What this sort of thing ends up meaning in userland is that you get support calls from (understandably) nervous customers saying things like:
"when I tried to install your application upgrade Windows gave a warning saying that xxxx application was not certified and could cause Bad Things to happen to my computer"
This is even more prevalent now that users are aware of malware and trojans that may disguise themselves as useful or necessary programs. It is sometimes difficult to persuade users to install updates to the software that they have already paid you for when they have been cowed by the 'everything unknown by microsoft is a threat' meme that is being promoted!
Amongst the uninformed this tends to strengthen the thought that Microsoft is the only safe place to go for your sofware -and from what I can see of the tremendous online upsell effort on the vista startup windows this fits fine with Microsoft's eventual online 'subscription' model aspirations.
Especially when you would be shielding someone who had unlawfully obtained and then posted materials protected by copyright.
That would probably make you guilty of aiding and abetting or some such....
Bands have started to have this shit happen too -rough, often incomplete or crappy mixes are surfacing on the net. I believe something like this caused one of Beck's album to have a rush release to try to keep the inferior versions from gaining ascendancy and so as not to lose the inertia of the buzz of the initial product release.
Not that it's more defensible morally, but at least with final releases you are presenting the artist's fully realized vision instead of some rough sketch. Studio cuts vs Director's cuts of films would be the exception to this case.
If you have ever taken the several HOURS it takes to read through a single, thin edition of the Economist (as opposed to the 45 minutes or so it takes to wade through the shallow waters of Newspeak(sic) or Time) you might realize that the Economist has some of the most even handed commentary and analysis of almost any news magazine out there.
The fact that they even look at other countries economic situations -even when they don't directly involve US or UK interests, or aren't the hotspot du jour separates them from the US rags whose focus is typically US isolationist.
I've been an avid reader for years (the captions alone are worth the subscription price) despite my left wing, liberal, libertarian background.
Unlike most business periodicals, which seem wholly reactionary, they seem to get the big picture about technology and world poitics and economy -and it is certainly not the IMF/WTO/Cato line despite what you seem to think.
Read about their takes on executive compensation and globalization and try to tell us that they are shills for capitalism.
and how long before Microsoft start insisting that peripheral and I/O card manufacturers require that 'Vista-certified' vendor products only function when attached to DRM'd driver modules by making them put DRM locks on their products? To protect from use in non DRM OSs? To protect content owners from piracy... To protect them from competition.....
This would certainly make life more difficult for Apple, Linux and others. It should raise the red flag of monopoly again though too.....
Dell's initial wins were due to the built-to-order model that let them reduce their supply chain and inventory costs.
GateWay and Dell were the first to pitch PCs to the general public this way.
No Bricks and mortar inventory costs helped too.
Once Compaq and Hp joined them in the 'race to the bottom' Dell started to lose that early-mover (and pricing)advantage. Notice that IBM bowed out of the PC market at about this time....PCs and to some extent servers have been pretty much commodotized at this point...
Outsourcing Support was probably the beginning of the shift in focus to the customer experience to the shareholder bottom line which has helped put Dell in their current doldrums.
All things being equal now that the supply chain advantage has been greatly lessened I would expect the balance of strength to lie with Apple and HP and others who still have robust R&D efforts to drive inventive new products while Dell struggles to squeeze the last few % points of efficiency and cost cutting from their model and can only ape the technological advances of others in the marketplace.
And I don't mean Alcohol, Tobacco and Humongous Firearms!
Maybe this is due to the generational gap or that it's too po-mo, but I don't find Aqua Teen Hunger Force all the appealing -or coherent.
Granted it's not as bad as Assy McGee, Brak, Stroker and Hoop, SquidBillies or Tom goes to the Mayor, but except for being non, or anti heroes the whole thing seems like too much of an in-joke or something. I mean I can sort of understand the joke behind SpaceGhost C2C and the deconstructionism of Sealab2012.....
On the other hand, I'm down with all sorts of anime from FLCL and Paranoia Agent to Inuyasha, Venture Bros, Family Guy, American Dad, Invader Zim, Fairly Odds, etc, so it is not that I don't like the genre or anything...
