I can't see the "Older Stuff" slashbox. This is easily my most used box as I paged back on a Monday and scanned the weekend's postings. Can I have it back please?

Ps I am using (work enforced) IE 7 so I deserve your pity and help...

What do you know... we actually use that at work. Indirectly, anyways, through OpenBSD's gzipped mirror in conjunction with spamd.

Thanks for the work you put into it! Because of spamd (and lists like yours, Beck's traplist, and so on) we're wasting over 1100 hours of spammer time every day.

Windows and Linux are not the same. Windows only patches once per month. Linux patches almost never. Because we are not comparing an OS with a distro are we?

Ubuntu patches fairly regular, but that is a LOT more then just the OS/Desktop AND it includes upgrades. IE only has major releases and patches but firefox alone is regularly updated and expanded. So how you do you compare the two.

The problem for windows users is that they have got all these seperate programs to take care off. All with their own methods for keeping up-to-date. For linux it is just a single command to update everything, but a windows user got to have a dozen "check latest version" proggies running.

That is what the story about.

This view is skewed @ Slashdot, but *most* people are not as wrapped up in technology. They will say "I have to pay for this? Than I want something tangible like a paper". It's easy to say "I'll never read a news paper

again" when it's free on-line. When the on-line edition cost something, people will back peddle and demand something tangible for their money.

I'm not saying one should not take human behavior into account, but at least they should get the boundary conditions right, and one of those is that our resources are limited.

But those limits are not so easily fixed or defined.

The microchip is the perfect example.

It doesn't exist before 1958. It's economic, technological and social impact scarcely felt before the 1980s.

No points of I'd mod you up to 5+. What a detailed usable response, well done!

The problem with document management software is that they require users to do some "extra" work filling in metadata. This fails. Generally users will not fill in more than title, adding keywords, short descriptions, file numbers are simply too much effort. When the metadata fails, the document management system also fails.

I suggest you first look at geting a good enterprise search engine. Lucene(apache.org) is open source and free, MindServer (www.recommind.com) from Recommind is not but is amazing (I'm a happy client, not a shill).

If your users can find everything they need to do their work, who cares how badly it is sorted or filed.

One vital part of project management that is often missed, sadly most often by highly technical folk is the need for communication.

Every project should specifically address communication. At the beginning of a project the PM should consider and write down, who needs to know "stuff" about this project, for each who, what stuff do they need to know and how will they be informed.

Examples are progress and budget reports to business owners, milestones achieved to the client, how you will achieve team co-ordination. Other things to consider before you unleash the programming hordes is how you will address schedule changes (usually for worse), how are you going to tell the client and management early enough for them to handle the business implications. Once you have this sorted for a workplace it is mostly templating and cookie cutting for each new project.

  I cannot stress enough how vital it is to include communication as part of your normal PM work. Projects are implemented by technical staff but the owner is the business and they must be able to make business decisions. To make business decisions and to manage business risk, management must have sufficient timely information. As a PM it is your responsibility to ensure that happens.