Actually, you can type out things like 1-800-BEST-BUY on a Blackberry. Just hold down the ALT key as you type each letter. The device will translate to the appropriate number for the phone call such as a 2 for B.
We live in economic exchange-based societies. While you may not value a business card that is handed to you in one of these exchanges, the other person may greatly value it. Even in Westernized Japan, the exchange of business cards is an important ritual and you would be seen as frivolous and irrelevant if you could not offer one. Personally, I like business cards because I tend to pause and write down some key facts about the person on the back of their card if I found them interesting. Another advantage of paper cards is they can exchanged quickly without as much fumbling as is often involved with electronic devices. Let's be honest, how many times have we spent five minutes doing something with an electronic device that we could have done in less than a minute using other tools at hand? Every tool has some associated overhead and while electronics are generally best for handling information, they have their limitations too.
The bottom line is that if you are trying to provide yourself with every edge to beat the competition, it would be stupid to stop handing out professional-looking, calling cards. Besides, the vast majority of people who dislike business cards and will shun you for handing them around are probably too young to have much money or power. In another 20 years, you may need to be a lot more careful about handing out paper cards. Obviously, it would be best to just ask someone if they prefer a quick email with a vcard or a paper card or both. Personally, I would like both.
I was first certified on MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1 and most recently on Windows Server 2XXX so I have been watching "Little Blue" for about 20 years now. (I ran Windows 1.0 on my 8088.) As Robert Metcalfe (3Com founder) recommended in the late '90s during the Department of Justice monopoly case against Microsoft, Bill Gates should have been fired, just as he and so many other company founders had been when their companies passed the early stages where the "Cowboy Entrepreneur" was the ideal CEO. Steve Ballmer was Gates' handpicked successor and has proven just as awful as most such second acts prove to be when the "Great Man" steps aside. Other than Steve Jobs, how many tech company founders stayed on as CEO "forever" leading their firms to greater and greater triumphs? Larry Ellison at Oracle? Rod Canion at Compaq? Scott McNealy? While Bill Gates was visionary about the future in many very accurate ways (smaller devices, triumph of the tablet, ubiquitous computing, intuitive familiar interfaces aka "Windows Everywhere"), he and Ballmer have been utterly incapable of making Microsoft a viable part of that future.
First, the few accomplishments during the long twilight of MSFT: 1 - share of the server market has risen from a few percent to over half. 2 - Xbox and a major share of the enormous gaming market. 3 - Hanging onto the desktop platform and office suite crowns/cash cows.
Now, the long list of failures, many spectacular, which have left Microsoft a profligate spectator while tech has conquered the world using much of the framework Microsoft contributed to so much: 1 - Miniscule share of the ubiquitous computing market: Windows Phone, tablet, and even netbook pieces are abysmally small. 2 - Windows Millenium Edition debuted in 2000 and was a dinosaur that was DOA. Many many heads should have rolled when that was unconscionably foisted on consumers and MSFT shareholders. It was another bloated, pretty version of a product that was perfect for 1998 and out of its league well before 2002. 3 - Windows Vista. Extreme bloat, countless useless, unwanted features, utter unsuitability for corporate use/support; many firms skipped straight from XP to Windows 7 which should have been Vista all along - Win 7 is basically the good version of Vista and even it is not a good tablet or netbook OS, missing massive parts of the market. 4 - MSN - a horror show and black hole for shareholder funds. 5 - Because It's Not Google (BING) - a poor shadow of Google. At least it finally does a decent job of finding Microsoft TechNet articles, something I relied on Google to handle for nearly 10 years. 6 - Live.com - you may not have heard of this, but it is Microsoft's free offering in cloud computing. Naturally it assumes your clients will be Internet Explorer which means Microsoft OS-based platforms, and those in turn are limited to PC's and laptops. Tablet and smartphone users (iPhone, Android, Symbian) - better luck next time; guess you will turn to an alternative. 7 - Microsoft.com - after about the third complete redesign I gave up on finding anything there without Google. Like I said, BING finally has some handle on the site, but it was mostly chaos for about 10 years when the Internet was getting rather important. 8 - The.NET architecture - yet again, Microsoft arrogance assumes its platform to be omnipresent and refuses to play well with others while "others" continue to grow at geometric rates while desktops and laptops remain stagnant in the saturated markets of developed countries. I could go on and on.
Seriously, for the defenders of a company that's biggest accomplishment of the last 10 years was milking two cash cows and finally sharing a bit of the milk with long-suffering investors, you need your investing heads examined. Whether or not MSFT is brilliantly run, it is part of a universe of potential investments and has had remarkably little to offer while many of its competitors have enjoyed far greater success: AAPL, GOOG, ORCL, IBM, and so on. I used to lau
I think you are right about the navel-gazing tendencies (bellybuttons, not warships). I'm working in the academic discipline of Management Information Systems and many academics don't quite know what to make of it. They ask, "Is it really the same as the discipline of Management? What is meant by Information?" While they go on mulling over these issues, our graduates get jobs as programmers, analysts, and consultants while the Management majors scratch for whatever jobs they can find. Computer skillz seem to be in demand while knowledge of management theories isn't so much. Buy hey, at least their discipline is completely respected in academic circles. I know we aren't as crazy smart as the demi-gods of Computer Science, but we seem to do okay in business without four semesters of calculus and assorted matrix algebra madness. Different strokes for different folks. Show some heart, give a philosopher a piece of pizza so he can spin out a few more dumb questions to people with work that needs to get done even if they aren't a million percent sure why they are doing it.
Astute as always! melikamp, my old friend, so nice to hear from you! How goes the reconnaissance? Any word from Zaphod? Are we taking this place over or will it be obliterated for a new space travel thoroughfare?
Funny, rdwulfe, I have had my eye on you in your Florida digs for four years now. Soon you should be large enough to feed myself and the 11,216 spawn currently growing in the crest atop my hyper-developed cranium. Of course, you alone will not be enough nutrition to sustain all of us for more than 6 Mercurian days.
I am a highly evolved alien living among the humans. While I will admit to a mild addiction to Slashdot and Drudgereport (some days these are very similar), I don't play computer games or watch television. I literally have no time for either as I am so busy watching the humans and pondering all the different recipes that would make them tasty. Not to mention that as an alien, I haven't figured out how to make much money and can't afford cable or satellite TV. I tried "bunny ears" for a while, but they quit working last Spring and I haven't missed the TV much. When I did watch it, I just kept seeing fellow aliens (Nadya Suleman, Marilyn Manson, Lady Gaga, Sheyla Hershey, et al.) entertaining the humans.
This theory that aliens are highly evolved and addicted to electronic entertainment is backwards because we know better than to end up sitting in Plato's Cave staring at flickering images when there is a marvelous world waiting to be viewed and humans, fattened in caves while watching flickering images, waiting to be devoured.
I guess so. Personally, I shove them away when that tongue first comes out, so they never get to my ears, but I have seen it happen to little children. If your theory is correct, then I would think that dogs would go after any bare skin they could get to given the olfactory nature of their mindset. I just found it interesting that the claims adjuster had handled plenty of similar situations before. A quick search got me this: The Dog Ate My Hearing Aids and a quote from this piece:
"I was at the audiologists a week after the distressing incident when I got an answer to the question that had been bugging me. Why had he chosen my bionic aids for a doggy treat?
"Feedback," said my audiologist.
"I'm sorry?" I replied.
"You probably didn't turn them off properly, so they whistled and the dog got attracted to them."
