At my place of employ, we track business data ...
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Free vs. free (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Free vs. free (Score:2)
Re:Free vs. free (Score:5, Informative)
I presume Free is "Free as in Freedom" Free and free is "free as in beer" free, which is how the FSF differentiates between the two.
Re:Free vs. free (Score:2)
I hate that "distinction" so much... (Score:3, Insightful)
Every single time someone says "Free as in beer", I need to check wikipedia to see which meaning that was again. I have difficulties memorizing it because it doesn't make any damn sense! Most of the time, beer costs something. Most of the time, speech doesn't cost anything. Whoever decided that we should say "Free as in beer" when speaking about things that don't cost anything and "Free as in speech" for things that do/might cost something... I hate him with a passion, just for this.
It makes some sense when you say "Free as in free beer". When you say "Free beer", you know it's still probably illegal to give it to children but it doesn't cost anything. Of course, people don't usually use that long form and it still doesn't make sense to use "Free speech" as the one that might cost you something.
Re:I hate that "distinction" so much... (Score:2)
I *actually* thought they meant, like, with a bathtub full of beer where one could freely swim 'in'. "Free as in a bathtub of beer". Also, I thought "Free as in speech" meant when you use the word "free" in speech, like "Is that beer for free?", so without cost!!!
Re:I hate that "distinction" so much... (Score:2)
You can share free speech as much as you want. You never run out, you never meet someone that can't have any. When you use it, you can re-use it. You can give it to others. They can use it and give it to others. etc... etc...
Free beer, on the other hand, is limited. Once it's gone, it's gone. You can only give yours away if you don't drink it.
Re:I'm not a jock contracts to I'm a jock (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I'm not a jock contracts to I'm a jock (Score:5, Funny)
When something is "Free as in speech", it's a freedom that is being granted.
In the US, we consider "free speech" an inalienable right.
OK! OK! Stop laughing. Sheesh.
free as in beer? (Score:2)
Not free though so your point is valid.
Re:Free vs. free (Score:5, Funny)
With the capital F, "Free" is a proper noun. Without the capital F, "free" is an adjective.
So, I assume that the first means software written by some guy named "Free".
Re:Free vs. free (Score:2)
Re:Free vs. free (Score:2)
Free's Free Software?
Freedom!
Comment removed (Score:2)
Re:Free vs. free (Score:5, Insightful)
Am I the only one who doesn't know the meaning of "business data"? Is it some sort of PHB-speak?
Re:Free vs. free (Score:5, Insightful)
No, you're not the only one.
I'm still not sure what it is even after reading the replies here so far either....
Re:Free vs. free (Score:2)
Am I the only one who doesn't know the meaning of "business data"? Is it some sort of PHB-speak?
That would be the data that is used to run the business. Timesheet data, project data, cash flow and other financial data, etc.
Re:Free vs. free (Score:2)
Then the correct answer for most large companies is probably "using at least a dozen different systems."
Re:Free vs. free (Score:2)
What does that have to do with running the business?
Sounds like what you use to run the management :P
Re:Free vs. free (Score:2)
Well, I was wondering what kind of data a business have that is not "business data", but it is not my department anyway, as people here don't care that much about tracking data.
Comment removed (Score:2)
Re:Free vs. free (Score:2)
Re:Free vs. free (Score:3)
Re:Free vs. free (Score:3, Funny)
Am I the only one who doesn't know the difference between "free" software and "Free" software?
"Free" probably means you're on day 734 of your 30 day trial.
Re:Free vs. free (Score:2)
Re:Free vs. free (Score:2)
They should have used "free (libre)" vs. "free (gratis)"
Re:Free vs. free (Score:2)
but then you get into arguments over which bsd code is because the say gratis sometimes and stallman dose not think they are free
wtf (Score:5, Insightful)
first the business knock off, now a shitty poll that only vaguely about tech? Seems slashdot has turned into a research marketing tool
Re:wtf (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:wtf (Score:2)
I knew his departure was the sign of trouble, but I had no idea /. would be taken over by marketing fscktards. The horror! The horror! It is worse than I could have imagined.
Re:wtf (Score:5, Insightful)
IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and lots and lots of other big companies make this a core part of their business and are constantly looking for new ways to out-innovate their competitors to achieve this kind of goal. This is also how one goes from being a geek playing with a couple of small servers to being a geek in business, making a lot of money and impacting a whole lot of other people with one's work and choices.
Of course it doesn't have any l33t m0dz or blinkenlichtens, so it doesn't appeal to many.
Re:wtf (Score:3)
As I posted before answering another person...I don't know WTF they're asking for here myself....