-if we step back to the '90s the growth of the internet and increased usability of PC-based tools combined with the.com boom resulted in all sorts of people becoming involved with software development who did not come through the traditional Academia, DOD and Fortune 500 DP departments avenues to IT and therefore did not learn formal software project best practices -particularly the ideas of QA, testing, signing off on approved, agreed to and frozen specs, and Acceptance testing/signoff.
Obviously some of the methodologies have changed and streamlined since the rise of the internet and I'm not dissing everyone who came into the industry through non-traditional routes, as I did, but there are a lot of people in the biz who are unaware of or unwilling to follow organized software project practices (or their corporate culture does not support these practices ie. the customer is always right, even when they're wrong, clueless non-technical managers, etc).
I also realize that the formal requirements of a Javascript applet on a webpage is going to be considerably less than those of an Fortune 50's payroll application. But it seems that there are too many people who are used to the Javascript-level of project formality who continue to work at that same ad hoc level even when working on something much more complicated and risky like the aforementioned patroll app which requires formal specs, schedule, acceptance criteria etc.
The resultant jumble today is that two identical projects at 2 similar companies will go completely different directions and potentially have completely different outcomes based on things like the personal prefernces or knowledge of the architect, or the lack of an architect and the whim of the Software Lead or Project Manager. Then the QA and Test departments and everyone else down the line will also have their unique take on what is needful and what they consider to be a priority and what is correct functionality.
This underscores the thing that I am wrestling with at my current company: Best Practices
Every company should have and follow them and the different softwware subcategories should also have them, but as with most good ideas, they are mostly honored in the breach as it takes extra effort and consensus to implement them.
On the other hand there is so much diversity in software development these days that there is definitely no 'one size fits all' Best Practices solution either.
MS are inserting themselves in the stream because they want to be the pimp of all media. they will shutout non-microsoft obedient hardware vendors as well as stopping use of VMs, alternative OSs and legacy multimedia I/O such as spdif and composite video
Watch for iPod Vista compatibility 'problems' to start surfacing for the benefit of Zune. The other big thing this DRM play will also try to do is to reintroduce protected CDs or to make it more difficult to play/rip unencumbered CDs.
MS want the cartel-on-cartel action that the music and video industries also want so they can dominate the mOS/HW market the media cartels want to force the users to go the leased-conent model and eliminate private music ownership -it would almost be socialistic -in the Kremlin sort of way, but not like true Socialism:-(...
It's too bad that the music publishers hound dedicated fans and hobbyists and stop them from sharing these resources when they are unwilling or unable to offer well-formatted songs piecemiel in a similar way to how they could be obtained on the net. Most of enthusiasts are reverse engineering songs they like with their ears and not directly copying the copyrighted materials of the publisher.
OF course, when it gets to the web it is 'published' -and therein lies the rub....
AS someone who plays cover songs with my friends and likes to throw them a few new songs every week I write my own charts because even if I could get that one song individually from a sheet music publisher it would be written piano/vocal style on about 6 pages with 12 bars or so per page. If you wanted a song that was not 'published' as a $5 single, you had to buy the songbook for the whole album for as much or more than the CD cost. Or hope that you could get it on a 'best rock of the '90s'-type collection and hope there might be another decent song or two that you could use.
I need a one sheet lyric and chord with optional vocal melody fakebook-type representation. The music publishers only make those available through 'fakebooks' which are limited to the most popular songs of a given era -for about $50 per book of 200-500 songs. I can't buy 'fakebook' versions of say, the Pretenders or Radiohead's Greatest Hits -I either have to buy their long sheets and write them 'by hand' to a one page format -or grab the lyrics off the net and chart them by ear if I can't find a good tab. I am sure that there are many other musicians like me in this respect.
I also appreciated the painstaking degree of accuracy that some of the OLGA enthusists acheived in their transcriptions of complicated multi-guitar arrangements. On the other hand I remember absolutely wretched transcriptions of pop and rock songs in the early '70s in my sister's songbooks where the chords were completely off -like they had been made by some classical or jazz intern with no comprehension of Rock. Admittedly, most of the charts I have seen in the past 10 years have been a lot better.