When Grandpa left his hearing aid (only 1 of his 2) on the window sill in our spare bedroom, our dog chewed it up. Our USAA homeowners insurance policy covered the entire cost of the replacement hearing aid. When I spoke with the claims representative at USAA, they said this happens all the time as dogs are drawn to the high pitched sounds emitted by hearing aids. Grandpa was disappointed as the new hearing aid was much better than the remaining old one the dog didn't chew up. I have had USAA for 22 years now and they have been great in every claim we have had. Note that membership is now open to ALL veterans of the US military whereas until recently it was only senior soldiers and officers and their immediate descendants. KEEP OUT OF REACH OF DOG.
Kuwait was "slant drilling" into an Iraqi oilfield.
This justified a complete takeover of the country? FYI, I read the Iraqi military plans for that invasion a few months after it went down (August 1990). D+2 was supposed to have the Iraqi Army in Kuwait City and D+6 was to have the Iraqi Army in the Saudi Arabian port city of Dharhan. How exactly does taking over the Saudi oilfields and major export infrastructure along the Persian Gulf fit with Kuwait's slant drilling? The reason Hussein stopped was the prompt U.S. intervention with USAF F-15's, the insertion of the XVIII Airborne Corps, and the fact that Bush the Elder was taken seriously by Saddam after his recent takedown of the junta in Panama. Saddam Hussein badly miscalculated as did April Glaser, the U.S. diplomat to Iraq at the time, and our policymakers not taking Hussein seriously enough when the NSA satellites recorded the Iraqi tank divisions' pre-invasion dispositions near the Kuwait border. FWIW, the Saudi Army was a bad joke and it was ONLY the U.S. intervention that kept Saddam from grabbing control of a huge percentage of the Mideast Oil exports. He had just beaten Iran, he did get Kuwait, and if he had occupied the entire South/West half of the Persian Gulf, even the U.S. Navy probably could not get oil tankers through to Iran if they wanted to. George H. W. Bush had no choice but to intervene.
I guess we can agree to disagree about W's "free pass". The media dutifully covered Ari Fleischer and the Pentagon's official statements, but I always seemed to hear them promptly rebutted by the news anchors with "Where are the WMD's? Where are the Thomas Jefferson/Founding Fathers of Iraq?" and so on. In contrast, the current operations in Afghanistan seem to just be "business as usual" even though this campaign is coming from a guy who sounded awfully interested in not doing much more fighting in the Bush Wars. If you don't believe the media is biased, please explain to me why I watched CNN in horror one morning in the weeks soon after McCain tapped Palin as his VP candidate. Palin (who is an idiot I won't be voting for) had just had her disastrous interview in which she said she "could see Russia from her front porch." CNN's morning show (I won't bother with adding the word "news" to that description) prominently featured a "story" about a p0rn0 clip featuring a Palin lookalike stripping as two guys dressed as Russian soldiers prepared for the hand-to-gland combat soon to follow. CNN even had to blur out the nudity of the Palin lookalike. Imagine if they had done something like that with an Obama lookalike. Seriously, try to imagine it. You don't think there is such p0rn out there? You haven't heard a peep about it in the mainstream media and certainly not on CNN's morning show. As "blackgoldalchemist", a Hillary Clinton supporter in 2008 should know, the media completely went for "bros before ho's" in the last presidential election. Palin combined the wrong sex with the wrong viewpoint as far as the mainstream media, (plus she is an idiot) and they were unconscionable in excoriating her. I view her more as Dan Quayle in a skirt, cute, bumbling, and a sop to the social conservatives of the Right.
I consider myself an extremely well-educated part of the actual conserve-ative wing of the GOP. We are known as "Crunchy Cons" (see book of same name by Rod Dreher who has a Crunchy Con blog as well). We believe in conserving all that is worthy and durable which includes the environment, religious faith, the family, beautiful art and architecture, and the Constitution with its emphasis on limited government and fundamental rights for citizens. This is obviously not without its contradictions, like any other viewpoint, but we certainly shouldn't be mistaken for Rush Limbaugh's "dittoheads". Probably the all-time Crunchy Con President was Teddy Roosevelt.
I grasp that rubber was in short supply as it had to be imported, like silk, which was also in short supply. I would think that less burning of fuel would mean more of it would be available for military use. Don't forget the millions of troops that never left CONUS but were burning plenty of AVGAS and vehicle fuels with all the training that went on during the war. Chicory in coffee fell out of favor because during the war it had to be brought up from South America and they wanted to use that space on the ships for other supplies that were more strategic. When peacetime returned, American consumers were accustomed to coffee without chicory and it now hangs on only in Louisiana.
I agreed with much of this post but "Bush got a free pass from the media"??? Really? The media gave me the distinct impressions that: 1) We all needed to know Bush was busted for drunk driving about 20 years before the 2000 election and I had to hear this the Saturday before Election Tuesday. 2) Gore had won the state of Florida even though the polls were open in the Panhandle counties for another hour costing W about 10,000 net votes in that strongly conservative part of the state. 3) Fahrenheit 9/11 was a documentary when it was actually full of outright lies and distortions. (I watched that drivel and recognized plenty of the lies.) 4) Dick Cheney was evil incarnate (entirely possible) but they didn't bother to mention that HE MOPPED THE FLOOR with John Edwards in the lone VP debate of 2004 5) Iraq War II was the Vietnam War all over again - on Day 2 of the initial invasion. (That reality came much later as it turns out. The media was just very premature.) 6) Ken Lay, the CEO of Enron was best buddies with W. What ever happened to that one? 7) Newsweek still didn't think Bush was the legitimate president the weekend preceding the 9/11 attack according to their cover story. (Look it up.) 8) Any rational person took Cindy Sheehan seriously. 9) The anti-war movement in America was really against war. The mainstream media in no way, shape, or form gave W a "free pass". W wasn't just the Big Oil president or the Wall Street president, he would seep with anything for enough campaign contributions, making him the perfect politician for our times.
It now turns out that the "anti-war" movement was really just against Bush. Notice the absence of mass protests as Obama continues Bush's policies, this time with a "surge" in Afghanistan, but the so-called anti-war movement now consists of occasional blog posts as opposed to marches through NYC. When Bush wanted a surge in Iraq, he had to battle with Congress, the media, and "anti-war" protests for months, giving Al Qaeda and Company plenty of time to prepare. Don't tell me with a straight face that the media gave George W. Bush a "free pass" as that is absurd. In contrast, the mainstream media did almost everything conceivably within its power to deliver the White House to Obama in '08 and the Republicans had it coming after the débâcle that was Bush II. How many Time Magazine covers has Obama had since he first announced his candidacy for president in 2005? Hardly anyone batted an eye as Obama sent his surge into Afghanistan. Maybe he could go ahead and annex Haiti while he is at it since the Haitians would be better off and the media and "anti-war" movement wouldn't cause him any trouble.
I'm sick to death of our hypocritical politicians, Democrat and Republican alike. Like the lawyers they truly are, they can take either side of any argument and push it without a twinge of conscience or consistency. See the amazing flip-flops of both sides depending on whether they were in the majority or minority. Specifically: attitude towards government spending (Pelosi was all about fiscal prudence a few years ago/the GOP were spendthrifts at that time - now it has reversed), attitude about overriding Senate filibusters, attitude about a larger government role in healthcare (Medicare prescription drug benefits were passed in the W years), and so on. It's sickening and their cynicism has made cynics of us all. They will reap a terrible harvest from the ill seeds they have sown. Look for the biggest "throw the bums out" election results in American history this November. This is a golden opportunity to pass term limits for Congress as their favorable poll number is now a mere 11 percent.