Re:wtf (Score:3)
Companies that track manufacturing processes that take a long time complete, like processes where things cool at certain rates, or where things have to cure and have to resume, or have processes that otherwise require time or waiting.
Distribution channel software can monitor the distribution process to deliver to stores...
There are many more examples.
Re:wtf (Score:2)
I can think and name off several as well... Your Time& Attendance was one, CRM, HR data repositories... then you get into the various different chunks of financial data that have to be managed, then you have compliance management... etc etc etc...
What everyone is asking is: Which of those / all? is this poll asking about? If you were to ask me what CRM software I'm using then I'd be able to give you a clear answer but this vague question can't be so simply answered. I'd be surprised if ANY company could say all of those various possible needs are handled by a single piece of software. If the correct answer tends to be "many" then how can your average person pick a single correct response?
I call shenanigans.
Re:wtf (Score:3)
I tought they could leverage some synergies in order to find those inneficiencies, and stablish procedures to address them...
Re:wtf (Score:2)
Re:wtf (Score:3)
I tought they could leverage some synergies in order to find those inneficiencies, and stablish procedures to address them...
If we took this off-line to workshop it, we would stand a better chance of engineering a best-practice solution to fit the paradigm of an adaptive revenue stream from product lines architected to incentivize the imagineering constructicated by cloud-conscious upwardly-mobile C-level Gen-Y clients demographically oriented by the dynamics of an elastic market.
Re:wtf (Score:2)
I'll come out of hiding for this one.
First, polls aren't scientific. It's in the FAQ. Anyone doing market research with Slashdot polls is higher than a kite.
Second, many businesses depend heavily on off the shelf solutions to strategic business problems. Until I created forecasting software for my company, we depended on Excel reports heavily with mixed results. So maybe it doesn't seem "high tech" to you, but this poll is far more relevant to most readers than asking who is on TDMA, CDMA or WCDMA networks or whatever bullshit you'd find more interesting.
Re:wtf (Score:2)
Sign of Corporate Stupidity (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sign of Corporate Stupidity (Score:5, Insightful)
I couldn't agree more. Some idiot bean counters think that the /. community cares about crap like business intelligence. They totally don't understand their audience if they think that is going to be the first successful offshoot. I refuse to even click the link for fear of legitimizing the stupidest thing to ever come out of /.
Re:Sign of Corporate Stupidity (Score:2)
What would the Slashdot brand be good for? I'm not trying to be snarky or anything... I genuinely don't see how they can hope to monetize the site. Slashdot's primary interests tend to be open source, piracy, and arguing about religion/global warming. Not much money to be made there.
Re:Sign of Corporate Stupidity (Score:2)
What would the Slashdot brand be good for? I'm not trying to be snarky or anything... I genuinely don't see how they can hope to monetize the site. Slashdot's primary interests tend to be open source, piracy, and arguing about religion/global warming. Not much money to be made there.
Ah, but if you have hold of the reigns as it were, then you can steer traffic to your site. A mention here, an article there, a perverted poll or two... it ads up (and yes, that was deliberate).
Re:Sign of Corporate Stupidity (Score:2)
Is /. selling out? (Score:5, Interesting)
Ok, so /. is launching it's new SlashBi site and interestingly, there is this poll. I hope this isn't the signal of the end of the /. The polls used to be interesting. Now we have thinly veiled /vertisement. :-( Now I know why CmdrTaco jumped ship.
Re:Is /. selling out? (Score:5, Funny)
Slashdot: News for MBAs, stuff that makes a profit
Re:Is /. selling out? (Score:2)
Not just Opera... I went and looked when I saw this post. Apparently "News for Nerds" wasn't trending well with the target 16-21 age demographic so it had to go!
Re:Is /. selling out? (Score:2)
Re:Is /. selling out? (Score:2)
I certainly don't have any inside information, but my take on it was that he was told "Do it our way or leave." He chose the latter. I think he decided it was better to find a new venture than to willingly take part in the evisceration of his baby.
On the upside, if /. becomes a vapid shell of it's former self, then I will get more work done.
Re:Is /. selling out? (Score:2)
In other words you don't have a clue and are making shit up to fit your world view.
I'm Retired (Score:5, Insightful)
I have NO place of employ, and I have NO business software. If this poll is to be used for marketing, I guess you are not interested in me.
Re:I'm Retired (Score:2)
Re:I'm Retired (Score:2)
Re:I'm Retired (Score:2)
So fucking what? Does everything, including every poll, have to apply to you? One fucking poll is not interested in you and you piss yourself. You say you are retired, so act like an adult.
Missing option: All of the above (Score:3)
I work at a company of around 8000 people, and I regularly use software in all of these categories.