Just as with music sales and licensing, music publishers have long dominated this area and would rather legislate than compete fairly in the new media and in the new information economy by offering people what they want and are willing to pay for in a format we can use.
"as of 2006, hundreds of millions of 32-bit systems are deployed, many in embedded systems, and it is far from certain they will all be replaced by 2038. "
Unix, POSIX date, time() epoch - January 1, 1970 to January 19, 2038
32-bit posix has to be altered and/or have new date handing libraries for those unlucky enough to still be on 32-bits 20 years from now or there will be problems. And there's still no guarantee that legacy apps will be able to handle the post 2038 dates even if the language does.
I Wonder if Linux could gain share in the embedded world if it were to offer a method to extend the operable date range to keep these embedded systems from doing Bad Things(tm) as that date approaches? Macs are not immune either -the mac epoch ends in 2040 and S/390's ends in 2042. Whoever setup these parameters in DOS did pretty well, as their current epoch does not end until 2108.
By then virtual quantum infinibit computers and robot hookers should be cheap and plentiful....I may not be around that long, but I expect to be involved in remediation work on these earlier epoch-ending events.
Their bean counters said they had to get this configuration support group's migration done in less than 9 months to save money.
So they got space in the new HP center at Chennai India and hired a bunch of folks straight out of University to support complex system configurations and a configuration modelling/ordering system that had taken me, an experienced IT person almost a year and a half to completely figure out. On top of that these folks had to work graveyard shift in an area not set up for 24/7 activity.
When I left, 3 months after I was supposed to originally, the folks in India said I had been like a God to them because I had so much detailed knowledge on every single HP product line and configuration.
The last I heard was that they had given up on India after less than a year (less time than it took me to learn the job in the first place) and were getting ready to repeat the same sorry mess in China this time -except this time they would not have native english speakers and would be dealing with a less communicative, more reserved culture.
so I would guess that you don't believe in ethical or socially resposible behavior by corporations?
I'm glad you're not my boss....
One of the things that myself and others admired about the old HP was its commitment to its customers and employees -Dave and Bill created a culture in which engineering innovation and customer service were paramount.
I realize that this may hearken to a bygone and more chivalrous era -and I say that it's too bad.
President Truman authorised the one time printing of a trillion dollar bill to help Europe. The man set to deliver the bill was America's richest, therefore must trustworthy, man -- Mr. Burns! However, the trillion dollar bill was never delivered.
Before that:
Agent: Let's take a walk Homer: that wasn't part of the deal! (tries to bite cyanide capsule)
As a former HP contractor who watched a once great company get dragged through the mud and watched hundreds of dedicated rank and file employees fall to the wayside on the deathmarch to the bottom line I can only say:
It's about time that these arrogant jerks were accountable to someone other than the wall street analysts and to something other than the allmighty dollar.
I was there from the time that Lew Platt's departure brought about the HP-Agilent split and Carly's reign of terror all the way through the Comapq HP merger and the Mark Hurd 'the beatings will continue until morale improves' era.
HP employees are still among the worlds most talented and dedicated, but it's getting harder when the best and brightest are forced in to early retirement or have to help in the offshoring of their own jobs -I had to do that, and though I did my best it was an absolute disaster. But since they are currently beating Dell at whatever cost management has little incentive to do things any differently.
although I agree that a production environment can help make a good test effort it is not always practical or feasible and I think the poster actually needs to hear about best practices, methodologies, tools etc rather than just being told to get a production environment.
Also, many unit and functional tests don't need a full blown production environment either -at least not until integration testing...
If the production environment consists of $1 million worth of HW and dedicated outbound feeds to banks and inbound feeds from a stock market for instance it is unlikely that it can be duplicated exactly because you would have to get the bank to set up a bunch of dummy financial transaction servers, pay for another feed from the market, buy a bunch more oracle licenses, etc
I worked on one deathmarch project where the production environment for an online Supply chain management solution consisted of 150 servers! Since they couldn't afford another 150 servers for the test environment they gave us 75 servers for front-end and middleware and had us connect to the backend of the production environment....
Sometimes you have to stub out or simulate external systems and it is important then to know how those systems interface with your SIT (system under test) and how you can properly simulate that interface and important interface events and messages.
