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Comment Re:A content problem (Score 1) 97

Thank you! I know where you're coming from. I think I'm a bit ahead of my/the company's time here. My major vision is that as technology grows faster, as we do different things, we have this social network and platform for lack of a better term. Something with tickers/feeds/updates that let people see what others are doing. Break down the silos of people in different departments having no functional knowledge of what each other do, and in turn grow that collective consciousness to something bigger. Facilitate a lot of lateral moves as people get bored with their jobs. If its cushy, they'll get bored and never move. If they're very talented and bored, they churn, but if I'm going to have 80-90% of the same workforce in 6-8 years as I do today, I'd rather the ones that want to move around in the org do so and not stay put the whole time. The training part is something I do today and would leverage as "at least a reason to start using my idea" but, the broader vision is to foster a feeling of belonging and purpose to the greater whole. As it is, its mass email, mass conference call, or I specifically chat to you, or Bob, or Phil etc - There's nothing out there that lets 2 people talking about some thing a way of knowing 2 people had the same problem yesterday/last week or month. Maybe I'm going a little crazy for thinking so hard about it, but I'm a bit of a dreamer.

Comment Re:Bingo. (Score 1) 97

Not so much that as we are a large org with many quirks in each little department. I agree with spelling everything out and reading - but sometimes filling out a request form on a terrible webpage takes forever and the wrong click of doom will negate the last 10 minutes you spent on it. That's where a video would be handy. As would repeat complex issues that need you to do the right basic maintenance task, but need an advanced level of troubleshooting to know what that task might be. If you're the night shift guy and get a mess of a problem, you can either wake up senior support (me in some cases) or, maybe watch a 15 minute video very specific to the problem at hand.

Comment Re:A content problem (Score 1) 97

Thank you! I know I'm going to need buy-in from lots of people to get anything off the ground, but what I'm looking at I think is half wiki, half LMS, half youtube in the sense that I'm trying to build a collective intelligence so that regular people can document their every day tasks - be it technical or administrative, and just avoid wasting time finding out how to do something that can be easily explained. Whatever the "it" is I'm trying to build needs to be idiotproof for people to contribute to. If I'm going to ultimately have something forced on people, it has to be "manage a youtube channel like a 7 year old" easy without needing instructions or training on how to use the training tool. That's where I'm having trouble finding something I can work with and organically grow bottom up.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Multimedia based wiki for learning and business procedures?

kyle11 writes: I'm scratching my head at how to develop a decent wiki for a large organization I work in. We support multiple technologies, across multiple locations, and have ways of doing things that become exponentially convoluted. I give IT training to many of these users for a particular technology, and other people do for other stuff as well.

Now, I hate wikis because everyone who did one before failed and gave them a bad name. If it starts wrong, it is doomed to failure and irrelevance.

What I'm looking for would be something like a Wiki with Youtube built in — make a playlist of videos with embedded links for certain job based tasks. And reuse and recycle those videos in other playlists of other tasks as they may be applicable. It would go beyond the actual IT we work with and would include things like "welcome to working in this department, here's 20 videos detailing stupid procedures you need to go through to request access to customer's systems/networks/databases to even think about doing your job"

I tried MediaWiki and Xwiki, and maybe I'm doing it wrong, but I can't seem to find a way to tweak them to Youtube-level simplicity for anyone to contribute to without giving up on the thing cause its a pain in the butt.

My only real requirement is that it not be cloud-based because it will contain certain sensitive information and I'd like it all to live on 1 virtual machine if at all possible.

I can't be the only one with this problem of enabling many people to contribute and sort their knowledge without knowing how an HTML tag works, or copying files into something more complicated than a web browser. What approaches have any of you out there taken to trying to solve a similar problem?

