maintainance users, but it allows the system administrators to keep the really dangerous 'own all data' and 'devour all resources' functions to be kept under tighter control than the all-or-nothing approach. (Arguably, you shouldn't even consider handling sensitive information on a platform that cannot administer privileges in a reasonably fine-grained way, but that's another argument.)
Next thing you'll be telling me is that some fungus that grows on damp bread will lead to a magic bullet against disease after some researcher breaks the health and safety rules by eating a sandwich while he's preparing the next batch of growth medium.
Slashdot Mirror
You, as system supplier, have some sort of maintainance issue with the current set-up, the nature of which is not described in detail, unfortunately, but I can understand that identifying the particular application on /. may not be the best way of endearing yourself to the rest of your company and its current client, especially if, as it sounds, it's a custom implementation for that client. Meanwhile, the client is saying that if the setup is going to have to be be changed anyway, then they want to take the opportunity to upgrade the application and make it... what? Just prettier for the sake of it, or a more common PC-like look and feel so that there is less sniping from their customers about it being primitive and out-of-date? Or do they want added functionality as well? Are the existing central servers sacrosanct, or can that part of the app be adjusted, too?
I've got no concrete suggestions, but as this response indicates, I'd personally be inclined to sit down with the client and explore what they want and their reasons for it, and then, and only then, evaluate the approaches you collect.
...but in your case I'll make a file deletion"
-- Groucho Marx, circa 2120.
Cirrus Design SR80 had a complete parachute system for the light aircraft, but that's hardly a scalable approach, and dropping even a small general aviation plane on a parachute over an urban area is distinctly second-best to being able to glide towards some reasonably open space *before* deploying the 'chute.
(Hm. A quick Google search indicates that Cirrus is actually manufacturing their planes. Good for them, innovation in any field is welcome.)
Actually, kids toys in general can be useful visual aids when you're at a meeting where different organisations are presenting their take on something and what they think is the way forward. By the time a few tens of PowerPoint bullet-item slides in the approved corporate style have been put up, everyone is getting drowsy and needs a bit of light relief: using toys to illustrate your contribution can get your point across pretty graphically.
A colleague of mine uses this technique a lot: Lego, Tinkertoys, Silly Putty, slinky springs, 'my first mobile phone'... he's used them all at one time or another to supplement his 'proper' presentation materials. Often gets his way because his contribution is the only one the PHB's can remember half an hour later (though there's always the danger that a decision-maker has zero sense of humor and writes him off as 'unprofessional').
There are good (or at least understandable) reasons that users should be asked or required to migrate to different applications. Costs of providing support to a mixed environment, requirements that data should be exchangable seamlessly, reliability and security of business and customer data, and so on. But "keeping up with the times" so that the young BOFH-wannabes in the IT department don't have to demean themselves by dealing with older technology doesn't cut it as a business case.
If the business does decide that there is a good case for following IT's advice for application migration, and it provides the necessary budget for IT to support that migration by helping the users, then it can quite reasonably tell you to either do that or to find a new job yourself.
(Apologies for the rant, but I see altogether too much of the "customers, we don't need no stinking customers" attitude in the IT organisation where I work. Believe me, in the current climate, enough of that from the wrong people, and everyone starts getting tarred with the same brush.)
No guarantee that any of the knowledge you acquire will actually be something that you will use, but it may make it less likely that you experience the sudden realisation that your current skillset is past its sell-by date and that unless you have at least some familiarity with newer stuff then many employers are going to automatically drop your application at the first filtering stage.
It's a bit difficult to do comparisons when both the manufacturers and their major purchasers have their own reasons to be, er, less than transparent about the actual figures.
Fujitsu do seem to be attracting a lot of attention recently, though. And the place I work has had 2 division-wide replacement programs for Fujitsu HDs for their Compaq ENs in the last couple of years - for most cases a precaution, with data copied successfully 1 for 1 to the replacement device.