The points here were: 1) The frog would use the wings to cushion his landing. 2) My neighbor hasn't shown me a cold fusion reactor yet. Count me among those people hoping for cold fusion, solar power, hydrogen technologies, and so on to show enough progress to start moving us past petroleum.
"as soon as they can get these to market, solar could be very viable and cheap to produce." And if a frog had wings his ass wouldn't bump the ground when he hops.
I appreciate Slashdot acting like an old Popular Mechanics here, but I wouldn't get too excited just yet. As somebody pointed out in another forum, when you compare ethanol with gasoline in terms of efficiency, if all we had was ethanol primarily from "corn" (U.S. term, UK term is "maize") and then someone invented gasoline, we would be raving about the improvement in efficiency and economy. IOW, I will believe cheap, efficient solar power when I see it on the neighbor's roof. Until then, this is one more expensive quest for a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. In the meantime, we could be practicing more energy efficiency.
FWIW, I knew W was full of crap with that whole "hydrogen economy" nonsense back around 2005. That was an absurd sop to deflect a little criticism that he was as much a tool of Big Oil as his Old Man. Make note that I served in Iraq during Operation Desert Storm and when it was over, George H.W. Bush was sitting on a 91 percent approval rating based on a war we had to fight to maintain a steady supply of petroleum for the Western Powers and Japan. From the desert, I wrote my Senators and lobbied them to get a bill going to get us to start weaning off Mideast Oil. That S.O.B. Bush didn't raise a finger, nor did our Congress and eventually Western wealth transfer begat Osama Bin Laden, 9/11, Iraq War II, and Afghanistan. Wouldn't you think a 91 percent approval rating might have been enough political capital to change things a little? It may even have made Bush the Elder seem like the President of the U.S.A. instead of President of the New World Order since he rightfully earned a reputation for being allergic to domestic policy. His detachment had a lot to do with getting booted in '92. A review of the stock market back in '90 - '91 reveals that Big Oil shot up and helped a lot of folks in that business recover from the very hard times they went through in the late '80's. Though I was a conservative and a combat veteran, I campaigned for Bill Clinton in '92 as I was so disgusted with Bush the Elder. Still am. God save us from another Bush.
Most of us know in our heart of hearts that our troops are in Iraq and Afghanistan because of the continued grip the Mideast has on Western economies. In World War II, the U.S. national speed limit was 35 mph and gasoline was rationed with coupons. This was done to make sure the military had plenty of fuel. If some shared sacrifice was called for now, I think most Americans would grumble, but go along with it for the sake of untangling from the Iraq and Afghan Wars. How about bringing back the 55 mph speed limit of the '70's and '80's? What about a tax based on the weight of a vehicle? If we cut back on petroleum use, we help our independence and the environment at the same time. Now that's what I call "conserve-atism".
If you want to see what needs to be done about our dependence on petroleum, just look for the occasional Charles Krauthammer piece on it. He makes the same recommendations about every 5 years, the centerpiece of which is a flexible tax on gasoline that seeks to wean us off cheap oil while keeping the price of gasoline fairly steady.
First off, kudos to ComputerWorld for this shocking newsflash "New Windows Operating System is Bloated and Disappoints Users". Is it 1995 again when I foolishly believed Microsoft and loaded Windows95 on my happy Windows 3.1 computer only to discover the 4MB minimum RAM requirement left my computer a useless lump of plastic with an endlessly spinning hard drive? Four more MB of memory for $130 from a shady computer dealer finally slowed the paging down. I have seen this cycle repeated 6 more times since then. Go ahead and set up the fill-in-the-blank story for Windows 7.1, 8, and so on.
Here is how to get a valid test together:
1. Figure out the testing objective. Sounds like this guy should build a Windows 7 and a Windows XP box with identical hardware side-by-side.
2. Install the same applications on both machines and run the same workloads on them.
3. Measure the performance using the only benchmark users care about, waiting times for things to happen. One thing that was unclear from this article (which I actually read, must be new here) was the level of memory paging that was going on and especially the feedback from the users. The numbers he talked about are pretty much of no interest to end users, just guys in the I.T. shop.
4. Call ComputerWorld with the results, but only if they make Windows 7 look terrible...
BasKet - OSS. I am a PhD student and asked about this very thing of some fellow Slashdotters and they recommended BasKet, a product similar to Microsoft's OneNote. I dearly love Foxit as my PDF reader/annotator, though Okular is quite good as well when I am fiddling with my Ubuntu box. Both are free products (as in beer). As I am stuck on a Vista computer for work/research, I use OneNote, but not as fanatically as some of my associates. Incredibly, the installation of EndNote on my PC trashed my MS Word 2007, so I have had to switch over to OpenOffice's word processor with excellent results so far. Sooner or later I will get around to setting up Windows 7 which hopefully can survive EndNote. I'm really liking the MediaWiki idea and some sort of OSS solution for doing bibliographies. I haven't really had to "share" much of my work yet, but I suppose that is coming later. On a related note, I'm a big fan of lifehacker.com and autohotkey.com using the AutoCorrect file for Autohotkey to substitute a lot of tedious typing for me. I type a few letters of a word IN ANY APPLICATION and autohotkey then replaces those few letters with yet another five dollar word: quantitative, qualitative, research, management, university, student, difference, relationship, and so on are on my self-generated list. Loads of other cool stuff can be done with autohotkey as well.
We will not suffer through this oppression by King Roger! To the barricades, mes amis! Le fleur de lis is the symbol of Le Ancien Regime, so on to New Orleans where we will show them who is boss with our red cockades. We shall erect le guillotine and make clear who will control the symbols of Le France!
I find it a bit weird, but I have known some people who heard TPM was so bad they just refused to see Episodes I, II, II perhaps as a way to avoid spoiling their image of Star Wars.
Personally, I saw Star Wars as an 11 year old and was pretty much knocked to the floor. Episode V was great, but Episode VI disappointed. TPM was so abysmal it took about 4 years before I could muster the stomach to see it again. I still can't believe they cast Jake Lloyd over Haley Joel Osmont who was spectacular in "The Sixth Sense" and "AI". Things were looking up a bit with Episode II, but I kept my expectations at immediate post-TPM levels before seeing Episode III. Honestly, I think Episode III is my favorite now. The FX are incredible and to finally close the loop to Annakin's descent was very very satisfying. Ian McDiarimid's performance was mesmerizing.
If you've never seen it, find the short video clip "Lucas in Love" for some good laughs. Like "Shakespeare in Love", it is intended to show where the Big Ideas came from. When do we get Episodes VII, VIII, and IX, Mr. Lucas? Can you please let someone else direct them?
I am a full-time writer and recently obtained an IBM Model M keyboard (behold! the buckling springs) that works like a champ. The great thing with the model m is you don't have to push the key very hard to make sure you have typed a letter; when it clicks, you have rendered a letter unto the monitor, no need to look. Unfortunately, it types too loudly for my three office mates, so I have to keep it at home. What would they think if I insisted on using an IBM Selectric typewriter? The cheap Compaq keyboard that came with my home PC has a sleep button that my toddler kept pushing much to my dismay. Now the Model M and Baby Smash! keeps her occupied and the Model M should survive better than the Compaq keyboard. When I caught her "typing" by hammering the mouse on the keyboard I had some doubts, but the springs keep buckling. My other writing obsessions are the Dvorak keyboard layout (almost all I use now) and Pilot Pens G2 -5 with Extra Fine point. I love the insane precision you can employ with this G2 pen and the Extra Fine point. Now I can cram an unreal amount of readable text into the occasional tight spot when taking notes.