Re:Missing option: All of the above (Score:2)
since two of the options use the word 'mostly' then you can't be doing all of them.
Re:Missing option: All of the above (Score:3)
Right, so the Mathemetician's Answer [tvtropes.org] is "none of the above", but that's misleading (as the Mathematician's Answer usually is), so the only reasonable response is "Mu! [catb.org]"
Re:Missing option: All of the above (Score:2)
Right, so the Mathemetician's Answer [tvtropes.org] is "none of the above", but that's misleading (as the Mathematician's Answer usually is), so the only reasonable response is "Mu! [catb.org]"
A mathematician's answer is not misleading if you understand math like a mathematician ;)
Re:Missing option: All of the above (Score:2)
Is that like the story about the mathematician watching people come and go in and out of a building, and he sees two people go in, then one more, then he sees five people come out, and then he concludes that there are now negative two people in the building?
Re:Missing option: All of the above (Score:2)
Is that like the story about the mathematician watching people come and go in and out of a building, and he sees two people go in, then one more, then he sees five people come out, and then he concludes that there are now negative two people in the building?
Of course, that's a better answer than the biologist gives, who concludes they must have reproduced...
Re:Missing option: All of the above (Score:2)
Is that like the story about the mathematician watching people come and go in and out of a building, and he sees two people go in, then one more, then he sees five people come out, and then he concludes that there are now negative two people in the building?
Let p be number of people in building b...
Any mathematician would arrive at p-2; only an MBA would abhor an algebraic expression as the answer and arrive at -2.
Re:Missing option: All of the above (Score:2)
A mathematician's answer is not misleading if you understand math like a mathematician ;)
Even when it's not misleading, it's still uninformative. In fact, that's basically the definition. If it's not misleading and/or uninformative, it's not The Mathematician's Answer, it's a mathematician's answer.
Re:Missing option: All of the above (Score:2)
He is referring to the situation my company is in. We are huge, spread over several continents, and use do in-house data tracking with a mix of proprietary, free, and home-grown software in about equal proportions.
In the company I work for, we use home-grown and free for data collection, proprietary and free for analysis and storage, and a combination of the three for presentation.
Re:Missing option: All of the above (Score:2)
Frankly, the term "business data" makes it pretty much meaningless. My company has more than 9000 employees; pretty much everything we do generates data. All different data. All tracked in different ways. How our HR department tracks recruitment data and payroll data is not the same as how we track customer contact data, account data, transaction data, logistics data, water usage data...
We must have dozens of different systems tracking data in different ways. God knows which poll option even any given one of them fits in to.
"Business data" is one of those brain-dead terms people use when they know nothing about business. Not a surprise having seen that abysmal SlashdotBI site..
Missing option - NSA (Score:2)
Missing option: Microsoft excel (Score:2)
I was looking for the "In-house but not software I wrote" option then I realized all of our data is all stored in a mass of excel spreadsheets that we try to desperately keep up to date with the so called "master copy" stored within a database.
So i picked "In-house, using mostly conventional payware"
Re:Missing option: Microsoft excel (Score:2)
Re:Missing option: Microsoft excel (Score:5, Funny)
Came to post this. Layers upon layers of interconnected excel sheets, all linked to other files and filled with macros written 10+ years ago. One of these days we're going to find out that there was an error in the original formula, and we actually went out of business years ago.
Re:Missing option: Microsoft excel (Score:3)
The next step is to migrate the data on those excel sheets to MS Access because "I heard this database thing is a good idea".
Re:Missing option: Microsoft excel (Score:2)
Access is far better then excel.
If they are truly clueless, just pout Oracle on the back end and link to it.
hat will make you next step far, far easier and more likely to happen.
Re:Missing option: Microsoft excel (Score:2)
I almost want to ask you what industry you're in. Your business seems like the ideal candidate for a new application. Even if you aren't interested, other companies in your market might be.
Re:Missing option: Microsoft excel (Score:2)
That anecdote was actually from my part-time job back in college: tech support for a special education company. Essentially they have a bunch of teachers who specialize in tutoring young (kindergarten or younger) kids with autism and/or learning disabilities. If a parent notices their kid isn't developing normally (e.g. not talking by a certain age), they do an evaluation and if necessary, the kid gets put in a special sort of pre-k that teaches them to cope with their disability from an early age and slowly integrates them into a normal classroom.
From what I saw in my time there, they really could do with a technological revolution in that business. I wasn't exaggerating with the excel stuff, and a lot of the software the teachers use looks like it was made in the 80s. It's the sort of work that really makes a change in people's lives, but it's not exactly what you would call high paying, so it's not going to draw attention from any big business. I would have liked to make some improvements myself, but I wasn't really qualified for the job - I was just a friend of a friend who was "good with computers" (i.e. knew how to use Google).