If you don't have access to intelligent testers then you at least need to get feedback from the system users so that you can build business case scenarios from which you can derive test cases to ensure full functional coverage.
bah-dum (I can't believe no one came up with that one yet)
with the iPod so popular among youth -well everyone actually, it seems odd that they would be strongest amongst older users with the PCs.
However, as mentioned before price may have something to do with it.
I think that eventually they will sell some sort of docking station or base station for the iPhone that will include network and KVM connectivity and that's all the computer most folks will need.
the difference between win98-xp and Vista and beyond is that Vista and beyond will be regulated via mandatory upgrades which will hold your existing content hostage against ongoing upgrades to the curent MS windows while gradually breaking binary compatibility with older MS programs.
I can see this also being used to force 'updated' software on users who are unwilling to upgrade -to a newer version of WMP for instance. Even to the point of browser access to an IIS site.
and I can see this scenario playing out constantly as hobbysists and hackers alike start hacking the new generation of DRM enabled Vista, office, WMP etc.
as soon as someone posts an exploit to say -allow running VMs on a home version of vista microsoft or to bypass dosument security they can threaten to revoke licenses on compromised versions of the software to force an upgrade to an 'improved' version of the software.
although I can see the uses against data and device theft as other posters have pointed out -but You'll probably need to have Vista DataGuard(tm) version to be able to do this....if they would even allow users that much control over their own data.
Good thing this isn't anything to do with the Bush Administration -else they'd have retroactively classified all this stuff as 'Top Secret' and then charged the Wayback machine of Treason under the Patriot act....
and then the machine would find itself held without trial or charges in Gitmo until it turned to rust.
Sometimes you gotta laugh to keep from crying.....Hopefully you're laughing at this
I think shes dead -No I'm NOT! Mary Queen of Scots
on
iPods at War
·
· Score: 1
Although you may not have meant that Junior swore on his mother's grave literally, Barbara Bush is not dead yet -although even the Republicans may have wished she was after she made some insensitive comments during a tour of the Katrina-damaged areas.
And what happens when Libya or Korea, or even a non-axis of evil(tm) country such as China which does not respect IP or license restrictions takes this code and does whatever they want with it?
I'd like to see the EFF go after China or Korea -nothing against the EFF -this is just unenforceable except for Western copyright abiding countries and I doubt Livermore or LosAl need an open source clustering application.....
it seems more like a PR move -sort of like Berkely labelling itself as a nuclear-free zone -not too many subs or aircraft carriers tie up at the Berkely Marina.....
I always liked the Oracle click thru license where you had to swear that you were not an agent of Libya or anyone else on the Dept of Commerce's badguy list...
The OEM license rights you are speaking of are those of the OEM customer which limits that customer from taking their Gateway PC license and putting it on a homebuilt machine or giving the disc to a friend to install on their old Dell.
I don't want to get too philisophical, but what constitutes a machine from an OEM manaufacturer (my) standpoint?
I bought my OEM license with a HD and built a system with that HD. What happens when that drive dies? DO I not have the right to put a new hardrive in that system and reload windows?
Likewise, if that motherboard goes can I not put the hard drive into another system?
I believe that there is more right of transferability as an OEM than as an OEM customer from machine to machine -but not from customer to customer.
As far as I am concerned, when I have bought an OEM license as an OEM that license is good for one machine -old or new. Otherwise I would be buying a new license every time I decommissioned a machine -and I don't think I am going to get very good terms on a site license;-)
Slashdot Mirror
What this sort of thing ends up meaning in userland is that you get support calls from (understandably) nervous customers saying things like:
"when I tried to install your application upgrade Windows gave a warning saying that xxxx application was not certified and could cause Bad Things to happen to my computer"
This is even more prevalent now that users are aware of malware and trojans that may disguise themselves as useful or necessary programs. It is sometimes difficult to persuade users to install updates to the software that they have already paid you for when they have been cowed by the 'everything unknown by microsoft is a threat' meme that is being promoted!
Amongst the uninformed this tends to strengthen the thought that Microsoft is the only safe place to go for your sofware -and from what I can see of the tremendous online upsell effort on the vista startup windows this fits fine with Microsoft's eventual online 'subscription' model aspirations.