I agree the PC is still a pretty good Swiss Army knife. I just have to comment that on my Vista-running HP DV6000, I find Windows Media Player to be as stable as MS Access 2.0 was on Windows 3.11, which is to say, not at all. After enough reboots, I gave up and switched completely to iTunes. You just have to be sure to set it to rip in MP3 format or you get a bunch of DRM-impinged AAC's. And I am way too busy to sort out some workaround for that DRM, so don't bother if it's going to take more than 5 minutes. It's not like I get to listen to the music all that often anyway.
Thanks to some poor choices in my younger days, I have become a full-blown Microserf herding along 250 Windoze servers, half of them in remote locations. If I had it to do all over again, I would have taken the red pill. This may offend the *nix snobs here, but if MS gets really serious about MSH (the way I keep seeing it when running PowerShell), it will be awesome. I haven't seen anybody here mention that it is built-in with Exchange 2007 and when you run through an E2K7 wizard, the last step is the display of the MSH script that will execute once you click the Finish button. It's also just waiting for you to copy and paste that script before clicking the Finish button, so you can expand it and reuse it later.
My boss is such a Windoze junkie, he pooh-poohs my scripting efforts at every turn. We often spend hours and hours doing repetitive crap in the GUI's because "we don't have time to work out a script now!". I have avoided getting really deep into cmd.exe and VBscript approaches ever since I first read about Monad during the betas as that crap should be passing away. I've been bursting at the seams for some good books to come out.
Beware a first effort from MS. If they get serious, the third version will be quite good. In the meantime, a wise sage told me to expect third party vendors to jump on this bandwagon and cook up gobs of stuff to leverage the PowerShelll to save Win Sysadmins keyboard time with canned scripts. That would leave me sucking garbage in the MS Matrix with the rest of the Duracells, but fortunately my boss won't spend any money on decent tools, so I will get to hack out the scripts by hand and really learn MSH. Awesome.
If you're a Win Sysadmin reading this, be sure to check out http://www.sysinternals.com/Sysinternals and download the Misc utilities package, especially pstools.exe I use them all the time like a telnet session (via RPC) into remote PC's to clear up networking problems on them. netsh.exe then allows me to remove freakin' static WINS and DNS entries in TCP/IP properties, all without disturbing the user. It doesn't take long to learn and it saves gobs of time.
Now I need to get back to my Linux lessons so I can use some discrete Linux servers on our edge networks, then they can start appearing closer and closer to The Core.
I am 40 years old and have been on both sides of the desk. I went from being a Lone Ranger three time zones from the HQ to being up to my eyeballs in the HQ. I'm not finding communication much better here than it was when I was way, way out. The biggest problem is we only have slow, formal communication channels that come dragging along with them rank and privilege implications that stifle discussion of the things that matter. Additionally, while the managers have meeting after meeting each week, not much of that info is percolated to the lower levels. Almost nothing is going up the other way. I am fairly sure that almost none of the IT managers have ANY formal management training. They just don't know much better. They are all extremely technically knowledgeable, but totally unaware of something Tom Peters quoted in the '80's. "Once you are promoted to management, you don't work anymore. Your job is helping others get the work done." Call me elitist, but I spent 8 years as an Army officer and completed an MBA. I've had tons of management training and think this could be a big breath of fresh air for the department. Army leadership and operations has often been summed up as "Move, Shoot, Communicate". Many of those principles apply here as well. (Let the jokes begin...) I can tell they are grooming me for management here as I meet the "techie" smell test and am an avid communicator too. I'm just hoping I will be allowed to roll out some innovations like "Talking and Listening"(TM).
As for "undermining my boss", I haven't posted anything of the sort. My boss did not forbid me from taking direct calls from our customers, he just doens't think it's wise. FWIW, he also is really bad about not keeping his Blackberry with him away from the office. If he leaves at 5pm, you can pretty much forget reaching him now that he no longer takes call. I heartily disagree with the style of management here, but I'm not actively opposing it. I'm hoping to reform from within. Wish me luck.
As a young buck, fresh from my MBA program, I shot off my mouth and got escorted out for my trouble. This is Round Two.
My boss and I are a severe contrast as far as the "social networks" part of this article goes. We are both SysAdmins, but he avoids everyone outside IT while I intentionally network all over the place. Naturally, I think my way is better and now there is a study that confirms it!
Seriously, every job I have had has had appallingly poor communications. As a result, I always end up figuring out how to get plugged into the grapevine. If I didn't, I would always be a day late and a dollar short. His logic in avoiding people is that he doesn't like getting called directly when something is broken, as he believes most of the "crises" are minor. I agree with him that we want people to use proper channels (Level 1 support then Level 2 and so on), but very few of them violate protocol more than once in a great while. Frankly, I have found that if they are violating protocol, it's urgent enough that I am glad they are calling me directly. If they fell through the cracks due to an improperly submitted support ticket, things would get really ugly. Guess what, when things are already ugly out there, tickets tend to get submitted improperly.
"When I'm the Boss"(TM) I want to deliberately set up "irregular" communication channels so the imporatnt things are addressed. How about an anonymous suggestion box? What about using an anonymous brainstorming session like I saw at the Thunderbird School of Business back in 1993? Heck, why not have all hands meetings once or twice each year, more frequently at the department level?
Speaking of communication, it is a drag on productivity to the extent that you have to formally track so much of what you are doing. It is a necessary evil, to some extent. At the same time, when I'm trying to figure out if a server is a chronic pain, it helps if there is a trail of tickets to be found naming said dog.
Back to being something of a Social Butterfly at work. Last week, I got invited to an informal luncheon that included the Big Dogs of the corporation. That face time probably didn't hurt me none.
In my view, the reason there is now a God-shaped hole in the European person is the two world wars fought there. Something about the deaths of tens of millions happening twice in the span of 30 years might make any group question its belief in a loving, protective God. It doesn't help when the churches during those wars have stepped in and declared that God is on one side (or the other's).
As for me personally, the rapid advance of technology has had zero impact on my belief in God. Since I have never been one of these "Young Earth Creationists" (Earth is about 6,000 years, old according to them), science has not displaced any of my religous views.
As for all those people who view themselves as too intelligent and knowledgeable to believe in God, I will attempt to quote from C.S. Lewis book Mere Chrisitanity. A very smart acquaintance of Mr. Lewis asked him, "How can you be so smart and still believe in God?" Mr. Lewis replied, "How can YOU be so smart and NOT believe in God?" Do all the smart people out there really think that science has all the answers, or ever will? Do they really think we will end up mastering all that we survey as depicted in Gene Roddenberry's Utopian future? It would sure be nice, but my faith in Man's capacity for such wonders has been severely diminished by centuries of butchery and waste. Only fifteen years ago, the USA and USSR were still poised on the brink of annihilating the human race. Why do so many still still subscribe to the religion of the perfectability of Man? It is not right for either the believers in God or the believers in Man to take up arms against one another. The true believers should let the chips fall where they may, similar to the tests Moses was subjected to by the Egyptian priests.
your underlying product is forged in the white-hot fires of online altruism
Redhat is competing with Sun, IBM, Microsoft, Suse (Novell) and dozens of other firms in the OS market and you're describing its big challenge as surviving the marketplace for altruism? I don't think Linus cooked up GNU/Linux just so it could be run on the machines of geeks for the benefit of other geeks. He must have known that when he tossed that source code out onto the Internet that there was no telling where it would end up. Redhat's focus must be the blue-white fires of the business computing marketplace or it will be as passe as the "Nifty Fifty" of the 1970's. Where are they now? Ever check out the list of the Dow Jones Industrial Average components in 1960 versus now? Today's Microsoft is tomorrow's Litton Industries or Penn Central Railroad. Compete or die.