Just a single data point, of course.
I'd only ask, for clarification: does this ruling erect any additional legal barriers that were not already there before?
--
No, this post isn't a troll.
Surely MS-Office for Windows and MS-Office for Mac can interoperate without trouble?
(Ducks and runs)
At least there's now an inquiry (by the SEC - errrrm) being made into the circumstances of Mr Webster's selection, but there does seem to have been, at the very least, a lack of due diligence in the SEC process, and this at the highest level.
Note that they're scheduling an Enterprise Desktop version for Q1 2003, too, for the larger scale companies. (And already have 2 German commercial organisations on board, with 3K and 1K desktops respectively, to smooth out the rough edges in deploying and supporting on that scale.) Sounds as though this might turn out to be a serious injection of business realities into the task of getting Linux et al established at desktop level.
(With acknowledgements to the late Peter Cook).
--
What colour is the sky in the parallel universe you're inhabiting today?
If you throw 'financial results embargo' at everyones favourite search engine you'll find a bunch of press releases that have been made available in advance of the nominal release time - my understanding is that this is often done so that information is available at the same time to everyone regardless of the news service they subscribe to. It feels somewhat odd if the companies involved haven't in fact been been doing this, but there may be some quirk of Scandinavian legal practice involved.
A bit odd, too, to find Reuters doing something that raises questions about their operating methods - most of the time they're keen to promote themselves as dependable partners of the companies they report on. They're undoubtedly feeling the effects of the current market storms themselves: perhaps a few corners were being cut in the effort to be first with the news.
[1]A small British automobile, manufactured from soon after World War 2 until the very late 1950's or early 1960s. (Austin Powers would know them, and would surrender to Dr Evil rather than being seen dead in one.) Primitive, but reliable[2], some of the station-wagon versions with the wooden window-frames in the rear extension were still going strong into the late 1990's. They probably finally failed their annual safety tests because of damage from woodworm and deathwatch beetle rather than from rust.
[2]The Morris Minor, not Austin Powers[3].
[3]Austin was another British automobile manufacturer, it merged with Morris after WW2.
[4]Apologies and credits to Terry Pratchett, independent inventor and populariser of the footnote-to-footnote joke.
"So that's why the police don't have the time to catch criminals any longer."
"If you want to know the time, don't ask a policeman."
(Yes, officer, I was just leaving anyway.)
Sad but true.
But for code that calculates my taxes or bank balance, or drives the displays at the operating theatre if I'm brought in for emergency heart surgery, I want implementation languages where there is no question of ambiguity in the interpretation of the semantics of the code.
--
Perl, C, C++ (urgh) hacker. Don't tell anyone I can read COBOL.
Personally, I'd like to see the responsibilities for security and for justice in the UK split up into different government ministries: the Home Office is institutionally incapable of balancing the two.
Google located a few droll suggestions for this.
But, does anyone have any *serious* suggestions for economically viable ways to reuse the materials in provided-for-free CDs? They're not yet so ubiquitous as waste-paper or retail shopping bags, but in the places where they are widely distributed, the obvious uses of propping up short furniture legs, mounting on strings to scare birds away from ripe fruit, and amusing children with microwave-oven indoor firework displays must all have been reached long ago.
Separating the various functions whose use should require privileges into catagories that can be granted individually (or in groups) to different userids is definitely a Good Thing: it probably won't eliminate the need for a super-user and a few godlike system maintainance users, but it allows the system administrators to keep the really dangerous 'own all data' and 'devour all resources' functions to be kept under tighter control than the all-or-nothing approach. (Arguably, you shouldn't even consider handling sensitive information on a platform that cannot administer privileges in a reasonably fine-grained way, but that's another argument.)
Aw, pull the other one, it has bells on.
Next thing you'll be telling me is that some fungus that grows on damp bread will lead to a magic bullet against disease after some researcher breaks the health and safety rules by eating a sandwich while he's preparing the next batch of growth medium.