-I'm just sayin'
Especially when you would be shielding someone who had unlawfully obtained and then posted materials protected by copyright.
That would probably make you guilty of aiding and abetting or some such....
Bands have started to have this shit happen too -rough, often incomplete or crappy mixes are surfacing on the net. I believe something like this caused one of Beck's album to have a rush release to try to keep the inferior versions from gaining ascendancy and so as not to lose the inertia of the buzz of the initial product release.
Not that it's more defensible morally, but at least with final releases you are presenting the artist's fully realized vision instead of some rough sketch. Studio cuts vs Director's cuts of films would be the exception to this case.
I'm just sayin'
If you have ever taken the several HOURS it takes to read through a single, thin edition of the Economist (as opposed to the 45 minutes or so it takes to wade through the shallow waters of Newspeak(sic) or Time) you might realize that the Economist has some of the most even handed commentary and analysis of almost any news magazine out there.
The fact that they even look at other countries economic situations -even when they don't directly involve US or UK interests, or aren't the hotspot du jour separates them from the US rags whose focus is typically US isolationist.
I've been an avid reader for years (the captions alone are worth the subscription price) despite my left wing, liberal, libertarian background.
Unlike most business periodicals, which seem wholly reactionary, they seem to get the big picture about technology and world poitics and economy -and it is certainly not the IMF/WTO/Cato line despite what you seem to think.
Read about their takes on executive compensation and globalization and try to tell us that they are shills for capitalism.
-I'm just sayin'
and how long before Microsoft start insisting that peripheral and I/O card manufacturers require that 'Vista-certified' vendor products only function when attached to DRM'd driver modules by making them put DRM locks on their products? To protect from use in non DRM OSs? To protect content owners from piracy... To protect them from competition.....
This would certainly make life more difficult for Apple, Linux and others. It should raise the red flag of monopoly again though too.....
-I'm just sayin'
Dell's initial wins were due to the built-to-order model that let them reduce their supply chain and inventory costs.
GateWay and Dell were the first to pitch PCs to the general public this way.
No Bricks and mortar inventory costs helped too.
Once Compaq and Hp joined them in the 'race to the bottom' Dell started to lose that early-mover (and pricing)advantage. Notice that IBM bowed out of the PC market at about this time....PCs and to some extent servers have been pretty much commodotized at this point...
Outsourcing Support was probably the beginning of the shift in focus to the customer experience to the shareholder bottom line which has helped put Dell in their current doldrums.
All things being equal now that the supply chain advantage has been greatly lessened I would expect the balance of strength to lie with Apple and HP and others who still have robust R&D efforts to drive inventive new products while Dell struggles to squeeze the last few % points of efficiency and cost cutting from their model and can only ape the technological advances of others in the marketplace.
-I'm just sayin'
And I don't mean Alcohol, Tobacco and Humongous Firearms!
Maybe this is due to the generational gap or that it's too po-mo, but I don't find Aqua Teen Hunger Force all the appealing -or coherent.
Granted it's not as bad as Assy McGee, Brak, Stroker and Hoop, SquidBillies or Tom goes to the Mayor, but except for being non, or anti heroes the whole thing seems like too much of an in-joke or something. I mean I can sort of understand the joke behind SpaceGhost C2C and the deconstructionism of Sealab2012.....
On the other hand, I'm down with all sorts of anime from FLCL and Paranoia Agent to Inuyasha, Venture Bros, Family Guy, American Dad, Invader Zim, Fairly Odds, etc, so it is not that I don't like the genre or anything...
I'm just sayin'
Oh wait everybody does do it now.....
.com boom resulted in all sorts of people becoming involved with software development who did not come through the traditional Academia, DOD and Fortune 500 DP departments avenues to IT and therefore did not learn formal software project best practices -particularly the ideas of QA, testing, signing off on approved, agreed to and frozen specs, and Acceptance testing/signoff.
and that's part of the problem.