If you want to look deep into the future for Microsoft, this site tells all.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, you can type out things like 1-800-BEST-BUY on a Blackberry. Just hold down the ALT key as you type each letter. The device will translate to the appropriate number for the phone call such as a 2 for B.
http://www.berryreview.com/2008/02/20/faq-how-to-dial-phone-numbers-with-letters/
We live in economic exchange-based societies. While you may not value a business card that is handed to you in one of these exchanges, the other person may greatly value it. Even in Westernized Japan, the exchange of business cards is an important ritual and you would be seen as frivolous and irrelevant if you could not offer one. Personally, I like business cards because I tend to pause and write down some key facts about the person on the back of their card if I found them interesting. Another advantage of paper cards is they can exchanged quickly without as much fumbling as is often involved with electronic devices. Let's be honest, how many times have we spent five minutes doing something with an electronic device that we could have done in less than a minute using other tools at hand? Every tool has some associated overhead and while electronics are generally best for handling information, they have their limitations too.
The bottom line is that if you are trying to provide yourself with every edge to beat the competition, it would be stupid to stop handing out professional-looking, calling cards. Besides, the vast majority of people who dislike business cards and will shun you for handing them around are probably too young to have much money or power. In another 20 years, you may need to be a lot more careful about handing out paper cards. Obviously, it would be best to just ask someone if they prefer a quick email with a vcard or a paper card or both. Personally, I would like both.
I was first certified on MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1 and most recently on Windows Server 2XXX so I have been watching "Little Blue" for about 20 years now. (I ran Windows 1.0 on my 8088.) As Robert Metcalfe (3Com founder) recommended in the late '90s during the Department of Justice monopoly case against Microsoft, Bill Gates should have been fired, just as he and so many other company founders had been when their companies passed the early stages where the "Cowboy Entrepreneur" was the ideal CEO. Steve Ballmer was Gates' handpicked successor and has proven just as awful as most such second acts prove to be when the "Great Man" steps aside. Other than Steve Jobs, how many tech company founders stayed on as CEO "forever" leading their firms to greater and greater triumphs? Larry Ellison at Oracle? Rod Canion at Compaq? Scott McNealy? While Bill Gates was visionary about the future in many very accurate ways (smaller devices, triumph of the tablet, ubiquitous computing, intuitive familiar interfaces aka "Windows Everywhere"), he and Ballmer have been utterly incapable of making Microsoft a viable part of that future.
First, the few accomplishments during the long twilight of MSFT: 1 - share of the server market has risen from a few percent to over half. 2 - Xbox and a major share of the enormous gaming market. 3 - Hanging onto the desktop platform and office suite crowns/cash cows.
Now, the long list of failures, many spectacular, which have left Microsoft a profligate spectator while tech has conquered the world using much of the framework Microsoft contributed to so much: 1 - Miniscule share of the ubiquitous computing market: Windows Phone, tablet, and even netbook pieces are abysmally small. 2 - Windows Millenium Edition debuted in 2000 and was a dinosaur that was DOA. Many many heads should have rolled when that was unconscionably foisted on consumers and MSFT shareholders. It was another bloated, pretty version of a product that was perfect for 1998 and out of its league well before 2002. 3 - Windows Vista. Extreme bloat, countless useless, unwanted features, utter unsuitability for corporate use/support; many firms skipped straight from XP to Windows 7 which should have been Vista all along - Win 7 is basically the good version of Vista and even it is not a good tablet or netbook OS, missing massive parts of the market. 4 - MSN - a horror show and black hole for shareholder funds. 5 - Because It's Not Google (BING) - a poor shadow of Google. At least it finally does a decent job of finding Microsoft TechNet articles, something I relied on Google to handle for nearly 10 years. 6 - Live.com - you may not have heard of this, but it is Microsoft's free offering in cloud computing. Naturally it assumes your clients will be Internet Explorer which means Microsoft OS-based platforms, and those in turn are limited to PC's and laptops. Tablet and smartphone users (iPhone, Android, Symbian) - better luck next time; guess you will turn to an alternative. 7 - Microsoft.com - after about the third complete redesign I gave up on finding anything there without Google. Like I said, BING finally has some handle on the site, but it was mostly chaos for about 10 years when the Internet was getting rather important. 8 - The .NET architecture - yet again, Microsoft arrogance assumes its platform to be omnipresent and refuses to play well with others while "others" continue to grow at geometric rates while desktops and laptops remain stagnant in the saturated markets of developed countries. I could go on and on.
Seriously, for the defenders of a company that's biggest accomplishment of the last 10 years was milking two cash cows and finally sharing a bit of the milk with long-suffering investors, you need your investing heads examined. Whether or not MSFT is brilliantly run, it is part of a universe of potential investments and has had remarkably little to offer while many of its competitors have enjoyed far greater success: AAPL, GOOG, ORCL, IBM, and so on. I used to lau
I think you are right about the navel-gazing tendencies (bellybuttons, not warships). I'm working in the academic discipline of Management Information Systems and many academics don't quite know what to make of it. They ask, "Is it really the same as the discipline of Management? What is meant by Information?" While they go on mulling over these issues, our graduates get jobs as programmers, analysts, and consultants while the Management majors scratch for whatever jobs they can find. Computer skillz seem to be in demand while knowledge of management theories isn't so much. Buy hey, at least their discipline is completely respected in academic circles. I know we aren't as crazy smart as the demi-gods of Computer Science, but we seem to do okay in business without four semesters of calculus and assorted matrix algebra madness. Different strokes for different folks. Show some heart, give a philosopher a piece of pizza so he can spin out a few more dumb questions to people with work that needs to get done even if they aren't a million percent sure why they are doing it.
Astute as always! melikamp, my old friend, so nice to hear from you! How goes the reconnaissance? Any word from Zaphod? Are we taking this place over or will it be obliterated for a new space travel thoroughfare?
Precisely.
Funny, rdwulfe, I have had my eye on you in your Florida digs for four years now. Soon you should be large enough to feed myself and the 11,216 spawn currently growing in the crest atop my hyper-developed cranium. Of course, you alone will not be enough nutrition to sustain all of us for more than 6 Mercurian days.
I am a highly evolved alien living among the humans. While I will admit to a mild addiction to Slashdot and Drudgereport (some days these are very similar), I don't play computer games or watch television. I literally have no time for either as I am so busy watching the humans and pondering all the different recipes that would make them tasty. Not to mention that as an alien, I haven't figured out how to make much money and can't afford cable or satellite TV. I tried "bunny ears" for a while, but they quit working last Spring and I haven't missed the TV much. When I did watch it, I just kept seeing fellow aliens (Nadya Suleman, Marilyn Manson, Lady Gaga, Sheyla Hershey, et al.) entertaining the humans.
This theory that aliens are highly evolved and addicted to electronic entertainment is backwards because we know better than to end up sitting in Plato's Cave staring at flickering images when there is a marvelous world waiting to be viewed and humans, fattened in caves while watching flickering images, waiting to be devoured.
"I was at the audiologists a week after the distressing incident when I got an answer to the question that had been bugging me. Why had he chosen my bionic aids for a doggy treat?
"Feedback," said my audiologist.
"I'm sorry?" I replied.
"You probably didn't turn them off properly, so they whistled and the dog got attracted to them."