Submission + - State of Iowa tells Tesla to cancel its Scheduled Test Drives (desmoinesregister.com)

puddingebola writes: Conflict between state governments and Tesla continue. From the article, "Iowa joined a growing list of states tussling with Tesla Motors' business model when it told the company to cut short three days of test drives earlier this month in West Des Moines. The Iowa Department of Transportation said the test drives were illegal for two reasons: Tesla isn't licensed as an auto dealer in Iowa and state law prohibits carmakers from selling directly to the public." While the article touches on the legal restrictions on selling cars in Iowa, it seems that Tesla was only providing test drives.

Submission + - Why the Z-80's data pins are scrambled (righto.com)

An anonymous reader writes: The Z-80 microprocessor has been around since 1976, and it was used in many computers at the beginning of the PC revolution. (For example, the TRS-80, Commodore 128, and ZX Spectrum.) Ken Shirriff has been working on reverse engineering the Z-80, and one of the things he noticed is that the data pins coming out of the chip are in seemingly random order: 4, 3, 5, 6, 2, 7, 0, 1. (And a +5V pin is stuck in the middle.) After careful study, he's come up with an explanation for this seemingly odd design. "The motivation behind splitting the data bus is to allow the chip to perform activities in parallel. For instance an instruction can be read from the data pins into the instruction logic at the same time that data is being copied between the ALU and registers. ... [B]ecause the Z-80 splits the data bus into multiple segments, only four data lines run to the lower right corner of the chip. And because the Z-80 was very tight for space, running additional lines would be undesirable. Next, the BIT instructions use instruction bits 3, 4, and 5 to select a particular bit. This was motivated by the instruction structure the Z-80 inherited from the 8080. Finally, the Z-80's ALU requires direct access to instruction bits 3, 4, and 5 to select the particular data bit. Putting these factors together, data pins 3, 4, and 5 are constrained to be in the lower right corner of the chip next to the ALU. This forces the data pins to be out of sequence, and that's why the Z-80 has out-of-order data pins."
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Woman Tells State Judiciary Committee, "DoD Implanted A Microchip Inside Me" 222

The Georgia House Judiciary Committee took up a bill that would "prohibit requiring a person to be implanted with a microchip," and would make violating the ban a misdemeanor. Things started to get weird at the hearing when a woman who described herself as a resident of DeKalb County told the committee, "I'm also one of the people in Georgia who has a microchip." Not sure of what she was trying to say, she was allowed to continue and added, "Microchips are like little beepers. Just imagine, if you will, having a beeper in your rectum or genital area, the most sensitive area of your body. And your beeper numbers displayed on billboards throughout the city. All done without your permission." Further prodding revealed that the woman's co-workers would torture her by activating the chips with their cell phones and that the chips were implanted by "researchers with the federal government." The committee thanked the woman for her input, and later approved the bill.

Comment Recall? (Score 1) 3

I wouldn't call this a recall as much as a warranty extension. I believe a recall requires a product safety concern to exist that would actually hurt someone. This is just more mac laptops with video problems. I'm looking at you iBook.
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Woman Fired For Using Uppercase In Email 364

tomachi writes "An accountant in NZ has been awarded $17,000 NZD for unfair dismissal after her boss fired her without warning for using uppercase letters in a single email to co-workers. The email, which advises her team how to fill out staff claim forms, specifies a time and date highlighted in bold red, and a sentence written in capitals and highlighted in bold blue. It reads: 'To ensure your staff claim is processed and paid, please do follow the below checklist.' Her boss deemed the capital letters too confrontational for her co-workers to read after they woke up from naptime."

Comment Happens all the time (Score 2, Insightful) 1

I'm not sure what kind of SLA's you have to offer a $10.00 bonus per day, but our SLA is reached as soon as we touch the ticket. It only hits the fan when the customers complain that they're disruptions outlasted the SLA and someone tries to hide behind having touched the ticket, thereby stopping the clock. Even tickets you open with internal helpdesk - you get an email right away telling you someone is working on it and hear nothing back for days. Its just part of the game. Numbers are a good way to gauge performance when people are actually working to do their jobs, but once their jobs become maintaining their stats and numbers, they lose all meaning because the quality of work goes down the crapper but everyone meets their stats. Unethical? Probably, but its just part of doing business.

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