-if we step back to the '90s the growth of the internet and increased usability of PC-based tools combined with the
Obviously some of the methodologies have changed and streamlined since the rise of the internet and I'm not dissing everyone who came into the industry through non-traditional routes, as I did, but there are a lot of people in the biz who are unaware of or unwilling to follow organized software project practices (or their corporate culture does not support these practices ie. the customer is always right, even when they're wrong, clueless non-technical managers, etc).
I also realize that the formal requirements of a Javascript applet on a webpage is going to be considerably less than those of an Fortune 50's payroll application. But it seems that there are too many people who are used to the Javascript-level of project formality who continue to work at that same ad hoc level even when working on something much more complicated and risky like the aforementioned patroll app which requires formal specs, schedule, acceptance criteria etc.
The resultant jumble today is that two identical projects at 2 similar companies will go completely different directions and potentially have completely different outcomes based on things like the personal prefernces or knowledge of the architect, or the lack of an architect and the whim of the Software Lead or Project Manager. Then the QA and Test departments and everyone else down the line will also have their unique take on what is needful and what they consider to be a priority and what is correct functionality.
This underscores the thing that I am wrestling with at my current company: Best Practices
Every company should have and follow them and the different softwware subcategories should also have them, but as with most good ideas, they are mostly honored in the breach as it takes extra effort and consensus to implement them.
On the other hand there is so much diversity in software development these days that there is definitely no 'one size fits all' Best Practices solution either.
-I'm just sayin'
MS are inserting themselves in the stream because they want to be the pimp of all media. they will shutout non-microsoft obedient hardware vendors as well as stopping use of VMs, alternative OSs and legacy multimedia I/O such as spdif and composite video
:-(...
Watch for iPod Vista compatibility 'problems' to start surfacing for the benefit of Zune. The other big thing this DRM play will also try to do is to reintroduce protected CDs or to make it more difficult to play/rip unencumbered CDs.
MS want the cartel-on-cartel action that the music and video industries also want so they can dominate the mOS/HW market the media cartels want to force the users to go the leased-conent model and eliminate private music ownership -it would almost be socialistic -in the Kremlin sort of way, but not like true Socialism
Plus they need more leverage against iTunes/iPod
-I'm just sayin'
It's too bad that the music publishers hound dedicated fans and hobbyists and stop them from sharing these resources when they are unwilling or unable to offer well-formatted songs piecemiel in a similar way to how they could be obtained on the net. Most of enthusiasts are reverse engineering songs they like with their ears and not directly copying the copyrighted materials of the publisher.
OF course, when it gets to the web it is 'published' -and therein lies the rub....
AS someone who plays cover songs with my friends and likes to throw them a few new songs every week I write my own charts because even if I could get that one song individually from a sheet music publisher it would be written piano/vocal style on about 6 pages with 12 bars or so per page. If you wanted a song that was not 'published' as a $5 single, you had to buy the songbook for the whole album for as much or more than the CD cost. Or hope that you could get it on a 'best rock of the '90s'-type collection and hope there might be another decent song or two that you could use.
I need a one sheet lyric and chord with optional vocal melody fakebook-type representation. The music publishers only make those available through 'fakebooks' which are limited to the most popular songs of a given era -for about $50 per book of 200-500 songs. I can't buy 'fakebook' versions of say, the Pretenders or Radiohead's Greatest Hits -I either have to buy their long sheets and write them 'by hand' to a one page format -or grab the lyrics off the net and chart them by ear if I can't find a good tab. I am sure that there are many other musicians like me in this respect.
I also appreciated the painstaking degree of accuracy that some of the OLGA enthusists acheived in their transcriptions of complicated multi-guitar arrangements. On the other hand I remember absolutely wretched transcriptions of pop and rock songs in the early '70s in my sister's songbooks where the chords were completely off -like they had been made by some classical or jazz intern with no comprehension of Rock. Admittedly, most of the charts I have seen in the past 10 years have been a lot better.
Just as with music sales and licensing, music publishers have long dominated this area and would rather legislate than compete fairly in the new media and in the new information economy by offering people what they want and are willing to pay for in a format we can use.