When Grandpa left his hearing aid (only 1 of his 2) on the window sill in our spare bedroom, our dog chewed it up. Our USAA homeowners insurance policy covered the entire cost of the replacement hearing aid. When I spoke with the claims representative at USAA, they said this happens all the time as dogs are drawn to the high pitched sounds emitted by hearing aids. Grandpa was disappointed as the new hearing aid was much better than the remaining old one the dog didn't chew up. I have had USAA for 22 years now and they have been great in every claim we have had. Note that membership is now open to ALL veterans of the US military whereas until recently it was only senior soldiers and officers and their immediate descendants. KEEP OUT OF REACH OF DOG.
This justified a complete takeover of the country? FYI, I read the Iraqi military plans for that invasion a few months after it went down (August 1990). D+2 was supposed to have the Iraqi Army in Kuwait City and D+6 was to have the Iraqi Army in the Saudi Arabian port city of Dharhan. How exactly does taking over the Saudi oilfields and major export infrastructure along the Persian Gulf fit with Kuwait's slant drilling? The reason Hussein stopped was the prompt U.S. intervention with USAF F-15's, the insertion of the XVIII Airborne Corps, and the fact that Bush the Elder was taken seriously by Saddam after his recent takedown of the junta in Panama. Saddam Hussein badly miscalculated as did April Glaser, the U.S. diplomat to Iraq at the time, and our policymakers not taking Hussein seriously enough when the NSA satellites recorded the Iraqi tank divisions' pre-invasion dispositions near the Kuwait border. FWIW, the Saudi Army was a bad joke and it was ONLY the U.S. intervention that kept Saddam from grabbing control of a huge percentage of the Mideast Oil exports. He had just beaten Iran, he did get Kuwait, and if he had occupied the entire South/West half of the Persian Gulf, even the U.S. Navy probably could not get oil tankers through to Iran if they wanted to. George H. W. Bush had no choice but to intervene.
I guess we can agree to disagree about W's "free pass". The media dutifully covered Ari Fleischer and the Pentagon's official statements, but I always seemed to hear them promptly rebutted by the news anchors with "Where are the WMD's? Where are the Thomas Jefferson/Founding Fathers of Iraq?" and so on. In contrast, the current operations in Afghanistan seem to just be "business as usual" even though this campaign is coming from a guy who sounded awfully interested in not doing much more fighting in the Bush Wars. If you don't believe the media is biased, please explain to me why I watched CNN in horror one morning in the weeks soon after McCain tapped Palin as his VP candidate. Palin (who is an idiot I won't be voting for) had just had her disastrous interview in which she said she "could see Russia from her front porch." CNN's morning show (I won't bother with adding the word "news" to that description) prominently featured a "story" about a p0rn0 clip featuring a Palin lookalike stripping as two guys dressed as Russian soldiers prepared for the hand-to-gland combat soon to follow. CNN even had to blur out the nudity of the Palin lookalike. Imagine if they had done something like that with an Obama lookalike. Seriously, try to imagine it. You don't think there is such p0rn out there? You haven't heard a peep about it in the mainstream media and certainly not on CNN's morning show. As "blackgoldalchemist", a Hillary Clinton supporter in 2008 should know, the media completely went for "bros before ho's" in the last presidential election. Palin combined the wrong sex with the wrong viewpoint as far as the mainstream media, (plus she is an idiot) and they were unconscionable in excoriating her. I view her more as Dan Quayle in a skirt, cute, bumbling, and a sop to the social conservatives of the Right.
I consider myself an extremely well-educated part of the actual conserve-ative wing of the GOP. We are known as "Crunchy Cons" (see book of same name by Rod Dreher who has a Crunchy Con blog as well). We believe in conserving all that is worthy and durable which includes the environment, religious faith, the family, beautiful art and architecture, and the Constitution with its emphasis on limited government and fundamental rights for citizens. This is obviously not without its contradictions, like any other viewpoint, but we certainly shouldn't be mistaken for Rush Limbaugh's "dittoheads". Probably the all-time Crunchy Con President was Teddy Roosevelt.
I grasp that rubber was in short supply as it had to be imported, like silk, which was also in short supply. I would think that less burning of fuel would mean more of it would be available for military use. Don't forget the millions of troops that never left CONUS but were burning plenty of AVGAS and vehicle fuels with all the training that went on during the war. Chicory in coffee fell out of favor because during the war it had to be brought up from South America and they wanted to use that space on the ships for other supplies that were more strategic. When peacetime returned, American consumers were accustomed to coffee without chicory and it now hangs on only in Louisiana.
I agreed with much of this post but "Bush got a free pass from the media"??? Really? The media gave me the distinct impressions that: 1) We all needed to know Bush was busted for drunk driving about 20 years before the 2000 election and I had to hear this the Saturday before Election Tuesday. 2) Gore had won the state of Florida even though the polls were open in the Panhandle counties for another hour costing W about 10,000 net votes in that strongly conservative part of the state. 3) Fahrenheit 9/11 was a documentary when it was actually full of outright lies and distortions. (I watched that drivel and recognized plenty of the lies.) 4) Dick Cheney was evil incarnate (entirely possible) but they didn't bother to mention that HE MOPPED THE FLOOR with John Edwards in the lone VP debate of 2004 5) Iraq War II was the Vietnam War all over again - on Day 2 of the initial invasion. (That reality came much later as it turns out. The media was just very premature.) 6) Ken Lay, the CEO of Enron was best buddies with W. What ever happened to that one? 7) Newsweek still didn't think Bush was the legitimate president the weekend preceding the 9/11 attack according to their cover story. (Look it up.) 8) Any rational person took Cindy Sheehan seriously. 9) The anti-war movement in America was really against war. The mainstream media in no way, shape, or form gave W a "free pass". W wasn't just the Big Oil president or the Wall Street president, he would seep with anything for enough campaign contributions, making him the perfect politician for our times.
It now turns out that the "anti-war" movement was really just against Bush. Notice the absence of mass protests as Obama continues Bush's policies, this time with a "surge" in Afghanistan, but the so-called anti-war movement now consists of occasional blog posts as opposed to marches through NYC. When Bush wanted a surge in Iraq, he had to battle with Congress, the media, and "anti-war" protests for months, giving Al Qaeda and Company plenty of time to prepare. Don't tell me with a straight face that the media gave George W. Bush a "free pass" as that is absurd. In contrast, the mainstream media did almost everything conceivably within its power to deliver the White House to Obama in '08 and the Republicans had it coming after the débâcle that was Bush II. How many Time Magazine covers has Obama had since he first announced his candidacy for president in 2005? Hardly anyone batted an eye as Obama sent his surge into Afghanistan. Maybe he could go ahead and annex Haiti while he is at it since the Haitians would be better off and the media and "anti-war" movement wouldn't cause him any trouble.
I'm sick to death of our hypocritical politicians, Democrat and Republican alike. Like the lawyers they truly are, they can take either side of any argument and push it without a twinge of conscience or consistency. See the amazing flip-flops of both sides depending on whether they were in the majority or minority. Specifically: attitude towards government spending (Pelosi was all about fiscal prudence a few years ago/the GOP were spendthrifts at that time - now it has reversed), attitude about overriding Senate filibusters, attitude about a larger government role in healthcare (Medicare prescription drug benefits were passed in the W years), and so on. It's sickening and their cynicism has made cynics of us all. They will reap a terrible harvest from the ill seeds they have sown. Look for the biggest "throw the bums out" election results in American history this November. This is a golden opportunity to pass term limits for Congress as their favorable poll number is now a mere 11 percent.
The points here were: 1) The frog would use the wings to cushion his landing. 2) My neighbor hasn't shown me a cold fusion reactor yet. Count me among those people hoping for cold fusion, solar power, hydrogen technologies, and so on to show enough progress to start moving us past petroleum.