I know this is /., but... (Score:2)
The rural library I run tracks some things on paper, some things with Free/free software, and our core statistics on payware, though not conventional. They are all combined on Free software for our monthlies and annuals.
Re:I know this is /., but... (Score:2)
Totally! I *wish* I had more business than I could handle on paper ... but sadly it isn't even a pain in the neck.
Which Business Data (Score:2)
Business Data? Like data that customers pay for us to maintain, internal data like asset tracking (of one sort or another), internal data like project documents, internal data like software written by devs?
Too many options, or just one too broad an option.
Sure, we have an asset (hardware) tracking database but it pretty much blows so I have a database I wrote that provides system tracking with automatic updates of system information. It was a spreadsheet when I got here but I pretty much don't like using spreadsheets as a database so converted it to mysql.
So "in-house; with software I wrote" is a good option too, for a small piece of the business.
[John]
Missing Option: (Score:2)
With index cards.
'Business Data'? (Score:2)
Another missing option (Score:2)
In-house using software my company develops and sells but I don't personally write.
Microsoft All The Way (Score:2)
At my place of employ the IT department's mouths are firmly glued to Microsoft's teats. It doesn't matter how slow or inadequate the product is to our needs, if it comes from Microsoft it's gotta be the best, right?
If for some reason MS doesn't make a product that we need then we go with the most monolithic, unresponsive corporate behemoth which does.
There's been a lot of pressure lately to support Macs, which must have scared the bejeezus out of IT. But now that Apple is acting more and more like Microsoft, I think they're starting to come around.
Re:Microsoft All The Way (Score:2)
it comes down to accountability, if the shit ever hits the fan do you want mega corp to honer their support contract or even have their army of minions work up a fix, or rely on some guy / group who's homepage still points to a sourceforge page that has not been updated since 2003?
Define "business data" (Score:2)
a+b (Score:2)
It's Tom Lehrer, isn't it? (Score:2)
That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun
Missing Option: (Score:2)
Using sticks and twigs.
Missing Option: (Score:2)
In-house using totally pirated payware.
Welcome to the sell out.. (Score:2)
Get your shit together /., because this isn't going to float. A million companies go down this whole "business friendly revamp" route, and none of them come back. Try something else for fuck's sake. Try actually turning the site back towards the core readership instead of fucking taking the piss by peddling this marketeer horseshit on the side.
What does "Track Business Data" mean? (Score:2)
Okay I (think I) get what business data is. Data generated for the business. Customer/student/patient/stock databases, transaction details, billing information, documents, etc. Is that right?
But what does it mean to "track" this? Storage and backups? Transaction management? Top-down view of who has what open files?
Can anyone help?
ERP & Custom (Score:2)
Re:fuck (Score:2)
Re:Missing Option (Score:2)
Sounds like the kind of place where the corporate standard database management system is Excel, and some interns/peons acting as human SELECT and JOIN statements. Hell I've seen peons as human ORDER BY statements manually sorting stuff in Excel. Check.
Re:Assumptions: (Score:2)
by definition, a poll is only for people it is relative to. So unemployed person are not relative to the question.
And the Economy isn't that bad, and it's growing in the tech industry.
Re:paper files (Score:3)
Paper files. Stored safely in a fie drawer at our corporate HQ in George Town, Grand Caymen.
Want to conduct an audit? Come on over. No appointments are available. Just hope you can catch a corporate officer on the rare occasions they happen to be in.
Re:SAP (Score:3)
SAP is used here. I've only seen it used at other monstrously large companies.
You've got it backwards -- SAP uses monstrously large companies.
Re:SAP (Score:2)
Re:SAP (Score:2)
"You've got it backwards -- SAP uses monstrously large companies."
Uses their wallets anyway. Our SAP migration flushed two vice-presidents so far and it still isn't done.
ME51N is your friend. Yeah, right. Heaven help you if don't put a D (for service, isn't that mnemonic) in the column next to the K (for charge to account).
And in the service entry section make sure you click on the little folder with the bar BEFORE the little green flag, or else.
Is the key to German business success convincing foreign companies to use SAP to hobble themselves while the Germans use an accounting book and pencils for reliable and accurate results?
Re:SAP (Score:2)
Yes, it is called C++. It is also cheaper to customize.
Re:SAP (Score:2)
Re:I don't always log in and comment... (Score:2)
Stand by .....
Re:pay software (Score:2)
Re:WORDS! WORDS! WORDS! (Score:2)