-I'm just sayin'
Run for your lives!!! or at least hope that no one is using 30-year old systems for anything critical when the time comes -Right.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
"as of 2006, hundreds of millions of 32-bit systems are deployed, many in embedded systems, and it is far from certain they will all be replaced by 2038. "
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
Unix, POSIX date, time() epoch - January 1, 1970 to January 19, 2038
32-bit posix has to be altered and/or have new date handing libraries for those unlucky enough to still be on 32-bits 20 years from now or there will be problems. And there's still no guarantee that legacy apps will be able to handle the post 2038 dates even if the language does.
I Wonder if Linux could gain share in the embedded world if it were to offer a method to extend the operable date range to keep these embedded systems from doing Bad Things(tm) as that date approaches? Macs are not immune either -the mac epoch ends in 2040 and S/390's ends in 2042. Whoever setup these parameters in DOS did pretty well, as their current epoch does not end until 2108.
By then virtual quantum infinibit computers and robot hookers should be cheap and plentiful....I may not be around that long, but I expect to be involved in remediation work on these earlier epoch-ending events.
-I'm just sayin'
Well -I would be using 100% of my CPU if it wasn't for that Damn System Idle process that hogs the CPU!!!
I'm gonna git me a CPU doubler download -that should help....
-What's the speed of dork?
Not really, although that's a good joke
It was management's fault.
Their bean counters said they had to get this configuration support group's migration done in less than 9 months to save money.
So they got space in the new HP center at Chennai India and hired a bunch of folks straight out of University to support complex system configurations and a configuration modelling/ordering system that had taken me, an experienced IT person almost a year and a half to completely figure out. On top of that these folks had to work graveyard shift in an area not set up for 24/7 activity.
When I left, 3 months after I was supposed to originally, the folks in India said I had been like a God to them because I had so much detailed knowledge on every single HP product line and configuration.
The last I heard was that they had given up on India after less than a year (less time than it took me to learn the job in the first place) and were getting ready to repeat the same sorry mess in China this time -except this time they would not have native english speakers and would be dealing with a less communicative, more reserved culture.
-What's the speed of dark?
so I would guess that you don't believe in ethical or socially resposible behavior by corporations?
I'm glad you're not my boss....
One of the things that myself and others admired about the old HP was its commitment to its customers and employees -Dave and Bill created a culture in which engineering innovation and customer service were paramount.
I realize that this may hearken to a bygone and more chivalrous era -and I say that it's too bad.
-What's the speed of Dark?
obl simpsons quote:
(from the film the IRS agent makes homer watch)
President Truman authorised the one time printing of a trillion dollar
bill to help Europe. The man set to deliver the bill was America's richest,
therefore must trustworthy, man -- Mr. Burns! However, the trillion dollar
bill was never delivered.
Before that:
Agent: Let's take a walk
Homer: that wasn't part of the deal! (tries to bite cyanide capsule)
-What's the speed of Dark?
As a former HP contractor who watched a once great company get dragged through the mud and watched hundreds of dedicated rank and file employees fall to the wayside on the deathmarch to the bottom line I can only say:
It's about time that these arrogant jerks were accountable to someone other than the wall street analysts and to something other than the allmighty dollar.
I was there from the time that Lew Platt's departure brought about the HP-Agilent split and Carly's reign of terror all the way through the Comapq HP merger and the Mark Hurd 'the beatings will continue until morale improves' era.
HP employees are still among the worlds most talented and dedicated, but it's getting harder when the best and brightest are forced in to early retirement or have to help in the offshoring of their own jobs -I had to do that, and though I did my best it was an absolute disaster. But since they are currently beating Dell at whatever cost management has little incentive to do things any differently.
-What's the speed of dark?
although I agree that a production environment can help make a good test effort it is not always practical or feasible and I think the poster actually needs to hear about best practices, methodologies, tools etc rather than just being told to get a production environment.
Also, many unit and functional tests don't need a full blown production environment either -at least not until integration testing...
If the production environment consists of $1 million worth of HW and dedicated outbound feeds to banks and inbound feeds from a stock market for instance it is unlikely that it can be duplicated exactly because you would have to get the bank to set up a bunch of dummy financial transaction servers, pay for another feed from the market, buy a bunch more oracle licenses, etc
I worked on one deathmarch project where the production environment for an online Supply chain management solution consisted of 150 servers! Since they couldn't afford another 150 servers for the test environment they gave us 75 servers for front-end and middleware and had us connect to the backend of the production environment....