"as soon as they can get these to market, solar could be very viable and cheap to produce." And if a frog had wings his ass wouldn't bump the ground when he hops.
I appreciate Slashdot acting like an old Popular Mechanics here, but I wouldn't get too excited just yet. As somebody pointed out in another forum, when you compare ethanol with gasoline in terms of efficiency, if all we had was ethanol primarily from "corn" (U.S. term, UK term is "maize") and then someone invented gasoline, we would be raving about the improvement in efficiency and economy. IOW, I will believe cheap, efficient solar power when I see it on the neighbor's roof. Until then, this is one more expensive quest for a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. In the meantime, we could be practicing more energy efficiency.
FWIW, I knew W was full of crap with that whole "hydrogen economy" nonsense back around 2005. That was an absurd sop to deflect a little criticism that he was as much a tool of Big Oil as his Old Man. Make note that I served in Iraq during Operation Desert Storm and when it was over, George H.W. Bush was sitting on a 91 percent approval rating based on a war we had to fight to maintain a steady supply of petroleum for the Western Powers and Japan. From the desert, I wrote my Senators and lobbied them to get a bill going to get us to start weaning off Mideast Oil. That S.O.B. Bush didn't raise a finger, nor did our Congress and eventually Western wealth transfer begat Osama Bin Laden, 9/11, Iraq War II, and Afghanistan. Wouldn't you think a 91 percent approval rating might have been enough political capital to change things a little? It may even have made Bush the Elder seem like the President of the U.S.A. instead of President of the New World Order since he rightfully earned a reputation for being allergic to domestic policy. His detachment had a lot to do with getting booted in '92. A review of the stock market back in '90 - '91 reveals that Big Oil shot up and helped a lot of folks in that business recover from the very hard times they went through in the late '80's. Though I was a conservative and a combat veteran, I campaigned for Bill Clinton in '92 as I was so disgusted with Bush the Elder. Still am. God save us from another Bush.
Most of us know in our heart of hearts that our troops are in Iraq and Afghanistan because of the continued grip the Mideast has on Western economies. In World War II, the U.S. national speed limit was 35 mph and gasoline was rationed with coupons. This was done to make sure the military had plenty of fuel. If some shared sacrifice was called for now, I think most Americans would grumble, but go along with it for the sake of untangling from the Iraq and Afghan Wars. How about bringing back the 55 mph speed limit of the '70's and '80's? What about a tax based on the weight of a vehicle? If we cut back on petroleum use, we help our independence and the environment at the same time. Now that's what I call "conserve-atism".
If you want to see what needs to be done about our dependence on petroleum, just look for the occasional Charles Krauthammer piece on it. He makes the same recommendations about every 5 years, the centerpiece of which is a flexible tax on gasoline that seeks to wean us off cheap oil while keeping the price of gasoline fairly steady.
First off, kudos to ComputerWorld for this shocking newsflash "New Windows Operating System is Bloated and Disappoints Users". Is it 1995 again when I foolishly believed Microsoft and loaded Windows95 on my happy Windows 3.1 computer only to discover the 4MB minimum RAM requirement left my computer a useless lump of plastic with an endlessly spinning hard drive? Four more MB of memory for $130 from a shady computer dealer finally slowed the paging down. I have seen this cycle repeated 6 more times since then. Go ahead and set up the fill-in-the-blank story for Windows 7.1, 8, and so on.
Here is how to get a valid test together:
1. Figure out the testing objective. Sounds like this guy should build a Windows 7 and a Windows XP box with identical hardware side-by-side.
2. Install the same applications on both machines and run the same workloads on them.
3. Measure the performance using the only benchmark users care about, waiting times for things to happen. One thing that was unclear from this article (which I actually read, must be new here) was the level of memory paging that was going on and especially the feedback from the users. The numbers he talked about are pretty much of no interest to end users, just guys in the I.T. shop.
4. Call ComputerWorld with the results, but only if they make Windows 7 look terrible...
BasKet - OSS. I am a PhD student and asked about this very thing of some fellow Slashdotters and they recommended BasKet, a product similar to Microsoft's OneNote. I dearly love Foxit as my PDF reader/annotator, though Okular is quite good as well when I am fiddling with my Ubuntu box. Both are free products (as in beer). As I am stuck on a Vista computer for work/research, I use OneNote, but not as fanatically as some of my associates. Incredibly, the installation of EndNote on my PC trashed my MS Word 2007, so I have had to switch over to OpenOffice's word processor with excellent results so far. Sooner or later I will get around to setting up Windows 7 which hopefully can survive EndNote. I'm really liking the MediaWiki idea and some sort of OSS solution for doing bibliographies. I haven't really had to "share" much of my work yet, but I suppose that is coming later. On a related note, I'm a big fan of lifehacker.com and autohotkey.com using the AutoCorrect file for Autohotkey to substitute a lot of tedious typing for me. I type a few letters of a word IN ANY APPLICATION and autohotkey then replaces those few letters with yet another five dollar word: quantitative, qualitative, research, management, university, student, difference, relationship, and so on are on my self-generated list. Loads of other cool stuff can be done with autohotkey as well.
We will not suffer through this oppression by King Roger! To the barricades, mes amis! Le fleur de lis is the symbol of Le Ancien Regime, so on to New Orleans where we will show them who is boss with our red cockades. We shall erect le guillotine and make clear who will control the symbols of Le France!
I find it a bit weird, but I have known some people who heard TPM was so bad they just refused to see Episodes I, II, II perhaps as a way to avoid spoiling their image of Star Wars.
Personally, I saw Star Wars as an 11 year old and was pretty much knocked to the floor. Episode V was great, but Episode VI disappointed. TPM was so abysmal it took about 4 years before I could muster the stomach to see it again. I still can't believe they cast Jake Lloyd over Haley Joel Osmont who was spectacular in "The Sixth Sense" and "AI". Things were looking up a bit with Episode II, but I kept my expectations at immediate post-TPM levels before seeing Episode III. Honestly, I think Episode III is my favorite now. The FX are incredible and to finally close the loop to Annakin's descent was very very satisfying. Ian McDiarimid's performance was mesmerizing.
If you've never seen it, find the short video clip "Lucas in Love" for some good laughs. Like "Shakespeare in Love", it is intended to show where the Big Ideas came from. When do we get Episodes VII, VIII, and IX, Mr. Lucas? Can you please let someone else direct them?
I am a full-time writer and recently obtained an IBM Model M keyboard (behold! the buckling springs) that works like a champ. The great thing with the model m is you don't have to push the key very hard to make sure you have typed a letter; when it clicks, you have rendered a letter unto the monitor, no need to look. Unfortunately, it types too loudly for my three office mates, so I have to keep it at home. What would they think if I insisted on using an IBM Selectric typewriter? The cheap Compaq keyboard that came with my home PC has a sleep button that my toddler kept pushing much to my dismay. Now the Model M and Baby Smash! keeps her occupied and the Model M should survive better than the Compaq keyboard. When I caught her "typing" by hammering the mouse on the keyboard I had some doubts, but the springs keep buckling. My other writing obsessions are the Dvorak keyboard layout (almost all I use now) and Pilot Pens G2 -5 with Extra Fine point. I love the insane precision you can employ with this G2 pen and the Extra Fine point. Now I can cram an unreal amount of readable text into the occasional tight spot when taking notes.
I agree the PC is still a pretty good Swiss Army knife. I just have to comment that on my Vista-running HP DV6000, I find Windows Media Player to be as stable as MS Access 2.0 was on Windows 3.11, which is to say, not at all. After enough reboots, I gave up and switched completely to iTunes. You just have to be sure to set it to rip in MP3 format or you get a bunch of DRM-impinged AAC's. And I am way too busy to sort out some workaround for that DRM, so don't bother if it's going to take more than 5 minutes. It's not like I get to listen to the music all that often anyway.
Thanks to some poor choices in my younger days, I have become a full-blown Microserf herding along 250 Windoze servers, half of them in remote locations. If I had it to do all over again, I would have taken the red pill. This may offend the *nix snobs here, but if MS gets really serious about MSH (the way I keep seeing it when running PowerShell), it will be awesome. I haven't seen anybody here mention that it is built-in with Exchange 2007 and when you run through an E2K7 wizard, the last step is the display of the MSH script that will execute once you click the Finish button. It's also just waiting for you to copy and paste that script before clicking the Finish button, so you can expand it and reuse it later.
My boss is such a Windoze junkie, he pooh-poohs my scripting efforts at every turn. We often spend hours and hours doing repetitive crap in the GUI's because "we don't have time to work out a script now!". I have avoided getting really deep into cmd.exe and VBscript approaches ever since I first read about Monad during the betas as that crap should be passing away. I've been bursting at the seams for some good books to come out.
Beware a first effort from MS. If they get serious, the third version will be quite good. In the meantime, a wise sage told me to expect third party vendors to jump on this bandwagon and cook up gobs of stuff to leverage the PowerShelll to save Win Sysadmins keyboard time with canned scripts. That would leave me sucking garbage in the MS Matrix with the rest of the Duracells, but fortunately my boss won't spend any money on decent tools, so I will get to hack out the scripts by hand and really learn MSH. Awesome.
If you're a Win Sysadmin reading this, be sure to check out http://www.sysinternals.com/Sysinternals and download the Misc utilities package, especially pstools.exe I use them all the time like a telnet session (via RPC) into remote PC's to clear up networking problems on them. netsh.exe then allows me to remove freakin' static WINS and DNS entries in TCP/IP properties, all without disturbing the user. It doesn't take long to learn and it saves gobs of time.
Now I need to get back to my Linux lessons so I can use some discrete Linux servers on our edge networks, then they can start appearing closer and closer to The Core.
I read the replies as they stand thus far.
I am 40 years old and have been on both sides of the desk. I went from being a Lone Ranger three time zones from the HQ to being up to my eyeballs in the HQ. I'm not finding communication much better here than it was when I was way, way out. The biggest problem is we only have slow, formal communication channels that come dragging along with them rank and privilege implications that stifle discussion of the things that matter. Additionally, while the managers have meeting after meeting each week, not much of that info is percolated to the lower levels. Almost nothing is going up the other way. I am fairly sure that almost none of the IT managers have ANY formal management training. They just don't know much better. They are all extremely technically knowledgeable, but totally unaware of something Tom Peters quoted in the '80's. "Once you are promoted to management, you don't work anymore. Your job is helping others get the work done." Call me elitist, but I spent 8 years as an Army officer and completed an MBA. I've had tons of management training and think this could be a big breath of fresh air for the department. Army leadership and operations has often been summed up as "Move, Shoot, Communicate". Many of those principles apply here as well. (Let the jokes begin...) I can tell they are grooming me for management here as I meet the "techie" smell test and am an avid communicator too. I'm just hoping I will be allowed to roll out some innovations like "Talking and Listening"(TM).
As for "undermining my boss", I haven't posted anything of the sort. My boss did not forbid me from taking direct calls from our customers, he just doens't think it's wise. FWIW, he also is really bad about not keeping his Blackberry with him away from the office. If he leaves at 5pm, you can pretty much forget reaching him now that he no longer takes call. I heartily disagree with the style of management here, but I'm not actively opposing it. I'm hoping to reform from within. Wish me luck.
As a young buck, fresh from my MBA program, I shot off my mouth and got escorted out for my trouble. This is Round Two.
My boss and I are a severe contrast as far as the "social networks" part of this article goes. We are both SysAdmins, but he avoids everyone outside IT while I intentionally network all over the place. Naturally, I think my way is better and now there is a study that confirms it!
Seriously, every job I have had has had appallingly poor communications. As a result, I always end up figuring out how to get plugged into the grapevine. If I didn't, I would always be a day late and a dollar short. His logic in avoiding people is that he doesn't like getting called directly when something is broken, as he believes most of the "crises" are minor. I agree with him that we want people to use proper channels (Level 1 support then Level 2 and so on), but very few of them violate protocol more than once in a great while. Frankly, I have found that if they are violating protocol, it's urgent enough that I am glad they are calling me directly. If they fell through the cracks due to an improperly submitted support ticket, things would get really ugly. Guess what, when things are already ugly out there, tickets tend to get submitted improperly.
"When I'm the Boss"(TM) I want to deliberately set up "irregular" communication channels so the imporatnt things are addressed. How about an anonymous suggestion box? What about using an anonymous brainstorming session like I saw at the Thunderbird School of Business back in 1993? Heck, why not have all hands meetings once or twice each year, more frequently at the department level?
Speaking of communication, it is a drag on productivity to the extent that you have to formally track so much of what you are doing. It is a necessary evil, to some extent. At the same time, when I'm trying to figure out if a server is a chronic pain, it helps if there is a trail of tickets to be found naming said dog.
Back to being something of a Social Butterfly at work. Last week, I got invited to an informal luncheon that included the Big Dogs of the corporation. That face time probably didn't hurt me none.
In my view, the reason there is now a God-shaped hole in the European person is the two world wars fought there. Something about the deaths of tens of millions happening twice in the span of 30 years might make any group question its belief in a loving, protective God. It doesn't help when the churches during those wars have stepped in and declared that God is on one side (or the other's).
As for me personally, the rapid advance of technology has had zero impact on my belief in God. Since I have never been one of these "Young Earth Creationists" (Earth is about 6,000 years, old according to them), science has not displaced any of my religous views.
As for all those people who view themselves as too intelligent and knowledgeable to believe in God, I will attempt to quote from C.S. Lewis book Mere Chrisitanity. A very smart acquaintance of Mr. Lewis asked him, "How can you be so smart and still believe in God?" Mr. Lewis replied, "How can YOU be so smart and NOT believe in God?" Do all the smart people out there really think that science has all the answers, or ever will? Do they really think we will end up mastering all that we survey as depicted in Gene Roddenberry's Utopian future? It would sure be nice, but my faith in Man's capacity for such wonders has been severely diminished by centuries of butchery and waste. Only fifteen years ago, the USA and USSR were still poised on the brink of annihilating the human race. Why do so many still still subscribe to the religion of the perfectability of Man? It is not right for either the believers in God or the believers in Man to take up arms against one another. The true believers should let the chips fall where they may, similar to the tests Moses was subjected to by the Egyptian priests.
your underlying product is forged in the white-hot fires of online altruism
Redhat is competing with Sun, IBM, Microsoft, Suse (Novell) and dozens of other firms in the OS market and you're describing its big challenge as surviving the marketplace for altruism? I don't think Linus cooked up GNU/Linux just so it could be run on the machines of geeks for the benefit of other geeks. He must have known that when he tossed that source code out onto the Internet that there was no telling where it would end up. Redhat's focus must be the blue-white fires of the business computing marketplace or it will be as passe as the "Nifty Fifty" of the 1970's. Where are they now? Ever check out the list of the Dow Jones Industrial Average components in 1960 versus now? Today's Microsoft is tomorrow's Litton Industries or Penn Central Railroad. Compete or die.
If you want to look deep into the future for Microsoft, this site tells all.