Sometimes you have to stub out or simulate external systems and it is important then to know how those systems interface with your SIT (system under test) and how you can properly simulate that interface and important interface events and messages.
If you don't have access to intelligent testers then you at least need to get feedback from the system users so that you can build business case scenarios from which you can derive test cases to ensure full functional coverage.
-What's the speed of dark?
just make sure they're Granny Smith!
bah-dum
(I can't believe no one came up with that one yet)
with the iPod so popular among youth -well everyone actually, it seems odd that they would be strongest amongst older users with the PCs.
However, as mentioned before price may have something to do with it.
I think that eventually they will sell some sort of docking station or base station for the iPhone that will include network and KVM connectivity and that's all the computer most folks will need.
-What's the speed of dark?
the difference between win98-xp and Vista and beyond is that Vista and beyond will be regulated via mandatory upgrades which will hold your existing content hostage against ongoing upgrades to the curent MS windows while gradually breaking binary compatibility with older MS programs.
Cheers,
PY
I can see this also being used to force 'updated' software on users who are unwilling to upgrade -to a newer version of WMP for instance. Even to the point of browser access to an IIS site.
and I can see this scenario playing out constantly as hobbysists and hackers alike start hacking the new generation of DRM enabled Vista, office, WMP etc.
as soon as someone posts an exploit to say -allow running VMs on a home version of vista microsoft or to bypass dosument security they can threaten to revoke licenses on compromised versions of the software to force an upgrade to an 'improved' version of the software.
although I can see the uses against data and device theft as other posters have pointed out -but You'll probably need to have Vista DataGuard(tm) version to be able to do this....if they would even allow users that much control over their own data.
What's the speed of Dark?
How come they get to telecommute when most of us can't? :-(
Guess they have more supportive management -and benefits! 17 virgin afterlife sure beats underwater options.
And before there were CDs we cut our coke on Cassette shells.....
Mind you, there was less room for error.
-What's the speed of dork?
Good thing this isn't anything to do with the Bush Administration -else they'd have retroactively classified all this stuff as 'Top Secret' and then charged the Wayback machine of Treason under the Patriot act ....
and then the machine would find itself held without trial or charges in Gitmo until it turned to rust.
Sometimes you gotta laugh to keep from crying.....Hopefully you're laughing at this
Although you may not have meant that Junior swore on his mother's grave literally, Barbara Bush is not dead yet -although even the Republicans may have wished she was after she made some insensitive comments during a tour of the Katrina-damaged areas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Bush
And what happens when Libya or Korea, or even a non-axis of evil(tm) country such as China which does not respect IP or license restrictions takes this code and does whatever they want with it?
I'd like to see the EFF go after China or Korea -nothing against the EFF -this is just unenforceable except for Western copyright abiding countries and I doubt Livermore or LosAl need an open source clustering application.....
it seems more like a PR move -sort of like Berkely labelling itself as a nuclear-free zone -not too many subs or aircraft carriers tie up at the Berkely Marina.....
I always liked the Oracle click thru license where you had to swear that you were not an agent of Libya or anyone else on the Dept of Commerce's badguy list...
-What's the speed of dark?
The OEM license rights you are speaking of are those of the OEM customer which limits that customer from taking their Gateway PC license and putting it on a homebuilt machine or giving the disc to a friend to install on their old Dell.
;-)
I don't want to get too philisophical, but what constitutes a machine from an OEM manaufacturer (my) standpoint?
I bought my OEM license with a HD and built a system with that HD. What happens when that drive dies? DO I not have the right to put a new hardrive in that system and reload windows?
Likewise, if that motherboard goes can I not put the hard drive into another system?
I believe that there is more right of transferability as an OEM than as an OEM customer from machine to machine -but not from customer to customer.
As far as I am concerned, when I have bought an OEM license as an OEM that license is good for one machine -old or new. Otherwise I would be buying a new license every time I decommissioned a machine -and I don't think I am going to get very good terms on a site license
-What's the speed of dark?